Sky Over The Limit

A New Adventure

2010-07-17T09:29:00.000-07:00

The sound of ladies chattering. In Spanish. The sound of waves lapping the shore. I open my eyes and yes, I am on the beach. And now surrounded by holidaymakers catching the early morning sun before it gets unbearably hot. Slowly I piece together events leading to this moment. My new friend Adrian said he would meet me here in an hour or two. That was just after sunrise, when I arrived and the beach was empty. Judging by the height of the sun, it's been about 2 hours. I sit up and look around. Is he coming back? Paranoia seeps through my body. ALL of my shit is at his apartment except the clothes I wear and my tobacco. I think I could find it. It's bang in the middle of the Born area of Barcelona. He seemed like a nice guy...

Not much later I'm cruising down the Avenidas on the back of Adrian's moped for the 5 minute journey back to his place. I met him last night in The Born Bar. I'd just had a cuttlefish & cockle spaghetti and a bottle of wine to myself, and went out to find a bed/sofa for the night. I met him and his friends, we chatted for a while, I bought a round of tequilas and hit them with the crunch. It was an ambiguous response, but it was out there anyway. The rest is a bit hazy, but involved several more bars. Turns out he has this pimp almost top floor apartment right in the heart of a beautiful old bustling neighbourhood 5 minutes from the beach. Score.

The next day, after a killer burger, I stop to watch a guy playing a hang drum in the street. The magical harmonies filling the square pour into my ears and softly massage my body from the inside. Now back to the beach to catch the late afternoon sun. I think I'll find a hostel for tonight first.

El Petronio

2009-08-17T14:34:00.000-07:00

It was a tough call. Last time I was in Cali, 2 weeks ago, I was sketching out my plans. The Mompox Film Festival was, like Parque Tayrona, one of the only clear things I really wanted to do while in Colombia - other than the last few weeks' commission - and look what happened there. So, no great surprise then, the Law of Plan B prevailed. It was described as unmissable - thousands of people dancing and stomping to marimba bands for 4 nights in a row.

I've just about caught up on my live music drought. Hermanos Lebron, the Cuban salsa band, in Santander de Quilichao last month was a start - but these last 4 days have been utterly amazing, reminiscent of Carnival in Panama. Last night had me actually welling up with tears, for the second time in as many years. Maybe it was the 'viche'... Around 9pm, this group appeared on the revolving stage, as the last were revolved away behind them, a troupe of about 60 kids, aged between 4 and 16. Playing marimbas, drumming, stamping, and singing, they made an emotional impact on me that I won't forget.

Petronio Alvarez is the name of the 13th Pacific Music festival of Cali. Busloads of Afro-Colombians from Choco, Buenaventura and communities all along the coast converge on Cali to witness this spectacular event. For 2 days, back to back bands from 6pm to midnight compete in various categories to see who gets to play on the final day. Saturday is the special invitations days, where famous bands & old winners play and Sunday is the final. The revolving stage ensures there is little more than a couple of minutes between acts.

We were lucky enough to have colour photocopied some press passes, and had access to the central arena. This free festival takes place in the Plaza de Toros - a huge bullring. The stage is set up at one edge of the ring, and about 40,000 people fill up the tiered stands. In the bullring we packed in about a thousand people on Sunday. The atmosphere is crackling with excitement, and the dance moves are incredible. I remember turning around at several points to see literally the whole panorama from top to bottom moving and arm-waving in step.

To me it seems like there are two types of bands - the marimba bands that generally have a lot of drums and those with violins. It's my theory that because this is only the second year with violin bands, that they need another few years practice and audience appreciation until they get better and faster - the rhythm is just a bit too slow on the whole and doesn't really get the crowd going as much as the drums - when they get going something magical happens and I just can't put words to it.

And then at midnight every night the whole place decants to Calle Pecao in the centre, and the Parquedero (the car park) around the corner. Last night there must have been 2000 people in the car park all shaking and moving to miramba sounds from a fat, very loud sound system.

The pacific drink of choice is viche - it's my informed guess that this is made from fermented sugar cane juice - it has that grassy earthy sweetness that French Agricole style rhums do - with a punchy rough kick. It's known as a Pacific aphrodisiac (on Saturday a beautiful latina testified to that) and they sell it in reused plastic bottles - proper homebrew.

Last night nearly didn't happen. We turned up at 6pm on the dot, along with 25,000 other people. The VIP (performers and press) queue was a mess, the cops just standing around and the security shouting at a raging mob of 250 people baying at the gates telling people to get organised and into queues without any success. Pisspoor organisation. After being in this writhing mob for an hour, finally made it into the outer enclosure, and were greeted by a 100 person queue to get into the inner arena. Finally at the front, the security guy took my pass out of the holder, said to me "es una copia" and put it into his hand with a wadge of at least another 50. My mate had just made it inside ahead of me, he passed his copy out (mine was a copy of a copy) and after another 20 minutes queueing made it in for the final night. I could only last until 2am this morning, I think some of the last viche I had was a little more potent than normal and dragged myself to bed.

How To Blow A Week's Budget in 24 Hours

2009-08-10T14:29:00.000-07:00

1. Have a real pint of real ale - at Bogota Beer Factory - the first in over a year, while catching up with a mate you haven't seen in 4 years. 9,000 pesos (£3)
2. Have a cocktail in a bar on your first blind date. 12,000 pesos.
3. Taxi home. 8,000 pesos.
4. Buy nearly brand new Lumix camera, probably stolen, to replace the Digi-SLR that got stolen which you were borrowing because yours got stolen in the post. A bargain second hand at 115,000 pesos (£40)
5. Buy flowers for your friend's parents to apologize for waking them up and scaring the crap out of them at 2am because your key snapped in the lock of your own door, after walking around for an hour unsuccessfully trying to find mobile phone credit, but at least avoiding sleeping in the street. 5,000 pesos.
6. Buy a piece of acrylic to cover the hole in the door that you broke in the hope that the door wasn't double locked. 2,000 pesos.
7. Buy a ticket for the nightbus to Cali to go to a Pacific music festival. 55,000 pesos.

No dinner for a month then.

Colombia Solidarity Campaign - Comission 2009

2009-08-07T14:36:00.000-07:00

Here is a clickable summary of the six parts of my report in order - as brief as I could make it.

1. In At The Deep End - 16th-17th July, Bogota
2. Organise & Resist: The Minga - 18th-21st July, Bogota, Cali & Cauca
3. 117 Families Facing Eviction - 22nd July, La Toma, Suarez, Cauca
4. Caminando La Palabra (Walking The Word) - 23rd-26th July, Cauca
5. 4 Days & 4 Places - 27th-30th July, Cauca
6. 19 Days And Still Standing - 31st July-4th August, Cauca, Caldes, Tolima

19 Days And Still Standing

2009-08-04T14:01:00.000-07:00

mining community at La Marmota

weighing up 2 days work

Well, a day off after 19 days of meetings on the trot. Nothing like it after a year long break from it all. And I spend it writing about meetings. Sucker! Back in Cali, in the tropical heat...

So last Thursday after leaving Cais Maloka, we came back to Cali, where we had a couple of meetings with some local trade unionists. Then that evening, we took the 5 hour bus to Manizales, in Caldas, ready for our meetings with communities around Riosucio, where AngloGold Ashanti are active.

Friday was a packed day, with 2 days worth of stuff squashed into one, as the next day we were invited to Cajamarca for a symbolic action of resistance against AngloGold. We were whisked to the first Indigenous Reserve of Escopetera Pircie, for breakfast with the local human rights groups. The general format for meetings is that we have a go-around, everyone introduces themselves and gives a summary of what their interests in the meeting are. I've got my patter pretty down by now, and it's funny how the 4 of us change our intro depending on what order we are sat in.

This area, the department of Caldas, is a particular hot-spot thanks to its geostrategic location in the middle of the gold triangle of Bogota-Medellin-Cali. Nonetheless, the usual topics came up, AngloGold Ashanti active in the area, Smurfitt-Carbon also active with their massive mono-culture pine forests, and water issues. 3,500 people have been displaced from the Reserve in the last 20 years and there have been 450 assassinations recorded. Since the 2003 Inter-American Court of Human Rights case about the area, there have been 167 assassinations. 80% of these have been declared "crimes of passion" by the state. All this, and the area is now declared a "post-conflict zone". So AngloGold can come and sweep away the remaining people and tear up the stunningly beautiful countryside to create open-cast gold mines for their shareholders to line their pockets. Post-conflict...

After breakfast, we were taken to the town centre, and into a building with stunning views of the surrounding hills through the large windows. The visit was very ceremonious, with generous helpings of a panela-clove drink that reminded Andy of cough syrup. A lady in long white robes stood at the back of the room blowing cigar smoke over the heads of the audience with a cleansing wave. The meeting was opened by the governor, contextualising present day defense of territory and biodiversity within 500 years of resistance to imperialism. Now, the community's position on mining is a clear no to multinationals. However, a more complex explanation of how they are resisting was lacking.

After lunch of rice, plantain, potato, yucca and chicken wrapped in banana leaf, we got back in the 4x4 (paid for by a recent EU project) and were taken to the San Lorenzo Reserve. Here we met 25 local community representatives, 90% men, in a school classroom. The conversation here was a little more pointed, looking at strategies of resistance. First, the local tradition of mobilization means that they seem to be ready if things kick off. The trouble is that the plunder is usually given a veneer of legality, so that by the time evictions come they are backed by the long arm of the law. Really, mobilization needs to be pro-active and national, rather than local and reactive. Second, the role of the guardia has the potential, at this stage seems more like symbolic resistance rather than arming the barricades. And thirdly, the role of indigenous medicine, which I would like to know more about, but didn't get the opportunity to explore further.

reason number 8 against large-scale gold mining: water pollution

Back to Manizales, we then had meeting 4 on day 16 in a row. Initial impressions were cagy - in a fairly grand hotel meeting room, with folk that seemed generally more middle-class than we are used to working with. One reason I enjoy working with the Colombia Solidarity Campaign is that the focus is really on grass-roots movements - indigenous, campesino, afro communities, generally rurally based folk. Nonetheless, having meet with the communities, it was interesting to see the more NGO-type groups organising around local issues. Genuine social change can happen when the middle class unite with the base, so interesting to see the angles here, and good to see the themes of territory, displacement, multinationals and human rights violations on the agenda.

Saturday morning, up at 5am, and the day exactly one year ago I left the UK. We said goodbye to Rogelio and Lucia, leaving 2 of us, as they headed onwards and we caught the bus to Cajamarca. Cajamarca is in the region of Tolima, also within the Bogota-Cali-Medellin triangle, and where AngloGold Ashanti have been most active in trying to win over the community. Specifically, we were going to a local school, where AGA delivered a load of paint to brighten up the school. The community decided to return the paint, did a whip-round in the village, bought their own paint and today were painting the school. A huge symbol of grass-roots defiance and resistance to corporate attempts to buy off the community.

Later in the afternoon, after interviewing a few of the locals involved, we headed back into the town to meet with local activists in the community. The angle into mobilization against AGA here is socio-environmental. What AGA have up their sleeves is plans for one of the world's largest open-cast gold mines - right in the middle of some of Latin America's most stunning countryside and fragile war-battered communties. They have had numerous schmooze-the-community events, and recently a helicopter dangling a strange probe was seen flying at low level around the valleys.

The key demand of the community is a full independent socio-environmental investigation into the impact of the mine. Part of this would include the potential effects on the El Machín volcano - open cast mining involves use of vast quantities of dynamite - whilst within 15km lies Number 2 on the world list of volcanoes in most danger of erupting, which would cover the town of Cajamarca in at least 20cm of lava. The other demand is what the law demands - a public consultation - amounting to a regional referendum of all areas involved. Another legal element is the mining concessions that include protected forest areas - how would these forests be protected if turned into an open-cast mine?

Sunday we spent the morning in the town square interviewing locals on their views on the mine. Their opinions ranged from the environmental to the social - all opposed - a key concern noted was the impact on town society. Workers would be brought in from all around the country, undermining local trust networks, and bringing social ills such as prostitution, robbery and burglary. One wisely noted that not a single open cast gold mine in the world had brought any benefits whatsoever to the local community. Later we met with the local mayor. Basically he didn't want his neck on the line, and played a very middle of the road line. Unsuprising, but disappointing.

Monday we hit the road for Marmota, backtracking through Manizales to Caldas, as this was mentioned when we were there as being a very interesting and sad case study of multinational exploitation in gold in the area. Rather than restate the facts - this article gives an excellent history, published in Canada, where Colombia Goldfields, the company involved, is based. No UK involvement here, but an excellent example of why mining multinationals are bad news.

And now, I'm alone in Cali, ready to head to La Toma for the planned eviction on the 6th. It's been a marathon, but absolutely enchanting to get to know rural Colombia with an insider's perspective, not on the tourist trail and have an emotional connection. It's a magical place, replete with a turbulent history of 500 years of oppression and imperialism, still strongly redolent of Spanish colonialism despite celebrating 200 years of "independence" next year. But resistance is strongly rooted in the blood of Colombians, Afro-Colombians, campesinos and Indigenous alike. The seeds of hope of a brighter future are spreading, slowly, and cannot be extinguished, no matter how many U.S. military bases they build.

4 Days & 4 Places

2009-07-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

Cali, Colombia
[photos to come... patience]

4 days, 4 very different places. From observing a human rights community meeting with the UN, to going back to La Toma for their community assembly to discuss their mass eviction on the 6th August, to the other side of the valley where last week death threats were last week painted onto the walls of the village, to a rural project linked to New Generation in London where last night army troops had decided to occupy a farmhouse. Just another week in the Cauca.

After a heavy night, it was with relief that we weren't the centre of attention at this meeting, with the UN, in La Maria. We watched as local groups submitted reports about local situations to the delegation present on their high table, and spoke about their local issues.

On Monday we headed back to La Toma, the place with the forthcoming mass eviction, for a community meeting to which we were invited when we were there before. We arrived to find a packed covered area, with around 300 people. However our inviter was nowhere to be seen, making it slightly awkward to make our presence. The meeting itself was heavily front-centric, with very little opportunity for community input. There was a call-out for a march to Bogota, which was met with rapturous applause. An interesting idea, but takes the mobilization out of the local area. There was little room for suggestion of anything resembling local action in the community. And nothing suggesting mobilization on the eviction date of the 6th August. Nonetheless, the importance of unity of this black afro-colombian community with indigenous and campesino communties was noted in the struggle against mining multinationals.

Later in the afternoon we walked 45 minutes down a steep narrow mountain path to the community of Gelim, site of proposed evictions. Here there were workshops going on, when we arrived the local residents had split into groups to work on building a picture of local work and resources, and histories thereof. We caught up with them later after a delicious dinner, meeting in the school yard in a large circle. Here we heard how the community are ready to defend their territory by force if needed, if the eviction happens.

Since 2004, mining has been a main form of earning a living in the area. In 2005, Kedadha began their interests in the area, coming to a local meeting painting the wonders of the company. Since then, they have had a strategy to penetrate the community, including the mining rights through intermediaries Jesus Ario and Fernando Ruis. Law 70 of 1993, article 44, grants the legal right to public consultation before mining takes place... of which none has taken place. The community feel backed into a corner - both metaphorically and literally, into harder to reach pockets of territory that has been theirs for 409 years.

On Tuesday morning we received warnings from 2 sources not to visit Cerro Tijeras, our next stop on the other side of the river. In the end we decided it safe to visit the lower part of the village. The area is the site of recent fighting between the FARC and the military. We wanted to see the graffiti that had recently been painted in the town, signed by the Black Eagles paramilitary group. It read "We are coming for you sons-of-bitches leaders. Thieves 8 days to give yourselves up sons-of-bitches thieves. Black Eagles. Death Melba, Enrique, Leandro, Leonardo, Meraldino". Another read "Manipulative snitch leaders. Dead. Black Eagles". It is highly unusual that the Black Eagles do this without also leaving written threats, usually a letter posted under a door. This, additional to the fact that the army are right here in the village leads to the suspicion that it was the army that painted the threats rather than the Black Eagles. We then visited the village of Olivares, where the ex-governor Enrique has now received so many threats (including being mentioned in the above threat) he has left the village for fear of his life.

Wednesday we headed to Dagua, an hour from Cali, back in Valle del Cauca, to visit Cais Maloka, a project up in the hills towards the coast. They are linked to Nueva Generacion in London, a Latin American collective working cross-culturally to raise awareness of local issues, stimulate change and promote their culture. In Colombia, they are working on building a collective farm, working with children and young people to become change-makers, and through principles of Participatory Action Research. We paid this beautiful finca a visit, and having heard that the army had stationed themselves illegally in the upper farmhouse, to see what was going on, with a local human rights defender. We found that they'd left, but left behind a "Colombian Army" towel as evidence, along with various bits of litter.

Sitting around an open fire, I watched the cloud-line sink below us. It's so hard to marry the totally tranquil serenity up here with the knowledge of what's going on in this an countless other areas in Colombia. People are afraid to talk to each other about politics, to come to meetings. Meanwhile, the water supply has been privatised and bills push higher and higher. You might understand that when you live in a city of a million, having to pay for water, but when you live surrounded by natural sources of water it really boggles belief. Not only that, but the natural water that there is, is being drained to feed the pine mono-cultures that belong to the shareholders of Smurfitt-Kappa Carton, that Irish company I mentioned. It's here that I see the real effects of capital, punishing a population for daring to try and continue existing.

Caminando La Palabra (Walking The Word)

2009-07-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

On The Bus From Santander de Quilichao, Cauca, Colombia

For the purposes of continuity, I'm writing this on the bus, after Hermanos Lebron, on the way to a UN caucus. Actually I'm in Cali much later on, being far too tired after 4 hours sleep and dancing all night to have written this then. Plus my battery wouldn't last, the damn thing only gives about 40 minutes of charge these days. So since the last post at La Toma we've done a 2-day 40km march with 10,000 people for a Minga, and travelled to Popayan to meet groups there. And danced all night at a Hermanos Lebron gig. A heady mix of party and politics in appropriate proportions.

Walking boots donned, I finally felt glad that I've lugged them 25,000 miles around the hemisphere without having used them for more than a 2-hour hike half-way up the volcano on Ometepe. Packing the essentials - tent, sleeping mat, sleeping bag, mozzie net, spare clothes - I thought I had a light pack... it started to bite after an hour. Probably a bit unfit too...

So being a little late for the start of the march from Santander de Quilichao, we jumped on the roof of a Chiva (eye-spy's book of modes of transport was filling up with ticks). We waited for the bus to fill up - I have never yet in 10 months in Latin America seen a bus leave before its full. After what couldn't have been more than 5 minutes on the road through town, the driver pulled into a layby in front of a restaurant. And got out, and sat down, and ordered his dinner. No-one complained, or said anything to the driver, just patiently waited. This seems to be a distinctly Latin trait - tolerance. It's interesting how this translates into a history of dictatorships. You can also see the effect on kids, who seem far more well behaved despite a more lax disciplinary attitude.

colombia solidarity campaign secretary andy higginbottom interviewed by caracol tv

Having waited 25 minutes for the driver to finish his lunch, we hit the road again and caught up with the march soon enough. We joined at the front of the march, but quickly fell back with the pace being pretty fierce. National TV news crew Caracol interviewed Andy and Rogelio, with a 5 second soundbite of Rogelio's appearing in a 30-second slot about the march on the peak-time national news that evening. The march's route deliberately passed through several towns and indigenous reserves and presently experiencing conflicting armed interests. One house was riddled with bulletholes from a confrontation several days earlier between the army and the FARC. The town we stopped the night in had FARC stencils, and while the thousands of marchers were resting and enjoying the evening in the streets, several dodgy looking folk around were pointed out to us by local friends as known "demobilised" paramilitaries - now just in civilian clothes - but everyone knows them as paras.

Along the way I met Aida Quilcue who until recently was leader of the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC). Last December, her husband was murdered in an attack seemingly meant for her. On 11th May this year, her 12 year old daughter was leaving her house when she saw men pointing handguns at her from a car parked outside. She fled back into the house, while they drove around the house until they realised she was there protected by Indigenous guards. Aida was due to come to the UK to speak in June, but had to cancel. She is due to come in September - watch this space.

We also met with Feliciano, a spokesperson for the Minga, indigenous to the Cauca. He spoke something that touched me very deeply, through a concept I admire and respect. He spoke of the liberation of mother earth, with it concepts of the importance of living in harmony with nature rather than tearing it up. He spoke of the evolution of the politics of the indigneous, as seeing a marked turning point with the 1991 Colombian Constitution, from a politics of protest to proposals through protest, from reaction to proaction. And in 2005 the campaign for the liberation of mother earth began - taking, protecting and liberating "tierra" - the earth, the ground, the soil. Francisco, from a human rights NGO Asociacion Minga, spoke about how in this area there is a permanent war between public forces and the people that has been totally invisibilised.

After staying the night, we were up and ready to smack pavement with our boots by 6am. Another 20-odd km, and we made it to Corintho, making 40km in total. Phew. Here, everyone gathered in the town square, and listened to brief speeches of all the indigenous governors from the local area. Together at the end they made a joint statement, supporting the Minga and its continuance, denouncing local acts of violence against the communities, and refusing to enter into new agreements with the government until previous agreements to protect the population are fulfilled.

On Saturday we made for Popayan, a historical colonial centre about 3 hours south of Cali. Here we met with two groups, one with the Minga, and another that exists parallel but outside of the Minga. The first was CIMA, a local group in the National Agrarian Association (CNA). Here we heard a round of presentations of local represenatives about their local issues. He heard about 4 people killed in a massacre in Peregosa in 2000, and 10 campesinos killed in January 2001, both as revenge attacks for mobilisations in 1999. Paramilitaries give out pamphlets with threats in the area. In August 2007, Smurfit-Kappa Carton de Colombia (who on their own website claim to be advancing their most "aggresive and important expansion in their history"), an Irish-based multinational, bought up huge areas of land, in some cases forcing the sale, for monoculture exotic pine forest plantations.

The local soft drinks group Postobon, in negotiations with the government, recently acquired the rights "to protect" two local lakes, the Lagunas de Magdalena and Cauca. Funny that, a soft-drinks company with a line in environmental protection of water sources. Doesn't quite seem to add up to me.

We also talked about the changes of land use over the last 15-20 years. Back then, the area produced 7,000 tonnes of food, and was almost self-sufficient. Now, that has reduced to 1,500 tonnes, and today the area imports 7,000 tonnes of food from abroad. Seems totally crazy, doesn't it, that an area so rich and fertile has to truck, ship or fly food from other parts of the world to feed it. But that's the story of Colombia, a country that imports thousands tonnes of rice from the United States!

Later we met with the Process of Popular Unity of South West Cauca (PUPSOC). They describe their work as parallel to the Minga, and in concert to it. However, they are critical of the Minga's involvement with the Peace Laboratories of Europe, formed in the Cartagena-London agreement of 2002. Effectively, state funding to construct peace, which involves a certain doublethink given the amount of European capital being pumped into Colombia, which must be seen as intrinsically linked. Especially when the third component to the Peace Laboratories is to strengthen productive industry. This article by Gearoid O'Loingsigh looks into this in detail.

We talked about local issues. In the 3 communities of Mariel, San Sebastian and La Vega, described as the crown of the Colombian Massif, Kedahda (a subsidiary of AngloGold Ashanti) have mining concessions for 3,600 hectares. This follows exploration in the 1980s by Japan International. This is described as Phase 2 of Plan Colombia: the social phase. In Valencia, a community of 800 inhabitants, there are 1600 soldiers stationed. Other local issues revolve around water - "the eyes of the future" - and the importance of defending local supplies against privatisation.

Phew. After all that, catching my eye on a poster advertising Cuban salsa band Hermanos Lebron made me very excited, having listened to them heavily on the road trip through Mexico. They were playing that night in Santander. Phil, a English guy working with groups here, and I bought ourselves a bottle of rum and hotfooted it on the 2-hour bus trip. £2 to enter, we met up with our dance partners and salsad the night away - no way to learn like in the field! The only dark spot came later on, danced out, moving to get some food, when suddenly I realised that the lush Digital SLR camera that I'd borrowed was suddenly not in the case anymore. Ouch.

117 Families Facing Eviction

2009-07-22T10:01:00.000-07:00

La Toma, Suarez, Cauca, Colombia

So after an hour's sleep on Wednesday morning, we arose at 5.30am to head to La Toma, near Suarez, to meet the afro-descendant community there. We left El Mesón by chiva bus, accompanied by a Guardia 50 strong. They accompanied us down to the river Cauca, where we took a boat downstream to Suarez. This part of the Cauca river was dammed in 1984-6, in the midst of a ream of incompleted impact assessments by the government. This raised the level of the river by 350m, flooding huge swathes of the most fertile land in the Cauca valley, causing displacements of thousands of campesinos.

Arriving at Suarez, I think the best way to explain what's happening there is by reproducing this Urgent Action. If you have time, please help by sending an email with the demands to the emails below.

From the human rights team of the Process of Black Communities and other organisations:

6th August is the date fixed for the eviction of the black community in La Toma, in the Suárez municipality in north Cauca, Colombia. La Toma´s Afro-descendant inhabitants have been declared ´squatters in bad faith´ in a legal possession order taken out by Raúl Fernando Ruiz Ordoñez and Jesús Sarria. Yet the presence of black communities on these lands dates from 1636, since when they have worked small gold mines which is today the only means of subsistence for hundreds of families.

The black community´s territory in La Toma district consists of 7,000 hectares, some 6,500 hectares of which, including the cementary, are sought by Anglo Gold Ashanti for exploration purposes. The company has found a fast-track to an immediate start to operations, via two mining concessions together making up 403 hectares. They are concession EKE-151 (314 hectares) held by Raúl Fernando Ruiz Ordoñez, and concession BFC 021 (99 hectares) held by Héctor Jesús Sarria. Neither of these concession holders are linked with the community, nor have they carried out any mine exploration or exploitation activities. Rather, in the light of the known interest of Anglo Gold Ashanti, these two gentlemen have initiated a legal process of expropriation that will stop the afro-colombian miners from developing the work that they have carried out for generations in this district.

Anglo Gold Ashanti and the Canadian owned company Cosigo Resort have been pressurising to take over other territorios in Suárez, and the neighbouring municipalities of Buenos Aires and Santander. None of the moves by these mining corporations respect the the right of the black communities to consulta previa (previous and informed consent) the guarantee set out in ILO Convention 169, as recognised by Colombia´s constitution, and elaborated in Law 70 passed in 1993.

This is not the first wave of evictions from this region. Back in the 1980s the construction of the nearby La Salvajina dam and reservoir system displaced hundreds of families to the urban slums of Agua Blanca in Cali and other cities. The environmental, economic, social and cultural impacts of this hydroelectric project have still not been addressed by the operating company CVC (Corporación Autónoma Regional del Valle del Cauca) or the Colombian state. In 1994 the Salvajina project was taken over by Energía Eléctrica del Pacifico-EPSA (in turn owned by Spanish multinacional). EPSA tried to divert the Ovejas river that runs by La Toma in order to augment Salvajina´s gnerating capacity.

Before Salvajina, the Afro-Colombians native to this region sustained themselves through fishing, agriculture, la balsería and mining; after the dam´s construction much of the best farming land was flooded under the reservoir, there were also drastic climate changes both of which led to a crisis in traditional farming. For most of the black community the only remaining means of making a living was through artesanal gold mining. Besides the predicted environmental impacts from the opne cast mining that Anglo Gold Ashanti and similiar multinationals want to undertake, this artisanal mining would disappear and the black communities would be displaced entirely from their territories.

In Judgement No 005 of 2009, Colombia´s Constitutional Court stated a number of transversal factors tending to cause the displacement of afro-colombians including structural exclusion, the pressures generated by big mining and agriculture, and the deficient legal protection for the collexctive territories of the black communities. The Constitutional Court drew special attention to the situation of the black communities who are the ancestral inhabitants Buenos Aires and Suárez as an emblematic case; these communities are a clear and living example of the risks pointed out by the Court of the vulnerability of territorial rights, the loss of social and cultural control by the communities, the violation of their right to previous consent, and the absence of registration of ancestral territories that even now have not been recognised as collective property titles.

The Constitutional Court ordered that there be effective participation of the communities, and set in motion a plan of monitoring that would take into account the general factors and the specific risks identified in its judgement 005. The Court ordered that the territorial rights of the afro-colombian communities be protected through the design of a plan to be implemented by 30 October 2009, characteising the lands as ancestral territory, of ethnic signficance and part of the patrimony of these communities. The artisanal gold mines constitute one of the last common goods still conserved by the black communities of northern Cauca. Their eviction from La Toma would be one more link in the historic chain of unjust expropiations that should be blocked by determined action by all the communities. We call on all Afro-Colombian organisations, leaders and other social sectors nationally and internationally to take action to demand:

1. That the Colombian Ministry of Mines and Energy revokes the mining concessions EKE-151 held by Raúl Fernando Ruiz Ordoñez and BFC 021 held by Héctor Jesús Sarria, on the grounds that has not been previous and informed consultation with the black communities living on these territories..

2. That the Ministry of Mines and Energy definitively stops the order to evict the black communities of the Corregimiento (district) La Toma, located in Suárez municipality in the north of Cauca department.

3. That the Ministry of the Interior, Justice and Social Action immediately fulfils the the Constitional Court Judgement No 005, by formulating an action plan of attention and protection of these communities, putting in place the measures organised by the Court to protect the territory and the patrimony of the communities.

4. In the case of any process concerning the exploration and exploitation of mining resources, and other projects and political or
administrative measures that might affect the black communities, the application of Consultation with Previous, Free and Informed Consent in accord with ILO Convention 169 and the national Constitution.

5. That the Ministry of the Interior adopts measures for the protection of the life and security of community leaders in the region.

RECOMMENDED ACTION / ACCION SOLICITADA
Please send to the following emails a personal message with the above demands:

Minister of the Interior and Justice, Fabio Valencia, fabiovalencia@mij.gov.co
Minister of Mines and Energy, Hernán Martínez, menergia@minminas.gov.co
Address for matters relating to Black, Afro-Colombian, Palenquera and Raizal communities, Rosa Carlina García, drnegrasafroraizalypalem@mij.gov.co
Human Rights Director of the Ministry of the Interior and Justice, Rafael Emiro Bustamante, dhdirector@mij.gov.co
Vice-Minister of Justice, Miguel Antonio Ceballos Arévalo, vicejusticia@mij.gov.co
Vice-Minister of the Interior, Viviana Manrique Zuluega, viceinterior@mij.gov.co
Secretary General of the Ministry of the Interior and Justice, María del Pilar Serrano Buendía, sgeneral@mij.gov.co

Send copies and for any other information, pcnkol_bogota@renacientes.net

Translated by Colombia Solidarity Campaign. Campaign adds please also send a brief message with the above demands to the Colombian Embassy in the UK.

Organise & Resist: the Minga

2009-07-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

El Meson, Cauca, Colombia

So I experienced my first taste of the Minga. It's pronounced Ming-ga. It's funny, in colloquial British a minga is what you call someone unattractive, and in Spanish from Spain means cock. In Colombia, the Minga de Resistencia Social y Comunitaria is the Minga of Social and Communal Resistance, currently Colombia's most bristling social movement. Originating in the Cauca region of the South-West of Colombia, it started as the collective name for the indigenous groups and their physical collective presence. So a Minga is the gathering itself, rather than just an abstract collective noun. A good intro is here, the cover story of the last Frontline Latin America. Which, if you're interested in Latin American politics of resistance, is a superb publication and well worth the £6 subscription.

Last weekend was the Minga de Pensamiento in Bógota, Colombia's capital city, perched up at 2640m, making it the 3rd highest capital in the world after La Paz and Quito. That also makes it pretty chilly, having to wear my hoodie in the daytime for the first time since the Mexican hills in November. The Minga de Pensamiento is the ideological forum of the Minga. Since the Minga marched to Bogota last October, they have expanded their remit to include Indigenous, Afro-descendants and campesinos (farmers), and are nationalising their presence.

The Minga have 5 key points of agreement as springboards for action and mobilisation.
1. The right to life and human rights
2. Sovereignty, earth and territory
3. Plunder, displacement and economic models
4. Incompleted agreements
5. The agenda of the peoples

cuidad de bolivar, bógota

So on Saturday, we split the plenary forum from the morning into these 5 groups, to travel to different parts of Bógota for 'fireside' discussions. I went on the human rights tulpa to the Cuidad de Bolivar, in the South-West outskirts into the foothills that surround Bogota. The meeting room soon filled with over 100 participants, with an impressive amount of young people present, as well as gender-balanced. Discussion ensued around what we are struggling against (in terms of violations against human rights) and who is responsible for these violations.

"In spite of all the riches in the country, the open mine right here in our community is benefitting only the rich".

We spoke about visibilising and denouncing human rights violations - e.g. assassinations, disappearances, death threats, arbitrary detention - which are still happening at an increasing rate. We spoke about collective suicide by removing the blood from Mother Earth. We spoke about the struggle against impunity - the legal system totally failing to cope with the violence and this effect on memory. Part of the role of justice is recognition of crimes, and this has a role in constructing collective memory. This is what the campaign "forbidden to forget" (Prohibido Olvidar) work to do.

We then spoke about proposals, with a few clear ones emerging. The first was for the Minga to develop their own set of human rights norms, recognising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a largely white-Western-liberal created set of norms. We spoke about the creation of a national Minga Guardia. Currently in Cauca, the Minga organise a Guardia - local people volunteering to take responsibility for protecting their territory - armed only with sticks but with moral supremacy. The proposal would widen this nationally, and also encompass the new expanded remit not exclusive to indigenous groups. We also spoke about modes of communication, opening new spaces to operate, communicate and organise.

Sunday we regrouped, shared summaries together, then were treated to a punk band that almost felt New Labour with the bright lights school hall feel. And then some beautiful folk guitarist afterwards. Later we took the nightbus to Cali for the next stage, around the Cuaca and Valle region.

Arriving Monday morning into Cali, we headed straight for the Resguardo de Honduras, an Indigenous Reserve where leaders have been killed and threatened by paramilitaries and the military over the last few years. 17 days ago, 3 locals were killed, claimed by the military as 'in combat'. This is a case in point in the midst of a national "false positives" scandal, where victims of assassinations are dressed up in combats and claimed as FARC deaths in combat in order to fulfil kill targets. Meanwhile, AngloGold Ashanti, a South-Africa-based mining multinational, and Repsol, a Spanish oil company, are both active in the area.

community assembly

Arriving from the bus from Cali to the nearest town to the Resguardo (Reserve), we changed buses onto a Chiva. This is a monster bus with open sides and no aisle, crammed to busting point, including the roof. Meeting us was a local Guardia Indigena escort about 50 strong. At the endpoint of the bus, we were met by another 50, who joined us for the 45 minute walk to Chorrera Blanca. We arrived at 4pm, in time for a round of introductions, in front of a community assembly of over 200 locals, again well represented in terms of age and gender.

On Tuesday the assembly began proper. Repression started in the Indigenous areas here in the 1980s, with the presence of the armed forces in indigenous territories. Then the massacres began in 3 reserves. Then they began building military bases. Disappearances followed, along with the forced displacement of a few families. More recently, the paramilitary group AUC (United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia) entered the area in late 2000. In 2007/8 threats to local leaders began - presidents of action groups, teachers, governors - threats sent by text message, spoken by phone, and written. Local human rights organisations such as Nomadesc, accompanying us, document these threats.

this man cooks for 500 people at a go! and the rice is amazing! i struggle making rice for 6.

Meanwhile, AngloGold Ashanti have 1600 hectares of mining rights in the area. Clearly, to get under the ground, they need to clear what on the ground out of the way. We have seen internal documents of AngloGold that outline figures on the amount of people that will have to be displaced in the area. AngloGold Ashanti (AGA) is actually based in South Africa, with AngloAmerican (based in London) selling their majority stake last year. South African mining capital comes straight off the back of Apartheid, with AGA set up in 1895. With the end of apartheid, AGA's interests shifted abroad to see where it could exploit, and its interests would be most easily facilitated through pliant governments and legislation. Enter Colombia into the picture.

queueing for grub

By 4pm we were ready to leave, but the governor was refusing to allow the Guardia to accompany us to the next area, 2 hours walk away. Despite this, 200 people accompanied the 5 guardia that ignored orders, walking with us to El Mesón. The late afternoon breeze cooling the fading scarlet sun against a stunning backdrop of collosal thousand metre valleys juxtaposed the relentless torture these communities have experienced for the last 30 years.

We went straight into someone's house for the classic Colombian meal - served at breakfast, lunch and dinner - of soup (variations - this time was bean soup) with rice, beans & grilled beef and a glass of panela - unrefined sugar water. At least in Colombia, unlike a lot of Central America, they don't use sachets of Maggi monosodium glutemate flavourings. Then after, as we were checking out or lodgings, the sky opened up and we were surrounded by thunder, lightening, and a trillion gallons of rain came down with what seemed like a double dose of gravity. Sitting on the veranda, watching this unfold next to a roofed hamlet square - the size of a football pitch - under which a local band were setting up, while others toiled with the fact that the place's electricity had just gone out, made for a spectacle firmly etched into my brain with fond memory.

After the rain subsided, we were treated to some live folk music, before a circle meeting with the locals, going around introducing ourselves and hearing about local issues. Key issues here were about water and power - community fundamentals - with ESPA, the Spanish water company recently privatising the water supply. Funny, in a tiny village surrounded by natural water sources, the locals struggle to get access to it. And despite privatisation, the local energy supplier gives an average of 6 days supply a month - but bill for the full month.

And afterwards, the band resumed for a jolly good knees-up. After plenty of aguardiente - local moonshine - and dancing and talking all night, I crawled into bed at 4.30am with renewed vitality after a pretty emotionally grueling few days.

local cheeky chappie

In At The Deep End

2009-07-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

Bogota, Colombia

At last. It's finally time to get stuck into what actually motivated the whole trip in the first place for me, and began planning in 2006: spending some time on the ground in Colombia. After 4 years of solidarity work UK-side with only a 2-week whistlestop delegation to Colombian universities in 2005, I wanted to spend some time here and really feel what I was working for and with. And to question what I was doing the solidarity work for, when there's a million useful things in the world to get involved with, and particularly when local activism seems far more important and necessary. After that time in Panama, I had actually almost given up on Colombia. It seemed like things just weren't moving that way for me, as I'd intended to spend a few months here.

Well, my timing in the end was synchronous with a 3-week human rights commission from the Colombia Solidarity Campaign in the UK, that started today. Plus, something to keep me busy and my mind off other complicated and painful personal matters. It all added up to be a go-er: having been in Venezuela reminded me of the urgent need for real information from the bottom up in a world saturated by reactionary corporate news that protects vested interests and the status quo, and got me fired up again.

I heard an analogy a while ago of the role of international solidarity work that I'm particularly fond of. It's easy to dismiss any kind of political work as a drop in the ocean and thus futile - but to me this sounds like the voice of aging armchair cynics. There's 3 angles - the first 2 involve the same metaphor of building a window. First, solidarity work builds a window for the outside world, the international community as individuals, organisations and movements, to see the reality of what is happening mediated through an independent perspective without corporate funded media interests that frame the perspective their own way.

Second, the window thus constructed allows those inside to see the outside watching - the reflex to the above point. This point is fundamental - to provide solidarity is to say we are here with you in your struggle against violence and dispossession of your ancestral lands, both literally for a short period of time in person, but also in contact permanently and able to denounce acts of violence and intimidation internationally. It is this brotherly/sisterly demonstration of solidarity and human unity with people on the ground living in and organising & defending against the various instruments of the state, parastate and global oligarchy that is immensely powerful at countering the various mechanisms of divide and rule.

Third is putting pressure on the state to live up to its obligations under international human rights conventions and treaties it has signed up to. Under international law, it is the state that is responsible for "granting" these rights to its citizens - or at least defending them. Irony notwithstanding, human rights are nonetheless an instrument and point of reference to try to hold the state to account for its actions, or inactions. So, whilst the window metaphor is a little de-personalised and sealed-off, I think it's a good starting point to try and understand the role of international solidarity in supporting struggles against the common and diverse enemy - capital and its hoarders. I suppose my own fourth point is to build lasting friendships through interaction and cultural exchange.

Today was the first day of action, with meetings from 9-7. Nothing like being in at the deep end after a year of no meetings... The main order of the day was the first of a 3-day workshop entitled "The political conception of the struggle for the earth and territory, and scenarios, and tools for action". The day brought together a range of social movements from across the country, including the Process of Black Communities (PCN), the National Agrarian Association (CNA), and the Cauca Indigenous Commitee (CRIC), given as examples of how this workshop included Afro, campesino and indigenous movements, as well as academic involvement.

The ideological landscape was laid in a talk entitled "Dispossesion, Violence and Economy", coming from the idea of accumulation by dispossession, using a theory of "plunder" / ejection where resources are liberated at zero cost through the economic model / system. 2428 people in Colombia own 44 million hectares - that's 53.5% of the land in a country of 40 million people - which is an average of 18,000 Hectares per person. The next talk explained how the Spanish colonial mentality of administrate, control and dominate has never really ended, through a detailed analysis of the concept of territory.

And I've started coming down with manflu. Excellent, when listening to hours of Spanish - and taking notes - isn't hard enough to concentrate on, my body throws this into the mix as well. Nothing like a challenge though, eh? In at the deep end, adelante.

Breaking point

2009-07-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

This is the hardest post I've had to write. The thing with a blog is that you can put your life on a pedestal for all to see. That's what I want this to be, like a diary that other people can snoop into. One perception of this is that I'm bearing all for all to see. Well, I think it's more accurate to say I'm providing a selection of insights, rather than even trying to provide a comprehensive overview of everything. This would be far, far too long and really rather boring. And there are also some things I'd prefer not to share. So this is another selection of highlights - and lowlights.

So since getting back to Colombia from seeing my uncle in Venezuela and arriving in Santa Marta, it's been a busy week. The plan was to head to Parque Tayrona, which I had to pass through rapidly on my way from Cartagena to Caracas. This National Park, on the Carribean coast, would be a highlight of the trip, many people had told me how lush it was and I had high expectations. I also had in mind my rule of expectations - the higher they are, the harder they are to fulfil. This was a golden case in point, but by antiserendipitous circumstances alone.

I met a great guy in Hotel Miramar, the cheapest hostel in central Santa Marta, the only other person in the dorm. He was also up for missioning to Tayrona - not a huge coincidence as Santa Marta is a well-heeled stop-off for folks going there. I got on great with him - I instantly liked him when I heard him talk. The way he spoke with the volume turned down slightly below average gave him a humble quality that juxtaposed his other characteristics of being a school teacher and from the U.S.

The next day we packed up and headed towards Tayrona. I received an email from my then girlfriend 3 days earlier very briefly saying she was still in Tayrona, but failed to mention where exactly, oblivious to the fact that I would also be coming at this time. So, I knew the chances of finding her to be slim, she could have left, and the park is huge, but I thought that if we were in the same park I should at least go through the motions of checking if she was there. I assumed she would go to a campsite mentioned in Lonely Planet, of which there were 4 along one route.

So we missioned on foot, quickly stopping off at each campsite to have a quick check. I found her at the fourth site, totally suprised to see me. A couple of hours later she broke up with me. Unfortunately, sunset having passed, I had to spend the night there. Early, the next morning, I left again, and started the long journey to Bogota. The next day an old friend from uni would be arriving there on a 2 week holiday, who I was planning to hook up with anyway.

So travelling alone. This was always the plan anyway. I can't decide if it was naive of me to think that this wouldn't happen. In the last year, my what-would-today-be-7-years-relationship with my girlfriend was tested to breaking point. Onwards.

Chavizmo

2009-07-13T17:21:00.000-07:00

After a fairly gruelling 19 hour journey, I'm back in the promised land. I've occupied the cheap but elegant large mock-antique sofa in the centre of the courtyard of Hotel Miramar in Santa Marta, listening to my rocking new mix on my headphones. I don't have a portable music player, so I can only listen to tunes when I have power to plug into. I'm glad I have decent headphones. They want 5000 pesos - about £2 - to use the wifi here - jokers! - so I'm trying out my new wifi cracking software. No luck yet.

I left Caracas on Monday night by bus, aiming for Merida. I chose to stop off here on the way back to Colombia, having heard that there are rocks to climb. I've used my harness and boots only once in San Francisco, and they take up a fairly sizeable part of my bag, so might as well give em some use. Arriving 5 hours after schedule at 1pm, I trekked down Calle 24 towards the cable car - the highest (4700m) and longest (7km) in the world - but also closed for repairs. I'm quite happy with safety-zealousness when it comes to cable cars. Right at the end, Hotel Paty was just what I was looking for, small, cute, family run and cheap - 30 Bolivars (£3).

Tuesday afternoon went on a mission to Jaji, a village a few km away in the hills. Merida is set in the middle of two ridges of the start of the Andes, 1700m up and 19˚ as I'm accurately informed by the welcome sign. Quite spectacular and very lush. Wednesday afternoon, I took a bus on my own to the outskirts of town to find a rock. The workmen working nearby to Roque de San Pedro were highly bemused at the idea of bouldering. Without ropes, I don't really want to climb more than 5ft off the ground, so the idea of bouldering is to traverse horizontally. First one guy sent me up to the top of this hillock clambering through undergrowth, only to return, quite happy with the rock at ground level. It was great to stretch all those muscles I haven't used for about 9 months since last doing it, and I'm still feeling it.

Leaving Venezuela, I can't leave out my thoughts on Chavez. Before coming here, I was fairly supportive of Chavizmo for 4 reasons. First, reforming democracy, he has empowered decision-making at the local level. Second and third, education and health have seen almost 100% literacy rates return to Venezuela and provided (basic) universal free health care. Fourth, his middle finger to the U.S. hegemonic system and development of ALBA (Alternative American trading bloc) is something I like to see.

The other story is the one generally presented in the international media, especially in America (North and South): Chavez is a crackpot despot who is enforcing his tyrannical will on the Venezuelan people. He has only managed to spend on social goods because of the unprecented high oil price in the last 5 years, and it will all come crashing down so he must be got rid of at all costs before it's too late.

Well, I think it's fair to say that my uncle and I were on different sides of Chavez's fence, but after all, I think we're both much closer to the fence than I thought at first. Although I certainly wouldn't want to make too much of it, vague parallels can be drawn to Castro's highjacking of the Cuban Revolution in the 50s (and beyond). Chavez's model of socialism is certainly heavily imposed, and the opposition don't like it, crying election fraud, which I don't know whether or not to believe. Nonetheless, I'm still (just) on the Chavez side. But it's a golden example of how one the most progressive leaders in the world is still a far, far from perfect solution for a political system, particularly one contextually mired chest-deep in neo-liberal hegemony.

It seems the wifi cracking software needs to see someone else's packets being sent in order to snoop in on it. Hmmmm.

A Tale of Two Cities

2009-07-03T12:15:00.000-07:00

Caracas, Venezuela

Sitting at my uncle's dining table overlooking Caracas, it's quite hard to imagine what life in Caracas is really like. Last week I heard he would be going on holiday very soon, so my window of opportunity to spend some time with him and his Venezuelan family was closing by the day. After a 2-day bus journey I made it into the mad world that is Caracas.

After a couple of nice days is Cartagena, it was time to say goodbye to my girlfriend for a while. After 10 months on the road together pretty much 24 hours a day, this was the moment she had been waiting for perhaps a little more than me. Our last night together was certainly not from a Hollywood script. As we set off for an evening stroll, the big screen showing back to back Jacko hits was actually quite a nice bar where we stopped for a drink.

Smoking a cigarette outside, our host from the hostel we were staying - but moved to try and have a more romantic last night - bumped into us. She took it well, and invited us to join her for a spot of aguardiente on a bench on the main promenade leading up to the big clock tower of the old - beautiful - part of the city.

As an amusing anecdote, while we were talking, her dogs went crazy at this fairly dodgy looking street fella, which was unusual for them, which made him even more dodgy. 10 minutes later, another guy walked up to us, fumbled underneath the edge of the bench casually, explaining that he was just picking up something he left there earlier (all of these conversations were in Spanish, naturally). He walked away casually, and delivered his Coke to the dodgy guy.

Anyway, anecdote aside, the conversation with the lady was deep. Having been in Colombia 2 days, I was trying to put it all together for myself. I have read, studied, listened and talked about Colombian realities for the last 4 years in the UK. Actually being here seemed to juxtapose everything that I'd read. It's fine to walk on the streets in the evening. It all seemed rather cosy and a world away from civil war.

The lady's story brought it all crashing back into place again. She explained how her family were indigenous folk living near Medellin in the 1970s. Because her mother worked for and was quite friendly with some of the posh folk, one night they told her that that the shit was going to hit the fan that night. She put her children, aged 3 and 4, underneath the house (which was raised slightly on stilts) in the evening and went to bed as normal. The lady then explained how before dawn, she heard how gunmen murdered practically the whole village, including hearing her parents being shot dead directly above her, at the age of 4. Somehow she managed to find her grandparents and escaped, I don't remember the story very clearly after this point. This kind of put the romance for the evening on the back burner and we didn't really recover it.

The next morning at 7am I took a local bus to the bus station which was over an hour away, and bought a ticket (bargained down to $17.50) for a "direct" bus to Maicao, on the Venezuelan border, supposedly 10 hours away. One change and 14 hours later, I arrived in Maicao. On the way, the bus passed through Barranquilla, then Santa Marta, and the Tayrona National Park, the latter of which I'm heading back to in a few weeks because it is apparently stunning - jungle backing onto white sandy Caribbean sea.

As the bus pulled into Maicao, a local dude had jumped on board and organised the next leg, to Maracaibo, where I was planning on staying the night. Which was actually great timing, because it was already pushing 9pm, with a good "couple" of hours left. He took my bags and slung them in the back of a very large Chevy estate car. Luckily I was expecting this, as this is the only form of transport from here to Maracaibo, the nearest city on the Venezuelan side of the border.

This was a pretty cool journey, cruisin through the South American evening listening to tinny Argentinian pop music. Well, cruising in between the 10 times we were stopped on the road and asked for ID by various layers of Venezuelan authority.

I arrived into Maracaibo bus station at around midnight. Luckily I knew there were some cheap hotels near the back of the bus station, and headed over. Trouble was, I didn't have any Bolivars on me. The official exchange rate is about 2.5 to the dollar. But the black market exchange rate is around 6. So, the hotel owner of the cheapest place said he'd change my money at 3. When I only had a $50 note, that's quite annoying. Luckily after a little while, a guy from the next door hotel popped out to see what the commotion was about. He was a solo traveller from the US, a young teacher with lots of interesting stories. He helped me out bigtime, and saved me a lot in the process.

The next morning I started the next 12 hour journey after breakfast and a quick money change. The other confusing thing is that last year they took 3 zeros off the currency to make it a bit easier, but everyone still talks in thousands. The bus I took was the most luxurious bus I've ever got - huge amounts of room, almost fully reclinable chair - and of course like a fridge.

The only notable part of the journey was crossing Lake Maracaibo. It's a huge inlet from the sea, sitting right on top of an equally huge oilfield. The weird and beautiful thing was the patchwork quilt of green algae over the surface, it looked real trippy, like you could walk on it.

Arriving into Caracas, I hit a really lucky break. As we were getting our bags of the coach, a friendly looking fellow passenger asked where I was going, and offered me a lift. I gave him a once-over, and he was travelling with 3 children. Looked harmless enough. We piled 7 of us into his son's car and raced away from what turns out to be on of the most dangerous places in Caracas.

Caracas is built into a valley. As it's population grew to over 10 million, so it sprawled out it fingers into the surrounding valleys and up the hillsides. Consequently, it afford stunning views almost everywhere you turn.

2 quick observations about Caracas / Venezuela. One is that you can fill a 20 gallon tank of petrol for less than a dollar. The other is that food costs almost the same as the UK. Pretty weird.

Yesterday I managed to convince my uncle to let me out into the city on my own. I was accompanied by his wife most of the way, but then convinced her too that I really didn't need to be shadowed around and really wanted to amble around on my own. I checked out Bolivar's birthplace (he sure wasn't from a poor background) and hung out in the Plaza Bolivar soaking up the atmosphere and watching folk, like most people in Plaza. Not many tourists around, in fact didn't really notice any white folk at all. But nor did I get any sense of insecurity, danger, or a bad vibe at all. But I like it without the tourists, so best to keep up the charade. Tell everyone it's really, really dangerous!

In between being allowed into the city - actually it's more practical, as there isn't any public transport from my uncle's house - I'm learning html and php web languages. Might as well make myself useful... gotta go, gotta stir the famous Heston Blumenthal bolognese - the all day cooking meat in milk one. Mmmm mmmm. Dammit, didn't write about Venezuelan politics.... ha, the elephant in the room. Next post, I promise.

Sorry for the lack of photos, my camera got eaten by the postman sending it from Nicaragua to Panama. Will get another soon...

The Promised Land

2009-06-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

Thursday 25th June
Cartagena, Colombia

All right! After 4 months and 14 days in Panama, we have escaped! This Spanish pilot, Pepe, saw the car on Saturday, gave us the deposit on Sunday, the rest of the dough on Monday and Tuesday we flew out of Panama (not with Pepe though!). It sure felt weird flying for the first time this trip, but I didn't fancy paying $380 for a 5-day luxury yacht trip, nor hanging out in Colón (where gringos last no more than a few minutes without being robbed) trying to skank a ride on a cargo boat, nor trekking through the Darian. Another day... but I will try the boat thing on the way back up (towards Burning Man).

I will miss as a treat going to the fish market first thing in the morning to get a big red snapper to bake for $3, as well as a pound of seabass for $1.75 to make into ceviche for lunch.

I will miss the good european style lager from the hole-in-the-wall shop directly outside the apartment front door, chilled, for 25 pence a 330ml bottle, in returnable bottles.

I will miss going to listen to Reggaeton on big systems outdoors with a coolbox full of ice, a bottle each of rum and ginger ale, and Marco, our big friendly black Panamanian ever-smiling new friend.

I will miss slinging our shit into the back of the car and driving from one place to the next without waiting for buses.

I will miss the parties on the rooftop terrace of our apartment, with daiquiri/mojito in hand and looking out over Panama Bay, especially the one that turned into the panama couchsurfing birthday party.

I will miss Baños Publicos! They used to be public toilets, and in proper squat style had been turned into a sick bar right in the heart of the oldest part of Panama City. Then they did a remodel last week, and 4 hours before opening a very large section of façade from the adjoining building fell onto the roof of Baños, collapsing the entire roof. Thankfully it didn't happen 4 hours later, or I might very well be dead. No-one was hurt. Mad shit.

I won't miss finding a safe place to park.

I won't miss the lack of street food (or any cheap food) at night (i.e. after 7pm).

I won't miss hanging out on the swimming pool terrace of the Hotel Veneto watching guys take turns to take a prostitute up to their room.

I won't miss answering the telephone to people vaguely (or not even) interested in buying the car, asking us our lowest price before even seeing the car, then arranging to meet them and them maybe showing up, maybe on time, before telling us they will definately call us tomorrow either way.

I won't miss actually wondering what it would be like to retire in Panama....

Panamanian Plates!

2009-06-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

It's been a while. Things have been less adventurous the last few weeks, we're making plans for retirement in Panama, as we're resigned to the fate of never leaving here. Before leaving, Panama would not have been in my top 20 list of places to spend 4 months (it's still not). But, in between running around jumping through car import hoops, it's actually been nice to have some time and space to think and develop my ideas about what I want to do now and on return to the UK. I've started a film script (which is back on the back burner), and I've made a mix.

beans with holes in like this make you sick

In fact, I've made a new blog. You can download the mix there, for those that did download the first one, this is a much better version, the levels are MUCH better, it sounds much more punchy. If you're not sure which one you've got, the latest version ends has mastered in brackets. In terms of genre it's electronic dance music, and style it's all over the place but on a breakbeat/jungle tip. It sounds good on big speakers.

So right now we're housesitting Rose's apartment in Casco Viejo, the top floor end apartment with a balcony, stunning view over the sea and a breeze (pretty important here). She's been away in the States for 3 weeks and is back tonight, when we'll decamp into Room 2 - the bottom floor place with no balcony and a crappy single camp bed and no kitchen - but 'only' $7.50 a night.

We met an English couple a couple of weeks ago - who bought a car in California, went to Burning Man and then drove down here! It's funny, we're soooo similar, it's quite scary. They sold their car within a week, as it is, no import or nothing. Bastards. It's a Japanese car, which they lap up here, as everyone drives them making parts and repairs much easier. We couldn't find a decent Japanese car at the only dealer in NY state that would get our car registered on the sly...

On which note, we now have Panamanian plates! That took 2 months! It involved going to the customs broker with documents, waiting 6 weeks going to the Customs office ourselves to get the pre-declaration where they stung us for a $2300 bill in import taxes - by which stage it was too late to get it done cheaper by paying a bit under the table. Then back to the brokers, withdraw $2300 in $300 batches a day, pay it into a bank account, then back to the brokers twice. Then to the DIJ - the Police Investigators Office - to get a police check. We got there on Thursday, at 6am, which wasn't early enough. Friday we got there at 4.30am to discover they don't do checks on a Friday. Then Monday at 4.30am we got checked & told to come back Wednesday. Came back Wednesday, not ready yet. Thursday we picked it up & the friendly cop gave us his phone number (weird). Friday we went to the Council office outside the city, and got pulled over by a jumped-up little shit of a cop for trying to change lane in the wrong place (!).

He asked us for our passports. We are 4 months into a 3 month tourist visa, because of this bullshit taking so long. He didn't care, and we drove over the police hut on the junction. The 'tourist police' got called over. The little jumped-up shit then asked us for the car keys, saying he was taking the car and going to arrest us. I called our man in the Investigators Office, briefly explained that this jumped-up little shit wants to take our car, and passed the phone to the jumped-up little shit. He listened for 15 seconds and passed the phone back. I had a quick chat with him, he asked how much of a gift I might want to give him. I said 40, he said no problem, pass him over. 30 seconds later, the cop is letting us go and passes us over to the Tourist Police. They give us a jolly good telling off for not having the correct paperwork and show us the way to the Council Office!

So we get to the Council Office, queue for 20 minutes, to be told that we're missing a stamp and to go back to Customs to get it. Outside, the Investigator Cop call back, and explains that he told the jumped-up little shit that we were good friends of his and to make everything as easy as possible for us. He was relaxed about getting his 'gift', said he was glad to be of help. I then explained about the missing stamp, he said to pass him over to so-and-so, who told me to see so-and-so, the boss in the office at the back. Here I passed the phone again, and suddenly the boss brightened immensely to be talking to an old friend, they joked about a 'gift' of a dollar, and he told us not to worry about the stamp.

So, without this cop's number, we would be possibly in prison, but definately have the car impounded. I'm trying to figure out my moral position on this one. I think that the root is the facist cop demanding to see our papers for no legal reason. This is the system in place - they can demand to see your passport at any time - you have to carry it (or a copy). Sounds like Nazi-Occupied Europe - "you're pepperz plees". The friendly cop is just an aberration to disguise a shit system - kind of like George Monbiot disguising the Guardian that is otherwise a mainstream corporate funded rag.

But we're not done yet! So we 'inscribe' the car at the Council and pay $5. Then we drive back into the city, go into Banco Nacional and pay $10 into some account. Then we go to get a 'pre-revisado' - kind of like an MOT, but without the testing/checking part. They take some photos and write down some basic details about the car, and take $16 to give you a piece of paper telling you how many doors the car has. Then we need insurance. We trek to an office, and sit around for an hour while our policy is written up. Because the car is over 9 years old (10), we can't have a $30 monthly policy, we have to buy a $130 yearly policy. Great. At least they only take $43 now, then the other 2 payments in installments on my credit card - which at first they refuse to accept but after repeated assurances that this is a Visa card like any other, and 3 phone calls, we're sorted.

So, out of time on Friday, this morning (Monday) we went back to San Miguelito for 6.30am - by taxi this time - to swap our NY title (and our mountain of photocopied paperwork), for a Panamanian one (only having to wait for 1 hour). Then we take this to another office (thankfully 5 minutes walk away), past the cops that seem to be growling at us (a few skipped heartbeats - we are still techinically "illegals" in their eyes). And, hey presto, we swap some more copies of forms with $12 (50% discount today!) for a number plate!!!

I can't imagine anyone is still reading this, but there it is, the Panamanian Car Import Process. Now, all we need is a buyer...

End of our tether

2009-04-21T14:10:00.000-07:00

Sunday 22nd March 2009

6 weeks on, and we are still in Panama City, having planned to be here for 2-4 weeks. I guess selling a car isn't that straightforward. Well, this will be the last car I ever own. My girlfriend and I are nearing the end of our tether, not much hair left to tear out. We are couchsurfing, and have stayed for free with Christian and Kadir for the last 6 weeks.

These 2 are jokers, one is a straight air steward, the other works on boats (what else in Panama City?). We are sleeping on the sofa in their living room. Which is the first time I've slept on someone's sofa. What I hadn't prepared myself for is that this means slinking off to bed is not an option – either last to bed or going to sleep in the thick of things. Which is fine... for a while. Nonetheless, they have been wonderfully accomodating, and with the other Canadian girls staying it's a bit like a hostel, which is exactly the vibe they're trying to create.

It's been great having a kitchen. We have been busy making delicious wholemeal bread, rye bread, ceviche, iced coffee, yum yum... check out recipes and more pics at this blog .

The highlight of the last few weeks has to be Carnivale! We were invited to go with Marco to Las Tablas – apparently the place to go. And it was out of this world. A 4 day affair, what makes this one special is that there is a 50 year tradition of rivalry between carnival queens. One is from Calle Arriba (upper street) and the other from Calle Abajo (lower street). Each has their own float, and entourage. And we were with Calle Arriba – the posh lot – by virtue of our hosts. We had a place to stay nearby, with the family of Lourdes, one of the kru.

Before arriving in Panama, a Colombian friend back home suggested I look up a friend of his in Panama. What has developed is an extremely interesting social phenomenon. She is a trusted friend of my good and trusted friend. So, I have discovered for myself the law of triangular friendship/trust relationships – it seems like we have known each other for years. And her brother with whom she lives has bent over backwards to help us with the car selling. And Marco is her ex-boyfriend, and her brother's business partner, and now also a friend of ours. Visiting another city where you have friends has been wonderful at helping feel connected to the place.

So one morning at Las Tablas I woke up with an intense hangover, and came into the living room. On the TV was coverage of the Carnival. Looking closer at the TV presenter, I realised it was none other than Lourdes. How peculiar. After a quick breakfast, we proceeded for what turned out to be the daily routine – hit the carnival for the daytime session, check out the floats and get drunk. Every session (day/night) each Queen had a new float, as well as their princesses. So that's 32 different themed floats for the Carnival! Then back home, a quick bite and a nap, then back out on the streets for the night-time. We had been warned about looking after ourselves – but being with a local, Marco, and Ariel (a 6ft4 American football player) made it the safest place to be.

Back in Panama City, with my laptop charger bust in a flood, I have devoured books. Having spent 6 years at uni, reading was not something I enjoyed doing in my spare time. But now, a thirst is being quenched. Days of War, Nights of Love is a book by the CrimethInc Collective written in the 90s, a highly inspiration collection of anarcho-inspired readings. Then The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, a disturbing dystopian story parodying contemporary patriarchy and government control. And Cuban Anarchism, translated by Frank Fernandez, a concise history chronicling the hard work put in by Cuban anarchists prior to the Revolution, and the bitter disagreements amongst anarchists over supporting Castro's version it during his reign. Then Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, who fictionalises the 1930s wave of forced migration by US peasants to California in search of the American Dream. Finally Adelle Davis' 1950 Let's Eat Right To Keep Fit, a handy summary of the importance of vitamins, fats and protein in the diet and plenty of scientific anecdotes (unfortunately all involving animal testing). The library in Panama City has some crackers (not all the above though – 2 were from the Anarchist Bookstore in San Francisco).

Furthering our bourgeious dalliance at the Carnival, we were invited to a cheese and wine evening at a penthouse apartment in a skyrise last week – quite a view. A bit more down to earth, two bars are my joint favourite.

The first is Baños Publicos – yep, that translates as public toilets – a squatted place in the heart of Casco Antiquo, the original city that got ransacked by the infamous Welsh pirate Henry Morgan in 1671 and left in photogenic decay ever since. And it has a real squat vibe, with live salsa and reggae, a BYO alcohol policy and replete with porcelain toilet pan. The other is Bar de Cuba, which is a great place given the classy San Francisco neighbourhood, with arcade games, a pool table and $1 beers. On that note, from the Chino (local shop run by Chinese folk – as is every local shop) beer is cheaper than well-known soft drinks here (hurray!) - 40 US cents – 25 pence a bottle!

It has been nice to escape the city regularly at weekends. Last weekend we took a 3 hour trip back down the Panamerican Highway to El Valle, a town in the crater of a massive volcano, surrounded by a ring a hills. Inside is a special place, with a magical feel. We stayed at Shwami's campsite [link], a hippy campsite run by a sound Panamanian rasta, the black sheep of his family. We had time to check out the cool waterfall, but not the hot springs, as we were invited to lunch at Rico's parents' place. They designed and built it themselves and filled it full of their own stunning artwork. And a little bit of magic happened when we saw a hummingbird fly to its nest on a windchime actually on the patio area, to feed its 2 hungry mouthed children, right in front of our faces.

And the best bit of news – we both got our scholarship tickets to Burning Man for this year! To finish the trip in style! So $110 instead of $260, for a week of delectable hedonist debauchery – underlined by the principle of mutual aid - in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Chameleon

2009-04-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

Friday 13th February 2009

Sipping gin and tonic on a balcony overlooking a park, hearing that Bonjovi track in the background behind. This is the life of a couchsurfer. My feet hurt, I could say I'm tired but the gin won't let me. Today has been spent hanging around at the mechanic's, who was fitting a replacement Oxygen Sensor on the car (these measure the mixture of fuel and air before and after the catalytic converter, returning a voltage between 0 and 1 Volt to the car's computer). The thing being broken means the "Check Engine" light is on on the dash, which needs to not be on to sell it.

That's the ostensible aim here in Panama City, to sell the damn car. It seems actually quite a good place to do that: there appears to be quite a lot of money around here. It's quite out of place in Central America after these months on the road. From Mexico southward, things got slowly more, different, relaxed, poor, rural, dusty. Then from leaving Nicaragua into Costa Rica, things took a turn for the worse. More expensive, more mimicry of Western capitalism. The large U.S. expat and holidaying "community" make travelling in a US vehicle less of a thing I want to be a part of.

our couchsurfing host, Christian

I'm glad I brought my chameleon suit (does that make me a metachameleon?). We got to Panama City quite lost, and ended up driving for 3 hours in Friday afternoon rush hour traffic trying to find Casco Antiguo. This is the old part of town that the infamous Welsh pirate Henry Morgan sacked in 17something when he decided he didn't like the Spanish but did want their gold. So we found our hotel, which looks like it hasn't changed much since Henry Morgan was here. Which of course made it a wonderful place to be, crumbling wallpaper, high ceilings, an amazing tiled lobby complete with an art deco garden table and 4 chairs, a splendid rooftop patio (no breakfasts here though), and finally nothing better than the cheapest digs in town at 11 bucks a night for us both.

Hotel Colón

So, the chameleon... get on with it. A friend from home gave me a contact of a friend of his from Bogota, who now lives in Panama. So on Saturday night, we met up and hit the town. First stop was Bennigans, the now-defunct-in-the-US chain restaurant. It's really bizzare - in Central American big cities, U.S. chain restaurants (McDonalds et al) are actually the preserve of the middle/upper class, by a considerable price margin. Well, we had a couple of beers in this place, jammed to the rafters with posh Panamanians. Then, through our friend's friends, hung out in what appeared to be the most exclusive club in town.

I think the best way to describe the theme was arctic. Air conditioning down to the max (or min...) and white everywhere. The way to drink is to buy a bottle of vodka and some flaggons of cranberry, and serve yerself DIY style. Luckily I didn't see the bill. Then after a while of shaking rhymically to stay warm and alive, we headed next door for more vodka and reggaeton.

The next day, we were invited to a barbeque at our friend's best friend's house, and had a classic Sunday sojourn. Supping and munching pretty much all day and well into the evening, it was a much needed day off before the missions with the car. I had my chameleon suit on (with tact tie in a windsor knot) when I got in a long conversation with a chap who in the end offered me a job with his "lead generation" company, in perfect American English. Lead generation (as in business leads, pronounced leeds, not lead, as in piping) involves facilitating the expansion of businesses - I highly suspect that this involves fuelling the greed of our not-so-favourite multinational corporations - and thought I was very tactful in my polite declination. I have to confess I did say that if my tax refund cheque doesn't arrive soon I would (be forced) take his kind offer.

Ometepe and Costa Rica

2009-04-21T13:41:00.000-07:00

Maybe one day I'll write more about staying with Damian in Ometepe, a volcanic island in Nicaragua, Finca Bonafide - the permaculture farm, getting stuck on the island for 3 days because there weren't any boats cos of bad weather, forgetting my camera at Damian's campsite, cycling 30 miles to go back to get it, him not being there and me returning empty-handed, reading Rising Up, Rising Down - a history of violence by William Vollman, then driving through Costa Rica, and the trip to Panama City. Maybe not.

Puerto 3

2009-04-21T13:13:00.000-07:00

As I fluff up the blanket that separates my body from my wickered bed, a cockroach jumps out, surprised. I quickly reach for a cup and trap it, unsure whether I want to try and kill it or spare its life. I throw it out of the front of the house. Mercy.

Later on, I wait for the power to return to the town after an absence now several hours long. I go for a walk to smoke a cigarette, needing to use the internet at the Alcadia to download a Linux distribution for the computer workshop I'm doing tomorrow.

Earlier, I bump into the headteacher, and I explain how I'm was getting on with the computers, and my plan to get a bunch of kids involved. Virginia, my adoptive mother here, is a teacher at the school, and she said she'd find some kids for me that would be interested. So the headteacher gets all controlfreaked, and tells me she wants a written plan for what I want to do. Balking at this meaningless exercise in bureaucracy, I tell her if it's going to be complicated, I'd rather not actually bother involving the kids at all, for that would actually be easier for me. She backs off, and in the end wants me to explain to her afterwards what we got up to.

As I take a drag on my cigarette, I notice the sheep sat at the Western edge of the shade provided by the shelter of the baseball pitch. Clever, the coolest spot. A horse trots past, seeking pasture. Behind me pigs snuffle through the piles of smouldering leaves and rubbish in the street.

I walk back home, and past a tired looking dog. This is summer, although the coolest months of the year. It's 1pm, and 35ºC. Winter is hotter, but it rains. Dogs roam the streets, lean, wary of people. People walk slowly, in the shade, minimising beads of sweat which are soaking my clothing.

As I sit in the front patio reading, a grubby girl of no more than 5 clutching a coin comes up to the front gate. I know already what she's going to say. Posicle [poh-sikh-lay]. The sisters inside play an imaginary game of spoof that the youngest always loses, who emerges, with a small plastic bag, steaming and hard filled with something white and frozen. I have yet to decipher it's contents, but kids bite a corner of the bag and suck it. I think it's some kind of rice and milk and cinnamon concoction.

I scratch my leg, having resisted for at least 90 seconds now. The sancudos are a bitch, worst around dusk but fight around the clock. It's a war of attrition, and the combat gear is long trousers and a shirt. Not ideal in these conditions, but it's a case of survival.

The trackpad on my laptop is playing up. I guess it works by relative heat sensitivity, and so I suppose the ambient temperature must be approaching 37ºC now.

This morning I experience my second worst ever feeling, next to discovering I had worms for the first time in my life while tripping. I awoke to the sound of what seemed like water bubbling out of my ear, you know the feeling after emerging from being underwater. The strange thing was that I didn't sleep underwater. Focussing on the sensation, I remembered that seconds earlier in that pre-awake state I'd scratched an itch, inside my ear. It now turned into a sound, repeating regularly, matched by a ticklish feeling inside my ear, like one that prompts the instinctive "bug swat" reaction. So I swotted the side of my head, trying to get whatever was burrowing into my ear out, to no avail as it just burrowed further. I spent the next half an hour listening to this creature either dying, or laying its eggs, inside my ear.

Hmmm, maybe it's worse than tripping with worms. The jury's out.

Puerto Morazan - Part 2

2009-04-21T12:51:00.000-07:00

Monday 26th January 2009

"Gingo! Ey Gingo!" is the sound I awoke to this morning. That was 4 year old Esteben Benito Frambir (his name is one or all of the above, at least he gets called that by his family). He is of course calling to me, the cultural nuances of British folk not technically being gringos seemingly lost on him. I've explained about 6 times now. I guess 4 year olds don't really get it.

It was funny on Sunday though, at the baseball game, when I overheard some guy saying something possibly derogatory, probably not, involving the word gringo, which I assumed to be about me and not meant to be heard or at least understood by me, given that I'm the only gringo around (I've actually accepted the title gracefully). The funny part was that I then smiled at the chap, and asked him very politely how sir was doing this morning, in Spanish. He spent the next few minutes uncomfortably explaining that he didn't realise that I spoke Spanish as most gringos that come to the village don't. From that reaction I assume his initial comment to be derogatory and I told him I wasn't actually a gringo anyway. Well, I felt good about myself. Maybe it was that I was mildly hungover and had a bit of a grouch on. I wonder if the word gringo bears any sort of significance of cultural laden value, of "political incorrectness" to 'paki' in English.

I had a hangover (not really, I only had a couple of beers) from the night before, going out on the town with my sista - Leyris - who is 17, her cousin, her boyfriend (don't tell her parents), and a couple of others who formed their cru. I say sista meaning adoptive relative, being retroactively sad about being one of 3 brothers. We hit the second fiesta, after the first one (which is next to the Mayor's house) was empty, despite the arrayed stack of speakers that most Bristol clubs would be proud of. I felt kinda bad for them, there was a massive truck outside that had obviously been hired to bring the system. I hope no-one (nor the local council) was out of pocket for that. Having a window from the street inside the club is a recipe for disaster though - who's going to pay to be the first people in? So we hit the second party, which was considerably more populated.

I felt a bit of a granddad, going out with a group of 15-17 year olds. I bought them a couple of beers to share, not being made of money. They concealed them proudly, if such a thing is possible. Yes, I'm a bad person.

The night was fun, then a fight ended in the 3-man police squad for the town / municipality being stationed right in the middle of the club for the rest of the night, which made it less fun. It seems that you have to have a partner to dance, even if it's to house music, which the occasional song is. That mixed (well, played overlappingly, mixing is too gracious) with a bunch of reggaeton, and then 6 really slow tunes all in a row. Weird.

francisco and his grannie

So earlier on on Saturday we went to visit Francisco's grannie, about an hour away. They hadn't seen her in years, and she's about to escape life. I had said a few days earlier that as they didn't have a car, while I was there if they wanted to make use of it they just needed to say. So we packed em in, Francisco, his dad, Virginia, her mum, and the 3 kids, Leyris, Francis and Frambi all in the Jeep and hit the road. The visit was fairly procedural, nice to meet the old lady, took a bunch of nice photos, and Virginia and Francisco were very happy to have made it and spent some time with her. She's in her nineties, a right fighter, and made a sharp wisecrack about my now fairly long hair.

After returning home, we headed to the outskirts of town, where in a large field lay a profuse network of well-staked plots of land. We went to one of them, for some slash and burn action. Well, the slashing was done, more raking and burning. It doesn't sound as good though, rake and burn. Meanwhile, Francisco and his dad stuck a few more poles in. Clearly these were plots of land for someone, and I thought I heard Virginia explain that they were for homeless people. My thoughts of altriusm were put to rest when Francisco explained later that the land was owned by some teachers, and that all these plots were for teachers. Nice job, nonetheless. It would be interesting to find out if Sandinistan politics had anything to do with it.

The next day, Sunday, I got some great footage for the film at the baseball game, the conveniently timed Municipal Final. I gave a chap a lift on the way up, which only turned out to be 5 minutes away, and later on he brought me a sack full of plantain and oranges. An extraordinary act of kindness that I can't get my head around. Maybe it's the capitalist money-exchange culture I grew up in.

Speaking of which, the film is trundling along nicely. Plenty of footage (in 30 second clips) to work from. I've got the script finalised and a shoot lined up tomorrow with the photogenic and beautiful 12 year old Francis. I'm having to fake the school section a bit, as the schools are all on holiday. The mayor did offer to get them all in for me though, kind chap that he is.

While I was talking to the school principal, an experience as unpleasant at the age of 26 as any other time, I found my niche here though. As soon as the conversation began to sour towards the different things the school wants money for I felt awkward in that position I described before. Par for the course, I suppose, with the now stock response that the best way would be to formulate a proposal through Gioconda, that I'm here to offer practical help but am not the person to talk to about wanting money.

The niche though, is that what seems like at least a year ago, a whole bunch of computers were donated to the school. They've been sat neatly but without use, providing shelter for rodent families, since their arrival. So I spent the day starting an inventory, to build some systems that work, and put Linux on them.

After spending the day getting through half of 'em, I needed something inspirational to get the rest done. That came in the form of the plan to do a one day workshop with a small group of kids, teaching them about hardware and software, and basically how to build computers. It's not rocket science, more like lego, and with some interested kids it'll be fun and also be a team to look after the computers and give the project some sustainability. Well that's the plan anyway. In Latin America, plans tend to change more often than not.

Puerto Morazan, Nicaragua

2009-01-27T14:23:00.000-08:00

It's Wednesday morning, and I'm sitting in the front room of my host family. I've just noticed that the time on my computer says 8:30am. Strange. The clock on the wall says 10:15, and I'm pretty sure that my computer clock is right. My pocket watch has been intermittently functional over the last few days, a quality not especially useful in a watch. That does however mean that I went to bed at 8pm last night, not the 9.45pm I thought previously. Lightweight.

Francisco, my host, is a teacher at the local school. He is charmingly adorable. He just left to go to school, on his motorbike. Actually, no he didn't, I can see it outside. Last night he did pick up his papa from "the fields" and afterwards his wife, Virginia, on it. There aren't really any cars around here, in Tonalá. I reckon there certainly aren't more than 100 in the whole municipality, of 15,000 people. Those that there are are pick-up trucks. A fair few motorbikes, and lots of bikes though. And buses between the towns.

So the place I'm staying is Tonalá, not Puerto Morazán. I'm here because my home city, Bristol, is twinned with Puerto Morazán. Through the Bristol Link with Nicaragua (BLINC), I'm spending a couple of weeks here. Although it would be nice to spend a month here, the car has 30 days in the country and I've been in León for a week already. And afterwards I want to visit Damian on Ometepe, a twin-volcano island in the Lago de Atitlan, the world's largest freshwater lake.

So it appears that the municipality of Bristol (denoted by the local council, Bristol City Council) is twinned with the municipality of Puerto Morazán. Confusingly, that includes the town of Puerto Morazán, as well as the surrounding villages. Further, the administrative offices are in Tonalá. It's taken me a couple of days to get my head around all of this.

It's quite a shift to be figuring stuff out for myself. For one, a shift from the daily routine of getting up and going to the beach. But also from the 'development' gap year work I did in Nepal 9 years ago (wow, it was that long ago), as well as the Education solidarity delegation in did in Colombia 3 years ago. Both of the latter were more guided and led, with a lot of presentations, talks and explanatory workshops. That is mainly due to the fact that then I was part of organised groups.

I feel like coming here wasn't quite so big a shock, or shift, as flying from the UK to Colombia, out of one culture and into another, quite different, in 24 hours. I've had 6 months to feel my way along and into this life. That's has been the truly wonderful thing about this trip so far, and by avoiding flying, is noticing the gradual, subtle differences (cultural and socio-economic) as I creep along. Nonetheless, getting off the tourist trail has, like I said, been a shift of gears, and is a culture switch of different sorts.

I can see the difficulties that have been faced in the past by representation of solidarity campaigns. There have been issues when people from the UK have represented the Colombia Solidarity Campaign while in Colombia, and then said and done reprehensibly stupid, or at least naive, things. This had consequences for representing the Campaign in a negative light in Colombia, and also facilitated internal factional rifts at home. So, to be in this position myself, as representing BLINC, is a step I take with a heavy weight of responsibility.

So I can see how these difficulties have arisen. It feels like a minefield, what should I say, what shouldn't I say, who should I talk to, who shouldn't I talk to, and what the hell am I doing here in the first place? I feel like really I should have looked more closely at the BLINC website, on their stance and angle on the solidarity and development work the do. I know that they try and facilitate exchanges, and have helped equip and fund local schools.

Well, I'm here for my own reasons, that I'm pretty sure are more than compatible with BLINC's. After discussion with Alix, the Chair of the Bristol Twinnings Association and a comrade in the Bristol Latin America Forum (whose blog is incidentally getting a fantastic spread and volume of hits from around the world), I decided to try and make a short film about Puerto Morazán. Additionally, wanting to get my hands dirty, I was to try and help the Lucrecia Lindo shrimp farming co-operative, who have suffered storm damage from Hurricane Mitch, and also to have a chat with the new incoming Executive Mayor about their development priorities for the next 5 years, to present an informal report to Bristol City Council.

So last week, I emailed BLINC's local contact in León, to discuss my arrangements while I'd be here. Having waited 5 days, on Monday I found the address of the office and popped in. It turns out I had an incorrect email address. So, from there, after a phone call, it was arranged that someone would pick me up from Chinandega, the nearest large town to both León and Puerto Morazán, roughly half way between the two. So I met Norma, who would turn out to also be on the new Council Board.

I drove us to Tonalá, where she said it would be better that I stayed, and she arranged to put me up here, with Francisco and his lovely family. All this took a little while, with nonchalant efficiency, given that this was all being done without any of their prior knowledge. I felt bad about this, all happening on the spot. WIth hindsight, I wonder if had I announced my arrival 3 months previous whether this would have made any difference.

Explaining to Norma that I would like to help the women's shrimp farming co-operative, we drove to Puerto Morazán from Tonalá, a 20 minute drive down an occasionally bumpy, straight dirt road. I could see the lagoons on either side, some of which were decidedly dry. We arrived, and parked the car in the shade - at 2pm, it was around 34ºC. I'll spare the details of who and how, but we arranged that I'd meet the co-operative for Tuesday at noon, after meeting the new Alcadia (local Council).

So yesterday being Tuesday, I awoke and made my way to the Council building for 10am. A single storey concrete block, the Alcadia is not quite on the same scale as its equivalent in Bristol. That's a heritage of slavery and capitalist exploitation to thank for that. As I arrived, my contact from Leon was there to take a photo of the new administration. It turns out I was here for their inaugural cabinet meeting, the new administration for 2009-2012. They were a friendly bunch, and I tried hard to avoid comparing them to Bristol's Board. Somehow I felt closer and more alike to these people, from a rural municipality in Nicaragua, than to Bristol's elected representatives. Maybe it's my quasi-diplomatic status here, or something else, I'm not quite sure.

I observed the meeting, the details of which I'll spare you. Meetings are the same the world over - being at them is one thing, usually a fairly necessary evil, but reading about them is quite unnecessarily pestilent. I want to keep what little readers I have at this stage. Suffice to say that this is the steep learning curve that I need to improve my Spanish further at the moment. It's come on leaps and bounds since being in Central America, and pushing it further is pretty hard work. Maybe that's why I'm sleeping 10 hours a night.

Afterwards, I went back over to Puerto Morazán, to meet with the shrimp farmer co-operative. In the back of my mind, I wondered on the way over why Alix had suggested this lot in particular to work with. I said I was up for getting my hands dirty, and this was a suggestion. While driving over the day previous with Norma I questioned the appropriateness of a bloke helping out a women's group, but she quickly put my mind to rest. She said that women here were emancipated and liberated, that it really wasn't an issue.

So I got to Gloria's house, and the lady we met the day previous was there, along with Gloria. Not quite the 16-strong co-operative I had been led to expect. So we had a chat, getting some plastic chairs out in the shade in front of Gloria's house. I found out more about the co-operative, and the history of the relationship between BLINC and them. Without literally pushing the issue, I suppose my presence did. It seemed like the explanation I got was a explanation for the absence of action going on. From what I understood, BLINC had given a bunch of money to help legalise ownership of their land, and buy a boat. It seems like now, they need a bunch more money in order to actually get started, for machinery and suchlike. It appears that it all cost more than previously thought.

So this was the crunch. I felt my representation of BLINC and my level of involvement with them at home under irreconcilable tension. I explained that my role here was to offer practical help, for a week or so, to help repair storm damage that I suppose had been offered as an explanation for inaction in the past. Hurricane Mitch was in 1999, 10 years ago. I wondered how long had they been off-line? This is precisely why funding overseas 'development' work is so fraught with complicated ethical issues.

In return for my gentle prodding that elicited a diplomatically defensive response, it was my turn to take the back foot. I explained my level of involvement with BLINC as truthfully as I could, through the Bristol Latin America Forum as cross-solidarity work. I also felt a bit guilty in explaining the last 5 months of my time as constructively as possible. So sensing that doing anything practical with this group was not forthcoming, we agreed to meet tomorrow at 6am to go for a tour of the lagoons. This would be a great time to get some footage and photos for the film.

The film... is going to be a tricky one. I have a Canon Powershot S70 camera. It takes 10 frames per second of 640x352 video, approximate to a cameraphone. I think that it can work though. It'll have to be short, and snappy, and be led by a strong narrative. As long as it's viewed on computer screens, it'll be fine. Which if the target audience is for kids in posh Bristol schools and the Council, it will be. The hard part will be the editing, which takes time. But time is something I'm not short of really.

Getting More Productive...

2009-01-17T10:23:00.000-08:00

if you look really hard you can see me jumping on the horizon

Saturday 3rd January - Friday 9th January 2009

It's my last night in El Salvador, after a really rather relaxing, and moderately productive week. I'm extremely glad I came. It's a jolly beautiful place, despite the recently ended civil war. And there's not many tourists (other than surfers), which is also jolly nice. And the best part is that it cost absolutely nothing for either our persons or the car to enter the country. Just the way it should be, No Borders [link]and all that.

After leaving Finca de Eden, on the Honduran North coast, we backtracked a bit down a lush, well paved road. We decided we would make the border that night, so stayed in Santa Rosa de Copán, a colonial town described in Boring Planet as exuding a gentlemanly cool. Artistic license gone a little crazy there...

The next day, the border crossing took a little longer than hoped. Although free, the issue was that the 'aduana' (customs - the ones that deal with vehicles) for both El Salvador and Honduras were located together. It appears from my experience that Honduran border officials are amongst the worst I've met. In order for an El Salvadorian vehicle permit to be issued, the Honduran one had to be cancelled. Now, a brief look at a map shows that for those travelling South / East, one must pass back through Honduras (unless you have an amphibious vehicle). So I was being told that my Honduran permit "To Enter And Leave The Country" had to be cancelled, and I would need to pay $40 for a new one when re-entering Honduras. Again, Saturday crossings meant there was one tired and fed-up looking staff member, with no management around. All this just to get the (free) El Salvador vehicle permit.

This all sounded a bit odd, and after an hour of back-and-forthing, the lady agreed to phone the boss (a second time) to check this was correct. Turns out that because the vehicle is mine (with title to prove it) I don't actually have to cancel the Honduran permit in order to issue the El Salvador one. I wonder how many folks before me have forked out another $40.

So, another hour to do the paperwork with a jolly friendly El Salvadorian chap who came out to the vehicle to check it over, then another in the office to type it up, and by the time we were on the road it was 2pm. Note that no immigration paperwork was done here, nor taxed for this, as per the CA-4 agreement. Good job El Salvador.

The rest of Saturday I was in a rather foul mood. Our decision-making process broke down somewhat, and we ended up doing something I wasn't pleased with doing. Given that I'm the driver, that's rather frustrating, as I had to take us exactly where I didn't want to go. Consensus failed - majority vote ruled, and I was in a minority of 1 against 2.

My proposal a couple of days earlier was to go to a National Park in the Northern tip of El Salvador, as a park-up one-night stopover. The idea was to arrive with plenty of time to go for a nice long walk, although this was an afterthought.

So, it was decided that they (my girlfriend and Damian) didn't fancy the lush, only accessible by vehicle, National Park, and instead we chanced getting to the South coast by nightfall, as if we hadn't seen enough beaches in the last few weeks. Am I losing my persuasive abilities? I didn't think it needed persuading. They were all up for it until 5 minutes down the dirt road, whereupon we turned around.

Arriving at Playa El Sunzal, going for a Lonely Planet tip at Surfers Inn, we camped for $2.50 a night. The currency here is US$, quite bizarre. Good for getting dollars out of the hole in the wall to replenish the emergency supply though.

i haven't yet tried the aguardiente (local moonshine) i got from this shop... should I?

On Monday I took a daytrip by bus to San Salvador, an hour and a half (and $0.95) away. I couldn't face the prospect of driving to a capital city, and worried for the safety of the car and myself in it. Bussing was a good choice in the end, cheap and easy, and a good break from driving too. I wanted to go to try a seek out some film contacts for the Cinema Klandestino LatAm film festival in the autumn.

I went to the Museum of the Word and the Image, to check out their exhibition and film library. They have a great catalogue of documentaries, recently put onto DVDs, although few with English subtitles. I also didn't bring my laptop to San Salvador, so couldn't copy any. Nonetheless, I got a couple of good contacts, one with a local film club.

lots of people chilling in front of the National Palace prompts the old classic, what are they waiting for, justice?

The whole day in San Salvador I didn't see a single white tourist - except on the bus on the way back home, this German guy stood up and made an announcement. He'd had all of his stuff robbed, including passport and all, and there was no German Embassy. I didn't really listen to all of it, but it reminded me of how shit i felt when I got stuck for 2 weeks in Delhi aged 18 with no money having lost my onward ticket on my way home back from Kathmandu, having to beg in a city of poverty. I gave him a dime.

Wednesday we moved off to the next beach location, Playa El Espino, where there would hopefully be less tourists. The never-trust-the-guidebook maxim won loud and proud, the dirt road now paved, and the isolated beach a bustling fishing village. By Damian's "if there's cold beer, it's civilised" rule, it's civilised. We gave a ride to a couple of ladies hitching from the main road, and in return one of them hooked us up with her abuela's place, a champa on the beach. A champa is a basic shelter structure, made from coconut leaves. A great spot for our hammocks, a fire, and our pirate flag. See the video below for a 360 view.

We've got used to being stared at and laughed at. Maybe it's my silly haircut. Any interaction with the locals results in hard laughing... but usually success. We've been living off flatfish - I think they're plaice - for $1.50 for 3 big ones. I've got pretty good at filleting them, the first attempt to barbeque them whole didn't really work without the barbeque.

The moderately productive part has come through learning to use Traktor, this other DJing program that appears much more intuitive and useful at mixing songs than Ableton. I've worked my way through the manual, which I very well laid out.

The car in the top right corner, the sun top left. Ahhhh. Almost like a Jeep ad or summat.

Tonight, my girlfriend got her first driving lesson on the beach. The sand was pretty hardpacked, so was pretty good. And it's an automatic too, which is pretty easy to learn to drive on. I'm not sure whether it's good to learn to drive an automatic, but we'll see. Afterwards, Damian and I drove further up the beach to hunt down a beer, and ended up hooking up to the soundsystem in the bar and blasting a few tunes. We ended up having a soundclash with the locals, who put on the jukebox after each tune, and had a right laugh. On return, the abuela and my girlfriend were worried about us, going off on our own, which snowballed into an argument. Funny how the old gender stereotype stories often turn out true despite not believing them, and wanting to resist them.

New Years Day Swim - my best moment of 2009 so far....

2009-01-12T17:57:00.000-08:00

Saturday 27th December 2008 - Saturday 2rd January 2009

This post really is going to be short. Very little to talk about between Utilan New Year and getting here, Finca de Eden, back on Honduran mainland. And still no photos either.

The day after Boxing Day we left Paradise for Water Key, a small uninhabited island about 500m long by 50m wide. Sunday I perfected my hammock, mosquito net and tarpaulin setup, by using the diagonal of the tarp across the line of the hammock, and tying the other 2 corners down to not obscure the view too much. The net then attaches to the eyes of the tarp by 4 corners, being a hybrid 4-poster hammock net, perfectly suited for such use as this.

Monday night rained hard, the rainy season on Utila being completely out of sync with mainland Honduras and the rest of Central America. The horizontal sheet rain got me wet from both ends, so I crawled into the tent with Damian and my girlfriend. Damian's net and hammock all-in-one's zip's broken, but he is travelling with a hammock AND a tent, so is well equipped. Tuesday we blagged a bottle of vodka off some Guatemalan rich tourists, and had Bloody Mary shooters. Later Zorro picked us up and took us back to Utila and Paradise.

New Year's Eve was probably my second best ever (after the multirig free party 2 years ago), again staying up all night. It started fairly unpromisingly with having the runs during the day of the 31st. So I slept from 8pm-11pm, and felt a lot better. And my favourite moment of 2009 so far (ahem) was swimming from the dock of the bar to our dock, and then back again, at 9am on New Year's Day. It's not often you can swim from your hotel to the bar.

Today, Friday, we left Utila on the boat, picked up the car that I left the passenger side window open of as I left in such a hurry, paid the lady an extra 100L on top of the 150L for being 5 days longer than we said we'd be, dropped Jordan off in La Ceiba, and headed for El Salvador. Our stopover tonight is a place run by a German guy, pretty chilled given it's the 3rd January, with good cold beer as one would expect from a German bar owner. Tonight, in the absence of a good hammock spot, I think I'll sleep in the car, a factor I haven't really taken advantage of since the U.S.

Krimbo in the Caribbean

2009-01-12T17:39:00.000-08:00

Saturday 20th - Friday 26th December 2008

This is going to be a short one, I don't think anyone wants to waste too much time reading about Christmas in Caribbean paradise. Also, all of us left our cameras in La Ceiba, on mainland Honduras, whilst we are on Utila, the middle sized of the 3 Bay Islands, about 30km off the North coast of Honduras. So no pics :-(( until Jordan gets his disposable camera developed and sends me the jpgs, which I fear will take a good while, if at all.

So where I left off last we were in Antigua Guatemala. We crossed the border into Honduras on Saturday near Copán on the CA-10. This was a rather painful crossing, it being hot, and 3pm on a Saturday. The girl at the Customs desk (immigration for people, customs "aduana" for the car) was resting her eyes and head in her arms when I arrived, and not too pleased to be awoken. We needed US$29.80 - L580 - for the car. However, there was no explanation of a breakdown of this, and the Form 9A, the permit/certificate said "Value: 135L" at the top. The accompanying receipt said "Form 9A: 430L". So to be asked for the total of these seemed strange, particularly when there was no sign nor documentation to explain this. The large roadsign indicated a much lower amount, along with the instruction to refuse to pay more than this. Anyways, I put up a good fight but my girlfriend told me to shut up and paid.

The next thing was the $3 immigration tax. This was odd, as here the Foreign and Commonwealth Office advise me that the CA-4 agreement of 2003, to which Honduras is party, states that UK residents need not even register with immigration to travel inside the CA4. I again argued until blue in the face, the chap behind the desk not too keen that I knew the law. The problem was that he had my passport, and some of the above details I didn't find out until afterwards.

Well, the result is that I've made the point. The problem is that I imagine all travellers just pay it, given that it's only 3 bucks. If only everyone just refused to pay...

So we arrived at La Lima, the town closest to the airport near San Pedro Sula in Northwest Honduras, where Tori was flying out from the next morning. Damian took her to the airport in the morning, after swapping photos. I must add that she deserves credit for a few of the last bunch of photos too. Far from the boring nightmare I tagged her with earlier, she was fun to travel with, we had a good gas about plenty of meaningful and meaningless things.

Sunday, after stopping off at the airport for a coffee and a crap and narrowly missing the 15 minute free parking, we drove through lush Honduran countryside northeast to La Ceiba, the access port for the Bay Islands. Not fancying the hotelhunt very much, we stayed at Hotel Amsterdam 2001, camping for 30L (£1) for the night. La Ceiba was a strange town, a tourist platform to the Bay Islands with prices to match. We did nosh this amazing seafood stew, a Sunday Special, for dinner.

Monday morning we got food supplies for the week, being well equipped between the four of us in terms of actual equipment and outdoor cooking skills. Jordan says he cooks most of his meals on a fire. Meanwhile, Jordan and I set out to find a secure cheap place to leave the car on the mainland. We settled on this lady's house 20 minutes walk from the port, who had a driveway with a lockable gate and no car, agreeing to give her 200L then and another 150L on our return.

While waiting for the others to return from their last minute missions, I talked my way out of a parking fine largely due to my ability to speak Spanish. All 3 of the others took their goddamn time while I sat sweating about how we were missing the boat. We hightailed it to the port out of the East end of town, and dropped the others and our stuff off while I drove back to the lady's place, gave her the 200L, and sprinted the 2km to the boat. That was the furthest I'd run in a very long time.

Luckily the boat wasn't leaving at 4 on the dot, and after getting there at 4.05 the boat didn't leave for another 25 minutes anyway. The crossing took about an hour, for 425L, heading for a speck in the Caribbean distance to an averagely spectacular sunset.

On arrival at the dock, we got mobbed in classic fashion with offers for staying at dive schools for $2 for the first night. We went to the one with girl who liked Damian... Altons Dive Centre, down the East road, on the back of the Altons pickup truck. The place was pretty nice, but as soon as we said we were not interested in diving (yet) the English management couple lost all their nicety and interest in us. Added, we got told off for fishing off the end of their dock ("this is a dive centre you know"). Anyhow, we made up for it by topping up our cooking oil supply and some maple syrup out of the kitchen.

The next day we moved to Paradise Dive Centre, a locally owned place just off the main dock. The landlady, Rosa, was chilled and welcoming with a rather unusual Irish accent, being a 4th or 5th generation settler. We got a room for 4 for 50L each, but slept in hammocks anyway. This time, we thought better than presenting ourselves as uninterested in diving, and ended up actually convincing ourselves that it would be a good thing to ask our relatives for as Christmas presents. Now, on Boxing Day having heard nothing back from them, I think it's probably quite cheeky really, to ask for a bit of money to have yet more adventures.

There was a nice dock, used by a lot of locals. The best part was Zorro, the local fisherman who came daily with his catch of fresh tuna. Outwardly mad as a hatter, hands like an ogre's, and sunbleached body hair, his disregard for 'environmentally sustainable' fishing practices (like not fishing sharks) was interesting. He had clearly been doing this all his life, since when fish were plentiful. So because big-scale commercial fisheries have drained the oceans, why should he change his practices - if not for the commercial fisheries a local and sustainable way?

Wednesday was Christmas Eve, a night usually spent in my local pub at home getting drunk with my old friends. This was probably my best Christmas Eve (sorry guys)... dinner was a painstakingly sourced 14lb ham on the bone (not all for dinner!), then we got drunk in Treetanic aka the Tree House, the most beautifully decorated bar I have ever seen.

Until now, I've realised more and more that overplaying the beauty of something leads others that see it to be disappointed. With this, there's nothing I can say that would leave a future visitor disappointed. The painstakingly designed and constructed garden of multiple level areas and walkways, all inlayed by ceramic and glass collaged sculptures must have taken years to collect the materials and build. I really hope Jordan sends me those pictures... Afterwards, we stayed up all night, the first time I'd seen the morning through since... back home I guess, not even Burning Man. The other 2 dockside bars, the next 2 docks over from Paradise (our dock), saw us into the morning. Obviously our own clandestine supplies of rum made the whole night a little more affordable.

So yesterday saw in Christmas Day, at 32 degrees, with a dive into the Caribbean of our dock a pleasant interruption. And no presents for or from anyone. A nice change from the norm. Well, not such a short post after all...

Public and Private Spaces

2009-01-11T14:56:00.000-08:00

Friday 12th December - Friday 19th December

Another tumultuous week, this time more testing emotionally. Not that anything's really been that stressful until now actually. I'm beginning to wonder when I'm going to get down to doing something useful beyond my own horizon expansion and experience gathering. As I sit in a cafe in Antigua Guatemala writing this, it's a good time to reflect on the last week or so.

I feel a bit strange too airing my innermost emotional feelings in the most public way, about stuff that intimately affects my girlfriend and our relationship. I guess that's the more revolutionary aspect to blogging: transcending the boundaries between public and private issues and spaces.

I never was a disciple of the clarity of distinction between public and private spaces, be they discursive or physical. I think at home, in Britain, there is a real distinction between physical public and private spaces, evidenced in a number of ways. First, by the culture of "Public Houses" (pubs) and entertainment licensing that is derived from this. Related to this is public liability, and the [legal, suing] culture, perhaps more acute in the U.S. but certainly prevalent in the UK. Being in Central America, with critical distance from home, I can see how spaces in the UK are hypermanaged and defined as public or private. Going into an eatery here, you walk through someone's home to get to the toilet, shared by the family whose home it is. Or someone invites you to stay with them in their house. Without going into too much more detail right now, I won't overplay the distinction, but I think there is a difference in the way spaces are managed and controlled. Perhaps wealth has something to do with it too, being unable to afford another 'customer' toilet.

Wow, I don't know where that came from. But the point I was about to make was that my girlfriend wanted to break up, on Saturday, soon after arriving in Xela to meet her after 3 weeks going our own ways. I guess independent travel suited her pretty good. Love never being straightforward, the complicated part was what happened after. As I came to terms with these revelations, she did say she wanted to spend Christmas with me. I couldn't answer whether I wanted to as well, but left to think things through. We agreed to meet for dinner. The long and short of it is that we're gonna spend Christmas together. Things are now good, but a bit more complicated. We'll see what goes down.

Between here (Antigua) and there (Xela), we made a couple of stops. The first, shorter stop at the hot springs of Fuentes Georginas, the next at the Lago de Atitlan, a big ol lake in the middle of Guatemala. Tori didn't reckon she could make it to the Bay Islands anymore, her flight being from San Pedro Sula, just inside Northern Honduras, in 2 days time. So the last few days have been more relaxed, spending 3 nights in San Pedro (de la Laguna - on the lake).

The hot springs on Sunday were as lush as they get. Xela had been pretty chilly, one of the coolest places in Central America. So going up a windy mountain road to find a 20ftx50ft hottub, with 3 smaller, less bakingly hot pools below, was blissful. The cabins up there were pretty steep - 90Q (£9) a person. So 2 of got the cabin, and 2 paid for camping, next to the cabin (for 15Q each)! That brought the costs down nicely, we even put the tent up for full blag effect. There was a log fire inside the stone cabin, and a barbeque outside. And a jolly nice evening was had.

On Monday we left by noon and drove the couple of hours to the lake. 10km long and 3 km wide, the lake is surrounded by steep hills dotted with villages and a couple of towns. We avoided Panachel (the busiest), going for San Pedro, a little smaller with less, but still a fair few, tourists. Arriving just before dark, we stayed at Hotel San Francisco, Damian and I paying 5Q (50 pence!) for use of the roof to string our hammocks, with a glorious view of the lake interrupted only by the steel re-inforcement bars (reebars) poking out of the concrete pillars and the chicken wire fence that I don't think would have broken a fall. Damian won at spoof so got the lakeside spot. We ended up contributing 5Q a night to the girls' room's cost for use of their bathroom too.

One the 2 items on my checklist of things I wanted to do on the road (the other being breakfast on a rooftop terrace) was spend a day on a lake in a canoe. That day was Tuesday, hiring canoes and sailing over to the 'beach', 45 minutes away, and generally larking about on the water. The only thing lacking was ganj, I guess you can't win 'em all.

So yesterday we left San Pedro, and drove to Antigua Guatemala, a colonial town a little removed from the capital of Guate, and found the cheapest digs in town. 38Q each, for a fairly uncomfortable bed in a basic hostel in the middle of town. With a rollmat it was very bearable. Last night as I walked to the super to get ice for mojitos, I passed through a street that was cordened at one end and screened off at the other. Inside, things were setting up for a kids Christmas show. Sadly, the melting ice beckoned me away, but I heard lots of firecrackers from inside our hostel courtyard suggesting fun was had. Then Jordan turned up, having bumped into Damian in the street. He'd made his own way from Xela, and is down from our Krimbo plan...

So, next week, Christmas in the Bay Islands. We need to find somewhere in La Ceiba, the Honduran mainland port to access Utila, to park the car for a week. And stock up, as I hear it's expensive out there. I wonder if Amanda and Mega, who we met at Lanquin, or Julia (in Antigua), or Jay will make it. I hope so.

Guatemala - into Central America propa

2009-01-11T14:47:00.000-08:00

Saturday 6th December - Friday 12th December 2008
[seems like I'm doing a lot of week-long sections...]

It's lunchtime, I'm hungover from last night's salubrity, and it's time for a quick driving break and time to catch up. We've blitzed through Northern Guatemala, known as the Petén. Until about 15 years ago, this part of Guate was totally undeveloped, with very little infrastructure. Now, thanks to government funding and Guatemala's main tourist attraction, Tikal, paved roads and supermarkets make the traveller's life that little bit more convenient... Funny how that makes it so much less exciting though.

So the border crossing from Belize into Guatemala at San Ignacio was like walking from one world into another. From the friendly officials of Belize to the grumpy moody Guatemaltecans that can't even be bothered to make eye contact when you present yourself. We did manage to convince them that we weren't going to pay the US$10 entrance into the first CA-4 country though (CA-4 is a 2003 border agreement between Guate, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua to allow free migration between States for residents and non-residents of the CA-4).

Just before this, we had a few drops of some colourless liquid sprayed underneath the car, and were advised we would need to pay for this at a window. The chap asked for 18 Belize Dollars (about £6). I, "really?!?", asked to see the receipt, where beside the number 18 was a Q - for quetzal, the currency of Guatemala. 18Q - £2. Joker.

So after paying the police 50Q (£5) to be allowed in that region (!?!?) we hightailed it to Flores, the nearest town to Tikal, to stay the night before heading to the ruins there. The town reminded me of Venice, if a little less hectic, due to it's narrow cobbled streets, quaint architecture and being surrounded by water, with prices to match.

At the hostel there, we met Emma and Jordan, the latter of whom we hooked up with the next day at Tikal and has been with us since, making it down toward Quetzaltenango (a name locals conveniently shorten to Xela). Here I'll meet up again with my girlfriend and possibly study some Spanish, as she has been doing for the last 2 weeks. I hope she's fluent by now.

Jordan seems like a nice chap. Tori doesn't like him much, but then she has quite a strong personality that you either love or hate. He's a 23 year old cowboy from Oregon, spending most of the year is isolation looking after cattle on a horse, the rest as a guide. I like him because he knows lots of stuff I don't.

Tikal was, frankly, a bit of a wet fart. The stakes were high - £20 entrance fee, notorious for being the biggest and best Mayan ruins in Central America. We got the most out of our cash, by going after 3pm, for which they give you a ticket for the next day. The campsite located just outside the entrance was cheap. So we caught sunset, and then the early morning the next day. It started pissing it down just before sunset, while atop Temple IV, and we were thoroughly soaked by the time we got back to our palapa. In the dark, I then found a red antnest with my bare foot, a feeling similar to walking through a field of stinging nettles naked.

So the stones were impressive, and spending 3 hours atop Temple V holding an orange pip spitting contest whilst simultaneously conducting an informal anthopological survey of visitors who had just climbed the innumerable steps was fun, but I really think there are some great other ruins sites that cost a whole load less. Bah humbug.

Monday we made it to Finca Ixobel, described to Damian by a friend of his as an awesome place with great treehouses, and some fat semi-submarine caves explorable for free. The one treehouse only fitted 2 - the others were houses on 8ft stilts. And the cave was an organised tour, costing bucks. Added, there was a general bad vibe around, and then we heard news that a couple had had their cabin robbed of it's entire contents the day previous. We stayed the night, playing cards with a couple of Israeli girls, and cooked up a storm. I cooked the on-the-road adaption of a Heston Blumenthal classic bolognese, minus the meat. After the 3 and half hours cooking on a fire, it disappeared down our gullets within minutes, to wordless silence. I call that a victory.

Leaving Finca Ixobel as rapidly in the morning as the spaghetti disappeared the night before, we plotted our path to Xela. Next stop, Rio Dulce. Specifically, we parked up at Bruno's, underneath the main bridge over the Rio Dulce. Mainly frequented by old American yaghties, the very charming and hospitable patron let us camp on the lawn outside the hotel for £2 for the night. Hammock and mozzie net for shizzle. I couldn't help notice how we spent most of the evening in our camping chairs around the back of the car, in the middle of the dark car park, sipping hot rum chocolate, rather than anywhere in sight of the Rio, the reason for our being there. A timeless twist on that contemporary classic, the Welsh Cultural Fair. (That's a reference to back home a bunch of us sitting out of the back of my friend's truck at a rave, like English OAPs on a summer's day).

The final stop was in Lanquín, after a beautiful and tortuous drive up, down and around dirt roads not oft travelled by white folk. The expressions of locals as their gazes met our gringo faces was kind and gleeful astonishment, the views over the plains behind us and down unspolit valley after valley unforgettable. We arrived at El Retiro, excited by it's description in Lonely Planet as a backpacker's paradise. Our 15Q (£2) nightly fee for stringing up our hammocks in a room under construction certainly helped the wallet. The amount of Americans and Israelis firmly supported by their trust funds kinda ruined the 'paradise' I expected.

I have since decided ever more firmly to completely ignore Lonely Planet on all counts. As soon as something is described as 'paradise', hundreds of boring travellers arrive by the busload and render the place a nice little earner for the locals (or, usually, the ex-pat owners). I already knew this, I just forgot again.

Notwithstanding my disappointment, Damian and I rocked out another laptop Ableton set in the bar on our last night there, Thursday. None of my mixes worked, so I ended up fading most of the them in and out. Damian's tune selection went down a treat, his oldskool hiphop set from Mazunte. The first half of mine built up alright, no-one knew a single tune (slightly disappointing), but the icing on the cake came when during the heavy part of DJ C's Billy Jungle a random punter came up to me with a crazed look on his face and said "uh, could you turn it down or something, it's too loud". That makes me so happy when people tell me that, that I arouse emotion strong enough to make someone come up to the DJ and ask them to turn it down and play something more boring. This was not uncoincidentally also the guy who earlier on asked me to play more Manu Chao. Oh, please. The rest was great fun, until the bar manager unplugged me mid-song at 12.45am, the facist arse couldn't wait until 1.

Earlier that day we took the self-guided tour to the 'bat-cave', where every sunset about 2 million bats fly out into the night. We found it, 30 minutes walk down a paved road, despite the hostel's staff refusing to explain how to get there unless we paid for the tour. And the tour was led by a 12 year old. Pah.

On Worms and More

2009-01-11T14:16:00.000-08:00

Sunday 30th November - Saturday 6th December 2008

Well, I've spent a week in Belize, which certainly wasn't part of my plan. Partly because they speak English (or a funny creole/patois dialect thereof) and I want to immerse myself in Spanish, and partly because it's supposedly really expensive. We ended up here as a dogleg tour via Tulum to check out the white sandy Carribean coast (which was fukin lush as attested by the photos on the previous post); to pick up Tori, Damian's friend from home travelling for a month on a whistlestop tour of Central America; and to get some solo time away from my girlfriend, with whom I've shared the same 10 cubic feet since we left on the 1st August, all those 4 months ago.

The verdict is that it was well worth it, a couple of choice spots for camping (Gales Point and Barton Creek), lush nature and an immense ethnic diversity for a country with 300,000 peeps - altogether negating the negatives, when cooking for ourselves - rice and beans cooked in coconut oil mostly. I left Chetumal, in Mexico, with Damian, still on the same path after a month, Tori, Enzo and Mariposa, and am now sat on the deck of Barton Creek, about to leave for Flores, just over the border in Guatemala, with Damian, Tori, and Ayesha, aka Wishy, a lovely Ozzie girl who shares my love of good food. It's so much fun being inventive without a kitchen, made so much more pleasurable with Jay's Japanese knife he gave us a few weeks ago.

Leaving Chetumal, the Mexican border town, on Sunday and crossing into Belize was predicably fitful. It wasn't until we arrived and parked just before the border that I remembered my maxim to avoid bureaucracy at weekends... Signing the car in and out of countries needs a bureaucratic machine to process the paperwork and give us the certificate we needed to leave Mexico and avoid the $400 car import tax levied on my credit card. So we were then resigned to staying another night in Chetumal, a characterful town given its border location. It turned out we could actually cross, so I brought all the paperwork over, signed my passport out, found a closed customs window, went back and cursed at the passport man who told me it was open, went back, found the right window, got the certificate, went back to the passport man and apologised and got back in the car and drove across. All the above took about 2 hours.

Belizean immigration and customs was like a breath of fresh salty air. Smiles and 'alright sir' greetings made for an actually pleasurable experience. No costs to import the car. No immigration fee. Minimal paperwork all at the same desk. The only cost was having to buy car insurance, for £10 for a week. They give you a sticker you have to show inside the car. Although with hindsight, I can't see that not having bothered would have mattered, as the police were as equally chilled and friendly as the immigration lot. The one time we passed a checkpoint they pointed at a rolly in a way that suggested they didn't really care what it was.

The first nice spot we found was Gales Point. I guess the reason it was such a great spot was how we found it - by circumstances rather than planning to go there. We were headed down a long dirt road in the later hours of the afternoon and stopped to see if a broken down car needed help. They needed the wheelnut tool we had, and willingly obliged. Whilst one guy put the donut wheel on their car, we chatted to the others. In almost one breath he gave us a small bag of weed, and in the next he gave me his card; he worked for the Foreign Ministry. He also told me that he was best friends with the Chief Prosecutor and that if we ran into any problems at all, to give him a call. A get-out-of-gaol-free card, if ever I saw one.

So, this encounter made the rapidly approaching sunset trickle closer. I have been trying to avoid driving at dark, partly for security reasons, and partly because of the roads full of potholes, dogs, cows, pigs, kids, drunks, trucks, cars without rear lights or headlights or indicators, cyclists always without lights and cantering wild horses.

So after 5 minutes we passed a sign for Gales Point, with the magic word "Camping" (not the one above, for the eagleeyed amongst you will observe this one doesn't say camping). With my hammock I bought in Mexico, it's been the surefire budget accomodation winner, just needing 2 trees conveniently spaced. Most places seem happy to let us use the facilities for £1-2 for a night. Situated at the end of a 2 mile spit sandwiching 2 lagoons, Emmeth's Sugar Shack was one of my highlights so far. A postcard sunset and coconuts falling off the trees (not onto my head though!), with a garifuna host who looked 25 but was 39. Hmmm, must be something in the water. The next day we shelled out for a boat trip with ..., who took us fishing (Tori catching a 5ft tarpin), manatee watching and to a mad cave, clambering around the bat poo.

Tuesday we checked out coastal Dangriga, Belize's second biggest city, very briefly (not worth it), then made for Hopkins, a small Carribean coastal town to drop off Enzo and Mariposa, who were going to volunteer there for a bit. Just as I was beginning to think about looking for another passenger, Damian overheard Ayesha, who we hadn't met yet, saying she was thinking of heading for Guatemala soon. Perfect!

While I was chilling there, a man sitting behind me was singing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. Oh god, it really is nearly Christmas. It was very weird wearing a vest and my lightweight fishing trousers I got on the beach in Mazunte. Back home I'd be wearing two pairs of trousers and have a Big Thick Winter Jumper on. I've decided to try to spend Chistmas in the Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras in the Carribean, when Damian is still there after going there with Tori, who will have gone home by then. It sounds pretty awesome, about as far removed from the usual as it gets.

Wow, this is a pretty newsworthy week. Wednesday we left Hopkins and hit up Cockscombe Nature Reserve. Belize is actually covered in nature reserves, totalling over 40% of land. This one was lush, with a perpetual drizzle, and famous for it's Jaguars (so they say).

Hammock under the palapa structure, nice. Met a guy from Yorkshire, who'd been volunteering there for the last 2 months, but plagued by illness. He'd had worms for 2 months, and tried every medication given to him. He didn't however think through that they reproduce by laying eggs around the outside of one's bumhole and so sleeping naked didn't help him stop spreading billions of eggs all over the place, considerably increasing his chances of re-ingestion. All the drugs in the world don't matter if you can't stop the cycle of reproduction. I should know, I've had them 4 times in the last 6 months now. None of the latter 3 times have been less pleasant than discovering little white things crawling in my poo while tripping at a teknival in France last Easter tho.

Well, I digress. Thursday, we arrived here in Barton Creek. We heard of it as it was mentioned as one the the Country Highlights in the Lonely Planet guidebook (I'll save my tirade against them for later). The hook was the free camping. No catch.

A gorgeous decked bar and owners' living area, overlooking a creek with a wide deep pool right in front. Behind it lies a sheer rock face and we're surrounded by jungle. Rope swinging into the creek kind of reminds me of being a kid, but I don't think I ever did much rope swinging into rivers. Made up for lost time though. And made use of the car too, driving through a foot and a half deep ford (see the video below!) And without it, it would have been a hell of a trek to get here, being about 12km off the main road.

Tulum & Sian Ka'an Nature Reserve, Quintana Roo, Yucatan Pensinsula, Mexico

2008-12-19T16:03:00.000-08:00

24th - 30th November

Arrived Tulum, Yucatan Peninsula (actually in Quintana Roo not Yucutan State as assumed).

"arrived in tulum yesterday, white beaches, fukin lush. missing you already. and alacran...

we got halfway, by some ruins, and stopped to stay in a roadside hotel. got chatting to the proprietor, a sweet man. he has a dog, a tiny kitten (a month old, SOOOO sweet!) and a very strange mountain pig that looks like an anteater. alacran was very bemused by the latter 2 creatures, running rings around the pig that the guy let run around loose. the guy then took us to the ruins in the dark (just the other side of the road) which was fucking cool as fuck. there was a really steep narrow staircase inside a tower which alacran followed us up. then getting down he got stuck at the top and whined hard, it was funny. i tried to carry him then he realised that wasn't going to work so he just did it. funny as fuck. later, i talked to the guy who asked what we were going to do about alacran, and he suggested taking him on. the other dog was a very fat little sausage dog, so they obviously fed him well. damian and i thought it would be a good place, but we worried about the practicalities of leaving him. so we decided to come back from tulum via here and then leave him, partly because i wasn't ready to leave him. so in the morning, we got in the car, started the engine, and alacran feigned complete disinterest and just sat there looking into the distance a little way away. we called him but he ignored us... he KNEW. so we asked if that was cool to leave him there and then, they said yeah sure, what does he eat? the fact they asked that was another good sign... so off we went, no goodbye cuddles... leaving alacran guarding his new ranch (they have a load of chickens too).

so were satisfied he's in a good place, perfect climate, plenty of space to run around and people passing through to play with.

where are you? did you make it?

i'm looking into coming to xela via belize and tikal cos it's direct - doesn't seem to cost anything more to come through. not done online research yet... if i do it'll be with damian and tori."

Tuesday

Beach at the Fishermans Co-op. Hot sun. White long beaches. Clear cool sea. Palm trees. Paradise.

Wednesday
Left Tulum with Axelle on board as latest crew member bound for Punto Allen at 4pm, arrived 10km short, in the dark to find the engine overheating on the driveway of a (para?) secret unmarked military base looking at first menacing running towards us with combats and machine gun - and got directed by a helpful bunch only one turn further down the 30km dirt road, while we waited 20 minutes for the engine to cool down enough to get to our very own private beach for only the 21 pesos to get in the Sian Ka'an National Reserve.

Thursday
On the beach, not very private anymore, joined by some jolly friendly local fishermen.

Friday
Left beach paradise, said goodbye to Axelle, Enzo and Mariposa, arrived by flook in the pimpest beachfront pad for free!

"so we went down from tulum to punto allen, cos tulum is a tourist trap and charge 80 pesos to string up a hammock, with enzo and mariposa and a nice french girl called axelle we met in tulum. the whole area is a nature reserve, with miles of lush white beaches (with loads of washed up rubbish though) and palm trees, and a lagoon on the other side of the road. you pay 21 pesos a day to be there but then it's free camping (not advertised as such though). we left tulum at 3pm, looking for a place described very vaguely in lonely planet, where you can see the sea on one side and the lagoon on the other. it got dark, then the car overheated (which it did earlier in the day too). strange. so we lifted the bonnet, and a trucker pulled over to help (in the dusk with 1000 mosquitos buzzing around). he noticed the main engine cooling fan wasn't working. we had a fiddle but could figure out what the exact problem was. so after letting it cool (20 minutes), we set off again. 3 stops later, we were a bit further than the lonely planet spot, looking for a spot to camp. we pulled into a track, unclipped the small chainlink fence, and stopped when i saw a mexican in combats with a machine gun running towards us.... and then 3 more. to make matters worse, the car was overheating again, so we had to sit there fro 20 minutes until it had cooled down. they were actually quite cool, it was really dodge at the time, we didn't know if they were paramilitaries, private security (guarding what?) or what... turns out they are military looking after the nature reserve. we said we were looking for somewhere to camp and they suggested the next left. which was a track leading to a private beach, with a bunch of trees and a well! meanwhile, we'd also picked up a couple of giant crabs running accross the road, so cooked them up for dinna. the next day (yesterday), we bought a bag of fish off some fishermen that came and said hello and fished for 50 pesos and had ceviche/fish soup combo and barbequed a couple too on our driftwood fire. lushcore.

this morning, i woke at sunrise (which was outstanding) while having my face eaten off by sandfleas that must've jumped onto my pillow when i dropped it. i had to walk around for 45 minutes until the sun got warm enough and they buggered off. nice sunrise though...

then, it rained and simulaneously i realised there's a leak in the radiator so had to refill with engine coolant (which luckily we have although can use water anyway). not sure how bad, will get it checked out asap, i just wanted to check you were still alive first.

belize looks likely, pretty cheap to get in and out (if the car works that is).

hasta pronto mi amor"

Saturday
Javier and his (?) pad, picked up Tori (Damian's friend from Colorado), a "boring nightmare" (in-joke, sorry).

"Last night me and damian gave a lift to this mexican guy just after separating from enzo & mariposa, without having yet found a place to stay, but were planning to squat the beach at a spot we knew. the guy offered us his place to stay, just inside the nature reserve. it's a $300 (that's US dollars) A NIGHT place he sometimes rents out!!!! Wooden, palapa roof, teak floor, 3 lush double beds (between 3 thats one each - jonah still wanted to sleep in his hammock on the porch though). Porch facing the white sand (nudist) beach 30m away. The geeza is a fisherman, today caught 7 kilos of lobster on his own! slightly bad ethically, he's not a member of the local fishing co-op, but that means he can only sell it for 250 pesos a kilo rather than 400. it also means he probably contributes to overfishing. either way, we're having lobster tonight!

So the guy, Javier, is quite a sweet guy, slightly crazy and hectic. So after we got to his place, after a beer, when he started fiddling with an empty beer can, things began to make more sense. We hooked up with a crackhead fisherman! I respected his position though - he explained that it was his thing, and that even if we wanted some he wouldn't give it to us, let alone offer it. It reminded me of the time in Delhi when I met this Russian guy who took me for a ride around the concentric streets on his Harley, then after we stopped off at his hotel and explained to me he was going to jack up in the bathroom, that he was telling me in the sprit of openness (rather than doing it secretly), but that he again wouldn't even consider letting me have any even if i wanted it (which i clearly didn't).

Anyway, swede as a nut, free place to stay. The geeza, Javier, also hooked us up with a mechanic. So the water pump is fucked, to fix it is 500 pesos, another 700 for the part, and 500 to service the fan. Should be done by tonite. According to the guy in the parts shop over the road from the mechanic, there are loads of jeeps around here so parts are pretty easy to come by. So, I asked him to run the computer and do a diagnostic, which is 250 pesos (better than the 300 in Oaxaca) in order to determine which O2 sensor is fucked, cos I forgot. I took the decision given that parts are cheap and plentiful compared to how they might be in the rest of Central America, and that then we can turn the Check Engine light off see if anything else goes wrong, before it causes more damage. I hope that's OK with you.

Dont get salmonella. please.

Tori arrives tonite. Need to find 2 more to fill car to leave for Belize Sunday (day after tomorrow). Party tonite on the beach."

Sunday
Picked up Enzo and Mariposa who were trying to hitchhike to Belize, left Javi's teak joint, arrived cheapest hotel in Chetumal, on the Mexico-Belize border (Jose Luis Hotel) bound for Belize.

girls underwear photo shoot photographer and his stooges

Chiapas

2008-12-19T15:31:00.000-08:00

16th - 21st November San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico

Arrived San Cristobal de las Casas, capital of the Zapatista Uprising of 1994. Stayed at Hostel Posada Mexico, blagged a private room to share for the price of a dorm, dog friendly.

Monday
Kicked out of hostel and put in cheaper sister hostel for less money around the corner. Dog happier, less people. Sleeping outside.

Tuesday
Gorge ride on a daytrip from San Cristobal down Cañon del Sumidero in a speedboat. Alacrán loved it as much as I, riding on the bow.

Wednesday
Alacrán got lost. Eve went looking, worried. Dog went back to other hostel.

Thursday
Dia de la Revolución - against the Spanish.

Friday
Left San Cristobal with Enzo and Mariposa, a cute Colorado couple also going to Palenque.

21st - 23rd November Palenque

Arrived Palenque, well El Patchán actually, but who's checking anyway. Dog still in tow. Stopped at Agua Azul, swam in the lush green pool at the top end of the waterfalls despite the tourist tat stalls and the 50 pesos the EZLN charged us and gave us a ticket for just before the 'actual' entrance fee of 50 pesos, Alacran didn't swim.

Saturday
Staying in hammocks under a palapa at Rakshita's, El Patchán, literally metres inside the National Park boundary, arrived at through a path from metres outside the boundary.

Checked out Palenque. Big ruins. Lots of tourists.
Met a couple of guys on our way out who were from Tabasco, a couple of hours away, and shared their crate of beer. Interesting and amusing cultural exchange. He was a headteacher from a town, and had a small ranch. We invited him to the (crappy) restaurant that was the only one in the jungletown. He (and his family and driver) then left.

Sunday
Left Palanque behind bound for Tulum with Damian, Enzo and Mariposa and Alacrán, leaving Eve (feeling increasingly frustrated with her less-than-conversational Spanish) to go to Quetzaltenango to start before me at an intensive school, living with a local family for at least a week. Need to try and find a home for Alacrán soon. Arrived Xpujil [pronounced spoojill].

Monday
Left Xpujil AND ALACRÁN! He just wanted to stay! Like he knew he was meant to!

South of Oaxaca - San Jose del Pacifico & the Pacific

2008-12-19T13:43:00.000-08:00

5/11 - 8/11 San Jose del Pacifico

Wednesday
Discovered the reason I didn't sleep very well is that we're slept underneath some very large power lines. Doh.
Found some mushrooms, trekked off into the forest and got slightly trippy, crazy clouds. Base camp was a lush green clearing by a stream. Scrambled up hillside and surfed down on pine needles.

Later, met Alacrán at another hostel & chilled with some Mexican guys. We got on pretty well. We came back to the cabaña, Alacrán went to sleep outside.

Thursday
Bumped into Alacrán again, at that time it was Hongo (mushroom). He followed us around all day, we went for a walk, he waited outside while we had dinner at this amazing Italian place called Los Duendes - the leprechauns. Had an amazing steak, local, fresh meat and huge and delicious for 60 pesos - ouch though amazing value. Alacrán slept outside on blanket.

Friday
Chilled day, then went to Oaxaca in afternoon to pick up car.

Stayed night in Oaxaca, slept in car outside hostel as hostel was closed when I got back.

Saturday
Left Oaxaca with 2 hitchhikers picked up from the hostel in the morning to share petrol, arrived back at San Jose del Pacifico to pick up crew - Damian, Eve and Chantelle (Jay and Julia had gone ahead)... and Alacrán (still known at this stage as Hongo). He just jumped into the car when saying goodbye, jumped into the boot of the car and just sat there. Arrived San Angustinillo after tortuous drive through windy mountain roads at night - not Mazunte as we thought! Staying at this guy's house we met after 15 minutes of getting into town, geeza called Antonio. Nice terrace looking over the top of the rest of the village to the sear, sleeping in Jonah's tent. Realised we left skillet in Oaxaca. Doh. Played poker at Derek's bar, Casa Magica, a real nice place with cold beer and good music. First time playing poker, lost 200 pesos. Funny characters, an very drunk Argentine guy, Carlos who runs the Luna Nueva, Ross the American, Shane the Canadian Indian.

8/11 - 15/11 San Angustinillo and the beach

View from our place

Sunday
Alacrán loves the beach, a mountain dog that's never seen the sea before. Pescadillas - like quesadillas, but with fish. These sellers stroll up and down the beach, selling 4 for 20 pesos. Very addictive.

Monday
Went into Pochutla (aka Chipotle) to get supplies, dog worming tablets, flea shampoo. New favourite street food - barbacoa tacos.
Beach.
Jay made ceviche... mmmm... and then gave us his amazingly sharp Japanese knife. wow.

Tuesday
Beach.
Nearly drowned. Dangerous undercurrent. Not going out of my depth again until I can swim properly.

Wednesday
Beach.
Bought lush hammock for 360 pesos (ouch).
Fuil moon. Swam under the moon at night, doing flips into waves. Fun.

Thursday
Beach.
Concerned about what to do with Alacrán. We can't travel with him for ever.
DJed with Damian aka DJ Razzmataz at La Barritta. At about 11, the owner wanted me to play more salsa, so did, then everyone left. This guy has a drum kit in front of the system, on which he gets and jams it up. Which was great... for a while.

Friday
Beach.
Another game of poker, only lost 50 pesos.

Saturday
Left the beach - changed mind about staying until the weekend for the Jazz Festival - and with dog in tow, still loving it. Arrived in Tehuantepec, staying at a nice cosy motel in town, 5 sharing 2 double beds pushed together (no funny business). Dog inside because kid scared of him being playful.

Sunday
Left Teohuantepec, after checking out Sunday market soon after sunrise while everyone setting up. Lush to see the calm before the storm.

Oaxaca

2008-12-19T12:09:00.000-08:00

Friday 31/10 - Tuesday 4/11/2008

Friday - Oaxaca, Halloween
Took car to mechanic to have transmission fixed, making increasingly disturbing noises. Cost estimate at 10,000 pesos maximum. Ouch. Called back later, transmission now in pieces and will cost 19,000 pesos - that's £1000 - more money as transfer chain also needs replacing. Barter to 15000, then 14000 pesos. Still outrageously expensive for South Mexico. But they kinda have us by the balls, with the transmission in pieces. Parts cost 4 times what they cost in the US, but no time... hence price.

Eve dressed in my braces and trousers outfit, looking sharp.

Jay and 15ft tall paper mache dude

Dancing down the streets, crazed salsa soundclash - as soon as one stopped the next started, passing bottles of mezcal around between smiling strangers, failed to find a good bar despite getting sent over to a place with a live band by the bartender of the sister venue - they wouldn't let us in.

Saturday - Day of the Dead, Oaxaca
Morning went to cemetary. Lots of flowers, bright colour. Highlight - awning and patio grave with table and chairs. Symbolic of the light yet reverential atmosphere, where people still smiled at each other and said hello.

Extremely tasty street food - hard to get a handle on what's called what though - empandadas, tlayudas...

Partied at the cemetary/graveyard, with a carnival set up outside, inside with 2 brass street bands playing a soundclash, playing a twisted up salsa/cumbia/merengue mashup, with an experimental jazz vibe thrown in. Hard to dance sensibly to but easy to get down... in the graveyard. The atmosphere was incredible - drinking and dancing and livin it up, in the most unlikely (from a non-Mexican perspective) of places. The Day of the Dead is a pre-Columban festival, celebrating the dead. Replete with skeleton imagery, the dead are treated with reverence and respect, and celebrated as people do best - by having fun.

Sunday
Watched film at hostel, a great place called Banana Magic Hostel. Nice airy but part covered courtyard, rooftop patio garden, with kitchen, internet, dorm beds for 70 pesos.

Monday
Last day in Oaxaca, tried to sort out some film contacts. The 'Cine 8 Cafe' is run by a not particularly political couple, so not much use. Pablo, the hostel owner, is trying to get a friend of his to meet me, we keep missing each other. He's a film buff, probably with some useful ideas.

Tuesday
Decide to leave for San Jose del Pacifico by bus, a few hours South, while car is at mechanic, with some people from the hostel - Damian, a bearded mountain goat from Boulder, Colorado, US , Jay Tostado, a Mexican guy from Tijuana with a very funny name - "Hey man, I'm Jay Tostado", Chantelle, a reserved black London girl, and Julia, the squeamish German psychology student who Jay really wanted to score with (some names changed to protect the guilty).
Stayed at a cabaña, with an awesome mountainside view down the West side of the valley.

Mexico!

2008-11-19T16:00:00.000-08:00

Sat 18/10 Santa Monica (if it's blue, you can click on it - places link to a map)
got email from Nicole saying her & Tim (Exile) will be in Mexico City next Friday night - are you in the area. Mexico city in a week. Doable.

Sun 19/10 left Santo Monica, arrived San Diego
Eve tells me how the guy we were staying with in Santa Monica spent every minute my back was turned trying to convince her to sleep with him. 2 Faced prick. I should out him. Or not.

Mon 20/10 left San Diego, arrived Sonoyta, MEXICO!
bought new front speakers $20 from chain car store - proper job!
crossed border rinsing salsa
bureaucracy with car - found banjercito a few km in from border to do paperwork for car. Timeconsuming process but not impossible.

Tue 21/10 left Sonoyta, arrived Navajoa
stopped by police for not stopping at stop sign - let off!
lorries indicating left to motion that it's safe to overtake....????wtf!
Stayed at Palace Motel

Wed 22/10 left Navojoa, arrived El Rosario
applied muffler strips
left leatherman in motel. now other side of mexico but have found phone number on soap stolen from motel.
stopped for speeding, let off AGAIN!- cop said "just make sure you're not doing more than 75, maybe 80mph" - when that's what i was doing when he stopped us.
had 1st margarita. expensive in (other) hotel bar. felt good though.

Thu 23/10 left El Rosario, arrived Huaniqueo (500 miles as the crow flies...)
left early morning - amazing light in morning - leaving so soon allowed us to get as much (superfluous...) stuff done as possible.
picked up manuel, shrimp farmer, co-op 3000
left laptop at motel, drove back 90km with manuel, perlava with tolls & drugsearch (they wouldn't believe that we'd been collecting fresh herbs to put in a bag to make the car smell nice - and found a tiny tiny scrap in the carpet. Eventually convinced them.)
no hotels in huaniqueo, moved to next town, old walled cobbled courtyard hotel (no TV! yeah!)

Fri 24/10 left Huaniqueo, arrived Mexico City
Tim's gig - fucking fat
on tha VIP list innit - Anson Room vibes a bit except full of Mexicans havin it.

Sat 25/10 left Mexico City with Tim & Nicole, arrived Tuxpan, beach on North (Carribbean) coast, late.
car making strange sounds when putting into 4WD. needs looking into (along with the rattly muffler, the nonfunctioning alarm, handbrake, leak, clunky transmission...). still (very) driveable.

Sun 26/10 left Tuxpan, arrived Otumba
dropped T&N @ Teotitlan
beach. swimming. lush.

Mon 27/10 Otumba
sick. must've been dodgy oyster at beach. Or swallowing too much seawater. Or the oil refinery next to the beach.
should've gone to the south coast. beaches are lusher.

Tues 28/10 left Otumba, arrived Love Motel (Teohuacan)
still sick. and getting sick of driving.

Wed 29/10 left Love Motel, arrive Oaxaca
in Oaxaca for Day of the Dead in 3 days.
still sick. getting better. will be fully better tomorrow.

Thu 30/10 Oaxaca
Monte Alban. lush very old ruins short bus ride away.
went with nice bunch at hostel.

California

2008-11-19T11:53:00.000-08:00

Sat 4/10 Sebastopol (California)- stayed at abigail's
worked in garden picking tomatillos
start to fit amp in car - run 12v lead from battery, install phono cable, rewire speakers

Sun 5/10 Sebastopol - stayed at abigail's again
finished installing amp - works a treat - need to get replacement front speakers

Mon 6/10 Sebastopol - abigail's
pm beach - foggy
tasty abalone for dinna and hot tub

Tues 7/10 left Sebastopol, arrived Vallejo
Treasure Island. No treasure except good photos.
stayed at Clint & Emily's (met at Emerald Earth) - good to see them again and talk about EE

Wed 8/10 Vallejo
hanging around to wait for espresso maker I left at EE - Prana leaving from Oakland tomorrow - try to arrange pickup time - got call from Prana, left, didn't bring it. doh.

Thur 9/10 left Vallejo - arrived SF
The Warehouse - cool saloon type pub/cafe/bar on the other side of SF Bay. amazing place, must go back when open.

Fri 10/10 SF

Sat 11/10 SF
critical mass - didn't make it, watch has stopped working and phone is out of battery. :-(

Sun 12/10 SF
burning man decompression. fun. got box (with old car stereo in) back.
good to see the playa on the tarmac...

Mon 13/10 SF
recovery. beach.
Chinese Dumpling Session - sessioned

Tue 14/10 left SF, arrived State Park nr. monterray bay

Wed 15/10 left State Park, arrived Santa Monica
left park early, avoided paying.
The Get To A State Park Late And Leave Early Theory is born with (almost) conclusive proof.
picked up 2 alchie hitchhikers, in their 40s, sweet old couple.
cliff fire. drove back 30 miles to go around. v. annoying retracing steps.
stopped in Santa Barbara to offload hitchers onto local beach posse ( - jolly nice folk).
got drunk with guy we met at decompression and now turns out to also be a coke dealer.

Thur 16/10 Santa Monica
checked out Venice beach.
bad mood.

Fri 17/10 Santa Monica
LA hell.

When is a worker a skilled worker?

2008-10-10T14:37:00.000-07:00

Friday 3rd October, noon

Just about to say our goodbyes at Emerald Earth, it feels like we've been here a lot longer than 2 weeks. I'm quite sad to be leaving, I've had the most amazingly grounding experiences, that have fuelled my dreams and excited my fantasies. Is it strange to have fantasies about building mud huts?

And it was my birthday on Thursday, Lisa made a fabulous morell mushroom risotto for dinner, just like I wanted, and stuffed squashes to boot. And the birthday cake was an Eve Special - bananas, brandy-soaked raisins, chocolate. Mmmmmm Mmmmmn.

So I explained a bit about the setup in my previous post. That was quite broad, so I'll say a bit more about the details, from my perspective anyhows. The 2 weeks here were also cut in half by going to the Handcar Regatta to help out our "Producer" friend who "organises festivals". Maybe I'll start with that.

So we arrived in Santa Rosa on Saturday, the day before the Regatta, to help out with what I assumed would be a busy day for him. Well, nobody on site seemed to know who he was, nor could be discover his whereabouts. Hmmm. We headed back to Sebastopol, and collected our post - the new car stereo and rear speakers. A couple of hours and twizzles of wire later and we could now play whatever music we want as mp3s via a USB stick. Nice.

Well, it turns out we were not needed until Sunday actually after all, which is a little disappointing because we left Emerald Earth, missing the earthen oven making workshop which I was rather looking forward to. The photos show the development of the oven in preparation before the workshops, and after. The seduction of glamour can be deceiving (of helping our 'Producer' friend that is). No matter, the Regatta sounded exciting, and furthermore, Aubergine, the huge vintage clothing store in Sebastopol, was having a party to celebrate opening a bar/cafe in the back of the building - a huge wooden structured warehouse. With free food - my favourite kind of party.

Well, the party was OK, the sound system was a couple of regular Mackie speakers that simply couldn't quite fill the space. The band were good, but perhaps better on a CD than live. The bassist was a good craic to watch tho - the most energetic of them all, bashing out a smooth reggae bottom line. If I had a slightly larger wallet and wardrobe, I would be more interested in all the fantastic vintage wear, but alas I have neither so I tried to restrain my visual appetite.

The Regatta on Sunday was a blast. The dress code appeared to be 1920s inventor with a good dose of playa chic. Ideal for the old red braces and dress shirt get-up, with a marker-pen handle-bar moustache. We personned one of the info booths, selling T-shirts and jute bags and pointing to the food ticket booth a lot. And as for our Producer friend, Joseph is actually a friend of one of the Producers - with a slightly overinflated sense of importance, bordering on the delusional. But a lovely chap nonetheless. And despite his adamance in advance to the contrary, there was no afterparty.

looking at the old cob earth oven mid-destruction

So on Monday we trekked back to Emerald Earth, via a couple of stops to run errands, picking up some Hardy frame templates for the foundation of the new Common House. It's being made up to California Code specifications: an interesting pragmatic choice sewing a gap between visionary utopianism and the 'default' world.

laying the foundation for the new earthen oven

So in the 2 weeks I was there, I dabbled in a plethora of different tasks around the place. Trench digging had to be the toughest - good to get the blood flowing. Hauling, stacking and chopping firewood was fun. Fence bracing - for the new deer fence around the new Common House site - was fairly laborious but a useful skill. Clay waddling the new chicken coop was great - a timeless technique - I think I need more practice, as mine sagged a fair bit. Working in the garden, I moved 17 wheelbarrows of horse manure, and got a good sweat on. I cooked another meal, lunch this time, onion soup with polenta. And I helped out with the child care. The nice thing here is that everyone has a go at helping with childcare, including non-parents.

laying the sand/clay/straw mix for the oven base over the wood-store form

The sauna went on a couple of times over the weeks, a nice end to the day. When the hot tub's leaks are fixed it would be great as a cold plunge bath. The shower suffices for now though. At the end of a day up at the foundation in full sun all day, it's a welcome treat for the muscles. I spent a few days dogsbodying up at the foundation, helping out when I could. In that time, I had a good think about a lot of stuff, and one of those things was about 'skilled' labour. At the moment, there's one or two skilled workers working on the common house. A lot of stress is placed on those shoulders. If one of those got ill, it would set the whole thing back a lot.

laying the oven base

The problem is that most people are unskilled in this line of work. You can't just tell someone to go get on with that portion of the foundation. This interrelated to another problem, which is that one person is the site manager (as well as the main worker!)- that is the person overseeing the whole operation, and knows exactly what's going on everywhere on the site. So he's got to set people up with mini-projects, oversee them to make sure they are accurate and precise, while getting on with stuff himself, figuring out what needs doing in what order, the next task for helpers, etc. A mammoth task, undertaken admirably.

making the door arch

So there are the inter-related problems of skill more generally, and specific expertise on the section that needs work. Now what got me thinking is how do you gauge someone's skill? There is the underlying factor that work on the foundation needs to be very accurate - as it's holding up a building, hopefully to be able to withstand an earthquake, being that we're not that far from the San Andreas fault. I guess it's a process of building a picture - from experience of using particular tools (or at least how they work), and accuracy and precision. The more experience, the less mistakes, the less questions and the faster the work gets done.

completed earth oven

Anyway, these were some of the thoughts that drifted through my head as I dug into (admittedly soft) rock with a pick and a rock bar. And some questions - am I a skilled worker? Does that fact that I know how to use a bunch of tools and I have a good dose of common sense and got top marks in my physics A-Level assessed practicals make me skilled? Probably not. Does the fact that I don't know that the rafter goes from eave to ridge (and then the purlins go on top horizontally) make me unskilled? Probably.

A Recipe For Successful Sustainable Living

2008-10-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

Ingredients:

200 acre plot of land
16 people (firm but not overripe)

Bake carefully in an earth oven for 9 years, stirring horizontally regularly.
The longer you bake it, the tastier it becomes...

Wednesday 25th September, 2pm

This place is very cool. How I justify this, I guess is down to a mixture of the people there and the structure of the place. There are 11 full or becoming-full members, their 4 kids, 3 work-traders and us at the moment. The members are all in their 30s, the kids are aged 2-5. Their histories are diverse, but share a desire to live rurally, and developing living practices to be as self-reliant as possible.

What I find really interesting is that this position is quite a nuanced, and tricky, one. Radical, alternative, sustainable, utopian, whatever label you apply, there is a real sense of living the change you want to see in the world. And that is the tricky part. The manifestation of the dream, the utopia, can never be a perfect one and precisely how that is done, the translation of the image, the vision, into the everyday, and how people cope with that, is a process of compromise and pragmatism. This is what armchair activists call hypocrisy in a negative condescending sense.

For example, infrequently (not since I've been here though), the solar and micro-hydroelectric power sources are supplemented by a petrol generator. But they are off the grid. So here is an unsustainable practice that could be called hypocritical. Nonetheless, energy use is minimised and lifestyles are have been transformed towards those that are less energy-reliant. Sometimes power tools required to build the new common house, it's foundations, frame and roof are used. But minimally. This is a community of people that are not luddites - technology exists and it is harnessed appropriately - but there is a level of awareness of the resources required and used that you just don't get living on the grid. The meter that ticks away, as long as you pay the bill - usually by direct debit, so that you don't even see how much it costs, let alone be able to comprehend that energy use in fathomable terms - such as gallons of petrol, or hours of sunlight.

Cob making - stomping clay with sand and straw

None of the residents have been here since the beginning. One has been here for 9 years, when the community at the time settled on the land. The previous attempt ended in one guy living here, mostly on his own, for the previous 5 years. What is interesting about this is that although the mix of people changes, and the talents and energies and skills change, there must be something that evolves through this, what makes the place what it is.

The meeting room in the new common house

So my second justification for why the place is very cool is the structure of the place. The land is owned by a co-op, first off. The 'land council' oversees the maintenance of the land, and includes all full members, and also ex-resident members, and also the lady who bought the land and sold it to the co-op in the first place. The council operates by consensus, and is non-hierarchical. They meet quarterly.

Several unorthodox watering techniques are practiced here

Then there is the resident council. This includes all current residents (duh). This also runs by consensus, and is non-hierarchical. They have weekly business meetings, on Mondays, for a couple of hours. There are full day process meetings roughly monthly. And there are weekly sharing meetings, on Tuesdays, for 2 hours. This part I find really interesting. Here, they talk about what people have liked, what bugs people, and generally checking in with the group about what's going on in people's lives. I think this is a really crucial part to any successful community - having the opportunity to get things off your chest, and how you feel about things. Although they are aware that you can't separate business from emotion in quite such a way as is structured here, some overlap goes on but this is what works better for them, and makes sure they actually get a fair amount of stuff done.

The meetings are facilitated on rotation, and for each functional area of the community (e.g. garden, workshops, etc.) there is a focaliser (and backup). Each household has their own space, not owned by them but occupied solely, with enough distance between households. There are 6 natural build dwellings, ranging in small sizes, all cool as fuck. They are designed to the landscape and the climate, with an earthen floor that get winter sun but not summer sun, big South and South East windows, cob and straw bale walls, a fresco wall, visible timber frames, central hearths set into cob, etc etc. Oh they're so beautiful!

A small selection of harvested tasties

They eat lunch and dinner together every day, cooked and cleaned on rotation. And it's damn tasty. They are mostly pseudo-vegetarian - like me, they rarely eat meat and when they do it's local and organic. Last night I cooked hamburgers, flame-grilled mushroom burgers, steamed minty new potatoes, and tomato salsa. No quinoa, which has been in every meal for the last 3 days. Lots of raw food - fruit, vegetables, and in the States they call unpasteurised foods - milk, cheese, yoghurt, juice - raw. I can't recall whether we can get unpasteurised milk in the UK. But it contains loads of enzymes and bacteria that help the stomach, and nourishes the immune system. Kids fed on raw milk hardly ever get ill. And there's loads of fermentation going on. From soaking legumes (like beans) overnight in slightly warm conditions, to home-made sauerkraut, home-made yoghurt, those good bacteria are getting a good crack of the whip here.

The new chicken coop with clay waddle walls - lucky chickens!

Looking forward to the weekend, going back to Santa Rosa (right next to Sebastopol) to help out at the Handcar Regatta, before coming back here for a week... and my birthday, lest we not forget. Birthdays are made for hamming up, I say.

Decompression II - Sebastopol

2008-10-06T12:53:00.000-07:00

Friday 20th September 2008, 1.30pm

Another week gone, I've fully decompressed now. Currently writing this in Sebastopol library, with a crowded booksale going on behind me. I just overheard the most comical argument about a 6-inch squared tabletop space. They really get into their booksales here.

So last Saturday I drove all the way back down to Sebastopol from the Redwoods, a good 7 hour drive. We imagined it to take a little less, and had hoped to get back in time for a beer festival that our Burning Man friend, Michael, was working at, for Ace Cider. We missed it, and hit Ace's pub. Later, we checked out the later-drinking establishment, The Underwood, as Ace's closes at 9pm on weekdays and 10 at the weekend. Jeffry, the slightly eccentric English landlord has trouble with the neighbours - a story not dissimilar to our local haunt at home, The Cadbury. However, it does mean that people can get up in the morning, and there's always the Underwood.

Bar bacchi is the American bowls. Played on sand, on a shorter pitch. Lots of fun. My bar will have one. Better than skittles. Afterwards, we headed to a house party. At last, what I had been waiting for. It happened to be that a load of 'Burners' were involved, and full playa regalia was called for. As if I need an excuse to dress up. And, in the DIY nature of it all, there was a great bar outside, serving tequila that took with it the end of my memory that night. I awoke in Michael's living room, and sprung up to find a fry-up. Which, they do here (The Apple Tree in Sebastopol - and the US in general) in style. Full English, plus pancakes. Mmmm Mmmmn.

Sunday through Tuesday nights we parked up at the local campsite. A nice, friendly place, warm showers, $20, fairly standard fayre. Ordered a new car stereo, with an aux in at the front, and a USB slot. Perfect, with a USB stick we have all the tunes we need. And, for good measure, some new speakers for the back...

Wednesday night we moved to a friend of Michael's with a nice place, with a cracking orchard, on the outskirts of Sebastopol. He also happens to be a festival Producer, and has just got back from Earthdance, one that he worked on. He's asked us for help at his next, The Handcar Regatta, in Santa Rosa on the 28th. Handcars are railbound human-powered contraptions that look like a lot of fun. Sounds like a gas.

Yesterday, the lethargy of inaction began to take its toll. So, we checked out some WOOFing in the local area, and came across Emerald Earth via a bulletin board for Mendocino and Sonoma Counties in California called WaccoBB.net. It's an intentional community, in Mendocino County. They have 200 acres and the land has been owned by a non-profit corporation (which I guess is a similar legal structure to a co-operative in the UK) since 1989. They just emailed back saying that they're having a 'work party' this weekend, for which we are welcome to come and join. We want to stay for a couple of weeks, which without the work party would be tricky, but they can get to know us then, and then we'll know if they want our help for the next 2 weeks.

I'm intrigued by this place. Although we'd set out to help on a farm somewhere, it seems this will be a great opportunity to see an intentional community at work, and get some experience in natural building techniques, which this place is quite famous for. They run regular workshops, training in a variety to techniques, such as cob-oven making, timber framing, clay waddle and straw bale walling and organic gardening. It sounds like a fascinating opportunity to watch a community in action and learn from them. One small step to helping my dream of setting up such a community back home become more real. We leave in an hour. I'm excited.

Big Old Trees And A Beautiful Coast

2008-10-06T12:20:00.000-07:00

Friday 12th September, noon

Have just arrived in Jedediah Smith State Park in the Redwood National and State Parks in Northern California (click here for map / route). Some very old trees here. Going walking soon.

Left San Francisco Monday, arrived in Sebastopol. Went to the Ace in the Hole to meet a friend I made at Burning Man. A Cider Pub! Ah, home away from home. The Joker, at 8%, is dry, refreshing with a clean finish. Oh joy. Tuesday we hit up the Armstrong State Park on the way to the Redwood National Park (although there are redwoods all along the coast), going for a beautiful good longish walk of about 6 miles. That stretched the muscles nicely. Wednesday we took the coastal drive up the 1, along a magnificent stretch of coastline second only to the Dorset coast. Fond memories of walking and fossiling can't dislodge the top spot. Thursday morning we left the State Park we arrived at by nightfall the previous day, and having got up at 8am we managed to escape without paying. Nice. $20 for a parking spot for a night is a bit much really. Thursday night we arrived at Klamath, got excited about the big salmon barbeque they were having 'Friday', which became Saturday so we left for here, the cold and the fog making this place a bit macabre.

Exodus And Decompression

2008-09-19T13:35:00.000-07:00

4pm, Sunday 7th September

We made it out alive, sanity intact. That was certainly an overwhelming experience out in the desert there. We have retreated to the safety of San Francisco to recuperate and 'decompress'. I have had to hole myself up in the library here to give me a clear mind to put finger to keyboard. Having left Burning Man, we stayed Monday night in Reno, then finished the journey on Tuesday morning. The rest of the week has been a leisurely time in San Francisco, staying with a family friend of my girlfriend, a warm, generous chap with an apartment with a tremendous view over North-East SF. He works in the City Parks, managing a bunch of them, and is up at 5am most mornings doing so. Luckily, our small room in his cosy penthouse apartment has a door, and we sleep soundly through his exit every morning. Penthouse apartment, by the way, is my own moniker for top floor flat, although the views justify IMO the penthouse tag.

At this stage I suppose it would be appropriate to reflect on the good fortune we have had with our 'family connections'. Whilst this phrase conjures imagery of lofty occupational positions, in this context I mean friends of relatives, or relatives of friends. If I were to offer any advice so far from this trip, I would highly recommend anyone considering similar trips to research such potential links. We've found that at around 5 days the overstaying the welcome feeling begins to set in, although I am aware of the dangers of making general conclusions from 2 specific examples. I would like to think that our minimalist requirements - some floor space - have made our accomodation simple, and that having plenty to talk about made it enjoyable. Well, enough pontificatory musing, on with the action.

Leaving Burning Man was a pretty painless operation, a couple of hours from camp to tarmac, helped by restful air. The night previous we watched the Temple burn, and the storm afterwards made the trek across the playa cold and the air biting and opaque, when lit by torchlight. The photo from the last post is actually the Temple burning - Man burns Saturday, Temple burns Sunday - I was too wrapped up in the spectacle on Saturday to get any snaps... sorry. You'll just have to go see for yourself!

To conclude the lip theory experiment, I have positive results. Having applied no products to my lips in conditions that varied from 38C to 5C, no rain/snow and a little wind for 8 days, they are in tip-top shape. A 'cracking' result, I'm pleased to inform.

We stayed in a cheap, chain motel on Monday, washed all our clothes of the fine gypsum that encrusted every pore of everything we wore (which was, of course, everything), and washed our bodies likewise. My apologies go out to the cleaning staff at the motel. By the time of our arrival in San Francisco, we had assessed the impact of driving through fine dust storms on the car. Cosmetically, a thick film covered every possible crevice indoors and out - nothing that a carwash and a good hoover wouldn't sort. The liftgate lock wouldn't lock - $120 later that was sorted. And the stereo's ability to communicate in any way with either CDs or tapes was severely hampered. And, Eject seems a function alien to it at the moment. I decided that an early oil change would be wise, although we had done 3,500 miles anyway, and changed the air filter and oil filter at the same time.

view over Golden Gate bridge with SF in behind

OK, yawn, yawn, sorry, Friday our host showed us around SF. We picked up a sublime pizza foccacia at Liguria Bakery (at 1700 Stockton St, corner of Filbert St) - the only variety left by 10.30am - and drove around checking out the Art College, various cool parts of town, the Golden Gate Bridge, the headland to the North (with spectacular views of the city) and Baker and Ocean Beaches. Dinner at Café Gratitude was an unusually friendly (almost over the top - even by American standards) atmosphere with uniquely imaginative raw cuisine - quite unlike anywhere I've eaten - very tasty and left me feeling more satisfied than I imagined I would be.

Mural by Diego Rivera in SF Art College

Just before coming to the library, I happened across Bound Together, the Anarchist Bookstore on Haight Street. Haight St. used to be 'the place' back in the 60s with hippies everywhere, and now still has a high dose of charm, but feels a bit faded. Lots of cool thrift / charity shops with very cheap and cool second hand clothes. And this bookstore. I invested in 3 tomes - Violence by some guy, Days of War, Nights of Love by the CrimethInc Collective and a book on Cuban anarchism. Should keep me off the streets for a while. Had a good chat with a guy in there about social centres, squatting and collectives and there certainly exists a different take on revolutionary politics here than home, or at least how the politics are brought home, literally, to modes of living.

Squatting being criminally illegal in the States, there are no public squats in San Francisco. What squats there are, it's in the occupiers interests to keep out of public knowledge. He did mention that there are various collectives that do their own thing. Sounds fairly decentralised I guess then. Off to Sebastopol on the way to the Redwood National Park in Northern California tomorrow... the outstaying our welcome feeling is growing.

Man Down

2008-09-07T17:15:00.000-07:00

Sunday 31st August, 9.30am

What a week. It's hard to try to put words to what I've experienced over the last week. But, seeing as I haven't learnt the art of mass telepathy yet, I'll try nonetheless. Last night we watched what we're all here for: to burn the man.

So the site is huge. We bought bikes, as advised, to get around. I picked up a sweet single-speed back-pedal-brake beach cruiser for under £50. The only trouble was that the dust storm on Monday left drifts of sand up to a foot deep in places. Whilst the feel of the place, with countless camps set up with bars and domes and marquees, reminded me of European teknivals, the site layout was a little more ordered. In fact, those good old Americans had devised a grid layout.

The 30ft wooden man sat atop a 3 story structure with a double-helix staircase, with viewing platforms at each level - all of which went up in smoke last night. Surrounding the man is the playa. 3 causeways (lit by lanterns at night) lead off from the man at 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock and 9 o'clock if you imagine you are looking from above. After just less than a mile from the man, these roads meet the Esplanade, the inner street of 8 concentric rings (from A to G) that begin at 2 o'clock and end at 10 o'clock, with spokes at each half hour on the clock. In each of these blocks are a collection of smaller and larger, organised and less-so, camps, doing their own thing: the American cultural fayre.

To complicate matters slightly, at 6 o'clock and Esplanade sits Center Camp. This is the only place where monetary transaction legitimately take place, where one can buy coffee and ice. Inside this huge circus marquee various crazy people hang out, there's a small stage with solo acts, lots of sofas and a beautifully calm and tranquil atmosphere. It's the chill-out camp. Which is ironic, given it's location in the centre of the site. But the effect that it has on the vibe of the whole place is incredible - it's like there is no main show - the sideshows are the real festival.

Then there's a couple of concentric rings around Center Camp that intersect A, B, 5:30, 6 and 6:30, which after the street signs at each intersection get taken when the man burns get really confusing at night! So, in summary, it's huge. There was no way we could possibly get to explore even a third of every camp (which is where all the fun happens).

Now with a bit of a background in free parties and teknivals, I mistakenly expected to find a cacophony of soundclashes of soundsystems everywhere. I think the reason why I expected this, rather than imagining more of a festival setup with more of a focus on things to see and do, was because of having vehicles on site. You drive your vehicle right onto your camp and incorporate it into your shelter structure, something I have only experienced at free parties or teknivals. Or at least in the designated campervan area, but certainly not right in the thick of it.

Of course there are some pretty big systems. They're around the 2 o'clock and 10 o'clock edges. But the amazing thing is that the majority of the soundsystems are moving! They go around on mutant vehicles a.k.a. art cars. There's pirate ships all over the place, and all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures and beasts that you can ride in or on. And they drive around the whole place, so some of the best fun I've had is just jumping on an art car as it passes camp and seeing where it takes me.

Food is an interesting one... there are various places kicking out a multitude of tasty snacks, usually at set times and with various degrees of ease to find. The trouble with the places that are well organised enough to get in the programme is that the queues are sometimes pretty sobering. We brought enough food to make a few meals - I made a fry-up on Wednesday with scambled eggs, spicy baked beans, fried onions and mushrooms and curried home fries (a.k.a. fried potatoes) - which those that know me is a timeless twist on a contemporary classic - and went down a treat.

Drink is a bit easier - there are bars at most camps, the general rule is that you need a cup to get a drink. I've had mojitos, ice cold beer, rum, bourbon... and some shady red wine... all of course for free. Some places like you to do something in return (donations, recieve a spanking, etc.) but I don't think that necessarily fits with the ethos of giving without expecting something directly in return. It's nice to give without expecting anything in return; equally it's nice to be given something without having to cough up something. That said, there is a place for barter over the market economy.

On Thursday I played a set at a bar on a corner near our camp. They had a sweet system that made me wonder if they kept to the 300W limit, but I don't think anyone complained - not at 6 in the evening. It was my first time playing a live set using Ableton Live - and it went amazingly! The technology worked (and vindicated my decision to lug my laptop and audio controller halfway across the world) for me and the tunes were lapped up - big up Stivs, Drugray, Fix and DJ C. I played again on another system yesterday at about 4pm, and the combination of technical issues, wrong tunes for the time of day, me being really drunk and overconfidence from the previous day's set amounted to a bit of a shambles. But that's the advantage of being 10,000 miles from anyone that knows you!

And then out on the playa there's loads of art everywhere to seek out. Trouble is, that anything further than the man or the temple doesn't really get seen, because it's such a mission to get to. Normally, apparently the playa is much more solid, making cycling a lot more pleasant.

Out To The Playa

2008-09-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 26th August, 12 noon

Wow, what a day! Right now I'm sat in the back of Tony's dad's Dodge bus, who is our Canadian neighbour, our playa family. A good time to take stock and reflect on the last 24 hours. We've just finished making camp, by stringing 2 tarpaulins joined with cable ties across between the bus and our Jeep. It's quite low, but with a temperature of 37C / 99F, shade is golden. We got up at 9.30am this morning, awoken by the sun.

So yesterday we checked out of our motel, found lunch and headed out to find Black Rock City, 120 miles North-by-North-East of Reno (click for route). We filled up the tank and took the 80 East back the way we came for 28 miles. Here, we turned North and stopped at the petrol station, taking stock of the Burning Man folk who were heading the same way. Beautiful, excited, alive with the buzz of the prospect of that which I could not yet imagine. We hit the road to Gerlach with a tense sense of venturing out into the unknown.

I hadn't really been briefed on what to expect out here. I knew there was a festival in the desert. I'd never been to a desert before, so that was fairly meaningless, other than images conjured of hot and dry. My lips were beginning to feel the heat. I am going to test a theory |'ve heard that if you try to refrain from applying artificial substances to your lips, they naturally produce wax to protect them from the elements they face. I'll let you know how it goes. The other things I'd heard are that there is no market economy; no money to exchange for goods. So, we're fully stocked on water and food - ready to cook a few big meals and share, and hopefully others will do the same.

The route to Black Rock City past Pyramid Lake is so sublime the 'scenic route' sign smacks of superfluity. At 6000ft (2000m) elevation, we stand twice as high as the highest point in the UK, but not quite at the top of the Alps. The baking heat renders the soil barely able to sustain life - here and there are dotted trees and shrubs, underneath each of the former a structure takes advantage of the shade. A few settlements line the road, and a couple of Indian Reservations stand proudly in the midst of a strained history. We snaked through, slowed down by a procession closing up becoming a convoy. As we coasted to walking pace, I noticed the wind pick up gently. As I looked to the horizon to hope to make out the oncoming city of the desert, dust clouds obscured visibility beyond a couple of miles. By my calculations, Black Rock City was actually smack in the middle of the dust cloud.

We passed a caravan burnt out to a cinder. It reminded me of the guy we stopped a few days earlier driving with the hitchhikers at night, whose trailer safety chain was dragging along the tarmac, creating an effect like a sparkler. He was grateful. This guy looked less fortunate, the dry heat must've set his caravan up like a tinderbox.

We closed the windows, the dust picking up opacity and velocity to that of a fine morning mist. Still going walking pace, we began to stop occasionally. Then the duration of the stops outweighed the gos and we gradually ground to a halt. Later we found out that this was because they closed the gates because the eye of the dust storm as I'd calculated was causing chaos and they only opened them again after 10 hours - about 9pm. We inched forwards and left the tarmac for a gravel track, and in my excitement I switched to 4 wheel drive. The fine morning mist was becoming full whiteout, with visibility reducing to 50 metres at times. It seemed magical to be sitting in a queue of vehicles, piled high with bicycles, art and who-knows-what, waiting to be taken into a whiteout dust cloud that seemed to make the show and the spectacle as dramatic as could be wished for - but then it depends on whether you wish for semi-apocyliptic conditions I suppose.

As one lane split into 2, then 4, then 6, we took the right lane as directed for the 'will call' tickets - to be picked up on the gate - still inching forwards at 15 minute intervals. We filtered off to the right, and joined the last line of the back of a block of about 500 vehicles, parked away from the main queue. We collected our tickets, and walked back to the car. As I walked back from the toilets, I heard a shout of my name in an English accent. I turned, surprised to find myself standing at the front end of my friends' car, the only people here that I knew before, from my home city of Bristol. I hadn't imagined that finding my friends in a city of 70,000 people - before I'd even thought about looking - was going to be quite that easy!

We caught up on stories, and decided that the only way to get in on that night was going to be the break away from the block we were parked in, and rejoin the main queue. Within an hour, we had out tickets taken, the boot checked for food and water, and were at the greeters. As we were Burning Man virgins, we were initiated into this magical clique in the warmest, friendliest way. We were advised to embrace the dust and the playa, not to fight it.

We split with our friends, who were camped with "Shift", a camp of about 80 where private toilets, showers and 3 meals a day were provided by the camp (for $500!). We took another turn on the road, and another, and in pitch dark looked for a spot. We pulled in, had a quick survey and turned sideways to the prevailing wind. The Dodge bus with Tony, Rosa and Jonas pulled in just after us and we met our playa family. They too were virgins. We shared their cold beers and talked into the night.

Across The United States In Five Days

2008-09-05T16:40:00.000-07:00

Monday 25th August, 11am

We made it to the Biggest Little City in the World. In 5 days, across the U.S. in 2800 miles (click here for the route map). That was some drive. 3 points of note: one, stopped in Chicago and met some nice people; two, picked up some hitchhikers; three, Salt Lake City. On a more general note, sleeping in the back of the Jeep with the seats down just about enables me to stretch out fully, diagonally across. My girlfriend is luckily several inches shorter so fits in beside snugly. Also, the back windows are blacked out adding some degree of privacy, which is nice in a truck rest stop.

So we left Trumansberg last Wednesday, stopping to buy a wheel nut that was missing. The first couple of days were fairly slow going, making it to Lake Erie on Wednesday night. Thursday evening we were passing Chicago and I couldn't resist working hard to convince my girlfriend to take a stop for a beer.

What's been great about this trip so far is how many song lyrics begin to fall into place and make sense on discovering their roots. Bombin' the L by the Fun Lovin' Criminals of course refers to the eLevated train that circuits downtown Chicago and the graffiti artists that frequent it. I found this out from a friendly couple we met just before we gave up looking for a bar at a random stop off the L. They were sitting outside this university building drinking wine out of plastic glasses. The lightbulb flashed above my head and we tracked the free bar down immediately. Our friends were also crashing this uni schmooze event and we hit it off. They later took us to a club on Clark St called Metro, for a dubstep night. Maybe it was just the DJ, but it seems like the style is much lighter, funkier, than dubstep at home. The same is true of the techno we've seen/heard so far.

Seeing our new friends insobriety coupled with the knowledge they were driving home was a chilling thought. I took stock of my 2 drinks over 3 hours and felt comfortable with this, but I can't help noticing that EVERYONE drinks and drives here. Everyone. I guess that having the infrastructure and road system of towns, cities and states built around the car makes alternative forms of transport lurk in the shadows. The primacy of the individual, freedom and choice is fairly axiomatic with the independence of the automobile. And when you're the driver, and drinking and driving is socially acceptable, walking really is a tough option to take. I guess that it comes back to one of my favourite chestnuts, normativity. Back at home, when cycling was the norm for me (I cycled everywhere), I would balk at those that offered me rides for short distances. But now, driving around everywhere, to walk anywhere just seems counterintuitive. I suppose this is why I want to try to show, even just for myself, that flying is not a norm that I want to be a part of my life and so to eliminate it altogether to prevent its creeping frequency becoming normalised and therefore legitimized.

Back on the road again that next day, we drove past a couple of guys walking along the Freeway (which I believe is illegal in Iowa). By the time I thought to pick them up, we were half a mile down the road. My conscience itched, and I got to scratch it only half an hour later in the next town. As we stopped to pick up some more bits and pieces, we saw them in the car park. They saw our New York plates and came over and asked for a ride to California. Well, we took them to the border, over 4 states and about 1600 miles.

Monty and Abel had been riding freight trains, got caught 6 miles before when we saw them on the road, then got picked up by State Troopers and taken to the next town. Monty's best tip was that to orientate yourself with a stationary train, the red lights indicate the back end of the train, that won't be coupled with before leaving. That way you can be sure to go in the right direction.

By Saturday, having crossed Nebraska (flat and boring - except for a majestic footbridge over the road) and Wyoming (beautiful mountains on the border in and out) in a day, we reached Salt Lake City. This heavily industrial city reeks of chemicals, and we passed through it fairly rapidly in order to 'camp' beside the lake just outside the city. After convincing our hitchhiker friends that we weren't going to strand them, they hunkered down in the sand as we tried to make ourselves comfortable in the Jeep.

The excitement grew as we crossed the Nevada border on Sunday morning, and blazed across to Reno. We arrived by dusk, having stocked up on rum, tequila and gin, and parted company with our hitchers. I feel dreadful that we missed our rendezvous with them afterwards - I must've forgotten to wind my pocketwatch as it was running half an hour slow making us late for our meeting under the big scary clown at 11. Monty, Abel if you read this, sorry guys, we were there, just a bit late!

So having checked in and out of the big posh hotel whose windows won't open, we got comfortable in a motel on the main drag. Very comfortable. There's nothing quite better after 5 days of driving than a bed that does Swedish massage for a quarter for 5 minutes. 5 minutes that seem like the longest, sweetest minutes. After getting up, I can't testify to the physical benefits of such massage, but its soothingness that induced a semi-meditative state relaxed me to a state that I felt comfortable in.

And while I'm on the "semi-" lingo, I apologise. For the anglophile reader, you must of course pronounce this sem-eye. One thing I really don't get - what is a semi-truck? Surely it's either a truck, or it's not. A semi-truck? Oh, I give up.

The Road Is In Sight!

2008-09-03T15:42:00.000-07:00

Monday 18th August, 7pm

After a turbulent few days of carhunting, a few breathless moments here and there and a lovely time catching up with old friends, we're nearly ready to leave Trumansburg in upstate New York in our '99 black Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Arriving by bus (click the link to see a route map), we were met at the bus station in Ithaca by a friend of mine from Amsterdam, where we were both born. It's amazing to see someone about 20 years after you last saw them, when that was when you were both knee high to grasshoppers, and sink a few beers together. It was also great to get out of the city and its nitty gritty.

taffy throwing at the local fayre (just after the demolition derby!)

We have ended up staying here a little longer than hoped, leaving less time to cross the States than I would have liked, given that I'm the only one driving. This is our sixth night here, and I'm also a bit apprehensive of outstaying our welcome, particularly as for the last four mornings we've said to our gracious host and friend's housemates that this really would be the last day - which wears a little thin after the third time.

So, after careful inspection of the New York State ID requirements list for the registration of vehicles, it appeared that a NYS Certificate of Title counts as 6 points. Basing our hopes on this, we began all over again looking for vehicles in the Ithaca area. Thankfully my friend lent me his pickup for the 2 days we scoured the area, without which we would really have been up the creek.

We got to a shortlist of 5 options - as long as would we would be able to register it. This was still a major hangup as it then appeared that the title I just mentioned needed to have my details printed on it, not only having bought a car in NYS and having the title signed over. Some saving grace came from the very kind propietor of a car dealership. Tony, having thrown a number of rather large concerts at his house, knows quite a few people in the area and took it upon himself to try to figure out what we could do to get registered.

The next red herring was to get a non-driver ID. So, off we trekked to the Sheriff's Office with the insurance papers as proof of address, which had by now arrived since I'd got insured for the Ranger pickup in New Jersey to my address here. Upon returning to Tony the next day, ID in hand, he informed us it wasn't going to do, as I needed State ID, not just County (the latter of which the Sheriff is responsible for).

Well, needless to say, we did manage to get the car registered. But only through a stroke of fortune, thanks to a nepotist link of Tony's. I *legally* got my ID signed off, and got the plates within minutes. Phew. But, the moral of this story is that AS A FOREIGNER, WITHOUT SOMETHING LINKING YOU OFFICIALLY TO NEW YORK STATE (or a friend with good contacts), YOU CANNOT GET A CAR REGISTERED HERE. Check this list out for items that you need.

So, as proud owners of our first car, we paid $5000 for a big black shiny gasguzzling beast. It's a 4x4. But this is what I campaigned against at home. The title of my blog refers to how I'm trying not to fly in order to minimize my carbon footprint. Am I now the biggest hypocrite walking the earth? Do I have any moral integrity remaining? Will I be able to sleep tonight, before setting off across the United States of America in hot pursuit of the American Dream?

Of course I can sleep at night. I have a car and it goes vroom. Well, it's only a 6 cylinder so it's not quite like those V8 monsters. And it does 20 miles per gallon. Which is better than 10. But not quite 30.

There's a whole load of stats and debates out there about flying vs driving, mpgs, and carbon use. I'm going to give my take on it, and welcome comments. I think that one person driving in a car is a bad and inefficient use of carbon. Four in a car is good. Hence, 2 in a car is borderline (which there is in our case). Second, it is easy to compare car mpg against plane mpg per passenger (assuming an average loading of the plane) - but this doesn't take into account how damaging the emissions are at the elevation at which they are released. At 30,000ft they do a LOT more damage. Third, I fight what battles I can by focussing on those that are winnable. I believe the aviation industry is unsustainable and consumer demand can stop the growth projections that fuel demand for more and bigger airports. I believe the net effect of standing up and loudly and proudly refusing to fly is a positive one with the potential to generate waves of reaction as other consider their own willingness to fly. Who knows. But for me, the sky is over the limit.

2 Great American Institutions: Pizza and Cars

2008-08-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

Tuesday 12th August

In NYC I'm trying my hardest to avoid cliched tourist experiences. So no trip up the Statue of Liberty, no Empire State Building and certainly no WTC site visit. A couple have slipped through the net though, allowed to do so as they're enjoyed by locals alike. The first was yesterday, when we took a trip to Coney Island to check out the beach. Although Coney Island is not surrounded by water as such, it has a long South facing sandy beach. We were glad for the hazy sunshine, but it never quite got sticky enough to need to go for a swim. We couldn't pass up a ride on the Cyclone, a wooden rickety rollercoaster that gives a great view over the bay before plunging into a series of, even for my age, fairly stomach-churning turns.

The second was yesterday, on a food tip. After walking from Union Square to the Brooklyn Bridge to get the water taxi, we discovered that it had stopped service for the night. So, walking 6 blocks back in, in order to get onto the bridge, we crossed the Hudson on foot over the Brooklyn Bridge, as dusk had set in, affording lush views behind us over Manhattan, to the right out of the Hudson Bay and in front over Brooklyn. So having walked solidly for what seemed like 6 hours (okay maybe 3 with breaks), finding a 60 metre queue outside Grimaldis, at 9.15pm on a Monday, we were beginning to doubt the wisdom of our choice of dining experience.

view under the Brooklyn Bridge Southwards

In New York, as I am told by our more-than-gracious Brooklyn-based hosts, the best way to choose your dining venue is to imagine what experience you want. Obviously, good nosh is paramount, but to refine your options down you need to think about what kind of experience you want to go with your pizza. Although queueing for an hour didn't factor highly into the experience I wanted, Grimaldis have been turning out great pizzas for over 100 years. And at under £15 for a flaggon of wine and a 96 inch pizza (easily enough for 2 very hungry walkers - that's actually a litre and 18" for the litiguous amongst you), I felt compelled to try my hardest to convince my very hungry and grumpy girlfriend to stand patiently more than a stone's throw from the entrance. I did it by going of to find somewhere else to eat, and taking a very long time over it...

Was it worth it? Hell yeah! I so nearly bought their T-shirt until my more pragmatic girlfriend vetoed the idea.

If you happen be in New York City, with someone whose company you enjoy enough not to need alcohol to share a meal with, I'd recommend where we ate on Saturday night, for those interested in a less patience-wearing experience (even I'm talking the lingo now, I mean meal). The Bedouin Tent on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn does lush Lebanese food, with a nice back garden to eat in. Again the right side of £15 for 2, and highly recommended.

Wednesday 13th August 2008
6pm

What a ballache this is proving to be. From the various sites I'd read, I'd imagined buying a car in the US to be a lot less hassle than this.

I checked it out - a UK driving license entitles you to drive in most States (but check each one out - I know Florida doesn't) for up to 12 months before you have to get a local one. Insurance I thought would be the hardest with only 18 months of driving experience - in addition to being a foreigner - but a call to GMAC showed that I could quite easily be insured. I read on a forum there was only one underwriter that would insure foreigners - and they demand 2 years experience - I forget who they are but this is bullshit, probably courtesy of their PR department. Part 3 is registration...

So for those reading this thinking of doing the same, here's the process. You find the vehicle you want. You get insured on it, doable over the phone. You get the insurance company to fax you the insurance card you need in order to register. Then, you go to a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) office (also known by other names in other states of the US), with the title signed over to you and/or a Bill of Sale, the insurance card AND SUITABLE PROOF OF ID.

This is the chestnut that we failed to pick up on until we'd gone over to New Jersey 3 times. On Saturday, we went over to check out a pickup truck at a dealer. It looked great at a good price. I wanted a mechanic to give us a second opinion, as without my dad at my shoulder, I didn't feel grown up enough to make an educated judgement. Garages close at weekends, so on Monday morning I went back, another 40 minutes on the New Jersey Transit. Stopping in at the first garage, I spoke to the mechanic. He didn't know the dealer personally (hence more likelihood of an objective judgement), and happened to drive himself a Ford Ranger, the model I was after. Further, he seemed Latin American so I spoke in Spanish to him, explained our plans, and we chatted for a while. He came and had a look at it, and plugging his computer in saw that one cylinder was mis-firing.

But on the way he told me about a friend of his that had a better one, again the same model. So on Tuesday, we went again, another 40 minutes, to have a look at this one. It seemed perfect, so he signed the title over and I gave him the cash. I called the insurance company and got it insured, then got the train back to New York City.

Since 9-11, New York State has increased the stringency of its ID requirements. Without a New York State driving license, a foreign passport and a credit card is only 4 out of 6 ID points. This, I discovered this morning at the DMV office in Brooklyn. My girlfriend has just come back from New Jersey, thankfully with the money back (minus $100 for the day he took off work and to get a replacement title). She says he seemed kind of glad in a way to not be parting with it, and genuinely sorry for us. We're getting on a bus to upstate NY in half an hour.

New York City Gritty Commitee Pity the Fool...

2008-08-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

... that acts shitty in the midst of the calm and the witty.

Thursday 7th August 2008
6am

So.... New York City. By sunrise. Quite a sight. And coming up the Hudson sure is a great way to arrive. Cunard should pay me for writing this. Well, after 6 days at sea, it's a relief to see dry land. I'm going to miss this though. The free room service. The ever-clean bathroom. And the evening turndowns.

We're floating in towards Brooklyn, police helicopter escorts like flies in the sky. We pass the Statue of Liberty over on the West Bank (of the Hudson, not the Dead Sea), with New Jersey behind it. In front, the Manhattan skyline glistens with office windows like stars in a concrete sky. The crimson sunrise just to the right sets the scene as I stand on deck in my Elegant Casual wear from last night, jeans, a shirt and my suit jacket. Later, I'll wish I hadn't bothered with the jacket, as the continuous cooling effect of the Atlantic at 20 knots has melted away.

Friday
11pm

Somewhere out here there's an old skool jungle night recommended by DJ C. Not that we can find it. We're sitting in The Four Faced Liar on West 4th St, and I'm drinking a double Wild Turkey bourbon and cola (thankfully not Coca-Cola). It comes recommended by a couple of students as the least expensive in the area. Love, the club hosting this night we're looking for, hasn't appeared on our radar. In finding the nearest place to its supposed location, we entered a jazz club seeking libation. After dodging the $20 door tax each, we pored over the drinks list, and finding mediocre cocktails for £7 a pop we hastily re-emerged onto West 8th St, collaring the nearest folks for their advice.

Last night, we had dinner at Marlow and Sons. The proprietors also happen to be our truly wonderful hosts. As family of dear friends of ours, they have very kindly agreed to put us up for a few nights while we find our feet.

What they've helped create made me warm inside not just my stomach. My calamari were absolutely fresh and perfectly soft, not slightly chewy and slid down like butter. On a fishy tip, I went for scallops for main, which were served just as I like them - lightly seared on one side - on a bed of greens, served in a bowl. Mmmm mmmmn. Very tasty food, served in the antithesis of pretentiously formal dining environments - cosy, friendly and comfortable. My partner's homemade chorizo was like none other I've tasted (even from The Better Food Company in Bristol), all meat, none of those chunks of fat that really put me off. It reminded me of Bordeaux Quay, excellent food rooted in a strong philosophy. And the waitress explained the whole menu without having to look once. Cool.

What these guys are famous for pioneering in New York is the resurgence of the grass-fed cow movement. Yes, that's where the address of this blog comes from, in case you were wondering. Ecologically speaking, it promises many things for the States. Coming from a background where veganism is a radical political ecological solution to our carbon problems, part of me feels uncomfortable advocating solutions that involve the subjugation of animals for human consumption. But while many of my friends are, I'm not vegan. If it's local and organic, I'll eat it. I object wholeheartedly to factory farming, and make every effort to avoid buying such meat or dairy products. I try to only eat meat a few times a week, and at home cooked 90% vegan.

So, grass fed cows. It's about ecosystems. Grass pastures put carbon back into the soil. They support species that break down cow dung faster and better. Pastures support ecosystems of worms, insects, and birds. A crucial part of the argument against dairy herds is that such a huge proportion of the carbon helping cause climate change comes from cow farts. Corn fed cows fart more than their grass fed friends. Ergo, less farts mean less climate change.

Now this isn't just some trendy, marketable label to greenwash us into happy and healthy consumerism (or is it?). For Marlow and Sons, along with this goes the whole philosophy of raising consciousness about what we eat, and understanding every step of the process from calf to cappucino. Calves separated from their mothers at 12 weeks simply have not developed the stomach linings in order to properly digest their food. Hence the farting, from improperly digested food.

I think it is the duty of every food industry proprietor to know and have seen the farms and met the farmers from which their food is sourced. Of course, the catering industry itself can be argued to be fundamentally unsustainable. I think that the economies of scale also weigh in though - it's better than prepacked TV dinners. And it's more sociable. Either way, I found the whole experience fascinating - to see food politics approached radically, in a very cool way. Their journal, Diner Journal, is a beautiful piece of art lapped up by New York coffee bars and coffee tables. I want a subscription for my birthday please.

Like Dolphins Out Of Water

2008-08-10T18:10:00.000-07:00

5th August 2008
6.30pm

Oh yeah. Sitting alone in a hottub. There's something decadent about it. Mmmmm Hmm. Deckchairs to my left. Glass of bubbly to my right. Actually, a plastic flute, for the Scottish waiter has just decanted it from the glass because apparently before Southampton they had to close the pool for 5 hours because someone broke a glass. And in front is the deck below. In front again, the deck further below, with its pool and 2 other hottubs. Then below that, the Atlantic Ocean. As far as the eye can see. 1500 miles away lies Britain, Europe and Bristol. 4 days ago we left Southampton on the Queen Mary 2.

15 minutes ago, we saw about 12 dolphins skimming the surface. Well, my girlfriend reckons they're dolphins. I think they look like seabass, they're just not big enough to be dolphins. But she thinks the incredible proportions of the ship makes them look so small. I still reckon they're fish. Maybe not seabass, but fish nonetheless. Tuesday, we saw whales stopping for breath.

It's all a bit too perfect really. It is raining though. Which, in a hottub is quite refreshing. I feel a bit like a dolphin out of water on this ship, the average age here is about 2.4 generations above mine. And the luxury makes me feel a little queasy, even if the ship doesn't. At 148,000 odd tonnes we just glide through the water on this celebration of modernity, a triumph of human over its natural surroundings. The bubbly is The Co-op's finest Cava, fiver, smuggled on board. Nice. Bit of an 'edge' though.

The proportions of this beast are incredulous. With 14 decks; 4 stairways, in each of which a symmetrical double stairway flanks either side of a bank of 6 lifts; 1500 crew; 2500 passengers; 8 restaurants; 2 cocktail bars; a Champagne bar (apparently for I've not found it); a cigar lounge; a Boardroom (in which Masons met yesterday at 12.15pm); a gym; a Health Spa; 3 pools; 7 hottubs; a dance hall (the "Queens Room"); a 400 seat theatre to rival the Old Vic in Bristol; 'Illuminations', a 400 seat lecture theatre that doubles as a planetarium; and, of course a pub, The Golden Lion. We cruise at 24 knots, below the maximum speed of 29 knots, and at night we go even slower. Apparently, we could cross the Atlantic in 3 and a half days...

Nevertheless, at higher speeds the fuel economy increases by a factor of 2: that means to say an increase in speed demands an increase in power squared, because of the extra drag required and the resultant fuel needed. It's a similar reasoning to why everyone drives at 70 on the motorways at home these days with fuel prices as they are, 4 times what they were when I arrived in the UK 17 years ago - double what they were 5 years ago. This also justifies the slower speeds I suppose.

I am beginning to doubt the environmental reasons that we chose to avoid flying to the States. After a quick review of the 3 sea options available, we chose this as the cheapest. 148,000 tonnes. That needs a bit more than a V8 engine or 2. But, I concile in the knowledge that the carbon emitted at sea level is at least ten times less damaging to the ozone layer than when flying at 30,000 feet. I would love to see the statistics though, for I think it's a close call.

The sea has been, for what I've heard of the Atlantic's reputation at this time of year, fabulously calm. I am tense with anticipation of arriving in New York tomorrow. The other reason for travelling by sea is to savour the distance of the trip. With a 2 hour 'plane journey (or whatever it takes), you don't quite appreciate the miles you travel. And, to boot, Eastbound over the Atlantic, we get an extra hour's sleep every night. Better than having to stay up an extra 5 after the plane journey and waking up at 3 in the morning with nothing to do for the next 4 days, falling asleep over dinner.

We've met some lovely people. In an hour, I'm going to dinner in the main restaurant, the 'Brittania', where we have a table sharing with a delightful Yorkshire couple. I might grab myself a Tanqueray 10 martini with a grapefruit twist from the Commodore Club on the way: other than the pub, it's the only other indoor smoking venue. It's a bit surreal being able to smoke indoors, but then it pales in comparison to being able to see out of the front of the ship from my seat with the Atlantic on the horizon.

I've got into a bit of a daily routine aboard, the only way to apply some rational order in this otherwise flagrantly crazy microworld. After buffet breakfast at 'Kings Court' (waffle, maple syrup, asparagus & cheese omelette, bacon, perfectly chopped mushrooms, beans & hash browns) I head up to the Atlantic Room up on deck 11 at the bow end for 9.30am. This morning was my last bridge lesson there, with our instructor (Jim) who my Australian friends on my table tell me is very good. Then I head straight for the gym - I've never set foot in one before, but with free rein I couldn't resist seeing what all the fuss is about. Afterwards, I head up to the Pavilion Pool (the indoor one) for a shower and dip in the hottub there. Then down to 'Illuminations' for a lecture by an astronomer about galaxies and suchlike, a series of daily lectures, followed by lunch. Afternoons are a bit less structured (phew), normally involving gin (smuggled aboard).

The atmosphere for dinner is determined by one of three dress codes for the journey (formal, semi-formal and elegant casual). We have a reservation as standard in the 'Britannia' restaurant, but last night we reserved a table in 'Lotus', the Eastern fusion quarter of Kings Court. It was a tastings menu, 8 dishes in 5 courses, and rather tasty, washed down with regularly replenished green tea. We had a good natter with the waiter, from Croatia, about how things work for the staff. They work a minimum of 3 months aboard at a time (9 months for Philipinos, because of the higher costs of flying them home), 7 days a week. Bogdan, our waiter, works split shifts, up at 5 every morning and finishing at about 11. Which means that he can't sleep more than 6 hours a night. For 3 months. Wow.

My best night has got to be the night before last, the night of the crew party. Once a month, they shut the late night drinking holes early(ish) and let their hair down in the luggage hold. The Carribean band Vibes did a linkup with the saxophonist and played some skankin reggae / ragga mashup. The sight of the crew members laughing genuinely and having a drink cut the pretentiously stifling atmosphere of the ship that made it so alien, like nothing else could. It was a sweaty, sexually charged air that I hadn't quite experienced before. And it didn't last long. After about 25 minutes, the ship's duty officer appeared behind me at my shoulder, beckoning with her finger. Asking for our key cards, we walked to the hallway, made our excuses and left.