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Down the Amazon, no direction home

The recent news that ex British Army captain Ed Stafford has completed his 859 day walk along the Amazon from its source to the sea deserves comment – and praise. It’s an epic achievement and one never achieved before.  Previous attempts  have always been made partly by boat, and for good reason:  some areas of the Amazon, like the Solimoes in Brazil,  flood for hundreds of kilometers each year and there are no roads along the main river, so to walk the entire length is daunting.

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. …

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Down the Amazon, no direction home Read More »

Stonehenge – a national disgrace

Stonehenge was given to the nation in 1918.  So far, almost a century later, the nation has done a remarkably bad job at looking after it. 

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. …

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Stonehenge – a national disgrace Read More »

Lidar ranging

There’s nothing as seductive as new technology, particularly in the world of archaeology.   Some years ago I co-led an expedition that expended an inordinate amount of energy using a thermal imaging camera.  We flew over the cloud forest near Machu Picchu to determine the full extent of the nearby site of Llactapata, at a cost of $1000 per hour for the plane, let alone for the camera.  Its infra-red vision was supposed to be able to detect the difference in temperature between stone buildings which retain heat, and vegetation which does not.  By using it, we hoped to  be able to see through the cloud-forest to any ruins below the canopy  – the archaeological equivalent of those X-Ray specs sold in schoolboys’ comics to look through women’s skirts, and in the event about as successful.

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…..

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Mine’s a michelada

Once Acapulco was a remote and glamorous resort on Mexico’s Pacific coast.  Mass tourism from abroad and from within the country has changed all that.

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

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The White Stuff: How bird-shit can change your life

I’m coming into port at Pisco, past the Paracas Peninsula. It’s  home to a culture who created some of the finest of all pre-Columbian weavings, but I’m more interested in the bird-shit: in the guano islands that are dotted over the sea as one approaches, with frigate-birds and pelicans flying between them, over a fishing ground that even now, after the depredations of Chinese fishing tankers, is still one of the richest in the world.

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.

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In Chile after the Earthquake

I flew into Santiago airport with some trepidation – arriving just days after one of the world’s largest recorded earthquakes, at 8.8 – but it takes a while to spot any sign of damage at all.  Given that most taxi drivers can never resist a moan, mine was more concerned that the 2005 Skoda he’d just acquired had been installed with a tape rather than cd player.  ‘What is the point of that,’ he complained and apologised.  He’d wanted to play me some Iron Maiden to celebrate my common British heritage with the group.

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 19th century War in the Pacific to that other 20th 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!)

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My worst journeys from hell?

 

[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. 

…

My worst journeys from hell?Read More »

My worst journeys from hell? Read More »

The real story behind the flooding at Machu Picchu

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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.

…

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The real story behind the flooding at Machu Picchu Read More »

The Masks of the Moche

Only a few weeks after hearing about the exciting excavations in Mexico, another archaeologist  has been in town to talk about equally exciting work that has been happening in Peru. 

Steve Bourget is a leading expert on the Moche, the ancient Peruvian civilisation who perhaps left the most splendid artefacts behind  – fabulous masks of turquoise and gilded copper, and ceramics of extraordinary variety, depicting pre-Columbian life in all its forms including, most famously, the erotic:  many of their pots are still kept in drawers marked for-the-over -18 only. 

He was describing his recent work at a site called Huaca el Pueblo, where they uncovered a tomb dating from around 300 to 500 AD.  Inside were the remains of four individuals, two men and two women, all in their twenties at the time of death.  Working at frantic speed over the space of five weeks to beat the threat from both the humidity and local looters, his team of archaeologists injected alcohol under the mask of ‘the highest status individual’ – who Bourget has called ‘the Lord of Ucupe’ – to loosen it up for removal from his face in the normal way.  They then used thin slivers of bamboo to lift it, only to discover another mask underneath, like a Russian doll. 

And what masks!  Made from large sheets of gilded copper and fashioned with elaborate Moche iconography:  octopus tentacles, owl-heads and, around one woman’s headdress, a ring of minute dancers. 

…

The Masks of the MocheRead More »

The Masks of the Moche Read More »

At least it will taste smoke-grilled…

In the aftermath of Copenhagen, it’s salutary to look back at past civilisations destroyed by bad ecological decisions.

There is the obvious example of Easter Island where all the trees were cut down for religious reasons, with disastrous effect:  the topsoil was subsequently eroded, fishing boats could not be made and famine followed.  There are the Maya, who likewise decimated the rainforests of the Yucatán over a millennium and are thought to have suffered drought as a result, which brought the classic period of their civilisation to an end.

But the example that is closest to home for me are the Nasca culture of Peru, about whom I’ve written in Cochineal Red. Famous for the lines they created on the desert plateau, the Nasca were wiped out by a series of ecological catastrophes in around 780 A.D. Recent research done by David Beresford Jones, an archaeologist from Cambridge, and his colleagues suggests this was because they did not value the huarango, the local extremely slow growing tree with unusually deep root systems that gives protection from harsh desert winds. By cutting them down, the Nasca exposed themselves to the elements with fatal results.

It’s not a lesson that modern Peruvians have gained much from: last time I was in Nasca, the huarango trees were still being cut down – not least because the local pizzerias valued the particular flavour they gave to the food when used under the grill. Sometimes one wonders if mankind’s criminally short term memory is matched only by the facile way we misuse our remaining resources.

But it’s a reminder that 21st century Western civilisation is not unique in the way that it has become so out of touch with nature – previous civilisations were often just as bad. Which is why they are no longer around.

At least it will taste smoke-grilled… Read More »

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