getting into hot water in Guatemala

Every year on 1 November, the Day of the Dead, the communities of Sumpango and Santiago Sacatepéquez in Guatemala hold their kite festivals.  My assignment in Guatemala finished on 30 October so clearly I had to stay on to see this - and then for a few more days as there was no point rushing back to Panama when the office would be closed for three days for public holidays.

So I organised a trip with the Quetzalroo Hostel to the Sumpango festival.  Being a hostel trip, we set off late, and we had to stop en route for people to buy beers, and then again for people to eat fried chicken ... but eventually we arrived and of course being Latin America we hadn't missed anything by arriving a little late.

The kites were mostly waiting up one end of the field, although a couple had already been gingerly lifted up above people's heads and taken to the launching site at the other end, awaiting lift-off.  Except that it is very difficult to get such large kites airborne.  During our two-three hours there we saw I think seven successful launches and a great many more failures.  Up to sixteen metres in diameter, and made entirely by hand of brightly coloured tissue paper on bamboo frames, the kites apparently take months to make and can cost thousands of dollars so it must be heart-breaking for those that see their creations come crashing down, bamboo splintering and paper tearing, after rising just a few metres. Although it is good for those that succeed in getting their kite up as there is significant prize money given out by the event sponsors.

There seems to be no consensus on the origin of the festival nor the exact meaning of the kites, although most stories suggest the kites were originally advised by a shaman as a way to scare off evil spirits on the day when they would otherwise disturb the residents of the towns.

The next day I set off on a long trek: city bus across town, long-distance bus taking me five hours north-east of the capital, a tuk-tuk taking me the next 3km along a dusty road through the banana plantations - and later, after a couple of hours looking around the Mayan ruins at Quiriguá, a long hot walk back through the plantations and three different 'colectivo' small buses until I finally arrived at the town of Rio Dulce around 7pm.

This meant I was ready the next morning to take a launch along the river to Livingston, via floating gardens of water lilies and a spectacular winding canyon dripping with greenery.  This trip is usually done by tourists for the journey itself rather than for the destination, but Livingston is a lovely little town, very different from the rest of the country as it is the home of the Garífuna (mostly descendants of escaped African slaves) and sways to a Caribbean rhythm.  Sadly I did not have time to stay overnight but caught the next launch back to Rio Dulce, with time at least to see the old Spanish fortress of San Felipe.

Could I squeeze any more sightseeing in the next morning before the long journey back to Guatemala City?  I hadn't planned to, but the hostel manager insisted I go to see (and bathe in) a waterfall an hour outside of town.  He told me it is unique in the world as a hot waterfall.  So I borrowed a bikini from a very kind woman also doing the trip there, and we made our way to the falls.  They don't even seem to have a name, but are indeed hot (presumably coming from a hot spring somewhere up the hill) and although I had only ten minutes to swim around under them they were definitely worth the trip.

the Atacama desert

I so love the Sahara - whether entering it in Mauritania, Mali, Chad, or Sudan - that I have long been quite keen to visit other deserts.  So I was pretty happy that my Bolivia holiday ended with three days in northern Chile, in the Atacama.

This was pretty different from the Sahara, however.  At much higher altitude so very cold, and mountainous too - to be honest, nothing whatsoever like the Sahara apart from the lack of rain.  But it was scenic. The white in the Moon Valley above is not snow (although it was very cold up there) but borax (a continuation from the salt flats of southern Bolivia), and I loved the rock formations and the volcanoes all around.

There was little life up there, no lizards on the rocks and no birds that I could see (sadly we had left the flamingoes behind).  It appeared that there was not even any vegetation, but these cute little vizcacha - like rabbits with squirrel tails - apparently find roots and seeds to eat, somewhere.  All they seemed to do when we found them was to sit motionless on a rock, maybe needing to warm themselves in the sun every so often.

The coldest it got was when we visited the El Tatio geysers.  It's necessary to go there early in the morning, before the wind gets up (so that the steam rises from the geysers instead of being blown horizontally!), and it was apparently minus five when we arrived.  The geysers were pretty spectacular, this being the third largest geyser field in the world, I believe, and we were actually quite lucky to see them as they had only reopened that day after a five day closure.  A Belgian tourist, trying to take a selfie, had taken a couple of steps backwards and fallen into one of the geysers; her husband pulled her out, suffering serious injury himself, but his wife died of her burns.  The authorities had closed the place while they put little yellow-painted stones around to mark out the more dangerous areas.  You can see some of the stones in this photo.

the lagoons and salt flats of southern Bolivia

Potosí (see previous post) was one of the highlights of the trip, but it was to get even better as we got into the region of lagoons and salt flats in southern Bolivia.

First was the famous Salar de Uyuni, over 10,000 square kilometres of flat, white, salt that was once an inland sea.  Marooned within it is the Isla Incahuasi, which we clambered around to try to get that perfect "cacti and salt flat" photo, a couple of us also enjoying the birdlife.  We also visited a small village and watched the salt processing, wandered around a 'cemetery' of rusted old steam trains, enjoyed a night in a hotel made of salt, and visited a couple of caves on the edge of salt flat, one containing several mummified human corpses.


From the Salar we drove on through the high altitude altiplano, past other salt flats, extinct volcanoes, fumaroles, and a number of different coloured lagoons - green(ish), white, and my favourite, the Laguna Colorada which had red water between the expanses of salt.  All the time there was a ferocious wind blowing, good for seeing the colours of the lagoons as it stirs up the bacteria, but difficult to stand and extremely cold.



At lunchtime however we stopped next to another lagoon which thankfully was in a bit more of a bowl, the surrounding snow-capped mountains providing some shelter from the wind. Perhaps for this reason it didn't have any coloured water, but it did have two species of flamingoes that allowed me to get relatively close to take their photos.  The James's flamingo has particularly spectacular colouring:

On a good day for birds I also saw giant, Andean and horned coots, crested ducks, and a lesser rhea (like a South American version of the ostrich), amongst others.

In the afternoon we crossed the border into Chile.  It felt different straight away, the road in a much better state - but somehow felt less "authentic" to me, I preferred Bolivia.

Che Guevara and a silver mine

Following my work assignment in Bolivia earlier this year, I now had the opportunity to go there on holiday.  So a small group of us - five Brits and one American woman who doesn't like travelling with other Americans - met up with eachother and our guide in the south-eastern city of Santa Cruz to start our trip.

The first part of the trip was an experiment for the tour company, a visit to the pre-Incan hilltop site of El Fuerte followed by a couple of days following the "Ruta del Che" around the countryside.  Che Guevara went to Bolivia as a good central place from where he could catalyse revolutions in various parts of South America.  However, as with his earlier venture into Central Africa, this was not well planned.  At least some of the peasants accepted his message, but the welcome he'd anticipated from the local communist party was not forthcoming, his equipment let him down (for example he split his small group into two parties only to find after they'd gone separate ways that the radios didn't work) and his whereabouts was notified to the Bolivian army, who captured him without difficulty before he got anywhere close to overthrowing the government.


We visited the tiny former school where he was held prisoner and then shot dead.  This is now a museum, and the village around it is filled with Che murals, Che statues, and Che slogans painted onto everything possible.  Even this local lodgings has been given his name.

Though I don't think the Bolivians see him as anything other than a tourist magnet.

Behind the small hospital in Vallegrande is a double sink where the hospital laundry used to get done.  This is where Che's dead body was put on display for a couple of days before the hands were cut off to be sent to Argentina for verification of his identity against filed fingerprints, and the body was spirited away somewhere.  Finally in 1997 a retired army commander let it be known where the body had been buried; whilst the remains were removed to Cuba there is now a museum on the spot in Bolivia.  We met one of the eight Cuban doctors currently working at the hospital, and restoring the laundry building and surrounds in their spare time.  I wouldn't have made a special visit to see any of this, but it made for a pleasant couple of relaxed days.  This is the laundry building, now covered in the graffiti of visitors, where the body was displayed: I assume the Cuban doctors will eventually fix the sign and remove the ladder...

After a couple of other stops, we arrived in Potosí.  Once the richest city in the world as the Spanish directed the exploitation of the silver in the Cerro Rico ("rich mountain") that overlooks the city, apparently extracting enough to have a built a bridge of silver from Potosí to Madrid.  Unfortunately it took enough lives for them to have built a bridge back the other way with the bodies of the dead miners.  Eight million lives according to Galeano, although that seems improbable.  Nearly 500 years later it is still being mined, and is now riddled with miles and miles of unmapped tunnels and shafts  - clearly a major accident waiting to happen.  We were told that some 220 miners die each year in there now, crushed by speeding ore wagons, hit by falling rocks dislodged by the continuing little explosions as miners follow the remaining mineral veins, falling down shafts ... and this does not take account of all those who die later from the effects of inhaling silica and asbestos dust and various poisonous gases.

Despite the dangers, it is possible for tourists to go inside the mine.  Our guide organised a tour and we got kitted up with all the gear:

First we went shopping for gifts - gifts for El Tío, the guardian of the mountain, and gifts for the miners we would encounter.  Between us we bought dynamite, small bottles of alcohol (for El Tío), and coca leaves - the miners chew these to give them to stamina to keep working at this 4,000m altitude and to stave off hunger as eating in the mine risks greater ingestion of dust.  On entering the mine we went straight to an effigy of El Tío to deposit our gifts, anything that might help the mountain stay in one piece while we were in there!  Then we continued along the narrow, low, dark, tunnels, stepping gingerly along the slats over one very deep hole, trying to avoid knocking our heads as we scrambled under the lower parts where the ceiling supports were collapsing, and avoiding the asbestos deposits on the walls, until we reached the end of the tunnel, where two miners, a father and son, were collecting the rock released by the last explosion.

I suppose it isn't a very safe trip to make ... although one person told me that the tours are not allowed during the hours when they do the dynamiting, and it's true that we didn't hear or feel any explosions while we were in there even though the miners described the sound of them as the "daily music of the mine".

For the miners it is still very dangerous and also pretty unpleasant work.  & I was surprised to hear that the younger of the father and son we met, still only 20, had started in the mine at the age of 13.  But he was taking English classes in the evenings in the hope of giving up mining and becoming a guide.  I hope he succeeds.

birds and other wildlife in Uganda

Back from a three week holiday in Uganda, with so much work to do and so little time that I thought the easiest way to describe this trip was through a little photo essay.

Firstly, a few birds, starting with the shoebill stork.  We took a boat trip in the Mubama Swamp looking for this amazing creature - 1.2 metres tall and looking like something out of the era of the dinosaurs.















& then (left) the beautiful and delicate red-throated bee-eater.




& another bee-eater:










& to finish the birding section, a great blue turaco.  I've seen this bird before in Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, but there they are shy birds up in the canopy.  In Uganda they were flying around the hotel gardens:

Now on to the mammals.  I opted out of the expensive gorilla trek, having seen these amazing creatures a few years back in Rwanda and not wanting to pay a further $600.  However I did get to join a chimpanzee trek.  We were walking through the forest early in the morning in a good mood having just seen the beautiful and rare green-breasted pitta, when a male chimpanzee came down out of a tree.  We followed, stumbling into roots and branches in our efforts to keep up.

He moved fast, with breaks to sit and look up and the trees, and then when he saw what he wanted (just fresh leaves on a particular type of tree) he climbed up and ate.  He was difficult to photograph as he was moving so fast and the forest was dark, but here is one of him staring up at the trees.







There were plenty of other mammals. Unfortunately I could not get a photo of the serval cat, but here are a few of the more common larger mammals:

The wildlife was in many cases not hard to find.  At one hotel the warthogs and mongooses were literally right outside the hotel room doors:











& to finish, this is not a good photo at all, but the baby warthog cannot be more than a day old, so very cute:

wildlife and nature in northern Peru

Not at all in the order of the trip, but I've wanted to see a sword-billed hummingbird for many years, so this has to be the first photo for this post!  My top target for the trip was actually a different hummingbird, the marvellous spatuletail, but as expected I did not get to see it - after all, this was not a birding trip, but primarily one focused on archaeological sites.  But I was very happy to see the sword-billed, and that it sat still for long enough to enable me to get a focused photo!

I did see a number of good new bird species, including the endemic Tumbes Tyrant, White-winged Guan, and Koepcke's Screech-Owl - the first two, with a number of other species, at the Chaparrí reserve.  This was a wonderfully remote place with rustic yet comfortable cabins in the middle of a low scrub forest (I slept so well!), great food and very comfortable hammocks hanging in the porches.  I would have liked to spend another day there, in a reserve which had more than just birds. We didn't see any of the wild spectacled bears, only those in the rescue and rehabilitation centre, but a fox was cheekily walking around near the kitchen.

We drove through the arid coastal desert and up into (and over) the Andes, much of which was also very arid with little vegetation except for cacti.  There was the odd hummingbird - and some tarantulas in their web-nests beside the road - and one just sitting on the side of the road.  Like many people I find these spiders both fascinating and repellent at the same time.  We briefly passed through cloud forest, and also just into the Amazonian region where the Gocta Falls were located. 'Discovered' less than a decade ago, these are amongst the highest falls in the world, and the walk towards them, up and down hills between coffee and sugar cane crops and finally through a small area of virgin rainforest, was hard but very enjoyable.  This picture to the left is a distant view from early on in the walk, but I was one of those who succeeded in reaching the base of the falls.

When we got there our guide took a look in the rubbish bin, and didn't seem very surprised to find an oppossum in there...

The other part of the trip was the chance to see the Raymillacta festival in Chachapoyas.  This has been going for some twenty years, with groups coming from quite some distance to take part.  Rather like a harvest festival really, many of the villages or associations showed off the produce from their area, either through their costumes or through samples of food and drink being carried through the streets.  Many were throwing or giving samples to the crowd and I brought home a little bag of organic coffee as well as having drunk various local corn and spirit drinks.  There was a great deal of music too, from brass bands to traditional pipes and drums, The only part I didn't like were the headdresses of two groups which included real toucan bills.

death in northern Peru part II

The Chachapoyas empire came later, dating from around 800 AD up to the time of the Incas, and was further inland so involved a long and scenic drive to get there from the coast.  At their funerary site of Karajía a number of sarcophagi sit on a high mountain ledge, their anthropomorphic mud and cane structures containing the bodies of the dead, some also with skulls atop their mud heads.  Believed to date from around 1200 AD, there are clear signs that there were originally more of these or similar structures on the cliff ledges, including a number of human bones on the path at the base of the cliff.  For me this was the best archaeological site of the trip.

At Revash we were able to get close-up views of other mountain-ledge tombs, constructed like large dolls houses but with human bones visible inside.


In the same area as Karajía we visited the large hilltop ruins of Kuélap.  Surrounded by a high (up to 20m high) and thick wall it is often referred to as a fortress but it was more likely just a fortified town, as it contains the ruins of over 400 buildings, mostly circular, that appear to have been living quarters or perhaps storerooms.  This was also a Chachapoyas site although a few later additions show that it was fnally taken over tby the Incas.  Perhaps they were responsible for the skeletons unearthed there recently, more than 120 having been thrown into a pit at the site.


A little further on, just outside of the town of Leymebamba, was another great museum.  It covers the history of the area but the clear highlight is a collection of some 200 mummies, found on rock ledges above the Lake of the Condors.  It seems that nothing much is known about them except that they date from the late Inca period.

Amongst all these reminders of death, the twelve of us on the tour were dropping (ill, not dead!) like flies.  Thankfully I only went down with a cold, although the mild temperature that signalled its arrival made a 2km uphill walk, at 2600m, one of the most difficult I have ever done.  Others also got coughs and colds, fevers, dizzy spells, headaches from the altitude and the twisting mountain roads, and a vomiting and diarrhoea bug laid some low.  Worst of all though came from a vicious dog that bit two of the group on the walk up to Revash.  In one case the bite went through skin and flesh and into the muscle, and the poor guy needed anti-rabies injections once we got back to Lima.