Penguins and Battlefields

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No one would ever go to the Falklands for either the weather or the view.  That at least has been the traditional opinion ever since Darwin commented on his first arrival, ‘scarcely any views can be more dismal than that from the heights: moorland and black bog extend as far as the eye can discern, intersected by innumerable streams, and pools of yellowish water….. These islands have a miserable appearance.’

Like the Hebrides though, catch them on a good day with a bit of sun and they have their own wild beauty.  Throw in some accessible colonies of penguins and you have the beginnings of a tourist trade;  a surprising amount of passenger boats now stop there for a combined ‘Penguin and Battlefield’ tour, with fish and chips in one of the pubs in Port Stanley afterwards.

One reason for the bitterness the islanders feel towards Argentina is apparent as soon as you drive out of Stanley – the amount of land that is still uninhabitable because of landmines, including many of the beaches which they used to play on as children. The cost, both human and economic, of trying to clear such large areas has proved too much.

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Back in Buenos Aires

I’m back in Buenos Aires after 20 years. Outwardly, little has changed in the centre of the city. At San Telmo market they still sell Carlos Gardel, Maradonna and Benny Hill dvds, with a curious mix of old gaucho belts, movie cameras and Art Deco soda fountains. The steaks are as big as planks; the women as tall and elegant as greyhounds. The economy somehow manages to make life expensive both for inhabitants and visitors, and Peronist politics, as re-imagined by the Kirchner dynasty, are as incomprehensible as ever.

But there’s a big difference down at the docks. The old desolate area of Madero has been transformed by new buildings and promenades beside the waterfront, along which the gilded youth of B.A. rollerskate and hang out in the sun wearing as little as possible.

Porteños have always been a neurotic bunch.  It’s said that there are more psychotherapists here than in any other city on the continent. I put it down to the fact that, like some New Yorkers, they’ve always secretly wanted to be Californian but never had the access; now they can. I pass a pair of bronzed young men stripped to the waist and sipping maté. There is an equally bronzed statue of Fangio and his famous racing car; and memorial plaques to the disappeared of the dictadura.  Now that even the blonde angel of death, Alfredo Astiz, has been put away behind bars, there is a sense that that terrible period of their history is behind them, although the ghosts of 30,000 people still stalk the streets.

What gives me the greatest pleasure are the avenues of Linden trees they have planted, a tree which flourishes in Buenos Aires, just as in Berlin, but has almost died out in its wild habitat in England, despite once covering most of the south of the country in prehistoric times.  It is a fabulous tree, a tree with translucent green leaves and fragrant white blossom. As a symbol of a renascent city and country, it’s hard to beat.

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Espíritu Pampa: The Last City of the Incas

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Ten years ago I sat in the middle of the ruins of Espíritu Pampa and despaired that it would ever be cleared. Dense jungle covered the site. Kapok trees had ripped open the Inca stonework, their roots gripping doorways and niches. Brush obscured the lines of the great Plaza, the kallankas and the ornamental fountains.

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The work of ever restoring the place seemed both Herculean and pointless – the ruins were too extensive and remote, the vegetation just too dense, for this, unlike most Inca sites, had been built not in the mountains, but in the jungle on the eastern slopes of the Andes as they joined the Amazon.

The site has enormous emotional resonance – ‘the last bastion of Inca resistance’, as a noticeboard proclaims at its entrance, it saw the final dying of the flame after the Spanish conquest in 1532. Having held out in the mountains of the Vilcabamba for some 40 years, by 1572 the last Emperor, the young Tupac Amaru, was on the run, pursued down here into the rainforest by a Viceroy intent on finally wiping out “the pretender across the mountains”.

Espíritu Pampa was burnt in the process; the Emperor caught and executed.

But perhaps because it is such a potent symbol, the Peruvian government have made a superhuman effort and cleared it – one substantial section just three weeks before we arrived. I can finally appreciate the immense size of the site, radiating out from the central Plaza where they have tactfully left a few of the giant kapok trees.

Now is the time to visit, before the vegetation returns under a less benign or interested administration; or when someone realises that with just 30 or so visitors a year making the week long journey, the cost of maintaining it cannot be justified.

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River Swimming

Poor David Walliams’ illness contracted from swimming the Thames for Charity threw up (sorry!) the following quite incredible statement from Thames Water:

A spokeswoman for Thames Water said: “The Thames is not a designated bathing area and therefore the Environment Agency does not require us to disinfect the treated waste water before it goes back into the river.’

swimming on the river thames Swimming breaksWell speaking as someone who regularly swims in it anyway, why the hell not make it ‘a designated bathing area’!  It would be a fabulous resource that could be accessed from half the Home Counties.  And get rid of the many pathogens that Thames Water currently pumps in there……

One of my best memories of travelling through Russia is the way that Russians use every last available inch of water to swim, so that you see them in canals and rivers and lakes everywhere, usually with a cold bottle of vodka and some pickled mushrooms to help them recuperate afterwards.

Pioneers like Kate Rew and the admirable Outdoor Swimming Society, OSS, still have a long way to go in their campaigning to make the same thing possible in Britain.

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Highway to the Sangre de Cristo mountains

road to Sangre to Cristo mountains, Colorado

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In Colorado to ride horses in the mountains.  One of the first times I’ve been in rural America – most of my previous visits have been to the cities – and I’m blown away by the scale and wilderness.  The largely empty highways seem to go on forever.  The mountains are chunkier than I’d expected as well – we’re a stone’s throw from Pikes Peak at over 14,000 feet.

 

Even the apples are bigger in America. And there’s a reason for that.  They grow a thousand times as many apples in the States as in Britain, but they prefer theirs to be ‘meal-sized portions’ – so they export the little ones to us, with our smaller appetites and orchards.

We take a pack trip into the Sangre de Cristo mountains, south-west of Colorado Springs, and spend some nights at over 10,000 feet with nine wonderful horses who pick their way surefootedly across some difficult terrain.  The forests are a rich mixture of aspen, spruce and pine, with wild raspberries growing underfoot and a few bears lurking around to add spice to the mix (we have a large Great Dane with us called Guinness, who is said to be more than a match for any bear, as they are notoriously afraid of dogs).

I’m with my old friends Gary Ziegler, who has led trips with me in Peru many times, and his wife Amy Finger.  Their Bear Basin Ranch lies on the old stagecoach route to Westcliffe, and has over 4000 acres of fine riding country to explore.

By coincidence I’m just re-reading John Steinbeck’s excellent Travels with Charley, in which he also travels across America with a large dog, who at one point barks at a bear.  It’s almost exactly 50 years old, written in 1961, published 1962, almost his last book and a fine tribute to his love for the wide open spaces of America as well as a melancholy forecast of some of the changes he could see coming.  It came out the year he won the Nobel Prize and was subtitled ‘In Search Of America’;  perhaps helped by the Nobel Prize, it was a bestseller and deserved to be for the simple, direct approach he took to travel writing, and his perfect ear for American dialogue:  ‘the Badlands of Missouri are like the work of an evil child…’

 

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The Pinball Of Peruvian Politics: A New President

Every year, the Lima seafront becomes more Californian; not just the surfers hanging out in the Pacific breakers and paragliders spiralling around the cliffs, but the sense of affluence:  there are families strolling along the promenade after eating at one of Lima’s increasingly fashionable seafood restaurants and the shopping malls are full of  IPods, boutiques and tropical fruit flavoured ice cream.

But this is the first time I’ve been here when even the taxi drivers aren’t complaining. The Peruvian economy is booming, with a 7.1 percentage growth rate that European countries can only dream of; the Peruvian football team, serial underachievers, have done well in the Copa America, beating the old enemy, Chile, along the way. And they have been celebrating the centenary of the discovery of Machu Picchu, not only as the symbol of the country’s glorious Inca past, but because they finally managed to get back all the artefacts that American explorer Hiram Bingham took with him to Yale in 1911.

However, having told me all this, the taxi driver will then usually shrug and say “but now, quien sabe, who knows?’  For the recent elections have delivered a shock result that may take the pinball of Peruvian politics off in a completely new direction. …

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Deep memories: the death of Patrick Leigh Fermor

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There have been some thoughtful appreciations after the death of Patrick Leigh Fermor – none more so than Ben Macintyre’s excellent piece in the Times, which rather than following the obvious line of ‘the end of an era and can anyone still write travel books anymore’ instead proclaimed the continued need for them.

The thing that has always most intrigued me is the length of time between Leigh Fermor’s journeys and his books.  A Time Of Gifts came out 40 years after his Balkan travels of the 1930s;  Between the Woods and the Water 50 years later;  he was still working on the final volume of the trilogy at his death, which would have appeared almost 70 years after the events described.

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Such fine distillation of experience over very many years can do interesting things to a book.  I’m used to it from the chroniclers of South American adventures where you often also get such time delay:  Garcilaso de la Vega, the best known chronicler of the Incas, had been in Europe for forty years before he wrote his account of the civilisation he had left behind;  Pedro Pizarro wrote his memoirs of being a page boy at the Conquest of Peru when he was an old man;  similarly the great chronicler of the Mexican campaign, Bernal Diaz, only recorded his eyewitness account of that parallel conquest some fifty years after the event.

Is there something that makes ambitious journeys difficult to assimilate in the present tense –  that their sensory overload can only best be interpreted years later, when the glitter and noise has fallen away to reveal structure underneath? Many of Gabriel García Márquez’s novels depend on just such an almost optical effect,  in which events of the distant past are foreshortened and looked at with startling clarity.  W.H. Hudson’s classic memoir of Argentina, Far Away and Long Ago, relies as much on the passage of time between the writing and the remembered events for its nostalgic power.  Or is there a simpler explanation – that young men inclined to go out into the jungle and cross deserts  – or the Balkans – are equally disinclined to sit down at a desk and write about it immediately afterwards?

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Doing it without the Fez on

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The last place I was expecting to go for a party in Morocco was Moulay Idriss.  It’s the holiest city in the country, named after the man who founded it and brought Islam to Morocco.  Until quite recently, non-Muslims were not supposed to sleep within its whitewashed walls, although they could visit by day.

So it’s a bold move by those behind the popular Cafe Clock in Fez to open a restaurant, the Scorpion House, to try to attract more visitors both here and to the nearby Roman ruins of Volubilis.  Mike, the owner, invites my children and me to attend the opening party for staff and friends.

The restaurant has a truly spectacular position on the terraces above the green-roofed mausoleum of the saint.  The music and dancing are intense.  At one point a young woman gets overcome by the emotion of the moment and faints, apparently overcome by the djinns, spirits.  Once he’s checked that she’s all right, Mike seems pleased:  “shows it’s a real party.”

This stay in  Morocco is a chance to check out what the impact has been of the Arab Spring.  Aside from the bombing of a cafe in Marrakesh, there’s been little in the Western news about its effect on one of the Arab countries that is most visited.  The King and his government pride themselves on an ecumenical approach – there are Jews and Sufis in important positions – but power is still not equally shared.  No one would call the country truly democratic.  And many Turkish families still send their daughters here to be educated, as while wearing a veil in Turkish universities is banned, as befits a secular state, it is perfectly permissible here.

The King is well-respected and has announced a wide-ranging review of the constitution, but Morocco has a potent mix of foreign investment and visitors, and a well-educated younger generation with a desire for equality.  Expect more djinns to be released.

See Getting Lost in Fez text or as printed 

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Lost Pyramids in Egypt

There’s so much rubbish archaeological TV – Channel 4’s latest piece on Atlantis hit new depths, and not just beneath the ocean – that when something genuinely interesting comes along it can be lost in the mix.
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Saqqara pyramid
Saqqara pyramid where other pyramids have now been found

Next Monday’s BBC program promises to be truly revelatory – not just because an American team have discovered some seventeen lost pyramids in Egypt, but because they used infrared technology from space to find them.    More than 1,000 tombs and 3,000 ancient settlements have also been revealed by looking at the infra-red images.

This is similar to the same infrared technology I tried to use in the Andes a few years ago looking for Inca sites, when it was still early days for its use.  Now that it’s getting more and more advanced, there will be some truly staggering finds in the next few years to come…….

BBC documentary Egypt’s Lost Cities and their report

more on satellite archaeology

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