Reading Bruce Chatwin’s wonderful letters recently – see my review for the Independent – I came across a detail that brought me up short:  that Chatwin, while a mature student  at Edinburgh, used to go to Glen, the country house of the Tennant family near Innerleithen. He writes to the deeply eccentric recluse Stephen Tennant about it. 

So what?  Well I went there myself a great deal as a teenager, as the son of the household, Henry Tennant, was my closest friend.  It was a special place for me, about the only place I knew in Scotland, with its crazy Victorian Gothic castle and romantic glen leading up to a loch and trout stream where we used, ineffectually, to fish.

So the discovery that Chatwin used to go there as well had a special resonance.  Not least because the place has been in my thoughts as its then owner, Colin Tennant (Lord Glenconner), another eccentric member of the family, has just died – see Phillip Hoare’s obituary.  As a teenage boy, I found him a frightening but fascinating mixture of playboy charm and occasional irrascability;  he was a nightmare to partner at tennis.

It was not a happy time for Chatwin – he found academic archaeology stultifying , as I often do – and he left a cold Edinburgh flat prematurely, with little money left.  Glen was clearly a place of refuge for him; as it was for me.

Why do we like to think of our heroes as having trodden the same ground as we have?  Do they leave some footfall that we can pick up?  Walking with ghosts is something I increasingly find I do on my travels.

I sometimes go back to Glen as I know the current chatelaine, Tessa Tennant;  and the next time I do, I will be thinking of Chatwin as I walk up to the loch and the glen.

I was not quite sure what I expected from the Amazon.  It’s become such a romanticised  ecological symbol – a flagship of all we stand to lose – that it’s become hard to see the trees for the wood.   Which is why I wanted to spend some time in one small patch of land, a reserve near the Peruvian town of Puerto Maldonado,  close to the border with Bolivia and Brazil.

Most of my previous journeys to Peru had been to the Andes where the cold could at least kill off most of the bugs;  one reason I’d chosen this remote part of the Peruvian jungle is that, while deep in the Amazon, it’s considered free of malaria.

Another is that, as the early naturalist explorers like Henry Walter Bates discovered, the wildlife gets richer the further west you go from the Atlantic:   the Peruvian Amazon has a much richer density of species than the Brazilian.

Although that richness may now be at risk.  Puerto Maldonado stands on the route of the projected Transoceanic Highway, the first major road to cut across the Andes from the Amazon to the Pacific, so linking Brazil more directly to those countries greedy for its hardwood, like China and Japan.

At the moment Puerto Maldonado is a pleasant small jungle town, with plenty of couples strolling round its wide plaza eating fried chicken (forget their famous taste for guinea pig – Peruvians would much prefer a KFC to go) ;  but with the coming of the road it could swell tenfold.

My local guides were ambivalent about the project. As citizens they were pleased that the area was about to boom;  as naturalists they could also see how the reserves could be harmed, particularly by Brazilians wanting to plant the ubiquitous soya – about the only  cash crop that can successfully be harvested on cleared rainforest, even after a few seasons it leaves the ground exhausted.

We were heading in open motorised canoes down the Madre de Dios, the ‘Mother of God’ and one of the greatest of Amazon tributaries.  Although thousands of miles from the sea, it’s still wider than the Thames in London. Goldpanners were dredging the sandbanks.  With luck they can find 10 grams a day, worth $300, a fortune in local terms, so it’s a popular if damaging trade:  the destruction of the sandbanks causes problems downstream.

With the sun on our faces and a cooling breeze, the Madre de Dios is a fine river highway into the Amazon but a lousy place to see wildlife.  For that we turned off into the quiet Lake Sandoval, part of the Tambopata National Reserve, a tranquil body of water filled with catfish and piranha ( the locals joke that the piranha may be bony to eat, but then the fish probably say the same about us).

I’d chosen to stay at Lake Sandoval Lodge, run by a non-profit organisation in tandem with the local community, and  a simpler place than some of the other jungle lodges that have sprung up.  It is also right on the banks of the lake, a beautiful palm-fringed retreat where you hardly need to move to see the wildlife .  Within moments of our arrival a troupe of capuchin monkeys were passing overhead.

Much of the following days was spent floating around the lake with the guides tracking rare river otters.  Far from being benign and playful as I had imagined, the Spanish term fits the Amazonian river otter much better – lobos del río, ‘river wolves’.  Sleek , muscled and over six feet long, they bristle with aggression. The otters hunt in groups and when we finally saw them one dawn, they rippled along the shore in a menacing pack, climbing onto logs to eat some of the five kilos of fish they need a day.

And then came an extraordinary moment:  a great white egret, one of the giants of the bird world,  landed on the lower branches of a tree by the water.  Without pausing, the otters launched themselves out of  the water and tried to dislodge it.  When the alarmed egret scrambled higher up the branches, the otters even tried to climb the tree.

A further sequence of wonders followed as we floated past:  a troupe of white-throated toucans played hide-and-seek with us in the tree-tops, though their curved bill and bright colours make them easy to spot;  a young tiger-heron standing solemnly in the shallows peering at the water as if lost in thought; the ridiculous and ungainly hoatzin (which the guides nickname ‘the stinkbird’ from its poorly digested vegetarian diet), with startled hair and wild eyes, like a young punk experimenting with eye-liner;  blue-headed parrots peering down from the tops of the palms.

These same Mauritius palms provide a refuge for one of the most threatened of Amazon species, the macaws:   their toxic diet of largely unripe fruit requires them to lick sodium as an antidote, and the clay licks that provide this are few and far between. So naturalists have lifted PVC nests into the tops of these palms as their bark can also provide similar nutrients.

Macaws help propagate a tree crucial to the region’s survival – the Brazil nut.  As one of the few birds with beaks strong enough to crack open the adamantine shell, they spread it through the forest.  For reasons to do with pollination that have proved very beneficial to the survival of the rainforest, Brazil nut trees cannot grow easily in single species plantations. In order to preserve their enormously productive crop, acres of mixed forest are needed around each tree.

Many of our guides come from families of Brazil nut gatherers, who were the original colonisers of the lake, and they took us down some of the trails they had used to  search for the elusive nuts.  On some trees we saw the ‘bracket funghi’ that harden like book shelves so firmly on a trunk that they could support the multi-volume Flora and Fauna of the Amazon, and the termites the locals use as snacks (peppery and insubstantial, as if you were eating snuff) . There are large-nosed fruit-bats stretching themselves like elastic bands, first pinging one side then the other, and the remarkable ‘walking tree’, the socrates exorisa, that can shuffle along the forest floor in its search for a gap in the canopy above, retracting and discarding root systems to do so.

The lodge itself is large and open-plan, with hammocks and bedroom wings spreading to either side under mosquito nets; it’s cool and spacious but the bedrooms all open to the same shared roof for ventilation and you can hear a mosquito squeak two rooms away, let alone a bed creak, so perhaps not great for couples – any love-making would have to be done at the pace of the local sloths.

For more privacy – indeed complete isolation– you might need a remarkable new development at a lodge nearby, the Reserva Amazonica, where Joe Koechlin, the  ecologist and hotelier who helped Herzog with his epic Peruvian films Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: Wrath of God, has just built a bedroom 90ft up a tree.

I had been asked to be the first guest and ‘guinea-pig’ (not a comforting concept in Peru). When they’d told me I’d me sleeping 90 feet up a tree I had assumed this was latin hyperbole;  but no, there  it was, at the very top of the rainforest canopy, clinging to the slender trunk of a cepanchila.  To get there you had to climb a wooden tower and then a series of rope walkways to what must be the ultimate tree-house.

There was some trepidation from the management as to how the first guest might find it.  I was issued with a panic button so that if necessary a member of staff could rush in, strap me to their chest and abseil down to the ground, like a ninja turtle – a solution that seemed considerably more frightening for any nervous guest than staying put.

In the event I kept my finger off the button., although sleeping that high in the canopy was certainly an intense experience;  I enjoyed the exposure.  The nearest analogy I can think of is being in a small cabin at sea, with the wind and outside noise amplified, as when a troupe of monkeys descended on the cabin, rattling the walkway and playing on the roof.  In the early morning, the dawn chorus was raucous and spectacular, from the horned screamer bird which some say sounds like a donkey drowning, to the ‘water dropping from a giant tube’ gloop-gloop-gloop noises of  the oropendola.  There were also tree frogs that sounded exactly like digital cameras bleeping.

My guide Eric joined me in the treehouse at 5.00 am so we could see the sun rise over the top of the Amazon rainforest.  It felt like a biblical moment, a moment of creation. I had become used to seeing  the sun slowly filter its way to the forest floor – but above the canopy it came up fast, like a searchlight, and illuminated the heads of the matate and ceiba trees so that they looked like fibre optic lamps.

Eric pointed out a paradise tanager in a nearby tree, its blues startlingly vivid even by the standards of exotic jungle birds. As we looked out over the still unspoilt jungle, Eric listed the ways in which the locals could survive here:  by logging or gold-panning, which was destructive to the environment;  or from gathering brazil nuts which was slow and subject to the whims of the commodity marker;  but the best of all, said Eric, is you – the tourist.  Tourism is one of the few economic factors that can persuade a government to preserve a rainforest.  It’s a curious and unexpected thought but he may well be right:  if we really want to save the Amazon, then we should go and stay there.

 An edited version of this appeared in the Guardian (concentrating on the tree house section at end)

See factfile

I also like his candour.  He told the wire-press agency AP that he was “no eco-warrior” and that while, like all of us, he deplored the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, his own expedition was at its heart simply a grand expedition of endurance:  “The crux of it is, if this wasn’t a selfish, boy’s-own adventure, I don’t think it would have worked.  I am simply doing it because no-one has done it before.”

In these days when every expedition has to have its ‘eco-message’ , however admirable (like the Plastiki, which has just sailed the Pacific on a raft made from recycled plastic bottles that unfortunately proved very difficult to stop drifting sideways), I find this quite refreshing.  The elemental urge ‘to be the first to do something’ has always been an immensely productive one.

I am reminded of the very first attempt to sail down the Amazon.   Gonzalo Pizarro (the brother of the conqueror of Peru) was made governor of Quito in 1540, a few years after the Conquest.  He immediately set off down a tributary of the Amazon, the Napo, in search of valuable cinnamon and treasure.  He and his men met nothing but disappointment.  The Indian tribes would tell them that, while they had no treasure themselves, the next tribe down river assuredly did, and the gullible Spanish were led ever further eastward. 

At one point Pizarro sent an advance party ahead under the leadership of his second-in-command, Francisco de Orellana.  Orellana was supposed simply to reconnoitre and then report back.  Instead, in one of the most spectacular instances of military insubordination on record, Orellana just kept on going until he and his men came out on the Atlantic some thousands of miles away.  The journey took them – like Ed Stafford, who started in April 2008 - a harrowing two years.  In the process, they were the first Europeans to travel down the greatest river in the world.

Not much is left to commemorate their achievements in discovering the Amazon.  I once visited  an Ecuadorian town named after Gonzalo Pizarro (who, after kicking his heels in the jungle for a while, got bored waiting for his lieutenant and headed home to file complaints against him), while Puerto Francisco de Orellana is just downstream and there are a few other small settlements named after him scattered over the Amazon basin.

The rewards of discovery are fickle:  Sir George Everest, Surveyor General of India, famously never went to the mountain named after him, but has been immortalised, yet who now remembers Francisco de Orellana, the discoverer of the Amazon?  Perhaps it was because he named the river not after himself but after one of the tribes he encountered, recognising in a way not usually done by colonising explorers that they had been there first.

And there is a fascination in the way that the river should have been called after a Greek myth, on the most spurious of grounds.  Orellana and his conquistadors noticed that among the Indians of one tribe they were fighting were many tall women, attacking as fiercely as the men:  this particular tribe successfully drove the Spanish away.  It is from this small incident that the River Amazon was named.  The defeated conquistadors captured an Indian from another tribe and interrogated him about these female attackers.  He told them – or as sceptical later commentators noted, his answers confirmed all their questions in the manner they doubtless wished – that, yes, these women did all the things the original Amazons did:  they cut off their right breast the better to draw a bow (the word Amazon means ‘breastless’) and had intercourse only once a year. 

His answers fed the conquistadors’ fantasies about the myth they had grown up with, the idea of a tribe of women warriors with super-human strength.  This myth had been given great popularity  by the success of contemporary Spanish potboilers like Sergas de Esplandián in which the Amazon legend figured prominently.  Indeed Esplandián, a sort of Zorro figure cast in the mould that every Spanish conquistador liked to see himself as, not only defeats the Queen of the Amazons in combat, but makes her fall in love with him as well.  As a myth, it hit every button on the conquistador console.  That the native women might share the mythological power of their classical predecessors also soothed any wounded pride at having been defeated by female fighters – not an easy concept for the Spanish mentality to accept. 

Their wilful and gullible acceptance of this story is a good example of the power that literature still had over these men who had often been lured out to the New World in the first place by fantastical stories.  Drifting down river, with, as Dylan would sing, ‘no direction home’, enduring terrible starvation (they cooked the soles of their shoes at one point), living constantly with the threat of death at the hands of hostile tribes, or disease, or starvation, they reached out for a myth to reassure themselves that somehow, contrary to all the evidence, they were engaged on an enterprise as bold as that of Theseus.

Yet the Amazon was where this myth of chivalric endeavour became truly impossible to sustain.  Orellana’s men at least succeeded in getting down the river and emerging sane at the other end.  The expedition led by Pedro de Ursúa twenty years later in 1560 had a far less happy outcome.  By then the quality of conquistador stock had degenerated after years of civil war and easy living off the land:  Ursúa had a rabble to lead and was quickly murdered by the psychopathic Lope de Aguirre, who proceeded to kill most of the rest of the men as they sailed down river (Werner Herzog’s celebrated film about him presents, if anything, a sanitised version).

 He was finally killed by his own bodyguards, but not before he had run his daughter through with a sword and caused the deaths of hundreds of conquistadors and of their Andean porters.

Lope de Aguirre’s famous last, mad letter about the Amazon, addressed to the King of Spain himself, was as near to bleak existentialism as the sixteenth century mind could get.  It told him that ‘if a hundred thousand men came here, none would escape.  For the reports are false:  there is nothing on this river but despair.’

For Ed Stafford to have emerged at the other end of it just about intact (he almost collapsed with a day to go) and still able to blog – at http://www.edstafford.org/ – is an even more impressive achievement.

The situation at the site is currently, as its custodians English Heritage put it, ‘severely compromised’ and as others like leading archaeologist Mike Pitts would say, ‘ an embarrassing, abominable, inexcusable mess’. For decades, plans have been put forward to improve the site and then postponed.

Two main roads not only thunder past but divide the circle of stones from the Avenue that should lead to it.  The findings from Stonehenge are scattered piecemeal between some sixteen different museums and private holdings around the country.  For the almost one million annual visitors drawn there, it can be a dispiriting experience, with the stones themselves fenced off and the current ‘visitor centre’ resembling a British Rail station built in the 1970s.  Overall, it can be a bit like having a picnic in a car park.

Just last week the Government announced that it would no longer help finance the proposed new landscaping and visitor centre which Labour had announced last October. 

On the face of it, this might seem perfectly reasonable.  A saving of £10 million would result.  We all know that cuts have to be made;  the Government claims that Labour committed to projects that were never affordable.

What no one has pointed out is that they have left in place a whole raft of other projects that Labour committed to at the same time:  £50 million towards the extension of Tate Modern, £22.5 million towards the creation of the British Museum’s World Conservation and Exhibitions Centre, and £33 million to secure the future of the British Library’s newspaper archive in new premises in Yorkshire. ‪

While all these projects may be worthwhile, they are certainly more expensive and show a strange sense of priorities.  Stonehenge is a quite unique prehistoric monument that has Unesco World Heritage status.   We are supposed to be conserving it not just for the nation but the planet, and at present are failing dismally.

You don’t have to be a paid-up pagan or druid to appreciate that this circle of megalithic stones represent an extraordinary imaginative and creative effort of our prehistoric fathers that compares well with our own Millennium Dome of 5000 years later – and how much better it would have been to divert some small change from that grandiose project to Salisbury Plain.

Surely it behoves us to spend what little money we have left in the public purse on preserving one of our greatest monuments before embarking on far more expensive new projects?  Or, as a Conservative Party obsessed with home-owners might put it, perhaps we should fix the roof before we build an extension?

 see The Times for the published version of this piece (subscribers only)

and the piece prompted the following letter in the Times a few days later:

July 16 2010 

Letters to the Editor:  Stonehenge

Sir, Hugh Thomson (Thunderer, the Times, July 13) rightly questions the wisdom of the coalition Government’s decision to cut its support for improving the setting and building of a new visitor centre at Stonehenge, an icon of our national heritage and the centrepiece of the “cultural offer” pitched to the International Olympics Committee for 2012. The casual saving of £10 million places Stonehenge under threat as a World Heritage Site of outstanding universal value.  

The news is felt all the more painfully since this is now the third time the project has been cancelled and it is estimated that £45 million to £55 million has already been spent abortively in developing these proposals. More than £25 million has been promised from other sources including the Heritage Lottery Fund. Added to this, the visitor centre has already received planning permission. So to make a saving of £10 million at this advanced stage makes no sense, either financially or strategically. It would be cheaper to finish the job now, rather than cancel and have to start again. We invite the Government to seek an effective solution to the problem.

Professor Maurice Howard
Professor Geoffrey Wainwright
Professor Colin Renfrew
Professor Timothy Darvill

We ended up going into the forest on foot and looking in the more traditional manner, with machetes, frustration and a great deal of sweat.  (The full story is told in Cochineal Red for those interested.)

But an even newer technology has come along that sounds rather more effective:  lidar (‘light detection and ranging’).  Gamers have used it to create virtual reality sites for some time.   Now the husband-and-wife team of Arlen and Diane Chase have adapted  it at Caracol in Belize to penetrate the jungle cover and create 3-D images of one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands.

In the process they’ve established that the site was far more extensive than had ever been expected:  the city sprawled over some 70 square miles.

Diane Chase was quoted as being  ‘blown away’ by the new technology:   ’We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.’

Apparently, however,  they also emphasized that ‘it would not obviate the need to follow up with traditional mapping to establish “ground truth.” ’  What a terrific phrase – ‘ground truth’.  Now that’s something I’ve been searching for my whole life…..

Now it should be enjoyed more for the vitality and vulgarity of a latin Blackpool or Coney Island: plates of fried bananas and whelks;  rubber rings and trinkets in brash colours;  kids dashing under the waves or burying themselves under the brownish sand (no one can claim Acapulco has the purest water in the Pacific – a million people live there).  Along the central drag is a large, kitsch statue of a plump Diana firing her arrow directly at a gigantic inflated bottle of Corona.   Overhead, frigate birds try to mob the boobies and the gulls to get them to disgorge their fish.

I like best the old working fishermen’s beach at the north end of the shore, near the fort once used to keep the area free from English pirates like El Drago (Drake).  There the pelicans cluster round the catches, hopping from foot to foot like embarrassed teenagers at a ball waiting to be asked to dance.  These are not the picturesque Disney white pelicans of further north and California, but the brown ones of the Latin American seaport, with their ponderous heavy-jowled flight. 

The drink of choice for the locals is not tequila – that’s for the norteños or the American college kids who come here for their ‘Spring Break’ to party hard in the surf.  No the drink here is the michelada, a light beer with salt and lime on the rim of the glass, and a dusting of chilli powder to give more power to your elbow.  The more of it you  drink, the more of it you need to drink. 

I have one on the old fishing pier, watching the pelicans clustering together on a buoy and looking down the strip towards the gleaming high-rise hotels at the south end of the shore, now half empty with all the talk of Mexican drug crime (20 were killed in a nearby Acapulco suburb recently).  And then I have another.

Postscript:  and for those doubting that Acapulco has been infected by Mexican drug crime, see this more recent report

It was the Incas who introduced the world to the idea of guano as a fertiliser – ‘guano’ is a Quechua word.  By the 19th century it had become a huge industry, with fortunes being made;  the Gibbs family of Tyntesfield being the most famous British example.  As with any commodity in the New World, the rights of natives were trampled in the rush to lay hands on the money.  At one point, the entire population of Easter Island was transplanted by force to work the guano fields.

Over time, the use of guano came to be replaced by the nitrates mined in neighbouring Chile – a new trade the British supported, backing Chile in the ” War of the Pacific” against Peru and Bolivia to secure their interest in the nitrate holdings.

But it is now enjoying a revival, as an organically approved fertiliser.  Every six or seven years, depending on the frequency of el Niño, the locals “harvest” their crop on three islands off the Paracas Coast, La Chincha, Ballestas and Isla Blanca, and get some 40,000 tonnes of the white stuff.  It sells at two dollars a kilo, a good commodity price, although the work needed to extract it is backbreaking and often dangerous, with ‘guano-slides’ when stacks collapse;  they bring tough miners down from the mountains to help.

It’s the guano that helps make the Pisco valley so green:  as I leave the boat and drive into the desert, an oasis appears of cotton and maize fields, with orange groves and palms dotted throughout — a vision of what organic farming can achieve.  There’s a satisfaction in feeling that something so intrinsically useless as bird-shit should yet be so useful.

Heading into town, we cross a few bridge-sections of road which have had to be plated together, but Santiago itself seems unmarked.  The Zócalo, the central square, is the usual picture of shoe-shine boys, old men sitting on benches and a religious nut preaching the end of the world to a disinterested audience.

In the shopping streets nearby, the atmosphere is rather as if a fire alarm had gone off in John Lewis and now everyone was back in the building and shopping.  But then the Chileans are different from the rest of South America.  As one tells me:     ‘Everyone here is middle-class -  except for the new president, Pinero, and his friends, who are filthy rich!’  Many of the more menial jobs – the maids, the cleaners, the security guards – are taken by Peruvian and Bolivian immigrants these days.

The rest of the continent make jokes about the Chileans being a nation of bland shop-keepers, from their less spicy food to the mild, more temperate climate they enjoy.  I was impressed by the resilience and pragmatism they showed in the face of the earthquake – and by the foresight with which buildings had been constructed, in the main, to withstand such huge force.  But then they have had a long time to get used to such attacks.  175 years ago, almost exactly, Charles Darwin witnessed the Chilean town of Concepción, then, as now damaged by a ferocious earthquake:  ‘the most awful yet interesting spectacle I ever beheld.’

Eating a caldillo of conger eel in the Central Market, a magnificent iron-framed building erected by British investors in the past, I found the food was not so much bland as a balance of interesting flavours – perhaps why the Chileans have always been such natural and loyal allies of the British, from the 19^th century War in the Pacific to that other 20^th century War in the Atlantic, the Falklands.  We too have been accused of being a nation of shopkeepers;  though quite how we’d deal with a 8.8 earthquake, given our incapacity to handle a few wet leaves on a railway track, I’m not so sure.

written March 8 (posted late due to technical issues in posting from Pacific, as several of following posts will be as well!)

[A shorter version of this piece was published in the Times]

My worst journeys from hell?  Waiting days for a series of cancelled boats in Ziguinchor, southern Senegal, at 100° in the shade — 6/10.  A bus trip across the Peruvian desert that lasted 24 hours -  8/10.  Taking a train from Birmingham to Edinburgh – 10/10 and not just because it was the last one I did.  Or because it cost hundreds of pounds more for the pleasure that the other ones.  But because you know it could so easily be improved.

Take a much cheaper coach from Birmingham to Edinburgh and you need a numbered ticket with a designated seat to travel.  Just as you do with a plane.  So why is it that British train companies get away with crowding as many people as they possibly can onto a train before shutting the doors?  This particular journey saw passengers crammed solid down the aisles and in the doorways, with luggage spilled in every direction and children crying:  it looked like a train load of refugees after a catastrophe event.  If the train company could have got away with putting passengers on the roof, they would have.  And this was not for a couple of tube stops or a suburban commute, but a five-hour journey. 

It would never happen on, say, the Delhi to Haridwar train, a comparable long distance route.  Travellers to India are often amused by the practice of both numbered and named seats being posted on the entrance to the carriage (and ladies of a certain age embarrassed – your age is posted up as well) .  It’s thorough if pedantic: you are only allowed on the carriage if you have a seat.  Which of course is draconian for a short, casual journey but reasonable for a long distance one — particularly if there are overflow carriages for those without a reservation at all.  As a result you get a fast, comfortable service, with plenty of chai and chapattis to keep you going.

 Perfectly simple to implement here — but the real problem is that the train companies make a great deal of money from overcrowding.  They know perfectly well which services are going to be full — because they always are.  But rather than lay on the extra coaches needed, at additional cost, they continue to cram passengers in like sheep off to the slaughterhouse.  Because they can.  And because — here is the very British rub — they can keep apologising for it.  Every 15 minutes or so we have a tannoyed apology for the avoidable mistake — made with the smugness of an actor repeating his regular lines. 

In much the same way, Cortes and his conquistadors would read out a Spanish legal document to uncomprehending native Indians explaining that, once read, they had the right to conquer and enslave then.  So it is with these train services:  if an apology has been made, they can do anything they like, again and again and again.

No wonder that visitors here complain of the poor quality and overpricing of our trains.  I pity the Indian tourists who blithely imagined they might get service of the sort they are accustomed to at home.  And forget a cup of chai from the trolley service  — which was parked, immobile, at one end of our jammed train.  For which, of course, we received an apology.

One suspects it will take some tragedy of the sort of the Kings Cross fire before the companies are forced to take action.  Certainly the current arrangements make a mockery of the safety regulations which  the tannoy system instructs customers to study. There’s no point in knowing where the safety exits are if the aisles are so jammed you can’t move.

According to the deeply ineffectual Office of Rail Regulation, ‘There is no legal limit on the number of passengers that can travel in any given train coach.  In this, trains differ from other modes of transport – most notably buses and aeroplanes.’  And this is fine, explains the Office, because trains are so well engineered that it does not matter how many passengers are crammed into them,  as it will not affect their performance.

In the face of such breathtaking industry complacence about passenger welfare, there is clearly a crying need to create a legal limit on passenger numbers.  Because without a legal obligation to prevent overcrowding, the train companies will continue to exploit the legal loophole and cram as many passengers as possible onto their depleted trains.

Whatever happened to the Government’s much trumpeted promise in 2007 to provide 1,300 extra carriages to reduce overcrowding?  It has used the protracted negotiations over the new Thameslink contract to delay their introduction.  The Department for Transport has also since neatly changed the definition of overcrowding to massage the figures:  they tripled the threshhold  for overcrowding from 10 people standing for every 100 seats to 30 per 100 seats.   Even with those new definitions, the overcrowding has got worse.

Meanwhile the train companies have seized on an ingenious if perverse safety policy of their own:  pricing people off.  UK train fares are already the highest in the world, according to the Campaign for Better Transport.  They fear that the companies can now afford to raise them even higher – even if we can’t.

During the recent extreme flooding in Peru, media attention centred almost wholly and shamefully on the 1,300 tourists stranded at Machu Picchu. 

Now that they have been airlifted out from their luxury hotels – one told the television cameras that the helicopter ride ‘made his holiday’ – it is worth considering the real impact of the flooding on the people who actually live there.

For the episode is just a waymark in a far more important story.  The Andes is being ripped apart by a series of recent climatic disasters that threaten to destroy the fragile peace established since the terrible period of the Sendero Luminoso when Maoist revolutionaries held Peru to ransom in the 1990s.

This has always been one of the most volatile parts of the world meteorologically, as discussed in my post on the Moche below (‘Every six or seven years , a change in Pacific wind-directions causes a build up of much warmer water along Peru’s coast:  initially it is the fishing which suffers;  then the whole climate gets thrown into reverse, with flooding in the deserts and drought in the mountains’). 

But with global warming, what was an occasional El Niño phenomenon looks set to become far more regular – and even more extreme.  The Andean micro-climate means that the Quechua Indians in the hill, of whom there some 25 million, are beginning to experience ‘reverse global warming’ in the form of much colder, wetter winters.

Enduring prolonged sub-zero temperatures is a matter of course for Peru’s indigenous mountain people, many of whom live at more than 3,000m above sea level. Scores die every year from the cold, but in recent years the number of people succumbing to the freezing temperatures has triggered talk of a national crisis.

I have led many research expeditions to the high Andes and have an endless respect for the toughness of Quechua-speaking farmers and their families, who have managed to subsist for centuries at high altitude.  They are the only mountain people I have seen in the world who still plough their highest fields by hand – even in the poorest bits of the Himalaya, they have beasts of burden to help them.  But now some of them believe that they may not make it through the next southern winter. 

The changing weather has affected both livestock and the potato harvest, and is compounded by resulting problems in water supply and sanitation;  children’s health has got much worse (particularly acute bronchial problems) and food production has fallen by over 40%.

All this means that Peru may be ripe for conflict again, because the neglected, mostly native Andeans resent the coastal-based, more European government – just as many have emailed me to complain that all the West seems to care about is the comfort of a handful of tourists marooned in luxury hotels.  And if they do rise up, as the carnage of the Sendero Luminoso showed, the consequences both for the country and the continent  will be extreme.

Over the last decade or so, we’ve got used to a more stable and democratic Latin America, but that, like the climate, could easily go into reverse.