The Adventures of Pedro

Where have all the mountains gone?

2006-06-17T15:42:00.000Z

Having been back just over a week, I thought it might be time to report briefly on my trip to the Alps, which was excellent. Rather than spouting out a load of boring words, I thought I'd provide the following, in imitation of (and tribute to) a certain Mr Breakey.

(See big versions of the above and a few others at my Flickr page.)
Lest I give the wrong impression, I should say that most of what we were climbing was low-level rock, not big snowy mountains. But unfortunately, when actually rock climbing, one's photography is limited by one's requirement to keep one's partner alive by belaying him :)

Strangeness

2006-05-17T16:15:00.000Z

Hoo-ray, exams are over and I have spent the last few days lying in parks, shooting small coloured balls at friends and strangers, sleeping a'plenty, and spending obscene (but worthwhile) amounts of money on climbing and camping equipment, in anticipation of heading off to Chamonix next Monday. Exciting!

On a much more interesting note, they've found an old piano under a cairn on Ben Nevis. Fantastic. I love it :) They say it's a mystery how it got up there, but I found this site which, along with mentioning the successful conquering of the Ben by a Ford Model T, a horse and cart, and a bed (pushed by Glasgow Uni medical students, no less!), names one Kenneth Campbell as having "carried a piano to the summit and back". Now I'm not one to point fingers, so in the spirit of fairness and justice, I think we should come up with some non-Kenneth Campbell-related explanations for the presence of a piano on the Ben. Over to you guys!

Hot tips and brain blips

2006-05-03T21:10:00.000Z

Well, first practical exam of the finals over and done with. It was not particularly pleasant, but I'm hoping it will be the worst one, and the exams on Friday and next Thursday will be like a warm jacuzzi in comparison. I'll keep those fingers crossed!

In other news, my dear flatmate Chris Gaston has been hiding away in his room for some time crafting some wonderful songs which he has now blasted into cyberspace through his site on MySpace. I think he's got some great songs; check them out and leave comments on here if you like (you need to be a member of MySpace to leave comments there).

Oh, and here's a picture of a snow leopard, which could yet be my new favourite animal. Am I good to you, or am I good to you? Don't answer that.

Adventure

2006-04-29T19:25:00.000Z

Snatched a few blissful hours of sun and rock yesterday and today with Adam, Iestyn and Dave Leonard. Climbed the two hardest routes I've yet done outdoors. Struggled on both; hope I was safer than I felt. Succeeded; enjoyed myself immensely; but thought a bit about consequences and risk - occasionally sobering, amidst the fun.

"A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short." (Bertrand Russell)

What form will I allow my adventures to take?

The passing of time

2006-04-27T22:39:00.000Z

Woohoo! Well, my first final exam paper is behind me, and I have just one written paper (tomorrow mornin') and three clinical exams (over next two weeks) between me and some kind of medical career thing. And it seems like only yesterday that I was in first year: fetching water from the Murano St well for my morning ablutions, cycling down to Uni on my penny-farthing, and... er... whatnot.

My colleagues and I were noting today the extremely rarified patient populations that written exam questions seem to be based on. You don't even need to know their symptoms to diagnose them; just their age and a few key adjectives will do. In exams (but thankfully not in real life), all smokers develop lung cancer, all IV drug users develop hepatitis or HIV, and every youngish female has anorexia, orSLE or some other autoimmune disease. Everyone develops classical consequences of their disease too, which is also handy in diagnosing them. If only real life were like that.

I'm compiling a list of interesting medical facts for medical geeks and "laypeople" alike. The fact for today is: smoking protects against Alzheimer's dementia, Parkinson's disease and ulcerative colitis. (The list of diseases it predisposes you to is, however, too large to put here).

I can tell I may need to work on the "interesting" bit.

We haven't just been told, we have been loved.

2006-04-05T21:15:00.000Z

Listen (legal and free). If you fancy it. Unfortunately, I could not find Happy Birthday, by Sufjan Stevens, online, which is my song of the moment.

Amusement

2006-03-29T23:10:00.000Z

I'm so glad that things like this still happen (in Northern Ireland, at any rate), to remind us of the persistence of happy chaos in this often overly well-ordered world.

Can you imagine how the pilot must've felt when he realised? You can't exactly cover it up...

Shmatistics

2006-02-28T10:34:00.000Z

BBC news inform me that, according to the Brain Injury Association, one person in the US suffers a traumatic brain injury every 15 seconds. Poor guy.

What's the point?

2006-02-23T14:29:00.000Z

Fantastic to see medical students turn up in droves to Transfusion events, with standing room only (or not even) for talks with titles like "A God Who Allows Suffering?" and "Evidence-Based Faith". Modern society sometimes appears apathetic about such issues; such is the zeitgeist (good word). But once we get beneath the trivialities of everyday life (which, in the comfortable wealthy bubble in which most of us live, can be tricky enough), most people are intrigued by such questions; they may even recognise that, wherever you stand, the question "What are we here for?" is one which deserves serious consideration, and which should not be too quickly presumed unanswerable.

Linchpins

2006-02-11T02:51:00.000Z

Hopefully you will all by now have heard a bit of Sufjan Stevens (goodness knows I talk about him enough - although perhaps not that much on this blog), and will have decided what you think. Time to share some ther favourite music of mine, both new and old. But first, a plug for Epitonic, a most remarkable resource, providing free/legal/happy/complete mp3s and eloquent arty-adjective-sodden descriptions for bands playing a huge variety of genres. There's not so much mainstream stuff on there, and sometimes there's nothing on bands that you'd expect to find stuff on, but it's a good place to check if you hear about some new band. Moreover, if you do find some music on there which tickles your soul just right, there's always an extensive list of "similar artists", through which I've struck gold several times.

Everyone should hear the mighty Godspeed You Black Emperor! at least once; it's tricky to describe without listening to it (although Epitonic have a go), so here's a free/legal mp3 for you to feast on. A word of caution: it ain't background music (at least not for me) - it demands some attention.

Two allied bands I've been loving recently (having been introduced through Epitonic) are The Album Leaf and Tristeza. Especially recommend The Audio Pool by the former, and Golden Hill by the latter. See if they float your boat.

Explosions in the Sky are a group of passionate guitar-wielding Texans, who blew me away at the Triptych music festival here in Glasgow a few years ago. They're not on Epitonic, but there's a French fansite with live mp3s - try First Breath After Coma on for size (give it time, and apologies for the poor quality).

For something completely different to the above, check out Laura Veirs' website, where you can absorb her quirky and original guitar and voice compositions. I like her. I hope you will too.

That'll do for now. I should be dreaming; perhaps of edging my sweaty way up a nightmarishly technical 8a slab, 300 feet up with no rope, with Explosions in the Sky egging me on with their hopeful post-rock crescendos from a nearby cloud. Hmmm.

Don't try this at... anywhere, actually.

2006-02-03T12:42:00.000Z

A caveat: this is not what I do at the climbing wall every Saturday. It's not what rock climbing is for the vast majority of people. It's not a hard route, but some of the moves this guy makes are (ahem) fairly committing.
Enjoy.
By the way, I should probably advise you against watching any of the other videos on that site (or at least in the "Extreme" section that this one's in). They're not good. You have been warned.

The Great Escape

2006-01-23T20:48:00.000Z

Pedro was weary, and looked it. Those who passed him in the street commented upon it; even fussing mothers would chide their wandering wards with stern mutters thus: "Do mind the weary man, dear!" Pedro was weary of reading books, pages, screens of complex sentences, of Latin names, of pseudohypoparathyroidism with the 4th and 5th fingers characteristically shortened, of aspergillomas, hamartomas and hepatomas, of intravenous cranioexpialadocious, of stuffing his cranium (which, he knew, had finite volume) with apparently endless amounts of information and being merely able to watch sadly as it dribbled out again in tragic little rivulets every time he paused to so much as eat a biscuit.

So he decided to go for a walk. He got up from his desk, walked down the hall and out the front door, out onto the street. His socks got wet - he hadn't stopped to put shoes on. He kept going. He reached the edge of the city, where the streetlights stopped, where the dome of sickly yellow light enveloping the city ended. He took a step through it; the air changed, and he breathed in, deeply.

Goodbye, real world

2006-01-06T19:14:00.000Z

Well, having had a fantastic Christmas and New Year with my (quite frankly) lovely family and ol' friends, I am now back for the long hard slog towards finals at the end of April. Bring it on. I shall not be doing much interesting, however, and so this will be my last post from this present reality. Yes, dear readers, my bloggelganger (figure that one out) will be disappearing imminently into a fantasyland of excitement, action and, possibly, slightly overpriced baked goods. No guarantees on the baked goods, though.

Not alpine adventures.

2005-12-26T17:49:00.000Z

I liked this picture so much I thought I'd thought I'd post it on here for your enjoyment. See last sentence of previous post for its origin.

Christmas fact!

2005-12-26T16:03:00.000Z

I was going to call this "Christmas trivia!", but what I am about to divulge is far from trivial. Lemming suicide is a myth. Lemmings, like many rodents, go through marked population cycles, where the population builds up over several years until it reaches an unsustainable level for the environment, and a lot of them die off; this presumably gave rise to a folk belief that they hurled themselves off cliffs by the hundreds. Then in 1958, who but ol' Walt Disney (I shake my fist at him!) made a nature "documentary" called White Wilderness in which they staged a lemming migration, by chucking a load of lemmings (who weren't even native to the area they were filming) onto a big turntable covered in snow, and filming them sliding into one another. As a macabre finale, in keeping with the folk belief, they drove a crowd of lemmings off a cliff into a river, killing them. The truth is stranger, and more horrific, than fiction.

Spread the news! Tell your friends and colleagues! Wear a "Lemming suicide is a myth" t-shirt! Boycott Disney!

Oh, and for those interested in pictures of my alpine adventures, you may want to click.... here. Not here or here, for example.

Some have returned, others have not.

2005-12-23T16:16:00.000Z

Hey all! I'm back from a happy eight days' snowboarding in Tignes with my dear friend Iestyn. I sustained minor injuries by facebutting the mountain and by landing heavily on my lower back (forcing it through the deceptively soft powder and onto some immovable ice or rock below), but am still recognisable. Sadly, I lost a very good friend on the mountain. My dear green backpack, which may be familiar to some of you, was sacrificed in a particularly tumblesome fall in deep powder on La Grande Motte glacier. I wrote an ode to it, and I'd like you to appreciate it solemnly.

Through six long years we've been as one,
Gone forth together, gladly,
And all that time you never left
Though treated so, so badly.

Gave you my burdens, all those things
Alone I couldn't bear.
You kept on taking, even when
We'd just patched up the tears.

I dragged you 'cross all harsh terrains
Of countries near and far.
But 'twas on these high, snowy slopes
I pushed you just too hard.

So rest in peace, O faithful bag,
And though you'll be replaced,
Forevermore there'll be for you,
In my flawed heart, a place.

Photos (of holiday, not of poor bag) to follow.

Transfers

2005-12-10T16:33:00.000Z

Done in Bute. Was fun. Glad term's over. 15 weeks' university left. Going to Alps tomorrow. Woohoo! Hope I don't hurt myself. Playing ceilidh tonight. Must get sleep. Must pack. Must buy Christmas presents. Must stop feeling burdened by self-given tasks. Crap blog. Sorry. Have fun holidays! Bye.

Sleep is for the weak

2005-11-27T00:02:00.000Z

Anyone seen The Constant Gardener? Despite the awkward title, probably the best film I've seen this year. Not merely visually and aesthetically stunning, but utterly involving, emotionally intense, and both harrowing and enthralling in its realistic portrayal of real life. I won't give any of the plot away here - my advice is to go in blind. But do go. By the way, the photo is nothing to do with it - it's just a pretty 8am view out my window in Bute this week.

Cold red nose and alcohol

2005-11-17T18:24:00.000Z

I left the pharmacy down on the seafront as the full moon, amber and haloed, hung just over the horizon, over the pier. As I walked up the high street, I was accompanied by the sight of perfect aquamarine and perfect turquoise at the horizon, fading through every perfect shade of blue to perfect indigo right above my head - a spectrum no camera can do justice to. There is a range and depth of colour, and a spatial depth, to the sky at dusk, that nothing else can emulate. I arrived, my nose red and cold and numb, and I thank God for the conception of beauty.

So does anyone else think that 24-licensing is a really, really silly idea? I think that 11pm is a wee bitty early myself, but if they're trying to reduce alcohol-related harm, this really ain't the way to do it. "But it works on the continent!" they cry - it may well do, but British people have a totally different culture, and a totally different attitude to drinking (going back hundreds of years, I'm reliably informed) to France and Spain, and there is no evidence whatsoever (that I've been able to find) that changing the law in this way will change our drinking culture, or reduce alcohol-related harm. Indeed, if we look at countries with more similar drinking cultures to our own (Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand), trials of similar legislation have been counterproductive in the main.

The justification seems totally ridiculous to me. Some say that the early closing times provoke people to drink more in a short space of time, coming up to last orders; therefore, reducing restrictions on closing time will stop binge drinking. I'm not convinced: the only people who might be provoked in this way are those who drink to get drunk; but they are often trashed hours before last orders, and if their main aim is to get drunk, how will longer opening hours help? Admittedly, the Iceland trial did find reduced crowd congestion on the streets between 3 and 5 am (although increased congestion after 6 am), but paid for that with 23% more alcohol-related accidents, 34% more alcohol-related violence, more A&E admissions and 14% more police call-outs. See this Institute for Alcohol Studies factsheet for more info. The IAS also informed me that being drunk in a public place or licensed premises (including pubs!) is actually still illegal, which I suspect might be a surprise to many people.

Anyway, if anyone has any good arguments for why 24-hour licensing is a good thing, please let me know.

And here's a nice picture of the view out my window yesterday morning, to cheer you up again.

Laugh

2005-11-12T22:06:00.000Z

Just found these links, thought you folks might appreciate 'em:
Whoops
McDonalds
Harsh but fair

Mezcla

2005-11-12T21:27:00.000Z

Last weekend: happy eating big fry-ups, simultaneous overawed noises at the wildness of the sea, the lighthouse sweeping its solid bright beam for miles around, and much warmth and happy familial walks. Not to mention the large section of cliff I saw collapse into the sea minutes after walking past it. Hartfest 2005 was good. More photos on my Flickr photostream.

From one seaside location to another: I've been exiled to the Isle of Bute for my General Practice placement. I intend to make good use of lonely dark evenings by studying manically. This week, however, I instead succeeded in finding out a whole load of stuff about the physics of planetary orbits, Lagrangian points (which are fascinating, and how flippin scary the planet Jupiter is. I mean, seriously. I used to think that Jupiter was the biggest planet, then Saturn was a close second, then everything else. But oh no. Jupiter is two-and-a-half times the size of all the other planets combined. Be afraid, be very afraid.

Anyway, all time well spent, if for nothing but fueling (and thereby perpetuating) my insatiable hunger for knowledge about anything and everything. It'd be kinda handier if I could focus that hunger down to, oh, let's say, medicine? Handier, but far less interesting :) Post your random learnings of the week, readers!

Leftovers

2005-11-03T22:40:00.000Z

I never seem to get around to cooking up the big blogposts I plan. For example, I still have to write a review of that Sufjan gig... Argh. However, maybe it's better subsisting on leftovers; they're much more convenient for me to stick in the microwave, and easier digested by your fine selves as well. And maybe blogs were never really supposed to be a major source of nutrition anyway.

Ok, that's gone far enough. I'll just post this picture, which I like:

And I'll tell you about a wee program which allows you to right-click image files and resize them quick as a flash.

And I'll direct you to Ling's Cars, where you can meet the quite amazing Ling, and perhaps rent a car from her. Adieu.

Umm... Huh?

2005-10-28T22:07:00.000Z

Oh yes, I remember this place now... Didn't I use to... draw pictures on here or something? Anyway, I've been running about like mad the last week or so trying to get job application and CV written (handed in 40 minutes short of the deadline! I haven't heard of anyone doing it later!), and now I'm knackered. Bleugh. About to go to bed, but was "checking e-mail" (a deadly euphemism for "following every link I find") and found this, and wanted to share. Does anyone remember the Mary Whitehouse Experience, a BBC comedy programme many moons ago? It was genius... This is from The Unofficial Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopedia, a kind of online version of a book that they apparently released in connection with the show. Enjoy.

Ant
The thing about ants is that people are always going on about how chuffing brilliant they are. 'Oh their community is so socially regulated,' says Sir David La-Di-Da Attenborough - Not if you pour boiling water into it, it isn't !
What you do is you put the kettle on and then quick smart when it's boiled, you pour it down the cracks in the patio, and before you know it all the ants come out either dead or about to die. The next day, the surviving ants may well have built some form of mud/dust protective barrier into the cracks. A remarkable feat of architectural engineering, this is entirely un-boiling water resistant.

Tuesday night at the bible study

2005-10-13T20:12:00.000Z

Sufjan Stevens was amazing last night in Oran Mor, wowing an excited crowd with songs of such varied dynamic intensity, melodic beauty and lyrical craftmanship that I was left at the end of the night just longing for more. I'm studying tonight, and a fuller gig review will follow, but suffice it to say that if you have not listened to this guy's music yet, go and download some (freely and legally) from his website.

Wake, it's late, you've missed the day.

2005-10-05T22:07:00.000Z

Blog-hopping can be good fun. Click away on the "Next blog" button on the Blogger toolbar above, and you get an interesting cross-section of internet life. It's interesting to see a fair number of folks who also like Sufjan Stevens, even without trying. Today - the internet; tomorrow - the world! (And next Wednesday night in Oran Mor, Byres Road, if you're interested.) For some reason, Portuguese blogs are overrepresented. Anyone want to suggest a plausible or humorous explanation?

Ever want to go to sleep and have a really interesting dream adventure? Well, I want one tonight. My only recent recoverable dream was about shuddering uncomfortably at the Conservative party conference, which Victoria Morrow had apparently dragged me to. Still, that's better than the weirdly violent dreams I occasionally get, which must be a release valve for all the film violence I've been exposed to, and all my pent-up aggression which I only get to actually release if Tim Shirley's around to wrestle with.

What if I gave up my inheritance?

2005-09-29T20:11:00.000Z

For those interested, the odd conversation with the mysterious random texter came to rather an abrupt and anticlimactic, but still decidedly odd, stop, when she realised who I was - she asked which church I went to back home in Belfast, and she guessed my full name and said she had a friend who went to my church. There are a few unresolved issues here... The chances are surely vanishingly small that she would type in someone else's number a digit or two wrong and just happen to get someone whom she's heard of but never met. She won't tell me who this person is in my church who she knows, and seemed cagey about how my name had come up. All in all, it was all a bit weird, but she didn't seem to want to carry on, and I was just a bit bored, so I guess we've silently said our goodbyes. It wasn't meant to be, I suppose.

On a happier note, this is amazing. I haven't told many people this, but giant squid have always fascinated me, and I was very excited by the news. Then, the article mentions "colossal squid", and I'm, like, hold the phone - colossal squid?!? And no-one ever told me?

Finally, I've decided that individual express queues at supermarkets are perhaps the best-kept time-saving secret of our modern world, despite the large signs and shouting assistants. Seriously, almost every time I go to Samerwayfieldsons on Byres Road, there's a queue of about 20 apparently deaf and blind people waiting in a single queue, while the assistants vainly holler "Indvijual koos a' expresh checkoots plaaayyys!" I feel simultaneous guilty and incredulously frustrated as I walk on by them to the end queue with, at most, three others waiting. Oh, the madness. My kids'll never believe it when I tell 'em.

Wake up, it's no use pretending.

2005-09-26T14:56:00.000Z

Well, my life gets more and more exciting. Last night I got a text from an unfamiliar number saying "HEY SEXY. HOW ARE U? WHAT U UP TO?" Well, I replied, introduced myself and said I was in a pub (which I was - I always maintain strict standards of honesty in any text conversations with random strangers). Over the course of last night and this morning, we've had about 20 texts going back and forward; mainly, she (for Random, as I have christened my correspondent in my contacts list, does indeed claim to be female) has been asking me obsessively about my underwear (general preferences, nightwear, current wear) while I vainly try to steer the conversation onto more salubrious topics. I've made it clear that I'm not interested in flirting, but she doesn't seem to be heeding that.

Hmm. I definitely feel that anyone I knew, doing this as a prank, would've got bored a long time ago. My information and suspicions are as follows:

Random is probably a female under the age of 15, despite her claims to be 21; possibly older but sillier. In addition, the possibility of them being a 55-year-old man or a technologically proficient cat cannot be discounted.

She claims to live in Belfast.

Her interests are "movies, shopping, and music". And men's underwear, clearly.

She has MSN messenger. Thankfully, I do not.

Worryingly for her, she has no idea how old I am, or anything. I could be a weird old man, and could easily have asked her questions as provocative as those she asked me, and more, got chatting to her online, and who knows what else. This stuff happens.

In other news, I went buildering/free-running with Andy, Tim and Neal last night around Glasgow Uni. Good fun, with fair share of (minor) injuries. Particularly impressive was Tim's square-foot back graze. Ouch.

Onwards and upwards

2005-09-19T22:06:00.000Z

That's it.

Would you like me to put poetry, song lyrics or fragments thereof on here?

My current favourite fragments that I'm playing with are:

old and full of years

she briefly wondered if she might've been famous for some sport or craft she'd never had the chance to try

a half-said sentence, instantly and completely understood

rough warmth

Finally, if you haven't checked out freecycling yet, I strongly advise you to do so - it's a great way to simultaneous get rid of unwanted stuff, get free stuff you want, and minimise landfill expansion. Better than a slice of toast, eh? Speaking of which, I'm hungry.

Sometimes there's nothing left to say...

2005-09-11T16:22:00.000Z

It appears I only ever think of stuff to write on here when I'm actually nowhere near a computer, and when I get close to one, I forget what I wanted to write (note to self: investigate effects of electromagnetic fields on memory retention). Consequently (and for other reasons) I haven't posted much. But I did warn you.

The title is from a Low lyric, and as we all know, blog titles are just better when they're taken from a song that most of the blog's readers have never heard of. I plan to pepper my blog entries (should they come into being) with sprinklings of Sufjan Stevens, Radiohead, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Kid Dakota, and possibly even some Sigur Rós, whose lyrics are all in a made-up language. So now you are equipped with the links to educate thyselves about what songs the lyrics come from. Hey! We could even make it into a game, where you, you know, reply in the comments bit, that, um, what song the title is from, yeah? What fun!

At the moment I am listening to a song by The Mountain Goats called "There Will Always Be an Ireland". Reassuring, in our crazy changing modern world.

Familiar space

2005-08-30T15:50:00.000Z

If you're still checking this, I should say quite clearly that I have returned from South America (yes, safely, thanks), and this blog will no longer contain South American adventures. However, there may be erratic, or possibly semi-regular, postings on the much greater adventure that is this life. But I say "may be".

In the meantime, I wish to proclaim, for you deniers out there (I was once one of you!), that jetlag does indeed exist, as borne out by my own personal experience. I casually went to bed on Saturday night, quietly confident that my one rather weedy alarm clock would wake me safely in time to get to church on Sunday morning to drum in the band and to meet Rosie. Imagine my surprise, horror and shame when my bleary eyes eventually focused on those accursed red LEDs to reveal "12:55". Not good. I got to thinking about how helpless you are, when asleep; you have no guarantee you'll ever wake up at all, as you are not in control at all. We take it on trust every night that our sleeping selves will heed the call of the alarm clock, our mother, or the cat, and hand the reins to us (the real us) to allow us to begin our day. Mark my words... one terrible night, all the sleeping selves will rebel, and no-one will wake up, and the world will forever be filled with stillness and quiet, save the incessant beeping of alarm clocks.

Having been deprived of my particular flavour of music the entire summer, it is just lovely to get back to my little CD collection (I keep reminding myself not to get too attached to such material things... but I maintain that the music itself is no more material than an idea or a dream). The newest addition is the simply beautiful Illinois, by Sufjan Stevens. If you have never heard any Sufjan, I would strongly recommend giving it a chance, in a quiet room, when you have time to listen to it. Here is a song from Seven Swans, and here you can find out some stuff about his last album, Michigan, and listen to some tracks. I can't find anything about Illinois up there yet, but suffice it to say that it's the highest rated recent release on Metacritic (which I've just discovered, and seems to be a very useful wee site), and I absolutely love it. I especially recommend the song "Casimir Pulaski Day".

Life goes on. For a while.

Bye.

Providence, child abuse, and bus rides in the dark.

2005-08-23T01:28:00.000Z

For those of you wishing to follow my progress through Bolivia on your own join-the-dots version of the Bolivian map, I apologise for not telling you where I actually went after Jimmy left me in Cochabamba.

(Thanks to wikipedia.org for the map.)

Well, I managed to get Richard (Northern Irish guy, formerly volunteer in Trinidad, now doing engineering stuff in Cochabamba) to abandon his work for a few days to come with me on a trip. Thus began some smart providence on the part of God, for which I was very grateful. Obviously I had a tight schedule, wanting to pack in a lot of things before I go home, so I was hoping that a lot of connections would work out just right. We had planned to get a bus to Oruro last Wednesday morning, from where there was a train that same evening to Uyuni (roughly about the "o" of "Altiplano" on the map), which is the nearest town to the aforementioned massive salt lakes. Now, it just so happened that a bunch of engineering folks Richard works with were taking a 4x4 to Oruro that same Wednesday morning for their once-yearly (I kid you not) trip to buy outdoor gear. So we got a lift. We were not 30 minutes out of Cochabamba when we found that the road ahead was completely blocked by some kind of protest (a common occurrence in Bolivia); had we been in an ordinary bus, we would`ve been stuck there for I don`t know how long, but being in a 4x4 we swerved up a dirt road which took us on a long and entertaining detour via cliff edges, river beds and potholes, to arrive safely on the other side of the block. Score.

Anyway, we got safely to Oruro, then Uyuni, saw the salt lakes on a two-day tour (you`ve seen the photos), and then Richard left me to return to Cochabamba to work, while I took an evening bus to Potosì. I mentioned my experience in the mines in Potosì, but far more interesting than that was the totally guidebook-free adventure of Sunday afternoon.

Richard had advised me to try climbing Cerro Rico, the 4800-odd metre hill the mines are on (remember, Potosì itself is 4070m, so it´s not all that crazy). So I set off on Sunday afternoon, unsure how long it would take. After a bit of climbing various local boys who lived and worked around the mines had stopped me and told me variously 1) There was no way to the top, 2) It would take 5 hours, 3) It would take 3 hours. I decided to abandon the attempt (it did look pretty far away), and opted instead for the smaller hill beside it, with a wee church on top. It turned out there was a competition of local bands going on up there, with a cacophony of brass, drums and cymbals pouring out over the city. The area around the church was full of drunken, dancing, and/or trumpet-wielding Bolivians, and I settled myself down on a comfortable rock with a hamburger-ish looking morsel and soaked it in.

I decided to take a micro (very small public minibus, ubiquitous in Bolivia) back down to the town. I was sat beside a very cute little Bolivian child (maybe 18 months) on his mum´s knee, and about thirty seconds into the journey he took it upon himself to start poking me on the arm when I wasn´t looking. Before long, this had evolved into quite forceful headbutts (for an 18-monther), which were maintained by the joy that this provoked from the rest of the passengers. Clearly they hadn´t seen a good gringo-butting in a while. Occasionally, I would start thinking he`d got bored, and then as soon as I looked out the window or got distracted, WHACK!, a butt on the arm, or a tiny hand flailed at my chest, accompanied by the inevitable gurgling laughter, joyful grin, and the guffaws of the folks on the seat behind. All in all, a very enjoyable ride back to town. The kid`s name was Jefferson, by the way, for some reason.

On Sunday evening, if you`re still following the map, I took an overnight bus to Villazòn (SW of Tarija, on the border). Overnight bus rides are strange, dreamy experiences. Occasionally you stir awake, and catch another glimpse of some half-moonlit landscape out the window, shadowy shapes which don`t make sense for the first few seconds: yawning depths, mountain silhouettes and illusions of snow-coated rocks and houses. And then you drift back into sleep for another few minutes, and dreams and reality intermingle.

This morning, Monday morning, I took another seven-hour bus ride south to Salta, where I now sit. While the countryside on the way here didn´t look all that different from Bolivia, Salta itself is so much more European, with large glass-fronted department stores, neon signs, lights, and streets crowded with a massive variety of people. Far more tourists, too. I think this is the beginning of my re-accommodation to "normal" life; Buenos Aires, my destination on Wednesday, will only be one step closer to home, culturally and chronologically, and then I fly back to Scotland on Thursday.

Fotitos

2005-08-21T02:45:00.000Z

Having finally found an internet cafe with the capabilities to manage my photos, I thought I´d take the opportunity to give you a photographic slice of my Bolivian life for the last week or two.

Lake Titicaca was just ridiculously blue, with snow-capped mountains crowning the horizon, poorly shown without a decent zoom.

This rather stern-looking dude is a former president of Bolivia, and his portrait hangs, along with those of all the others, in the Casa de la Libertad in Sucre. His moustache is an example to us all.

One of the more bizarre examples of Bolivian graffiti. Everywhere you see graffiti saying "El Che vive" (Che (Guevara) lives), and also the occasional "Kurt Cobain vive". This one, on a random residencial wall in Cochabamba, says "Kurt and Che are alive and sleeping together."

The Cristo de la Concordia statue in Cochabamba, beautiful against the cloudless night sky.

These guys have a tough life, scraping salt manually (picks and shovels here, absolutely no mechanical wizardry here, folks) from the Salar de Uyuni. The Salar is almost the same size as Northern Ireland, experiences extremes of temperatures (regularly dropping under minus 10 at night), and contains about 80 billion tonnes of salt.

An example of the photographic fun that can be had in the Salar by gringos with nothing better to do with their time. One of the Israelis on our tour put it well, after about 10 minutes of carefully setting up another, similar, shot: "We´re all so lame."

Another example of the tough life had by some Bolivian folks. These guys work in the co-operative mines in Potosí, living off whatever they can extract day by day. With a life expectancy of about 15 years from entering the mines (pulmonary fibrosis, mainly, due to the presence of toxic deposits in the rock), average daily wages of about 40 bolivianos (less than 3 quid), and endless pestering by gringos, it´s no wonder they look like this. To get by, they chew ridiculous amounts of coca leaves (the ball in the cheek of the guy on the right), and imbibe 96% alcohol from plastic bottles. One of the drunk miners in our micro on the way back into Potosí had to be persuaded not to light up his dynamite fuse while in the bus. Very sad. On top of all this, they offer sacrifices to El Tío (the devil, whom they believe owns the mines), as well as paying homage to Pachamama (mother earth, to whom human sacrifices are not uncommonly still made in La Paz), and Christ too. To rescue you from despair, a bit of trivia about Potosí: it used to be the biggest and wealthiest city in South America in its silver-mining heyday, and apparently there was once enough silver in Cerro Rico (the mountain where the mines are) to build a silver bridge from Potosí to Madrid, in Spain. Ta da.

For those interested in my whereabouts and plans, I´m pretty much about to begin the long trip home... I´m leaving Potosí by bus tomorrow evening for Villazón, on the border with Argentina, and then heading on south to Buenos Aires (somehow) over the next day or two, before my flight home on Thursday. But I will try to fill in the last few days a wee bit more before then. God bless ye all.

All good things

2005-08-16T19:44:00.000Z

Alas, Jimmy and I have parted ways. He has left to go back to Trinidad to work at the project there until November, while I remain in Cochabamba, trying to figure out where to go next.

All in all, it`s been a great pleasure travelling with him, and we`ve certainly had some good times in the last few days, as well as some frustrating experiences - in other words, the true South American travel package. Allow me to recount one of the most memorable of our experiences together: our last night in Cusco.

Last Tuesday, we asked in the tourist office in Cusco if there might be somewhere we could leave our bags for a few hours on Thursday, after we got back from Macchu Picchu, so we could have dinner minus a superfluous seventeen kilos or so before catching an overnight bus to Lake Titicaca. A very nice chap there called Joan (pronounced like Joanne) Pinto enthusiastically offered to meet us at a random fountain in Cusco at 5pm on Thursday in order to leave them in his mate`s restaurant; we gratefully accepted the offer, but later realised that our hostel in Cusco could probably take our bags even while we were away at Macchu Picchu, and we only needed to take small bags all the way there. Getting bored? Sorry - I need to set the scene, you understand. So from Macchu Picchu we phoned Joan Pinto to say thanks very much, but we`ve made alternate arrangements. But we didn`t want to seem ungrateful or suspicious, so we asked him if he`d like to have dinner with us. So on Thursday night we met Joan Pinto in the main plaza, and, feeling happy to be able to repay him, asked him where he`d like to have dinner. Well actually, says he, there`s a little party going on at my place tonight, we`ll have dinner there. And, lo and behold, it turned out we`d kind of invited ourselves to his first wedding anniversary party... And it was lovely. They`d rented a wee room in a boarding house, just for a small gathering with about six or seven friends (and now two random gringos!), and cooked very ordinary but very tasty Bolivian food for us all, while we made conversation in our limited Spanish. Then, of course, they said we were going out dancing. We had two hours left before our bus left - what else were we going to do? But picture the scene: I in my hiking boots, both of us in fairly mingin clothing (we`d only brought the bare minimum change of clothes to Macchu Picchu, and it`d been a long hot train journey back), going into the uncharted depths of a Peruvian nightclub. Fortunately, everyone there looked like they felt about as awkward as we did, dancing somewhat tentatively to a bizarre mix of what seemed like 1980s Latin American one-hit wonders. There was fluorescent pseudograffiti on the walls and a blacklight over the dancefloor, and so Jimmy`s comment, regarding the white-turned-dayglo llama motif on his jacket, was priceless: "The llamas are going dancing tonight..." Maybe you had to be there, to experience the surreality of the whole experience, dancing in a circle with these random Peruvians I`d just met, Joan Pinto handing out animal-shaped biscuits from his pocket like they were LSD, and Jimmy´s llamas shining like beacons across the room. I laughed.

And now, the travel frustrations I alluded to. For example, when we boarded our empty 6am micro (tiny minibuses found all over South America) to take us from Copacobana to La Paz in time for our 11.30 flight, the driver told us he wasn´t going unless the bus was full, and we ended up paying for the twelve absent passengers, in order to actually get there in time (still only adding up to seven quid each, by the way). After initial annoyance, I realised that I couldn`t really expect this guy to drive all that way (3hrs one way) if he wasn`t even recouping the cost of his petrol.

Somewhat less defensably, our pilot on our Sucre-Cochabamba flight on Sunday decided, at the last minute, to actually just fly to Santa Cruz instead (which is as far away from Cochabamba as Sucre is), leaving us (and about 10 other passengers) to wait in Santa Cruz airport for about 3 hours for the next flight to Cochabamba. This rather messed up our plans of meeting up with a missionary friend of Jimmy`s, called Mike, and staying at his house in Cochabamba, and we ended up rapping desperately on a hostel door at 11pm on Sunday night.

But, those things have come and gone, and we`re still here (or, I`m still here... Jimmy`s in Trinidad...) I met up with another Northern Irish guy called Richard Crymble (anyone know him? We shamefully tried and failed to find any connections...) who was in Trinidad when I arrived at the beginning of July, and is now working in Cochabamba, and we headed up to the Cristo de la Concordia last night. This is a massive statue of Christ, just like the one in Rio de Janeiro which will be familiar to everyone, only bigger (by about a foot) - in fact it´s the biggest image of Christ anywhere in the world, so claims the placard at the bottom, at just over 33 metres. It was architecturally spectacular, with its massive armspan open to the city below; I just wish that more people would see it as an invitation, and not just a big, white, beautiful piece of concrete.

Today, I spent the morning wandering around La Cancha, the biggest open market in Bolivia. And it`s pretty big. I kept thinking I`d seen all that could possibly be for sale, when I discovered another long, narrow alley with stalls stuffed with small porcelain dogs, or desiccated llama fetuses (used by the indigenous folks in their Catholic-Pagan offerings - pretty horrible), or sacks of nameless coloured powders. The range of food that was there was amazing, too. All the folks from the surrounding countryside must come in to sell their wares, whether crates of every type of fruit in a proper stall with metal shutters, or just a few rather sad looking carrots and wizened potatos lying on the floor on the coloured cloth they were wrapped in this morning. But it was truly amazing the range of stuff they had.

Oh - didn`t buy anything.

Escape from the Tourist Trail

2005-08-14T02:02:00.000Z

Well, having been on the tourist trail for a couple of days, Jimmy and I have gathered enough momentum to escape its enormous gravity. There is a well-trodden route from Lima, Peru, via Cusco/Macchu Picchu, to Puno/Copacabana on Lake Titicaca (Bolivia/Peru border), and on to La Paz, from where most people fly home, organise guided jungle trips, guided tours of the salt flats in southwest Bolivia (the largest in the world), or fly somewhere else on the continent. Since Macchu Picchu, I´ve been seeing the same white faces again and again on various modes of transport, in queues for various attractions, and in various (but astonishingly similar) touristy shops. And now (I think) we´ve escaped.

Don´t get me wrong. Macchu Picchu was incredible; the juxtaposition of amazingly-well preserved 500-year-old ruins, and million (?) year old stupendous mountain scenery justly deserves its reputation as the experience of a lifetime. Cusco was actually a beautiful city, as previously mentioned. Lake Titicaca is ridiculously blue (my photos look artificially enhanced), and Isla del Sol tried to hold on to me for much longer than the pitiful hour that our tour boat allowed. And there are certainly benefits to having so many foreigners about. I got to try to excavate some Russian from the depths of my memory on the way to Macchu Picchu when we sat opposite Anton, a programmer from Moscow with a Peruvian girlfriend, and I got to be useful to a few folks from London, Israel and Ireland by knowing a bit more Spanish than they did. And the where-have-you-been chat is quite fun, comparing experiences, and collecting information for the rest of your trip. But the relationships are terribly superficial and short, and I find myself being drawn into trying to impress people with my own stories, and being a bit envious when people have been here longer than I have. There is definitely some kind of subconscious ratings system going on when you happen to meet up with other adventurers in the same territory, and it´s easy to get sucked into it, but it´s oh so silly.

But I think the real reason I´m glad to be off the tourist trail is the change in pace. Since Macchu Picchu Jimmy and I have been going fairly non-stop, and it`s so good to have arrived finally somewhere we don`t actually have all that many objectives. And that place is Sucre, the second capital city of Bolivia (La Paz is the other - the Netherlands and South Africa also have two capitals, by the way). It`s also the chocolate capital of Bolivia, which Jimmy and I took the time to appreciate. Mmm. It`s where the declaration of independence was signed in 1825 (or thereabouts), and the location of that great event, the Casa de la Libertad, is now a museum, permitting us a glimpse of Bolivian history. Apart from all this, Sucre is also just quite a pretty, and compact, city, with sunny tree-filled plazas, a large park, and a great climate, and thus an excellent place for just chillin` a little. Jimmy and I also went to see the Fantastic Four here in Sucre, in English with frequently amusing Spanish subtitles.

Next it`s on to Cochabamba, another major Bolivian city not too far from Sucre. See you there!

Weary legs in Cusco

2005-08-10T02:42:00.000Z

Forgive me, folks, for I have failed... It has been 8 days since my last update. But I have excuses, oh yes, many! My last week in Trinidad (starting the day of my last blog entry) flew by in a haze of medical-related wonders. Highlights included Rubén, the physiotherapist, signing hilariously to a deaf boy that he picked his nose and ate it, including a beautiful simultaneous action of chewing, rubbing his tummy and having a dreamy look on his face. Spectacular. Said deaf boy was an absolute comedy genius, crossing himself when Diego started poking around in his ears to remove wax, and pointing vigorously at his mum with a look of shocked innocence when Diego removed a lump of cotton wool from in there.

Friday and Saturday were days of sad goodbyes to health centre staff and volunteers, before Sunday morning´s trip to the airport to catch the flight to La Paz. Bye to Diego, Jo, and their two daughters Elena and Hilary, with full expectancy that I will see them again, some day. With my new travelling companion Jimmy (a volunteer from Colorado who says "Dangit!" a lot, used to work for IBM and has been teaching me about American politics), I flew to La Paz, the highest capital city in the world. Stepping off the plane at 4000 odd metres, on the lip of the canyon which cradles the city, the scarcity of oxygen was noticeable, and although the city itself is a steep 400m further down, Jimmy and I were still getting pretty breathless as we dragged ourselves up the steep, narrow alleyways of the La Paz markets. But there are many compensations. First of all, La Paz is visually stunning, particularly when seen from the highway up to the airport, with the snowy triple peak of Illimani in the distance. Second, it has such a different atmosphere to the sleepy lowlands - it´s busy, bustling, full of life, with street theatre, students hurrying to classes, businessmen eating empanadas on the go. Thirdly, there is political consciousness here (in complete contrast to Trinidad) - graffiti´d slogans included "All property is collective" and "Evo = +violence" (referring to Evo Morales, a candidate for the upcoming elections, which are likely to be troubled no matter what). Finally, they have pizza places where the largest size available is labelled "interminable".

Eating experiences here were not quite so varied as they have been in Trinidad. Several times we were just too tired or hungry to look any further, and settled for a hamburger or fried chicken in a local fast-food place. I guess those places are as much a part of real Bolivian life, if not moreso, than some tourist restaurant selling the supposed local delicacies.

Tuesday morning saw us leaving La Paz for Cusco, Peru, after a frenetic taxi ride to the airport along some of the steepest streets I´ve ever been driven up (some bits rivalled Baldwin St, Dunedin, for those in the know...) We´d been warned about Cusco, that it was just a nasty tourist trap where everyone was just trying to scam you or sell you something, that it was dangerous, that we should avoid spending more time there than necessary. Jimmy and I found ourselves pleasantly surprised, however. Fair enough, as soon as we were off the plane we were greeted loudly by a host of company reps calling us "friend", and compared to La Paz the street traders were a lot pushier, but there was goodness to be found. For a start, Cusco has a beautiful central plaza, including four (that´s right folks, four!) churches, the oldest of which dates from the 16th century and includes a painting of the Last Supper with Christ and the disciples eating the local delicacy, guinea pig. We visited the Lego-castle-like Inca ruins of Sacsayhuamán outside of town, zigzag rows of huge black blocks which once formed the walls of Cusco´s citadel. Most importantly, we found that the cusqueños (folks from Cusco) were not (all) a bunch of criminals... A nice bloke in the tourist office offered to let us store our bags in his mate´s restaurant for free when we found ourselves in need of such a service, at considerable trouble to himself. Our taxi driver from the airport recommended us a hostel which, it turned out later, he also ran, but redeemed himself by telling us about a very cheap, non-touristy restaurant with great food, and by keeping our bags for us for free while we are in Macchu Picchu, even though we´re not going back there. So there you go. The image of God can be found everywhere, even in Cusco, and not just the one eating guinea pig in paintings.

I write from Macchu Picchu (or Aguas Calientes, the small village which serves the ruins themselves), having arrived here by train from Cusco this morning, and having passed a quite incredible day up amongst the old stones and older mountains. More of which in the next report.

San Ignacio

2005-08-01T20:12:00.000Z

Just returned from the weekend fiesta, the central event of camba (lowland people, as opposed to the Kollas in the highlands) culture in Bolivia, in San Ignacio de Moxos, a wee town 3 hours west of here (2 hours if you´ve got a nice shiny pick-up truck of your own, like my friends did who just came for a few hours on Saturday, and 4 hours if you have a nasty old camión that breaks down, like I did on the way back). I wish, dear friends, that I could take you through the entire experience with me... the journey there with 40 people and a monkey sardined onto rough planks on the back of a camión (like them trucks you see normally piled up with fruit or somesuch), dust and insects flying in our eyes, ears and mouths, all the midst of stunning jungle scenery replete with alligators and random roadside stalls in the middle of nowhere...

River crossing in a camión.

the buzz of the town during the whole weekend, with drums beating out camba rhythms day and night... the endless parades of feather-headed, eerily-masked, beautifully adorned, or just plain wasted locals...

the nasty sunburn I got on Saturday from wandering round all day wearing my one t-shirt with the slightly-too-wide neck... the madness of Saturday evening, when locals run through the thousand-strong crowd by the plaza with lighted spinning fireworks attached to their heads, while others just throw said fireworks around the crowd, resulting in more than a few minor burns (I even got some singed arm hair as my battle scar), a lot of happy screaming and running, and thousands of failed photographs...

the bullfight on Sunday, which actually turns out to be much more about watching drunken locals (and they are all, to a man, completely leathered) make idiots of themselves in vaguely the same geographical area as the bull; a lot of the time the bull stands looking vaguely fed up while the humans are all having fist-fights over in the other corner... very ugly on the whole.

Miscellany

2005-07-29T02:29:00.000Z

Miscellany
Originally uploaded by Your new friend Pete.

Right, time for a bit of an update on the medical side of things. I've had
about as varied an elective experience as I could've asked for. On any one
day I could be doing clinics at the health centre in general medicine,
paediatrics, ENT or physiotherapy. I've done several days and a night in the
emergency department of the local general hospital including some serious
trauma. I've (as already mentioned) spent a week doing first-aid at a
teenager's camp, and the last two afternoons have been spent at local
schools doing health check-ups on primary-aged children (in the photo I'm
just glad you can't see this wee girl's face as I inexpertly excavate her
temporal bone with my otoscope...) What's left - palliative care? There's
time yet...

By the way, the NHS is great. The UK one of the best places in the world for
the academic side of things and medical research, but it also has a pretty
decent health service. It may not be the best, but here even in the
emergency department, before the patient gets any treatment, the doctor has
to write a prescription for the needles, syringes, fluids etc. which are
needed, which the patient or their family needs to go and buy from a
pharmacy.

Culinary experiences have been almost as varied. Last night I had armadillo,
piranha, chorizo, plantains and the Bolivian equivalent of haddock all in
one meal, while last week I had wild boar (yes, just like in Asterix and
Obelix). And it's all tasty and good, thankfully - I haven't once had to
conceal violent retching with a smile and a mmmm-it's-delicious facade. Most
of the food here is solid ordinary meat-with-rice-and-potatoes combinations,
with some delicious snacky things like empanadas and saltenas (pastry
thingies with deliciously flavoured chicken and things inside). Hmm, a few
too many "things" in that last sentence, but I think I'll leave it. Bye!

Hooray! Some photos!

2005-07-26T22:47:00.000Z

As you can see, finally got some photos up :) Most of them I´ve put into where they fit in the narrative, but these below were taken quite recently or just describe life here generally. I´ve got about 2 minutes to do this, so forgive me for the brevity of this post.

Bolivian electrics are the one thing that really unnerve me. If you touch the shower head or taps while it´s on, you get an unpleasant kind of stinging sensation. Hmm.

Ah, the fun of riding in the back of a pickup at night :) This is Mark. He´s from East Kilbride, and he is not an alcoholic (that I know of).

I may be 22, but I still find this funny. I don´t know why Mark is looking quite so murderous. It´s a loaf of bread, by the way. And the brand is called Bimbo. Which is hilarious.

This is the new plot of land that Fundación Totaí has bought, on the boundary between city and jungle. This was all just jungle 3 months ago, and it has since been cleared, and the temporary church building built in stages. The scorched earth in the foreground is the future site of various health workers´ homes, which have just started being built.

After the church service every Sunday, the women make a big ol´ stew on a fire out back, the men build a bit more of the church (we put up the front wall on this particular day) and the children run off into the jungle to find dangerous animals and plants. Makes me nostalgic for my own childhood...

I built this! Well, a bit of it. Along with four other blokes.

Homeless football!

2005-07-21T21:24:00.000Z

I saw this, and thought of you (all). Well, kinda. Interesting idea, eh? Well, if it does what it says it does I´m all for it. I wonder if any of the folks I met during my homeless health module were there...

Return from The Chaco

2005-07-15T21:21:00.000Z

Well, I´ve returned to civilisation (well, Trinidad at least) intact, having spent a very cool four days in the Chaco at a camp for 12-17 year-olds as the 24-hour on-call first aid monkey. That sentence requires a few brief explanations:

The Chaco, as explained in an earlier entry, is a cleared area of jungle about 45 mins drive away. I haven´t yet worked out if it´s a term in general use or not. The school project (La Palmera) bought an area of jungle just off a wee road (in turn, off the main road to Santa Cruz), brought in the bulldozers, pulled down what they could and burnt the rest (I don´t think Bolivia´s signed up to the Kyoto Treaty yet...) The result is a very rough area of ground surrounded by dense, uncharted (er.. possibly) jungle, which they´ve luxuriously furnished with a brick shelter (for pitching tents under), a brick toilet/shower block, and a few wooden shelters. This has all happened in the last month or so, and this was the first camp.
Thankfully, the 24-hour nature of my job was not required for the duration of my camp, and I slept peacefully through the night, thanks in part to my cushy set-up in my very own spacious and well-appointed medical tent.
Although I am a primate (or so the biologists tell me), I am not in fact, a literal monkey. Or literally a monkey. Or a literary monkey. Or, actually, any of those things. Sorry for lying.

So anyway, the camp was very enjoyable. The setting was spectacular. Most of the time, I wandered around as if in a Club Med with about minus 5 tridents (er... possibly only my family will get that fully... but the rest of you will figure it out, I´m confident), but sometimes, especially at sunset when the palm trees became silhouettes against a horizon turned red by sun and forest fire smoke, and betowelled boys began walking down the scorched flats towards the river to "shower", the whole landscape washed in a dusty haze (Dave, that Godspeed line with the "thin orange haze" came to me quite a bit this week..."), I realised I was really just inches away from proper jungle, and it was beautiful.

Of course, most of the time, I complained to myself and anyone English-speaking about the dust that carpeted everything I owned, despite my daily cleaning efforts, and I muttered as I scratched my (really quite mild and few) insect bites, and I chickened out of the showering-in-the-river option to wait til the girls had finished in the shower block. But hey, I am a choco, as they say out here, a non-Bolivian, and despite my attempted adoption of the local slang - "nos cheque" say the lads, as a see-you-later - all the kids still call out "¡Hey, choco! ¿Còmo vas?"

The language barrier is getting a little less impenetrable; while I don´t think I´ve learnt that many new words, I´m getting better at understanding, which I care about more. The local accent and the rapidity with which some folks speak still gives me difficulty, and most of my sentences are still pretty excruciatingly slow as I translate each word internally. But I love Spanish, and I just hope I get enough practice this trip to be able to do it justice.

I´m afraid I´m still running fairly behind on the ol´blogging front. I´ll not tell you much about the first few days in Trinidad, which I never wrote about; they weren´t all that interesting anyway. Suffice it to say, having arrived on the bus at 7 am, I was in clinic by 10:30 or so, and then began a series of full, tiring days. There was a medical conference on in Trinidad which Diego (to give him his full, very cool, name, Dr Diego José Santana-Hernández, the director and ENT specialist of Fundación Totaí, the health charity I´m working with) had to attend and speak at, and so I was along for the ride. It ran from nine til one and then from five til nine or ten, with an afternoon of clinics sandwiched between, and it was all in rapid, medical Spanish. I understood little of the speech and I mainly felt like I was reading the slides, and I got home each night at eleven or twelve (after a late dinner at Jo and Diego´s) knackered, and barely saw my housemates those first few

[Diego, Jo, Elena (4), Hilary (2) and baby (minus 2 months) Santana Hernández]

days. While it felt like I wasn´t getting much out of it, I hope and trust that my brain was diligently processing the words and syllables, and that it has helped me understand a bit better.

Right, that´ll do. A week of conference and a week of camp later, I have a free weekend before finally starting ordinary daily clinics and bits of hospital on-call shadowing. I intend to use it well. Remind me to tell you about the new church Jo and Diego have started on the edge of town, and the vision they have for the land they´ve bought there. In the meantime, I´ll leave you with a couple of Bolivian stories (some my own, some from others) which give you a bit of a flavour of life out here:

The first time they turned on the floodlights for the new stadium in Trinidad, the whole town´s electricity went off, and they´ve hardly used the stadium since.
The "parque infantil" (kid´s playground) just near the house has ponds in it which contain alligators.
The countless times I´ve forgotten about not being supposed to flush toilet paper away, and I´ve had to retrieve it manually...
There were four famous sloths who lived in the central tree-filled plaza of Trinidad, until Lorna (the Scottish wife of the director of the school) ran over one of them.

PS I posted a diary entry (the only one I made) from the camp, and changed the date of it - unfortunately broadband hasn´t reached the Chaco yet...

Letter from The Chaco

2005-07-11T23:00:00.000Z

Well, been here 8 hrs and so far it´s pretty good. Amazing place, just a clearing in the jungle, red sunsets, scorched earth, makeshift goalposts and a wide open sky.

[Another here.]
Seen 7 patients, 5 stomach aches, just getting into the swing of things. Wonder whats actually going on, pathophysiologically. Similar symptom stories - tum pain, nausea without vomiting. Mostly girls. We´ll see. They don´t know the word "heces" [faeces], or my pronounciation of it. We´ll try "¿Tienes diarrea?" instead. Must remember to ask about [drug] allergies in every patient. KC´s [American volunteer who´s been here yonks - that´s actually her name, not an abbreviation] great - v. busy and tired though. Looking forward to sleep. Grateful for cushy tent, mattress, space + solitude (bad for my Spanish though, probably).

[My medical tent]

Will try to tune into the adolescent chatter in the adjacent tents though. Getting chilly. Rosie´s sleeping bag will keep me warm.

Still alive.

2005-07-09T16:48:00.000Z

Hey there sportsfans! Sorry for the delay in updating the blog, and for any anxiety that may have caused. I am indeed alive and well, sitting in a Punto Entel (Entel´s the telecoms company here) in Trinidad, Bolivia. Ho hum, so much has happened since I last wrote. I unfortunately failed to memorise the Spanish dictionary, as planned, instead spending the remainder of my time in Madrid airport eating delectable Italian chocolate biscuits (thank you Rosie!) and reading the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (nod to Libby for the recommendation several years ago).
The 12-hour flight to Buenos Aires flew (chortle) by, with decent food (airline food is much maligned, and generally unfairly, I reckon), and broken sleep. I´ve decided that I possess the sharpest upper left canine tooth in the world, as it has been drilling a little hole on the inside of my mouth for the past week, and during the flight I was frequently rudely awakened when it found its painful little way in there once more. However, I arrived in Buenos Aires otherwise intact, and - hallelujah! - so did my bag :) Ah, the sight of it cruising slowly round the corner of the conveyor belt almost made me weep, like the father for his long-lost son returning home.
After running to and fro in Buenos Aires airport trying to sort out my Santa Cruz-Trinidad journey, I was left with just over 2 hours to explore the city; the bus ride from the airport takes about 40 minutes. Still, I was so glad to leave airports and airplanes behind for a brief dive into an unknown city, and the sights and sounds of Buenos Aires stand out all the more in my memory, surrounded as they are by the bland void of recycled air and departure lounges. I saw the ugly concrete high-rises in the suburbs, their dirty faces lightened by the day´s laundry; our bus on its freeway cutting through the sprawl of houses and telecoms masts; beat-up old cars and trucks mixing with the Japanese imports of the better-off; the city centre brimming with grand glass towers and carefully planned public spaces. I bought an enormous sandwich and an empanada for a few pesos and ran back to the bus.

Buenos Aires urban sprawl

It was getting dark when I landed in Santa Cruz, Bolivia (which I recently found out is pretty much the rabies capital of South America...); I found a minibus in front of the airport and asked if he was going to the bus station - "Si, si." He then stopped at a random corner in town and told me to get the number 74 from there. Hmm. Thankfully, the 74 did indeed exist, a tiny little minibus I had to hunch in and hang on, and I met a lovely old man (that ubiquitous breed) who reassured me about where I was going. I fought through the crowded chaos of Santa Cruz bus station, got myself booked on a bus cama to Trinidad, slumped in an internet cafe for an hour and then got settled for another night´s broken sleep on a reclining seat which would transport me through the Bolivian night to Trinidad.

Dawn arrival at Trinidad bus station

I got in on Tuesday morning, and it´s now Saturday afternoon; I´ll update you on the last few days next time. Which may be this time next week. From Monday to Thursday I´ll be the 24-hour on-call first aid dude at a camp for teenagers in the chaco (cleared area of jungle, I´m led to believe) about 45 mins from here, sleeping in a tent and refusing to believe rumours of snakes and alligators. See you soon!

The adventure begins!

2005-07-03T17:55:00.000Z

Well actually the adventure began on Friday when things started to go (mildly) wrong - my flight for the last leg of my journey was cancelled, so instead of a 1-hour plane ride I now face an exciting seven-hour bus journey as my introduction to Bolivia. Ah, it`ll be fine! Anyway, having spent a delightful last two days chilling out with my dear Rosie and trying to decide which bag to stuff semi-frantically at the last moment, I waved goodbye at Glasgow airport and flew off into the unknown. Well, Heathrow. Where I had a nice lunch with my sister Anna, who writes for FHM in London. I had a bit of a delay waiting to see if they could check me right through to Buenos Aires, and so it was a slight rush to the gate. But who am I kidding? Things are going fine so far (thank you God!) and the only things I`ve had to sweat about have been making tentative attempts at Spanish conversation with a dude on the plane, and the heat of Madrid, in whose airport I now stand, typing on a horrible metal keyboard thing which callously ignores most of my keypresses and which eats Euros like they were something tasty and Spanish. I`ve got about three hours before my transatlantic leg, in which I intend to memorise the Spanish dictionary, having found my vocabulary somewhat inadequate so far. Wish me luck.

Pre-adventure

2005-06-30T13:36:00.000Z

Oh, the pressure to come up with a witty and original first post! I think it's safer to not bother, to curl in a ball with my thumb in my mouth instead.

The main reason this blog is here is (at present) to share my adventures in South America this summer with friends, family, friendly animals and curious aliens. I leave on Sunday, and I look forward to my 40-hour journey: Glasgow-London-Madrid-Buenos Aires (Argentina)-Santa Cruz (Bolivia)-Trinidad (Bolivia). Sadly, I will not be able to post from the plane, but fear not! I may take an exciting photodiary of myself sitting reading, watching films and even eating (!), to post later on for your delectation and delight. But I might not.