Sweet (Jesus) Mayte

Ferris (his real name) is from Australia. Sydney, to be precise. I know this because every fourth word out of Ferris is "Sydney". With some room for manoeuvre, the other three usually include some variation of "orsum", "like" and "is". Sydney itself is of course, "like orsom". The beaches in Sydney are "like todally orsum". The weather? "aawwww, like! Seriously orsum". Food? "like it's like todally seriously orsum". He is currently giving a pain in the face to both me and his new best Turkish Facebook friend by talking about the Turkish community in Sydney. A community which is, in Ferris' opinion, "orsum". He has some Turkish friends in Sydney who are "like the orsumest". Sydney, apparently, has "like the biggest number of Turkish living in…" he pauses for thought, before arriving at "Uh-straya". His buddy nods blankly. I might as well have said that Belmullet has the biggest Turkish population in Mayo for all the frame of reference he has. 

On this occasion i don't need it, but I have discovered the off switch for Australians abroad. It is to tell them that I am, while Irish, living in Australia. Melbourne to be more precise. I have no idea why it works, but it does, almost immediately. They shut down. This has proven itself exceptionally useful on several occasions, for there are many tools besmirching the already ropey name of Australian travellers out there. With a few exceptions they typically fall into one of two categories. First the shirtless bogans. Usually they are young, and often these are not, in fact, shirtless, preferring the wearing of the Bintang wifebeater from the todally orsum trip to like Kuta last year. Often this look is rounded off with Australian flag shorts. Like many Americans of all ages, these are people who don't know that "like" is a verb, and "party" isn't. Like many Irish backpackers, they tend to do very little except get drunk in hostels with other shirtless bogans. In essence, they typically go everywhere and do nothing. Second are the thirtysomethings. They are very cool and always say "that's expensive" when you mention you're going, or you've been to somewhere off the beaten track. Well yes it might be you think, but then i can afford it because I'm not backpacking with eight grand worth of SuperDry clothing, 2 iPads and 11 pairs of shoes. Although they don't get drunk in hostels with their compatriots, these people typically - also - go everywhere and do nothing.

Today we are on a bus tour of red-bricked Medellin. Specifically, a Pablo Escobar bus tour. Not a bus tour driven by Pablo Escobar - that would be impressive - rather a tour to some buildings and places - including his grave - that have a connection (sometimes tenuous) to the man himself. It's interesting, and the guide is knowledgeable and engaging about all things Pablo, Medellin, cocaine and Colombia. She is not, however, in possession of limitless patience. Ferris, who is still from Sydney, has recently learned the word "perception", although patently not quite what it means. He asks the guide four times what the "perception" of Pablo is now. She explains with escalating impatience that it's mixed, some people think he was a saint, some people a bastard. The fourth time she ignores the question and fiddles with her chemically-straightened hair. I don't need to switch him off because he's gone quiet at the snub, preferring instead to focus on the guide's new-mom boobs and probably thinking to himself "orsum".

It's not as big as mine Paul.

Meet Malcolm. He's in his mid fifties by my reckoning, going on 11, and we're sharing a 6 day cruise. He's English, but refuses to admit it. He is Australian he says (at every opportunity). He has lived in Melbourne for an undetermined number of years. "Thirteen" he blurts out, instantly bettering my "twelve", when we first talk. I later hear him tell someone he's been there "around ten years, maybe a bit more". He betters everything he hears. He has done everything you've done, but better, for longer, in a more authentic fashion, and with cooler photos and memories. And naturally, more insight.

Yeah, not in those shoes mate.

When we talk about diving he wants to know if I've done a famous wreck in the Pacific. "Yes", i tell him, "i did a couple of…" I was going to say "days", but on the off chance that "trips" was the next word out of my mouth, he interrupts to quickly tell me "I've done it three times". His questions are always those to which he already knows the answer, often including the answer in the question. He used to work for Logica in Melbourne. I tell him a friend of mine works for Logica, and does he know him. I give the name, but he interrupts me midway through the surname to say that yes he thinks he knows Carl, but anyway now he work for Fujitsu and he manages the blah blah account which is worth snore million dollars, which is much better for them obviously to have him on board and anyway he has more experience and has a better job than me.

We were all in school with a Malcolm. Usually primary school. He's the kid who has everything you have only better, or bigger, or newer. And more of it. You got the Lego Moon Station Rocket Launch Set (™) for Christmas? So did he, but he got the Lego NASA Space Shuttle Mission to Mars Add-On Set (™) as well. And he got to open it on Christmas morning so it was built by dinner and he didn't have to wait until after dinner to open it like you did in your family so it wouldn't be built until the next day by which time he had taken it all apart and made his own Super Space Rocket Shuttle Mars Moon Space-Station (™ Malcolm). 

There are few people on the planet who could attempt to out-wildlife the Galapagos, fewer again while actually in the Galapagos. But Malcolm does. Oh this is all very nice I suppose, but the wildlife in Australia is just as diverse, probably more so, and more threatened, but the parks and the government do more to protect them etc. and so forth. "You're English you tool" I want to scream, but I don't, because despite his best efforts, he can't ruin the place. It's just too magical. Too strange. Too unbelievable. Words and photos don't do it justice, and though it doesn't stop them trying, even twats like Malcolm can't spoil it.

Beached as, bro.

I'm on a beach in Nicaragua. I've been here for an hour or so. It's a warm, almost moonless night, and I've just watched a turtle haul herself out of the water, climb a small sand dune, dig a hole nearly half a metre deep and start to lay eggs. The only noise is from the crashing waves. But then They - inevitably - arrive. Americans. 8 of them. Women. With the subtlety of a tank wearing a mu-mu. The silence is replaced by endless chatter. "There she goes again";  "oh my God";  "pop, pop, there was two of 'em right there"; "okay, I'm just going to go ahead and take my phone out and take a photo real quick". An iPhone appears out of nowhere and lights up half the beach.  Mercifully, we are near the end of the laying, and shortly after, wen she has her nest covered, she is done, and turns to head for the sea. But the Americans have built themselves into a half moon blocking her return, causing her to detour up the beach - which they track, the fucking tools. Eventually they give her a path, but trot ahead, constantly in her field of vision, forcing a much longer, diagonal walk to the surf. Incredibly, they take it upon themselves to go up each and every one of them and touch her shell, causing obvious distress. Finally, when she hits the sea, they applaud. You couldn't make it up.

A few weeks ago, on the Honduran island of Roatan, I listen to the amazing Jeff (from Brooklyn) tell his newest buddy in a bar about how "these negroes down here, they work hard. Harder than our ones". Referring to the local Garifuna population, descended largely from British-Caribbean creole-speaking, refugees. Jeff is showing admirable ignorance of the volume of his own voice, and the colour of the skin of both the barman fixing his cocktails (unseen, below bar level), and the gentleman grilling his chicken (unseen, in the kitchen). Casual racism clearly being just as de-rigeur for the yachty cruisers of the Caribbean as it is for the west of Ireland of my parents' generation.

Prior to this, on a dive boat in Belize, I am subjected to an horrific nuclear family. The older child is a severe, outdoorsy boy, embarrassed by his parents. The younger is 14, and flagrantly homosexual, something which will devastate his parents when they figure it out. Mum is not quite vegetarian, but used to be, and still eats little or no meat. Or carbs. Or dairy. She is a walking advertisement for everything wrong with extreme dieting. Devoid of energy, she is sallow, sunken and stooped. She is forty-seven years old but doesn't look a day under 80. Dad, when he wears pants - which is about 50% of the time - fastens them just below the nipples. He speaks in paragraphs, usually beginning with "studies have shown that…", and ending with "but what we've done right in California is…".

'No' is the curt response form the taxi driver in Northern El Salvador when i ask if there are many Americans living here. The jeep/truck in front of us has a number plate holder that reads "US Air Force Dad". 'None' he adds, somewhat definitively, just as we drive past a joint El Salvadorian-US air force base. While there are more tourists than troops these days, they are on the whole unwelcome, likely as a result of a century of political and military meddling (usually on the wrong side). At best they are ignored - itself a noteworthy skill.  The woman who hawked us into her hostel in Nicaragua at the turtle nesting beach is delighted we are Irish. "Anything but Israelis" she says, "they are the worst". I ask: " what about the Americans?" She smiles but says nothing. They may be more welcomed if they had some humility. Or a mute button.

Even Rocky had a montage

(although his didn't involve a 3 metre jump into black water in full scuba gear...

... but then I never had to fight Dolph Lundgren for the future of the free world)

F'hippies.

A mobile hippy is a happy hippy. See one sitting down and they look miserable. Presumably this is because in motion they can't smell themselves. By extension, it would be an interesting - if hazardous - study into the links between hippy walking patterns and local climactic conditions. I hypothesise that they almost always walk into the wind, and will, if required, detour significantly out of their way to avoid self-contamination. Benefits of this strategy include getting noticed more, and seeing more stuff to potentially rob. 

There are many things hippies love: robbing stuff; not wearing shoes; staring at anyone cleaner than themselves, which is most people; pontificating about the evils of the modern world to other hippies. Most of all though, hippies love to be noticed. For this they need a gimmick, something that sets them apart. Seemingly the smell is not enough. Time was a relaxed attitude towards personal hygiene and a fearlessly inventive streak when it comes to wearing pyjamas in public were enough to get you properly noticed. Nowadays that probably just means you're French. Similarly, it used to be that deadlocks worked, but there are now too many iPhone and multi-thousand-dollar camera toting be-deadlocked tweeting Facebook addicts, who are definitely not real hippies (although we should not lose sight of the potential devastation to be wreaked on global flea populations by fire-bombing some of the cheaper Mexican Internet cafes). A mate flask and cup used to be more than enough, but now every middle-class European backpacker can be seeing walking the streets of Latin America with the offending (and frankly offensive) implements. These people might as well wear a t-shirt with the Mayan glyph for "tool". And let's not mention bandannas.

These fashionable faux-hippies have driven the real hippies beyond the pale in order to highlight their hippy credentials. Among the more ridiculous things I've seen proudly lugged through the streets have been: ten-pin bowling skittles (for juggling don't you know); a hoola-hoop (for pretending to be 8 years old again); an offensive musical instrument like a banjo (for the aural rape of anyone within a 1km radius); a child (for ignoring as part of your "life education" policy); fire-sticks (for giving me images of taking the things - lit or not - and impaling the bearer); and my favourite - seen on more than one occasion, but never in use - a unicycle (for fuck knows what). It can be fun spotting the more bizarre and stupid things they cart around, as long as you do your observing from upwind.

Chichen out.

Throw a rock in any direction from the middle of Merida and you'll hit Mayan ruins. Well, okay, you won't. Merida is a city of almost one million people. Throw a rock from the middle of Merida and all you'll hit is Merida. Or possibly a Meridian. But the point is that you'd be very nervous about buying land around there, in case you'd have to sell it back to the government. Or worse, zone some of it off and allow archaeologists to have at it. And let's face it, the last thing you need is unfettered access to your farm when you're trying to grow your dope in peace. Not that the archaeologists would mind, but they'd probably have at that as well.

Chichen Itza is the mother of all Mayan ruin sites. And by mother, i mean warm, safe and very busy. It is invaded daily by convoys of buses from Cancun and Playa del Carmen depositing two-week sun-holidayers for their mandatory hour and a half of local culture (ruins) before having them back by the pool in time for happy hour. Many of these Europeans and Americans come ill prepared for the walking (wedge shoes), the heat (lip liner and layers of makeup that the Mayan stucco producers would envy) or the history (vacant looks after 15 minutes). The site itself is nice, without being spectacular or vast, and very commercialised. If it were revealed that the whole place was a manufactured theme park built specifically for the Caribbean tourists, it would not be all that surprising. 

As it stands, nearby sites are more impressive (Uxmal), more buried in the jungle Indiana-Jones-esque (Ek-Balam) or more interesting (Tulum). In many of these you can have the place to yourself for hours. This is - i suppose - due to the fact that most tourists are off at Chichen Itza with their 45 new best Facebook friends, happily ignoring the twelve hundred years of history in front of them. Instead discussing the important issues of the day, like which Spring Break mega-bar frequented by bandanna wearing fuckwits they'll spend that night. It makes Chichen a bit depressing when you walk around it, but the others all the more enjoyable.

Sweet Home Teotihuacan

Claudia, who was probably once Klaus, barks something in German. "Gin and tonic?", is my hopefully response. "EIS?" she screams at someone 12 or 14 rows behind, all the while making bulging eye contact with me. Give me my effin gin and eff off, i want to shout, but this woman is scary, and i have a cold, and I'm starting to sweat, and can only nod. If she offers me lemon i'll probably surrender Poland. 

This plane is taking me to Mexico, a place to which i've been excited about returning since about 4 minutes after I left it the last time. I've had mixed experiences going back to places. New Zealand gets better ever time, Thailand slightly worse. Of course, there are some places you should never go back to. LA for instance. Or any conversation with Americans about coffee, who inexplicable hold Starbucks up to be the best. As though combining a watery espresso shot with a litre and a half of burnt milk in a small bucket marks, on the evolutionary scale, the pinnacle of coffee presentation.

Those same Americans are afraid of Mexico. North of the border they believe that it is dirty, smelly and dangerous - a description considerably more appropriate to New York. In reality Australia is more dangerous for backpackers, and the United States itself is more dangerous for its own citizens. The fear is irrational, although if you are a drug trafficker or a policeman - and presumably bad at what you do - there might be something in it. For the rest of us, it is a warm, friendly, clean country, with welcoming people, stunning scenery, and exceptional food. i'm very happy to be going back.

New Year's Eve - A review

A shameless attempt to remake - for an American audience - Love Actually - a decent, if sentimental British comedy about a disparate but connected group of people in London in the run up to Christmas. Remaking any European comedy is done by following a number of basic rules, most of which have easy touch points in this dreadful effort:

- move the action to New York. Most Americans don't know what or where Europe is, but they labour under the delusion that NYC is cosmopolitan. Because it's New York, you need to have a slow tracking shot over water rising to reveal the (slightly less so since 2001) instantly recognisable skyline sometime during the opening credits. Dispense with climactic concerns and show New York being bright and sunny and warm, despite it being the middle of winter (average December New York high temperature: 7 degrees centigrade).

- remove any religious symbolism, for example, transplant the action from Christmas to New Year's Eve.

- cast a large number of semi-recognisable American John Actors, like That Guy What Used To Be In That TV Show, and That Chick Who Is Always Making Terminally Unfunny Comedies With Seth Rogan. 

- also cast - because this is New York - Sarah Jessica Horseface.

- crucially, cast a respected actor, unused to comedy, in one of the key roles. Hilary Swank is someone who knows how to act (but doesn't here). More importantly, Hilary Swank's agent is someone who knows how to do accountancy. 

- remove all foreigners from the movie, and cast a positive-discrimination-friendly number of African Americans. If no rappers are available, try a stand-up comedian, but don't let him swear.

- remove all humour by whittling down all jokes to two long running, laboured situation comedy gags better suited to (and better used in) situation comedy TV shows. 

Verdict: Watch it with the sound down and make up your own dialogue. Except for Jon Bon Jovi's bits, they are so bad as to almost redeem the whole film.

Let sleeping lions lie.

There are many things that can make you sick in the jungle: malaria and dengue carrying mosquitoes; drinking tea-coloured river water the guide assures you is safe; getting too close to 4-day unshowered Irishman; having to eat catfish; listening to a self-absorbed French woman wittering on and on and on about her favourite subject, herself, and loudly proclaiming that the thing she likes the most about the jungle is how peaceful it all is. It will be considerably more peaceful - you think uncharitably - when you tie her hammock closed around her tonight and chuck her in the Amazon. French women flesh out conversation with padding words and phrases like "so", "then", "well", "i don't know", "frankly", "seriously", "enormously", "really", "truly", "it was…", "mad", "crazy", "serious", "funny". Two French women together can hold a conversation lasting several minutes using only padding words, never actually saying anything of any meaning. Padding gives the impression of someone who is uncomfortable with silences of longer than 4 seconds. It is exceptionally rare to meet one that pads in a language other than french, but Magalie can. And Magalie does. And Magalie just won't shut up. And Magalie's incessant chatter drowns out the ambient jungle noise.

She is travelling for 6 months you see, and she has a boyfriend in Barcelona and he wasn't ready to travel so she just left without him and she only has 2 more months left and even though she has had lot of opportunities and offers of sex she hasn't taken advantage of any of them because she has a boyfriend you know and she doesn't do that, but she could have, oh yes, but she didn't, and she's been to some of the places you've been but she had a much better time than you, and any places you've been she hasn't been are not important and she deliberately decided to avoid and she doesn't regret it, but you probably do regret ever mentioning it, and the places she's been that you are not going are frankly the best places in the world, and how old are you, but i'm not really interested in the answer, how old do you think she is. This is always a trick question, but having lived in France, i have the answer. If you want to sleep with any French woman over the age of 18, tell her she looks 24. If you want one to stop talking, tell her she looks 37.

There are also many things that can kill you in the jungle. Poison-arrow frogs, beloved of the indigenous tribes when they tried to fight off the invading Conquistadors. Hungry jaguars too. It helps though, as you lie awake half the night, gently swinging in your hammock, if your tour guide snores like the sound of two particularly vigorous mating jaguars. That, apparently, keeps all the other jaguars away. Hungry anacondas can also kill. As can hungry tarantulas. Luckily, Magalie leaves a day early, so she is no longer a threat.

No Coke, Pepsi?

Angel falls takes your breath away. From the base you can look vertically up to the top of the tepui, where the waters gleefully succumb to the challenge laid down by gravity. On the journey down the flow thins, before turning to mist, and - susceptible to gusts and breezes - moves as cigar smoke, before collecting again in hundreds of small pools and re-merging into a single river. It is in one of these pools at the base that we swim. Looking straight up at the almost one kilometre of water coming towards you is truly frightening. The only real way to get here is by 3-day tour, flying into a nearby village in a 6-seater plane and river-kayaking five hours upstream to a one hour jungle trek. I know who found the falls (Jimmy Angel), and when (1937). I know that the indigenous groups that lived here (and live here still) are in awe of the power of this waterfall. But what little i know, I know from the Lonely Planet. Our guide (for three days) has decent English, but tells us nothing. Nothing of the falls, nothing of the plans for the day(s) ahead, nothing of why we stop and start randomly, nothing of why he throws himself into the river to float downstream in the current, round a bend and out of sight. It looks like fun, but do we follow? Do we wait? Is he coming back? When?

Thinking about it, all Venezuelans have been like this. Unsmiling and uncommunicative. Crossing the border into Brazil you are struck by how happy people seem. Probably because they are on the right side of the border. It's easy to think that maybe they don't have a lot to smile about these days. Inflation is unmeasurable and the currency is poison. The state has fixed prices on staples like flour, sugar and milk. The short-term consequence is that limits need to be imposed on the amount of these things that customers can buy in supermarkets. Longer-term it becomes uneconomical for supermarket owners to stock these things so the shelves run empty. The cars are all '60s and '70s Detroit big, but they are battered, often windowless, sometimes doorless and seldom roadworthy, like something from a 1970s futuristic apocalypse movie. Foreign investment is non-existent. Buildings crumble and the only paint is on police and government edifices, typically emblazoned with quotes from Castro or Guevara extolling Bolivarian ideals. Despite big promises and thundering Chavezian rhetoric, the population is no better off under him. Except when it comes to fuelling their dilapidated monster cars. The cost of petrol is one euro cent per litre at official exchange rates, something like half that at black-market rates. 

The benefit of distance - temporal and geographic - has not softened my view of the natives, and my memories are almost universally unpleasant. This may sound like a generalisation but ALL Venezuelans are bastards. You can get sucked into thinking they have few enough reasons to be happy if you like, but i feel that never was the adage about a people getting the government they deserve more apt than in Venezuela. In one Carnival street-corner fire, someone has thoughtfully burned a dog. A woman selling bus tickets, in the bus station. is openly disgusted when I ask her for bus tickets. A girl selling popcorn conducts all transactions without words or eye contact. Our Angel Falls guide tells us that a walk will be 45 minutes, then 35 minutes, then 25, 20 and finally 15. The guy we book the tour through tells us wrong National Park entrance fees. The man flying the plane away from Angel Falls engages someone in a phone and text row for much of the hour and twenty minutes of the flight, including taxi, takeoff and landing. Small children don't play or smile. They don't wave at anyone and they are not very inquisitive about foreigners. Venezuelans just don't care. About you, about each other, and about themselves.

This is no more evident than in how they eat. They don't farm. Farming involves work, and they don't work because they don't need to because they have oil. This is something of a mantra for Venezuelans. They eat big deep-fried meals of whatever is available, usually fish or pork. The latin american word for juice - "jugo" - here means fizzy sugary drink (always Pepsi products, never Coca-Cola). Street-corner fruit vendors common in every latin American country are absent. Instead there are hotdog stands and popcorn vendors. The bread is laced with sugar and gives you a headache if you eat too much. This is no production line of Miss Universes, this is a country speeding towards collective national diabetes self-genocide. And they don't seem to care, so why should I?i. They are lazy, dour and mean, and you are more likely to hit a breaching humpback whale on the way to your small-plane crash death than you are to meet a helpful one. The US State Department warns that Venezuela is not a safe place to visit and recommends avoiding it. I didn't find it unsafe, just thoroughly unpleasant. The best thing that can be said about making the effort is that most Americans heed their government's warning and stay away.

Ruined

"Do you guys know what the biggest agricultural crop is in America?"  Noah asks. "Corn", comes the swift and unwelcome response from the Belgian agriculture student. "Right. Does anyone  know what the 2nd one is? he continues, annoyed, but only mildly daunted, and pointedly avoiding asking the Belgian directly. "Soya", comes the response. He's never had to go to the 3rd before so probably doesn't know it, so this thankfully shuts him down for a while. He's a tall, stringy fresh-out-of-college know-it-all American with floppy hair and a bandanna, which he wears Rambo style. He describes himself as a "a bit hippyish", and frequently uses terms like "bio-fuels" and "sustainable energy". Usually this is to try to change the subject from anything about which he knows nothing. Which is just about everything, including - you realise when you listen to him for longer than 2 minutes - bio-fuels and sustainable energy. He tells frat-house stories involving worrying amounts of male nudity. He laughs delays into them so that he can think where to next, which means that as well as being terminally unfunny, they are - I suspect - not true. I have heard the one about being burst in on in the shower and handed a beer on your first day multiple times. It's always a lie. Or homosexuality is rampant in American universities. Or there is a niche-but-lucrative bathroom door locksmith campus market waiting to be tapped. He has a bizarre repertoire of stretches which call to mind a World War 1 handbook designed to keep the chaps in the trenches occupied rather than fit. They start and end randomly and appear to never actually put strain on any muscle. He also meditates - in the lotus position for authenticity - for as long as twenty seconds at a time. He's been told that he's pretty good at accents. He's not. Over our first lunch he asks me where I'm from and i tell him Ireland. I can see where this is going so i cut him off mid way through his next word (a heavily accented "Oireland"). "No", i tell him abruptly. "No. No. Don't do the accent. Really. Don't." It may have been harsh, but i was not prepared to put up with a bad Irish accent from a try-hard supertool for five days. He fucking hates me immediately as a result, and reverts to a couple of words repeated over and over again in a bad London accent.

All of his attention seeking, his public and fake idiosyncrasies, and specifically the London accent, are for the benefit of Chloe. She's a wispy high-pitched Londoner who craves attention almost as much as Noah. But unfortunately for Noah, not from him very specifically. You can't tell him this, but he's probably just a bit too weird for her. She fake laughs - all the time - like a cat coughing up fur balls speeded up. She and her friend Isy are on a round the world 10 month trip to shag as many men as possible, and the whole thing has been "amazing" so far. Australia was "amazing". New Zealand was "amazing". Tubing in Vang Vieng was "Ah! Mazing". Angkhor Wat? "Ah! Maze. ING". Over breakfast on the 2nd day Isy sees the butter and this too is "amazing". I don't know whether it is the presence of the butter, or the butter itself that's amazing, and i don't want to ask. It is clear that "amazing" is the baseline for everything and the word itself has no currency. After the butter-watershed moment nobody seems to think "amazing" is anything other than "normal", or even "slightly underwhelming".

These, and a few other misfits, are our new best short-term friends. It takes five days of trekking to get to and from La Ciudad Perdida (Lost City) in the jungles of Northern Colombia. Discovered in the mid 1970s, it is still relatively underdeveloped. All available literature tells us the walk is hell (people finishing with hundreds of bites), that it is unsafe (people fall and die, people get kidnapped etc.), and incredibly difficult (hours of trekking up hills). It is the hardest thing many bloggers on South America have done. From this I can conclude that many bloggers on South America are pansies. We walk for no more than three and a half hours for each of the first three days, never rising before the sun. Along the way we have comfortable beds or hammocks, exceptional food, deep river pools in which to swim and beer and rum available on demand. The whole thing could be done comfortably in three days. The majority of our group don't feel this way however, and the level and volume of complaint rises as we go on. These people - I imagine - will go home and tell other people about how it was the hardest thing they did. The main problem as far as i can tell is not that the trek is tough, it is that the trek is undertaken largely by people singularly unsuited to any activity that takes them outside a dance club. Meet Chloe, Isy, and Noah, who, between them, have trekked into the jungle for 5 days with no mosquito repellent, no toilet paper and one 600ml water bottle.

The final push to the lost city itself is a tough one-hour hike including a river crossing and twenty minutes straight up the very narrow "1000 steps". We are lucky enough to be given the chance to make the climb to the city twice, once on the day we arrive to base camp, and once again the next morning with a guide. Less than 20 people per day visit, and of our group of 13, only 6 go up again in the morning. The sense of isolation and quiet makes it hard not to imagine yourself like some of the first modern visitors to Macchu Picchu. This city was after all, they believe, bigger, and equally as reclaimed by the jungle on discovery. The ruins are stunning, and while the afternoon air is hazy from swarms of mosquitoes, the bright clear morning sunshine allows me to reinsert some meaning into the word "amazing". 

Down down down down (dooby-do) down down.

We flatten ourselves against the cliff to allow Inka-Kola laden mules past on the narrow track. Overhead, condors circle, and snakes rustle through the bushes that appear to be hanging onto the same cliff for dear life. It's over a kilometre straight down to where we will be spending the night, and it'll take us 8 hours of trekking to get there. Tomorrow - we've been told - it'll take only three and a half to trek back up to the top. But that's for worrying about in the morning. Right now the path down is steep, winding, beset by wildlife, and liberally sprinkled with small stones. The better to roll from under your foot as you try to keep up with the guide, Roy.

We are in the Colca Canyon, 4 hours from Arequipa, Peru's 2nd city. Roy is a local, hailing from the village at the top of the canyon, "the one that has road". Only narrow paths go into the canyon and all traffic is either pedestrian or mule. His village, Roy tells us, is pre-Incan. Is was conquered by nobody, not the Incas, not the Spanish. I want to ask why his village hasn't retained its independence, but there is no time. Roy has moved on. He speaks English with the speed of a native speaker, but neither the grammar nor the vocabulary. It generally takes a few seconds to decipher the words he has said and then process them into meaning. By which time he is two sentences ahead and you are already playing catch-up. He is a civil engineer, and guides people into (and - we hope - out of) the Colca Canyon once or twice a week. But his real passion is the flora of Peru. He pulls innocuous looking plants from the cliff-side, rubs them a certain way (or crashes them against another plant) and announces with no small degree of reverence: 'oregano of the Incas'; or 'mountain mint'; or 'cannabis'.

Last night, in Arequipa (the White City), knowing that the trekking bus was arriving at 3AM, we opted, naturally, for a night out. Arequipa is very beautiful, and nowhere near as dangerous as the Lonely Planet makes out. On the 'going-out' street with all the bars, opting for a quieter looking place, we encounter a barman whose general uselessness (and rudimentary grasp of communication) would mark him out for superstardom in any Melbourne pub. His boss - possibly by way of punishment, and despite the bar not having any Irish pretensions - has a Clannad cd on repeat. We pretend to be Belgian. A typical Peruvian dinner ensures, and involves many different types of potato, a large oven-roasted guinea pig, numerous photos and a chef with eyes permanently raised to heaven. I don't know what a guinea pig costs normally, but i am more than happy to pay the 30 Soles for the enjoyment i got out of eating one, and then playing with the head and paws.

'Pah', Roy says when I tell him this, 'you ripping off. In my village, 5 guinea pigs: 20 Soles'. I do manage to tell him that i don't think i would have been able to eat 5 guinea pigs in one sitting, but he smiles the smile of someone who has no understanding of what has been said and launches into a diatribe on the cost of avocados in the city. Roy, you see, is obsessed with the cost of everything. Cocaine, guinea pigs, avocados, pears, mules, beer, water. If is it bought or sold, Roy knows for how much, and where, and when. He inadvertently identifies half a dozen business opportunities every minute. But maybe he knows, and maybe he's happy doing what he does. Next month he goes to the Amazon with a friend to pick, dry and infuse a native leaf which apparently cures cancer. He's probably winning.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: a review

My name is Aron Something, and i like to do outdoorsy stuff. I am an American (Fuck Yeah!). I have written a book about my adventures in outdoorsy stuff, focusing primarily on one horrible outdoorsy misadventure where my hand gets trapped by a rock and i end up having to chop it off with a blunt imitation Leatherman. Hence the supremely cool (and totally ironical) name I've decided to give my book. You get it, right? Rock... hard place... Yeah?

My book alternates between chapters about my predicament and the slow descent into madness that this involves, and chapters about how i am so totally awesome at doing outdoorsy stuff. The story about how i am here, and what I'm doing, and more importantly, how I'm going to get out of this situation is gripping, even if i tell it like a five year old coughing up some school story for Grandma so she'll give me some sweets. Man i miss Grandma's sweets.

The rest of the chapters are liver-meltingly dull. Even more so because despite my proficiency in skiing, mountaineering, rock-climbing and trekking, instead of heading off to see the world, conquer the Andes or lose myself in the Himalayas, i devote myself to scaling a set of mid-sized mountains in winter, alone, in Colorado. Fucking Colorado. Seriously. Almost all of my stories have some near-miss scenario for me, or more often than not, for someone foolish enough to hang around with me. At the end of most of these i solemnly declare that i have learned a valuable lesson and will never again put myself, or others, in harm's way like that again. This is flagrant horseshit, as is obvious when - 2 chapters later - i am gleefully causing avalanches, or throwing a soon to be former friend into raging whitewater. The only conclusion anybody can reach after reading these chapters is that i had it - something - coming.

Thankfully, Danny Boyle (who is from like Europe which is not in America) has made my mess of a book into a riveting film, dispensing with all of the other rubbish apart from the central story, ensuring that i come across as only a mild twat, which non-Americans will probably just think is because I'm American. Which isn't necessarily true. If you read the book you'll see that I'm a twat and I'm an American.

Hear me moo.

San Pedro de Atacama, in the Atacama desert - the driest in the world - averages some 35mm of rain per year. They recommend you take showers of only 7 minutes. Melbourne - which is not in the driest desert in the world - recommends 4 minutes. It comes as something of a surprise then on our last day when the heavens open for almost 4 hours, a significant increase on the 30 minutes of rain we are told they've had (cumulatively) in the last 12 months. The locals are caught between taking photos of this shocking natural event, and frantically getting rain-unfriendly things like plasma TVs and stereos either covered or moved.

Before we can leave for Bolivia, we have 6 hours at Chilean immigration. 'There is too much snow on the road to the border, you can't pass' says one driver. There was no snow. 'There is a police checkpoint 5kms from the border and the Chilean police are not letting anyone through' swears another. There was no checkpoint. 'The Chileans don't want you to go to Bolivia spending your tourist dollars there, so they make it hard for you to leave' conspiracy-theory-ed another. Bizarrely, this worked and a number of people dropped out of the queue saying they would try again the next day. One Irish backpacker had been trying to get out for 3 days and had heard this excuse before, so was not buying it again. 'The Chileans don't like the Bolivians very much (because they won't sell them their natural gas (because the Chileans stole the Bolivian coastline)) so they pile everybody up at the Chilean immigration site (45 minutes drive from the Bolivian) and then let everyone shoot through when there is only an hour to the end of the Bolivian site working hours so the poor fools will have to work late' said our own driver. This is pretty close to what happened, though as dastardly schemes go, it's hardly world changing.

From here, it's 4 days to Copacabana, on the Bolivian shores of lake Titicaca. During that time, we see 2 significant jeep breakdowns, one at freezing, snow-blasted 4886 metres above sea-level, and one in unsheltered 36 degree heat on the edge of the stunning Uyuni salt flats. We also get one unscheduled bus stop where we had to wait "for the lake to go down to see if we can pass through it". This is the same lake that caused the bus to La Paz the previous night to be written off. 

We also have the joy of listening to an American woman wittering on and on and on and on and on about her like great kids where she like teaches at her like Innernashional School in like Cartagena where she like lives like right across form the beach like oh my god you wouldn't believe how close it's like todally awesome she goes there like everyday its like liderally thirdy seconds like seriously and she's like on expenses so she can go out and have like rilly nice dinners whenever like but  seriously though it's all about the kids, the kids are rilly rilly great, she rilly rilly loves them. I'm paraphrasing, she actually spoke non-stop for roughly 17 weeks. It's not that Americans are congenitally thick necessarily, it's just that they talk too much, reducing the amount they breathe, thereby starving their brains of oxygen, thereby making them thick. If they stopped talking, they might get smarter, but then it's probably the quiet ones that are the ones you have to watch. 

Them and thieving hippies.

The Correos strikes back.

I'm in the queue at the post office in Salta and it's 9:20am. This is my third attempt to post a parcel of cold-weather (and subsequently past their usefulness on this trip) clothes back to Australia. I tell the woman in the hostel what I'm doing and she tells me I'll need a box. 'I know' i tell her, does she maybe have one i can steal? 'They'll have plenty at the post office". Outside the post office there are upwards of 500 people queueing. This is not a good sign, although i realise relatively quickly that they are all queuing to collect their new digital set top TV boxes, presumably because the analog signal is about to be turned off, and also presumably because the easiest way the Argentine government thought to get set top boxes into every home was to make each and every Argentinian queue at the post office to get it. In 35 degree heat.

At the post office the helpful security guard at the door tells me that I'll need a box. Yes, but I'm informed that the place to get boxes for posting things, i tell him, is at the post office. 'Aha' he says, 'yes, go to the man at the Customs office and he will give you a box'. Having twice before been thwarted trying to post this self same parcel, i have some idea of the process involved. There is a Customs office, and an International Post desk. They are adjacent, but with autonomous queues. You take your box to the Customs office, where the (invariably) man inspects your goods, gets you to fill out a form, prints something out and then sends you, your form and your box to the International Post desk, where the (invariably) woman weighs your box, gets you to fill out two more forms, demands payment, stamps the form from Customs, takes your name and your box (for giving back to Customs behind the counter), and sends you out of the queue. Customs (man) will then - at some stage - call your name, inspect your box again, inspect the form to ensure you have paid the requisite fee, have one of his (female) assistants seal the box, and then send you on your merry way, happy in the knowledge that your box will likely never see light outside this particular post office ever again.

I go to the empty Customs office and after ten minutes of increasingly elaborate gesticulating the man can no longer ignore me, and he comes out. I tell him i need to post this parcel to Australia. 'You need a box', he says. I know, i tell him, but all intelligence in Salta has told me that he is the man to see about a box. He looks at me like i have belittled the entire footballing history of Argentina. Why would he have a box? Does he look like a box seller? I need to go and get a box somewhere and then come back. I come up somewhere between not speaking Spanish and outright refusal to go anywhere. He sighs and shouts over at the woman at the International Post desk. She has boxes apparently. I should queue there and get one from her and then come back to see him to start the process. So i queue, and check my watch, and it's 9:20. 

This is a problem. There are 20 people ahead of me in the queue for International Post, and the two women just in front are grumbling that the people at the very front have been there for fifteen minutes already. As it happens, they end up staying at the front until 9:55am, whereupon the woman (who i am quite sure is someones lovely granny), finally gets them organised. This is another problem, as the signs everywhere are telling me that as opposed to the normal onerous working hours of 8:30 to 12:00 worked by the Customs office, today, because it is during the holiday week between Christmas and New Year, they will close at 11. Granny, it seems, needs - for every customer - to stroll to the other side of the office to get any one of a set of forms which might be better situated within arms reach, given her reliance on them. She then, likely on account of her age, needs to wait for one of her colleagues to "do the computery bit". This means that every single person has to wait for someone else - who doesn't work at the International Post desk - to have a spare 2 minutes from shovelling set top boxes over the counter to anyone with a form and a smile.

At 10:45 there are still seven people in front of me in the queue. One of the people who had been at the head of the queue when i arrived has just now been called into Customs, fully one hour and thirty minutes after i first laid eyes on him, and fifteen minutes before the Customs office is due to close. As though this had just now dawned on the Customs people, they hastily call out a number of names and in a flurry of activity they dispense with a handful of people who are waiting. Then a Customs assistant announces (to nobody in particular, lest she get lynched) that the Customs office will close shortly, and that even those people that have already been processed by the International post desk will not be seen today, and will have to come back tomorrow. Between 8:30am and 11am, she finishes, failing to appreciate the irony that the current time (10:51 by my watch) appears to meet these criteria. 'Fuck' i decide, 'this', and I leave.

As i write this - 4 days later -  I remember that my brother told me once that in Argentina everything looks modern and new and shiny, but that nothing really works. I have just come from the Chilean Correos/Post Office in San Pedro de Atacama where two lovely women sorted the whole thing in less than 15 minutes. That included one of them having to duck out to the shops for packing tape, and the other doing everything one-handed while holding a 12-month old with an eye infection.

Hi Andy!

The whole bus sleeps through the first two hours of the trip. It's boring, merely driving from one city (Salta) to another (San Salvador de Jujuy). Also it started at 7am, so everyone has had at least a 6am start. The trip will take between ten and twelve hours (depending on the border, the ticket agent says). 

After San Salvador though… it starts. As we climb higher into the Andes, the road snakes and bends back above and round us. Sometimes you see a stretch of straight in the distance, maybe three or four kilometres away (and elevated), but it will take a long and winding hour to reach it. Scree flutes ascend sheer cliffs, delineated by rain channels, seemingly held together with nothing more than force of will. Hills roll into and out of each other in amazing colours. Bright, vivid, yellows, red, purples. Shining whites and greys, and very occasionally, an ominous black. Cacti dot the barren hills. This is pure Sergio Leone country, and a young, poncho-wearing Eastwood wouldn't be out of place on top of any of the ridges (except i don't remember any llamas in "The Good The Bad and the Ugly"). We are in the high Andean plains now, but there is no snow, on any of the peaks, near or visible in the distance.

The bus attendant tries to distract us from the stunning natural beauty we are 80kmph-ing through by serving us a truly horrific lunch. This is the worst bus-food we've had in Argentina (where normally bus-food is significantly superior to airplane food). The bus attendant then tries to distract us from the downright awfulness of this food by showing us a movie called The Contract. In it, veteran African American actor Nelson Mandela plays himself playing a veteran assassin who, after traipsing around the woods of Washington State for an hour or so, inexplicably doesn't kill John Cusack (possibly forgivable given his pedigree) and his son (whose untimely and bloody death eleven seconds into his first scene would have improved the whole venture immeasurably). 

On the Chilean side of the border (time spent waiting at: 97 minutes), everything changes. Hundreds of tall rock sentries keep watch, and while they can't be anything other than naturally formed, they are all man-chiseled flat surfaces and hard angles, like the corners of large brick houses left standing after some catastrophe. Suddenly everything is brown. There are subtle deviations into "golden" and "reddish", but the underlying base colour on everything is brown. The other difference is that - not that you need to be told it, what with the tingling lips and good sit down needed after climbing a single flight of stairs - we are seriously at altitude, and the peaks in the distance are snow-capped again, for the first time since Mendoza.

And on and on to dusty San Pedro de Atacama, less an oasis in the middle of the desert, more a very slightly less deserty bit of desert in the middle of the desert. This sleepy, backpckery town is home for New Years, where the tradition is to burn effigies of people in the streets, health and safety be damned. It is apparently a Northern Chilean tradition, where the burning of the figure - dressed in old clothes and usually holding last year's calendar - represents the casting out of any badness from last year. Apart from a few banger happy children (far too close to the flames for some social workers in the crowd), this is the most firework free New Years I've experienced as an adult.

9 hours on a rusty bike (Betty Swollocks)

While Patagonia was stunning and richly rewarding, i have been left a little cold by the rest of Argentina so far. Buenos Aires suffered - i suspect - from "we're coming here again in 10 months, so no need to everything now" syndrome. This quickly turned into doing pretty much nothing for far too many days in a row. The futbol season was over, so that couldn't even distract us. Although outside the Boca Stadium, a fat man with a moustache - bearing absolutely no resemblance to Maradona - selling "fotos con el Diez" did keep me amused for an hour or so. Cordoba was fine. "Nice" almost, but seemingly embarrassed by its history and looking to the future a little too vigorously. Every woman in the place seemed to be pregnant, as though some sort of coral spawning type event had taken place in the town some seven months previously, and every fertile female ended up with child.

Mendoza, however, is wonderful. Lazy if you want it, without being boring. Active, if you want it, without requiring you to scale mountains or white-water raft. And best of all, it is wine country. And Jesus do they know how to look after their tourists. In a village called Maipu (some 45 minutes out of town on the bus) they encourage you to get on two wheels (motorised or not, at your discretion) to spend a day winery hopping. This is exactly what we do, renting bikes from somebody called Mr. Hugo (who gives you a glass of wine while he completes the paperwork, no matter what time you arrive). He then points out on a map the closest five or six wineries (all within 2 kilometres of his shop). He gives you price for tastings (accompanied by a very honest assessment of the generosity of the winemaker), so you can calculate which ones will get you most drunk for your peso. He indicates the local "beer garden" (in case you get sick of wine), and finally tells you that the wineries all close at 6, and that from 6:30 until 9 there is free wine at his shop for everyone who rented a bike from him. The day has an unmatched ugliness potential.

To mitigate this, we devise a strategy to essentially do the opposite of what everybody else is likely to. We visit three wineries, our first - the furthest from the bike rental shop - we have to ourselves for an hour and a half, before slowly making our way back to base, encountering more and more tourists as we get closer. Drunk cycling (or mopeding if you so choose) might be an issue here you see, what with all the English and Irish backpackers lorrying free wine into themselves, but - in a stroke of policing genius - they have established a whole division of the local constabulary tasked with following cyclists around from winery to winery, making sure that, as they get more and more sozzled in the harsh Mendocino sun, they are kept safe. This involves, but is not limited to: stopping traffic to give cyclists right of way, even the wrong way on one-way streets; escorting weaving cyclists through potentially hazardous roundabouts; and best of all, providing a free taxi service if the cycling becomes too much after a long afternoon imbibing. This may be the greatest use of a Guard's time ever invented, and i think it should be looked at as an add-on for cycling pub crawls of Dublin.

Argentina: Vegan unfriendly.

Christmas Day, and in the hostel a succession of backpackers queue up to cook themselves dinner. Today the supermarkets are closed, so yesterday everybody went shopping. There is an easily discernible mood amongst the lethargic hordes waiting their turn at the cooker though. They all have steak. The last thing any of them want is steak. For, while Patagonia was all about the lamb, the rest of the country is All About The Steak. And most backpackers never make it to Patagonia anyway. The problem today is born of two disparate, yet complimentary factors.

First, there is the steak. It is exceptionally good. Even the rubbish they will flog to tourists in your local Pak'n'Save is spectacular. Add to that the fact that while the steak is amazing, not a whole lot else that the Argentinians do - food-wise - is up to it (again though, Patagonia, lamb etc.). So you're strolling around the supermarket, opposite a very well stocked food market, and you think, feck it, any old Argentinian can cook up a good steak and chips, I'll have a go myself. And anyway, it's Christmas, i couldn't afford to do this when i was in college, so i might as well spoil myself now. There are a number of issues which arise when people who have never bought or cooked steak before suddenly decide now is a good time to start, none of which I'll go into here.

The second factor is that yesterday - Christmas Eve - there was a barbecue in the hostel. It was tremendous fun, with 40 people eating and drinking all they could for a paltry fee. The starters were a couple of wonderful empanadas each, followed by a very juicy chorizo sausage. The main course was, inevitably, steak. 30kgs of it, according to the man in charge of the asador. This particular asador - built into the wall of the hostel, just beside the pool - catered comfortably with 30kgs. The 40 people tasked with eating it all: less so, although there was much mirth and merriment (free local wine all night), and a good fist of it was made by a handful of protein-addicted gym junkies. Afterwards we truck - slowly - to the rooftop terrace to let off fireworks (midnight on Christmas Eve is the height of the celebration here) and drink more until people peel off to local nightclubs or bed, depending on age and/or inclination.

Back to today… This is probably the most this kitchen has ever been used. But it is probably the most grudging succession of cooks i have ever seen. I didn't think one spurious steak purchase could do this, but as I discover quickly enough, they have made another crucial miscalculation, linked to the second factor above. When they were shopping for steak, they also bought wine, and right now wine is the last thing any of them wants to be drinking. There are a large number of one-glass-taken bottles strewn around the public areas of the hostel. They sell beer here, so most people have switched.

I have spent a good portion of the day making shepherd's pie (with ingredients sourced from 3 cities), and while there is beef (and wine) contained therein, it also contains vegetables, which (chips aside) are the first consumed in nearly a fortnight.