7th Wonder

Cuzco :: Peru

The other Lost City of the Incas.

Places: Machu Picchu & Cuzco.

Coolest thing I did: Watched the clouds and mist slowly clear to reveal Machu Picchu, as a reward for walking for 3 days to get there.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The avocado was originally from Peru. How they failed to invent guacamole is beyond me.

Sometimes when you travel around for long enough you get a bit jaded about things having become too touristy, and being forced to say "no gracias" about once every 60 seconds or so walking around the streets of Cuzco to offers of massages, paintings and food doesn't put you in the mood for a proper adventure. However, you often forget in your cynicism that some things really do live up to the hype.

Walking for 4 days to Machu Picchu along the Inca Trail is one of those things.

Now let's be clear, since the government limited the numbers of people who walk the Inca Trail from infinity to somewhere around 120 a day the prices have risen, but so has the service. This is probably the poshest camping I've ever done in my life. Not only are you basically carrying your personal effects for the day, but an army of porters from the local area carry your tents, tents to cook and eat in, and everything else that goes in it. There's a chef that comes along, so you get fed about 5000 calories a day of really good food and the guides all speak several languages and are ridiculously knowledgeable about all things Inca. After the grunt work of carrying all our stuff in and out of Huaraz it was much, much easier.

The trek itself takes in many lesser Inca sites along the way, many cleared and reconstructed so you turn a corner and find terraces dropping down the hillsides right in front of you, or roofless fortresses sticking out of shelves carved into the cliff faces. I'll say this for the Incas: they had a flair for the dramatic in the placement of their buildings.

The second day of the trek is the only one that you would consider a serious challenge to someone of average fitness, with a 1,200m climb to 4,200m to a point called Dead Woman pass, which inevitably leads to a whole bunch of jokes directed to every woman that climbs it. However, the name comes from that fact that at a distance it looks like there is the upper half of a woman in profile sitting at the base of the pass, complete with what the guide liked to refer to as a "titty". This was also the day that one of the Brazilians in our group got hit hard to by the lack of oxygen and basically dragged himself up the hill in bits. Even with a serious hit of oxygen from the emergency supply he never really recovered enough and by the last day he was almost being carried. I'm glad even with my altitude problems at their worst I was never hit that bad.

The third day is a long one, but it involve many stops at Inca sites along the way and a very spectacular stretch through the cloud forest on the far side of the ranges as you drop down toward MP. The terrain over 4 days goes quickly from forest, to dry exposed hillside down to jungle on the other side. You've constantly reminded about how seriously the Andes divides the country and creates these micro climates, and why the Andes may well have been the only place outside Mesopotamia in modern day Iraq where man started agriculture independently.

The 4th day starts at 4am, with a climb up to the Sun Gate, the traditional first glimpse of MP that you get from the end of the Inca Trail. When we got there (basically last) pretty much everyone of all the various groups we'd seen over the previous 3 days were sitting at there, waiting for said glimpse. What we got instead was a cliff dropping into a perfect sheet of white. The sun came over the hill, shined it's rays down in the direction of MP and we were still waiting to see the damn thing. By 8am the guide decided it was unlikely to clear in the next couple of hours so we kept down the path towards our goal. It was probably almost 2/3rds of the way down before we got our first sighting of one of the New Wonders of the World.

Having seen many Inca sites on the lead up you think you're ready, but nothing really prepares you to see the huge numbers of terraces zigzagging down the hillside, overlooked by temples and living quarters and all watched over with rocky vigilance by the peak of Huayna Picchu. At first we were only getting either the citadel or the mountain not covered by cloud, so were frustrated in the goal of getting that photo that's appeared on a thousand postcards (and that you're probably already familiar with) but by mid-morning the cloud had lifted and we could see the whole thing.

And the couple of thousands of day trippers up from Cuzco or nearby Aguas Calientes. You get so used to sharing the trail with a select group who you've been meeting all along the way you get almost offended at your first site of someone else. It's amusing to see people who caught the bus up traipsing around in perfectly clean, brand new hiking gear for half a day while you smell like you've slept in your clothes for 4 days, mostly because you've been sleeping in your clothes for 4 days. By lunch time it gets almost out of control, so that you can't walk 5 metres without your way being blocked by a tour group who got there on a bus while they sit there and have facts bounce of them in about 9 different languages. I know it's something that everyone should be able to see, but at the time I strictly thought if you walked that long to get there the least they could do is limit the tour groups to an hour in the late afternoon, once I was done with the place. You get some funny thoughts.

As I was the only one in our group who had been warned, I was the only one who had bought the extra ticket to climb Huayna Picchu to get a view back over MP and all the way we'd just come since the morning. By the time I started at 11am the sun was blazing down on the side of the peak, and to be honest some of the steps came up to my waist. The whole thing would be made a little more manageable if you didn't have to stop behind really fat people who hadn't been warned that climbing hundreds of really steep steps would actually be hard, but I still managed to get up in a reasonable time for a 360 degree view over the valley below. What's even nuttier is the Incas built structures all the way up there, including terraces that I  assume were agricultural (because they all seemed to be agricultural, or retaining walls). That would have been a pain in the arse to get up there to water them.

No such problem in MP itself. There's a massive system of aqueducts that were used to irrigate the hundreds of terraces you see, and about a third of them are still working after 500 years of neglect, despite all the earthquakes and landslides since. This has led to some theories that the place was a large scale lab for cross breeding different plants to grow at altitude, as there isn't enough flat land there to feed a population the size the place probably had at it's peak. This is one of many, many facts that bounced off the front of my head that day.

So who built the place, and why? There's endless theories, but it's known that it was one of the later Inca sites, and it must have been fairly important, because when the last Inca emperor to resist Spanish rule led them on a wild goose chase out into the jungle he made damn sure to skirt MP and leave it undiscovered for centuries. They instead led them to the city of Vilacamba, some 100km away from Cuzco and had their last bloody stand there. So when the Spanish looted Vilacamba and burnt the place to the ground, MP survived nearly intact. With the notable exceptions of grave robbers, both local and foreign, they remained as such until a local farmer led the Yale professor Hiram Bingham up the hill and the first scientific discovery of the site in 1912. He had been on an expedition to find Vilacamba, the Lost City of the Incas, and assumed that with it's sheer size that Machu Picchu must have been it. He also carted off a whole crapload of Inca stuff to Yale and they remain in a museum there, much to the chagrin of the Peruvian people. In the last few years the demands for their return have rivalled those of the Greeks petitioning for the return of the Elgin Marbles from the British Museum.

The Andean people in general were crazy about lining things up for the cardinal points and having the light hit certain things during equinoxes, and that has of course led to a whole lot of mystic mumbo jumbo being speculated about the place. If I never hear another ageing American hippie talking at high volume about ley lines or the healing power of the earth it will be too soon.

Due to the high cost of the Inca Trail (due to the laws of supply and demand brought on by limiting the numbers) many people choose to do other hikes to get to MP, but I'm glad I did it the old school way. Besides MP itself, I think the highlight for me was the stretch leading up into the cloud forest, where the trail seems to disappear into the clouds themselves, with the wind occasionally clearing it long enough for you to see way down into the green valleys below. There's something otherworldly about walking through clouds that has to be experienced to be believed.

Jesus and the guinea pig

Cuzco :: Peru

A town that's more of a life support system for Machu Picchu than anything else.

Places: Cuzco.

Coolest thing I did: Took in the many buildings the Spaniards built by tearing down all the existing Inca buildings and using them as pseudo-quarries.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The pre-Colombian people of South America weren't literate like we understand, so they used big bunches of strings with knots tied in them, called quipus to record stuff. They had histories, maps and accounting information all encoded in the knots. Computer geeks dig that kind of stuff.

Even if you've never planned a trip to Peru, one of the only things you've almost certainly heard of is the jewel in the crown of pre-Colombian archaeological sites in South America; Machu Picchu. The closest town to MP is the old Inca imperial capital of Cuzco, so if you're planning a visit to MP, either on a day trip or at the end of the famous Inca Trail, you're going to spend at least a bit of time here. If you're like me, for the first time in all of Peru you're also going to get the feeling you've found somewhere spoiled by mass tourism. It's a stunningly beautiful town marred by not being able to walk the streets as a gringo without being constantly harassed by someone selling handicrafts, offering massages or trying to wedge you into their restaurant.

As I mentioned last time, I've had to spend a few idle days here acclimatising before starting the Inca Trail, so of course the first thing I did is spend Friday drinking practically no water, eating massive meals (you should have seen the mountain of fries that came with my half roast chook) and going out till the wee hours of Saturday morning. In order to prepare for altitude you should stay well hydrated, eat light meals and avoid alcohol, but man, how boring would that be?

A word of warning to anyone planning a big night out at 3600 metres above sea level - you get drunk really quick and the hangover is magnified by about 10.

I'm not sure if the indio influence is really stronger here than in the rest of the country, or whether it's just hammed up for the package tourists, but the streets here are thronged with women in traditional dress trying to sell you stuff made of alpaca wool that's usually woven into a design that contains llamas on it. For the first time in all of Peru I'm being confronted with dirty children begging and old people sitting in the gutter looking miserable. Again, I'm not sure if this is just because of the proximity of so much gringo cash but I do find it strange that you didn't encounter this kind of stuff in the north so much.

Most of the sites you visit in Cuzco are colonial structures sitting on the original Inca stonework (which was pretty sturdy), with the stones used mostly coming from the remains of Sacsayhuaman, the fortress that used to watch over Cuzco during the Inca days. The most famous of these was Qoricancha, which used to be the original Sun Temple, the holiest place in all of the Inca empire. When Pizarro was conquering Peru he once captured the Inca (emperor) and ransomed him off for a whole room full of gold and silver. Most of that was stripped off the Sun Temple and melted down by the Spaniards. When Pizarro took control of Cuzco for good he left his brother in charge, who donated the temple and grounds to the Dominicans, who pretty much tore it down and built a church and monastery on the foundations. Some of the original temple has recently been rebuilt inside, using descriptions provided by the early Spanish conquistadors (they wrote quite a few books on the Incas) but most of the stone is now being used elsewhere.

The main cathedral is a object study in how the native religions were co-opted into Catholicism. There is a famous painting of the last supper next to the main alter which shows Jesus and his boys chowing down on some cuy (guinea pig) and most of the pictures of Mary are basically a white woman's head superimposed on the body of Pachamama, the earth goddess. It was through this process that the Spanish managed to convert the natives to Catholicism. The patron of the city is also housed in the cathedral, Senor de los Temblores (lord of the earthquakes), a large wooden statue of a crucified Jesus that gets paraded around the town at Easter. The name alone should tell you the locals are fairly pre-occupied with the fact their city is knocked over and needs to be rebuilt every 50 years or so. The cathedral is full of holy iconography, a lot of it far more spectacular than the stuff in Lima, and in another nod to pre-Colombian traditions the Peruvians like their Jesus bloody. You get used to seeing the clean, sanitised European art of the Passion of Christ back on the old continent, but the indios were ever going to believe a man with nails driven through his hands  and feet was going to end up with a couple of neat blood spots on each wrist. These people used to sacrifice humans, after all. Much like Qoricancha, the cathedral was built on the site of the Inca's palace and used up all the stone that said palace used to consist of. All of this stuff shows just how brutal the Spanish conquest was and how the large percentage of the population who pretty much still look like they did in Inca times is able to retain a grudge against the white people who rule them from Lima.

So I've had my briefing and been given a lovely yellow t-shirt stating I survived the Inca Trail (I wonder if I have to give it back if I don't survive?) and tomorrow morning I'm finally getting started.

All watched over by volcanoes

Arequipa :: Peru

Also, Juanita the Ice maiden.

Places: Arequipa, Chivay, Cabanaconde, Cruz del Condor & the Colca Canyon.

Coolest thing I did: Hiked up the Colca  Canyon starting in the dark, with the sun revealing snowcaps and sheer cliffs all around as the climb progressed.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The sap of an actual aloe vera cactus smells like beef. Why has no-one marketed beef scented skin products to men?

It wasn't until the last day in Arequipa I had a day clear enough to realise that these people live cheek to jowl with three fairly mean looking active volcanoes. Getting up this morning I was greeted by a perfect autumn morning that allowed me for the first time to make out the perfect cone of El Misti right behind the twin spires of the main cathedral and the mangled peak of Chachani off to it's right. There have been people growing stuff in the fertile volcanic earth around the city since at least the time of the Incas, but like most places in the world where the town is juxtaposed directly with a mountain or two that likes to spew hot ash every now and then (apparently the last time it happened here the ash blew over the town for a mere 8 years or so) you wonder if this is a really good long-term survival strategy.

I'm in Arequipa today when I should be camped out at El Misti's base camp at 4800 metres because it seems that it's again really hard to organise stuff as a solo traveller in Peru. Every travel agency in town offers treks to the Colca Canyon but pooling enough people together to want to climb a volcano together seems to be beyond their powers. I had been told I'd be able to go up with a trio of American lads who ended up being on my tour to the Colca Canyon, but it turns out one of them wasn't fit enough for the mild 2 hour climb out of the canyon so they decided the 5 hour climb from the base camp of El Misti to the summit at 5825m starting at 1am was a bit much. So despite my best efforts to find another group going on the only free two days I have left before I have to be in Cusco to prepare for the Inca Trail, it looks like I won't be doing it on this trip. Which got me down, before I remembered I'd never even heard of El Misti a week ago and vaguely had even heard of Arequipa.

The reason most people come to Arequipa, besides to take pictures of old, white building is to go on a trek into the Colca Canyon, by a whisker the second deepest canyon anywhere in the world. I elected to do it over three days instead of two, which most people are into.

The first stop is always the Cruz del Condor, one of the best places in the canyon to see the giant Andean Condors at work. After a 3am wake-up and 5 hours in a minibus we were very lucky to see a condor perched right below the road the second the bus pulled up next to the 25 or so other minibuses that were already there, and managed to see not only condors gliding effortlessly up in the high air currents of the canyon, but also many acts of high dickheadery by tourists looking for a better photo. Seriously, if there are fences next to a several hundred metre drop you probably don't want to climb over them.

The first day had drop all the way down into the canyon to the river below, then climb not too far to the village the two dayers have lunch at, which gave us ample time for our guide, from the nearby village to show us every plant in the area had some use to the locals, be it to eat (man, did I eat a lot of figs that afternoon), use as medicine, glue & quite awesomely, parasites that live in cactus that people in Lima will pay by the kilo for to be turned into organic lipstick. I'm always a bit sceptical of some of the magical claims ascribed to some of the plants, but in this part of the world tradition a folk lore will trump a double blind clinical trial any day of the week.

It was also quite lucky for our guide that she was so close to her parents home, as she tore her pants and was able to climb through her Mum's window (she wasn't home) and get another pair.

The second day takes you back down the gorge to Sangalle, which used to be some pools to swim in that has been turned into a full resort town. Each of the groups of bungalows has a concrete pool, usually with a single wall made of a massive natural rock that was too hard to move that are fed from the waterfall up the valley so the water circulates through and is constantly clean. On the way we only stopped to try some chicha, a beer made of fermented corn that is common all along the Andes. I'd tried it's unsweetened version in Colombia, but gave up trying to get drunk on it after three cups (that one was 2% ABV), however we were promised the Peruvian version was much better, as it was fermented longer for more punch. However, being chock full of sugar it was hard to tell, and I was pretty happy to only go through one cup, it being so sickly sweet I could have had a little vomit.

So Sangalle was good to us, giving us a lazy, sunny afternoon to go swimming, drink room temperature beer (the real stuff, not chicha) and talk nonsense amongst ourselves. As the two day trek sleeps in the same place we got a whole influx of people arriving just as the sun was setting and the rain started. While doing the whole thing over three days goes at a pretty lazy pace, you do get a bit more time to yourself, which is good for someone as allergic to organised tours as I am.

The best part for me was starting at 5am in the dark back up the mountain to arrive back in the hamlet of Cabanaconde as it was probably the only part of the trek that really made you work, with several hundred metres to climb before breakfast. As the light slowly starts to hit the valley you can make out the multicoloured cliffs on all sides starting to poke through the clouds and mist that will clear throughout the morning. In the distance you get the sunrise striking the snowcaps of nearby volcanoes in the background and the snow and clouds both reflect dawns golden hues.

Due to the altitude issues of my early days in Huaraz I thought it better to go at a constant, steady pace and do the projected 3 hour climb in about 2 hours. Along the way I graciously stepped aside to let a group of young guys, Americans and Brits from the accent pass as they were obviously in a hurry. However it became fairly obvious that 3 of the 5 were going way too fast, with me overtaking them every 10 mins or so as they panted on the corner of a switchback, only to have them charge past me again on the way up. It turns out that these were the guys my hostel had organised for me to climb El Misti with later in the week, but at the time I didn't realise I was watching that trip fade in their youthful inability to pace themselves. This I can forgive, but one of the rest of their group kind of ruined my morning.

On my arrival to the top, possibly the 5th or 6th person up I was able to get a full panorama of the valley as the sun was just starting to pierce down into the depths of the river at the bottom, something that would have been awe inspiring to behold in contemplative silence. Instead I got the sound of an Oxbridge accent trumpeting his sheer awesomeness of being the first up the mountain and how the woman at the top who was selling food and drinks gave him a free banana as a reward. It would have been cool if it stopped there, but I had to listen to this tale retold to everyone one of the 60 or so people who reached the lip of the canyon, and his constant update on how long he'd been waiting at the top. A big part of me wished I'd gone up at full pace, just so I could have beaten him and sat there without saying a word, just to take away his ability to continue to expound on his hill climbing and banana receiving talents, but then you have to remind yourself that some people are just dicks, and are best ignored.

An hour in some hot springs and a full buffet lunch restored my good humour and despite the lookout at the high pass back to Arequipa being pointless to stop at, due to the clouds reaching right to the lip of the valley below it was a fairly pleasant ride back to town. The sun was well and truly out and it was possible to make out the agricultural terraces that made these valleys farmable all along every steep surface it was feasible to carve them in.

The people around Arequipa are probably as close to the stereotypical descendants of the Andean natives as it's possible to imagine, with all of them being short, broad and able to function quite well on a 1/3rd of the oxygen the rest of us usually deal with. Like most of the Latin American countries there is still a very stark divide in the visual appearance of the taller, light skinned European descendants that people the better parts of Lima and the natives that live in the rest of the country, and unlike Lima, Arequipa is small enough for you to pass the mass slums that have built up around it since the large scale migration of rural people into the cities started as agricultural productivity has risen since the 1960s. However, the divide in Peru feels far more stark than it did in any of the other countries I've visited (with the possible exception of Mexico) and that has been a constant tension pretty much since the time of Pizarro.

Over the years the indios have risen up various times, but the most recent and violent of those uprising has scarred much of Peru's modern history. Much like the FARC in Colombia or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the victory of Fidel Castro's communists in Cuba inspired a local professor of philosophy, Abimael Guzman to start an armed revolution that would come pretty close to civil war territory in the 1980s and early 90s. Due to long standing divisions in Peruvian society it became fairly easy for his group, Shining Path to recruit young people in the poor rural areas of the Andean foothills to their cause and despite their dwindling power since Guzman's arrest in 1992 they managed to shape much of the modern politics since. The President who brought the Shining Path to heel, Alberto Fujimori did manage to restore the country to some sort of order, but he was later convicted of crimes against humanity and corruption, mostly due to his involvement with directing extra-judicial killings by right-wing death squads who had been given carte blanche to do whatever they needed to to bring down the Shining Path. Latin American history across the whole continent has depressingly familiar themes.

So my Inca Trail deadline is approaching fast, and I can't really think of enough stuff to do to justify another day in Arequipa so it's off to Cusco tonight on the night bus. I did manage to spend some time today seeing another of the ice mummies the Inca left on the mountain tops as a sacrifice to stop things like El Nino (the other I saw was in Salta in Argentina). Juanita, the Ice maiden was found on top of a volcano near Arequipa but due to the fact she'd slid down the crater sometime in the last 500 years her face is severely damaged but you can still make out the wrinkles in her skin and the colour of her fingernails on the parts of her that remained hidden from the elements. Despite the guide telling us there were no other ice mummies on display anywhere in South America (hmmm...) it was just as creepy to see a girl 500 years old so perfectly preserved again. It did also take up a whole hour of my day, between breakfast and a surprisingly good cerviche for lunch, mostly because we're so far from the sea you'd not think much of fish steamed in lime juice and chilli.

The next one of these I write should come after I've seen Machu Piccu, only the second of the New Seven Wonders of the World I get to see on this trip!

Snowboards & Spacemen

Arequipa :: Peru

Moving fast with my first deadline in ages looming.

Places: Huacachina, Nazca & Arequipa.

Coolest thing I did: Flew over the highly mysterious Nazca lines in a tiny little light plane.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The strangely yellow Inca Cola has about the same amount of caffeine as Coca Cola. That would explain why it's done nothing for my sleep when I've replaced one with the other.

I'm being repeatedly amazed by just how different the scenery is in different parts of Peru. After a night bus got me to Lima from Huaraz just in time to change buses to Ica I already felt overdressed for the heat. Arriving in Ica, the pivot town that gets you to my goal of Huacachina I felt the change even more readily, the fact being there's a 500m high sand dune right in the middle of the city. Once you get away from the Andes the coastal region of southern Peru turns pretty quickly into ultra dry desert, and the reason you'd keep going to Huacachina rather than Ica is it's an oasis that kind of sits at suburban distance from the main town itself, and as a result is chock full of tourist goodness.

Huacachina is a briny green pool you'd think more than twice about swimming in surrounded by massive sand dunes, and it's those sand dunes that attract most of the backpackers who want to slide down them on boards. Unlike the time I did this in Floripa in Brazil, the sand dunes are high enough in places to be way too painful to walk up, so you go at sunset in a 9 person dune buggy out into the dunes and ride down a progressively more scary array of sand walls. I decided that I'd try my hand at doing it with an actual snowboard (complete with boots and bindings) instead of the sand board, and very quickly remembered why you do your best to find boots that fit properly and bindings that make good contact with the board. Due to having a shoe size basically unknown to anyone but giants of legend in Peru I was forced to wear boots two sizes too big, which were designed for old-school step-in bindings, so the contact with the board was non-existent. Add to this the fact I haven't been on an actual snowboard in somewhere approaching 5 years and I was destined to eat a fair bit of sand on the way down.

The first dune would have counted as a short blue run and my attempt to make a toe turn resulted in me face first practically every time. I managed to ride the second one (which would have been a long blue at a ski resort) without turning once, which solved the problem for a bit, but the last two drops were massive and steep. The penultimate ride was basically me going down on my heels, falling over on my toes, repeat about half a dozen times, which wasn't much fun. The last drop was really, really scary but I managed it by basically starting on my toes and doing it in one really long toe turn. It was very cool to be able to do it all without having to climb up hills, but I suspect I probably could have had just as much fun on the actual sandboards, which most people rode flat on their bellies face first.

For me the best part was riding around in the dune buggy, as the driver did his utmost to treat us like we were in a roller coaster. Hitting the lips of the dunes at full speed makes for excellent jumps, and he had absolutely no fear of just pointing the nose straight down and letting gravity do the rest. Add to this the sunset over the dunes and the view back into town were breathtaking and even with the bad equipment the day out was well worth it.

Which was good, because despite their best efforts to milk the place there isn't a whole lot to do in a desert oasis except be hot. You can wander around the whole of Huacachina in something like 3 minutes. Bring a good book.

So due to the fact I'm running into a deadline to be in Cusco two days before I start the Inca Trail (otherwise they say they won't take my money and let my spot go empty - something tells me they'll take the money anyway...) I decided to take the next afternoon bus to Nazca and try and see the Nazca lines in the morning before heading off to Arequipa in the afternoon. I'm glad I did this, because much like Huacachina, Nazca is a one-trick pony.

What are the Nazca lines? Despite Speilberg's best efforts to wind them into the recent Indiana Jones movie,  no-one really knows. It seems like the Nazca people (who were top dogs in this part of Peru up until they were taken over by the war-like Wari in about 600AD) decided to make these huge glyphs on the desert flood by turning over the rocks in lines and then letting the desert preserve them (it really doesn't rain much in Nazca if the lines are still there 1400 years later). They're in the shape of things like monkeys, dogs and birds, but the one everyone likes is called the 'Astronaut', to take into account many a nutjob has decided that the anthropomorphic figure set out on one of the hillsides could only have been an alien. That goes into the deeper question of why the Nazca decided to draw these lines that could only be seen from the air, with being-used-to-signal-aliens being only one of the wackier theories, but the truth is no-one really knows, as the Nazca weren't literate and didn't leave a whole lot of other remains to give clues. There are some irrigation ditches and aqueducts, but none of those seems to suggest a reason for the lines.

The area has been pretty steadily populated for thousands of years so it was a total surprise when someone flew over the desert at Nazca in the 1930s and saw the lines for what they were for the first time. This is still the best way to see the lines, and as a result there is a minor airforce of light planes at the Nazca airfield waiting to take tourists up for a 30 minute flight over the lines. I actually thought that was a pretty cool way of doing it, with the pilot and co-pilot taking it in turns to wheel the plane over the glyphs so each side of the plane gets to take pictures and they spend more time pointing out the lines than paying attention to how level the plane is. Of our flight of 5 people that did, unfortunately make one of the girls sick as a dog and we had to spend most of the flight with a strong whiff of vomit emanating through the plane. The pilot was pretty quick to open the windows the second we were landed again.

So from Nazca it was a nice ride along the coast until sunset, taking in the long waves off shore and the close mountains in the desert above the road. By the time I rocked into Arequipa at 1am the temperature had most definitely dropped and I assumed I was in for another cold town, much like Huaraz.

Waking up on Sunday morning however showed me I was wrong. I've been walking around in a t-shirt all day, ever since I stumbled out looking for breakfast at about 9am. I turns out there was the Peruvian equivalent of Anzac Day going on, so I sat on a balcony above the main square to breakfast and watched people with uniforms and guns do some marching and yelling. The rest of my day was mostly devoted to taking pictures of white buildings, which there are a lot of, and going to the local convent, which is a city within a city. The Santa Catalina Convent was founded not too long after Arequipa itself and was a closed area to everyone but nuns until the 1970s. As most of the nuns came from aristocratic backgrounds they lived in pretty good style, with massive cells, orchards and large courtyards to go about doing nun-ley things in. I especially liked the massive sign calling for 'silenco' on entering, because lets face it: who likes a mouthy nun? I had thought I was fairly churched out, but the area covered by the convent is the size of a small village and the bright colours offset each other very well, making the whole place very photogenic. If, of course, you like your photos full of fat German daytrippers, like all mine seem to be. The only downside is the reason the colours seem so bright is because they were very wet when I was there, and my daypack now has a nice rusty hue to it. Bloody nuns, can't trust 'em.

So towering over Arequipa are three volcanoes, one of which I'd really like to try my hand at climbing. I've spoken to people who have climbed El Misti as recently as a week ago, but I have had some trouble finding someone reputable who will ensure I can actually climb it overnight Thursday. Right now I've spent a bit too much time at sea level so I'm off to the Colca Canyon for 3 days in order to get some more time at altitude and due to the fact I have to be in Cusco by the weekend I'm really running out of days. If one of them has to go, then I'm obviously not going to climb El Misti instead of the Inca trail, but it has been frustratingly hard to organise anything with a guarantee of leaving on the day you are told you will be in Peru. I don't know if it's just the off season, but even doing the most popular things in Peru seems to involve a lot of wasted days of waiting around. I'm guessing Bolivia won't exactly be more organised, but it surprises me that places so reliant on tourists can't get this kind of thing right. When I'm in charge, things will be different.

So we're down to the last 6 weeks, and all going well I know exactly what I'm doing for about the next fortnight. I can feel Santiago and June creeping up on me now.

Glimpses of beauty

Huaraz :: Peru

Living life without oxygen.

Places: Huaraz, Chavin de Huantar, the Cordillera Blanca & Vaqueria.

Coolest thing I did: The bus ride up to Vaqueria rises up to a mountain pass at 4900 metres and the view was so good you basically stuck your camera out the window, pressed the button at random times and got postcards.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The term "National Park" in Peru seems to mean "comes with cows".

Huaraz is a nice little town nestled in between the very impressive Cordillera Blanca and the slightly less impressive Cordillera Negra mountain ranges (translation: The White Mountains and The Black Mountains. About Australian levels of originality in naming things in Peru then...)

and after about 4 days here I was ready to punch someone. I came here on the recommendation of a few people I travelled with early on in my trip with the express purpose of doing the 4 day Santa Cruz trek and was quite willing to pay for a guided tour. So after waiting 3 days for a group to leave I was told at 6:30 in the morning that my trek was cancelled, but it would leave tomorrow. So I waited another whole day and the night before, again they cancelled. It was then very lucky that James (who I did all of Patagonia with early on showed up in town and after doing the Inca trail and thinking it was way too soft to have donkeys carry all your stuff was determined to hire gear and do it all himself. If 4 days of carrying all our camping stuff and food sounded a bit easy, he had also decided to tack the Lago 69 trek (usually done as a day trip out of Huaraz) onto the start to make it 5 days worth of food and about 15kg each on setting out.

After a stupidly early 5am start, a taxi and two collectivos (minibuses) we found ourselves with all the day trippers standing in a cloud covered valley full of cows. For some reason the term National Park seems to not preclude people's livestock roaming free all over the place. This means after a few days you stop noticing you're walking in cow poo, setting up your tent in cow poo, sitting in cow poo etc. If you've ever been camping and thought "this whole thing could be made a heap better if there was only shit everywhere" then Peruvian national parks are for you! Despite this we set off carrying our full packs on a hike that included a climb from 3600 metres to a truly beautiful alpine lake at 4400 metres.

Having done Torres del Paine with James we knew I tended to charge off ahead so by the time we dumped our packs 3 hours later at a height of 4200 metres I'd probably been a good 45 mins ahead of him. I'd felt my heart beating well above normal pace for that level of effort and being honest I'd never really tried this kind of hiking at altitude before. The last 200 metres to the lake absolutely killed me and by the time we got to the lake I felt like I was having my worst ever hangover x10, with a massive headache and queasiness. I attempted to plough through lunch at the lake but was really feeling terrible. It seems like a lot of people who do a fair bit of endurance exercise I'm pretty susceptible to altitude sickness - which amongst the mountaineering fraternity is a bit like admitting you're a premature ejaculator. I'm not sure if it's just we've got too much ego and get sick by going out too hard too early, or whether exercising a lot at sea level makes changes to your body that don't work very well at altitude. All I do know is it was very annoying to see chain smokers having an easier time of it than I was.

We cooked pasta up for lunch and spent a lot of time trying to fight off the two cows that were constantly bugging us for food and during that time all the day tripping groups came and went with the ridges behind the lake totally covered in thick cloud. It was only when we were packing up the clouds cleared for half an hour to show two massive snow caps behind the lake, making it postcard perfect. Chalk up one to James for wanting to not do a day trip - that lake was possibly one of the most impressive I saw in all of South America.

We camped back down near the road at 3600 metres in pouring rain but luckily the next morning I felt good again when we hooked up with our collectivo to take us up the road to the next town, Vaqueria. This involved an hour and a half drive through a pass at 4900 metres (the highest I've ever been in my life) and we were blessed with a perfectly clear morning. The winding switchback road up the side of the mountain gave us incredible views of Huascaran, the highest mountain in Peru and simply sticking your camera out the window and pressing the button at random gave you some of the best pictures I took on the whole trip. This was lucky as on the way back the road was covered in fog and we would have missed everything.

The Santa Cruz trek used to be a 4 day trek through the Santa Cruz valley up to the Punta Union pass at 4760 and then back down to the village of Vaqueria, taking you through two of the most spectacular valleys in the national park. However about the middle of March this year there was a massive mudslide that covered the first two days of the trek in waist deep mud and it's since been impossible to do the original trek. So instead you start off in Vaqueria and spend two days getting over Punta Union, camp down the bottom and then do the whole thing in reverse, which still takes in both valleys but obviously misses out most of the first one. Unfortunately too is the fact Punta Union is much harder to climb to from the side you currently do under the current trek than under the old one.

Generally speaking we were walking unaware of the mountain ranges around us, as cloud or fog was covering them most of the time, but that made it a bit more special when the cloud did clear to show us the jagged white caps of the biggest mountains of the range. I've seen pictures of what it looks like in June, but you have to work with the conditions you're given and I think we were pretty lucky to see what we did during this time of year.

The second day is a 900 metre climb from the first night's camp site to Punta Union and that 5 and a half hours, even though I was doing it slowly to avoid a repeat of feeling as bad as a I did a couple of days before is probably the hardest thing I've ever done. You simply aren't prepared for how hard it is to climb that high carrying (at that point) 12kg on your back with what feels like air so thin you're getting nothing from busting your lungs breathing. I was literally stopping every 4 or 5 steps for the last 200 metres or so and was in bits by the time I reached the tiny notch between the mountains at the top. Still, if you're travelling this long and you aren't occasionally saying "this is the hardest thing I've ever done" then you aren't doing it properly. For that matter, you could apply that to your life in general.

We had lunch at the pass and once again we were lucky to have clear views over both valleys during the hour or so we spent up there. We could see just how much of the other valley was covered in mud and with the weather closing in by the time we came to leave we made a call to drop back down the side we'd just come from and cut a day out of the trip. Neither of us could really see the point of going down the other side to camp for a night and then kill ourselves coming back up the same pass the next morning. We went down to a flat area near a lake at 4400 metres and slept there, under what turned out to be a light dusting of snow. It turns out it's actually very hard to sleep at that kind of altitude, you can feel your heart racing even when you're lying still in your sleeping bag. At least I was free of major symptoms of altitude sickness, but my appetite wasn't great. We'd been chewing coca leaves all day, which do act as an appetite suppressant so perhaps that was part of it.

Despite it's unpopularity with the DEA, the indios of the Andes have been growing and chewing coca leaves since time immemorial. There's statues of the gods chewing coca going back as old as pottery in the Andes and it was it's ubiquity and obvious positive effects on people operating at high altitude that caused Western chemists to first extract the active ingredient, the cocaine alkaloid in the late 19th century. Due to the fact you need about a kilo of leaves to make a gram of cocaine hydrochloride (the stuff you'd confiscate of Paris Hilton) you can pretty much buy the leaves here in the petrol station if you want if it's in the kind of quantity you can carry around with you all day. You masticate it your cheek between the teeth and the gum and add a little bit of lime (because it's an alkaline) and you soon feel a slight numbing sensation and find walking and climbing a little bit easier. Those of you that work in investment banks won't have to worry either - it's such a small dosage that you could chew it at your desk all day and your wee would still be clean at bonus time.

So having seen some awesome views in patches we pushed back to Vaqueria by mid afternoon in the hope of snagging a ride back to the Real World that afternoon. By 6pm it was obvious that wasn't going to happen, as we saw one car and two trucks pass in 3 hours and they were all full. So the woman who owned the only restaurant in town (which was basically a room with a table she served from her own kitchen upstairs) let us sleep in a couple of beds they have in the store room behind the shop. Which didn't have any doors. Still, after 3 solid nights of sleeping on the ground beds were a welcome sight and she fed us dinner and breakfast for about $8 all up. Vaqueria had about 8 houses so our predicament caused a bit of amusement, with the locals sitting around watching us sit around waiting for buses that were never going to come. Still, they were all very nice. I also got up fairly early to a clear morning and managed to get some nice photos of the craggy snow caps behind the town. It was also possible to dry my shoes for the first time since we started, which meant they stank slightly less when we got our collectivo at midday.

On the return to Huaraz we decided to celebrate by going and having a curry at the most westernised restaurant in town (Chilli Heaven - owned by possibly the most sour Scottish bastard in the world), and being foolish enough to have the Vindaloo my guts are an absolute mess today. We also decided to get a taxi out to the 9 month old local microbrewery, Sierra Andina and try our hand at high altitude drinking. Owned by two Yanks from Colorado (which has a fairly hectic microbrewery scene of it's own) with visa issues that are currently keeping them out of the country, Sierra Andina beer has pretty much infiltrated every place you can eat and drink in Huaraz, pushing out the local mass produced drops. It turns out they make a passable stout and very nice pale and amber ales, but due to some of Peru's laws about beer it's really hard to say how strong they are. You can't sell beer with an ABV of 6% in Peru, so three of the four beers on the menu were suspiciously 5.9%. I admit to being fairly unsteady when we wandered out at midnight, two hours after the official closing time.

So after 5 days in the rain I wake up this morning to find absolutely glorious sunshine and the hostel window giving out onto the best view of the Cordillera Blanca I've seen during the week or so I've spent here. Put that in the dictionary under Murphey's Law.

My only other trip out of town while I was trying to get the trekking organised was to one of Peru's most important archelogical sites, Chavin de Huantar. The Chavin culture existed at about the same time as the Greeks were at their peak in the Classical period, thus being as far from the Inca Empire and the Spanish conquistadors as we are from the Vikings. They were credited as the people who brought the various strands of Andean culture together for the first time, combining a lot of the agricultural and religious motifs that wouldn't have been too unfamiliar to the Incas. Their religious and cultural centre was at Chavin de Huantar, and what remains these days is the base of a pyramid looking out over multiple levels of plaza and some underground tunnels where the priests prepared the various ceremonies.

Most of the artefacts excavated from Chavin had been sitting in the museum in Lima until the local government got their act together and build a museum near the ruins, opening it in 2008. The building has taken a fair bit of inspiration from Chavin de Huantar itself, but also looks like it could have come from the pen of Frank Lloyd Wright, with big flat stone slabs blending seamlessly into the hillside behind. If I'm honest I think I was more impressed with the building that I was with what was in it. It is the current location of the Tello Obelisk, considered one of the best artefacts that still survived the Chavin people. It's such an intricately carved pattern of jaguars, felines and so forth I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before the young, hipper Peruvian kids of Lima start sporting tattoos based on it (if they aren't already).

So despite a false start I too would now highly recommend Huaraz and surrounds to anyone making their way through Peru. Despite being fairly famous it seems to have escaped the most common of the Facebook generation's Gringo Trail, so most of the people wearing North Face clothing you see in town tend to be my age or older. Most of the kids I'd spoken to in Lima had no idea what I was talking about when I said I wanted to come here and that gives the place a very laid back pace of life. Tomorrow I make my way back through Lima to Huacachina, a town in the desert known primarily for sandboarding, so I suspect the party atmosphere will be in full swing when I get there.

Heaps holy

Huaraz :: Peru

A whole lot of hard core Catholicism going on.

Places: Lima & Huaraz.

Coolest thing I did: Accidentally discovered that Good Friday is much bigger than Easter Sunday here and managed to see all the churches at peak usage.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Lima has some fairly good surf beaches right in the city. Unfortunately lots of surfers were coming out tangled in plastic shopping bags and such like.

Lima surprised me. I'd been warned by many people who passed through it recently that it's a bit down at heel and full of poor people, but with the centre of gravity of the hostels being based in the swish Miraflores district I didn't really get that feeling at all. The taxi from the airport took me along the coast, which goes quickly from massive docklands to piles of concrete and garbage that most afternoons you can see being added to by dump trucks. However you follow the lower road (at the bottom of massive cliffs) along for a while that that gives way into a series of stony beaches with really long lines of waves coming in cleanly, and about a million surfers trying to take advantage of them. There was one that I was watching out the taxi window who managed to track along the same wave for something like 30 seconds. Unfortunately there is also a lot of evidence that garbage does get dumped directly into the water.

I know Lima must have the same poor districts surrounding it that every other Latin American city seems to have (a result of the rise in farm productivity meaning a massive migration of poor country people to the cities) but I didn't really see any of them during the 3 days I was there. Miraflores could be any of the richer areas of the Colombian cities, including possibly the world's most well situated shopping centre. The LarcoMar mall is built right into the cliff face that faces out over the Pacific, so you can drink your Starbucks latte that costs what most people make here a week and get a lovely view out at surfers showing themselves incapable of lining up for waves and smashing into each other.

So I arrived in Thursday night and took the Mexican bartender's advice in the hostel to try and get out, as Good Friday was probably going to be fairly tame. I went to a place called Help, which only opens once a week and is pretty much full of Peruvians trying to acquire gingos, and thus visas. I nearly missed it however, as the taxi industry here seems to be totally unregulated and the bloke who was sitting in the car with "taxi" written on it obviously had little idea where he was going. On the way home it took 10 mins, on the way there, an hour as we slowly circled in on the place with the driver stopping at every policeman to ask for directions. At least it's all negotiated before you start, with meters being non-existent, but it would have been nice to have gotten there before the line got around the block.

So knowing I had limited time, and not knowing exactly what would be open after Easter I took the brand new bus service (which has stations like a train and it's own bus lanes - same as in Bogota) to the downtown core. I was again surprised at just how clean and ordered everything was there, but I'm wondering if there had been a big spruce up for Easter. The main square is dominated on one side by the cathedral and the whole place was packed with people who couldn't fit into the building for one of six masses of the day, so we could hear the story of Jesus y Maria over loud speakers. There's some tradition involving palm leaves woven into little fans I don't really understand, but it seems like you go around each church and touch the statues and icons with it, and cross yourself a lot. They also dress up all the statues of Jesus and the saints in purple robes for the big day, which I'm told is something that carried over from the indigenous religions that were co-opted by the Catholic church. When the Inca Empire was conquered by the Spanish the Indios were so impressed by how big the victory was they just assumed that the Spanish had better Gods, so pretty much started worshipping them alongside the old Gods.

It's fairly easy to see why they would have been impressed. A bloke called Francisco Pizarro came to Peru on this 3rd attempt with about 150 men and managed to capture the Inca emperor, ransom him off for a room full of gold and then kill him anyway. This led to the initial total capitulation of an empire spreading from southern Colombia to northern Chile and Argentina, mostly because the Andean world-view of the time was totally smashed by this little party of white blokes showing up and killing their incarnate God-king. It sucks when that happens.

My other big cultural outing was to the neighbourhood of Pueblo Libre, which hosts most of the cities museums and is not yet integrated into the new bus system. I went to the private Museo Larco, and the far less impressive Museo de Arqueologico which are a few blocks apart and led me to walking through the ultra flat, wide streets that strangely reminded me of Downtown LA, with all it's short buildings and car centric amenities. However that makes perfect sense when you realise they're both in really active earthquake zones and the buildings probably have a habit of falling over in the same way if you build them too tall.

So the Museo Larco is the work of a private family of collectors who set up their finds in an old Vice-Royal mansion and have done a much better job than the poorly funded official Museo de Arqueologico nearby. It's a good way to see stuff from all those ruins I expect to be traipsing through over the next few weeks, and unlike the MdA all the cards are translated into English so you know what you're looking at (the very few translations in the MdA are pretty funny due to Google-translate levels of accuracy but not that informative). Taking in a massive sweep of the pre-Colombian cultures (the Inca only being the last in a long line) the highlight for most people is the porno pottery, which is kept in a separate room in the garden from the rest. Basically every way that humans, animals or some mix of can copulate is depicted somewhere in the gallery, and rather disturbingly there's also a fair bit of mating between skeletons, who represent the dead. This was all made complete for me by the group of US collage-aged girls there on a school trip giggling uncontrollably, their unimpressed looking teacher and their deeply reddening local guide.

One of the better documented cultures in the collection were the Moche, who held sway over the North Coast of Peru about the same time as the Roman Empire were reaching their peak in Europe. They're interesting because they were a fairly blood-thirsty bunch, who took human sacrifice to a new level. Andean cultures have always had a bit of a problem with earthquakes and the El Nino cycle, which with short lifespans and poor science they could not have accurately predicted, so the priests built up stories about the gods being angry and demanded sacrifices to restore the natural order. This repeats itself in all the El Nino exposed cultures from Mexico down to Chile, and each one has had it's own way of dealing with it. Or sometimes not. The collapse of each empire tends to coincide with an El Nino period and elevated levels of war and human sacrifice.

In the Andean world view human sacrifice was more powerful an incentive for the Gods to stop messing everyone about than animal sacrifice, and due to the caste system the higher up the food chain the people being sacrificed were, the more powerful the results. Of course, the priests were never going to say "hey, let's sacrifice a priest!" and it was probably a career limiting move to suggest sacrificing the nobility so the Moche priests decided that the warrior caste could fight it out, in probably one of the most practical examples of applied Darwinism in human history. They'd pick a couple of high caste warriors who would engage in ritual combat with clubs until one of them managed to get the other one's helmet off and grab a fistful of his hair. The loser had his throat cut ceremonially after that, so you were left with a stronger warrior caste and hopefully some happier Gods. It probably also made for very good viewing in the days before TV.

Not really wanting to spend a whole lot more of this trip in cities I took an overnight bus on Easter Sunday to the town of Huaraz, about 8 hours north of Lima with the intention of doing some trekking in Cordillera Blanca range, which has come highly recommended by everyone who has been through this part of Peru I've spoken to. It's the first time since Argentina at high altitude (the town lies at just over 3000m) and I'm feeling a little out of breath. I'm taking it pretty easy, due to me foolishly ignoring all advice and having a massive Saturday night out in Lima (it was someone who I'd never met like an hour earlier's birthday, so how could I refuse) and then backing it up by playing drinking games before my night bus. I'm hoping that I have a hangover and not altitude sickness, but only a good night's sleep will tell. The advice on avoiding it is don't drink too much, drink lots of water and be well rested, none of which I managed to do.

A little bit jittery

Bogota :: Colombia

A cursed city, and coffee.

Places: Manizales, Salento, Cocora Valley & Bogota.

Coolest thing I did: Spent the evening playing tejo for real with the fine bunch of kids I went walking down the Cocora Valley earlier in the day.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Chiquita banana company got in big trouble for paying off both left-wing guerillas and right wing paramilitaries in the 1990s and 2000s to leave their bananas alone.

My trip to the coffee growing region of Colombia didn't start out very well. Due to a flight delay I arrived in Manizales wearing a t-shirt and shorts only to find the overnight temperature was below 18 and the airline decided not to bring my bag. That put off my going to Nevado del Ruiz, a snow capped volcano you can see from town, mostly because I had no clothes. So I decided to go the next day, but that night I got food poisoning, and just to add to the gayness all trips up the volcano were cancelled until further notice due to their being too much 'sulfur' and 'poison' in the air. I've decided that Manizales was cursed. There is no other logical explanation.

However, for a cursed city, Manizales is in an amazingly beautiful location. The main street of the city runs right along the highest ridge-line available and as you walk along it you can see the city sliding off down into the valleys on either side. I was particularly blessed that when I got to the hostel in a foul mood (due to my lack of bag) the guy at reception stopped checking me in so we could take a photo of Nevado del Ruiz behind the city skyline at sunset. He said he hadn't seen that since January, so that was kind of cool. Out in all directions are beautiful valleys where this countries second most profitable cash crop, coffee is grown.

There isn't that much to see in the city itself if I'm honest, the best bits are looking away from it from the natural vantage point the city happens to give you. Due it being a highly active earthquake zone (volcanoes tend to be a give away of that kind of thing) the cathedral is only a recent build, and is the highest spire in Colombia by virtue of the fact it's a Gothic structure made totally out of reinforced concrete. You only realise that when you're right up close, as you can see the rusted steel mesh sticking out of several of the saint's heads where the concrete has chipped away.

So due to the cursed nature of Manizales I decided to get into a series of minibuses and make my way to the much smaller Salento, which used to be a tiny little coffee growing hamlet but due to the actions of a single Pom, it's now firmly on the backpacker trail and it's hostel population is growing exponentially. I managed to arrive on a Sunday and that turns out to be a bit of a treat as it's the day when no-one does any work but rather hangs out about town in their best boots and cowboy hat. Not long after arriving in town I went into a small place where an older bloke in a serious moustache was pulling tintos (black coffees) from an ancient espresso machine while his daughter was waitressing. It had the kind of old school diner decor that every designer from Surry Hills to Newtown is trying their hardest to copy so it's crazy to see an authentic version made by simply not changing anything since the 50s. It was full of old men arguing about something my poor Spanish wouldn't let me understand, but one of the joys of people watching in foreign countries is you realise how universal people really are. I'm sure a large component of the conversation was about how young people are screwing up the world, and how it was different in their day.

As the afternoon bled into evening it became obvious that what you do in Salento on a Sunday is sit in a bar around Bolivar square and drink beer. So that's what I did. Again you can see human universals where extended families laugh and sing to the radio, kids run wild in the park and couple canoodle in the corner. I especially liked the old bloke with his face painted white who spent his time miming behind people walking around in order to entertain the patrons of each bar and get a bit of change out of each. Just like home some people have a sense of humour about it, and some people tried hard to punch him.

Besides the coffee Salento is right near the Cocora Valley, a highly green burst of farmland along the river north of town. You get up in the morning, haggle your way onto a jeep (quite often requiring some of you to hang off the back in a form of extreme car pooling) and start walking when you reach the top. It was a good 3 hour loop through a mixture of jungle and people's cow paddocks, with large sections of the hillsides cleared to make way for cows to graze and horses to run angrily at people who don't realise which side of the fence they are on. Like the Lost City I kind of just liked doing the exercise again, and being at a slightly higher 2,500m I feel like I'm getting a bit more used to thin air, which will be really important when I get to Peru.

The main drawcard of the valley, however is the fact Colombia's national tree grows there. It's a palm tree. I didn't think that would be cool either, except for the fact they grow something in the order of 30m high, and you can take very cool pictures of yourself as a dot at the base of one of them. You get a much better idea of just how tall they grow by the fact that so much of the ground around is cleared for cows to eat grass so they look taller than the very few of them that are still rising out of the smaller trees.

I ended up walking with a group of 8, who I met later on that night for dinner and after (rather surprisingly) smoking a Hookah pipe at one of the local cafes, and quite a few beers we decided to go looking for a tejo place. As I think I said earlier in one of these, tejo is a game that could only have come from Colombia. You throw 2kg lead weights across the room at little triangles of paper embedded in clay that contain small amounts of gunpowder. A direct hit by the weight results in an impressive explosion, and if you're really lucky a pile of burning paper landing somewhere in the middle of the people playing in the next lane. It's completely unsafe, and made more so by the fact you tend to be drinking heavily at the same time. We decided to play on the full lanes, where the target is about 20-odd metres away from you and predictably it took a full hour to actually get the weight to hit the clay, let alone make something explode. Even with a few direct hits only one of us managed it, but there is enough exploding going on around you to not matter so much.

So it was a hung over and early morning that had me on a minibus and the bus back to Bogota to make my flight for Lima on the Thursday before Easter. I was quite lucky that completely by accident there's some kind of cultural festival going on and Bolivar square was full to the gills with people waiting to see Manu Chau, who is apparently famous.

After a while you realise the main square & main street in every town in Colombia is named after Simon Bolivar, who was instrumental in getting the Spanish out of South America back in the 1800s. Despite dying on his way into exile he's had quite a resurgence as a historical hero of all the countries that he liberated to make a place called Gran Colombia (Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and parts of Northern Peru). He's a personal favourite of current Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has turned his country into a semi-communist kleptocracy under the flag of what he calls a Bolivarian Revolution, the idea being he's liberating Latin America from yanqui domination. No ego there.

Most of Latin America threw off the Spanish when they were a bit distracted in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars in Europe and really couldn't give too much of a crap what happened in their remote colonies. Bolivar was responsible for liberating pretty much everything down to Peru, but did so after Argentinian Jose de San Martin had already done the same in the south of the continent. They met in Peru during the liberation wars there and Bolivar basically told San Martin to bugger off home, he could handle things from here. Apparently San Martin did just that, quitting the military and politics altogether and living a content old retirement while Bolivar ended up a fairly hated military dictator who died trying to flee the continent (ironically) back to Europe.

So Manu Chao. I wandered into Plaza Bolivar and found half of Bogota waiting there for a free concert by said Mr Chao. Despite not really knowing his work I managed to follow along with the crowd, who seemed to know the words to every song and lose it and dance around like a fool in time with everyone else. There was something cool about seeing all the people filling the plaza and crashing like a wave up the steps of the cathedral (and quite often, climbing up on it) all singing and waving their arms together in time, even though I didn't know basically any of the songs. Well, it turns out, I did know one. When I was taking Spanish lessons the teacher used one of his songs Me gustas tu as a way of us getting to listen to spoken Spanish, and to drive into our heads by crazy repitition that me gusta something means I like whatever. It was kind of cool to be able to sing along to that one.

So tomorrow I leave Colombia behind to start a new life in Peru. The thing that has stuck me the most about this country is just how friendly and curious the people are. I guess we're in the early days of mass tourism here, and it makes me wish my terrible Spanish was a bit better so I could answer all their questions, a remarkable percentage of which seem to revolve around the death of Steve Irwin. You have to give the people what they want, so I learnt that "stingray" is la raya.

The Lost City

Taganga :: Colombia

Now with less kidnappings by Marxist rebels!

Places: Taganga & Ciudad Perdida.

Coolest thing I did: Managed to get clear of my tour group on the second last day and pretty much run down the trails rather than walking them. It's been ages since I did any running at all and I miss the endorphins.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Right up until 1903 there was no such country as Panama, it had been part of Colombia since independence from the Spanish.

Having now passed through the town of Santa Marta a couple of times I'm glad I decided to base myself in Taganga, it really looked like nothing more than a big town, whereas Taganga has converted itself over the last few years from a sleepy fishing village to a full blown backpacker slum. It's in a lovely little bay but unfortunately, being a working fishing village the beach is covered in boats and the sand is stained by marine diesel and studded with broken house bricks and such. There is a much nicer beach about 20 mins and a "random" police search for drugs away, called Playa Grande where you can swim in water like warm glass. They have built a lot of restaurants on the beach, but it is shaded by a few trees and the menu in most of these places involves someone bringing out a tray of fresh fish for you to pick from. They then bring it back about half an hour later on top of fried bananas and coconut rice. It's pretty hard to beat. The only downside is the sand is also fairly dirty looking at Playa Grande too, so you shouldn't expect postcard Caribbean if you don't want to be a bit disappointed.

Despite about 35% of all buildings in Taganga being dive shops it's not considered a very good place to dive. The main drawcard is it's currently the cheapest place on the planet to get a PADI certification. The Irish people I was drinking with on St Patrick's Day were here doing their Open Water course (which is the beginners course, for you land lubbers) and they were telling me there's fish living in truck tires and stuff like that down there. Didn't exactly make me want to fork over my hard earned.

About another 30% of the buildings are selling treks to this area's other big draw card - Ciudad Perdida. This was traditionally a 6 day trek through the jungle but with improvements to the trail (things like bridges, and wacky stuff like that) it's now possible to do it in 4 days. I chose 5 days, mostly because it costs exactly the same amount to do it for 4,5 or 6 days, and all the companies that do it have set the same price by agreement, so you're only really competing on quality. I also liked the idea of being fed for an extra day.

Ciudad Perdida was the work of the Tairona people, who started building a series of stone platforms for their wooden houses and crops to grow on. I assume because they liked these things to happen on flat bits and the hills of the Sierra Nevada are pretty damn steep. They started about 500 years before Machu Piccu in Peru, and I assume things got way out of hand, as the site now is supposed to have 600 odd platforms, 200 of which have been fully cleared and excavated. The city was supposedly inhabited until the Spanish came, at which point the Tairona abandoned it and moved deeper into the jungle instead of taking on the conquistadors head on. It then stayed a bit lost, except in local myth and legend until grave robbers stumbled on it in the 70s and started pulling artefacts out of the ground to sell. During the next decade the grave robbers fought over the site (including a couple of shootings where the bodies are still out in the jungle somewhere) before one disgruntled grave robber went to Bogota and tipped off the authorities about a decade later. The government then sent archaeologists to excavate the site. No-one really knows how much loot was lost in that decade.

The hike itself, despite having some fairly hard core hill climbs in mud (due to the daily afternoon downpour) isn't as challenging as I'd been led to expect. These days you have campsites with hammocks (and occasionally beds!), mosquito nets and cold showers. They feed you very well, as the food is now brought up using donkeys you don't have to carry any of it yourself and vast improvements have been made to the actual path. In places where the trail used to have you clinging onto the side of the cliff they've concreted a new path and places that used to involve waist deep river crossings now have a bridge. This quite easily could knock a couple of days off. However, doing it over 5 days now involves swimming in rivers, reading and playing cards a fair bit, and also makes sure you're under shelter before the really heavy rain starts at about 4pm on the dot every afternoon and continues into the night. I was lucky to have a young group of top chicos y chicas who all went at pretty much the same pace and provided good banter in the evenings. We saw about 4 or 5 other groups on the trek, and some were so varying in age and fitness there couldn't help but be tension and frustration. There was also groups where you saw or heard someone and thought "yeah, I'd do the time for killing them, just for the peace and quiet".

The descendants of the local natives still live all along the trail, and they seem to in general be fairly happy these days with the tourists as the companies are making sure money goes into everyone's pockets. One night they came down to tell us about the local rituals, including every man being given a gourd like thing made of calcium to allow them to easily have something to chew coca leaves with, and the fact when a bloke turns 18 he spends 5 days married to an older woman (35-40) who is widowed learning how to be a husband before he then goes and gets married to his actual wife (14-18). The older woman is apparently picked by consensus of the village, with the blessing of the shaman, but all of the girls seemed to be a bit freaked out by that idea.

As the foothills of the Sierra Nevada used to be one of Colombia's prime coca growing regions the tour used to include a demonstration of how to turn coca leaves into coca paste - the first of 3 steps into making the powdered cocaine that has spent so many years turning Keith Richards into beef jerky. The government has banned that now, but the guide said he used to actually like doing it, as many of the tourists who see the process includes powdered cement, battery acid and diesel and decide that maybe cocaine is not the drug for them. Back in the 80s and 90s this used to be the way it was done, with smallholders from the Colombian coast all the way down to Bolivia processing their own leaves and selling the paste either directly to the Colombia cartels or to middlemen who dealt with them in bulk. However due to the successes of the mid-90s with the death of Pablo Escobar finishing the Medellin cartel and the extradition of the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers to the US bringing down the Cali cartel, the high end work of using solvents to turn the paste into the cocaine hydrochloride that goes up Aussie backpackers noses fell to the left wing rebel groups. By the year 2000 both the FARC and ELN had come to an agreement with the government that allowed them de-facto control of vast areas of jungle in both Northern and Southern Colombia and they operated drug labs there with impunity. The area the Lost City was in fell into use by both groups, taking it well off the tourist trail, especially after the ELN kidnapped a whole bunch of trekkers in 2003.

In 2005 the area came under the control of the AUC - right-wing paramilitaries who the government claimed not to control but seemed to be fairly comfortable doing it's bidding. The trail was reopened, but you had to hire AUC bodies to come with you, dressed in combat gear and carrying big guns. I don't know if this would exactly make me feel that much safer. That only really ended a couple of years ago, when the army took full control of the area to protect the tourists. When you actually get to the centre piece of the Lost City there's several soldiers there watching over you. They're happy to pose of photos, though I have one where I'm petting their dog, with the whole city spreading out into the jungle valley behind me.

Despite the fact that you end up being constantly damp or wet for 5 days, as the humidity means your clothes don't even dry overnight and you tend to carry a few kilos of sweat in your shirt everywhere you go, it was quite enlivening to actually be doing some proper exercise again. One of the days our group got mixed up with a slower one, which allowed me to get ahead of the guide and basically run for an hour or so down the trails instead of walking it, getting me to the camp a good half hour before the others. The runners out there will know what it's like to sit there in a pool of your own endorphins after a good bout of exercise and understand how much I've been missing that feeling.

So after a massive night out in Taganga to celebrate our return, and as a result a totally wasted day on the beach yesterday the time to make some tough calls about what to do next. The result is later today I'm going to fly back to Bogota and onto Manizales in the coffee growing region south of Medellin and then it'll be back next Wednesday to try and fly to Lima in Peru on Thursday in order to avoid trying to travel over the Easter weekend in any seriously Catholic countries. This means that Ecuador is now completely off the menu for this trip but something had to give. I think I'd like to come back for a diving holiday to see the Galapagos and then maybe also the Pacific coast of Colombia. That was one of the last areas the government regained control of from the FARC and supposed to be world class diving on live aboard boats that has just reopened as a result. That Next Time list is getting fairly long now.

It's just a flesh wound!

Cartagena de Indias :: Colombia

"This reminds me of a Caribbean beach" - Canadian backpacker on Playa Blanca, a Caribbean beach.

Places: Cartagena de Indias, Islas de Rosario & Playa Blanca.

Coolest thing I did: The boat ride back from Rosario and Playa Blanca, where the driver seemed to think safety wasn't that important and decided to see just how fast he could go over the massive waves. Better than any roller coaster.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Just to be different here in Colombia they don't use the word gringo to describe the whities, but rather mono, which I think means monkey.

For some reason when I heard that Cartagena was on the Caribbean sea I assumed it would also have beaches you could swim in. This wasn't a great assumption. However, what you do get from Colombia's second oldest surviving Spanish settlement is a whole heaping spoon of colonial history and old buildings. Due to the rise of tourism in the wake of Colombia's newfound security the old walls and buildings have been lovingly (if not historically accurately) restored to their former glory. This is really about looking at a town that has been living within it's history for centuries and is now going about using it for something useful. Instead of trying to dress everyone up in costume and pretend it's the late 1500s the city walls have been converted into working markets, bars and nightclubs and you don't get the same feeling of total sanitisation I got in central Salvador.

This leads to interesting accidents, like Cartagena being home to what must be the world's most beautiful welfare office, so the people who come to collect their dole cheques do so in the courtyard garden of an old colonial casa. A far cry from Centrelink at Blacktown.

In order to show there is some new culture as well as the old a fair proportion of the world of local sculptor Edgardo Carmona has been dropped into the squares either side of the Naval Museum (which I didn't go into). He seems to be into flat surfaces and hard lines, but his subjects, like the bunch of old guys playing dominoes or the fruit seller with the basket of pineapples on her head have the look of rusty robots. There is also a single lone Botero gorda who is nude and lounges on her side looking directly into the entrance of one of the many city churches. It's a nice, irreverent contrast.

Of all the history probably the forts are the bit I found most interesting, mostly because I hadn't seen them anywhere else on these trips. The most impressive of these is Castillo de San Felipe, whose cannons now point menacingly out at the high rise apartment blocks of the rich peninsula Bocagrande. It's massively thick walls are filled with tunnels that are designed in such a way that shouts are amplified along their length (a good design feature before walkie talkies and mobile phones) and was part of a fire signal system designed to warn of attack to sister forts all up and down the coast. All this became necessary due to the fact that Cartegena was shipping massive amounts of gold plundered from the interior and the English had a fairly lax tolerance of it's nationals becoming pirates and taking said gold.

One of the most notable was Sir Francis Drake, a favourite of the first Queen Betty. Having already made himself unpopular with the Spanish by doing such things as plundering Panama for it's gold and silver, Frank (as he was known to his mates) became a large part of the English defeat of the Spanish Armada. As part of this first actions in this fracas Frank sailed to the New World, put Cartagena to the sword and ransomed it back to the Spanish crown for as much gold as he could carry. It was a direct result of this kind of chicanery from the English that Castillo de San Felipe, with walls sloped to deflect cannon balls like a stealth bomber deflects radar, was built.

In the 1700s the British tried to take Cartagena for good, and it's forts were under the control of one Don Blas de Lezo, who was already the veteran of many battles. This showed mostly due to the fact that Donny B had already at this point lost one arm, one leg and an eye. For some reason this brings to mind Monty Python and the Holy Gail and the Black Knight yelling out "It's just a flesh wound!". So the British fleet of 180 ships attacked and despite Donny B being wounded in this thigh and remaining arm the Spanish managed to ward off the British until they had no choice but to retreat back to Jamaica. There's a statue out the front of the Castillo that makes you assume that every pirate in fiction is somehow based on Donny B.

So my day trip out to find salt water I could swim in was to the Islas de Rosario, which are about 2 hours from Cartagena by speed boat, a bit quicker when driven by the complete lunatic we had. When you get there the options are to visit the aquarium (which all the old people did) or to go snorkelling in some of the clearest water I've ever seen. Despite the fact the Caribbean sea breaks directly over the reef there's still large schools of colourful fish to see. I was lucky enough to spot a barracuda, but beyond that it's only little fellas. The coral, unfortunately has been heat bleached and also seems to have taken it's fair share of tourist kickings. For some reason you never get to rent fins out here, which means the many tourists who can't seem to swim end up standing on all the coral and breaking it. People do dive here too, but I hear it's had many of the same problems. Still, it's nice to get out there and swim with the fish in bathtub temperature water.

The other story worth relaying is the fact that there's lots of little islands big enough for a single house, one of which is the ruin of the mansion once owned by Pablo Escobar. It's apparently still ransacked in the hope of finding a modern day version of the pirate legend, for many still say that somewhere on the island is Pablo's Gold. Of course, most of that went into numbered accounts in Panama (apparently a key factor in Papa Bush invading Panama in 1989 was to cut off the money laundering done there by the Colombian cartels) but that doesn't stop the chancers.

Landing on Playa Blanca you get the feeling you've found the most perfect stereotype of what a Caribbean beach is supposed to look like, with it's white sand, palm trees and water so clear it looks like the boats are embedded in the surface of someone's coffee table. What also becomes clear is that during the peak of the high season it must be absolutely rammed, with huts and shacks selling food lining the entire beach. Being there on a Tuesday most of them were closed, but it's also dawned on me that they probably aren't all open on a weekend at the moment, as someone I've drifted out of high season and into spring. While I wasn't looking the needle on my tank of time on the road has drifted well past half way. I'd say this could me my last stop on the beach. With hindsight I could have slept overnight at Playa Blanca, but I only realised that when I got there so it was a little late.

That would have been a good idea because after spending a morning people watching the extreme heat has forced me back indoors in the middle of the day. This last day of just lazing around the place drinking coffee has given me time to watch what the Colombians sell to each other, rather than what they try and sell to us. In all the cities have been people carrying around boxes of bashed up looking old Nokias and a sign "llamadas celulares 200", which I've since worked out is why there aren't any payphones left in most places here. It seems these people rent out these phones by the minute to anyone with 200 pesos (about 10c), but in the big cities they take the precaution of tying the phones to their wrist first. It also seems the guys that sell cigarettes and gum (and usually can source bad quality cocaine) to the monos also sell single cigarettes to the Colombians with free use of a lighter. I guess it's like the poorer parts of the US, where people buy loosies so they don't have to have everyone bludge cigarettes off them if they buy a whole pack, even though it's much more expensive to buy them one at a time.

So my plan now is to head 2 hours to the north tomorrow to Santa Marta and it's little beachside suburb of Taganga. The idea is to then arrange to go on the six day trek to Ciudad Perdida (the lost city), which used to be quite dangerous in the early 2000s (see this bloke who got kidnapped by the ELN back in 2003) but is pretty must standard fare now. It was funny, but when I was looking for that article Google also threw up an early article in the Guardian (same newspaper) travel section telling people about the trek only a few months before the kidnapping took place. I wonder if the kidnappees read it too...?

Ski Instructor

Cartagena de Indias :: Colombia

Only one of the many euphemisms used to sell gringos Bolivian marching powder in this country.

Places: Medellin & Cartagena de Indias.

CoolestStrangest thing I did: Had my picture taken behind the window bars of one of Pablo Escobar's old city pads with his only surviving brother, Roberto.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The yellow stripe on the Colombian flag is bigger than the others, to represent just how much gold they have (or possibly had, as I guess a load of it is busy decorating churches in Spain these days).

Coming into Medellin by night (you know, because your bus journey is 5 hours longer than it was supposed to be) you can see nothing but a constellation of lights consuming both sides of a steep valley, which is only a hint at just how far from it's centre up the valley walls it's grown. During the daylight hours you can see the same terracotta and concrete cinder block construction that characterises the favellas of Rio, showing that urban slums are pretty much a common feature of all growing developing world cities. I'd been told to expect Medellin to be a much easier city to love than Bogota but outside El Poblado, the swankier part of town holding the shopping centres and nightclubs I found it a fair bit more threatening and unattractive than the capital. The thing is, you can see the area around the centre where some more of Botero's best statues of gordos/gordas (fatties) might have been nice if it wasn't overrun with dudes forcing panama hats on you using standover tactics.

Botero is a Medellin native and some of the best work of the cities favourite son (as opposed to it's more famous sons for the wrong reasons) is dotted around the place. I especially liked the fat Roman soldier, and the fat Sphinx. The most famous is the Parrot of Peace (the man was once obsessed with parrots), which used to stand on it's own but now has a twin that is twisted as if it's exploded, in memory of victims of one of Medellin's many car bombs. During the late 80s and early 90s Medellin spent over a decade at the top of the world league tables for world's most dangerous city and though that title has since moved on to Central America (Honduras now holds the title) along with the pointy end of the drug trade violence has left it's mark on the popular image of the city.

You simply can't tell the modern story of Colombia in general and Medellin in particular without talking about it's most famous export: cocaine. Just the same, you can't tell the story of cocaine in Colombia without talking about the countries most famous corpse: Pablo Escobar. During the rise of cocaine as a glamour drug in the US in the 70s, but especially with the rise of crack in the 80s Escobar headed the Medellin Cartel and pretty much controlled most of the supply side, making Forbes once estimate he would be the world's 7th richest man on their Rich List. He dabbled in politics (mostly to avoid being extradited to the US on trafficking charges), funded right wing paramilitaries to stop the FARC from kidnapping his people and kept Medellin under his violent thumb right up until his untimely death in a hail of bullets in 1993. His cartel gave the world such inventions as the Colombian Neck Tie, the creative use of chainsaws in punishment of their enemies (that gave rise to a fairly gruesome scene in Scarface and gave a market to the uniquely Colombian trade of motorcycle pillion mounted hitmen, who would ride up to a target in Medellin's terrible traffic and put 3 bullets in someone's face for about $30. They controlled the drug trade simply by the face they were willing to do what their competitors would not.

The Pablo Escobar tour is now run by his younger brother Roberto, who due to a letter bomb incident in prison now has replacement corneas and is pretty much deaf so you're not always sure he knows where he is. After Pablo's grave they take you to one of Pablo's old city houses where Roberto now lives full of blown up pictures of his brother in jail and getting out of his private jet so tourists have something to take photos of. It's an entirely strange setup, but apparently he wanted to stop other people using the family name so despite not actually needing the money he does it to fund the Escobar AIDS charity. Years ago I read the book Killing Pablo which is about how the end came about and based on that alone I think the tour gives a slightly sanitised version of the truth, but it's at least not totally one sided or tries to pretend Pablo was a misunderstood Robin Hood figure. He did fund housing for the poor, and was instrumental in funding the Colombian football teams' rise to the 1994 World Cup, (which unfortunately led to the death of team captain Andres Escobar, who is no relation, after an own goal) but that hardly makes up for turning a country into a war zone for 25 years.

After the death of Pablo Escobar things got really, really bad in Medellin, as the Cali cartel took over the drug trade every part time hood tried to claim the crown of King of Medellin and the streets ran red with blood. There is footage of drug traffickers fighting the police in armoured cars - only it's the traffickers with the light tanks. It was that bad. It's hard to imagine just how bad it was when you're able to walk the streets now and the worst you have to experience is poor people shoving their babies in your face as you walk by.

The only other seriously touristy thing I did was to get out of town for the day to the town of Guatape, which spreads over a whole load of islands in a beautiful lake and climb La Piedra de El Penol which is a rock strangely similar to the Sugar Loaf in Rio to get a view over it all. Instead of a cable car they have some fairly utilitarian looking stairs that seem to have been built by the same people who make all the slums on the hills of Medellin. The view is spectacular over the lakes, but you're constantly reminded it's a militarized town by the fact Blackhawk helicopters keep buzzing you the whole time.

What most tourists are in Medellin to do, however, is party. I was told legends of it's nightlife from far and wide since I've been in South America but to be honest, with the honourable exception of the rooftop pool bar I ended up in after St Patrick's Day I found most of the clubs and bars to be full of under-age kids and prostitutes. I'd also heard of the legendary beauty of Medellin's women, but unless you're really into improbable feats of silicone engineering I wouldn't expect to be bowled over. I do suspect it is vastly improved by two things: local knowledge and a lot of cocaine.

Despite the fact Colombians seem to want nothing to do with cocaine themselves, probably due to the havoc it's wreaked on their country throughout it's modern history, coke is both readily available and cheap. If you don't want to buy it from the guys selling gum at 2am (hmmm) then you simply have to sit in any tourist friendly hostel or cafe looking vaguely gringo-ish and someone is sure to come and give you a card advertising something along the lines of "snowmobile repairs". While most of the gringos dabble in it I've found the young Aussie kids to be by far the consumption kings here. I suspect that may be due to the fact the price for a gram is $10 rather than $350, which also explains the zombie like behaviour you see around the hostel pool every morning as people are trying desperately to come down enough to sleep. That alone makes me not want to have anything to do with it, not to mention having the high chance of coming into contact with a totally corrupt foreign police force or the moral argument that you're also helping fund violence in both Colombia and all through the trade route to the US via Mexico and Central America.

This kind of neatly exposes the view of the drug trade from the view of places like Colombia, and now especially Northern Mexico, which is experiencing something like a low level civil war at the moment for control of the export routes into the US. The growing and transit countries seem to be fully aware that while the Western world consumes all the drugs, it's the growing, processing and transit countries that suffer most of the violence (with the honourable exception of New York and LA during the Regan era when the crack epidemic got way out of hand). The Presidents of several Latin American countries have recently mused openly about what their countries would look like if the US legalised drugs, even though they know there's little hope of that ever happening. The simple truth is cocaine became the most valuable commodity in the world mostly because it's illegal in the places 90-odd% of it is consumed. It's not an easy problem to solve.

So after spending St Patrick's Day with Irish people trying to kill me with beer I've moved on the night bus to Cartagena, one of the oldest cities in the Spanish New World as the gateway to the Colombian Caribbean. I've mostly spent today wandering around feeling like I'm jetlagged so I'll write on that once I've given it a fair shake.