T.L.T.R. (Too Long To Read)

Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' (2005): a Review

2011-12-30T18:49:00.000Z

Where to draw the line between personal taste and 'literature'?... This is a well-crafted work which, in its simplicity and scale of vision resembles William Golding, and certainly it is concerned with humanity and its limits as Golding was. My criticism of it is probably a matter of taste alone. Ishiguro has written Never Let Me Go using such a simplistic vocabulary that I found it a little dull where it could have been sharp. It is written as a first-person confessional and doesn't get lost in unnecessaries, but rather, I feel it loses something in its simplicity. Doubtless the writer chose simplicity of language for directness and purity, but IMHO such a subtly horrific neo-gothic tale could be better, and more heart-rendingly told with a bit of lyrical poetic wandering.
As with other examples of Ishiguro's writing, much of the meaning lies in what is unsaid and that is not an easy way to craft. I get the feeling that if I read the novel again I might notice and feel more of the unspoken sadness, but, for my sins, I am more cerebral than cardiac and my emotions would be better piqued with telling detail and a bit of fancy prose. Which is why I began with the taste thing. Sooner or later, the taste/quality debate comes up in any English or Creative Writing course (tellingly, more often in the latter) with no clear answer or even much worthwhile reasoning despite the hours of empassioned discussion. Simply (and diplomatically, I hope), I will say that the language of Never Let Me Go will appeal to some because of its clarity, while to others it will seem too pared down and all the worse for it. I don't often sit on fences, but in this case it is a fence between two fields worth keeping in view.
Having said all this, the large-scale metaphorical matters, particularly those of 'devotion to a greater good' and the loss of selfhood and individuality that is entailed in such sacrifice, is brilliantly considered. It is something not at all considered enough. This novel proves that the vast and seemingly unchallengeable logic of Society is vulnerable at least to literature; that the idea of 'progress' can lead in terrible directions because of rather than despite it.
The novel could easily have been written as a near future sci-fi warning tale (a la The Road), but would have been less effective. As it is, the choice to set it in a more or less parallel contemporaneity gives the reader a spooky feeling that indeed this horror could be a reality. In short, the absolute believability of the story makes it all the more disturbing and is likely the reason for the author's choice of simplistic structure and vocabulary. It is very easy to praise everything about a novel if it 'works', and this is what I think many reviewers have done, but in this case, the simplicity lacks the poignancy that some lyric observations might have added, even if it does 'work'. I look forward to seeing the film version.

The End of The World in Modern Culture

2011-11-30T11:42:00.003Z

Many people I know express an interest in books and films with an apocalyptic setting. I remember that I have had a taste for them since quite young. I suspect it began when I watched Mad Max back in the '80's. My parents said it was depressing and that seemed the limits of their consideration on the matter, and rather made me feel unusual in my tastes, but as I've aged, I've met so many people that share my interest in the concept of the end of the world, that I became curious about the taste itself. Representations also seemed to become much more mainstream.

Recently I discovered a list of 'Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Culture' on Wikipedia and I was fascinated to find hundreds of entries I'd never heard of. The first recognisable apocalyptic work of literature (discounting the Bible for a moment) in English, for instance, was Mary Shelley's 1826 The Last Man. I had previously thought that HG Wells was the first to imagine the End in sufficient detail to put into a narrative. Shelley's novel, set in the late 21^st century, was so ahead of its time (no pun intended) that it was slated in the press and called “sickening,” and the product of a “diseased” imagination. I must reserve judgement until I have read it myself, but it's in the pile next to my bed and I'll get to it soon.

With a little spreadsheet work, I have converted the list into a graph that I think you'll agree has an interesting trend. There are many potential problems with such a list/graph, and I will try and address as many as I can in this and future blog entries, but I am still convinced that this graph shows something very interesting about modern culture. It is intended to be the initiator of a discussion, so please feel free to express your views and inform me of any corrections that should be made.

Notes on the graph

Popularity and commercial success is NOT taken into account. Obviously some of the entries have become more influential than others.
The graph takes account of only those works published or normally viewed in English. I would love to compare the graph with similar studies in other languages and nations, but that is something for the future.
A prime purpose of the graph is to examine the concept of 'Apocalypse' in culture and the social imagination. I therefore include not only literature and film, but board games, role playing games and computer games as all are significant forms of cultural expression and influence. This, of course, leaves the graph open to the criticism that the upward trend is because of the proliferation of cultural expressions in both number and form (more people are creating more cultural forms on more subjects than ever). This is true, but, even given this fact, it remains the case that the concept of the end of the world is more considered and imagined than ever before. Whether the upward trend is due to the increased printing of books or an increased obsession with the subject, the result is still interesting and tells us something important – the concept of the apocalypse is growing in our collective imagination. The question that this graph cannot answer is whether this trend is out of proportion to the cultural proliferation or not.
The graph, derived as it is from the work of others at this site, is highly unlikely to be complete. A self-published book from 1921 that sold only 100 copies might well have disappeared from record completely. The graph cannot therefore be exhaustive.
Where I have included a series (TV, radio, etc), only the first episode is entered on the list so as not to skew the data. However, remakes of films or adaptations of another form (i.e. book-film), ARE included separately. This decision is, of course, open to criticism.
In the original list, some films and books have multiple entries under the same year because the list was designed to look at the different imaginations of the apocalypse. Thus, where there are two reasons given for the apocalyptic setting in the book/film/TV show etc, there were two entries in the list. I have done my best to get rid of this doubling up, again, because I think it would skew the graph. For example, in the list, John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids is entered twice because both a blinding meteor shower and an alien plant species contributed to the End, but in the graph I have given the book only one entry (although there are later TV and film adaptations which are given their own entries).

The Money Speech from Network

2011-11-17T00:21:00.001Z

If you don't know it, please find and watch the 1976 film 'Network'. It's an absolute masterpiece, with one of the greatest scripts ever written for the big screen. My favourite speech is reproduced here:

In a darkened boardroom:

“ You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it. Is that clear? Do you think you merely stopped a business deal? That is not the case: the Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance.

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations, there are no peoples, there are no Russians, there are no Arabs, there are no Third Worlds, there is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariant dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, Rands, Rubles, Pounds and Shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone.

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up there on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T. And Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state? Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since we crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression, or brutality: one vast and ecumenical holding company for whom all men will work to serve a common profit; in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquillized, all boredom amused.”

Reasons to write: 1, The Piano Player

2011-10-23T12:26:00.003+01:00

Why I Write: The Piano Player

One of the loveliest moments in my life happened while I sat at my kitchen table in a little house I was renting in Montpelier, Bristol. It was one of those solitary but warm and happy moments that you can recall with a secret smile; one of those moments that, if your reality were ever questioned by doubting scientists, if they needed confirmation of your consciousness, that you were real and not a replicant, terminator or android, you could provide as evidence. We all have them, don't we?

I don't recall exactly what I was doing, perhaps a cup of tea after the washing up, but as I sat at the chunky wooden table silently thinking, or not perhaps, a calm tinkling appeared, drifting through the kitchen. For a second I looked around before I realised it was was coming through the wall from next door. Someone was playing piano. Bach, I thought.

The wall muffled the highest treble and the lowest bass, there was an occasional mistake in the notes, but it was magical. I'm very interested in why. Why I can remember such a moment so clearly after several years of much bigger deals happening; why it was, and is still, magical.

I had no choice in its occurrence nor the music played. Without banging on the wall, I could do nothing about it at all. I gave myself to it and just listened without thought of choice or agency. I listened as a dog listens – with acceptance, unquestioningly, and there was great pleasure in that.

It was far from a perfect recital, but I loved it. The playing only lasted a couple of minutes, but I didn't stop smiling throughout.

There was something else, too. I was listening to something private and solitary in someone else, some enjoyment they felt. They probably had no idea that anyone was listening. I had a strong feeling that the piano player was alone in the house and looked forward to being so in order to indulge in a pleasure and to be able to make mistakes comfortably, without any nervousness. It was like we shared a private moment of happiness, my neighbour and I.

I hadn't lived there long and, while Montpelier is one of the friendlier neighbourhoods I've lived in, still this was a city and these were modern times with all the busy work and technological distractions, so I had never met my neighbours and had no idea if it was a he or a she playing the piano. Vaguely, in the background of recent unconsolidated memories, I knew from bangs, steps, and distant voices that there was more than one person living there and hadn't thought any further. But now there was some connection and it was lovely, as if I knew one of them better without even knowing their name.

It happened a few times when I was alone in the house over the brief months I lived there, though never as often as I wished. It always surprised me and always made me smile. I felt I should show my appreciation and encouragement somehow. I took a little more notice of the sounds coming through the walls and looked out the window when their door slammed. Over the months, I discovered that a man and a woman lived there. They were about the same age, in their forties, and I suspected, without hard evidence, that they were together, perhaps married. I'd never got close enough to see rings and had never run into them outside the door or at the corner shop. I considered knocking on their door and telling them that their playing made me smile and I hoped it would continue. But I didn't. It might, I weakly reasoned, make them (whichever of them it was) shyer about playing. Involuntarily once, I almost clapped at the end of a recital to show my appreciation, but stopped myself and again rationalised the thought away: the piano player might think I'm being facetious and again, they might become shyer. So I said nothing and eventually moved out.

Sometimes in life there are things which cannot be said, sometimes there are things which you fail to say because of weakness or shyness or worrying or distraction, sometimes there are things you wish in retrospect you had said. It doesn't have the perfection of the moment, but at least there is writing so we can tell about such moments, and in a curious way, it gives performance to a wish.

WG Sebald's 'The Rings of Saturn' (1998), a review

2011-09-06T12:18:00.000+01:00

Max Sebald died ina car crash in 2001 in Norwich, leaving a growing reputation as theinventor of a new way of writing about our interaction with history,memory and places. It has been said since by those in the know, thathad he lived, he could have been a Nobel Laureate.

The narrative ofThe Rings of Saturn is very loosely structured around a more-or-lesscoastal walk in East Anglia, England, looking out across the NorthSea to Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. The places serve asdiving boards from which to plunge into various historical storiesand personal anecdotes, the details of which are not always accurate.

I haven't read anyother of Sebald's books but I soon will do. His mental wanderings area pleasure to follow, even if at times they feel a littleold-fashioned, with his interest in heritage architecture and smallinsensitivities like this:

We may draw fromthis the conclusion that it was precisely Casement's homosexualitythat sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation,enslavement and destruction, across the borders of social class andrace, of those who were furthest from the centres of power. (p.134)

But then I lovedhis evocation of crumbling old mansions inhabited by crumbling oldfamilies concerned with pointless activities like sewing quilts onlyto unpick them to start again the next day to save on thread. Andwhen he talks of Empire, which it must be said, is one of the majorsubjects of this book; he deals with it brilliantly, marking out suchoft-ignored points as

The capitalamassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through variousforms of slave economy is still in circulation, said de Jong, stillbearing interest, increasing many times over and continuallyburgeoning anew. (p194)

The apparentauthor's voice (or at least a character with the name WG Sebald)blurs, within the same lengthy paragraphs, with historicalcharacters' voices so that the Sebaldian first person is the voice ofmany, without separation, but it is so well done that it remainsclear and smart to read. A similar effect could have been producedwith the use of references and footnotes to link to vast worlds ofhistory and thought beyond the text, but Sebald chose to concentrateon the flow instead, and it works.

Growing up in theruins of bombed-out Germany after the Second World War, the youngSebald found silence and enforced forgetting all around, offering noexplanation to his generation of what had happened there. But memoryand history are always present in the landscape, of course, even ofthe subjects we remain silent about (horrors of war, abuses ofempire), but it takes tenacious and imaginative writing to bring themto the fore. He uses the landscape to tell a tale, to give up secretsunspoken and hidden, but that are present all around us if we justlook hard enough (as Sebald does) and use our imaginations (as Sebalddoes).

Mevagissey Gulls

2011-08-12T19:11:00.000+01:00

I lie awake in the most unsociable hour of the morning having been woken in the summer heat (single sheet) by a very sociable non-human society. Echoing calls, prehistoric, territorial calls, screeches, screams, honks and bellowing calls of such alien familiarity carry on, a rainforest of sound surrounding my home, murderous, violent, bullying, casually ferocious descendants of veliciraptors, lacking razored claws but none of the killer instinct: you can hear their will in their fearful chants, taunting from perches, otherworldly: “we own the night”. I feel like the alien suddenly. They are otherworldy precisely in their unchanged wildness, suggesting distant darknesses of howling monkeys in the imagination of Conrad. The same, just the same as an ancient tribe would have heard as they settled this fine wooded valley wary of flooding in winter rains, close to easy fishing and bountiful mussels, clams dug from the sand at low tide and nights under rock ledges lying awake by embers listening to the very same echoing, territorial screaming heralds.

Roadkill on the A31

2011-03-06T16:07:00.001Z

The haziness of sleep finally dissipated just as I reached the The Hog’s Back. I was halfway through the daily commute and my brain was clambering up to a useful level of consciousness in time with the revs of my rusty Fiesta as it rumbled up to top speed. I drove twice daily the full stretch of the A31, the road along the ridge of The Hog’s Back. It passes between the wide patchwork quilts of the fields and woods of west Surrey in a straight line like a spine between Farnham and Guildford. It is surrounded by SSSI’s and Heritage sites, ancient farmland ploughed every year for hundreds of generations.

It was the same every morning in those days; I hadn’t yet discovered coffee and it took a while to boot up and realise where I was. Not that there was any pleasure in the awareness of my situation. In your first job at eighteen you don’t want to be told to slow down at work, that you need to ease off the accelerator a little, do less in a day. Encouragement was lacking and so therefore was any desire to be there. So I sank into the same desultory stupor as the other staff moaning endlessly about their kids, the managers or the price of the coffee machine. Driving to the office I would pray for my car to break down. But then I’d lose Flexitime and I’d just have to stay longer another day. I suspect a great deal of sighing takes place on the commuter route of the A31.

It’s difficult to appreciate the Outstanding Natural Beauty of a place when rushing to get somewhere you don’t really want to be. Looking at the scenery is a little discouraged by the survival instinct when travelling at seventy miles an hour. I flicked the odd look at the broad valleys, the cornfields, the spinneys and the copses.

Again and again the commute would become a fantasy of some distant natural reality. Real life couldn’t exist simply in a job, a car, a house, kids you moan about. It was out there in the trees and hills, surely; there were mountains, oceans, forests and cliffs in the world, places that would make me smile and feel alive, but here I was heading for something... mundane. Mum was happy when I got the job. “You’re going to work in a Court? Ooh, well done, my goodness, a proper job. My boy might be a lawyer someday or ... or something.” The only previous contact she’d ever had with the legal system was when dad was up on one of his drink-driving charges.

A fox appeared one clear morning in late winter lying dead in the central reservation. Just before the Guildford turn-off, the body, crumpled a little from an impact, whizzed past me. The rusty red, white and black lump was there the next day too, and the next. Traffic jams of bored commuters often stretched this far back so I had plenty of opportunity to watch the daily show of decomposition. The hairy carcass became gradually darker and the skin hung limply over the bones, the shapes of the ribs becoming clearer. The fluffy tail became a damp shapeless sod like a flannel left outdoors. One night there was a downpour and in the morning the fox had swelled up to twice its size. It amazed me and every morning the usual depression or daydream would last only until the stretch of road with the corpse on it. My hands would tighten on the wheel in anticipation and I’d ensure I left a gap in front of me so I had a clear view.

By May the fox had morphed unexpectedly into a tarry black puddle and the entertainment was just about over. The difference between a thick black puddle and a thin one is not vast nor hugely interesting, and my mind wandered further and the job ground me down. I wondered how long it would take for me to become a tarry black puddle if I drove off the ridge and into one of those ancient twisted oaks.

I’d forgotten about the fox by July and I was sat in a sweaty jam breathing exhaust fumes when a wingbeat noise brought me round from another daydream. From the north came a helicopter, a huge green bulk with two propellers and round windows down each side. It flew straight over me at the point of the Guildford turn off, low and loud at right angles to the Hog’s Back and the A31. I followed it with my eyes into the distance until a beep from behind made me let up the clutch and move on. That lunch-break at work I burned an hour of Flexitime to drive back along the Hog’s Back and walked into the Aldershot Army Recruitment Office. Since, I have been asked a hundred times why on earth I joined the Army; it's not easy to explain that a rotted fox on the central reservation of the A31 drove me to it.

Review of 'Death and Nightingales' by Eugene McCabe (1992)

2011-02-01T01:07:00.004Z

Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep

In the next valley-glades:

Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Fled is that music:---do I wake or sleep?

These last lines of Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale' must have been in the mind of McCabe for this masterful novel. The lines between dream and reality, history and present, memory and fantasy are never clear and haunt and reoccur throughout the book. The quality, breadth and depth of his work is likely only to become fully clear on re-reading, and wonderfully, I wanted to re-read Death and Nightingales as soon as I'd finished it. I have never come across a book that begins by whispering and ends by shouting its quality. Interwoven in the story are all the complications of past in the present (although it is set in the late nineteenth-century), of politics, of love, of religion, of imperialism, of landscape, of hatred. Death, natural or otherwise, pops up and surprises all over this book in horrific, frightening and effective ways.

The squealing seemed alongside her. Then she saw it . . . a white owl grounded, a baby rabbit gripped in his talons, the hooked beak tearing ravenously into the wriggling upturned stomach. Suddenly her voice blended with the rabbit squeals as she stumbled towards them crying out. (p.83)

McCabe listens intently to how people speak and gets the everyday cadence and comedy just right. These passages are a pleasure to read and I seemed to look forward to the dialogue in a way I have never done with other writers. I would give an example, but a short passage wouldn't do it justice. And the one character with the truth, the one who seems to see it all is a dumb man, largely mocked and ignored.

Echoes, dreams and memories appear and reappear. Of what the English have done to Ireland, of the intimate economic and physical violences, the disgusting intimacies, the subtle, the brutal, and the cycles of humiliation and penury that follow. It will not become clear to you what a work of depth this is until the end. Not just the narrative tension builds, but your own realisation of what you are reading. Fantastic.

Everyone digs in the book. The Secrets are everywhere hidden in the bogs, the wells and the lakes. Bodies, bog butter, and lost children. The more you examine this masterpiece, the more stinking secrets it will reveal. It has instantly become one of my favourite books. It deserves to be studied and I can't recommend it highly enough. A pleasure and an education.

"The Jungle"

2011-01-27T14:48:00.000Z

I've been writing a lot of short non-fiction pieces related to nature and place recently as part of my course. I felt this one needed to be fiction to work. Most of the professional travel and nature writers I know seem to think fiction fails to get to the heart of 'place' but I like to experiment with it anyway. Hope you like it.

The Jungle

Jonny escaped the boring family walk around the garden. Whenever visitors turned up it was customary to wander round showing them what was new in the herbaceous borders. But Jonny had a better idea. Across the lawn he sneaked, through the gate and into the overgrown chestnut coppice before anyone noticed. The dog followed but thought more of the meal being prepared and turned back. Jonny wanted to see past the wood where he knew there was a wall, twelve-foot high and hiding a jungle. It took a time to get there, but he did, and started around the perimeter to find an entrance with increasing excitement. With a stick he bashed down a bank of nettles that guarded a collapse, but the rubble was too frightening a climb, so he continued along the shaded line of the wall, picking through chestnuts and hollies. A break in the wall appeared – a rotten-looking brick arch, filled with a mass of waxy rhododendron. This was his way in.

He was halfway into the tangle of branches and darkness when he got scared and thought of going back; of the hot meal waiting – but he turned his face back to the jungle and continued. He had on grey trousers which reminded him of school and they caught on the points of snapped branches. At one point he had to crawl and the ground hurt his knees, but there was light ahead and he entered the ancient world.

Above and around he saw more light than he'd expected in a jungle. All was overgrown, but as this had once been a garden there still remained an element of spacing, gaps filled with bramble tangles, stinging nettles and holly. It was spring and light still found its way to the floor. A bluejay who perched high on a branch, turned its head to look at the small intruder and half-bounded, half-fluttered off out of sight.

As he pushed though the growth of catchy, scratchy twigs and thorns, shapes slowly appeared. Mossy, almost covered bricks marked out old rectangles filled with clumps of ash; grey lines reaching smooth and straight; black buds bursting shocks of green; roots pushing up the old formal borders. A trio of blueberry bushes were squashed almost out of existence by another dark mass of rhododendron growing here now like triffids. A pile of rubble and wet, crumbled wood marked an old outbuilding defeated by the encroaching years. Jonny smiled at the patient strength of the sessile oak that must have finally pushed the building down decades past. He bent at the rubble to see wild strawberry runners had made themselves at home, surviving the death of the garden. Lifting the leaves he found a few white berries and then, yes, one red spotted delight, and he popped it in his mouth.

The soft and fragrant flavour, more strawberry than strawberry could be, brought a flood back to him and he had to sit down. This place had been where he'd worked as a boy, pushing heavy wheelbarrows and hoeing the lines in the dirt. He remembered clearly and all at once the squeak of the rhubarb as he pulled a stalk, brushing the dirt from the crunchy carrot singlings, and the sweet satisfaction of raw peas thumbed from the pod straight into his mouth... And that time, that time when it had looked like snow as the breeze blew and the cherry blossom all fell at once around him, fluttering, fluttering. Jonny was overcome with flavours and sounds and scents in a way he hadn't known since his youth and for a time he sat, leaning on his walking stick, noticing relics of the old cottage garden he remembered.

Coming back from the smiling past, his head filled with his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren, waiting, probably worried about an old man lost in the woods and he creaked up as straight as he could and hobbled back to the house and the sunday roast. What would they say to the state of his trousers?

Time at Sennen Zawn

2011-01-04T21:44:00.002Z

Oh! when I have hung

Above a raven's nest, by knots of grass

And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock

But ill sustained, and almost (so it seemed)

Suspended by the blast that blew amain,

Shouldering the naked crag, oh, at that time

While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,

With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind

Blow through my ear!

('The Prelude', William Wordsworth)

I'm panting away to myself with one hand on a decent flake of granite awkwardly above my head. Both toe-points are on the same centimetre-deep ledge and my arm is getting tired. A helicopter behind me gets closer, louder than the sea crashing the tidal shelf below: the Zawn. It's the Coastguard doing a fly-by check again.

I'm scrabbling to unclip a mechanical cam from my harness-loop. The karibiner is fiddly in my numb, fumbling fingers and in my other, left arm, I can feel the lactic acid burning the strings of my forearm. It's a solid hold, rough and sharp, but it's awkward; not designed for hands. Change arms. If I fall from here without putting this bit of gear in the crack it'd be a broken back at least. I pant so hard my voice-box makes pannicky rasps. I look down without thinking – doing so rarely helps to get your head straight. It's not fear, but fear of fear and the descent into its cycle which is the danger. I see Rick below me ignoring the rope in favour of putting his arms aloft to try and brace my fall if I slip. It doesn't reassure my quickly calculating brain. We both know I'd break his arms from this height and might knock him off the ledge, but it's a slightly better risk than a wheelchair.

The average density of this course granite is 2.65g per cubic centimetre.

It is 72% silicon dioxide.

There are about 10 parts per million of uranium.

Its compressive strength is 200 Mpa or higher.

The helicopter is too loud for us to communicate now and Rick – bless his soul – doesn't take his eyes off me to look. With my other, slightly less tired arm, I grab at the cam. Unclip. Pull the trigger and slot it in the crack. Too small: it wobbles. “No,” I want to shout in the long, deathly manner of someone being shot in a Vietnam film, but the effort would push me off the cliff. Somewhere in the distance there is a physical sensation, somewhere outside the fear I can feel the top layer of skin from my fingertips being peeled off. It is a millisecond of a sensation before it is prioritized lower by my brain. Panting, I clip the cam back to my belt and choose the one next to it; it goes in smoothly and locks tight first time; I pull the rope up and clamp it between my teeth, change arms again, and... clip. It's in and my mind relaxes a little even if my breathing doesn't. “Okay... That's one”. I feel tension on the rope and I know Rick now has me. I push up to the next hold which, mercifully, feels friendly and solid. I swing back to look at the helicopter. A Sea King with it's door open and two helmeted faces staring. I give them the thumbs up and I realise that's all they were after. Two thumbs return the gesture, the machine leans – so big it looks like slow motion as it turns, and the noise dies away. All this happened in seven or eight seconds.

Among many reasons, I love climbing for its slowing effect: your life is measured in seconds, not years and you notice everything as if it were your last experience in the world. The granite here at Sennen, a little north of Land's End, I already know intimately. The quartz shapes embedded in the pinky-grey or black granite are all curiously alike. How on earth can geology have done that? The pale quartz pieces, all of them, are the size and rectangular shape of an average potato chip. Like a cave painting of a pack of McCain's strewn vertically around me, glinting in the meagre autumn sun. My fingers know the rasping roughness. It inscribes my skin. The grip of the rock is excellent when dry and the holds solid, but by the end of the day both of us have cuts and grazes from jams and finger-wedges: it's like smashed car windows – all those tiny glass nuggets of about similar dimensions – that have been glued solidly together and just barely sanded-down to form a sharp crystal-gravel compress.

HVS 5a

A classic crack-fest that follows the intimidating vertical crack on the left side of the face and the exposed corner to the left of the huge capping roof. Move up to below the crack and bridge and layback up it, past a useful chockstone, to a large belay ledge. Pull steeply up into the corner and follow it all the way to the top. An exposed pitch.

The cliff is a place to see the timescales beyond our own. “Don't look down” is the common cry: below you are the rocks that a hundred or a thousand years ago fell, shrinking this island a little more. Below you are the rocks being rounded gently by the tides and by the storms. Below you are the rocks that wouldn't notice flesh and bone. Below you are the rocks, grinding themselves to stones, to pebbles, to sand. “Don't look down” or you may see the truth of the rocks, that they don't care and cannot feel, and will never notice your tread or fall, nor those of a hundred generations more.

Granite is an igneous rock. Being a relative lightweight in the underworld, it 'floated' above the rest of the magma beneath the Earth's crusts hundreds of millions of years ago. It makes little sense to talk of the age of igneous rock when an arbitrary decision to draw a line makes millions of years of difference. Would you say it was born as it floated up, separating itself from the core? Or would you say it was born as it solidified – over millennia, its large grains and crystals forming from the very gradual cooling of the molten magma, the slow process allowing time for lumps to form? Granite is also an intrusive igneous rock, meaning that it squeezed its way up into base or sedimentary rocks, and in the case of Cornwall, the top, softer rock layers have been largely eroded away to expose the harder. Relatively little happened for a very long time, just cycles of storms and slow wearing. The last two million years have been the toughest.

The Earth wobbles on its off-centre axis of spin. It varies between 22.1° and 24.5° and back again every forty one thousand years, give or take. It is a little like a spinning top just past the stage of its perfect spin, but before it topples over: it wobbles, but keeps spinning. Presently our angle from perfect spin is 23.44° and falling. These few degrees may not seem like a great deal but they make enough of a difference to the amount of the sun's radiation that reaches the surface of the planet to cause an ice age. It is not as simple as this though. There are other cycles of change. Every twenty six thousand years, the gravitational pulls of the sun and the moon have a gyroscopic impact on the amount of solar radiation. Additionally, the orbit of the Earth around the sun is wobbled by interactions with the pulls of Jupiter and Saturn, though this is a varying cycle because of the complexities of the positions of the planets. All this adds up to a complicated picture, but one which can be seen in the relative densities of rocks. Bands of sediments vary in their texture and some geologists have argued that they show a rough one-hundred thousand year cycle, rather simplifying all the wobbles.

There were twenty ice ages interspersed with warming periods during which the seas rose up to crash and erode another chunk for a few thousand years. The last but one was the worst. The glaciers scoured the surface clean of anything at all. All life was gone here and everything this far north was under kilometres of ice, although here is a flexible concept at this temporal scale what with tectonic wandering and continental tipping. As the billions of tonnes of ice melted back, the plate tipped back on its bed of liquid rock. Rivers flowed out in deep canyons and wide deltas to form hundred kilometre-long waterfalls out past the bay of biscay at the edge of the tectonic plate. Unimaginable amounts ran over the edge into what would become the Atlantic. The last ice age was less hard on the granite here at Sennen. The ice didn't reach this far down but again, as its weight dissipated, the plate tipped and the south sank while Scotland rose. The seas came up to meet the granite once more and the erosion of the waves gradually exposed the sun to quartz crystals so that they glinted for the first time. At some point in-between ice ages, a little before the sea will rise over Sennen, the crumbling rock is briefly tickled by clothed-apes enjoying themselves in the sun before the rock disappears below the surface again. The large island that makes up the bulk of the archipelago becomes a warmer place and floods to become hundreds of smaller islands. On the same latitude as Britain, tundras in Siberia and Northern Canada thaw out releasing millions of tonnes of methane, accelerating the warming. The ice caps dwindle so thoroughly away that the flood of colder, denser water into the Atlantic disrupts the direction of the Meridional Overturning Circulation, or the Gulf Stream as it's usually called – a kilometre-deep and hundred kilometre-wide flow that keeps the Eastern Seaboard of the United States warmer than it would otherwise be. It flows on, gushing above the colder North Atlantic waters and on to Western Europe, keeping it much warmer than its latitude should be. It helps to imagine the Gulf Stream as cream poured into coffee as you stir it. For a couple of seconds, there is a white streak in the dark coffee until it becomes too complicated to tell them apart and it mixes. We exist in these islands because that streak has not yet mixed with the colder water around it. As it dissipates, there will be even more climatic confusion and Western Europe is likely to get much colder again, very quickly.

The clothed-apes, in their short period of existence sometimes chipped out these quartz-crystals, having learned that if they shape them correctly and pass a small electric current through them, the hexagonal silicon-dioxide prisms vibrate at thirty-two thousand times a second, enabling them to measure their lives with extreme accuracy. Most of them kept them on a strap on their wrists.

Apatite, or calcium phosphate, is there in the Sennen rock in small amounts. It crystallizes in two very different places: kilometres-deep under ground at nine-hundred degrees centigrade and in the bones of animals. The primary use the apes made of it was to grind up the crystal or the bones containing it and to spread it thinly each year over agricultural land in the form of fertiliser. They learned also that two types of uranium decay to lead at different rates and their presence in different ratios locked away in zircon crystals permit the ageing of rocks to the point of their formation.

The ways of speaking about rock vary from lyrical to scientific to technical, all attempts to engage with the geological forms in one way or another. Nothing alone manages to express our relation to it, or rather, our own inconsequence in the face of it. The lyrical always overplays the personal, the scientific is too full of cold facts. To climb a cliff is to be aware of the life of the rock in an instant, and there, in that instant is a meditation on the incredible forces ingrained around you. So removed are we from geological and tectonic timescales that we think of cliffs and crags as permanent features. We write books and guides about them. I've met father and son climbing teams at the bottom of cliffs, fathers imparting their decades-old local knowledge to help their offspring. But we climb up temporary surfaces. Our hands grip, and our lives depend, on rock features which are at the border, the very forefront, of geological change. The cliff is a borderland, a no-man's land, between land and time. Our descendants, if they still find climbing a worthwhile pursuit, will not climb the same cliffs and tors that we do. The changes, insignificant in our own lives, are easily ignored; to be part of the continual procession of millennia before us and after our existence is utterly forgotten. Us, squashed in the middle.

It is not easy to appreciate the temporal distances present in rock faces. Through writing and gradually recording our thoughts and discoveries, we clothed-apes have built helicopters and camming devices and have learned to measure time from the millionths of seconds to the billions of years, but it is only while hanging from your own ape-fingers, counting seconds, alone on the rock, that the loud dry wind of fear blows in your ear some strange appreciation of what holds you.

Kennal Vale, Cornwall

2010-12-14T18:28:00.002Z

Group Captains, Colonels and anarchists, mushroom hunters, grandmothers and young couples, ask them all on your visits walking dogs and the answer will always be the same. It is a place where nature wins, where death and life are the same and the unhustled urging is simply understood. Slow down now your reading and think of the syllables like leaves. No containment by the boundaries of parks, fields, gardens and paragraphs. Love its very slowness, the unhurried covering of the forgotten buildings, cluttering up corners and swirling in the gusts. The huge words of the gunpowder factory crumble, crack and rust away in splitting, splintering seasons; things fall apart with the rot and recycling of the eternal wood. Visit the valley and its roofless camouflaged collection between autumn and winter and the changes are subtle: there is a fluttering fall of leaves, then there are damp dank smells and evening mists, later snow and icicles and then a bare white sky with only bald trees slicing it. The valley is of another speed to out past the gate. You wonder once or twice how it would feel to be here for weeks or months or years, never putting a foot in the world outside. All memories of it would leave you. Forget completely the bills, and suits, and the TV news. Fathers and mothers and friends and lovers. All merges here to a nothing, an everything, it becomes indistinct and recycled into greens and blacks and browns, into rushing rivers and silently crumbling stumps. Still there are greens in the canopy in the autumn, then just skeletons against the winter cloud. Few leaves are falling now, but everywhere under-foot: rich-brown oak-squiggles, stain-brown star-sycamore, fat brown oval hazel, a manilla-brown beech, a million rotting solar collectors disposed of by the frosts for fertiliser. Autumn again: the lateral spread of the beeches canopy the way, shading the light green a little, and then more winter and only the white sky and silhouettes. There has been snow between visits and the soft cushions of leaves have gone to soggy blankets. There is nothing else to do any more for the ghosts of guardhouses, stores and stables but gradually to decide to lie down and rest their granite bones. Moss-matted blocks in piles want again to be hillocks. The bricks and blocks and shards and crocks lazily begin again becoming features of the land. It may take them ten million years but that is as a moment for a rock. A little further, a quarry face looms, bedraggled with ivies and mosses like a temperate Mayan city wall. It reaches from the blackness of an unhealthy dark lake, obsidian in the stillness, banked by a border of slowly sinking leaves. At its deep bottom lie the leftovers, the uncut gravestones or lost, dropped gravestones, whatever could be sadder than the forgotten gravestones and the once-living things that sunk from the light among them. Memorial benches, plaques inscribed with the names of old pilots and fishermen. They loved this place in their lives and they choose to haunt it now. You can imagine death here, but as part of the process. Part of it all. Perhaps their eyes closed for the last time in their hospital beds with the calm of the leaf-fall around them, slipping into that still lake and feeling no cold anymore, no fear, the oily fathoms drawing them down among the other lost things. Perhaps it's not a stretch of the imagination that these people, from perspectives of sky and sea, saw a different scale of the world, recognised it at Kennal, and now wander amongst it forever. In the ashes pushing through wall-cracks and lichens founding colonies in forgotten corners; in the squirrels forgetfully burying sweet chestnuts, beech nuts and sessile acorns among the ruins, planting each autumn new scraps of a wood.

There was an explosion once.

There were people and words and storehouses and cart-rails. There was a war on. There was always a war on. Gunpowder first. The great smoke-maker of redcoat battlefields. The soldiers changed their skies often. The powder was used against Turk, against Sikh, against Ghurka, against Irish, against Xhosa, against Zulu, against Russian, against Greek, against Chinese, against Burmese, against Maori, against Napoleon. And then the powder blasted rock in local quarries until it blasted the factory itself. But it rose again. There seemed no limit to the industrious hands to help.

Then the Great War came.

There was suddenly a limit to the hands. The rock had to be cut for the graves. There were so many fallen, as this place fell. Twice. The call was for headstones now, not powder. Ever more headstones. There seemed no limit to the headstones. But there was an end again.

So the quarry filled and formed the lake that looks like it swallowed death. The ivy fingered its way up stone and through windows broken by the ice; ferns uncurled each spring in greater numbers, and a slow process of erasing began. The return of what came from the land back to the land. The bare-naked bodies of trees grow from the empty fireplaces, from empty rooms and the cold loss of the empty indoor chills. A blackbird jumps and flaps from an indoor nest. It's colder here than outside, somehow. You are drawn along, past the buildings by veiled sight of the end-bulk of the wall, like a castle keep holding you out of somewhere. But beyond, you see are only more trees. Those that signed their names on a paper sheet in a county office claim ownership past the boundary. That wall too will grow old and black and mossy; the creeping aerial roots of ivies will latch and hold and suck and fold, pushing in to the concrete, the stone, finding or forming tiny cracks and expanding them at the pace of growth, levers pumped once each year until finally, a piece falls. A century might pass then another fall and three decades more and more. Then it has gone enough that deer can jump, and even a roe's light step pushes a little more until a breach. One day it will only be a bank, grassed and greened and grown over. Perhaps the rhodies will have spread, perhaps the ash, but not the oak or the birch; whatever, the paper will have rotted along with the signatures and the hands that made them and even the office that keeps them. There is no ownership, can be no ownership, what is the point of ownership in the greens and blacks and browns of an unhurriedly creeping all. Walls are nothing, factories are nothing, life and labour and words are nothing to the death and life and fall and rise of the force that will outlive us.

Review of 'Connemara: Listening to the Wind' by Tim Robinson (2006)

2010-09-30T22:28:00.012+01:00

This is one of Tim Robinson's series of Connemara books that together must make the area one of the best memory-mapped places on the planet. The incredible personal project to map, describe, historicise, and 'imagine' one of the wilder parts of Ireland is awe-inspiring in it's scope while remaining grounded and non-academic in it's avuncular style: it's as if your genial retired uncle got up from his armchair one day and disappeared out the door mumbling that he's off to discover the history of the area. These books are the work he sits at his writing desk on the days he's not wandering and types out.

My personal interest is more in the loving sections devoted entirely to the landscape and it's physical history, although the interwoven human-history elements are commendable too. Although Robinson is interested in the usual class-biased historical accounts of the more powerful and famous characters among the land-owning classes, to his great credit, Robinson is as interested in the scraps and remains of everyday working life narratives. His treatment of the prolonged starvation-holocaust of the potato-famine is excellent: he returns to it again and again in the manner it crops up in the cultural memory. When, after all, should the English be allowed to forget their feckless, foot-dragging reaction to the famine that cost millions of lives. The potato blight epidemics themselves were less a cause of the worst mass death in Europe since the time of the plague than the racist disinterest of the English rulers. A certain opprobrium for such selfish, clinical acts of profit-loss calculation is a vital part of the correcting of history and is something I have written about before with regards to the slave-mines of South America. It is easily forgotten or ignored that we in the rich home-states of ex-empires are still reaping the benefits of our ancestors' cruel investments. The tales of mistreatment of Connemara natives by land-owners before, during and after the famine is at times indistinguishable from slave narratives Toni Morrison and others remind us of. Slavery in it's most obvious forms may be long dead, but the impact of that immense quantity of labour output is still to the benefit of those at the centre of old empires and the detriment of everywhere else. Arguments over basis-point reductions in interest repayments of loans are an insult to the dead, used and abused, and reparations should absolutely be in an honestly apologetic form rather than one of business or self-aggrandising charity. But I digress.

Throughout the book, the question who will remember these people and places when we are gone? seems repeated. The residents (among whom Robinson considers himself part of the we) of much of the land are elderly, the young having been depleted over the generations, being distracted/attracted by work and excitement in towns, cities, Britain, the US, and Australia. As in so much rural land, two decades after birth, new residents leave and with them the likelihood of further residents and ongoing supra-individual memory. But the book answers itself, being a document of collected snatches of his-story and her-story linked to wanders across the bog and mountain landscapes that bring the land to the reader far better than mere description. Funnily enough, one can imagine the population and vigour of Connemara increasing, not just with tourists, but with settlement, as a direct result of Tim Robinson's collecting project. If that were to happen, perhaps it would be the most telling rejection of governmental development interferences and proof of the possibility of a direct, measurable impact of art-born-of-love for a place that one could imagine.

Trodden Nature in Habberley Valley, Worcestershire.

2010-09-09T01:25:00.003+01:00

I stayed last night in a friend's family home left to them in a recently argued-over will. The strange, fifties-cake slice of a house slumps on top of a hill, slowly degenerating in it's own junk piles and ivy-growth - but set in a 'charming three and a half acres'. It sits immediately beside Habberley Valley, near Kidderminster. They have a little field I estimate to be about five acres, a few hundred metres down the lane where they let horses graze and trot and dream of freedom. This field is the object of much neighbourly attention in that it is on the edge of the village and thus ripe for zoning as the next Tescos or Barratts estate in the simcity-plans of local developers.

Over wine and a good dinner last evening, my friends and I discussed the strange effect of moving to a rural location: that everyone around takes a close personal interest in your doings and ownings. I compared it with the pleasant anonymity of the city, where, although you are always being observed by uncaring gazes, at least no-one interferes. During a few minutes of confused map-reading the afternoon before, trying to find a place rural enough to be outside the remit of my A-Z, I pulled up on a kerb to make a direction-finding call. The open-mouths and shocked stares of the grey-haired Nissan Micra drivers that appear to run things round there were unnaturally interested in my unfamiliar rust-bucket and what on earth I could be doing in their village. I felt like a Jew hanging around in a Mosque car park.

The slight ripple in the Worcestershire sandstone is rather aggrandised by the name 'valley' even if it is technically true. It is a left-over bit of countryside yet to be swallowed by conurbation. It is nowadays differentiated from a park only by virtue of local dog-owners' cavalier attitude to the shit their pets dump into the heather and bilberries. In a park, the owner would feel some pressure from onlooking eyes to pick up the warm, brown lumps of toxic waste in a plastic bag-glove, but this is The Countryside so it's fine to leave dogshit everywhere. The intricate and inescapable web of tracks leaves less untrodden ground than on Hampstead Heath. But it is pretty. A couple of large lumps of rain-dribble-moulded sandstone resemble discarded lumps of giants' play-do; climbable and very evidently, carvable. There was something charming about a rock-feature the size of a house covered almost-completely in scratched love-messages and 'Ricky woz ere' graffiti. Something I suspect looked down on mightily by the local landowners and Micra-drivers, but something those same people go to gawp at in the caves while on holiday in Central France. The difference is largely one of time only.

Wandering in the trodden-nature of the valley, I recalled other woods and heaths I know around the greatest of all nature-swallowers: London. Those commons and nature reserves of Essex and Surrey, with their own populations of dog-walkers and the increases in the house prices of the surrounding estates. Their character as once-wild places replaced in the collective mind by estate-agents' tag-lines. "Pleasant semi-rural location"; "space to breathe"; "space to walk your dog". This is the fate of any land designated 'Nature Reserve' within quick Micra-distance of a city, as they soon become a recreation ground for the populace and a litter-tray for their innumerable dogs. Indeed, I was made to feel a touch uncomfortable by the dog-walkers, receiving mistrustful eye-narrowings from them simply because I was a man walking without a dog. Neither was it was it an easy place to hide. Now I'm no Raul Moat, but I do like to remain unseen in woods. It is my play-place where I can chase a deer on a whim if my ancestral memories encourage me to, or laugh out loud to myself, or whistle The Queen of the Night Aria if I like. But in places of trodden-nature like Habberley Valley, you are reminded constantly by the voices, barking dogs and Ginsters sausage roll wrappers, that, like the city, there will always be people watching or listening (whether they care or not). My little games of imagining my own freedom and the lack of anyone else around will have to wait for one of the many societal-collapse scenarios floating around pop-culture to come good. Perhaps then the scratched rock graffiti might take on the new significance of messages from a lost empire.

Review of 'The Songlines' by Bruce Chatwin (1987)

2010-09-03T00:52:00.002+01:00

I trust the recommendations of people I respect, and The Songlines has been on my list for that reason for a while. “They're like the maps and histories rolled together in poetry and songs - but you need to read it”, was the answer I got from my respected friend when I asked her what 'songlines' were on picking up the book.

For a 'travel book' to approach such broad philosophical points is not only original - certainly when The Songlines was written - but simply lovely. This is a lovely book. It could be said that it breaks conventions and avoids genre definition, but the verbs 'to break' and 'to avoid' both include senses of intention in their meaning which make them just slightly inaccurate here. I happen to think that Bruce Chatwin couldn't really have cared less about convention or genre and just wrote the things that filled his thoughts; and his thoughts are interesting, concerning at their core what it is to be us - to be human.

Many won't like this book; there is little structure and it is full of wide-turning ramblings and apparently random anecdotes. But, as with In Patagonia, which I read recently, Chatwin uses the hidden poetry of large-scale prose-construction to create an atmosphere or perhaps the landscape of a place. The wide-turning ramblings are wanders in the open spaces of the outback. And the random anecdotes are the events of travelling there. This book tastes of the dry red sands of Australia and the freedom and individuality of the outback-dwellers one finds there. But more than in In Patagonia, Chatwin allows himself to meditate as well as to observe. There are repeated (chant-like) thoughts on the origins of language, how language relates to landscape, the cooperation v's competition debate in evolutionary development, animal migration patterns... I could go on.

If you care to, call it travel literature, but it exists outside genre in the way all genre-defining or genre-beginning books have done. There are historical, linguistic, archaeological, philosophical, comedic, and personal stories all tied in the only way they could be tied – loosely – to the soil and the songs of Aboriginal Australia, and a place we all come from. We have a term for it now that just about fits: Landscape Literature, but there is more here than even the best that followed Chatwin. It is what I'm about to spend the next year studying with Exeter Uni, and this book is a model for me.

There are simple but careful recordings of conversations (or, if you believe Chatwin's detractors - embellishments) that are like 'place-capsules' and without the need to describe a landscape they put the reader there, in the place, the only place that that particular conversation could take place. In these passages, Chatwin's writing feels more like skilled editing, and as I read I get the same pleasure as I do watching a well put together David Attenborough documentary: they are both infectiously excited to learn first-hand. That quality is something I have never felt in literature before reading Chatwin. 'Thought-provoking' is an inadequate adjective. It made me feel, or remember (or is that the same thing), that land and life and song and words and self are all one and the same. The book reinforces feelings that you've pushed down inside you, that you're more than an urban, city-dwelling, house-dwelling, sedentary being, that you need to be outside, and that you need to be moving to be really alive. Or is that just me?

Review of Robert McFarlane's 'Mountains of the Mind' (2003)

2010-07-12T12:54:00.003+01:00

Writing about mountains very often simmers down to tales of derring-do and the inflation of hero-worshiping reputations. It is really a lovely change to read a writer on the subject clearly very aware of these weaknesses. His only foray into personality-cult mountaineer-adoration is in the penultimate chapter: on George Mallory; and he knows he's doing it; and the book is better because of it. On the surface it would seem like a continuation of the very British genre of heroic failure, but it is a sensitive study of the climber's letter's home to his eternally suffering wife, Ruth, during his three attempts on Everest in the '20's.

I think the publishers and editors need to be congratulated for a change, too. It may be difficult to tell, almost by definition, where the writer's job ends and theirs begins, but I have a feeling the 'peaking' of the Mallory chapter is a joint effort. And it makes the book. The previous chapters are slightly resemblant of the slog up the mountain towards the peak, but certainly with some interesting views and fireside tales along the way. But they are necessary to understand what drove the man and what drives many others to risk their lives climbing mountains.

The bulk of the book is a pleasant enough ramble through the history of peoples' attitudes to mountains and altitude. It could have been a little deflating to discover that our appreciation of mountainscapes is entirely constructed in the massive changes of attitude begun in the enlightenment (like so much else we now hold dear). I suspect I am not alone in having thought before reading this book that humans had always appreciated a beauty in mountains. But, we are told, mountains were for the bulk of human history, forbidding places full of unknown nightmares for the god-fearing peasantry and educated alike. Robert McFarlane does not deflate, however, but picks an interesting and intelligent middle path between the potentially depressing examination of the construction of the beauty-myth of mountainscapes and the common hero-worship approach. I was made comfortable with the knowledge that we who do appreciate them now are responding to the subtle persuasion of a few hundred years of literature, philosophy and science rather than the direct vision before us. McFarlane merely makes our gaze deeper and more learned.

I climb the odd mountain myself and recognise the arrogance and absurdity that McFarlane partly condemns. He faces off these human weaknesses with the untellable beauty that should be the reason for climbing up to high altitudes, and not the competitive first, fastest, or longest. Mountaineering is often called a sport and for some who want to be heroes, it is. And perhaps there is no need not to call it a sport. McFarlane doesn't get dragged into this argument. Instead he cleverly and passionately (partly through the tragic case study of Mallory) persuades us that perhaps it goes a little far sometimes, and we should look past the sport aspect of mountains and appreciate the magical happiness that can be provided by reaching a spot so breath-taking that you are washed over with the wonderful feeling of being exactly where you wish to be. I have felt that absolute contentedness a few times and agree with McFarlane that it doesn't have to be a peak and you don't have to have nearly died in attempting it. Being there, wherever it is, is enough.

Northern Patagonia, Argentina

2010-05-26T03:26:00.003+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I went down to Patagonia. I've been meaning to ever since I started this trip almost a year ago. It's always been a symbol of escape from the rest of the world for me and for just about anyone with even a passing interest. I probably had as little information about the place as most people, but the little bits I'd heard and read made me imagine and dream all the more.

I was all too aware that the two weeks I had given myself were completely inadequate to explore a territory of a million square kilometres. I'd been in Buenos Aires learning Spanish and writing and reading and having city fun for almost six months by then so some serious outdoor leg exercise was what I wanted more than anything. I planned on staying in Bariloche, the main town for Northern Argentinian Patagonia, for the whole time and to hike and bike in the mountains and lakes around it. It's also the best mapped area, but as I found out, this is not to the same standard as OS in the UK and I got 'a touch self-misplaced' a few times.

It was colder than I'd expected, getting down to minus 10 at night, so, although I felt a bit of a wimp, I stuck to one day hikes and rides because I didn't fancy hiring a tent and arctic sleeping bag. I've slept out sub zero a few times and if you can get to sleep you're fine, but if the bag isn't good enough, then it's a long night of shivering in the blackness hoping you'll pass out. After exhausting the immediate and beautiful hikes and bike rides around Bariloche, I went to El Bolsón by bus about a hundred kilometres south.

Waiting at the bus station, sat on a sunny bit of kerb, I made friends with the local stray dogs as I often do. One particular mutt took a liking to me and kept coming back for nose-strokes. I asked him if he minded being called Scratch at which he tilted his head as dogs do when they wonder what you're on about. The nose-strokes made him dreamily close his eyes like I do when someone softly massages my neck. A painfully cool traveller type in Ray Bans and colourful jewelry looked on with a slightly scrunched nose as I nuzzled my new friend and we made friendly yelps at each other. I sawed off a chunk of a fatty salami and Scratch ate it down without chewing. He watched me get on the bus with such sad eyes. But that's the life of a stray at a bus station in South America. There must be thousands of them, all making friends and then losing them again within an hour. It's like a reverse Littlest Hobo. On the bus I settled in to reading or watching the incredible lakes and mountains pass by. That is until about an hour and a half into the winding journey.

The driver pulled up and the people on the other side of the aisle started standing to look at something. I heard the driver call “ambulancia” on his CB and a few people started getting off. I couldn't see anything from the bus, but realised there must have been an accident so I got off to see if I could help. There were no vehicles visible... then everyone from the bus started running to the bridge we'd just passed over. As I ran up, I saw there was a missing section of the bridge railings, and looking down, saw an articulated lorry, twisted and battered on it's side, facing diagonally upriver. A couple of men, our bus driver included, had got down the steep bank and were wading out to the cab. I rushed down too, leaving a growing crowd on the bridge frantically trying their mobile phones.

By the time I reached the rocky beach one of the guys from the truck had somehow got out and was being tended by a woman trying in vain to mop up heavy blood loss from his head wound with tissues. It was thick, arterial blood but at least I couldn't see it pumping out from anywhere. I always carry a large wound dressing in my bag, so I fished it out, but what I really needed was a thick, padded field dressing. There was simply too much blood, and because it was a head wound, we couldn't put pressure on it. He was clearly in shock but moaning and managing to sit up, so I left him with the woman and hopped over some rocks and climbed up the back wheels of the truck and onto the body. There were three or four men at the cab, but I was worried that the truck might explode as I could hear a hissing noise. The engine had stalled thankfully. I checked around for a broken fuel line as I clambered around trying to avoid any hot bits of metal and putting my feet on whatever bit of twisted metal or plastic was available. I could see fuel and oil shimmering in the water but satisfied myself that the hissing came from a hydraulic hose that had popped off, and if the fuel line was broken it must be underwater. I took several good sniffs to make sure. Nothing. Good. It was likely to be diesel anyway, which is far less flammable than petrol. Even so, I hoped no one on the bridge above was stupid enough to smoke.

I crawled onto the white cab and looked down through the side window. Inside I could just make out the bus driver standing knee deep in the icy water, over a man lying at the bottom of the cab in a pile of soaking blankets. The bus driver and another man had managed to rip off the front window to gain access. With another guy who'd followed me onto the cab, I tried with all my might to open the cab door, but it might as well have been welded. I managed to get my fingers in and pull down the window so we could see inside properly.

The cab seemed to have landed in a relatively shallow, rocky part of the river, so it was three-quarters out of the river, but the guy laying sprawled, and extremely pale, at the bottom had icy water lapping all around him. He must have been frozen, but he didn't seem to be shivering, which didn't look like a good sign to me. I could see now he was conscious and he moaned weakly. I looked him over carefully but could see no obvious injury other than some blood on his chin and jumper from where he must have bounced off the dashboard. No one ever wears seatbelts in South America. I tried to make the bus driver and the other man understand to keep him warm as he was clearly in shock and we discovered that the injured man could move his arms but not feel his legs. He was lacking the energy even to moan with the pain. Ambulances can take a long time to arrive in the mountains so we had to get him out of there despite the risk of back injury. The water was freezing glacial melt so at least it had limited any bleeding we couldn't see. We needed a stretcher.

At first we tried to get the bed/luggage rack out of the cab but it just wouldn't fit through the mangled wreckage, so one guy had the bright idea of removing a side panel from the truck – one of those flip-down sides that make loading easier. We manoeuvred the heavy steel stretcher around the cab and into position balanced on a couple of rocks in front of the cab. Three men, as carefully as they could, evidently conscious of the pain they were causing the victim, moved him slowly onto it through the front window space. It took six of us several more minutes to carry him on the heavy stretcher over the rocks and up the steep bank and onto the road where an army truck had just pulled up, the back of which was being cleared to put the stretcher on. The man with the head wound had apparently been driven by someone on to hospital. Thankfully, just as we were lifting the man up onto the truck, someone saw the ambulance coming round the bend from Bariloche. We all sighed with relief. I patted our bus driver on the back and told him he'd done well. He shrugged it off, but he had been a hero. After emptying out boots of water and wringing out socks, we went back to the bus where people were standing around having nervous cigarettes. Back on the bus I saw that the only person not to get off and at least try to help had been the ultra cool traveller from the bus station who was now avoiding eye contact, still wearing his inscrutable Ray Bans. The driver sat back in his seat in his soaked trousers, took a deep breath and called “vamos”. It made me wonder what the cool guy will say about Argentina when he gets back. Everyone always wants bits of essentialising info on far away peoples. I have a feeling he won't be saying “to a man, and woman, Argentinians have more balls than me”.

I was tired when I arrived in El Bolsón, and slept well that night. The next few days were spent hiking in the beautiful valleys of the Rio Azul and Rio Negro. It was utterly beautiful and some of the best hiking I've ever had the pleasure to do. It was on a par with Peru and Ecuador, which is saying something. Though at a much lower altitude. And the pleasure of going alone was lovely. Previously in South America, I have not been able to get good enough maps to attempt much hiking solo and had gone in small groups. Even so it can be dangerous. With the relatively decent 1:125,000 map I had for the valleys, I still managed to end up at one point on a crumbling cliff edge. Stubbornness in following a thin trail usually pays off, but this time I had to admit that it was dangerous to keep going: my feet were slipping on every step and rocks were tumbling down the 1:1 or greater slope into the Rio Arroyo Raquel a hundred metres below. I remembered the injuries I'd seen in the truck crash the day before and I gave up. Retracing my steps was more a matter of sliding gracelessly down on my bum aiming for the only vegetation hanging on to life there which happened to be extremely thorny bushes. It always seems to be thorny bushes in situations like that. Luckily, my adrenal glands don't get excited very easily so I don't panic, and I find a strange pleasure in such risky situations. I was literally hanging on for dear life, testing my balance and climbing skills until I finally made it back down to the bank of the river and found another trail. I had lunch halfway up the steep hill sat on a log with the sun reaching my face through the canopy and a few wasps buzzing well above my head in the pines. Unaccountably they seemed more interested in the scent of pine needles than my jam sandwich. It was as pleasant a moment as I could remember in my life, and the freshness of the scents, clearness of air, and the aches in my muscles made me smile a smile that not one person saw, without needing to think any thought at all. If I hadn't already done so several times, I would then have promised myself that I will return to Patagonia.

Review of Isabella Allende's 'Daughter of Fortune' (1999)

2010-05-22T20:21:00.005+01:00

On the cover of the book and on the marketing pages just inside, there are total of eighteen scraps of reviews from (mostly) prestigious newspapers and magazines around the world offering positive reviews. One has to wonder if the spirit of those reviews has been respected in each case, because this is not a good novel. I think, in fact, I may actually be angry that so many reviewers are unable to see that Isabella Allende is not very good. But then I question if perhaps they can see it, and it's the pressure of not wanting to disagree with her huge fan base that forces them to write something positive and go against their discernment. It is not enough to try to draw conspiratorial connections between Harper Collins and other News Corp owned companies (The Times, The Sunday Times, TLS) that appear in this list of reviewers. Indeed, so many newspapers have given her good reviews that it makes me doubt my own judgement. But only for a second before shaking my head and returning to my instincts not to judge the book by it's cover but it's content.

Allende is a storyteller, and not a terrible one. Not a great one, for me, but she certainly shows her journalistic training by keeping the reader reading. I found myself tutting at her flat style but wanting to read on regardless. Flat? Here's what I mean:

At the time Tao Chi'en had escaped his servitude, he was thin as any of the countless people in Hong Kong who suffered from tuberculosis. This was his first decent meal in a very long time, and the onslaught of tastes, aromas, and textures was ecstasy. (p172)

But easy-reading is not enough for me. There is flow to her writing but there is no beauty or descriptive talent present in this work at all. No innovation in the structure. No art, in short. This is an airport-novel with a big name attached. A student of literature will learn only one thing from reading this book: that you don't need to be clever to make a living from writing, all you need to be able to do is fill a mould and market it.

Her prose is paint-by-numbers. Though it is translated, so it is possible some of the blame lies with the translator. But I doubt it. It feels as if she has read a book on how to write a novel, collected a few research books and then locked herself away for a few weeks and this is the result. She shows off what she has been researching rather than subtly weaving information in to the narrative. Her descriptions of Chinese life in the early nineteenth-century, for example, read as if they're a simple, even slightly bigoted, boiling down of a high school textbook.

The passingly interesting story is narrated blandly in some cases, too. Can you ever imagine reading something like this, for instance, in Martin Amis, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, or any other writer worthy of the title?:

Karl Bretzner was the key to her past and her personality; their fleeting affair had shaped her destiny and the woman she had become. (p250)

What a boring way to put something that could be really quite interesting.

I learned a rule of writing prose once, which I am yet to see successfully broken: lead the reader to the door, don't push them through it. It is what permits post-reading thought, in a sense; a personal analysis of what you have just read; it is your relationship with the novel; and to me it is the source of a large proportion of the vast enjoyment I derive from novels. I can imagine that this rule, as any other in literature, could be broken, but Allende is not the one to do so successfully. In fact, I'm pretty certain she's ignorant of it in any form.

Don't get me wrong, I've had my doubts in thinking about this novel. How can she be so popular and yet I think she writes trash? chief among them. I was particularly worried by her statement in an interview that she loves literary fiction, particularly Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Is it possible to love such beautiful writing, and yet sell such pap to so many people? All I can say is that there are a lot of people in the world who think she is a wonderful writer. I was reading the novel in a restaurant in Argentina and the waitress held her hand to her heart in delight that I was reading one of her favourite authors. Did I like it? "Errrm. Perhaps it's not quite the same in English," I said.

Read the book if you have to just to see what so many people call literature. But remember that there are a lot of people in the world also who consider Eckhart Tolle a philosopher. If you don't know who he is, click on the link and have a laugh.

The great missed opportunity of the TV election debates.

2010-05-02T00:46:00.001+01:00

The BBC spreads it's reach worldwide, and I'm grateful that I get some news from home, particularly in the form of podcasts streamed through their website. It is, however, rather difficult to avoid (should you wish to, of course) talk and analysis of the upcoming election. In a spare few minutes on 6th May, Britons will be name-checked before wandering into their local polling booths to mark their X's. Everyone's very excited (in the media anyway) because, for a change, politics in the UK looks a little different. The first TV debate ever between the top three UK leaders chucked a spanner in the works of the red-blue thumb-wrestling machine that has been going on all my life and well before. The introduction of the TV debate has made two significant changes to the landscape and given column-writers fresh, or at least fairly fresh, ammunition. Firstly, it is remarkable how little we have seen of cabinet-members other than the leaders. In other words, we now have a presidential style even if we don't have a presidential system. Secondly, the Liberal Democrats, whom have traditionally been ignored by the mainstream media as outsiders have jumped in the polls. All three parties are close in the polls.

I heard an interesting interview on one of my streamed BBC podcasts yesterday, and I was surprised to find myself agreeing with a venture capitalist. We agreed on the point that the current economic situation cannot continue. To put it simply, the UK government spends £1.36 for every £1 it receives in income. The government has managed to get to a stage where it is borrowing to pay off borrowing in the hope that the economy can grow it's way out of trouble. Again, the venture capitalist and myself agree that this is highly unlikely. Owing about £50 billion and still borrowing a great deal is not a plan, in fact it's more of a spiral. Even non-economists understand that borrowing and borrowing and borrowing is providing nothing for the future but debt for our children to pay off. Anyone who has ever run a business or had a family or even considered their own personal finances for a minute knows that this is an unsustainable way to live. This raises a couple of important points:

1) What can be done about it?
2) How on earth were they so stupid as to let this happen?

The highly respected venture capitalist (if that's not a contradiction in terms) was clearly a smart man. He had that informed but straight-talking manner (characterised by the ability to say 'yes' or 'no' for instance) antithetical to political speak. Unfortunately he chooses to use his brains simply to make more money - an exceedingly dull occupation if you ask me (I've run businesses before, and profit margins or numbers on a screen could never motivate me as much as creating something with my mind and muscles or being thanked by a satisfied customer). Mr venture capitalist and I disagreed on the question of what should be done about it and, more subtley, why. We agree of course that debt on this scale is bad, but he thinks that we should to reduce the debt to do that magical thing: 'restore the confidence of the market'. I think we should reduce the debt because my parents always taught me to save up and don't borrow money. Debt puts you under the thumb of somebody else. The logic of this household wisdom can't really be denied. Mr venture capitalist sees there to be only three ways to reduce the huge debt. 1, To reduce the size of the state in the form of firing civil servants and cutting other expenditures (building rents, ditching expendable departments, efficiency savings). 2, Increasing taxes hugely (in whatever ways will cause the least riots). 3, Allow the currency to crash in value thus reducing the relative size of the debt. None of them are very attractive to governments on the eve of an election as points of discussion. But that is where I think they're making a mistake. There is an appetite for straight-talking, honest, and intelligent leader in a public overwhelmed with political dishonesty. Everyone knows the party hardly matters these days. The days of left and right are gone. It's about ideas and strategy now, for better or worse. A politician may huff at this and say it's political suicide to tell everyone they're going to increase taxes and cut state spending more than the other parties. And they would have been right before the advent of the TV debates. It would have been a perfect opportunity to introduce a new, radical idea to the mix.

This leads me to the second point: how on earth did this happen? Here the blame is shared between the media and the politicians. The media live on soundbites and headlines. Most people only ever read or hear the selected, summarised and highly edited elements of what politicians say. A speech is reduced to a headline, as politicians are constantly, and rightly, complaining. An entire debate in the commons is reduced to a line or two in the papers. This is both the benefit and the curse of the media - it is their job. But it has two intertwined effects. An exceptionally accurate metaphor would be 'two sides of the same coin'. Firstly, politicians will play to this rule and talk in soundbites hoping to provide easy headlines of their choosing by doing the headline-writers' jobs for them, and inevitably eliminating the substance of their arguments. Secondly, detail (that place where the devil is, as we all know) is ignored and washed over by the media in competitive headline related-sales, causing it to become increasingly unimportant for the politicians to go into detail. After all, as a politician, if the media doesn't spread a message, why waste your breath saying it. You might as well spend more time making your hair appeal to as many people as possible or on your ability to look persuasively into a camers - these things do appear in the press directly and indirectly. And thus you have a vicious circle of sorts. Or at least a deadlock between the media and the politicians, often talked of in the media themselves (that great self-referential industry) as a 'dumbing-down'.

In this mutually-reinforcing relationship of simplification how does one break the cycle? This is where the leaders have missed the true opportunity of the debate. Between 8 and 11 million people watched the final debate the other day (depending on who you listen to) and that is down on the previous two. When do the leaders get a better chance to speak directly (almost unmediated!) to the people with sufficient time to go into some detail and present more complex arguments? Party political broadcasts are for millions the perfect chance to get up and make a cup of tea - they have the air of the ad-break about them, whereas the debates kept people watching far more. It should have been the opportunity for a strong, smart, straight-talking politician (don't laugh) to break the cycle and talk passionately about the sea-change that is required. They had the opportunity to first shock their viewers with the truth, then to back up their statements with truth. They could then play on the fact that the other leaders are simply not being as honest. The public would buy that. They can smell honesty a mile off, especially when it brings bad news. It might even have got Nick Clegg elected.

The radical idea that they should have introduced into the mix is a new way of looking at national economics. The tweaking and plugging of holes will only keep the nation afloat so long, debt weighs a great deal. Greece is sinking, Portugal, Ireland and Spain might too. What is needed is not just the short term fix of paying back the debt, but debate on ways to never, ever get in debt again. Yes, we need to increase taxes and cut the state, but that is with a long-term view to create a sustainable economy. That's what they had the opportunity to say and they didn't. A sustainable level of growth, or even zero-growth. Until then the cycle will continue.

2010-04-17T20:33:00.000+01:00

My 2005 (cough, prize-winning) essay on the philosophical problem of taking account of scale is available to view now on the page http://danieljfox.blogspot.com/p/philospohical-essays.html to the countless millions who are interested. Does anyone have any idea how to get rid of the orange bits? Don't know enough HTML.

Review of Toni Morrison's 'A Mercy' (2008)

2010-04-15T21:31:00.005+01:00

As ever, Morrison is a sad pleasure to read. She is the very definition of a writer to me – it is not enough just to write and publish books, they must tell us something new, reach between the lines of thought (in this case history as thought) and pull out something previously unclear or hidden. Milan Kundera calls it 'pulling back the curtain'.

Even if you haven't read Morrison before, her fame (Pullitzer, Nobel) probably precedes her and you will likely be aware of her infinitely fertile subject matter. She wants us to understand as she does the effects of the great long-term crime against humanity that was slavery. To paraphrase her in an interview about the time of the release of A Mercy, slavery was nothing new when it appeared, but what was new was linking it to race. A Mercy is an examination of the very early stages of that change, in the wild Virginia of the late seventeenth-century, the humble beginnings of the North America that came to rule the world. But it's no eden: fractured communities and fearful people live in clearings surrounded by the endless wilderness, and a little-known uprising in these early days that was brutally put down resulted in laws aimed at splitting white from black, and preventing their ever coming together again.

Half a dozen years ago an army of blacks, natives, whites, mulattoes – freedmen, slaves and

indentured – had waged war against local gentry led by members of that very class. When that

“people's war” lost its hopes to the hangman, the work it had done – which included the slaughter of

opposing tribes and running the Carolinas off their land – spawned a thicket of new laws authorizing

chaos in defense of order. By eliminating manumission, gatherings, travel and bearing arms for black

people only; by granting license to any white to kill any black for any reason [...] they separated and

protected all whites from all others forever.

The main characters of the novel are all orphans, accidental finds, or at least present because of circumstances beyond their control. That is, apart from the male characters, who are the ones who take the women and girls in in one way or another; they are the only ones permitted any real agency. And naturally in such a distended proto-society, pressured from the outside by the simple need to survive, the contingency of the lives of the main community of lost and misplaced women on the masculine-head is fragile. His death splits the group of disparate friends and makes immediate survival urgent.

A Mercy's central character – the only one narrated in the first person – is Florens. Now keen readers will know that Morrison likes to attach rich meanings, clear or otherwise, to her characters' names. A 'florin' was a gold coin minted in large numbers between the thirteenth- and sixteenth centuries in Italy. It became, through its use by the Florentine international banks (literally with branches all over Europe), the main currency of international trade between the Western European powers. At that time, before the raping of the New World of its huge mineral wealth, most of the gold used in Europe came from Africa. Florens is part of the currency of international banking, her life as an object bought and sold (she is used in payment of a debt to the reluctant farmer-trader, Vaark); her very name is synonymous with trade. That gold from Africa and the Americas has not disappeared, or been 'used up' – it is a foundation of sorts: it still exists in the vaults of US or European Banks, Central or otherwise, making up a fair proportion of what our economies are built on. The same goes for the unimaginably huge amount of stolen labour that was the primary purpose of slavery. The profits of that labour still exist. Trade, banking, economics; these are the foundation-stones of slavery and they themselves were built taller in return. The gnawing persuasion of the profit-logic. And indeed Jacob Vaark is persuaded to invest in the sugar-plantation boom:

The sale of molasses to northern-colonies is brisker than ever. More steady profit in it than fur,

tobacco, lumber, anything – except gold, I reckon. As long as the fuel is replenished, vats simmer and

money heaps. Kill-devil, sugar – there will never be enough. A trade for lifetimes to come.

Indeed, Vaark, as he grows richer builds a huge house with the proceeds, and, following his death before he is able to move in, he haunts the big empty structure. Some people talk of scars of events like the Holocaust or Slavery (I feel a capital 'S' is appropriate) living on, but I think it is more instructive metaphor to think of them in terms of being a basis, a terrible foundation for events that follow. It is arguable what the Holocaust can be shown to be the foundation of, but Slavery, unarguably is a foundation-stone of European and North American wealth. The big empty structure built on the profits of slavery.

Brain Scans and the Future.

2010-03-15T23:37:00.003Z

Brain scanning in neuroscience has moved on far further than you probably realize. It is highly likely that it will begin to alter the way society, education, and the law work within your lifetimes. To give one example that I couldn't believe until I fact-checked it - a woman in India was recently convicted of murder on the basis of a brain scan (FMRI) - read about it here.

What about the thought-police? Just a creation of Orwell or are we just a step away? In this article, a report by neuroscientists at NYU and Yale is detailed that examines a bio-neurological basis for racism - in a sense, determining whether you're having racist thoughts by brainscan - read about it here.

Brain Scanning Documentary

The above link will play a documentary recently broadcast on BBC radio. It truly is one of the most thought-provoking ways you could spend 29 minutes. It's about the advances in the science of brain-scanning and what effects they may have in the future. Amazing, miraculous, frightening, dangerous: choose your adjective and please tell me what you think.

Karl Rove and 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques'

2010-03-12T16:33:00.000Z

I've just listened to an interview with Karl Rove (George W. Bush's Senior Advisor) on the World Service (listen to the mp3 here). Having had just enough time to write his memoirs since leaving office, Mr. Rove is now marketing his book all over the place. Now you can't blame the BBC for wanting to interview him (despite the boost to sales it's going to give the man's book): Mr. Rove is often referred to as dubbya's brain and probably has a much better idea of what happened during the neo-con's period in office than dubbya does (rumour has it Bush now resides in a sock drawer in a back room of the Council on Foreign Relations but may return to the public eye for a one-off show with Sooty).

Cuddly old Karl says he doesn't like the term 'torture' to describe sleep deprivation, 'diet modification', and 'waterboarding'. He prefers 'enhanced interrogation techniques'. Gotta love him. He defends the process of waterboarding with two points. Firstly that valuable intelligence was garnered from the process; and secondly that US troops regularly go through a course including such methods. The first point is impossible to prove and I'm tempted to say 'he would say that wouldn't he'. This is something I know about being an ex-soldier. There was indeed a course called 'Resistence to Interrogation' and involved the teaching of various techniques to help resist creative methods of interrogation. I heard stories about different methods of torture (yes, we all used that term because we were soldiers and understood that there is no difference between 'enhanced interrogation' and torture), including: being tied up and hooded and put in front of the tyre of a land rover which inches forward, engine revving, pushing against your head; waterboarding - although it was never called that in the UK; sleep deprivation, starvation and enforced confusion as to time; temperature, light and sound confusion, and others. The first thing you are taught is that you cannot succeed in holding out against these tactics. Everyone will fail, ii's just a matter of time and suffering. We all knew that the whole purpose of the course was to give you an idea of what an enemy security service with no regard for the Geneva Convention (not to mention morality) might put you through. We all knew it was torture. That's why I never put my name down for the course. It's not very enjoyable! But there is a difference. The course has a value to troops who might be taken prisoner in a combat situation because it does help you resist for a time and to develop tactics of pretending to be broken etc. But the point is, this is only acceptable because the troops involved volunteer for the course. This is rather an important point. If you don't volunteer for it, of course it's fucking torture. Karl Rove should give the course a go himself and see how long he lasts before (literally in many cases) shitting himself and crying for his mother.

Let me state this as clearly as possible. From the perspective of an ex-soldier or otherwise, it is NOT acceptable, under any circumstances to carry out torture on prisoners, terrorists, enemy combatants, whatever. Speak to the smarter soldiers (they are there, believe it or not) and they will generally tell you that the torture techniques used by the Americans destroyed the moral high ground argument and made the battlefield a more dangerous place (what reason would an enemy combatant have for not torturing you after hearing that the other side do it anyway). I note that Karl Rove says that these techniques have made the world a safer place. I'd laugh if it wasn't so sick.

The Grey Area of Truth in the Information Age

2010-03-09T00:53:00.005Z

One point about the internet that is often lost in the deluge of information we receive these days, and something which is forgotten in the promotion of the internet as the greatest informational and connecting power the world has ever known (see the BBC's latest season of programmes 'Superpower'), is it's amazing ability to create or expand intellectual battles. It has, for example, hugely increased the scale and importance of the battles between code-makers and code-breakers; the virus-creators vs the anti-virus developers; intellectual property rights vs free information flow; and, last, but certainly not least, truth vs fiction.

Take the example of the French writer, Bernard-Henri Lévy. It is apparently arguable whether he can be called a philosopher, so we can safely demote him to the rank of writer without fear of embarrassment (after all, everyone's a writer if they say they are). Embarrassment is something Lévy knows rather a lot about. His recent book "De la Guerrre en Philosophie" (2010) cites the work of a French philosopher named Jean-Baptiste Botul as central to his argument. Trouble is, Botul was invented for a laugh (a very French-intellectual laugh) by another writer, Frédéric Pagès who seems to like nothing more than creating spoof diaries and characters. The embarrassed writer has, to be fair to him, congratulated the hoaxer on a job well-done, but has also been widely quoted as saying "My source of information is books, not Wikipedia". And that, really, is the important lesson here: you cannot these days be a credible writer or journalist without using the internet generally, and Wikipedia specifically, to check your sources. Had Mr. Lévy done so, he would have easily discovered the elaborate hoax (which involved the publication of two fake-philosphical tracts, and the invention of fake lectures in Paraguay).

You have to feel (a little) sorry for M. Lévy given that Wikipedia is banned as a source in most of the academic world and is railed against regularly in the press, blind to any irony. The Times called him a "laughing stock". After all, Wikipedia has been used many times to present false information (just type Criticism of Wikipedia into Wikipedia to find them!) such as the hoaxed death of British TV presenter Vernon Kay. Truth is not always an easy line to draw in the world of the information Superpower, but one thing's for sure: writers have to be more careful than ever of their sources; the internet is one huge, expanding grey area.

Child composer

2010-03-04T17:16:00.001Z

I've never wanted children before, but look what you can teach them to do with only 7 years of Pavlov's Dog punishments and a small electric-shock machine. Amazing. Check out her miraculously marketed life at her website: http://www.emilybear.com/

Open letter to several newspapers about the Falklands/Malvinas

2010-03-02T04:58:00.003Z

Dear Sir/Madam,

Until about a year ago I lived in Bristol, but now every day I walk through the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires on the way to my Spanish classes. The plaza is opposite the main government building and is, every single day without fail, home to a protest or two. It is literally home to a group of old veterans of the Falklands/Malvinas war who, like many millions are unemployed with little or no state help. Argentina just does not have the money to pay benefits to everyone who needs them, nor the jobs to fix the problem. Living in Buenos Aires you get used to protests, perhaps desensitised. You also get used to dirty children juggling on the underground for a few coins, entire families going through the rubbish bags outside your house every night, and people sleeping rough all over the city. Argentines learned nearly a decade ago to mistrust banks after they closed their doors, stopping people from withdrawing their own savings. The currency then collapsed, reducing the savings they couldn't get at to a fraction.

I have started telling people I'm Irish here because I don't want the confrontation that I fear might result if I tell them the truth. Yes, I'm from the UK, that country that your murderous dictator who was in power forced you to go to war with in 1982. That country which has an extremely weak claim to the islands just off your coast. That country which is starting to drill for oil in the surrounding waters in what could be their final act of colonialism. The claim of the UK over the Falklands/Malvinas is in reality based on only two points. Firstly, that British blood was spilt there within living memory; and secondly, that the 2,500 islanders wish to remain 'British', or rather, independent but with military support from Britain. There is no avoiding that these two points make it politically impossible for the British government to back down from its duty to protect the islanders (whom, I understand are financially self sufficient apart from defence).

In 1982, there was a man called Colin Phipps in the War Room with Margaret Thatcher, advising on the likely wealth of oil around the islands. When former-MP Colin Phipps died last January, he passed his company, Desire Petroleum, on to his son Stephen, who is now sending a rig out to drill for what he believes to be deposits many times the size of those in the North Sea. I find it extremely likely that the 1982 war was fought, at least in part, for those oil deposits, which the British had superior information about.

It is very difficult to find an Argentine who believes they should invade the islands, but very easy to find an Argentine who is insulted by desperately needed resources being taken from under their noses. The islands are not under military threat, and the fact remains that the islanders themselves wish to remain independent of Argentina but with support from the UK. Given all of this, and the poor state of the economy here in Argentina, would it not be a wise diplomatic move for the British government to equally share the proceeds of any oil found with the Argentine people? As this money does not yet 'exist' it would not cost the British taxpayer a penny. Such a move would vastly improve relations between the two countries that I love, while reaffirming the right of the islanders to self-determination, not to mention showing an excellent example of what can be achieved peacefully between two nations that have previously been at war.

Yours faithfully,

Daniel Fox,

Former NCO in the British Army.

Copies to: The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Economist, Indymedia UK, and The Buenos Aires Herald.

Chomsky on Imperialism in Latin America

2010-02-21T17:21:00.001Z

Old Noam on US imperialism in Latin America. Particularly focusing on two recent developments: 1) the coup in Honduras in 2009 (when I was next door in Nicaragua and Costa Rica) when the democratically elected Zelaya was ousted because he threatened the ruling class' business interests; and, 2) the recent decision by Columbia (depending on how you look at it) to allow large-scale military base construction in it's territory. As much as I think Obama is a step in the right direction, his foreign-policy has not significantly differed so far from the 'backyard' theory of Latin America in US policy. Perhaps with the exception of his stance towards Cuba, which I note Noam doesn't mention.

To me, Noam Chomsky is one of the most important writers and lecturers in the world at the moment. He can be criticised at times, but his value to all of us lies in simple opposition to the vast bulk of opinion disseminated in large-scale media.

One of his most important ongoing observances, which I think is extremely difficult to counter, is that US foreign policy mirrors business interests, even to the exclusion of democracy and the inclusion of warfare.

Robin Hood Tax : 0.05% of financial trades

2010-02-14T19:04:00.000Z

Steal something from work day, April 15th!

2010-02-01T22:59:00.002Z

Steal From Work Day - April 15th from Steal From Work Day on Vimeo.

Amazing the campaigns that exist out there!

To my little moleskine

2010-01-23T01:17:00.004Z

I haven't written in you, my little black book, for so long now. I feel guilty that you haven't felt my pen press your skin. But I have been writing. A bit. What is it about me? I want nothing but to be a writer and to be happy. Just those two things and yet they seem to conflict. Or I allow them to. I hope I don't want them to. You see, your place in my heart, little book, has been taken by a blog, and thus you have lain in the bottom of my backpack and then on my dirty bedroom floor among the screwed up bits of paper, partially read books and discarded underwear. When released from the weight-constraints of backpacking, I replaced your notebook-use with more convenient notebooks; better size, hole-punched, better for writing sat at my dining table. You were just a little chunky, a little stumpy and lumpy for everyday use and your advantages of lightness and small size have been negated now by my living a more sedentary urban life. I always intended to pick you up, because deep down I miss you , but I've been finding so many fun things to do that I'm hardly finding the time to write more than my blog. That is idiotic really because I want to write short stories for my entry to a Masters course in the UK this year. I have to do it and thought it would be easy when I settled in to a flat and a bare-bones life in Buenos Aires. Thing is, little book, I've fallen into a fun life like I used to have back home, one where I don't have time for the hours and hours of sitting around in silence (or perhaps with background Bach) and thinking that it takes me to write. Perhaps I am doing it after all; combining those two aims: writing and fun. Perhaps I just need to alter the proportions a little.

I've found a happy routine of the gym, Spanish lessons, cooking, eating (a lot), and friends that leaves hardly any time for creation. You remember, don't you, little book, the notes and stories I've written in you? You know I can write? So why don't I do it any more? Why do I seem content with not actually doing what I wanted to do – to spend my time here writing. I wouldn't have been content, back in the UK, with such a simple routine. In fact I found it rather dreary when I slipped into it and had to create new things to take up brain-space. Each part of my routine takes its toll, Spanish being the worst culprit. Or perhaps it's the best. Because all these simple elements of routine are rendered more challenging by being done in a different language and in a different culture. What is not satisfying in the familiar country of birth, becomes satisfying somewhere else. What a strange thought: I need the challenge of the new culture and the new language to stop going nuts. Generally, I need a lot of stimulation. It's not just the lessons everyday that take the time, nor the pleasant, sunny hour round-trip commute, but the hours of revision and homework I feel guilty if I don't do. More than guilty. I feel that if I'm not putting everything into learning then it is almost an insult to my host culture, as if I don't care enough. I recently met a woman who has lived for 6 years in a Spanish-speaking country and has worse Spanish than me. Every one of the ex-pats (for want of a better term) I mention it to snort at this. They understand what I mean. It's embarrassing, and I hate to feel embarrassed. That's my prime motivation for learning. I had a bad day today. The complications of imperfect and preterite past tenses are getting to me. Especially as, having been schooled in the eighties and early nineties I was subject to Margaret Thatcher's Tory education policy of producing an efficient workforce, I didn't know my subjunctives from my gerunds when I started this learning a language malarkay. Grammar, you see, is not essential, nor even conducive to, the smooth-running of an office, a factory or a bank. So my generation are rather lacking in grammatical knowledge and if we happen to fall into a life that requires it we need to educate ourselves in it. This slows down language-learning. This is all despite having a wonderful English teacher who encouraged us in every way allowed by the syllabus. She's the reason I'm writing this now and the reason I'm applying for the Masters, and, I might push it to say that she's the reason I don't want that life that everyone else seems to want – the office, the house, the wife, the kids. In short, she had quite an influence over my life. Cheers to Mrs. Freeman. She first gave me the encouragement to write. It was her giving me an 'A' for that first short story – all swords and magic, but with a female central character which she loved – that made me keep writing, and after four more years of her influence I was hooked. Writing gives you a sense of self. You're not just a conduit for the rest of the world (well, sadly you are, little book, but us humans needn't be). No matter what happens around you, if you keep writing there will be a stream of 'I' throughout the pages that helps you think. And becoming better at it changes your life. No really. It's not just a hobby or even a vocation, it's the creation of individuality. If you had a hand and eyes and a pen and another little book, my little book, maybe you could become a person too.

But back to this Spanish thing... I'm really finding it hard. I don't know if it's Maggie Thatcher, my thirty-year old brain, all the weed I smoked as a kid or what, but I don't think I'm overstating it when I say this is the hardest thing I've ever asked my brain to do. Every day is like trying to crowbar a rusty mechanism of cogs and pistons into gear. The ideal is to actually be able to run at the same speed as the English part of my cerebral cortex – the bit kickstarted by Mrs. Freeman. Then, one day, I might be able to provide a little more detail than “My dog had black fur and a long tail. Now it is dead” in Spanish. But writing is the poor relation of conversation, anyway. And I urge to communicate in this way. Currently my conversation goes about the speed of a milkfloat with a puncture, which is particularly slow compared to Porteño Ferrari-speak. There are days when I feel I've learned and achieved something and there are days when I feel useless and stupid. I know quite a few words now. I know the word for belly button (ombligo), I know the word for century (siglo), I know the word for aubergine (berenjena), and a host of inessential vocabulary, but putting everything together, mixing it up, and ladling it out is so frustratingly slow that I get a little depressed about it. Especially when you meet people who seem to be able to drive a Ferrari in just a few months.

So, little book, with your moleskine outer coat, you have a little update on my thoughts, and although you missed out on little adventures like my jumping into a runaway taxi with faulty brakes on a hill in Cuzco, or my becoming a fake-Peruvian TV sports star for the night, you will, little mate, get more impressions of them in future. I promise. But right now I need to type this up on my blog.

Buenos Aires

2010-01-12T02:40:00.011Z

In my last year of the army - you have to give twelve months' notice to leave - my face would involuntarily screw up every morning about 3 seconds after my alarm went off and I'd pull the covers over my head. It was because I realised where I was and that I was stuck there doing something I didn't want to do. Every day. I hate that feeling, and wherever I've felt it in life, I have left. It's not easy, but it's worth it. Always. When I woke up the other morning I smiled and lay there peacefully with not even a sheet over me because of the heat, and considered where I am now. It's a satisfying feeling to wake up and find a new life has constructed itself around you serendipitously. People are, of course, the foundation of this. Lovely new friends. But there are little building blocks too. Things which you can do that really help you feel belonging.

It helps to have somewhere to go each day. For that I have 2 hours of Spanish in the City Centre and that gives me a reason to walk purposefully (there is no verb 'to commute' in Spanish) along Defensa and Reconquista, listening to my sister's old band on my mp3 player, fooling everyone else in the crowds that I belong. Then there are habits. Changing your life provides you an easy way to acquire new habits. I've joined a gym and am now a regular, occasionally even receiving a reverse-nod from one of the muscle-heads doing one-armed pull-ups. I'm cooking every day too, which I've really missed while traveling the last 6 months. As I did back home, I take pleasure in shopping for food. Where I lived in Bristol (near Gloucester Road) has to be one of the last places in the UK where it is still possible to avoid supermarkets and walk to a local butchers, bakery and greengrocers. Here that is the norm, and the quality is better. The covered market in San Telmo a couple of blocks from my flat is beautifully resplendent with brightly-coloured fruit and veg. So much so that often I have to get in the way of a tourist taking photos in order to buy some basil and onions from Mario and his missus. Shopping somewhere other than a supermarket also forces me to learn the vocab for fruits, veg and cuts of meat to save embarrassing pointing incidents. Having a mobile phone too - the ultimate machine for communication - is one of the building blocks of belonging. Sitting on the Subte (underground) and having your phone ring somehow makes people's body language more accepting of you, even if you speak to it in English you are doing something that they do, and tourists and travelers generally don't. And yes, mobiles work underground here.

It is of course learning the language and cultural references that are the keys to belonging. Possibly a good test is to see how many jokes you get. 100% and you might as well be a local. My efforts to increase the number of humans I can communicate with by 500 million are progressing slowly. Taking up a language with a thirty year-old brain has made me sure that if I ever have kids I will force them, whether they like it or not, to learn a language while their minds are still taking root [To any parent reading this, remember, someone who speaks several languages is highly unlikely to starve. Make them learn, don't leave it up to schooling]. I have found it is just as important to pay attention to the subtleties, both of spoken communication and things unsaid. I am not yet qualified to give an accurate description of Argentine culture, having been here only six weeks, but there are a few little things I've noticed which would seem to tell quite a lot about Porteños (Bs As natives).

Food and Drink
It's true what they say, the steak here really is the best. I've never had Kobe beef (you know, that massaged and pampered Japanese cow-meat which is getting on for the price of silver by weight), but I doubt it's much better than a steak from a half-decent restaurant here. Often you don't even get steak-knives because you simply don't need them - the meat is that tender. But, weirdly, the chefs seem to think well done is actually a good idea! No one with any real appreciation of meat in Europe would have a steak cooked more than medium, but here the unseen chefs all seem to think they know better. If you find a restaurant that actually cooks your steak as you ask for it, you're lucky. Vegetables are not a big deal here. Unless you order them specifically, you will likely get a slab of meat on a plate. Solo. The red wine will often be accompanied by a miniature bucket of ice. I was a little confused by this at first, wondering if the waiter had brought ice for forgotten water, until I realised people were actually putting the ice in their red wine. The majority seem to do this, but I have to admit to having been tempted on the sweatier nights. Air conditioning is the exception rather than the rule and, being summer now, it's hardly below 25 C even at night. Nobody has dinner till at least 10pm. It's not uncommon to see families with toddlers out at a restaurant still half-way through their meals at midnight. Everyone's up so late drinking and eating that breakfast, much to my disappointment when I first arrived, doesn't really exist. Many jobs don't start till 10am or later, so the quietest time of day on the street is about 7am. Much quieter than 4am. If they have anything more than a coffee for breakfast it will be medialunas (croissants glazed with sugar) or facturas (pastries) grabbed on the way to the office.

Language
My mind is slow with syntax because I am in the habit of trying to translate each word in my head, which rather slows me down. I need to relax into listening without concentrating too much. In a sense. Porteños will speak quickly and passionately about going to buy a pair of socks, let alone the subjects of sex, football, politics, the USA and the weather - which is, very generally speaking, the order of importance for topical conversation. I need to concentrate on the meaning of words and sentences rather than translating them into my native tongue. A dictionary is no help here, you just need to talk to people and ask questions. Take the word chicos for example. Look it up in a Spanish dictionary and it will give boys or guys as translations, but this only tells you what the word is in English, it doesn't tell you how to use it. Chicos reveals a little about Porteño attitude. In the UK you wouldn't generally expect a waiter in a reasonably expensive restaurant to refer to your party as 'guys'. It just doesn't fit with the fairly formal situation. Here it does. Because formality is not taken that seriously. That appeals to me because after my Army mess experiences I can't stand formal dress or behaviour (one reason I've stayed away from Tango for this long). Further, nothing seems to be taken that seriously. Certainly not the silly things we take seriously in the UK. Political Correctness (it even asks for capital letters in the UK it's so serious), for instance, exists only on the periphery of life here because it's considered vaguely ridiculous to have certain words disallowed by convention.

Sex and Relationships
My limited experience of these subjects in Buenos Aires might be a touch warped by having too small a sample to theorize on, but talking to friends has aggregated what I know. Basically, relationships are far more flexible than we would consider normal in the UK. People seem to subscribe to the don't ask, don't tell way of living with infidelity. Without any prior indication that this might be the case at all, I have already unwittingly slept with a woman who (I later discovered) is engaged to be married. I have not seen any obvious jealousy evinced yet here, but it must exist, or do both partners live in a constant state of looking over the shoulders of their lovers while embracing? In short, people have a lot of sex here, with lots of different people. They care about sex and have none of the hangups that Brits do with their laugh-it-off-silliness. There is no shyness here, they waste no time, and, to use one of the most English of phrases: they don't suffer fools gladly.

Sonrisa en Retrospectiva

2009-12-24T22:05:00.004Z

My hemisphere-splitting metallic wedge has died away now leaving a reduced memory capacity and a slight touchiness. I am thankful that these are very temporary inconveniences as today's two-hour Spanish lesson with a new teacher was not an impressive exhibition of my concentration.

For the last 36 hours I have been stuffing my log-splitter headache with beetroot, orange juice, apples, bananas, walnuts, cherries, spinach tagliatelle and wheat-flakes; vitamins, minerals, water, proteins, carbs, riboflavins, beta carrotines, whatever, absolutely anything to avoid the usual cold and to aid brain recovery. Flashbacks are a good sign, I tell myself. Flashbacks are a good sign. Memory's returning.

The end of the night walk from where the taxi dropped us on Independencia was nearly beyond our capacity, despite the smiles and laughter still on our faces. My body, by this stage, and in deep contrast to earlier in the night, felt rather separate to the rest of me. My body wanted bed and its campaign of persuasion of at least four hours (using the smart strategies of functional attrition and threatened shutdown) had just about won over my mind to it's wisdom. Sometimes your body knows best. "This guy's more wasted than us," said the petite blonde German I shared the cab with. The psychotic taxi driver attempted to qualify for the Dakar rally while listening/feeling his stereo chucking out tunes as loud and deep as the festival. He would have scared the shit out of us had we not had the tail-end responsiveness and the stuck-fast smiles of a big night.

My new friends had found me cuddling a huskie and barking him down when he got aggressive. He'd taught me his language over the last hour of conversation and negotiation over pack-dominance. I was dragged into the black and yellow cab just as I was educating him on paw-fist bumps.

"What the fuck are you doing?" said a new French friend. His concern was well-founded (in retrospect) as the dog had the attitude problem of a paratrooper surrounded by civil servants, but I knew he just needed to be bossed around to feel at home. I barked at his attempts to bite my nose and then hugged him tightly which made him snarl. The secret is to snarl back and bark louder and look down your nose. "We sweet?" I said and laid out my palm. My huskie gave me his paw in a low-five.
"You see, we're sabes." I said to Frenchy.

The sun was up by now and everyone looked amazing in the soft yellow light, sweaty in a good way, with huge smiles. There was a slightly different atmosphere to an English festival. People don't need as many drugs here to go till morning; less people going nuts; less people passed out in puddles of mud. I however, was brain-fried at dawn, I sat down on a curb near the exit and smoked my fortieth cigarette. My fingers, I noticed with interest, were taking great pleasure in extending and stretching themselves in time with the bass: the only muscles I had at that stage capable of significant movement other than my smiling jaw, of course. My eyes looked deeply into those of everyone who passed as they had while dancing earlier; you look at peoples' souls when at that level of consciousness. There's no faking it. You can say it's all because of the drugs, and yes, you're right in a sense, but despite being the drugs it's still real, and you're still looking at those souls. It is still happening, you're still communicating with your eyes in a way you only do with lovers normally. Faced with this, many avert their eyes downwards or pretend they haven't seen you when you look at their soul. If you're not wasted then it can be quite a headfuck to have someone search your soul for goodness and love, after all. But if you are, then nice, we're on the same level and we show it with confident knowing smiles. Occasionally when soul-searching, you come across a strong character and she (it is almost always women who have the strength to look back at your soul) reciprocates and you fall in love in that instant without needing to speak. Either that or the other person's fucked after all and you both toss your heads back in laughing recognition and fist-bump for the hundredth time. Fist-bumps. I think I insist on them because they're a way of getting people involved, to spread the love, if you like. Well before Obama's inaugural fist-bumping of Michelle, my festival crowds had fist-bumped since time immemorable. I have a dim awareness that I'll regret all these fist-bumps in the morning, but it's dim, too dim to matter. Two girls skip hand-in-hand through the thinning crowd wearing shades and bikinis, laughing out loud and I smile contentedly – knowingly – and spark up my twentieth cigarette.

There had been countless hours of crowded, smiling-at-the-sky dancing. Not the stylish moves Porteños are used to (Tango, et al) but the rhythmic, repetitive carelessness of boosted serotonin capacitors and European Dance music. The point of it is no-one gives a shit as long as you enjoy moving your body, and there's no critiquing that for a motive. I took pleasure in noticing many of the chin-strutting, shade-wearing locals displaying almost-hidden uncertainty of what to do ("Why's everyone dancing so badly? Why does no-one seem to care? I'll just keep trying to look smooth like usual"). Whereas others, used to the release of societal cool-constraints that this music provides, gave it as much as anyone else in the world could. Hours and hours of smiling, dancing, laughing, shouting, living. Remember the office? the water-cooler? the aspidistra? the photocopying? No, no-one ever does.

For a while when we got there we didn't leave the entrance. Girls join the toilet queues, guys against the fence. Early polite efforts to stay together were abandoned, however. Strangely this occurred shortly after coloured pills were swallowed. At about the time when you start dancing and loving everybody but stop caring about anybody. Waiting for the brown pill and the half of a red one to kick-in I smoked my fourth cigarette.

The pre-field bar in town was filled with a lovely expectant atmosphere from the congregation. But after a few drinks everyone knew we needed to get going and get down to business. After a couple of hours, there was much trainer-watching and fidgeting. "What are we waiting for, it's Creamfields," said Frenchy. Drug dealers are not the most reliable of people anywhere in the world, but Argentinian ones have a painful lack of urgency. When they arrive people are generally not as happy to see them as they would have been two hours before, which probably contributes to the vicious cycle of laziness endemic to dealers. I'm offered a cigarette to kill time. "Nah, given up, mate... oh go on then."

Buenos Aires, Argentina.

2009-12-08T00:40:00.005Z

Well, I finally made it. My aim since I decided to quit my old life has been to live in Buenos Aires. I've never been here before, but I have been semi-consciously drawn to it by little ear-flickings for years. Everybody probably knows that feeling of hearing a word they've never heard before and wondering what it is and then it pops up again and again. In the end you just have to look it up in the dictionary. Well, Buenos Aires started blipping away on my radar when I started collecting World Cup '86 Panini stickers and I had to look up loads of countries on the map. Argentina was the first page in the sticker album I managed to complete (Paraguay was next – funny the things you remember) and all the stars seemed to come from one place: Buenos Aires. I was seven. Then, like that word you've never heard before that keeps recurring after you've heard it, Buenos Aires kept appearing in a series of accidents of curiosity for the next couple of decades. All of them became parts of the great mysterious and completely nonsensical path that life follows, eventually leeding me to the events of Saturday when I put a deposit down on a 2 bedroom apartment for rent in the San Telmo area of the city. Within a few hours the friend I met in Ecuador whom I was going to live with pulled out, feeling that she needs to follow her heart (and a man) to Columbia; so I need to find a flatmate as well as Spanish lessons, new friends, work of some kind, and generally build a new life. These things used to be too much to contemplate, and whenever anyone has asked me, uncomprehendingly, why I have just upped sticks and left for a new city, these are the barbs of life that hold them back from doing the same, but now they just seem to me like a few more little challenges. I don't want to count my hens, but I already have a side-smile feeling of self-satisfaction that I'm where I wanted to be and doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. Like I've overcome the wild randomness and rubbing habits of life with a simple choice. It's a feeling that I have had a couple of times in my life when I've managed to drag myself out of a perceived rut and dump myself down somewhere else, doing something else altogether. It's a good, exciting feeling and it gives you a new energy to do things that before seemed improbable if not impossible. Best of all, it keeps you feeling young.

So, Buenos Aires... is it what I thought it'd be? Well, that's the strange thing, I really didn't look into it much before I got here. I didn't know what to expect apart from the knowledge it's rich compared to the rest of South America. And coming directly from Bolivia, the first day of wandering around wide-eyed was a day of culture shock. There is a far greater difference between La Paz and Buenos Aires, than between (for example) London and Buenos Aires (BA from now on). In some ways BA could be any major city in the world; the similarities are everywhere: crowded streets, malls, corporations, banks, shiny black commuter cars, a sweaty metro system, suits, designer-stores, department-stores, chains of bars, superclubs, tree-lined avenues... and in other ways, of course, BA is unique. I will only dwell on two of these striking idiosyncrasies, because they have already obsessed me, and they seem to have something to tell about the psyche of the city.

In the reversed seasons' pleasantly warm summer daylight of December, a walk through the main central neighbourhoods of tower blocks and tenements may well make you fall in love. I've never been much of a believer in love at first sight until I experienced it three times in a day. Whatever you've heard about the beauty of the residents of this city (and I was a doubter, I have to admit) – it's all true. I thought the rumours were simply based on a silly idea of fashion-consciousness and plastic-surgeons' fakery, but no, there are naturally beautiful – and naturally sexy – people everywhere. Of course, it's a ratio thing. There are attractive people in every city, (most towns and some villages) but the ratio here is simply higher. I don't want to get into all of that 'what is beauty anyway' kind of argument here. Shut up. Just trust me. Your neck muscles get the workout of a lifetime with all the head-turning that you do. I truly think that a supermodel prancing down Avenida Corrientes would arouse only disinterested whispers of “seen better working in McDonalds”. And I'm not one of these guys blind to the attractiveness of men either – both sexes here just have ... something. Couples who come here must leave with gnawing little jealousies, singlies with aching eyes. Now, as we all know, beauty rather results in a certain... self-awareness, shall we say. Yes, arrogance is here too. Upturned noses are, interestingly, almost precisely as common as botox. And absurdly inflated lips and tits and sharpened noses are rather clear everywhere. Now, it may surprise you of a former soldier, but I don't generally have that much pride in my home country, but one of the few elements of the British psyche which pulls my head up is that in the UK there is still a certain freakery attached to plastic surgery which I hope will prevent its' becoming common. Here in BA, however, every third or fourth person appears to have had some 'work' done, and that probably means that more, in fact, have. It may be a personal opinion (this is a blog, after all), but plastic surgery rather smacks of individual weakness and societal unhealthiness. It may be because I can't understand anyone voluntarily going into a hospital, let alone being sliced open by a well-tanned man with a porsche, but, with a few exceptions, the spread of this kind of 'medicine' would seem an indicator that the world of the well-heeled is not a happy place. I can't pretend that it doesn't achieve what the individual wants it to in many cases (for $20,000!), but I have, in only a few days here seen literally hundreds of women (and a few men) that are simply off-puttingly fake. They look like fat-lipped androids and have unknowingly become caricatures of themselves. This, to me, is the ugly side of beauty and an absurdity which I'm convinced that future societies will look back on with raised eyebrows and embarrassment rather like we look back on our ancestors' painstaking endeavours in eugenics. So, plastic surgeons. I'm afraid I think you're not that far lower in the moral-vacuum stratosphere than mercenaries, cigarette company marketing agents, and land mine designers.

The dark side of BA is not just visible in the glaring sun casting fake plastic shadows of silicon cup enhancers. When the sun goes down and the pretty urbanites scuttle away to bars, gyms and liposuction consultants, another group of residents appears. They are invisible by day apart from the odd pair of sleeping feet sticking out from crumbling holes on waste ground and abandoned buildings. Walking around the same streets at 10pm will allow you to see a little of how the other half live. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, families often, spend the night dragging cubic-yard bags around collecting recyclable waste. These occupationally dirty crowds pick over the waste of the richer half for cardboard, paper, and junk and take the bags to a couple of central trading points I have seen in the city centre. Here, the sorted waste, dragged or in some middleman-cases, driven in ancient trucks, from all over the city is bought up by equally dirty men and women with fat wads of small denomination pesos. Every single pile of black bags in the city gets ripped open overnight in the search for recyclables to sell for a couple of pesos a bag. The chronic lack of jobs since the economic fuckups of the nineties has clearly swelled this underclass picking a living from the shit and carcasses of urban wealth to mammoth proportions. I will probably write at some point, following more research, on the devastating impact of free-market policies on this city over the last couple of decades, and the dictatorships before them. For now, if anyone is unconvinced that the strategies of the IMF and World Bank have demonstrably hurt people around the world, read a bit of the following couple of books and then come to Buenos Aires after dark.

1) Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (an award-winning journalist and broadcaster);

2) Globalisation and its Discontents, by Joseph Stiglitz (who is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and used to be the Chief Economist at the World Bank).

A lovely poem and my thoughts on Colonialism

2009-12-01T00:42:00.005Z

Men of wisdom, who look beyond
the rest of their people
when hard wintry times arrive
are chosen by God like good ripe seeds
to sow in them.

And so it was that
when the conqueror from the North
sheathed in his iron raiment
came to vanquish in essence
a people born in the Andes
in the mountains, natural temples of God,
in a blood-coloured sunset
the chosen one among the preists
heard His internal voice
and He spoke like this:

“I love my son, your people
because they obeyed my command
and remained pure.
Because of this I gave them much wisdom
but now the rest of my flock
who lives beyond your world
has arrived.
Not only in the flesh
but also in the spirit,
that is why your brothers are fighting
among themselves.
The gold-seekers are already here
to oppress the heart
and pierce the flesh
with their iron thorns.
But you must not forget that pain
is the receptacle of happiness.
She permeates the heart
through the way opened by the pain
The times you must live through are such
you shall burrow your way
through the heart of earth
like the worm does
to take out the gold and the silver
(Gods of mud, men have built).

But at the end of your quest
you will find darkness
and you will be lost in it
and this will make you yearn for
the light that was left behind
And so
the more you fall
the more you will long
to climb up again
and you will reach me once again.

The purity of your heart has moved me
and so, to fight the darkness
which lies at the bosom of Mother Earth
to withstand cold,
the hunger and sadness of hearts
torn apart from their father
I shall give you a gift for your brothers.
Climb up to that mountain
where you shall find a small plant
one with much strength.
Guard the leaves with much love
and when you feel the sting of pain
in your heart, hunger in your body
and darkness in your mind
take them to your mouth
and softly, draw up its spirit
which is part of mine.
You will find love for your pain
food for your body
and light for your mind.

Further more
watch the leaves dance with the wind
and you will find answers to your queries.
But if your torturer, who comes from the North,
the white conqueror, the gold-seeker,
should touch it, he will find in it
only poison for his body and madness for his mind
for this heart is as callous
as his steel and iron garment.
And when the coca,
which is how you will call it,
attempts to soften his feelings
it will only shatter him
as the icy crystals born in the clouds
crack the rocks;
demolish mountains.

This folk-poem is usually called The Coca Legend, and has been passed between generations orally. This version was recorded by Diaz Villamil in 1921, but it is much older. This translation is by Jorge Hurtado in the Museo Coca, La Paz, Bolivia. I copied it out while sitting at the desk halfway round the museum on 30/11/09. It is one of the most prophetic, and simply beautiful pieces of literature I've ever read. It may not be in iambic pentameter, but it speaks of pain and strength in a way that contains the feelings of millions somehow. I think anyone with any sympathy for the indigenous peoples of South America, and anyone with friends with coke problems will likely see it as an intensely sad and unheeded warning. The indigenous Quechuan and Aymaran peoples of the Andes have used coca leaves for millennia and are forced to accept, after a string of pogroms, abuses and insults five-centuries long, the punishment for the West's inability to cope with the alkaloid cocaine. And yet we, in the West would never allow ourselves to be forced by aboriginal people around the world to criminalise alcohol, despite its terrible effects on Native Australian and American populations, because they have not had the centuries of getting used to it that we have. Is the similarity clear enough? And what, boys and girls, is the difference...? That's right...power.

So to get all topical for a moment, when the USA talks of putting (7) military bases on Columbian soil in order to deal with the USA's cocaine problem, do not be surprised that South American leaders are upset and insulted. It is yet another example of the US/European blindness to the other side of the coin. Oh yes, and it's not too much of a stretch of the imagination to see a certain 'strategic' importance to the bases in the long term, is it now?

-

I have been reading for the last couple of weeks Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, and have been seriously effected by it. It's a little old now(1971), but this combined with Naomi Klein's latest book, Shock Doctrine has given me an awakening view of what Europe and the USA have done to this beautiful continent (I will never call the USA, America again. It is an insult that the term for the continent is nowadays attributed just to one of it's northern countries). There has been much written about Colonialism in the old sense of conquistadors, slavery, and the destruction of indigenous populations. But it is easy for many of us sitting in London, Bristol, New York, Madrid and Berlin to think that Colonialism is something our ancestors did and that, while it may be sad and regrettable, there is not much point in feeling guilt generations later.

I can imagine many of you thinking something like this:

“We had no part in it, after all. It was our great-grandparents and theirs. Banks and corporations may take advantage of poorer countries, and I don't condone that. I am simply lucky to have been born in a rich country. It's not my fault.”

Well before you go to sleep tonight please take a moment while looking at the ceiling, to consider exactly why your country is a rich one. Sitting in the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, and all the other Central Banks of the West are the gold and silver reserves that largely prop up our economies. While I am aware that our currencies are no longer linked to the 'gold standard' (it would actually be more sensible in my opinion if they were) the thousands of tonnes of metallic reserves provide such a base (literally trillions of dollars in modern terms) for our countries' economies that if they suddenly disappeared from even one Central Bank the effect would be ... well, shall we say, interesting. In the UK we hold about 310.3 tonnes of gold representing about 18% of our 'reserve' (i.e. what props up our currency and banking system), much of the rest is in US dollar bills. The US meanwhile doesn't have quite as much interest in foreign currencies for obvious reasons. It holds about 79% of its reserves in pure gold. Or 8,133 tonnes. Now America may have had its own Gold Rush in California, but still a very large proportion of that American and European reserve has come out of the rock and soil of Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and other Latin American countries. It hasn't been destroyed, it isn't 'spent'. It may be melted down and made into ingots or sovereigns or pleasing shapes, but it is a permanent fixture on the planet just like any element. It just moves position. And this position is rather important, of course. Spanish and Portuguese colonial miners stole this wealth centuries ago and most of it ended up in British hands to pay for loans made to the dying Iberian monarchies or simply through trade gradually monopolised by the UK. Britain fought the Peninsular War to gain control of this wealth in effect. Napolean nicked a good few tonnes for France before he was kicked out, and Germany was far from blind to the importance of the gold and silver flowing out of other Europeans' colonies. I haven't even mentioned the millions of indigenous people worked to death in the mines to dig it out, or the British slave-traders stealing people from Africa to provide labour when the natives had been almost wiped out. So. Yes it was all a long time ago. Terrible acts committed by people we can hardly recognise as our great-grandparents, but laying down to sleep tonight, consider that lives might come and go, morals might change, and even nations might fall, but a large part of the reason your country is rich is because that wealth was stolen from its rightful place, and is sitting in your capital's Central Bank propping up the pounds, dollars, and euros you have in your wallet.

La Paz, Bolivia.

2009-11-28T15:24:00.004Z

I have developed a nasty stomach upset (I suspect an evil parasite!) which nearly made me run from the cinema last night halfway through an entertaining film, and I have decided to spend the day in my room at Cactus Hostel. I do not feel bad at all, but my mind has wandered in an interesting manner given that I am following the old advice my mother gave me as a child to not eat anything all day, thus starving whatever bug had found a home in my gut. I always remember it working when I was young and, although by evening I would feel a little weak, the strategy not only seemed to kill the bacterium but to have given me the ability to do without adequate food without ill effects far easier than most. Today I have passed the familiar minor pains of initial emptiness into the stage of rather restless boredom due more to lack of concentration than lack of interest. I did venture out to buy some water and soap in the market and found myself particularly short-tempered with low insulin and crowds. At some point my mind found some starved clarity and mused, quite without the involvement of my will, over my thoughts of city and country, perhaps answering a little of why I feel contentment of different sorts in both, but cannot settle forever in either. This is what it came up with.

The energy of the city and the beauty of beyond it: I have an addiction to both; both serving different purposes in my senses, but one in my mind, my sanity depending on both somehow in more or less equal measure. The smiling solitude of godlike moments enjoying the deep-shed tear and tightening stomach that announce them. Moments of certainty that I wouldn't be anywhere else in the world given all the money, all the time, all the love, and there's no need to share them, but I'm happy to with someone who might find one themselves and we might smile at each other, just another element of the moment of life.

And then to La Paz and the noise and the movement and the passion of the bustling ants, climbing over each other with their own paths fixed in front of them invisible to all the others. Minutes of calm entrenched in cafes untouched by the swarms outside the frosted windows, then out again and shouts and words and eyes jostling, encouraging purchases and services. Cars and buses and crowded collectivos aiming fast for the way ahead and I have to dart and weave between them or I'll never get anywhere coz that's the point of the city: getting somewhere, anywhere, have somewhere in mind to go, something in mind to do, point aim and shoot and everything else is just a hurdle, a distraction: focus, focus. And the city is like the expression of all these human trajectories, the result of all these energies and motivations, with their own hidden reasons, drawing lines in the picture of the city.

A timeless godlike moment occurred again sitting with a pretty French girl on a boat on Lake Titicaca as the angle of the rising sun blued the water three shades darker than the sky. And the sky was so much bigger than ever before and it was definitely much bluer and the icy white of the distant mountains and the icy white of the sparse, whispy clouds just made everything bluer than was ever ever possible except in dreams and those special, natural moments.

I remember another moment – those ones more valuable than any coin or note or ingot – watching underwater, beside an island reef in Malaysia a darting school of little silver fish being hunted and herded by barracuda knives. The whole school glinting in the sunlight that burned my back as I snorkled, the hundred flipped direction all together with a mirror flash as one of their comrades was picked off left, right, left, down, right. I observed, through bubbles, the terror of the hunted fish and it was beautiful.

Another moment in the ancient woods across the gorge from Bristol: I was running happily but hopelessly after a deer and, after climbing the rocky path out of Nightingale Valley, hands on knees, sweating and panting I looked up and my breath disappeared surrounded and amongst a white rain of cherry-blossom that had chosen that minute to make me gasp. Falling all around me, dozens of wild-cherry trees that had been there forever shed their dancing confetti all at once in the slightest of spring breezes and the brightest of sun-rays. The papery rain stuck to my cooling sticky skin and I couldn't move from the beauty of feeling alive with a child-like expression and a wide-eyed solitary tear that no-one would see. Never would anyone ever feel that choked moment of slow white rain the trees were giving to me.

Back in the city words didn't work as I told my disinterested friends. The distractions, the clear in-front TV colours. But I came home to the smell of a roast shoulder of lamb, yorkshire puddings, honey-browned roast carrots, honey-browned roast parsnips and real pan-gravy and I loved the city and non-solitude again.

Another. People pressing on every side, all of us soaking wet with the low-ceilinged heat and every one of us smiling and jumping in the colours, smiling and jumping and feeling at the very peak of life, this is life, this here, right now, dancing to the sounds a DJ loving life even more seriously than us is throwing at us, from four-feet away, sounds that shake our intestines, our livers, our lungs in time with each other, senses together as one, joyous to be part of a crowd, an organism bigger than ourselves, and a giant unheard balloon explosion overhead rains down silver and gold paper strips to a raise in pitch and a raise of arms and everybody's smile grows with a chord-change and the blood and pleasure wants to explode from our dancing heads.

That's the city and I love it as much as the trees, mountains and sea. The beautiful cancer of squeezed-in minds and bodies where tomorrow's music will be different to today's and rough life in all it's people bursts like a bud surrounded by the green and blue that will always be the same provider of quiet god and cherry-blossom moments, flickering silver fish, floating condors and dancing fields of ripening grass: different expressions of the same aliveness, the same Nature. I need both.

Colca Canyon, Peru.

2009-11-22T04:23:00.005Z

It was a little before seven in the morning when I looked into the eye of a soaring condor not two-metres away from me. Although I missed the photo of a lifetime I am glad I lowered my camera. The hideously majestic giant vulture turned its bald head and eyed me in the disconcerting way large animals are spookily capable of. At Bristol Zoo once, a tiger looked at me in such a way that I knew what he was thinking; I knew that he was thinking – unconcerned with me... such a weak creature you are no threat to me and the second you become one I will merely put the fear into you that we both know I am capable of. In a flash, the condor's head-turn regard was similar, vaguely interested but without concern.

I was sitting on a large rock overhanging a two-mile deep canyon (twice the depth of the Grand Canyon says my guide book) called Colca and the best place on the planet to see these giant, ancient birds. Never having been one to understand bird-watching I doubted my own sanity when my alarm went off at a quarter-past three in the morning to catch the 4am bus from Chivay at the head of the canyon. I slipped in and out of half-dreams in the grey dawn curtain light until the bus dropped me and a couple of other first-time twitchers off at the Cruz del Condor, an hour or so down the valley. The viewpoint is at the deepest part of the valley which is the deepest in the world but for one 163m deeper a few hours more remote and awkward to get to 'nearby'. Nearby, at least, in Peruvian terms, a country as large as France, Spain and the UK put together. Eyes unused to looking two miles straight down rather have trouble comprehending the sheer size of the drop and it is really impossible to tell the size of any object at the bottom of the canyon (it must be big to be visible at all), one's concept of scale being so thrown by the alien distance.

Shivering on a cliff edge as the colour seeped into the canyon with the rising sun, I thought long about how silly humans can be sometimes. How we pursue an experience or a photograph with hours of suffering, and for those hours I doubted whether seeing a bird would be worth it, or even if they would appear at all. Maybe condors have lazy days. Maybe sometimes they just don't want to get out of the comfy nest. But somehow it was worth it. To look into the eye of a very rare gigantic vulture (wingspan 3m in captivity; locals told me they had seen them up to 6m, but I slightly smell exaggeration) after watching it rising from a thousand metres below me on thermals warmed by the morning sun, and for other condors to sweep silently over my head as well. Darwin wrote how he didn't see them flap their wings for half an hour at a time. Somehow it was most definitely worth the wait and the early morning effort, and I do have a certain smugness that I reached the peak of bird-watching first-time, never to be repeated. It felt like I was watching a living dinosaur or a mythical creature and I doubt I could better that feeling sitting in a hide on the Cambridgeshire fens with a pair of binoculars and a flask of tea.

By the time a few more condors had flown past and my pitifully inadequate camera had attempted their capture, a large crowd had formed, many telling me to be careful on the cliff edge. Then a security man requested that I return to the safety of the viewing platform. “I've been here for four hours already, you know. I'm fine.” But he wasn't having any of it and I had to comply and become part of the crowd of French and German tourists.

Having seen the best I was going to, I started on a poorly-considered hike back along the valley to Chivay. Although it was a simple road to follow the whole way, I prefer to have the comfort of a map normally, and my provisions of a few stale muffins and a small bottle of water were a touch inadequate. Having had no breakfast but a banana, I was low on energy to start with and I rather underestimated the length of the valley. I soon exhausted my water in the dusty heat of day, but found a stream that became a miniature waterfall beside the road and sat and filtered the stream water from a roadside Coke bottle I'd picked up for the purpose, through a filter-cloth and into my empty water-bottle, popping in a chlorine tablet for good measure. It might have been an idyllic mountain stream but I could see hoofprints in the mud above so it was better to be safe than shitting my guts out beside the road in a remote Peruvian valley. Hours went by of pleasant plodding, watching the canyon open out into ancient Inca terraced slopes largely still used for the same crops they have always been used for, with only the upper terraces above me abandoned. The altitude here – over 4,000m – is conducive only to a limited number of crops (potatoes for instance), so I imagine crop rotation to be difficult and thus soil exhaustion much more of a danger than on the lower, more productive slopes. A few llamas and sheep were all I saw grazing the tough grasses above, with cows on some greener terraces below.

I spent a pleasant lunch in the shade of a clump of Eucalypts and Pines (the only trees that will grow at this altitude) beside the road, washing my hands in a convenient cattle trough after scoffing my meagre, squashed muffins and a couple of dried apricots. After six and a half hours of walking and several rather different opinions of the distance to Chivay, I finally discovered from a confident young farmhand outside a tiny adobe village that I had at least five-hours further to go. Having already covered at least 25km, my legs were feeling the strain and I decided to sit down like a hobo beside the dirt road, with my back against a mossy stone wall and wait for a passing bus or collectivo. With nothing to do but sit, between dozes I watched the distant grey mists on the mountains across the valley gather together to form rain. Thunder dully snapped occasionally and I pulled my hat down over my eyes. There was a peaceful, eventless quiet. A bus turned up eventually and I waved it down, intent on a beer and a hefty alpaca steak when I got back to town. It was a most pleasant day all in all, and, as I am getting used to now, I smiled as I lay down to sleep early that evening.

Cuzco and Arequipa, Peru

2009-11-17T04:27:00.007Z

Arriving in the desert city of Arequipa a little after dawn a couple of days ago, as is often the case, I needed to find a hostel to collapse in following a lengthy bus journey. Another breakdown and a particularly uncomfortable seat made it even longer. Climbing down at 3am to see why we had stopped, I discovered that the driver had disappeared, causing minor panic among the other passengers and several defections. I reasoned that he'd gone off to get help so settled down for a wait. He returned with an oil filter and a can of oil an hour or so later and took another hour or so to repair the damage leaving a large black puddle under the sump. To his credit, he succeeded and we continued. In Peru, bus drivers, along with many, many others are on their own.

I was coming from Cuzco. I didn't spend long there because I didn't really like the atmosphere a great deal. It's quite a pretty town, but it's too full of tourist dollars and high prices to feel comfortable. Everyone is out for your money. It is the most popular destination for tourists in Peru, after all, and that brings with it a comedic variety of clothing. Each had an opinion before they left home of what would be appropriate attire for the place of their imagining and, on arrival, of course found the city to be rather modern, full of cafes, mobile phones and car alarms. You can see it on the face of many tourists walking around: the subtle embarrassment at being dressed for a safari, mountain expedition or sporting occasion when all all around are in jeans as in every other city in the world. The funniest thing about it is that those that at home spend the most time considering their clothing look the most out of place, their imaginations having run wild in their local outdoor store. I booked a trek to Machu Picchu as soon as I arrived via the Salkantay glacier. It's a popular route, but nowhere near as popular as the 'Inca Trail', which is so oversubscribed these days that you have to book months ahead. My chosen trek was beautiful, of course – the scenery in Peru rarely fails to be spectacular – and hard work. I have to admit I was a little sceptical about Machu Picchu. Thought I was going to be underwhelmed. I get that feeling when something is so super-hyped that you've heard of it before you leave home. But to my surprise and wonder, the mountain city of the Incas really lived up to its status as a modern Wonder of the World. It is unbelievable. It really reminded me of childhood visits to English castles with my parents, but it's much bigger: the scale of the place is as breathtaking as the mountain scenery 360 degrees around. It's not surprising the Spanish never found the city: as you trek along the river (a major Amazon tributary) that winds around Machu Picchu mountain a thousand metres below the city, the only sign that would have been visible of the huge collection of buildings is a tiny stone outpost on one side, easily missed if you're not looking at exactly the right spot. Not to mention the mist that blankets the site for much of the time. I was lucky and, several hours after the 4am, 2,000-step climb up to the site, the mist cleared to reveal it fully, and as with everyone else there, I took part in the picture-taking flurry. My advice would be, despite the expensive prices, you have to go if you're in Peru. It's worth it. But sneak in enough food and drink for several hours – the cafe at the site is so overpriced it's more than Central London or Manhattan ($5 for a coke!).

I hung around in Cuzco only long enough to indulge in a little book shopping while I was in a town with a reasonable selection of English-language books. Five-and-a-half months ago when I left the UK I brought a very limited number of books. Now I have a backpack half-full of books, having ditched clothes and other items in their favor. I cannot live without them. Apart from my sister and my friends, I miss my shelves of books more than anything. My latest read is the brilliant and motivating Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano. I'd recommend it to anyone, but especially if coming to America. Just his section on the Potosi mines was a revelation to me. It's only a slight overstatement to say that the Potosi silver and tin mines (one great hollowed-out mountain in Bolivia) helped create the wealth required for Europe (not just Spain, most of the wealth went to other European nations) to enter it's Industrial Revolution, start large-scale banking and increase it's Imperial and colonial expansions. If you want a reason why you are relatively rich and most of Latin America is poor, then Potosi is as succinct as you can get. Between 8 and 11 million Native American and African slaves died in the mines in a slow, grinding, commercial holocaust in order to extract the thousands of tonnes of silver that funded European governments, banks and royalty for centuries. Never heard of it? Funny that. The book clearly explains how Latin America funded Europe and later the USA and has made a huge difference to recent American Politics.

Arequipa. After the day of catching up on sleep (I hardly sleep on buses, and consider them a minor torture), I walked into one of the many tour agencies in the lovely main Plaza and asked about a few tours. Having been planning on going to the Colca Canyon (twice the depth of the Grand Canyon!), rather on the spur of the moment I booked a mountain-climbing expedition for 8am the next morning. It's been bugging me that I failed Cotopaxi (5,897m) a couple of months ago and was unable to find a climbing partner to attempt it again after a month of hiking-training. So when El Misti (5,825m) turned up, I squinted for a second in consideration then jumped at the chance. I was joining a German couple, so I didn't need a partner. Although it's a non-technical climb and there is so little snow that crampons and ice-axes are unnecessary, it's a two-day climb from about 3,200 to the peak, and it was hard! The first day was ok, just a five-hour steep uphill. But after a 1am breakfast we started the main ascent – seven hours of baby-stepping, gasping and private torture. The difference this time was that I did not have a cold, I'm a lot fitter after 2 months of trekking at reasonable altitude, I no longer smoke, and that I didn't let failure enter my head for more than a second. I think the key to it is switching off to the suffering of it. And don't let anyone tell you climbing mountains isn't about suffering. You simply have to ignore your body telling you that what you're doing is silly. That 60% of normal oxygen is not enough. That your legs need a rest. That you are the only one making you do this. That you could be in a warm bed right now instead of on a freezing volcano. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, ranking up there with some of the most exhausting, sleep-deprived exercises I did in the army. The altitude slowed me down so much that by the end I could only shuffle along a few paces at a time. I'd love to say it's worth it at the top. There is a certain minor elation, but for me the thing that keeps you going is imagining having a hot shower and slipping into a warm bed with a contented smile on your face. After scree-running and hiking down for another few hours, then the drive back to Arequipa, I got my hot shower and my bed and, if I hadn't been so exhausted that I forgot, I would have had a contented smile too.

Huaraz, Peru.

2009-10-31T02:49:00.010Z

I've just finished another day of rock climbing with Ronald, my tiny little Peruvian powerhouse instructor, all of about 5' 5''. We were both dozing off minor food poisoning in the cramped collectivo on the way back, our faces crushed by various bums, elbows and bags. Peruvians in particular and South Americans in general have far less sense of personal space and privacy than I'm used to. That's why the towns and cities are so loud with blaring music, TV's and car horns. Collectivos are minibus taxis that go a regular route indicated with a sign in the window. They stop for anyone beside the road and pack people in like you wouldn't believe (there were 23 in a 17 seater this afternoon – and that was a converted 14 seater). The seats are all moved around to provide an extra row which means if you're over 5' 6'' you need to put your legs in the 'aisle', where, probably, somebody is standing. There are regular arguments over how full is full, with the driver and accompanying child (who's job it is, in the cramped back, to hang out the open door and shout the destination and to take passengers' fares) constantly trying to fit yet another body in. They are still a more pleasant form of transport than the London Underground in Rush hour, however, if a touch more dangerous. On each collectivo, there is without fail, at least one indigenous Quechuan woman in colourful clothes and neat hat, with deeply wrinkled sun-darkened skin, taking a couple of live chickens, or a net-bag of wriggling guinea pigs, or some bunches of pinks to sell in town. The stern-eyed, upturned mouthed mountain people are everywhere in Huaraz, usually sitting in colourful lines along the street, at least partially in the way of pedestrians. Weirdly, they seem to group together so that you find five women (it's always women, you rarely see the men in town) next to each other on a certain backstreet, each sat on the ground with identical displays of white cheese laid out on a cloth. Turn a corner and you're suddenly in Blanket Street with another seven selling beautiful, but nearly identical patterned blankets for about 9 soles (£2). It would feel like walking through a medieval city at times if it wasn't for the deadly traffic, car alarms and mobile-phone repair and spares shops. I went to get my well-worn jeans repaired the other day and looked all over town till I found a whole line of women with little stalls of fabric sitting patiently in front of their respective sewing machines. The damage was beyond my sewing skills and needed a large patch. A lady did it in five minutes for £1 and I know I got charged double, but I don't really feel it's fair to haggle in circumstances where back in the UK it would have been brilliant service for a bargain price. And what does 50p matter to me anyway? The indigenous lady who sewed my jeans can buy five loaves of bread for that 50p. In the same market I found a large butcher's section. I went looking for jerky (dried, seasoned meat) which I have made myself in the UK and is excellent to take when trekking in the mountains, and hopefully on long bus journeys. I wandered around amongst flies, fur-less, belly-up, eviscerated guinea pigs, cold, pale, baby porkers, rows and rows of yellow chickens at eye-level and mutton and beef joints of all types hanging on steel hooks. I eventually found on one counter, a large pile of excellently preserved dehydrated beef in large slices. I bought some, slightly curious why the woman gave me a price per kilo rather than per slice. A kilo of the stiff slices would have filled a large bag. And it was very cheap. At the hostel, sitting on my bed I gratefully bit-off a chunk and tried to chew the tough, strongly-flavoured meat, realising after some rumination that I had bought a large amount of dog food. I have since been feeding these treats to the local stray dogs – of which there are thousands running in front of cars, dozing in the morning sun or standing dripping in doorways with afternoon rain. The usually starving muts can't believe their luck and I think word's got round because random mongrels keep following me wherever I go and jumping up playfully. I am the Dog-man of Huaraz.

Huaraz is a great place to get fit. The air (and lack of opportunity to drink) has encouraged me to give up smoking. I'm past the need stage and am in the slightly want stage. Got through the 4 days of need with the best method – distraction. I've been climbing a couple of times now and in-between I went on a beautiful trek in the Santa Cruz valley, sleeping in tents pitched in meadows grazed by horses and donkeys, huffing and puffing past turquoise-blue mineral lakes and through high-mountain passes above the snow line. I learned my first word of Quechua (Tamia = rain) from the mule handler and was worked hard by our tough mountain guide, Milena. She said we were a fast group so we completed the hike in three days rather than four. Those valleys are like the land that time forgot. Literally, virtually nothing has changed for the few dozen families that live in them for at least five centuries, with the exception that horses, donkeys and cattle are now preferred to llamas. It was wet, cold and hard work, but I was glad to be altitude training again. What for I don't quite know, but hiking at 4-5k makes you feel fucking fit. Since my return my appetite has doubled, especially for meat and I'm stuffing as much down me as possible along with ceviche (raw fish 'cooked' in lemon and lime juice) and the delicious sweet yellow potatoes they have here.

My plan – at least since the last change – has been to travel quickly down through Peru and Bolivia and into Argentina to arrive in late November to find an apartment for Christmas and in time to get to know Buenos Aires before visiting friends arrive. I now realise that this journey would mean I would be almost continually on buses and would hardly see anything of Peru and Bolivia. I underestimated, in the way many Europeans do, the size of this continent. I am really loving Peru so I've decided to, despite the pollution-guilt, buy a plane ticket from La Paz, Bolivia, to Buenos Aires. It means I can spend at least a few more weeks in the mountains learning to lead-climb in beautiful surroundings, have the time to go to Cuzco and Macchu Picchu and see the beautiful lake Titicaca. Perhaps even go for a hike in the deepest canyon in the world (2 miles deep! That's twice the Grand Canyon). I will have to see the wild beauty of the Amazon and the empty steppes of Bolivia next year. In the mean time my cold and my aching body from mountain-living are nothing compared to how fit I feel and how much I'm enjoying myself. Even my writing is benefiting from the healthy air.

Trujillo, Peru.

2009-10-23T00:57:00.003+01:00

The last couple of days have been amazing. I suspect like many before me I am finding that Peru is far more than I ever expected. With the help of my excellent archaeologist/guide, Clara Luz Bravo (of the Hostal, Casa de Clara, Cahuide 495, Santa Maria, Trujillo), I have visited three extremely impressive archaeological sites preserved by the desert sands. El Brujo consists of a settlement and ceremonial tomb-pyramids with a tatooed female mummy and beautiful multi-coloured friezes from the first few centuries AD (although the site was first used at least 5000 years ago and by ten intervening cultures). The place is covered in a fine white sand but sits in a fertile, irrigated valley now home to the largest sugar cane plantation in the world – tens of thousands of hectares of monoculture that once supported the great civilizations of the area along with several similar desert river valleys flowing from the nearby Andes to the East. Chances are you've eaten sugar from here. It is a beautiful view from the top of the main pyramid, looking out at the long clean left-hand point break of surf on the anchove-rich Humboldt current (which allows this area to catch more fish than just about anywhere else in the world), and the ancient rainless but fertile valley, bright green with sugar cane. There are thousands of little holes in the sand surrounding the site where huaceros (effectively grave-robbers) have tried to divine the presence of ancient treasures. Un-investigated sand-covered tombs pepper the cane plantation. Archaeologists could spend lifetimes here.

And so could they at Huaca de la Luna closer to Trujillo city. A spooky and gigantic pyramid site, which, with Huaca del Sol a few hundred metres away were, at the time of Spanish Conquest, the largest human structures anywhere in the Americas. Huaca del Sol was largely destroyed by the Conquistadores looking for gold (over 4 tonnes in total have been found here over the years – could this have been El Dorado?). Huaca de la Luna, meanwhile, sitting beneath a mystical-looking white mountain is well preserved. It has over 8000 square metres of Moche murals and reliefs, clearly showing colourful geometric patterns and complex animal motifs, scenes of sacrifice and battle.

Next we visited the incomprehensibly large Chimu city of Chan Chan. At 28 square kilometres it is impossible to see much of the soon-to-be UNESCO world heritage site and even they don't have the billions spare it would take to search through and preserve the whole crumbling mud-walled city. But there is one palace (of nine so far uncovered) that has been largely cleared of sand and restored and opened to the public. Inside its 9 metre-high earthquake resistant walls lies a huge labyrinth of internal passages and structures, including a flooded rectangle that used to be a large well, but has become a beautiful lake with reeds, birds and fish. Remember this is a human-made oasis of desert-irrigation inside a gigantic palace. There is evidence of trees being planted, allowed to grow and then being used as structural support while still alive – the 6 metre deep roots much stronger than any sunk post. These people were masters of their environment, far superior to our modern efforts to 'live in harmony with nature'. Earthquakes here have reduced modern buildings to rubble, while most Chimu structures still stand, if crumbling with age. Building without cement or metals, they managed to protect structures using the ingenious method of walls and posts with rounded bottoms sitting in ball-joints enabling them to rock in their concave foundations. They supported hundreds of thousands of people by growing food in a desert where it rains less than much of the Sahara, and they lasted longer than our own culture, with all it's chemicals and machines will, all without writing, the wheel or any beasts of burden bigger than llamas. The Chimu were conquered by the Incas in 1471 after an understandably long 11-year seige. The conquerors then absorbed and learned from the 1000km-long coastal desert culture, nicking good ideas wherever they found them.

I didn't think I could be so captivated by ruins, but I had forgotten the excitement of trips to Medieval English Castles my parents took me on as a kid. Places like this 'little Egypt' make people want to become archaeologists. For me it has set my mind racing with ideas for a story I'm working on. But I need to move on again and the mountains are calling – my eyes and muscles need them.

Piura, Peru.

2009-10-19T22:15:00.006+01:00

Bus journeys. I´m getting used to them. After several hours´ wait in Guayaquil´s soulless bus station/mall I boarded a bus for Piura, Peru - as far as I could get on one bus from Guayaquil. The journey was long and full of imterruptions for various reasons, some intelligible, some not so.

Sitting in my appointed seat I was musing on the fact the bus had it´s own small but healthy population of cockroaches when the woman who patted me down for weapons before getting on stuck a camcorder in my face and kept it there. When I asked what was going on she misunderstood my limited Spanish and gave me a slightly pitying look as if I was from some poor far away country and showed me the screen explaining that it takes moving pictures. I giggled and said, ¨¿si, pero por que?" It is a new strategy introduced to prevent robberies and thefts from passengers.

Despite insisting that passengers always sit in their allotted seats (even when there are no numbers), I always seem to be moved by the bus staff. Every bus has a driver and at least one other helper whose job it is to count passengers, check tickets, deal with luggage and the frequent disagreements between passengers over seats. I left my significantly more comfortable seat at the front with legroom when asked to swap for some reason, forgetting that a good seat is worth fighting for on such journeys. So, for the next 12 hours I tried to sleep with a large man´s elbow and thigh rubbing against me while watching the resident cockroaches scuttling between cracks and dark places.

For the first hour or two we were constantly invaded by sellers announcing their wares. They jump on the bus usually with the consent of the staff and try to sell their random goods. Some, like those selling cold drinks and snacks need little explanation, but others - usually the ones getting on in the areas away from the stations - need to be creative, loud and outgoing to peddle their boxes of unknown chocolate bars from the back of lorries or their cheap, heart-shaped silver-plated tie-pins. Tactics involve handing one of the items to each potential customer whilst explaining it´s infintite virtues and drastically reduced price. People finger the items with lacklustre interest and hand them back after the ten- to twenty-minute speeches. I calculated that the chocolate bar Delboy made approximately $1.50 (turnover). He shook his head as he sat down accross the aisle from me and pulled from his jacket pocket a snack of a rival branded chocolate bar, and tucked in while waiting for the next stop. I assume he´ll cross over the road and do the same on a bus back in the opposite direction.

After the city was far behind and the pale internal lights had come on after dark, I read a few chapters of The Grapes Of Wrath, which I am enjoying far more than I thought I would. After a few hours the lights popped off and I put my book down having nearly had my fill of reading for the night anyway and not wanting to annoy my neighbours with a head-torch. Although it was tempting as the Big Elbow man continually seemed to be receiving mobile phone calls. We lost some passengers before the border so I managed to change seats for a time, nearer the cockroach hangout but farther from ringtones and elbows.

The border at Aguas Verdes was more a matter of two immigration queues separated by several kilometres of streets packed with revellers celebrating the Miss Aguas Verdes crowning. The bus crawled through crowds of faces and we all stretched necks to try to see the winner. But she was not there; just an announcer on a well lit podium backgrounded with red, blue and yellow cloth drapes for the benefit of the assembled press´ photos. The Peruvian side was more militarised, and, watching the bored comouflaged men sitting around in plastic patio chairs while a colleague shone a torch into various luggage compartments, I remembered that feeling that only soldiers really understand. Of being continually trained for excitement, explosions, violence, but having to sit and wait and do nothing but be alert for hours, days, weeks. Gun-toting humiliating boredom. Glad for the the thousandth time that I left the army.

Along the desert road through Tumbes, Mancora and on to Piura, huge dark shapes of crumbly sandstone are illuminated by our passing. Stunted bald trees and pale dusty rocks are all I see through tired haze between short, incomprehensible stops and checkpoints. Eventually we reach another town and I ask the name and it is Piura. A few minutes and a tuc-tuc ride later and after a short bargaining session with a hotellier, I collapse in the bed of Hostal Las Jardines, dawn light entering around the curtains and sleep till midday. Bus to Trujillo tomorrow.

Santa Cruz, Galapogas Islands.

2009-10-17T21:56:00.005+01:00

I have finally reached the islands I´ve always wanted to visit. Everyone is probably aware of the mythical draw of the islands on the edge of the world that have had such an impact on science and thought just by existing. It is indeed a unique place with a curious atmosphere to match. There are curiosities to look at everwhere and once-in-a-lifetime experiences at every turn. In the last couple of days I have seen the famous marine iguanas, white-tipped reef sharks, a Galapogas eagle, giant frigate birds, fed giant tortoises, snorkelled with eagle rays, sea lions and giant turtles. I´ve always wanted to see the giant tortoises since I was a child, they are like living dinosaurs. I wanted to sit on one but I wasn´t allowed and felt a little too guilty to do it when there was nobody around. I failed to see flamingos unfortunately and found only one solitary baby penguin abandoned at their major breeding site. In a flurry of ticking boxes, many tourists here (70,000 a year currently) I think fail to take in the place in quite the ´right´way (if there can be said to be a correct way). It´s not an easy thing to explain but it is easy to mock so there must be something about it that´s rather silly. Desperate attempts to hunt animals don´t really show the best elements of humanity, whether you shoot them with a gun or a camera; and the locals (about 30,000 people live on the island which have problems with too many people moving over from the mainland) think it´s a bit ridiculous.

The islands are in many areas an arid, spooky, semi-desert filled with impenetrable thorny scrub and odd looking cactuses the size of trees. The higher up the volcanoes you go the more mist and rain there is and the greener things become. Many of the amazing arid parts are forested with grey, dead-looking trees and undergrowth which are actually alive but conserve moisture by rarely producing leaves. You can literally walk from a grey desert to lush cloudforest in a few minutes. It´s freaky to feel like you´re always on the edge of an environment. The atmosphere is best explained by the word ´foreboding´. It almost looks like a place you would come to die and the flora and fauna are like deathbed hallucinations, especially when the mists come in. I pity and simultaneously am jealous of, the first pirates, settlers and castaways to try to live here. The Galapogas are not what I expected, but that is the point - there is nowhere on the planet like here so how do you correctly expect?

I would like to live on these islands for a time to see more of the amazing volcanic landscapes, particularly the younger Western isles, which judging from pictures, are particularly haunting - places where you see nature creating land as lava hits the sea and cools, while iguanas that have learned to swim bask on the warm black rocks watching rising clouds of steam. The islands are full of stories too - of pirates hiding out in caves and burried treasures, of malcontents who chose a solitary life of growing vegetables for passing ships, of love affairs that end in death and murder, and of small wars over a dribbling rock, the only fresh water supply apart from rain.

Anyway, as sad as I am to leave these islands which deserve far more exploration than the 5 days I´ve given them, I´m excited about moving on again - to somewhere completely new. I´m flying the 900km back to the mainland and plan to get straight on a bus to Northern Peru. I have a manic smile from pent-up energy and an itch to cover as many miles as possible. And to get into the mountains again - I want the thin pure air again. I´ve spent far longer in Ecuador than I ever thought I would, but it´s been amazing. I know I could easily spend months in Peru too, but I have to get moving. I´m aiming to get a flat in Buenos Aires in December and get in some more Spanish lessons before the arrival of visiting friends at Christmas. Tonight I´ll be in Peru!

Canoa, Ecuador.

2009-10-11T18:30:00.004+01:00

Sometimes you meet people and have conversations which really inspire you and make you think. They may be few, but one thing´s for sure, when wandering, you have more of them. More time to think, chat, relate. I´ve just had one of those conversations with a lady from Oregon called Mary-Jane. She told me of Peruvian legends which amazed me, we talked of languages and the death of cultures and we compared experiences of ´volunteering´ and intentional communities.

We began with logging. For those of you that spend too much time in front of a computer, that means chopping down trees. Being from Oregon and knowing Washington well, she has been around a lot of logging her whole life and when I told her of my sister´s story of when was on an island near Vancouver (at a green queer festival, where they handed out airhorns. When loggers in the area hear them they, by law, have to switch off and lay down their chainsaws. So the festival goers, working in shifts, managed to prevent a whole week of logging by taking advantage of the airhorn safety law), Mary-Jane smiled and thought it clever, but wondered aloud if it was really fair to prevent people who´ve been loggers for seven generations to carry out the only work they´ve ever known. And if cutting down trees - if it´s done properly - isn´t one of the more sustainable of industries. I couldn´t help at least partly agreeing; I have done woodland work and tree surgery before, after all.

Then, somehow we moved on to the wild superstitions of a village in Peru where she lived for some time. One was that if one falls in the local Incan ruins, particularly if blood is drawn, one must carry out a ´pago´. This involves burying offerings to the spirits to prevent the natural result of injury in such an ancient site: the entering of spirits into the body of the fallen. If a person falls and grazes a knee, they may well find that they receive dreams of vivid eccentricity (visits from spirits trying to take them over) and that their wound may become infected or even lose the leg. The blind and disabled are often said to have fallen in the ruins when they were young.

A related superstition is that when a child is born, a live puppy must be buried to satiate Earth spirits which might otherwise take the child. Another legend has it that walking in the woods at night, particularly when drunk, may well result in the visitation from a spirit that blows dust in the eyes of the wanderer causing then to fall asleep. While laying there on the forest floor, the spirit strips the slumberer of their body fat and internal organs in order to sell them to the devil (note the mix of pagan and Catholic legend) who in turn uses them for people who make diabolical pacts to become healthy after some disease or injury. Mary-Jane said that the people there said that it doesn´t happen much nowadays but ten years ago it was not uncommon! One local thought it a bad idea to tell those legends of spirits that can hurt you because it was the knowledge of them which allows their continued existence and that a little knowledge means they can prey on you and from there there is no way to prevent the attacks but a great deal more knowledge. So it is thus irresponsible to only tell the legend without the accompaniment of in depth methods of prevention and cure. I loved this aspect. The idea that an evil spirit is only dangerous because people still talk about it; existing in the world only because it still exists in language.

Then our conversation moved on to discuss places we had ´volunteered´- that is to say these days, paid to work. It is an amazing and bizarre time when people actually have so much money that they can work all day and pay for the privilege, and finish the day still smiling about the backwards relationship that seems to turn capitalism´s rules of labour upside down. Locals cannot comprehend it and I can´t blame them, having trouble myself more and more. We in Europe and America simply have no concept of how comparatively rich we are. Even if you would never dream of paying for a volunteer placement, you probably know someone who has or you can at least understand that people pay for holidays and some of those people choose to make it a working holiday, and some of them further choose to travel to far away amazing places on the condition that they are doing something for a group, organisation or charity. Of course, if you are in one of those far away amazing places, you either think these rich people from the other side of the world are a gift from the gods or simply insane. Unfortunately, in the experience of both M-J and myself, volunteer organisations are only rarely gifts from the gods. They are usually out to make a profit, remember. And even charities are often run badly. M-J has plans to change that.

-

I´m relaxing in Canoa, surfing and reading, waiting for Nick and Louise to arrive. I have a feeling they won´t because I haven´t heard anything from them in a couple of days, and, although they said they were coming here (so I bought an overnight bus ticket rather than hang around in Quito for five more days till my Galapagos flights), I´m not surprised or annoyed by any change of plans. It´s lovely to be down at the seaside again, able to soak up the sun and take dips in the ocean and generally do very little but read Hundred Years Of Solitude again and think about my next meal. Ceviche or bacon and eggs?

I have definitely become more comfortable with doing very little and being alone. I can notice the difference even since I was here six weeks ago. I have no trouble spending ten hours a day reading, smoking and thinking alone, and not feeling the slightest urge to go out and drink and flirt all the time. Mind you, I seem to have a girl back in Quito. I don´t quite know how it happened but S__, from Missouri, is going with me to the Galapogas and I´m not sure I will be able to spend a night alone if I choose to. She´s definitely interesting, but I seem to have lazily flirted my way into something I´m not sure I want. Especially as I´m supposed to meet up with the beautiful T__ from a wine-growing Northern Californian family while I´m on the islands. How am I going to manage to be away from S__ for a night without it being rather ... awkward? Or am I just being ungrateful. When I want a no-strings fling I miss relationships and when I fall into one somehow I miss the lack of strings? Anyway, I´m happy to be away from Quito and strings, smoking weed and reading and chatting to people for a while with nowhere I have to be for a few days and nothing much to do. Might go and make a necklace from some coloured seeds. It takes practice to be this idle but I´m learning.

Quito, Ecuador.

2009-10-06T22:50:00.003+01:00

I am back in the city and have never felt more quickly tired by it. Tired is the wrong word. So is disgusted. So is sickened. But it's something like that. I feel like I don't belong here.
The city.

I have not written for about a month now as I have been working high in the Ecuadorian Andes at a hostel and guiding their hikes. The work was easy and relaxed, laying tables, clearing up, changing sheets for new guests, feeding the animals on the attached farm (I particularly favoured the pigs), helping with the horses, lighting the fires and candles and keeping guests happy. The hostel was sat looking over a valley of pasture for cattle, horses and fighting bulls (which we regularly had to avoid on hikes), surrounded by the volcanoes Cotopaxi, Rumanahui, and Sinchalagua, with Pasachoa behind us. I would guide short hikes every day to the waterfalls for photo opportunities, hopping between boulders along a dry river bed leading up a steep wooded valley North from the Hostel, my legs learning to use momentum to move confidently and quickly among the rocks; some guests called me a mountain goat. Every couple of days I would lead longer hikes of around six or seven hours up Vulcan Pasachoa to an altitude of 4,200m or take the horses up Rumanahui. Consequently, I am much fitter than I was a month ago and I'm now able to control horses reasonably well and laugh out load with the excitement of galloping. But it was the sheer tranquillity of the place that made the most difference to me; there was such a silence to the place but it was in no way oppressive. I was able to spend long hours in a hammock or by the fire reading several books and writing when the need took me. I think I now feel about as stressless as I ever have in my life and I have a feeling of peace that I really didn't expect. It felt like home.

One of the best things about my time there was the clarity and regularity of my dreams. Back in Bristol, I was so busy working and whatever else we find to be busy with in cities, that I hardly slept five hours a night and consequently my dreams were confused when they made an appearance at all. One night in my bunk at the hostel, I had a nightmare. My first for some time. I woke up sweating with a feeling of being lost and trapped at the same time. In the dream I had been in an office that seemed to be a composite of all the offices I had ever worked in; it was packed with desks, people sitting opposite each other with telephones and computers and papers and whiteboards. There were windows but the view was obscure and grey. In the manner of my dreams, it didn't quite make sense: it felt like I worked there but I was sat with a tired, grey-haired accountant who was, for some reason informing me about my limited and expensive home insurance options. He quickly became angry with my wandering mind and lack of interest in fire risk and subsidence and significantly reduced bottom lines. It had been the bane of my previous life, dealing with insurance companies, accountants, forms, risk assessments and the dictates of finance directors and banks, and I hadn't thought about anything related to any of them since I escaped on a plane at Heathrow four months ago. I kept telling the man that my mind was on other things and I'll just risk it and I'm not much interested in insurance anyway, to which he grew angrier and more red-faced, unable to accept that someone had no concern for the necessity of accounting and insurance. For some reason I couldn't leave and I was feeling the pressure of the grey-haired clerk and the others in the office bearing down on me, persuading me of my errors and the logic of finance and paying for things which might well never happen. I awoke the moment I began to feel my will being broken down and I was about to give in.

I thought about that dream – I've had the time and space to think about such things which I haven't before – and it has helped me realise that my greatest fear is not the unknown or taking risks or starting new adventures, but the possibility of having to be in that stifling environment of an office again, where counting the minutes of busyness causes years to flash by and your energy drains away through your legs – those appendages made for wandering that are kept invisible and static under your desk. Even when I ran my own businesses back in the UK I wasn't able to handle the regularity and habituality for too long and when working to make others money I never managed to last more than a few months in a desk job, day-dreaming of being fired. But I survived, I did it, because that's what everyone else did. Perhaps all the climbing mountains, surfing, horse-riding, swimming, chasing wild horses, dozing in hammocks, meeting, loving and learning I have done in these months since my runaway has made me too weak for England, because I would not be equipped to survive in those alien offices any longer. My brain and body would starve and I would curl up in a corner like a sick sheep or jump from a high window into the non-air conditioned sky.

Thankfully I have a terrible memory so nothing bothers me for long, but I couldn't help going back to that dream and wondering what it was that I was no longer equipped with that I cannot now survive that stale environment. I am absolutely certain it would kill me within months. What have I lost/grown out of/disregarded/disposed of. I know I have learned a little more to be happier, more confident in my abilities and to enjoy new experiences rather than hide from them in habit and comfort; but what had I lost and where did I learn it in the first place. I have begun to feel like I had been stolen as a baby from a wild tribe and brought to a brick semi-detached house in an alien land of concrete and glass and sat in front of teachers and televisions telling me, softly, subtly, without needing to speak, that the aims (my aims) in life are such and such. Life just seemed to flow from there with little real choice or thought as to what I was doing. Now I feel I have chosen, or rather found, the lonely effort of burning muscles and lungs and the bite of the wind and the sun. Watching the choa grass accross the valley flattening and rising in intricate, ever-changing patterns in the breeze v's. the comforts and chores of claustrophobic urban habit. I can't say I'm in a better position now exactly, just that I am further from those such and such aims of other people, of that alien logic, and closer to the wild wandering tribe I know is there in my genes and in the distant memory of gut feeling.

Cotopaxi, Ecuador.

2009-09-02T04:53:00.005+01:00

The last week or so has been a mad mix of changing plans, leaving friends and making new ones. My plan to drive across the continent has fallen by the wayside, Nick has gone to volunteer somewhere South and I've said yes to a job which will be amazing. For the next month my bedroom window view will be of Cotopaxi (see right) and I will be leading hikes into the treeless sedge-grass mountains, doing 6 hour horse treks through the National Park, mountain biking down volcanoes and helping out at a hostel/farm.

Nick knackered his ankle the day before our attempt at climbing to the peak of Cotopaxi so I attempted it alone (apart from my guide, Lobo de la Montanas - Wolf of the mountains!). I failed. My lungs would not feed my legs enough oxygen and by the time I'd leapt a crevasse and ice climbed halfway up the glacier I was coughing up blood with a splitting headache. It was sheer torture and I enjoyed not a second of it. I need more acclimatisation before attempting it again. I have a new respect for mountain guides: Lobo does the climb at least a couple of times a week and is about the healthiest looking person I've ever seen. It's part of the reason I took the job - I want to get fitter and stronger and more comfortable with the mountains. It's a beautiful place and when the sun goes down, the candlelight and log fires are all we have. It suits me to be healthy for a few weeks. I can play drinking games and dance anywhere and I'm slightly bored of Quito. The pollution, the hustle, the noise.

Today I spent much of the day browsing for books in the 3 English bookshops, shopping for things I'll need in the mountains and negotiating with the Correo (post office) over the price of a long distance package to a friend. Found a guitar shop too, but decided a new guitar would be unlikely to make it through the 2 hour cobblestone ride on the back of a pick up and might cause annoyances when there, anyway. One pleasant thing about travelling is that you can take time over food, too. The restaurant where I had breakfast was a typical little place where I knocked my head on pink plastic mobiles hanging from the ceiling and had to make my own coffee with a mug of hot milk and a pot of nescafe at the table. Weirdly, a standard desayuno (breakfast) seems to be a small plate of scrambled eggs, a delicious juice of blackberries and ice, the coffee and a cheese sandwich. It cost about 90p.

I wrote in my diary the day after Nick left how I already missed him and how it was gonna be such an effort to go through all the making friends process for the hundredth time again: those standard questions and cliches. But then that very night I won a pub quiz with a nice girl from Kent and the prize was a trip to the hostel in Cotopaxi. The romantic chalet with a log fire and double bed rather surprised us but we coped. I loved the place and they had a job going, so I agreed to come back after a couple of days back in Quito for emails and phonecalls.

In the creatively named 'English Bookshop', Mark the owner and I got chatting and he offered me a cup of tea. Nick, who was also behind the counter was from Bristol and used to be a landscape gardener. We chatted some, but neither of us wanted to remember our old jobs that much so we supped our imported PG tips and talked about books. Another two English ex-pats who seemed to run a gym or self-defence classes, or something joined in the conversation and they soon turned it around to moaning about Ecuadorians. It seems to be a theme among Brits who have years of experience of a country to arrogantly believe in some sort of outdated imperial superiority, to the extent that I wonder why they bother living abroad at all. I finished my tea and left having swapped a guide on journalism and a collection of Latin American short stories for Kerouac's On the Road. I also found Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia, which has already given me the idea of buying a couple of horses in Argentina and riding down through the lonely scrub desert. I really want an adventure, a real one, not just drinking in hostels and tortuous bus journeys.

I'll write again if I can get a horse into town in the next few weeks, otherwise I'll see you in a month.

Quito, Ecuador.

2009-08-19T18:40:00.004+01:00

Plans are up in the air, a thousand choices of path in front of me. Feeling busy creating adventures. This is what I left England for. Looking at a car this evening that I might buy in order to drive through Equador, Peru, Bolivia and all the way to Buenos Aires and the Atlantic Ocean. Wouldn´t do it alone, but luckily have found a lovely friend who is game for any adventure - Jodi is slightly insane with an extremely large reppertoire of extremely bad jokes and is probably the only person I´ve met who I would spend weeks in a car with. We´ll see. Hope it works out. Hope we don´t get held up by Bolivian gunmen, roll off a mountain pass, or get stuck at a border because of a lack of paperwork.

Anyway, that´s next week. Tonight I´m off to a local Ecuadorian football match (I expect it to be nuts in a stadium filled with Ecuadorians), then up at 6am for a three day acclimatisation hike at about 3-4,000m in preparation for summitting Cotopaxi (5,897m) if I don´t die or start crying. I know from Jodi that it´s one of the hardest things I´ll ever do. Why inflict pain and suffering on myself again. Had enough of that in the army. For bloody photos isn´t it. How silly. We´re like old school big game hunters, but shooting pics instead of lions. The more extreme the better. The more remote the better. Maybe I´ll feel differently when I´m coughing my lungs up at the height of a cruising airplane. Still looking forward to it. Nick and I did a short 3 or 4 hour easy hike a couple of days ago to a local volcano crater just to get our leg muscles burning. Quit ciggies as my training. Apart from last night. Not including joints obviously. Wish me luck.

I´m beginning to see that everything in Ecuador is a bit absurd. It is a place where Chinese Restaurants (there are lots of Chinese immigrants in Ecuador and Peru) sometimes don't have rice, a single rizla costs more than three cigarrettes, rich people with massive 4x4´s and huge fake boobs drive around throwing empty bottles out of the window while the poorest of the poor collect them to make fifty cents a day. It´s a place that has been forced to accept the US dollar as their national currency following the collapse of their own. All because of previous governments´ dealings with the IMF and the economic restructuring forced on the country by that organisation (please, please, please read Naomi Klein´s recent book Shock Doctrine for more info. It´ll change the way you view the world). The differences between rich and poor here are probably similar in scale to America or Europe, but here there is no minimum and everybody mixes on the streets. There are tin shacks next to beautiful colonial buildings and high-rise apartments. Nothing in Ecuador makes sense. The Correa government was the first in the world to introduce a law forcing all to take into account the environment in their plans and actions. This deeply impressed me before I came to Ecuador, but now I see that laws mean nothing when people lack the pride in their own country not to throw all their litter out of their windows. Every road outside the cities is bordered with plastic bags, bottles and packaging. Every one. Nobody cares enough about their beautiful country anymore. It´s sad to see what a real and total financial collapse can do to a national psyche. Ecuador is beautiful, bizarre, absurd, funny and sad all at once.

Quito, Equador.

2009-08-16T21:33:00.005+01:00

In Quito now after the most uncomfortable overnight bus journey for a long time. No Tamazepams this time, just people leaning on my head, standing on my foot and waking me up to try and sell me weird cakes with fish in them.

The 5am cold and breathing effort of the 2,800m altitude were a shock after warm, wasted nights lying around on the beach. Nick and I stayed longer than planned in Canoa as there were so many fun people and the place was so chilled. Surfing there was nice and easy too. In fact we´re still wondering if we did the right thing in leaving. If you didn´t have to book bus tickets ahead of time to get out, then we probably would have kept putting it off and got stuck in the whirlpool forever. I don´t think my lungs, nose and body would have taken it for too long however.

So, back in a city. Beautiful as Quito is, it feels like they´re all the same if you´re not there for long. Really, the only reason we´ve come here is to stock up on useful info and stuff for some hiking in the Andes. We´re gonna take it easy with a little day trip tomorrow to one of the mountains surrounding the city and then start to think more seriously about more challenging hikes near Cotopaxi or somewhere. We both feel that quandry - we feel like doing some hard physical effort like hiking but we also know that easy and unhealthy beach-fun is not far away.

Canoa, Ecuador.

2009-08-11T23:36:00.004+01:00

Adjusting to Ecuador after Costa Rica and Nicaragua has taken more time than I thought. It's not just the new landscape, vegetation and climate; there's the added new experience of a travelling companion. Nick is a friend from Bristol who happened to be travelling in Latin America at the same time as me, and so, even though we didn't know each other particularly well in Bristol and wouldn't dream of travelling huge distances to meet up if we were in Europe, here, I flew over 3 countries and took a long bus journey to meet him in the grey, surf/party town of Montanita. As soon as the first familiar greetings left our mouths, our experiences of travelling altered. We have talked about this change from doing exactly what we choose every day and moving without thinking about anyone else's feelings, to having to consider and adjust to another persons' tastes, budget and choices. We get on well though and need about the same amounts of time alone and have about the same amount of patience with a place: neither of us are the sort to be dragged into the dreaded beach-town whirlpools where you can wake up and realise you haven´t worn anything but boardies and flip-flops for a couple of years. Nick has a girlfriend though. That makes a significant difference to his nocturnal drinking and he often wanders off from a bar when my attention is focused elsewhere for a while.

We're in a much nicer town with pleasant, easy surf called Canoa, though we've got overnight bus tickets to Quito tomorrow. From my current position on my dorm-room's balcony, slung with hammocks I merely have to raise my head to check the ever-changing state of the surf and to decide if it's worth the effort of waxing my board and putting on a rash-guard. A peek. Not yet. Soon. I'm listening to Nick's weird mix of Dire Straights, Muse, good techno and dubstep. It's so nice to hear some music I haven't exhausted on my iPod. And the local stuff is the same as I heard in Central America. Neither of us has any patience with the appalling and ever-present Reggaeton genre. I think I've got the record between us for putting up with a club for an impressive fifteen minutes. But then I'm older and, as everyone knows, your sensitivity to embarrassment reduces with age. Latin America is, I think, the place where all marketing agents for the music industry should be sent in the hope that they can redeem their evil lives by finally increasing musical diversity. A prison colony for marketing agents. It's an idea. They'd need Wi-Fi and coffee, of course, give 'em suits, a black leather sofa and a coctail bar and I doubt they'd notice they were in a different country.

I'm wrestling with writing at the moment. There's a moral and a laziness component to the battle. Firstly, blogs. I enjoy writing this blog for you, but I really can't be arsed to write everything that happens to me. It really is too much effort when I'm lying on a beach. And where do I draw the line anyway? How much detail do you want? Dirty beach fucks at dawn between fishing boats (sandy!)? Awkward, camp dancing to terrible alien beats (demoralising!)? Stoned afternoons trying not to fall out of hammocks while playing backgammon (giggly!)? It's not like having a diary, you see. My diary has grown over the last ten years to several hundred thousand words, filling several books with my small handwriting, but no-one has ever read it but me. No-one ever will while I'm alive and probably nobody will care after that. For this reason it is a place for memories, but mostly a place for recording the progression of my thoughts. It is an insurance against forgetting. Blogs, though, are for other people, for you. Words are instantly published. That worried me for a time and you can´t help it altering your style, but now I promise that with a few practical exceptions, the only limit to my continued blogging will be laziness.

My surfing has been getting steadily worse with practice so I have searched (walked 100 yards) for some other things to do. Went paragliding the other day. Having never before thought it was a good idea to run and jump off a cliff, I was somehow persuaded by three pretty girls with tans so perfect that they made me think of those donar-kebab roasters, slowly, evenly turning. And I'm grateful to them for persuading me. Apart from the seventeen-stone Kentucky-man strapped to my back I felt as free and as calm as a condor, not pumped with adrenaline as I thought I would be. We followed gliding hawks who know where to find the thermal gusts hidden in the regular winds pushed upwards from the Pacific by the cliffs near town. It was a lovely experience that put a meditative smile on my face for the rest of the evening. The sun was going down so my pictures were not the best, so I just put my camera back in my pocket and enjoyed being as close to feeling like a bird as I will ever get. We landed smoothly on the beach a few yards from the hotel bar and I gratefully paid $30 to the jocular Kentucky-man content with his job showing people what it´s like to be condors.

I mentioned above about my wrestling with writing. Diaries and blogs are easy and pleasant. But they're not going to keep me in Pina Coladas and board-wax for the rest of my days. Unfortunately, sooner or later I need to earn some cash from writing. Or do I? Had a chance to write some stuff for The Sunday Times Travel Supplement a while back. More of a potential opportunity than a chance, but anyway, the limits of the required style and subject matter were too restricting. I would have had to go to places that Sunday Times readers want to go. Nicaragua and Ecuador are of no interest apparently. Costa Rica, maybe. And then there´s where to go. The places I´m happy in are a bit rougher than the posh hotels that the Supplement wanted. Fuck it. Maybe an opportunity down the drain, but it just didn´t feel right.

Leon, Nicaragua.

2009-08-03T00:40:00.007+01:00

The tinkling bells of the ice-cream sellers' carts offer a temporary distraction from Spanish Eagles covers. They must eat a lot of ice-cream here. One of the few chains in Nicaragua are Eskimo Ice-cream stores and the hand or horse-pulled wooden carts with bicycle wheels all seem to be Eskimo too. The company seems to have cornered the lucrative cool-down market in the way Starbucks rule Seattle. But it is an exception. One of the most clear differences between Nicaraguan and European or American societies is their lack of signs. They are here, of course, but the concept of marketing and advertising so ubiquitous in my culture is blessedly still at the level of practical, hand-painted letters on walls or perhaps wooden sandwich boards. The shock to Westerners is often one of strange isolation from trade, particularly in the smaller towns. I suspect it is the cause of that weird effect that many people feel when travelling - of suddenly wanting a Burger King even though you didn't eat them at home. Not that there's Burger Kings here. Or McDonalds, or anything like that. Many cafes, sodas, restaurants and tiendas lack anything to tell a customer what is on sale. In the UK, even street-sellers have large, bold signs to attract distant customers. Once you get used to the idea that if you see a hole in the wall with a woman sitting behind it you simply ask what is for sale you realise that our reliance on masses of signs renders many meetings and much conversation irrelevant. Do you get that feeling that you're not meeting many new people? Do you get that feeling that you only mix with the same group? Blame signs for controlling your life without even realising it. If you want a coffee in the UK, you look down the street and you see signs for coffee shops and cafes everywhere. Everyone knows that marketing pushes into our subconscious thought processes (the awareness of the fact is weaker than the pressure of sheer numbers, advertisers don't even need to hide it): even the desire or lack of, is tweaked by the ubiquitousness of signage. Here, people talk to each other instead: " Do you sell coffee?"
"No just mangoes. Try down the street. It's good stuff there."
"Oh, thank you very much."
"No problem. Can I interest you in a mango?"
"I'm ok thanks."
"What's your name?"

Signs are also lacking for traffic and safety and yet somehow the populace manage to avoid multi-directional traffic, the terrible pavements, potholes, and random roadworks. They use their eyes without the laziness instilled in us by the thousand signs we see a day in Bristol, London and New York. The only people who nearly get run over or fall down the giant holes in the roads are Americans and Europeans still unpracticed in using their eyes to avoid dangers, expecting signs to pop up to do the job of perception for us.

As I write this in a massive, high-ceilinged breezy cafe with all the doors open in the most pleasant form of 'air conditioning', a blind man walks in feeling with his stick. He has come to work as a masseuse in the corner of the cafe. I wonder what other elements of my senses are drowned or blinkered by the mass-scale culture I am used to. Most of the signs we have are superfluous, but we are so used to the superfluity of life that we would, I'm sure, in almost every case, walk past a shop without a sign and even think it odd and a place to avoid, perhaps. We would hardly think to look in at what is on sale, so focused are we on the surface, the name, the label. Of course, illiteracy is relatively high here (approx 10% in young people, higher in older groups), but I have to wonder how much is altered in a culture by signs alone.

-

Climbed a volcano the day before yesterday. It was one of those amazing feelings that I've mentioned before, to wake up, unzip my tent and see a smoking crater right in front of me with wild horses grazing below. It was hard work and my legs are aching but I loved it. After breakfast I helped a couple of local kids lasso some wild horses and then gave them some jam sandwiches. They rode bareback with amazing skill and both were under ten. If I hadn't had a ticket booked for Ecuador in the morning I would be living here being a volcano guide by now working with some lovely people I'm writing an article about. Maybe in Ecuador. Or maybe more surfing. Just want to use my body all the time.

PS. Happy 30th Birthday Me!

Leon, Nicaragua.

2009-07-28T01:08:00.010+01:00

I haven't written for the time it's taken to have a lot of fun. Leon is a really dusty, edgy town where cowboys come to town with guns, horse-drawn carts (and 4x4's – don't want to make it sound overly romantic) take fruit and car parts to market and the locals love a party as much as they do telling stories about the revolution. There seems to be a festival every night. It is also filled with a class of traveller that minds a lot less about home comforts and a lot more about fun experiences and meeting people. Having said that I'm sitting by a courtyard pool looking at bikini-clad Germans and Dutch at the moment so I'm hardly roughing it just now.

Nicaragua is a very different place to Costa Rica. The American summer-vacationers are replaced with people open to randomness and seeing as much as possible. I've become friends (in the short-term, travelling sense, at least) with some really lovely and inspiring people, and have some useful notes for another article when I finally get round to writing things up. Probably not till I have an apartment in Buenos Aires. The Nicaraguan countryside is a lot drier than the wet forests of Costa Rica and so has become largely a horse and cattle-rearing landscape fenced into large fincas dotted with subsistence farming communities living in tiny concrete shacks. There's no need to build on stilts as there is in much of C R.

A typical day here for me begins with my alarm clock – the giant siren in the centre of town at 7am which, I am told, though how reliably I don't know, is still sounded to remind the populace of the curfews and oppression before the Sandinistas won the war in 1979. There is perhaps a slight irony if this fact is true, of course, but it's been happening for so long now no-one seems to mind. Indeed, by 7am most people are up to get as much done before the natural oppression of the heat of the day kicks in. I'll have some coffee and fruit for breakfast at my hostel, finish my homework if I didn't the night before, go to Spanish school until 12, pop out for some street-food lunch or iced juices in a cafe if it's really too hot to walk around. I normally have a dip in the pool to cool off and then go to a Nicaraguan guitar lesson or a Salsa dance class. My lack of coordination at dancing has rather riled my beautiful dance-teacher who insists on stopping the music and re-starting every time I make a mistake. I don't think I've heard any of her tracks all the way through yet. But somehow the lessons seem to work wonders in the evening when I go with friends to see a local band or to a sweaty Raggaeton club. The night normally finishes with a drunken fall down one of the holes that pepper the pavements (and are between a foot and 12 feet deep!) and a midnight swim. Hence, life's pretty sweet at the moment, but I'm still looking forward to meeting my Bristol friend Nick in Ecuador next week. I'm so unused to seeing people I know that I fear a friendly face might induce tears of some new kind.

Went to the local beach this weekend with a few people and discovered that the only spot where surf was possible was between some rather large and jagged rock outcrops. Not to mention that the hotels were flooding at high tide due to some freak storm out at sea. I admit to being too scared to get on a board when I saw 12 foot waves crashing with deafening velocity every 3 seconds. Thankfully the local surf-school refused to hire boards that day, so I had an excellent excuse. The next day the waves were still larger than any I've ever seen but I just couldn't resist a body-board. I had a lot of fun trying not to knock over the young kids playing in the shallows as I zoomed in. A little later I could resist real boards no longer and had to get out there. The only board they had which was anywhere near serviceable was a 6'10'' which is much smaller than I've used before. In short I loved it but nearly died. At first I naturally stayed away from the rocks (which I heard later from a French guy with an eye-patch kill people every year!) but then realised what the locals knew: that that was the only spot to catch. You feel a lot safer on a board than you do swimming and the strong undertow wasn't a problem. Even so I'm now partially deaf in one ear that got filled with sand, have bruised ribs again and a few little cuts in various places. Not to mention a collision with an ultra cool 12-year-old surfer. It was his fault: he cut me up on the peak of a big wave. I politely pulled out, but my final paddle somehow caught his leash round my left arm and ripped both of us off our boards and into a tumbling tangle. It felt like minutes before I breathed again and discovered I had nasty bruises all over my bicep. I'm having a little trouble straightening my arm today. But at least I can still play pool. Salud.

San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.

2009-07-18T01:16:00.007+01:00

This morning, I woke up with a nasty hangover and a desperate need to surf. Remembered I was in Nicaragua now and was right by a lovely beach. Knew I needed to eat a little something before getting in the water so I reached into the bag of snacks I´d used to make it through the 9 hours of travelling and waiting at border checkpoints the day before. As I munched on the raisin cookies my sleepy eyes started to focus and I discovered that a battalion of ants had found my food overnight and I was ingesting rather more protein than I had expected. Cue reactive spitting and then manic laughter. Went up the street to hire a board, met up with a nice girl I met at the hotel last night and we were in the water within the hour building up appetites.

Somehow I prefer the atmosphere of Nicaragua to Costa Rica. Both countries are beautiful in different natural ways, but Costa Rica is not a pretty place architecturally, and I´m appreciating what a difference that makes to atmosphere - the little brightly coloured wooden terraces of Nicaragua are absolutely charming and seem to put a smile on everyone´s faces. That and the pleasant dearth of loud, uniformly dressed American families makes this place a happy choice. There also seems to be a more friendly and open set of travellers here. It´s still on the beaten track as far as Nicaragua goes but I´m starting to care less and less about the Lonely Planet attitude of "must find sometwhere nowone else is" (the irony is of course that everyone has a Lonely Planet to tell them where to find somewhere quiet). People are what makes us smile more than anything, after all. A lovely person is worth a dozen rosy sunsets. I´m kinda done with sitting on isolated beaches now.

The Traveller´s Cliche (But Pleasant) Meeting
"Buenas, ¿habla ingles?"
"I thought I heard an English accent."
"I´m good thanks, been here about two days, you?"
"Cool. You heading North or South?" (i.e. North towards Guatemala/Honduras/Mexico, or South to South America)
"Me too. Where you from?"
"Oh yeah, small world - I lived there for a bit. Do you remember the shit pub on the corner?"

"No, haven´t been to Columbia. Heard it´s fun." (Often at this point the conversation drifts off into talk of other places those around the table have been to in some sort of qualitative, and in some way competitive, comparison).

"How long you travelling for?"
"Cool. What do you do back home?"
"Oh yeah, sounds shit. What´s your name?"

We´re all guilty of it, the lack of imagination the conversation above represents, but at least we´re talking to people. Random people. How often did we start a conversation with the random sitting next to us on the bus back in the UK? Did we ever have time? There was always something better to do - a text to send, a meeting to think of, or an iPod cable tangle to untangle. I am determined to come up with a new conversation pattern (or even manage to do away with them altogether) by the next time I cross paths. Perhaps I could draw on my interesting selection of information regarding how intelligent pigs are. Pehaps not. Or perhaps I should be more like Aussie surfers and move in to kiss/punch before the end of the second sentence. Or perhaps I should stop writing now and go and get a beer to celebrate the birth of Isaac´s new little baby boy Oscar! Congratulations bru.

Jaco, Costa Rica.

2009-07-14T04:24:00.003+01:00

I'm sitting out a thunderstorm in a cafe and just saw lightning strike two places within 30m of me simultaneously with a bang as deafening as the grenade that went off a few yards away from me back in basic training. This is some serious storm. I couldn't help joining in with the Americanos surrounding me in exclamations of "Woh, cool huh?" A grey-haired yank behind me started going on about Vietnam flashbacks and 20mm cannon!

OK, a few things have happened since I last wrote. Firstly, and probably most importantly for the rest of my trip, I have started surfing. I wanted to give it a go last weekend and chatted to a lovely Swiss surf instructor called Tamara (who I'm still slightly in love with) about a lesson, but a nasty green bought of the shits kept me indoors. This weekend I was determined. I experienced a tiny amount of disappointment at the instructor turning out to be Tamara's chizzled Rasta husband, but Herchel turned out to be a good enough instructor to have his entire class riding 4ft waves within half an hour of starting. I'm fucking hooked. I want to learn everything I can about surfing and while still in the water decided to cancel my trip to climb Mount Chirripo in favour of chasing waves. I already had a ticket to San Jose that afternoon so I thought I'd check out the Pacific coast. Herchel suggested Jaco for it's relatively easy waves and a friend of his who runs a surf school. So here I am.

My intervening night in a hostel crowded with Israelis (who told me I'd missed seeing Infected Mushroom by one night) in San Jose was far more pleasant than I expected it to be with plenty of the long conversations I've craved for the last few weeks. I met a couple of fellow solo English travellers who were lovely company. Susi advised against Jaco but now I'm here I don't care about the Americanized nature of the town, nor the pimps and whores who somehow seem to find me as soon as it gets dark. I'm just here for the surf. The couple of lessons I've had with Gonzalo are already doing wonders for my abilites, tan and strength. There seems to me no better way of spending a day, and none healthier for the mind and body than playing around in the waves. I never had the time or inclination to try it before for some reason. Lucky I came really. At the moment it exhausts my muscles in a few short hours and I have to go and eat large amounts of meat and carbs to regain my strength, but it is the most happy exhaustion I know (with perhaps one exception). I'm already planning ahead and looking at surf destinations in Peru and Equador for when I rendezvous with Nick.

-

Walking around San Jose the other day Lee (one of the lovely English people I met there) and I noticed a rather disturbing (depending on your point of view) amount of boob-jobs in Costa Rica. Jaco seems almost to be drowning in silicon. Conversations with other travelles have led me to understand this is a trend common to Columbia and Venezuela also. My own opinion is that they (implants) are vain and unnecessary cyborgization, but then the women I've spoken to (and flirted with) are humans (98% human anyway) and I'm not about to condemn them for a little vanity. There are worse crimes. Always enjoyed cyborg-theory at uni. Yes there is a branch of cultural theory based on the technological modification of and addition to the body! I'd recommend it, actually. And don't even bother taking the piss Matt, Mike and Russ - I can already hear you slagging off my degree.

Anyway, it's stopped raining now so I'm off to drool over surfboards.

Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.

2009-07-11T03:09:00.006+01:00

Solid shits again! Yes!

The last few days have been my best so far. The many tasks I've completed this week have given me a feeling of simple contentedness that sits well with the self-sufficient lifestyle of the Finca. I feel on the level. Cliff and I cleared a small hill behind the garden with machetes in order to plant maize. The simplicity of planting and growing field crops here makes the job so pleasant. And I'm used to the heat now. In the UK even a small farm will plough an area using a tractor or rotovator (or a horse in the old days) before planting. Here there is no need, after a couple of hours of clearance of shrubs and a strim we just jab a stick in the ground and chuck a seed in. The maize is a local type given to us by Minor from the farm on the other side of the mountain and is adapted to the environment perfectly: probably over many generations of use. Seed saving is so obvious a thing to do, the locals find it very odd that we buy seed every year (if you want to know why, click here). Planting by the cycles of the moon is also the norm here. In the UK such 'bio-dynamic' methods are looked on as vaguely hippy by all but a few. Here the practicalities are clear: “Moon affect water. Like sea tide. We plant with moon,” as Pana concisely explained to me without the use of any such modern word as bio-dynamic. The chickens will be kept in till the seed comes up.

Christine was whingeing as usual about her lack of conveniences so I made a table for the Canadians from start to finish. By that I mean I went into the forest and found a decent fallen tree (I stress, we don't cut down any living trees on the land or buy any wood from outside) and sliced it into usable sections with the chainsaw. Quite a bit of carrying, some amateur chainsaw carving and some bark-removal with my machete (I have bought one now) and I had my raw materials. Then it was all about working out angles and lengths (not easy on an uneven dirt floor) before nailing together a rough but serviceable table. I was a little bit proud.

Spent a nice afternoon with Celina, chopping up yet more fallen tree and erecting a sign for the Finca by a stream halfway up the mountain. I sat on a rock with my toes in the cool water sharpening the chainsaw, blunted by the hard wood. I remember how I used to hate sharpening saws (it takes ages) when Sam taught me how to do it on a building site in Bristol. I smiled to myself, enjoying my surroundings. Environment. It's all about environment.

By the end of the week I had a reputation as the handyman of the farm when I repaired a light with a soldering iron one evening. Contentedness. And a feeling of being useful to others.

I think much of the good feeling of the week stemmed from a moment last Saturday night after I'd written the last blog entry. I was determined to push my body by going for a long swim in the sea. The heaviest surf I have ever seen nearly put me off but I made it out to the calmer waters beyond and relaxed, floating as the sun went down, my wallet and key in a plastic bag tied by a shoelace to my ankle floating next to me. I body-surfed in laughing out loud through the foam and sat, satisfied on the beach watching the last red rays disappear behind palm trees on the other side of the bay. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that a tear came to my eye for no other reason than the beauty of the scene. The only time this has ever happened to me before was nearly ten years ago in New Zealand. I was sat on a minibus with a load of soldiers going from Christchurch to Arthur's Pass and, as the massive shapes of the Southern Alps on the horizon began to surround me I realised it was the first time I'd ever seen real mountains. Something plucked a string in my head and a rush of smiling tears overcame me. I hid them from the others, of course, but couldn't stop my wide-eyed smiling. I've missed that feeling so much. I think it is the feeling of appreciation of a moment; the feeling of absolute certainty that you don't want to be anywhere else in the world. Speech and thought isn't necessary.

I finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being again today and it made me think of that moment on the minibus surrounded by mountains in New Zealand, and that moment on the Playa Negra last Saturday. Kundera's argument is that happiness is the desire for eternal return, the replaying of a moment of your life again and again. Most of them would bore us stupid quite quickly if, like a broken record or a groundhog day, we experienced them over and over again. But occasionally you find one, completely by chance, without trying and you know it.

Unfortunately I won't ever eat a meal at the table I made or see the maize grow tall, or the beans harvested, or the tomatoes come to fruition or smoke Cliff's next crop of weed, because I've left the Finca for the last time now. And I felt a little sad as I descended the mountain with all my possessions on my back, sweating profusely and with pins-and-needles in my arms. But not too sad. The Finca has allowed me the time and space to become happier in my own headspace and content with simpler pleasures even if my Spanish hasn't improved. It was a good plan to have a few weeks set up in advance; it's really helped. I would have been lost without it. And, as silly and moany as the Canadians could be sometimes, the people of the Finca knew they had a little slice of paradise.

I have a surf lesson in the morning (with the beautiful instructor Tamara!) and then a bus ticket in the afternoon back to San Jose. One or two nights there and a resupply of books and I'm off to climb Mount Chirripo, the highest mountain in Costa Rica and hopefully (fitness and weather-permitting) be one of the only people on the planet to be able to see the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans merely by turning my head.

Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.

2009-07-04T20:38:00.008+01:00

Right... rant warning.

I've always had a strange desire to test myself by being washed up on a desert island, but I fear that my skills at survival would be no match for a lack of will.

I'm having one of those off-days. It started yesterday with yet another bought of the shits. I think it's the river water feeding directly to our taps. The simple system goes wrong at least once a week which offers me a diversion from the garden and usually involves flushing through the 300m plastic pipe and sealing it again with bits of recycled tyre inner-tube. Been feeling weak for a couple of days and unable to motivate myself to do much more than check the seedling corn, beans, tomatoes, peppers and squashes we've planted or to go for a wander in the rainforest again to get away from the screaming kids (another one has appeared from nowhere).

I did have a nice, fulfilling feeling that I was Ray Mears during my morning walk. As I walked along a trail I recognised several fruit trees, taro roots (which are a great form of jungle carbs but need to be cooked or they will poison you), and a couple of useful trees for making bows or shelters. But I couldn't stretch out the work-dodging for ever, and I needed to rush back to the toilet again anyway! I've completely lost my appetite and fear I insulted Selina by not eating her lunch burritos. After that I had to lay down and felt so weak I couldn't bring myself to leave my bed. And it was raining heavily. And the dogs had had diarrhoea all over the porch. And the cat had puked on the sofa. And I ran out fags the day before yesterday. Considered a 3 hour trek through the mountainous snake-infested rainforest with a machete to the shop but thought that might be admitting addiction. I remained hidden under my mosquito net while Selina cleaned up the various soils.

Not sure whether my malaise is a result of weakness or the other way round. Feeling like I'm in my own headspace a little too much at the moment. Don't feel like communicating, but at the same time feeling lonely and missing grimey Bristol nights out with friends or simple nights of guitar and giggles with my sister and Emily T. Or a DVD round Martha and Jim's where she always falls asleep on me before the end of the film. Decided to get up and play cards with the Canadians and discovered it was Friday. You lose track in the rainforest as days blur into one another. Needed a change of scene. After an excited bag-packing session I realised I had a spare hour before the bus arrived at the foot of the mountain so attempted to teach them the wonders of Shithead.

Arrived at the bus stop dripping wet with tropical rains. On the bus I had a chat with an indigenous farmer I met last week at the bus stop. He was off on his regular friday mission to sell a bunch of plantains and some unidentified yellow balls to shops in town to earn some cash. I took heart that my Spanish is at least good enough to have a broken conversation about growing food and the weather. A quick trip to the supermercado to buy Frosties (they'd ran out of Crunchy Nut) and REAL milk and I checked in to the cheap hotel I stay at in town. Was glad to be able to charge up my iPod again and listen to The Gits to remind myself of the sounds of dirty city passion. Checked emails and discovered some bad news from home - my thoughts are with you, mate and I'm sorry I'm not there.

Chatted to a couple of drunk locals last night over some Cuba Libres. When I told them my plans to climb mountains and travel they asked "what do I need to do to have what you've got?" I didn't have an answer for them. I realised I was just lucky and felt stupid.

My rather empty feelings, leaving-guilt, and lack of motivation are resulting in an emotional state that I think is some strange combination of a feeling of waste, ungratefulness and an overdose of freedom. It's something I've written about in other places and chatted about with Martha a lot - the strange feeling that many of our generation have: an excess of freedom. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it. Thousands die for the idea of it every year and we have this weird psychological problem with it. It is the existential problem of our generation as Kundera would say. The ridiculousness of it is the reason we can't face it and can't overcome it. We feel guilty that we don't know what to do with all our freedoms. We can travel anywhere in the world if we save for a bit. We have the education to do anything we want if we put in the corresponding effort. We can, within certain practical limits do whatever we want, anywhere. So what do we do with our freedom? Read about the struggles of others, do drugs and either flit between flawed causes or keep ourselves busy so we don't have to. Perhaps our inheritance from Baudellaire (the first to write about it in a sense) is a similar boredom, disgust, and addiction to decadence, except now we try and hide it from ourselves. Even living the dream by buying land and setting up an organic farm in another country is a kind of rude decadence. The land is only available to us because it is too expensive for the people who have always lived there. The mass result: melancholic lack of will and an urge for distraction. It is both a hidden insult to those who lack the freedom we have and a quicksand of fear of our losing it. We say we'd fight for it but we lack the certainty that we'd be doing the right thing. We want the destruction of the system of which we are the benefactors. If we had the button in front us to do just that would we have the will to push it?

I'm jealous of those who can sing and make heartfelt music or dance their hearts out. There is no question of right and wrong, just beauty and honest feeling and smiling satisfaction. Listened to one of E.T.'s albums on my decadent little iPod while writing this entry. It's amazing how music has the power to bring tears to the eyes when we can walk by dying dogs and people who live under banana-leaf shelters on the beach without a second thought. Never let anyone tell you music's a waste of time ("you should be out earning money or something" say a million Dads). Anything with that power has purpose.

If I had a guitar I'd be playing it. I'm going for a swim in the sea instead. It's still raining.

Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica.

2009-06-28T18:46:00.008+01:00

Had a lovely day yesterday, beginning with a long swim in the Caribbean. The giant rusting United Fruit Company barge was my start-point. This relic of the recent Imperial past was aparently beached here for use as a pier but then shifted with an earthquake and became useless. Decades later it is a rusting hulk used by kids to fish from. It's worth a short aside to make a note of the dirty history of The United Fruit Company. One of the first politically important multinationals, their influence is still being felt today throughout Central America. Not only in the landscapes of banana plantations but in hangovers from imperial politics like what is happening at the moment in Honduras. If my Spanish was better I'd be on the next plane to Honduras to see what's happening.

... Back to swimming... don't know the word for sharks but I didn't want to ask anyway. Heard that if they come near you it is best to act aggressively - like a shark - and they won't mess with you. Hope I don't have to try it out. Then it was breakfast of pancakes with tropical fruit and syrup (had the same today - damn good).

Sunbathing and reading on the beach was the order of the day because no-one I knew fancied pairing up for sea-kayaking. Maybe next weekend. I always read a few books at once, but I need to find a big bookshop with English books soon coz I'm nearly through my Penguin History of Latin America, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. Wish I'd brought more books now. A bit of exploring along the coastline and a considerable time watching crabs on the beach and avoiding falling coconuts and it was time for dinner. Met a lovely Aussie girl over sushi - Caribbean-style!

Nearly got bitten by a snake the other day. If it hadn't been for my wonderful, life-saving Candians (did I mention how much I love them?!), I'd have stepped right on it and this blog would be over! Rushed back to the Finca to look it up and found it to be quite a poisonous one. Blimey. Did some research and discovered 49 different species of snake in Costa Rica, the vast majority poisonous or constricting! I will be more careful.

La Finca, Costa Rica

2009-06-26T23:11:00.006+01:00

As I lay here and listen to the strange noises of the rainforest - a bird that sounds like R2D2; a beetle that sounds like a very loud siren - I wonder what I am doing here. The question has been at the back of my mind since leaving the UK and I have succesfully filed it underneath the level of practicalities in order to ignore it. But with nothing but time to think it has come to the fore.

[Two little lizards just jumped onto my mosquito net in some kind of near suicidal courtship ritual. I kicked them off and they stuck to the wall like those little jelly toys you get from toy shops for 50p.]

I don't wonder what I'm doing here in the spiritual sense. I mean - What am I doing here? What was the purpose, really? Where am I going from here?????

I'm getting sick of the 'spirituality' constantly inflicted on me over mealtime conversations with my Canadian friends. Sharon and Christine really do not understand that I have no need of what they call spirituality. When I look at how much they bicker and how closed-minded they are to any knowledge other than that related to their concept of what it is to be spiritual, I fail to see how it has helped them. My spirituality is Nature as I try to explain to them without success. That is enough for me. If I have a question of life I look at a river or a tree. It is enough. It just makes sense. I do not need their crystals, Mayan philosophies and watered-down, ill-informed buddhist theories.

I tried to tell Sharon this morning as she fixed breakfast and I made coffee, how happy I am that my dreams have returned. For months I have not recalled dreaming but here in the rainforest my mind has cleared and I can dream again.
"What was your dream?" She asked.
"Oh it was about Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. I was in a supermarket in Wales on my way somewhere and I was really happy to find Crunchy Nut Cornflakes."
"And what do you think that signifies, Dan?"
"That I really miss Crunchy Nut Cornflakes."
"But don't you believe dreams have a deep internal value? Don't you believe it is your soul speaking to you?"
See what I have to put up with? I'm in the middle of a beautiful rainforest, surrounded by Nature at it's densenst, most alive, living off the food and materials provided in abundance by the forest and the skills and hard work of a few people, and I share such simplicity with people who like to complicate things. They actually consider Crunchy Nut Cornflakes evil because they come out of a box. " Yeah," I said, " but they taste good."
All I got was a family of blank looks.

Yesterday I was really exhausted by work. I'd been planting plantain offsets in the 30 degree heat and had only been given a salad for lunch. As lovely as it was, I needed carbohydrates. The Canadians were convinced I was tired because it was the spring equinox. Thankfully, Pana cooked spaghetti for dinner.

Anyway, back to the question - why am I here? Well, yesterday I saw a moth as big as my hand and so beautifully coloured I almost got out of my hammock to take a picture, but couldn't quite be bothered. The other day I found a bamboo clump in the forest that would have taken a full minute to walk around. It was as tall as a mature oak tree and as the stalks (which were as thick as my thigh) bent under their own weight they created a circle of shade surrounding the clump that was the size of a tennis court. On Friday, when I went to Clifford's mother's place I met a family so poor in material wealth but so happy and generous. There must have been ten of them under roofs of leaves on dirt floors, no walls, no mosquito nets, with chickens and dogs running everwhere.

I'm not sure what my daily experiences will add up to at the end of my journey, but I know that they are the reason for being here now I am here. No longer is life filled with distractions. It is now filled with new experiences and time to think through the knots in my head. And the occasional screaming child. Little shits.

Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Costa Rica.

2009-06-21T02:06:00.004+01:00

Came to town for the weekend with Clifford yesterday for some much needed partying. Or rather, I thought I needed it. After a fantastic and surreal football match with Cliff and his local mates, a few spliffs in what I think was a crack den, a visit to his mama's shack on the edge of town (which could only be reached by crawling through a barbed wire fence and then through a graveyard) and quite a few beers, I had to go home before I passed out. Felt a bit of a spare wheel hanging around street corners with him anyway. Missed the reggae night he was on about all week but I'm glad I did coz I puked within half an hour of getting back to my hostel. Having not got very drunk for a couple of weeks has made me a lightweight.

Today has been nice. Spent a good amount of time on my own walking along miles of beach, dodging falling coconuts, swimming in the clear, warm water - warmer than any shower I've had since I got to Costa Rica - and wandering around town. My new watch has stopped. Presumably from the sea water. Thought about buying another but... is it worth it? Light and dark are the only times that matter.

At its worst, traveling alone is killing time. But then what is most of life? At least it's killing time in an unfamiliar, and therefore stimulating environment. At it's best it is an activity which strengthens your confidence and instills a meditative contentedness. I have a theory that it is impossible to travel alone if you don't smoke. But then I like to be proved wrong. Traveling alone is a kinda sink or swim thing. At the moment I'm treading water. I need to learn more Spanish, but at the finca (farm) we speak mostly English so I get very little practice. I like my own company but I crave a real conversation in company I can be honest with. You know who you are. Met a nice girl called Marianne (or something - I'm terrible with names) today because we were both sat next to each other reading in a cafe. I was reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being for the third time. I asked what she was reading. Eckhart Tolle. I'm getting a little sick of hearing this guys name. I'm gonna have to borrow the copy at the finca just so I know what I'm talking about but the little I've read seems a bit too much like a New Age self help guru's marketing diarrhoea for my liking. Just look at his website. I'm sure he's a lovely guy, but I just can't get excited about something that happy-clappy. Slightly sinister if you ask me. Generally, how I decide if I trust someone is by imagining going for a pint at the pub with them. If I wouldn't enjoy the experience at all (a la Mr. Tolle) I don't trust them. That's why I never vote. Can you imagine going for a pint with a politician?... Down-to-earth?... Honest?... Don't make you feel uncomfortable?...

Note1: Met the third young Americano/a with a Banksy tattoo today. Can't even be bothered to talk about how I used to live in Banksy-land any more.

Note2: I have been emailed a couple of times about my use of 'coz', 'kinda' and other such shortenings. I like them. Their use is intentional. I'm not illiterate. I hate the dictionary.

Finca Tocori Verde, Costa Rica.

2009-06-18T18:44:00.008+01:00

In the rainforest of the Talamanca mountains a few km from the Panamanian border to the South and a few km from the Caribbean to the East is a smallholding called Tocori Verde. Each morning I awake to the sound of Howler monkeys calling their spooky call. I pull back my mosquito net and look for scorpians. The cabin where I'm living is made of fallen wood from the forest around us and made into planks and 4x2 using a chainsaw mill on the pemises. I'm here to help the little community of Canadians and Americans live more self sufficiently off the land. At the moment their 'garden' needs a lot of work and is producing hardly anything. The 2 locals that live with us know what they're doing and yesterday we planted beans in the traditional style on a steep slope and tried to keep the chickens away. Other than that, our water comes from the mountain stream, and most of our food from the forest or local farms.

From the porch where I sit for a smoke in the evening, I can see at least 6 plants that are edible or produce edible fruits + 2 more medicinal ones - and that is with my minimal knowledge of tropical plants. Everything is useful in the rainforest. It's alive and far easier to live in than you might think back home. You don't have to be Ray Mears: this place is like the Garden of Eden. Even the heat and humidity feels right. I can't believe I've ever lived in a cold environment. I've been for a couple of short solo treks through the forest and along rivers and have never felt more safe. I can't explain the feeling exactly - I just feel part of it, and if I got eaten by a puma or jaguar or crocodile I'd just be more a part of it! Don't worry I'm careful, I always carry a machete.

The small community I'm living with comprises a family of 4 Canadians, an American/Puerto Rican woman and her Costa Rican boyfriend and his friend. The Canadians are convinced the world of the Northern Hemisphere is about to end in one way or another and talk continually of crystal healing, cosmic energies and government conspiracies that seem rather far fetched even to my paranoid ears. I have learned never to have kids. I can't tell you how irritating an 8-year old Canadian boy can be. Wish I'd never made him a slingshot on my first day. They cook for me though.

Apart from this minor annoyance, I'm nearly in heaven. Slightly more breeze in the heat of the day and a beautiful woman in my bed and I'd be there. Life can be so satisfying when it's so simple. I'll be here a month at least, but I'm thinking of waiting for the beans to crop. Also, I've heard a rumour of a treehouse village nearby which I just have to try and live in!

San Jose, Costa Rica.

2009-06-13T05:24:00.002+01:00

I've been in San Jose a week now. I needed to let it sink in before I could write anything about it. The numbness is starting to wear off.

I've been living with Doña Rita and her constantly expanding family. Every day a new person turns up who seems to know who I am but whom I have never met before. While sitting round the dinner table eating the incredibly salty food Rita cooks - really, it's so salty I think I'm getting a kidney stone - I attempt sentences en español. My vocabulary and confidence is growing but I always feel like the idiot relative at meal times. Living in a family again has been an odd experience too. The last time with my own family was a lifetime ago. I'd forgotten the subtle oppression of it. It's me though, not them. They're lovely. I'm just used to total freedom and sorting myself out. I can't get used to someone cooking and washing up for me every day. But it's part of the deal.

I've been doing Spanish lessons at www.epifaniaschool.com in the suburb of San Pedro each day. It truly is the best I could have hoped for. The teachers are absolutely lovely and I would recommend it to anyone. They teach you so much vocab you think your head's going to explode but it sinks in and slips out again when you need it talking to a guy in a music shop or when you're looking for the bathroom in a cafe. There is simply no substitute for being 'in country' to learn a language.

If it wasn't for San Jose being a pretty crap town I would stay here to learn as much as possible for a month or more. As it is I've got a ticket to Puerto Viejo tomorrow morning and will be living and working on a beautiful organic farm in jungle filled with waterfalls, snakes, parrots, monkeys and crocodiles!

Farnham. UK.

2009-06-05T04:59:00.002+01:00

I'm just getting over the feeling of saying goodbye to everyone I know and not knowing when I'll see them again. I'd like to describe the feeling more but I'm unable to. I'm numb and can't think about it. Am I repressing? Is it repression when you know you're doing it? Who knows? Somebody at Thames Valley University will have done a thesis in it, I'm sure.

Generally all my feelings about my trip (didn't write 'new life' there, did I: maybe I am repressing fear) are rather numbed. I'm not upset exactly. I don't miss anyone quite yet. I'm not scared or worried. I've been thinking practically. Packing. Writing letters. Sorting out the drag-you-down paperwork that I never want to think about again. OK, I am a tiny bit worried. I've learned from a few wise souls that if you're genuine and open-minded and calm and come to people with a smile, then life tends to go smoothly. But making friends still depends on meeting good people. That's my only worry. I can't replace my friends in the UK of course, but I need to make some or I won't make it. Generally though... numbness.

Tomorrow Costa Rica.