around the Balkans

I was able to slip in a quick trip to the Balkans before our Amsterdam conference - just a few days each in Serbia, Kosovo, and Bosnia & Herzegovina, but that was enough to get a flavour of the culture and an introduction to the complicated history, too complicated to understand properly in such a short time.  I suppose a summary would be that the region lies on a kind of crossroads between Asia and Europe and so was invaded and occupied over and over again through the centuries by Celts, Romans, Slavs, Hapsburgs, Byzantines, Ottomans ... and parts were also bombed by the Nazis and most recently by NATO.


As a group we were most interested in the recent history - the break-up of Yugoslavia and what followed - but, maybe not surprisingly, our Serbian guide avoided the subject and focused instead on the fourteenth century under Stefan Dušan before the Battle of Kosovo where the Turks defeated Serbia, beginning 500 years of Islamic rule.  The resentment against the Turks is still part of the politics for some, shown by the fairly recent persecution of Kosovan Albanians and of Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs.

We arrived at Srebrenica the day before the annual commemoration of the massacre.  In addition to the thousands of existing graves there were around seventy newly dug graves awaiting the burial of remains of victims identified during the past year.  It was very moving as families surrounded these empty graves, some in tears - the genocide was only 22 years ago so the memories are still fresh and raw.  & there is still work ongoing to find further remains and carry out the DNA testing required to identify them.  A difficult task, as the re-burial of many victims, in an attempt to hide the evidence of the massacre, was crudely done such that many partly decomposed bodies were broken up in the process.  I heard of one victim whose remains have been found at five different sites.  A later visit to the Srebrenica Gallery and the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide in Sarajevo provided more information - including gruesome photos and videos.  Hard to believe that this happened in Europe, in my lifetime.

Maybe in part because of the history, I found myself a bit ambivalent about Serbia, but totally smitten by Bosnia & Herzegovina.  It's easy to focus on this recent history as the evidence is all around, from the museums and memorials, the tunnel in Sarajevo (used to get people in and out during the four-year siege by Bosnian Serbs), the mortar holes in buildings, and even a monument erected in the Republika Srpska (one of the three constituent parts of Bosnia & Herzegovina) to the war criminal Ratko Mladič - the underlying tensions between the different ethnic groups did not go away just because a peace accord was signed.  However there is also beautiful countryside, great architecture (including several UNESCO World Heritage sites) and a great ambience in Sarajevo and, although very touristy, in Mostar.

Really oddly, I cannot post my best photo of this famous bridge in Mostar, as every time I try to upload it I get the message "Upload failed: server rejected" (has blogspot been hacked??) but this is a different view of it, taken from the top of the minaret of the Koskin-Mehmed Pasha's mosque.  One of the only places in the world where the minaret of an active mosque is open to the public.

Another stunning place was the village of Počitelj with its ruined fortifications:

An enjoyable half day was spent travelling up a terrible track to the village of Lukomir, the highest settlement in Bosnia & Herzegovina (at 1,500m), a place that is only occupied for half the year because of the deep snow that cuts if off over the winter.  The houses are built of stone and sit next to the stunning Rakitinica canyon.  The picture shows one of the old buildings (they seem to function as houses and barns at the same time) with the edge of the canyon behind.

Just one more picture from Bosnia & Herzegovina, forgive me, the Kravica Falls:

I shouldn't ignore the other two countries, however. Even Serbia had some reasonable Roman ruins and the beautiful winding Uvac Canyon with its nesting Griffon vultures and 6km long Usac cave full of stalactites and stalagmites.  Kosovo is low key, but very nice, the most impressive parts for me being the old painted monasteries.  No photos were allowed inside Gračanica monastery, but in Visoki Dečani we were allowed to take non-flash photos of the amazing frescoes.  It's impossible to capture the impact in a photo of all those amazing paintings surrounding you, (you really do go "wow!" when you enter!), but here is one pic looking up at part of the ceiling.  The frescoes date back to the 14th century, and the monastery is protected by KFOR (a NATO international peacekeeping force), since as recently as 2007 it was attached by Kosovan Albanian insurgents - as noted above, ethnic tensions have not gone away even though there is currently peace.

in rural Haiti

I had one of the assignments in Haiti that I really enjoy - where I get to go out to visit some of the communities where we do our development work.  Always so much more satisfying than sitting in the office looking at documents.

The journey to this particular community was not an easy one, up steep, rocky tracks that apparently become so slippery as to be impassable after rain, and a short spell driving through what had become a seasonal river following Hurricane Matthew last year.


I couldn't capture it in my photos but in places the track was so steep that I held on tight, nervous that we wouldn't make it.


But the driver was very good - and used to this kind of road I suppose.  Even he, however, couldn't get around the obstacle that faced us around the next corner:

It had seemingly fallen onto the track from the hillside above, and there was no way of driving around it.  Thankfully we were two vehicles, with a number of young men, and after some considerable effort they moved the rock off the track.

Finally at the community, I met some of the community management committee, a group of people who had realised that if the community were to develop, they had to organise themselves to make this happen.  As the community leader told me, "The government have abandoned us".  Apparently the teachers have not been paid for the last three years.

Their small community school was paid for with donated funds a few years back, and at the end of my visit I went to verify the existence of a filing cabinet and some teaching materials we had delivered to them at the start of the school year. They told me proudly that they had just succeeded in getting their first pupil to university.  This was quite astonishing when I saw that there were not even any desks or chairs for the children to sit at, and the school principal said quietly that he was very happy with what we had provided - but that he would really like a desk.  I thought of him when I was booking my flight for my next work assignment in Brazil.  There was a flight home departing Sao Paulo at midday; another flight was departing at 05:24, meaning a night without sleep before the seven hour flight home. But taking the early flight would save $200, and who knows what difference $200 could make to that tiny community school.  Certainly every little bit helps.  & it's good to be reminded, every so often, of the realities of life "in the field"- for those who will never in their lifetimes even dream of the kind of life I've had.

getting lost in Panama

In my ridiculously busy schedule of the last few months, I had a weekend in Panama in between trips to Nicaragua and Haiti.  I could have sat at home and rested, but the apartment was a mess as the landlord had moved all my stuff as he worked on fixing the ceiling (although he had removed and painted over the mould before fixing the pipe above where the water was leaking from so the mould was already starting to regrow amongst the drips ... sigh ... such is Panama) so I decided to go out for the day.

We have a few Whatsapp groups for different interests, one of which is Panama Hike and Beer.  I don't like beer but they were running a hike on the Saturday described as "easy" so I joined them.  It started off easy - a local bus to a nearby town, a climb over a low fence, a jump over the litter, and we were in a patch of rainforest with a sort-of trail.  Just five of us, which was nice.  After walking for an hour so so we reached a stream, and the others proceeded to cross it, stepping carefully from one (slippery) rock to another.  I pondered turning back at this stage, but they persuaded me to stay with them - but without making it clear that we were now going off trail, to rely just on the GPS of the hike leader to make it back to some form of civilisation.

To cut quite a long (six hour) story short, the features marked on the GPS (such as a road) didn't seem to be there, whilst lots of fallen trees, streams, thick rainforest vegetation interspersed in places with thick reeds growing to above head height were there.  It was quite a tough hike.  The leader kept saying we were x metres from a road, but the best we found was a stony track that disappeared into nothing.  Then we saw a sign in the distance, and were hopeful that we had reached at least the edge of civilisation, but a closer view revealed this:

... a warning to keep out because of unexploded ordinance!

So we gave that area a wide berth.  We had no choice but to keep going though, as we would never have been able to follow our winding route back and by now we were running very low on water, and two of the five seemed close to heat stroke.  Still trying to follow the GPS (with the battery charge nearly gone), we got to a rather wider stream - more like a small canal.  There was a dammed area which we were able to cross, and an abandoned lighthouse came into view higher up the slope ahead.  We pushed on.

& to our relief (well, you knew I made it out or I wouldn't have been writing this) we hit a cleared area with a road, and some way beyond it the Cocolí Locks of the Panama canal.  We collapsed beside the road for a while in the shade of a tree, but then flagged down a passing vehicle.  It turned that we were inside the restricted zone of the canal.  Before long a security vehicle came along with a policeman and a canal security person inside, and of course they stopped to question us.  Turned out that we were not the first foreigners to somehow find ourselves in the restricted zone, and we were not arrested but rather escorted out onto a public road where we were able to find a taxi.

Quite an experience, and not one that the hike leader has shared with other people signed up to his Whatsapp group!

yet another corner of Nicaragua - the Indio Maíz Reserve

After so many weeks away I was entitled to a little compensatory leave, and joined up with a birding trip to a very remote corner of Nicaragua.  The Indio Maíz Reserve is on the Caribbean side of the country, just north of Costa Rica.  Nobody really goes there apart from a few fishermen (and perhaps the drug smugglers who are rumoured to use this sparsely populated coast to get their drugs from Costa Rica to Honduras, on the way up to the US), and there is only a small population of indigenous people, who are remote enough from the main part of the country that they speak English creole rather than Spanish.  Even the settlements that had been there were fading away.

If you can't read that (even in extra large size the writing is small and faint) it concludes with a note that the British cemetery was used until the 1980's.  This is what it looks like now:

In this state partly through neglect, but partly because of Hurricane Otto that hit last November - the southernmost hurricane on record in Central America which made landfall right where the lodge is located.

Unfortunately the company I was travelling with had not heard about the hurricane.  So the itinerary I read in late March, with its references to 8km of trails around the lodge in pristine rainforest, and much more primary rainforest to view mostly from a small boat, where we could see all kinds of rainforest birds not to mention otters, tapirs and perhaps even manatees, still reflected the situation pre-hurricane and was, frankly, a load of rubbish.  There was only a 1km trail that was passable, and even that just passed through a post-apocalyptic landscape of broken vegetation.  This is a view from the river.

Hardly a dense, pristine rainforest.

However it was quite fascinating to see the effects - how powerful nature can be - as this forest will surely take decades to regenerate.  We all tried to make the most of it and our poor guide, as well as predicting that we will get sizeable refunds, made superhuman efforts to find us birds so I was able to add Great Green Macaw, Nicaraguan Seed-finch, Masked Duck and Least Bittern to my life list - all of which are pretty difficult to see.  The green basilisks and the green and black poison dart frogs were pretty cool too!

visiting home and family

I was going to post something about my recent time (nearly four weeks) in the UK, but it was so depressing that I really don't want to.  Let's just say it was very cold, and too right wing.  I was glad to get away.

Although London will always be my favourite city, in part because of the amazing variety of culture there.  On my first day back I went to an exhibition of world music photography (which the Royal Albert Hall kindly let me and another woman in to view, even though it had officially closed the previous day), and then that evening to a concert by Bassekou Kouyate, Seckou Touré and others (an Afro-Cuban thing) that was superb.  If I'd had time I would also have gone to see Orchestra Baobab, Leftfield, and a talk by Yanis Varoufakis.

& being in the UK of course gave me the opportunity to visit my Dad, which is always nice.  Lots of discussions on politics, which can get heated but always remain discussions rather than arguments.

Then, just one week after spending time with my Dad, I was with my Mum in Kenya!  Probably the first time in thirty years that I have seen both of my parents within the same month, let alone within a week!!  Nice to visit her too, with lots of discussions on the pros and cons of living in a different country and culture.

a few hours off over the Easter weekend

I did have to work through the Easter weekend, to make up for the days 'lost' at Sacha Lodge, but still found the time to rush downstairs on Friday evening when the Easter parade went past my building.  For over an hour there were marching bands and biblical characters passing slowly by. As an atheist I struggled with some of the references - why did the bands keep playing "Abide with Me"?  Isn't that the FA Cup Final song?  & why the creepy Ku Klux Klan style costumes (with the tall pointy head coverings)?  But it was interesting to see the effort put in, not just to the fancy costumes and the big floats, but also in the people who walked along the road barefoot in various roles.  I'm not sure how heavy these crosses were either:

Then I also took Sunday morning off to get a little exercise by walking up Cerro Ancon, a big hill in Panama City with various historical connotations as well as some nice views from the top.  I can just see it if I look to the right from my balcony, but had not yet made the effort to walk up it in my four years' living here, and I must say now I'm in the final year of my contract I've become even more aware of the things I haven't yet done and places I haven't yet visited.

It was a bit of a slog in the humidity, and the views were hazy - again because of the humidity. But it was worth it not just for the exercise and the 'tick' on the To Do List, but also for this great caterpillar I found up the top.  The size of my index finger and quite beautiful, although I resisted the strong temptation to put it on my hand as it almost certainly had stinging or at least irritating hairs along its body.

a long weekend in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Work is getting more and more demanding as we managers in my department are currently down to three, from the usual six (vacancy, secondment and long-term sickness).  So in 2017 I have so far been asked to cover on assignments in India, Kenya and our UK head office - and that is in addition to my regular workload in Latin America.  It's not that I don't love the job so much as to want to work seven days a week for months on end, it's just that I am in the last year of my contract here, and there are still so many places to go and things to see in this region.

So following a recent three week assignment in Ecuador (where disruption caused by the flooding and the post-election protests added to the demands), I decided to add on three days for some personal travel, even though I knew this would lead to my working throughout the Easter weekend.  The thing is, Ecuador has something special - the best place in the Americas (well, in the world) to see crested owls.

It was worth the trip.  A 45-minute flight to Coca, followed by a 2-hour speedboat ride down the Napo River, a twenty-minute walk and finally a twenty-minute canoe paddle to reach Sacha Lodge in the Amazon.  But I saw the owls - the ones in this photo - before I even reached the lodge, during the twenty minute walk!

But I'd booked three days, so went out as planned with the specialist bird guide to see what we could find, relaxed in the knowledge that I had already seen my target species. There were plenty more birds, including some seen at a clay lick (macaws, parrots and parakeets go there to eat clay so as to ingest the minerals it contains), some from the comfort of the little canoe and some from the top of a kapok tree, courtesy of a wonderful 41 metre high canopy tower.



The views over the treetops were superb, especially with the early morning mists draping themselves around some of the trees.  & when the mists cleared there were some lovely birds perched in the tree canopies, like this toucan:

Quite a few monkeys too, including the bush-baby-like night monkeys with their enormous eyes, and a tiny pygmy marmoset peering down from a high branch.  There were caimans and turtles in the lake beside the lodge, and short-nosed bats hanging onto the wooden piles that hold up the bar area.  Although not part of the birder itinerary, I asked to join the non-birders for a night walk, and there I added a whip-scorpion, a wolf spider and two different types of tarantula to the list.  So it was three days (and quite a lot of money) well spent.  Pretty busy, with a 4:30 alarm call on one day, but with no internet access - thus no work and no depressing world news - it was also very relaxing.  How can you not relax when your guides paddles your canoe silently across Lake Pilchicocha with this early morning mist over the trees?