the end of the Peru holiday

 My short holiday in Peru comes to an end today, and it has been fun, although sitting here in multiple layers of clothing in Cusco and still freezing cold, I am certainly looking forward to getting back to the warmth of Panama!

I did go back over some old ground on this trip: a second boat trip around the Ballestas Islands; and second views of the Inca ruins at Sacsayhuaman and Pisac.  I saw more trepanned and elongated skulls, and more Inca mummies.  But I also saw a number of new places.  Arequipa is a great city (as is Cusco despite being too cold - and too touristy), the Colca Canyon is impressive, the floating islands tour on Lake Titicaca is a massive tourist shopping trap - to be avoided - and the Inca ruins at Ollantaytambo are not to be missed.

My favourite sites of this trip though were rather unexpected.

This is the active Sabancaya volcano, seen from the 4,910m pass at Patapampa, on our way to the Colca Canyon.  It was cold, of course, but the early morning sun was glistening off the snow on the rocky ground, and then with the bonus of this volcano ... absolutely stunning.

Also stunning were the salt pans, or Salinas, at Maras.

Extremely salty water from a spring has been channeled into a series of hundreds of ponds - each owned by a local family - from which (once the channel is temporarily blocked) the water is allowed to evaporate and the remaining salt is collected and sold.  The process takes only a few weeks.  It was one of those rare places that made me go "Wow!" - out loud - when the bus turned the corner and the salt pans came into view.

Finally, there were two small village churches - at Chincheros and Andahuaylillas - with amazing painted ceilings and walls, although unfortunately no photos allowed in either place.

Huacachina - is this what tourism means?

Huacachina is a small oasis in the southern sand desert of Peru, apparently a once tranquil place where one could bathe in the lagoon and wander amongst the peaceful sand dunes.  But then it began to develop into a more active tourist destination, with backpackers coming in to go sand-boarding down the dunes, zooming around in noisy dune buggies, peddling around the lagoon in garish plastic boats, and partying all night on cheap pisco sours.

I spent a night there as it is on the route going south down the Peruvian coast, and it sounded nice despite the dune buggies.  I did find the odd nice corner such as this mini-lagoon a dune away from the main one:

There were moments of tranquility (between passing dune buggies).  It truly was a beautiful setting.

However, the presence of so many temporary visitors leads to much more consumption locally.  Not just in whatever fuels those awful buggies, but in the acres of plastic bottles and bags that people seem unable to do without these days.  When I travel I carry a water bottle with me, fill up from the tap, and add a chlorine tablet - and sometimes a neutralising tablet to get rid of the chlorine taste, but not always.  As far as I know these do no direct harm to the environment, although there is of course some environmental impact in their manufacture and packaging.  But - despite this also being cheaper than buying bottled water - no-one else seems to do this.  With the result that the above mini-lagoon looks like this if you walk a little further down:

(with dune buggy on the sand dune behind, grrr!).  & the yellow-crowned night heron I was so pleased to see was surrounded by plastic waste:

I used to have hope that we could sort out our environmental problems.  I started giving to Greenpeace some 35 years ago and they are still the main beneficiary of my will.  I am mostly vegetarian (100% vegetarian at home, and mostly so when I travel though will eat meat to avoid inconveniencing people), for environmental reasons as I do like meat, I always use public transport (have never owned a car), and I try not to consume more than I need to - although I do recognise the negative impact of all my flights around the world, of course.  I will continue all this for the rest of my life, as I would feel selfish and irresponsible to live any other way.  But sadly I no longer feel sure that it is worth the effort.  The world's population keeps on increasing, we keep on consuming more and more, and finding more stupid ways of using up finite resources whilst churning pollution into the environment (bitcoin??  using more energy to 'mine' the coins than most countries use in a year - so that people can use them to evade taxes and other obligations or to gamble on their value?).  I no longer feel much hope, and sometimes even wish that some deadly new disease could sweep the planet and wipe out half the population.  As I say, I will continue to try to keep my own contribution to the damage low, but knowing at the same time that there is probably no point.

Peru - and thinking about Senegal

Straight after my assignment in South Sudan I had another in Peru - so with two weeks' leave still to use up by the end of the year I thought the easiest option would be to stay on in Peru, and visit a few places down in the south of the country where I haven't yet been.  But life is never that simple.  My new boss - still learning the trade, I guess - made a mistake with her calendar as a result of which a meeting had to be scheduled - in the UK - for mid-December.  Straight after my Peru assignment.  So instead of travelling around Peru I was in the bitter cold and snow of the UK, reminding me once again of the need to put off my return 'home' for as long as I possibly can.

By the time all this happened it was too late for me to think of some alternative holiday (somewhere I could have gone directly from the UK, perhaps?), so I used up my remaining air miles to fly back to Peru once the UK meeting was over.  I had an afternoon in Lima to start with, so treated myself to a meal at Maido, currently ranked as the eighth best restaurant in the world.  I didn't go for what the restaurant is famous for, however - the 13 course tasting menu at $130, or even more if you have the recommended drinks with each course - but just one of the cheaper main dishes from their a la carte menu.  A kind of seafood risotto with a seafood omelette draped over it, accompanied by a glass of 'vinmuth' (wine steeped overnight in herbs).  It was nice but did not make me feel like I was in a world class restaurant.  But I'd really gone there for the experience: arriving rather before 7pm in order to get the one slot that cannot be reserved in advance; having all the staff call out 'Maido!' (Japanese for welcome) as you walk in; and watching the guy next to me go through the first few courses of the tasting menu.

I have no idea what he ate as the food was beautiful but unrecognisable (little colourful blobs on equally colourful bases), although I overheard bits of the extremely long descriptions of his first two courses, especially the instruction that the second course be consumed in one mouthful as it was designed to explode in the mouth...  Dining at Maido was an enjoyable experience but also a valuable lesson, as I left 30% of my one dish - not because of any issues with its quality, but because I was already full.  I realised that my decision on where to retire will not need to take any account of the availability of top quality dining opportunities as those are wasted on someone with as small an appetite as mine.  As long as I can buy good quality (preferably cheap) fruit and vegetables I shall be happy food-wise!

I've been thinking a bit about retirement recently, as my contract in Panama comes to an end on 3 April.  Luckily I do have an option within my current organisation, as my old position in Senegal has become vacant and I would be eligible for a second posting there.  I was disappointed that the East Africa position was made available for locals only (ie for Kenyans, as the job is based in Kenya), but then intrigued and confused about the possibility of returning to Senegal, taking a weekend of deep thinking before deciding to send in my application.

Those of you who know me may be surprised that I didn't jump at the opportunity to apply to return to Senegal, which I loved so much.  In part it is through fear that it won't be the same second time around.  I won't get to live again in that beautiful apartment, my friends have all departed, the management team in the office has changed...  Also, just the fact that I've already been there.  You've seen how busy I've been during my time here in Latin America, squeezing in trips to every corner of the continent in any spare moment - but I've already seen all those corners of West Africa.  In the end, however, it was this factor that encouraged me to apply.  Whilst I've loved every minute of all the travelling I've done here, it does take its toll.  I never have time to rest, I never have time to build a social life, I never have time to listen to music or read a book - and I realise that I need to re-learn to do those things.  The main alternative I had in mind to applying for that post is early retirement, which I could afford to do if I chose to live somewhere cheap like Nicaragua.  But I was a little scared of this option - what would I DO all day??  An hour a day working to regain my fitness, perhaps, another hour reading a book, maybe a third hour online, reading the newspapers and commenting on friends' facebook posts ... but then what?  So I'm hoping I am successful in my application for the Senegal post.  An opportunity to return to a place that I loved (the local music and culture will still be there even if the apartment isn't), where the work feels very worthwhile - and where I have more time to myself, to learn to relax again in preparation for the future.

at the airport

Juba airport is the most strange place.  Surrounded by portakabins, which are the offices of all the airlines.  The places where you have to go to turn an e-ticket into a boarding pass and to check in your luggage.  More portakabins for some of the officials' offices, and then the departure area consists of tent roofs held up on top of scaffolding poles, strips of rotted hardboard perched on cement blocks on the ground over the bare earth below ... no photographs allowed of course, but it's always possible to take one at a strange angle with your camera hidden in your bag ...

But I jump ahead of myself.

My airport journey started in the Bannastars portakabin (between the Kush Air and the Dream Air portakabins) where I checked in for my flight.  I showed my ticket, I showed my passport - the visa, plus the Registration Stamp on the back page - and I showed my government Travel Authorisation allowing me to go to Yei, and I collected my boarding pass.  My suitcase was weighed and tagged on a portable weighing machine outside.  Then I waited.  & waited some more, standing around trying to catch shade from the already hot sun (at 8am) near the suitcases.

Finally they tell us to go and check in at the departure gate (the tented area above).  But on the way there, foreigners are pulled aside and told to go to another portakabin for another check of our documents.  My turn comes and the man tells me "you need a stamp".  "Where do I get that?"  He motions to his left (where there is a wall) and tells me I get it from the man in the office.  So I leave his 'office' and wander about looking for a different man in a different office .. somehow find him and he eventually gets off the phone then checks my documents.  Obviously satisfied, he affixes a post-it to my passport, writing on it, "To Yei: Approved" and he signs it.  I go back to the first man in an office who stamps the post-it.

Now to the tented check-in area.  People are checking in for a multitude of flights, all on the small airlines that are making money out of the South Sudan tragedy - going to Yei, to Nimule, to Torit, to Pibor - and one international flight to Nairobi.  I stay as close as is decent to the man in front, to prevent anyone from queue-jumping.

But then the man who gave me my boarding pass in the Bannastars office pulls six of us (all foreigners) aside and says we have to go to CID.  We follow him out of the departures area and around the car park and into another set of portakabins.  In an office there I am asked for my travel authorisation, which I produce.  The guy who took us there gets a ticking off - "They have their documents!  Why did you bring them here?"

Now back to the original office where the whole morning started.  We wait.  The departure time of my flight comes and goes.  There is no information, but I realise there is no power in the office, as the fan sits motionless and the sweat drips down all our faces.

Eventually we are called outside to watch the loading of our luggage into the back of a van, and then we walk back to departures.  At one stage a man inspects my passport and takes the post-it note.  I ask if I can't keep it as a souvenir but am told they need to file it with their records.  I cannot imagine the filing system for post-its ... already mine was curling at the edges in the heat.

Through the departures area and we got on a bus, and then finally onto the plane.  I reflect again on what an amazing life I have (and how lucky that none of the people who checked it spotted that the registration stamp in my passport by the Directorate of Nationality, Passports & Immigration describes me as being of US nationality).  Finally, here's a sneaky photo I took (camera inside my bag which was on the ground) of the Ethiopian Airlines check-in desk at the international departures area...

working in South Sudan

After my four weeks in Panama it was nice to be travelling again, especially as it was to Africa - and to a brand new country on my life list.  Indeed quite a new country in other senses, as South Sudan was only born in 2011.  Sadly by 2013 it was embroiled in a civil war.  At the time of independence the humanitarian needs were already massive, with some of the worst health indicators in the world.  Then the civil war made it too dangerous to farm the fields, there was no rain, and parts of the country slid into famine.

With famine, the cattle herders have to travel far with their cattle, and there are skirmishes if the cattle eat farmers' crops, as well as cattle raids as these valuable animals are stolen and anyone defending them is killed.

But the main problem is the confusing set of of conflicts, mostly between the Dinka and Nuer tribal groups but also with other smaller groups and even now between different Dinka groups.  The government controls only part of the country, and everyone in all areas has guns.  There are only two intercity paved roads in the country, and in the rainy season the other roads - red laterite like the one above - become rutted and flooded and often impassable.

So it was an interesting country to visit!!  We have an office in the capital and eight field offices around the southern half of the country - none of which is now accessible by road.  Earlier in the year two field offices were accessible in road convoys with UN support but the last convoy was in May.  I had to go out into the field to see if we were doing what we should be - primarily distributing food to vulnerable groups (the malnourished, the displaced, breast-feeding mothers, etc) - which for the first trip meant a flight on the UN Humanitarian Air Services flight to Rumbek, the second a commercial flight with JetStar to Yei.  The Juba airport experience will get a post all of its own...

It was great to get out of Juba and actually see something of the country.  I will regret for ever that I didn't ask some of the women in Wulu if I could take their photograph, as the tribal scarification on their faces was so beautiful.  But I did take some photos of a 'welcoming committee' of women in another village, where in this close-up shot you can at least see that the woman in the background has undergone the traditional removal of the bottom front teeth.  A painful experience that you never forget, according to one of my colleagues.

Whilst I met plenty of displaced people in the villages - people whose homes had been burnt down by raiders, who'd had to trek for days to find somewhere else to lodge - it was heartening to find in some villages there was a mix of Dinka and Nuer, co-existing quite happily - so there is some hope of peace between the two groups, eventually.

In Yei I was excited (and saddened) to visit a camp for Internally Displaced Persons - no photos there as there were too many children around and we have rules about publishing photographs of children.  But these makeshift homes of displaced people were beside the road in Juba.

Not sure how long they'd been there but some of those I spoke to in the camp in Yei had been there for three years.  Children had been born there and knew nothing else.  I asked about the life - how did they get food (in this camp we were working on early childhood development projects rather than feeding)?  They said they received rice from an aid agency but otherwise had to go and forage in the bush.  Some of them also collected stones in the bush and worked to break them into smaller stones to sell for construction ... impossible, really, to imagine that life.

But even there people were smiling and laughing, the joy that is always there in Africa, whatever the circumstances. 

& here, a typical village - the sort of place they would have fled from before they began their years of displacement:

the Festival of the Handsome Bull

Strange how I should write my last post, and then almost immediately afterwards go to a small rural town to see some real Panamanian culture at a local festival.  There are festivals like this somewhere in Panama every week, but this weekend I felt I needed to get out, as the only way of ensuring that I didn't spend another whole weekend working, so decided on the Festival of the Handsome Bull in Antón, just a couple of hours' bus ride away from Panama City.

The first half of the proceedings took place on a stage, with an announcer at the side introducing the various different groups in their polleras (the Panamanian national dress for women) dancing in traditional style to the cumbia music played live by a group of musicians beside the stage, and reminding us repeatedly that this was Panamanian Culture.  I don't really like the pollera - too frilly and fussy for me - nor do I like cumbia (an accordian and drums with the occasional seemingly random yodel thrown in), but it was fun to see everyone dressed up and enjoying themselves, and some of the young girls did look very pretty.

The second half was a long parade, with floats pulled by bulls (seemingly the only reference to the Handsome Bull of the festival's name) and plenty of dancers accompanying them.  There were also a few traditional masks around, some (or maybe all?) representing the 'dirty devils' of Panamanian folklore.

And as ever at these festivals, the wonderfully colourful 'congos' - the Afro-Panamanians from the Caribbean coast region.

It was fun, a nice distraction from the preparation for my next work trip, but still doesn't make me feel any more connected to the country, I have to admit.

some time in Panama

There was clearly to be no hope of getting to sleep on Tuesday night, after Panama qualified, for the first time ever, for the World Cup.  After last Friday's 4-0 defeat to the USA the team was all but mathematically out of the competition.  This was not a surprise to the Panamanians - after all, with a population of just 3.5 million, what hope did they ever have of reaching the World Cup?  Tuesday night's game was really just a formality - of course it was possible that they would beat Costa Rica, but so what?  I mean who could possibly have predicted that at the same time the USA would lose 2-1 to little Trinidad & Tobago?

I wasn't watching the game on TV.  Why would I?  But from the great cheers I heard from the street outside I knew Panama had won the game, and as the volume went up - the traffic gridlocked with horns blaring and music blasting out (above a photo looking down on what is normally an endless stream of traffic along the Panamerican Highway) - I wondered whether something unusual had happened, and checked in to the usually endless stream of pointless messages on the Panama Expats WhatsApp group to learn the exciting truth.  Well, exciting for the multitudes that thronged the streets until 4am celebrating - to be honest, I cared more about the fact that I couldn't sleep through the noise, although at least I knew I didn't have to go to work in the morning, with the President having decided at midnight to declare a public holiday.  Some didn't know, and turned up to locked offices in the morning, others sat at home cursing the cancellation of conferences, meetings and appointments they had made weeks before, bosses of companies that were obliged to open no doubt cursed the fact that the law requires them to pay 2.5 times the normal daily pay to staff working on a public holiday, as well as granting them a day off in lieu.  & many, perhaps the majority, continued through their unexpected day off celebrating their country's achievement.

It highlights how detached I feel from this country that has been my home for 4.5 years that I really didn't feel anything about the qualification, merely annoyance at having my work plans for Wednesday mucked up.  Looking back to my time in Senegal, I know I would have been celebrating with them, and I often ask myself why I have failed to 'bond' in the same way with my current home.  It's not that I don't appreciate the wonderful bird life (this pic on the right taken just last week), or the 60Mbps download speed I get with my 'standard' home internet connection, or the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Casco Viejo that I can see from my balcony, or the variety of different activities on offer here (last weekend I went to a 'bat night' at the Smithsonian to hear all about bats and take a close look at a couple that flew into the mist net during the talk), or the local food (sweet potatoes and fried ripe plantain will forever be a part of my diet!) ... it's just, well, the place has no real local character.  It may be different in a small farming community somewhere out in the hills, but Panama City is so much a hub, a transit place, with so many foreigners and international companies, that it doesn't seem to have any identity of its own.  & I do appreciate that London could be described in the same way whilst being, to me, the best city in the world ... but it still has character.  Which really Panama City doesn't.  I think I've said this before, but it wants too much to be Miami (traffic, high-rise buildings, shopping malls, fast food joints), without celebrating what it has of its own.

To think that the old buildings like this:

have nearly all been knocked down to be replaced with these:

(and I do have some much less flattering pictures of the skyscrapers here) is sad.  In these tall buildings, no-one knows their neighbours - in fact many don't have neighbours as half the flats are empty, either victims of an over-ambitious construction sector or, more likely, money-laundering vehicles.

There is also the factor of Panama's short history.  Colonised by Spain, then independent but as part of Colombia, then effectively colonised by the USA, its indigenous people seen as backward or at best as tourist draws, rather than as a source of cultural pride.  Plus, as noted above, the country's role as a crossroads, with both the canal but also the 'hub of the Americas' airport with Copa being probably the main airline of the whole region.

In other, different countries, the history of the relationship with the US might have served as a uniting factor.  The overarching point of dispute being the 5 mile US-controlled zone either side of the canal - which was an unincorporated territory of the USA from 1903 until 1979, and then jointly controlled until 1999 - with the Zonians having all the comforts of 'home' and Panamanians needing permission to enter it when they wanted to cross their own country - Martyrs Day is still celebrated on 9 January to commemorate the death of 28 people in 1964 when riots followed a bunch of Panamanian students trying to raise a Panamanian flag within the Zone.

Then of course there was the US invasion of Panama in 1989 to get rid of General Noriega.  Not that many Panamanians supported Noriega, but his rise had been supported by the US, and the invasion destroyed property and the lives of civilians in the slum district of El Chorillo in Panama City.  This bit of city-centre graffiti commemorates that day:

("National Hurt: on the 20th December 1989 the Yankee army invaded this country and killed innocent people.  Until today it isn't known how many went.  The wound is still open.") but I've never met anyone who seems to hold a grudge about it.  I suppose it is countered by the money that the canal brings in, the number of people with some US blood from the canal zone days, and of course the cultural dominance of the USA generally in Central America.

I'm sure there are many things I will miss when I finally move on, but I'll always feel a little sad that I always felt like a visitor here, and never like it had become my home.