celebrating the heritage of Portobelo

Another (rainy) day in Panama's short dry season, another provincial festival.  This time the Diablos and Congos festival which takes place two weeks after carnival every other year in the Caribbean village of Portobelo.

Well, technically it is a city, but with its current population of less than 3,000, it is only its ruins that hint of its past importance.  Founded in 1597, it became an important silver-exporting port for the Spanish after Francis Drake burned its rival port to the ground.  It was sacked by Henry Morgan (yes, him again) in 1668, and then captured by the British in 1739 as part of the War of Jenkins Ear.  Apparently this victory was greatly celebrated in Britain and is the reason that Portobello Road is so named.

The Spanish quickly recovered Portobelo but its importance declined as ships began to travel around Cape Horn.  Today one can still see the remains of three forts and the impressive old Royal Customs House where the Spanish used to store all the silver they had taken from Peru, but otherwise it is just a fishing village.

The festival, however, gives everyone the chance to dress up and to celebrate their heritage.  The inhabitants, the Congos, are descended from escaped black slaves and they are proud to maintain elements of their African heritage.  I say 'elements' because I saw little to remind me of Africa.  Just the drums, in fact.  The costumes appear to me to be either colourful versions of the Spanish flamenco dress (like the less colourful pollera worn throughout the country on festival days), or a collection of everything the wearer could find to somehow stick together!  More photos here than usual, but it really was a colourful spectacle and some of the costumes are hard to describe...

carnival

Unfortunately my boss had decided to organise a meeting in Madrid during the carnival week, so I only got to go to the first of the four days of Panama's carnival before I was off to the airport again.

I managed to take this one picture that gave the impression that our carnival was something like the one in Rio, but in reality there were only five floats, separated by groups of ordinary people in T-shirts sort of shuffling along to various different drum rhythms.

A section of the Cinta Costera, that part of the Panamanian highway which skirts the Bay of Panama, was cordoned off, with tight security for entrance (full body pat-down as well as thorough searches of bags).  Inside, there were countless stalls selling coca cola and beer, a few barbecue stands, large speakers belting out Latin music (I admit that I still can't tell the difference between salsa, merengue and bachata) and lots of Panamanian families milling about.  Everyone appeared to be enjoying themselves, so perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood that day as I thought it was rather boring!

There were also a number of people in red-and-black devil costumes wandering about and posing for photos.  I wasn't sure of their significance so googled them, and it seems that their origin is unknown but they generally represent evil (colonial conquistadors or perhaps slave masters), and that the colour of their costume reveals their seniority as a devil, with the beginners in red and the more senior devils with more black in their costumes.  Here in Panama they weren't really doing anything, they were just wandering about, but it seems that in some of the provincial towns they have far more defined and interesting roles.  Very clearly there are many provincial carnivals which are better than the one in the capital.  Maybe next year I will have the opportunity to attend one of those, so I shan't post a devil photo this time but instead the one I took of a costume lying ready on the ground, an hour or so before the parade started - coincidentally, it appears to be the same costume as in the photo above.

Panama Viejo

The city of Panama, founded in 1519, was the first permanent European settlement on the Pacific Ocean.  Today, however, the site of this settlement is just a collection of stone ruins, with the modern-day Panama City a few kilometres to the west.  I started feeling guilty this morning about just faffing around at home so decided to play the tourist for the day and take a look around the old ruins.

As with most other colonial cities in this part of the world, the damage was done by a British pirate, in this case the Welshman Henry Morgan, who sacked the old city in 1671.  It seems that everywhere I go in the region either his name or that of Francis Drake is raised as the culprit for burning and looting the old Spanish cities, with no amount of fortification seeming to be too much for them.  Both of these men were knighted - and are generally referred to in British literature as 'privateers' rather than pirates.  Of course Britain (England) was at war with the Spanish at this time so I suppose such behaviour was excusable.  Indeed I overheard someone's guide at the ruins today speaking quite admiringly about Henry Morgan, telling the tourist that he was a very clever man - it seems there are no hard feelings today.

A significant amount of restoration has been done to these ruins since I last visited them in 1996, apparently partly funded by Spain.  Perhaps it would have been a nice gesture for Britain to have found the money for this!

A week in the Dominican Republic

I always thought of the Dominican Republic as a place of all-inclusive beach resorts, sex tourism and a problem with food poisoning, but a quick holiday with a bird-watching group changed all of that.  I saw that the interior is mountainous, in the north quite lush and green with plantations of fruit, coffee and cacao, and in the south rather drier but with areas of cool pine forest.

More surprising to me though was the capital, Santo Domingo.  The city was founded in 1496 by the brother of Christopher Columbus and is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas as well as the site of the region's first university, cathedral, monastery, castle and fortress.  The old colonial quarter is reasonably extensive and contains some wonderful 500-year-old houses, solidly built of thick coral blocks with heavy wooden doors.  The city held a strategically important role in the expansion of the Spanish empire, with conquistadors setting off from here on their voyages of discovery including Hernando Cortes (Mexico), Diego Velazquez de Cuéllar (Cuba), Ponce de Leon (Puerto Rico) and Vasco Nuñez de Balboa (first European to see the Pacific Ocean).  The street running from the Plaza de España and past the old fortress still contains the old houses where they were based.

There are museums too, and other interesting remnants of history, including a cannonball lodged on the roof of the cathedral, fired there as part of Francis Drake's invasion of the city in 1586.  The city is not overrun with tourists, but there are enough to support a good number of decent restaurants and cafes.  A potential retirement spot?

sightseeing in Colombia

After my month of birding was over, I had more time to spend in Colombia, having accepted an invitation to spend Christmas in Bogota with a colleague.  This didn't work exactly as planned, as her mother fell ill and so the whole family turned up leaving no room for me to stay in the apartment.  Nevertheless it gave me the opportunity to explore the attractions of Bogota and the area around it.  Highlights were the Gold Museum and the salt cathedral at nearby Zipaquira, low points were the cold, wet weather and travelling on the Transmilenio buses during rush hour.

After Christmas we travelled to the pricey but relaxing resort town on Paipa.  There we spent time in the thermal mineral baths as well as visiting some important historical sites in the country's battle for independence from colonial rule.

From there I went on to Villa de Leyva, a beautifully preserved colonial town with the largest plaza in Colombia. 

Although around the same altitude (2,500m) as Bogota, it was much warmer with clear blue skies for most of my four-day stay.  I went on some long walks along country lanes to visit blue pools, a pliosaur fossil, and a collection of 3,500-year-old stones in some kind of solar observatory, and I saw in the New Year with 20,000 others in the plaza watching the fireworks, followed by the traditional burning of effigies by each family, through which all of the previous year's concerns and disputes are supposed to go up in smoke so as to start the year with a clean slate.

Then New Year's Day saw a long hike up a mountain for a great view over the town and surrounding area.  I must have got fitter during this trip and wonder if there is a way to maintain it once the holiday is over?

After Villa de Leyva I travelled to the Caribbean coast for a few days in Cartagena.  This beautiful city was founded in 1533 and its city wall, defensive forts and solid old colonial houses are incredibly well preserved.  Other than a half day visiting a thermal mud bath and one classical guitar concert ($3 for a seat only ten rows from the front in in a large modern auditorium!) I spent my four days there just wandering around the old streets, stopping for coffees, platters of fruit and coconut drinks of to do the odd bit of shopping.  I even day-dreamed a little about going to live there until I heard that the old houses start at $1million!

six owls and four snakes

Six owls (including the critically endangered and endemic Santa Marta screech owl, only discovered in 2007) and four snakes (including two harmless ones I got to handle) were amongst the creatures I saw during a 29-day birding tour of Colombia.

The purpose for me was as much to see the different parts of Colombia as to see the birds, but still, was I completely mad to sign up to this?  Besides being the most expensive holiday I have ever taken, it also involved getting up between 4 and 5am for the entire month, getting freezing cold up in the mountains and hot and sticky in the rainforest, slogging up muddy trails, being bitten by chiggers, mosquitoes and ants, and having only cold showers available for much of the month.  I admit there were one or two moments when I wondered what on earth I was doing there...

But the scenery was spectacular, from the snow-capped volcano of Los Nevados del Ruiz actively belching out steam, to cloud forest dripping with lichens, other forests of giant tree ferns and bamboo, the mangroves and semi-desert of the Caribbean coast, the lush hillsides of the coffee-growing region and the Amazon jungle.


In addition I saw around 825 bird species, including the six different species of owl, a number of the bizarre nocturnal oilbirds roosting in a cave, an array of multi-coloured parrots, trogons, tanagers, toucans, hummingbirds and others, and quite a number of the maddeningly elusive skulking birds, that could sing away totally unseen in bushes only three metres in front, stop, and then with no sign of movement start singing again from directly behind us...  But with patience we saw many of them.

Much of this was done with the aid of recordings of the birds' calls, however - the bird hears the call and stops whatever it is doing to come and respond, whether to discourage an intruder on its territory or to investigate a potential mate.  In places where the birds have not had exposure to bird groups using recordings it is extremely effective, but with repeated experience the birds modify their behaviour to ignore the calls.  Then as their own calls are ignored by other birds they may even stop calling.  On the Santa Marta mountain the flocks of birds are now oddly silent.

I struggle with the ethics of this approach although at the same time I recognise that some bird species would be almost impossible to see were it not possible to lure them out of the undergrowth in this way.  However, to cause a critically endangered bird to spend time and energy responding to a recording when it should be feeding/breeding, or to change the behaviour of some birds such that they no longer sing, seems totally wrong.  Especially so when done by people who profess to love birds - many of them perhaps love the length of their world bird list more than they love the birds themselves.

When I look back at the hundreds of birds I saw in Africa and the pleasure this gave me, I recall that only one single bird was seen with the aid of a recording.  That was right at the end of my stay when I realised that it was the only way I would get to see a cricket warbler, and I did only play it once although I could have persisted in order to get a better/longer look at the bird.  But of course I did have the luxury of many years in the region, rather than a few weeks with a guide under pressure to show me as many birds as possible.

Difficult one.  I enjoyed this trip immensely but shall think twice before booking another trip with a company so keen to find you the highest number of species possible.

a weekend in Paris

Various factors came together to make me spend a weekend in Paris, but the trip was based around a concert by the Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara in the town of Savigny-le-Temple, a nondescript place some 33km from the capital. Not only would I see her perform for the first time but I was also to meet her after the show, an opportunity that had come about unexpectedly when a facebook post had revealed that an old friend knew her husband.

Paris was cold and covered by a blanket of grey clouds, and I came down with a cold immediately (in fact it started en route - in anticipation of the awful weather?) as I usually do when I visit somewhere cold. & the Fatoumata Diawara concert wasn't to be, as I arrived at the venue to discover that she was in bed suffering from dengue fever. But there was a replacement, called in at the last minute, an unknown (to me, at least) Malian singer called Nanou Coul. She was good (although not really good enough to justify a trip from Panama to France) and listening to her griotte-style singing and the band playing the djembe, balafon and ngoni made me reminisce about the happy times I have spent in Mali.

Once again the usual thoughts went through my head. How I detest the cold and could never again live in a cold climate. How much I adore West African music, especially that from the Sahelian region. How much I adore the climate of the Sahelian countries. So why not retire there? Then the usual thoughts about the negative side: lack of decent medical facilities, the lack of a 'social space' for the unmarried, childless woman, and most importantly my status there as an outsider - someone who would always be stared at, and asked for money, because of the colour of my skin.

So what to do? The next day, back in Paris itself, I ended up as I usually do at the Musee Quai Branly, going around the wonderful collection they have from Africa, and then being tempted by all the CDs and wonderful coffee table books they have in the museum shop. This time they had a special collection of exhibits related to initiation amongst the Lega tribe of the Democratic Republic of Congo - headgear, masks and other implements as well as a good deal of very interesting information about the various levels of initiation. It was fascinating but I was well aware that I was looking at things I could not see if I went to the DRC to visit the Lega as most of the exhibits (collected by some old colonialist many decades ago) are only brought out for secret ceremonies for the initiates themselves.

It is a strange paradox that the best of traditional African culture - the masks and the music - is more easily available to the outsider in Paris and London than it is in Africa. The trouble with working as an expat is that it loosens the ties to your original home but does not necessarily provide an alternative. So the question for me remains unanswered - where do I plan to retire to?

Not that I'm ready to retire yet, but I really would like to know where 'home' is to be - and to buy a house or apartment there and start transporting my books, my masks, etc (those things that cause such difficulties through either their weight or their fragility in moving from country to country) to that home. Any suggestions welcomed!