la vuelta

Here I am in Sao Paulo a few hours before I fly back. There feels like a bit of symmetry to the start of my trip as i spent my first few days wandering alone through the streets of a big city and i find myself doing the same at the end - but with a much more positive mindset (I was, i´ll admit, pretty anxious at the start of this journey). I also consumed alot of steak in my first weekend and the same can be said now. The whole churrascaria thing they have going on here in brazil is something special - better than any ¨help yourself to the salad bar¨ jibber you get in a Harvester.

So yes - what a trip. Nearly 6 months on the road and river (well, ok, i took three internal flights too) in this fine land. Time has past in a very calm and mellow fashion and not in one of those fast paced living in london 6 months where you blink and the seasons have done a full cycle. For that I am very grateful for it does feel like a large chunk of time has elapased (about a 60th of my life to date).

I´ve been lucky enough to have seen some beautiful and wonderful sights, done some mindblowing stuff, read some good books and chatted to a whole lot of fun and interesting people along the way. Hard to really digest it all really.

That said, i do feel ready to come home. I miss my friends, family and Marmite... and playing football (which i have done but once in Bs As i taught some portenos how to tackle). I understand the team I play for on Sunday has had one of its best seasons of late so I fear for my place in the side. All the moreso that i have put on a little bit of weight...this clip from Alan Partridge might give you an idea.

Big thanks to those of you who have read this blog and a 10 gun salute to all those of you who have left comments and e-mailed me on my adventures - all very much appreciated. Obrigado.

Well- i know i´ve been a bit slack on keeping this updated, but i have a few more tales to tell, so i´ll keep updating this when inspiration strikes. I still haven´t told you about the one eyed guide in the amazon rainforest, how i spent my christmas and how Andy and I got on Peru TV with a local Beauty Queen.

When my esteemed friend Simon Hunt goes away on his travels his correspondence is always peppered with apt and befitting song lyrics that sum things up very nicely. I shall attempt the same here, but the on song I would like to use (I Love You by Lou Reed) i used on my old blog at the end of my last trip. bugger. Instead then, I shall leave three links to songs that i think in all or in part (perhaps out of context with the M.Ward song) sum things up.

Flaming Lips - Do You Realize




M.Ward - To Go Home
¨God its great to be alive,
takes the skin right of my hide,
to know i´ll have to give it all up some day¨


Theme - Littlest Hobo (Gotta love the bit with the rifle in his chops!)

¨The division of labor among nations is that some specialize in winning and others in losing. Latin America, has specialized in losing¨

The quote above is from a fine book (obvioulsy not on the topic of football) Ive been reading the past week or so: The Open Veins of Latin America - Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

It was written in the 1970s, so obvioulsy things have progressed since then, but its put a lot of what Ive seen, heard and thought into context and perspective. It highlights how these lands have been exploited by first the europeans and then america. Always serving the interests and fuelling the wealth of others and never allowed to look after itself and the people who live there. From the many aboriginal communities who were decimated and destroyed by the blind greed of the spanish and other europeans until the book ends in the midst of many, US backed, cruel dictatorships - the continentents natural resources and peoples have suffered for others.

Basically, your man Eduardo Galeano documents (with a nice line in humour) meticulously the statistics of exploitation and murder - the facts, the numbers, and most importantly the emotions and situations behind the well documented data.

It would have been a boon to have the tome at the start of my trip as it would have informed me of what i was seeing (e.g. abject poverty, political corruption the continent over, etc) and informed me of where to go. For example, i would most certainly have headed to Potosi in Bolivia - once the most important city in the world, but that was before the silver dried up...

Anway, if you´re coming out this way and interested in why things are the way they are, then i highly recommend it.

Guinea Pig

When we (andy and me) finished our Inca Trail we returned to Cusco and had a banquet of Cuy (pronounced coy) which to you and me is Guinea Pig. The first time I saw this dish being served was in my first port of call in Peru - the town of Puno on the shores of lake titikaka. It was basically a whole guineapig - teeth and claws n´all - but it looked like it had been flattened by a rolling pin or a heavy goods vehicle. She tred to maintain her honour and the pride of her host, but the look of disgust and fear on the chinese american girls face was not lost on anyone.

The next time i saw this ancient Incan delicacy being served up was on Andys first night in cusco and on this occasion time rather that being pancake like, the rotund little Cuy looked liked it had been skinned and dropped in a deep fat fryer - still alive by the look of alarm in its crispy little eyes.

When it was our turn to eat the furry little bugger it was baked, i think. I´ll happily confess that i couldnt eat much. Not only because of the claws, the eyes and the teeth, but because i thaving flashbacks to when i was a kid. My mate Bobby (aka Stephen Baulsom) had a garden full of the furry balls and when they went away i, on occasion, had to clean and feed them. The ungrateful buggers would bite and they stank worse than any farmyard and during one winter one of them froze to death like a furry stinky snowball.

So back in present day - while i picked at what little meat there was, andy wolffed his down merrily as he told stories of the Guinea Pigs he and his sister had known and loved as children.

After seeing the Nazca Lines, the amazing earthquake stricken town of Pisco and having some kick ass fun sand boarding in Huacachino, we had our last enocounter with the beast. On returning to Lima we were riding in a taxi to our hostel as we stopped at some traffic lights. All across South America i had seen people selling the most incredible things at traffic lights from blankets to acoustic guitars via fruits of all kinds. Anyway, the one thing that i had not seen, and that was proffered through the window on Andys side, was a dead guinea pig ready to cook and eat. Thankfully the lights changed and under our urgent shouts of VAMOS the driver wheel spinned away.

A crap pun thats been rattling round my head for a while now is that the song to accompany this posting should be ASK by the Smiths purely for the line : ¨Coyness is nice, but coyness can stop you from blah de blah de blah...¨



made me laugh anyway

Due to hurricanes in Holland Andy Mac was a day late getting to cusco and i'll fess i was worried that he might not have enough time to acclimatise to the altitude and the local conditions. As such, once we met in Hostal Nino it seemed to make sense that we immediatly go to a british cafe that i'd heard stocked marmite - which they did. which was nice (5 months is probably the longest i've been in my life without my beloved yeast extract).

We went to SAS Travel to pay the remaining cash for the Inca Trail and got accused of being "charlies" because we were getting the luxury vista dome train back to cusco post walk and also because we opted for the top of the range walking poles (extendable with lights). The rest of the first day we wandered round cusco, got surnburnt and ate alpaca (yummy) and drank the first of many many cusquenas and pisco sours.

Day two saw us head to our first Inca Ruins - Pisaq. To confirm our status as Charlies we haggled hard with a local lad - Yuri - (who claimed to play for Cuscos football team) to be our chauffer for the day and off we pootled in his tiny little car to Pisaq. A lovely town with a nice big square full of market stalls which we watched as we ate some more local cuisine - llama this time i think and again very tasty. After making some purchases (andy an alpaca hat and i a pair of gloves which i later realised were two right hands...hmm) our man Yuri drove us up to the Inca Citadel sitting above the village.

Spurning the offer of a guide we strove off up the hillside and wandered round the city with Yuri giving us some lowdown in spanish and me doing my best to translate. Incredible and stunning are two words i will use to sum up the walk we had. How the bejesus they built such an intricate city atop a mountain i will never know. The views of the terraces were breathatking and i was blown away by the water system they had going on. (They seemed to have tapped into a stream in the mountain and used it not only for irrigation, but also as ceremonial baths near the temples). All told it was ace.

We rocked back to Cusco and gave Yuri a hefty tip for his troubles before meeting the rest of our "friends" (our guides most used word) we would be doing the inca trail with. These were:
- A couple who lived in Chicago but were from Tanzania and Sweden
- A swedish couple who taught us a brilliant and slightly complicated card game known as, if i recall correctly, old sh1t git.
- Pedro and Rodriguez - a couple of top lads from Portugal who knew their football alright
- Tom, Tom and Arron - three aussie lads who were a good laugh
- Oscar - a chatty, know it all aussie kid.
- Dimitrus - a nice chain smoking greek traveller whose prophesy of group death nearly came true.

After our meeting we then went on a comedic mission for some long sleeved synthetic walking tops where we must have gone into every shop in cusco asking "usted tienes remera sythentico?" before settling on some scratchy knock off North Face clobber.

Inca Trail
Day 1 and we're up crazy early for the van to take us to a place for breakfast and to purchase some coca leaves and the catalyst (a ball of ash and herbs that you add to the leaves before masticating). After this we rocked on to KM 82 for the start of the 4 day "camino Inka" walk to Machu Pichu.

Darn it... out of time on the internet... there might well be a long pause between blogs (alright - nothing new there) as i head back to lima tomorrow and then fly with Aero Condor to Iquitos in the Peruvian rainforest before taking a boat down the amazon to Northern Brazil (via Manaus and Santeram) where i'm gonna hole up on a beach for a week before heading home...gulp.

I hope alls good where ever and who ever you may be.

oh yeah...

... i´ve just discoverd that i´ve lost my camera. the thing was falling apart, but i´ve only gone and lost about 3 weeks worth of snaps...

anyway - i´ve heard stories of somepeople losing several cameras in the one trip so, i guess i´ve not done too badly.........mmm

right off to the shops.

The last few weeks

Hello,
I´ve been very lazy with this blogging lark of late and if you think of a good reason why then mail me.

So - since andy mac left bound for blighty over two weeks ago my head has been spinning trying to decide where to go and what to do. As such i fled Lima and headed to a town on the north coast of peru called Mancora. However, with easter weekend approaching all the hotels were doubling their prices so i again fled north into Ecuador and a town called Cuenca. A pleasant little cobblestreeted town where they´re famous for making Panama Hats - so i bought one or three.

My plan was then to head north to the equator and quitos then back down to peru for a few days on a beach before heading to Iquitos to head down the Amazon into Northern Brazil. However, that soon went awry when on the spur of the moment i decided instead to join Rodrigo (a belgian lad whom i taught to play backgammon and who nearly gammonned me in the 2nd game we played) to a town called Vilcabamba. The town is famous for people living till ripe old ages and year round good weather. We turned up and it was cloudy for three days. Still, no one died to my knowledge so we couldn´t have brought all the bad luck.

With the weather being a bit poor i basically sat and read the Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell which, depsite a ringing endorsement from Richard and Judy, is actually a fine fine read.

With 4 weeks and one day left of my trip i need to get a wriggle on to get to Sao Paulo (other side of the continent and several 1000km away). As such, i´m heading to a mellow peruvian beach town called Huanchaco to hang for a few days before flying to Iquitos where i begin my boat trip to Brazil.

While i´m in Huanchaco i promise to update this blog on a throughly fun and comedic fortnight with Andy.

I hope alls good where you are, like.

Oh - also I found a cool site where they give away daily downloads of music and as such my Daza has been slighty updated. Thanks to www.largeheartedboy.com I have no more Keane and lots more of coll stuff like this:

My Morning Jacket - the Bear

Unhappy St Patricks Day

Four leaf clovers all round.