Birdwatching and Mud Stains

This is myself and park warden Henrry (with two R's) on the binoculars. I am following his lead, trying to spot what he sees. He is one of the most experienced rangers at the SNLMT.

On Tuesday, I got the chance to join him on the bird survey, along with Jose (park warden), two MEDA colleagues and some university students (pictured above). Early morning and low tide is the best time for spotting birds since they are out looking for crabs and fish to eat along the newly exposed banks of the rivers so we were on the river by 7 AM.


To the right is a Google Earth satellite image of the mangrove reserve, the SNLMT. The mangrove reserve is outlined in red and the international border is yellow. The right side of the picture is Ecuador, separated from Peru by the International Canal. At the top, the river flows into the Pacific.

On all sides, you can see that former mangrove habitat has been taken over by farms, rice and shrimp. A lot of products of human activity (plastics, mercury, petroleum, pesticides) find their way into the mangroves.

Despite the encroachment of human activity, the mangroves carry the heavy load, providing food and habitat for a diverse bird population. Monthly bird surveying is a way to keep tabs on bird populations.

The way bird surveying works is simple. The boat follows a set path every time. You identify and record the number of each bird species you see. If they are flying, you only count the ones flying in the opposite direction as you, to prevent double counting. Henrry does most of the identifying while another ranger, Jose does the recording. The rest of us point out anything in case he has missed it.


This apparently was the sighting of the day.
Not the white guy, that is a baby Snowy Egret, Garza Blanca chica, the most populous of the birds in the sanctuary. No, it's the grey blob I circled to the left, sitting on the branch and barely visible, the Bare-throated Tiger-heron. Despite the superhero name, this bird is not bloodthirsty, courageous and carnivorous. Rather, it is very shy and rarely sighted. So much so that I couldn't get a better shot of it. Though I admit I didn't know what was going on. I thought people were getting excited about the Snowy Egret.

Having an expert around opens your eyes. The first time I visited the mangroves, I saw a Blue Heron and a bunch of Snowy Egrets. This time I had a page full of bird names I scribbled down while trying to keep up with Henrry. Hundreds of sightings of herons, egrets, frigatebirds, cormorants, martin kingfishers, pelicans, blackbirds etc.

Most are waders, a loose categorization for birds adapted to shore areas and wading in pools. They have long legs for walking in pools and eat small crabs and other invertebrates. To the right is an example. He is the largest heron in these parts of Peru, Ardea cocoi or Garza Cuca.


Some were fast little guys zipping and darting around like the Ringed Kingfishers. Think hummingbird with hunting skills.


Some were big air floaters, like these Fregata magnificens to the left, just floating in the air taking it easy until doing precise dives for prey. They are also known as Man O'War for their rakish lines, speed and aerial piracy says Wikipedia. Air pirates. Gangsters.





After an hour, we had motored to Point A on the map, whose proximity to the ocean meant that a laguna was drying out from the last high tide. This dynamic makes it a favorite spot for some birds.

This is a Roseate spoonbill. When standing, he looks like a flamingo cause of the pink coloration but he can be differentiated by his long beak, the spoonbill.

I could pretend I took this picture if I had one of those cameras with the serious looking zoom. It's stolen from wikipedia.



It was still spectacular though. Here's my photo of a bunch of them taking flight.








To compare, here's a Chilean flamingo displaying a remarkable lack of spoonbill.
Both flamingos and roseate spoonbills derive their pink color from the betacarotene from the shrimp and crab in their diet. They are not related.








These are Black Necked Stilts, Himantopus mexicanus, local name: ciguenuela. The english name is pretty self explanatory. They look like they're walking around on pink stilts.

The day ended with a chance to get filthy and trek through the mangroves to Point B on the map.


Best mud stains I've had in a long time. Point B is another laguna that floods during high tide but by the time we got there it was dried out and the birds were gone.


I'm out of postcards. First one to point me out in the picture gets a pair of pants to wash.

So, that's it for my month in Tumbes, though I'll be back when the heat gets serious in January. Back to Lima and the big city life.

Farming and Reforestation in Dry Forest - A MEDA Peru Workshop

6:45 AM - Early Sunday morning. Tired. Stumble around. Too tired to eat. Grouchy, slouching.

7: 20 AM - Meet others at Plaza at. 12 of us pile into truck, 7 in the truck, 5 in the flatbed. Uncomfortable drive to the Mangrove Sanctuary. Tired and squished in backseat. Left leg asleep. I wish I was.

8: 15 AM - Arrive at Algarrobo guardpost. Mill around. Tired still but waking up. Left leg too.

8:45 AM - Erik, Peruvian colleague in charge of Tourism, tells me about cultural poverty. He says the poverty here on the coast is not the same as the poverty in the Andes and in the jungle. Here near the mangroves and coast, these people have it easy. They live on 15 soles (less than 3 dollars) a day. In the Andes and the jungle, the people live on 1 or 2 soles (50 cents) a day. Here, the luxury of living near such a productive environment like the mangroves means that people can go fishing for a few hours and haul 60 soles worth of fish, allowing them to spend 45 soles on booze and waste the rest of their day drinking it.

We did see some 15 year olds boozing on our way here. And it's before 9 AM.

According to Erik, this is one of the obstacles holding Peru and Latin America back. This is a country and continent whose abundance in resources has led to stalled development. Hmmmm...logical. Unsure if I agree.

He says the people need education, so they can stop mindlessly following stagnant cultural examples.

I tell him I agree. I tell him as best as I can that I've seen people whose parents pay for their university, party every day and drop out because the worse that can happen isn't that bad and so they don't see the incentive in working hard and getting a degree. Meanwhile, some people work part-time to support their tuition and come out with flying colors. And then there's everyone in between. He tells me a joke about Henry Ford's son. I think of Paris Hilton as a representative example of the child of a millionaire.

9:30 AM - I am finally wide awake. People from the different associations start to file in.


In total, 30 people come to take part in the workshop. 4 women. I follow the guy in the cowboy hat around for a while. He's got a great toothless smile that I didn't get a shot of.

10:10 AM - Everyone stands up and introduces themselves. Dante, colleague in charge of Environment, explains the importance of the mangroves and why we are here today. Surrounding the mangrove reserve is dry forest, an important ecosystem. Many of these people are land owners, farmers whose land around the mangroves provides a buffer against the contamination from human activity.


These are not the people who waste their money on booze. Their dollars come from the hard labour of farming within uncooperative crops in a harsh environment.

People listen intently, man in cowboy hat included. They seem really interested.


11 AM - Refreshments are served. Spilled pop means a party for ants, lined up like gazelles and giraffes at an African watering hole.


I mercilessly kill one ant to see what other ants will make of it. There is temporary chaos and I lose track of the body. Drinking of 'Real Kola' continues, humans and ants together. No 'Real Kola Lite' here. Orange, sugary, carbonated deliciousness. Not short on sugar.

11:15 AM - The meeting continues. The people are broken up into their respective associations. First task of the day is to make a map of all the land of which they have ownership of. In other words, arts and crafts. They break out the color markers, scissors, pencils, rulers. Fun is cowboy hats, drawing things and group work.



12:20 PM - Under the great Algarrobo tree for which this guard post was named, people present their maps and biggest problems with farming in this dry area without water.

The main problem for most of them is irrigation. There are only a few months per year where they can grow anything and the crops are fruits with roots deep enough to survive throughout the dry season. Most of the year between March and September is unproductive and people want a complimentary source of income. Digging a well and irrigation would cost a lot. MEDA wants to incorporate these ideas to help with reverting area to dry forest.

1:15 PM - Lunch is served. It is food.

Afterwards, people resume the arts and craft session with maps of their ideal farms in 5 years time. Before and after depicted below.


3 PM - Last task of the day is more drawing. People draw a map of actors, people or organisations they are involved in.

The day winds down. Closing ceremony, group picture and lots of applause and laughs. It's a happy time. Click on the picture and try to find me, I blend right in.


I'll send a postcard to the first person who can point me out, regardless of whether I know you or not. Seriously, anyone, answer in the comments.

4 PM - The heat of the day is dissipating. Participants collect their travel stipend and then pile into their trucks to leave. Dogs bark and chase as the wheels kick up dust.


4:10 PM - I check on the ants at Lake Real Kola. All gone. I assume even they left happy.

Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

This week is the last week of my one month stay in Tumbes. The work has been great and I´ll put up a few posts on the stuff I've been doing at work soon, cause it has been an interesting month and because that was the initial point of this blog, not all this ruminating on beautiful mountains and fiddlee dee dee. But as I get ready mentally to move back to Lima, I've started to feel at home here in Tumbes, a rewarding feeling that I want to write about.

When I first came, I thought adjusting would be a breeze since Lima had been so fun and easy but it wasn't and again, I had to learn to call a new place home. When you're a tourist, you're constantly on the move and there's no need to settle down and feel at home and you also don't have to learn to like places that don't immediately appeal to you. When you're a tourist, you spend the money and look the part and people treat you like it and it's comforting. You say your thank yous and pleases and do as you would in your home country, have a blast and people cater their actions for you and your tourist dollars. And in Lima..well I guess big cities are universally very similar. Busy streets, lots of different people, grocery stores, McDonald's and Starbucks if you're so inclined, roommates who watch Gossip Girl. It's all familiar before you get there with reminders everywhere that home is not that far away. But some places don't get along with you so quickly. For me it has taken an anxious month of second guessing to come to terms with Tumbes.

You walk around at first and you are looking everywhere, screening nothing. You pay attention to everything and it's overwhelming. And you better pay attention to the way people do things around here because not everyone is going to change just so you can keep doing things comfortably the way you do at home. Every sound and face is foreign. When the policeman whistles, you freeze and look at him and look at the street and wonder what the hell he is whistling about. It makes no sense. When you walk down the street, you look every single person in the face because you're kind of scared of getting robbed and you look over your shoulder a lot as if someone is following you. You make snap judgements, you have to. "Do I trust this person, do they have a trustworthy face, can I stop noticing them now?" and the passing of judgement affects how tightly you clutch your backpack.















(Stacey and Jorie guarding while Wendelien visits the ATM)

And you're back to the miscommunication and it sucks. And that old habit of saying things like questions because of uncertainty creeps back. And you can't handle the number of unknowns and because there are a lot of unknowns.

And sometimes you want more vegetables in your food and you think to ask but first you wonder "Is that allowed? Or will they think I'm rude and picky?" Or you want to yell out "taxi driver, slow the %!$# down," and you get kind of mad but you don't say it because before you do anything you always ask yourself if it's customary to do this or will they think I'm rude. You always think twice.

And everyday, you walk to work and cross the street when it's safe but your idea of safe starts to change because you walk the roads twice a day you get familiar with the few streets that you walk down all the time. Slowly parts of it are committed to memory and you start to learn little things, like how to make weak jokes. You learn to watch out crossing the street outside work because motos come flying down the hill but from home to work you can sneak across the street before motos start moving if the light is freshly green because they have no acceleration, especially going up a hill and plus, they'll swerve ever so slightly to avoid hitting you. You learn to take the shaded route to work back from lunch to avoid the midday heat.

So you can sneak across the street and hop onto the curb and go down the hill and cut through the market and get to work all sneaky and lithe. You get to know the traffic lights, like at Boundary Street and Nathan Street...or University and Westmount. Lithe. And you begin to relax a little more in your town, at ease.

And now when the policeman whistles, you hardly take notice and it still doesn't make sense but it's not an urgent matter. It's a conceptual police whistle and you filter it out as background noise because you have acquired the Tumbes filter. You have learned to separate background noise from what requires attention. Stray dogs will bark, won't bite - do not require full attention. People yelling are not yelling at you - ignore. That cute girl who works at the store on the corner - don't ignore. Conservation of mangroves - requires attention. You talk to a couple waiters that start to recognize you, and store owners and guards and you relax a little more and you sleep better because you know to point the industrial fan away from you to keep the mosquitos away without making you too cold and you start to feel like "yeah, no matter what is thrown at me right now, I can probably handle it." Though most of the time that is true from the beginning, it just takes realising. You know where to eat and where to buy water, what to do for breakfast, the routine provides comfort. And you realise that not everyone is trying to rob you or con you. And you go from biding your time and counting the days, to actually living them.



And at one point, that feeling of having settled in hits you and you smile to yourself, like when Steph said "God willing" to that guy. For me it was when I played my second game of chess with the 10 year-old kid local champion near the Plaza de Armas after he narrowly beat me last week with his defensive tactics and I told him I knew his strengths this time and that I would win, and I smiled inwardly and thought to myself that I didn't have to think twice about saying that and I don't have to think twice about as much anymore and it's nice to not have to think twice about everything though I should think twice about opening with my knights again.

So I go on and play with this hyperactive, chubby genius kid who drinks too much soda and uses his pawns so well and always controls the centre of the board. And he beats me twice, once just barely and then once easily and arrogantly, and I vow that I will beat him next week though I really doubt it.

On Beauty

When Mother Earth made Peru, she was not messing around. She told Papa Earth to turn the volume of the game down because she needed to concentrate and he did it immediately because she had that serious look on her face.

Along the coast of Peru, desert meets the Pacific Ocean, laying down sandy beach after beach, uninterrupted except for a precious little mangrove reserve near the Ecuador border. Year round, the sun ignites the ocean at sundown, like a match to oil.


Moving inland, the Andes mountains tower above, high enough to harbour glaciers despite being three degrees latitude off the equator. Clouds pour in and around the steep vertices, playing peekaboo with snow capped summits. Mountain and water cooperate, roaring off cliffs with reckless abandon or bubbling down rocky streams, dancing jigs around sharp bends, occasionally pooling in lakes and lagunas, cold and clean enough to drink and live to tell the story.





Within 30 minutes at llama pace, you can go from being blanketed by humidity, squidging around in mud to squinting from the reflection of the sun on an expanse of snow crunching beneath your feet.



I often find myself at the back of our hiking group, trying to take in all the beauty. The change in altitude makes my head pound and I hang back, letting the group move further away. I close my eyes, breathe deep and open my eyes again. I'm hoping it will become clear why these mountains are so good. Nothing ever happens. I see deep blue, blinding white, fresh green. I think about how billions of years ago and thousands of miles below, massive tectonic plates coming together push these mountains towards the sky. I wonder how many million newtons of force are involved. But these words are too small, even factorialed by infinity and the universe a trillion times. I don't know why these mountains are so good, so beautiful.



But they are, and photography sure is easy with cooperative subjects.

East of the Andes lies the Amazon Jungle. I haven't been there yet but I'm sure Mother Earth won't disappoint.

PS. On a different scale, I am moving to Tumbes to get more involved with our mangrove project. Work here in Lima has picked up as of late and it has been a valuable experience, writing expansive funding proposals or concise Letters of Inquiry, maneuvering between Spanish and English words and concepts. It's a good feeling to go home every day knowing you accomplished something. Of course, I am excited to be spending more time in the mangroves and less in the office.

PPS. Obama becomes President today?! I'm guessing yes and so is everyone else.

Hoo-ray.

Tumbes is a hot, dusty frontier town on the Peru-Ecuador border.




If it were an accessory, it'd be a big copper belt buckle, slightly rusty. Water goes out in the middle of the afternoon. Some of the bars and restaurants have those swinging saloon doors that Clint Eastwood used to come sauntering through. The dust gets in your mouth. It is like a town out of a cowboy western except the horses are three wheeled mototaxis. Oh and there are bandits. Five minutes after arriving in Tumbes, a robber tore Fernando's camera away from him and made a getaway in a sputtering mototaxi (pictured above, not the actual getaway vehicle). Earlier in the week, I caught a funeral march as it went through the Plaza de Armas for a policeman who had been killed by robbers.



I walk around a little scared. But Stacey handles it. She is the intern stationed here and more gangster than I.

I've spent the week here in Tumbes, getting a handle on what's going on. The Santuario Nacional Los Manglares de Tumbes is under MEDA's care. It's a mangrove forest, the only one in Peru and ecologically important. We need to sustainably generate USD 100,000 yearly to support the cost of operation and we have five years to do it. To make this kind of money, we're going to have to turn a tranquil mangrove sanctuary into a buzzing, commercialised Disneyland. Sell souvenirs. Offer exciting adventures. Add value. To save the mangroves we're going to have to sell plastic versions of them. Hoo-ray for capitalism and consumerism.

Life imitating souvenirs.

To do some research on target markets, we headed to Mancora, a touristy little surf town a few hours south and stayed the night. Mancora's tourist dollars will likely play a large part in keeping the mangroves afloat.

Fernando dug for crabs to help forget the indignity of watching his camera get away from him on a spluttering 8 cc mototaxi.


It's nice in Mancora, touristy but the scenery makes up for it. Check the emo sunset complete with birds flying off into the horizon.



I get to spend my weekend (and my dollars) here, in a town that would barely exist if not for tourists. And I'm going to love it.

Hoo-ray for capitalism and consumerism.

Whose Money and Why?

A few things I have learned on the job:

1. One hectare (ha) is 10 000 m2 and the number of zeros is deceiving. It looks like 10 km squared but it's just a box 100 metres by 100 metres.
   
2. The administration costs for conserving a 2,792 ha mangrove forest is about US $100,000 ($36 per ha).
3. No wonder 13 million ha of forest are lost annually.

It would be oversimplifying things to say that to stop deforestation, 468 million dollars a year ($36/ha x 13 million ha) would be needed. But the point is that unless some new incentives appear, our forests are doomed. Guilt inducing appeals like this make people look away.

(Picture stolen from: Greenpeace)

But money makes the world go round. Yes, money catches peoples attention.

(Picture stolen from: moneymingle.com)

But whose money? And why would they pay to to help conservation? An emerging idea is Markets For Environmental Services (MES).

A tree can be sold for it's lumber, oil or fruits but the services it provides like absorbing carbon dioxide, preventing erosion or filtering water had no monetary value until MES came along.

What MES hopes to do is create a market to sell the services that ecosystems provide, mainly carbon sequestration, hydrological services, landscape beauty and biodiversity.

Carbon sequestration is a famous one. Trees take up carbon dioxide. The purchase of carbon credits are payment for that service. There are still a ton of complaints about carbon credits: an area can be deforested and then obtain carbon credits for reforestation, trees planted at higher latitudes catch more heat than is balanced by the carbon they capture, if people think they can negate their carbon output they will just pollute more etc. But one inarguable thing that carbon credits have introduced is a large pool of money and recognition of the value of trees for an environmental service they provide. In 2007, the carbon credit industry was worth US $63 billion.

Another example is the hydrological services of forested land. Forested land purifies and filters water, a service that bottling companies and water providers benefit from. With MES, they can pay to keep the watershed intact to reduce their costs.


(This is the Peru I signed up to see)

In the same way, biodiversity can be valued. From the insect pollinators to the plants that may hold the key to future medicines, the habitat provided for them by an ecosystem can be protected by MES. The economic valuation of bees is somewhere near US $300 billion because of our dependence on them to pollinate so many of our crops. And if some plant has new chemicals that may yield new medicines, you can be sure pharmaceutical companies will be stepping on each other to secure the rights to it.

I'm really just learning this as I go along and I have my doubts. I can't even grasp these huge denominations; billions of dollars and millions of hectares. I think the utility of MES other than providing a pool of money for conservation, is that MES creates a monetary framework for people to understand how much they rely on nature. And there is hope that along the way, the poor will reap the benefits of MES since they are the ones who live closest to the land.

(Pictures stolen from: Kristina)

At the same time, I don't know if this will yield the wanted results. It sets up all of nature to be centered around what we humans deem useful or not and how much we are willing to pay for it. I guess it's a little late to lament the fact that our environment is one that is already highly controlled by humans. But with this system, only species that humans deem profitable will be valued. A cheetah is worth how much tourists will pay to see it. That's not even close to true value. And what about lichen, or ugly plants?



Something is better than nothing I suppose. Maybe humans and nature are so closely linked that eventually it will become clear that everything nature has created has monetary value. But maybe we won't see it in time. Or maybe the power we have to accumulate things so far beyond our needs makes us incompatible with the rest of nature. There are a lot of maybes. I've got a lot of questions and not a lot of answers. Here's to hoping we can save worthless, beautiful things too.



What do you think? Am I boring you?

The Burden of Genius

The last time I chose a best friend was when I was in Grade 3. I remember declaring it, maybe in my head, maybe out loud to whoever would listen. His name was Ian MacDonald and we played soccer together and I thought it was funny to ask him if he wanted a hamburger cause his last name was MacDonald. He didn't find it funny but we had a lot of sleepovers anyway. I'm not sure why I chose him as my best friend, but I know I adhered to my choice religiously.

Who knows why but as a kid, there is an excitement to choosing favourites, favourite movies (Lion King) or teams (Edmonton Oilers) or foods (Eggplant mush that my Dad used to make). But as I've gotten older, I rarely choose favorites anymore. Maybe because as an adult you have to justify your choices and because this world is too full of great things to decide which one you like best. I can't justify my choices with the simple platitudes that pass unquestioned when you're a kid (I like the Lion King cause of Timon and Pumba!). Well you can but who would care. But after the two months that it took me to finish reading the 1,100 pages of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, and definitely after I read it a second and a third time, I was sure that it was my favourite work of fiction, by a long shot. I didn't declare it out loud and tell all my friends (or maybe I did, Dayna?) but I knew.

So I was stunned when I heard from my sister that David Foster Wallace, at age 46, had committed suicide this past weekend. Genius is not a word that applies as often as it is used. I call my friend a genius for wearing snowboots and snowpants to university when it snows (we used to walk to school) when in fact, it's just logical and a little eccentric. But DFW was a genius.

If you don't know, I can't tell you. But I'll try. If you have time, click the links at the bottom of the post.

After finishing Infinite Jest, I craved more. I started reading everything else he had written and the breadth of the topics seemed too much for one man to handle without resorting to a superficial assessment. His essays tackled everything, from the horrors of a cruise ship (see link below) to America and the proliferation of talk radio, to tennis as a religious experience and it was all from an unbelievably original and inspiring point of view. Says Thom Bissell, "He had the ability to make intellectual things sound plainspoken and scatological things sound beautiful and horrible things sound honest."

He covered tired topics like John McCain, animal rights and 9/11 and still came away with new discoveries and realizations about society, human psyche, politics. He would take the issue and look at it from a satellite and then with a microscope. Then he would examine the popular perspective in the same way. And somehow, he would tease out these brilliant, universal conclusions. It seemed he was always five steps ahead. And he wrote with such blistering honesty, clarity and grace, with a grandfatherly decency, that even when he wrote about the discomfort of attending the annual porn star convention in Las Vegas with a confusing mix of disgust and arousal, reading it aloud to your parents would be enlightening and enjoyable, not awkward.

And the book, Infinite Jest. How do I even begin to describe it? While I was reading Infinite Jest, every few pages I had to stop and just smile because it was too much joy to handle. It's a difficult read and I had to stop to let it sink in because it was too much insight, too much wisdom for me to handle. His writing is not for those without patience because he will keep writing and writing until he is absolutely sure that he has made himself understood. He finds irony in the most curious of places, his definitions are beautifully accurate, his descriptions load your senses and take you places that are sometimes dark. He makes you feel at home in your most anxious, neurotic and self-conscious state. When you read his words, they map your thoughts, his word transcend the page, and transplant his ideas straight from his brain into yours. And this makes you feel unalone.

Like other geniuses, he had an ability to see things differently, maybe because he noticed all the things that most of us filter out on a daily basis to keep us from going insane. And maybe that's why, like other geniuses (Hemingway, Cobain, Van Gogh) he killed himself.

For the rest of us, it seems that the ability to create such staggering beauty would be reason enough to live on. But what non-suicidal mind knows how to understand suicides. Obviously, that wasn't enough or for him, it wasn't about beauty. Maybe he was a genius because it wasn't enough. In Infinite Jest, DFW describes the case of one girl in a mental house who has tried to commit suicide. She describes her depression as being entombed in a sense of nothingness, no emotion, just the pain of an infinite numbness. His short story 'The Depressed Person' begins, "The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror." He had dealt with depression his whole life. Who is to say he made the wrong choice?

Was he thinking before he hung himself “What’s the point?” Despite all the answers we could come up with that would end in exclamation (Wait! What about life! Puppies!! Mountains!! Love!!! God?!!?!!), I'm sure for him they would still be unsatisfactory.

I emulate him in my writing. This post runs on and on because I have DFW's fear of not being perfectly understood. I have learned from him to write with honesty and to examine things that I would normally ignore, and to step back from things that I scrutinize too closely. I try like him to be profound without being cheesy but with this next sentence, I fail. He has changed the way I see the world, the way I write and read, and the way I live my life.

Transcript of DFW's Kenyon Commencement address to 2005 undergrads

Literary communities' memories of DFW

Collection of Essays DFW wrote for Harper's Magazine
(His essay 'Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise' is acclaimed and hilarious but long and hard to read on a computer)

All Cooped Up, Nowhere To Go

Well, I was warned but I didn't believe them because I thought I was strong. Plus, I am opposed to bottled water on principle. So, I drank the water (in my defense it was filtered and my boss drank it first) and now I can't leave the house because I have limited control over some of my bodily functions. It's funny how the more basic a function, the more you appreciate it after it's gone. I am making mental note to remember this day so I will always have a good basis of comparison when I think I'm having a crappy day. Har har. Being opposed to medication too, I have resorted to pain relief in the form of movies Ratatouille, The Darjeeling Ltd, and Meet The Robinsons. Pictures of this little one also work wonders in helping me forget the stabbing abdominal pains. She's my three week old niece. Her name is Noa Fei Leenders Cheng as of right now though that might need to be reversed. Haha get it? Cause she's Chinese. Well, half. And the last name for Chinese people comes first. I'm dehydrated and possibly delirious.


I had a good weekend though.

Me and the roommates decided to escape the city. The pollution is smothering in Lima, the cars are loud, the overbearing color is grey. Exhibit A:But as soon as we left city bounds, the cloud cover thinned and the unrelenting smell of combusted fuel fades. 4 hours later, we arrived in Barranca, a oceanside town. To say the cool pacific breeze blowing inland was a breath of fresh air would be a gross understatement. There's Jesus in the background.

We ate, had a few drinks and then joined the rest of the town at the party sponsored by the new fast food chain, Roky's. This is a tactic frequently employed by fast food chains here. Get 'em while they're developing. Savvy marketing ploy for sure.

Maarten, being the conspicuous tall white guy, got called up on stage to join in the festivities. There was potential for some cross cultural miscommunication when he was asked what he thought of the ladies in Barranca and all he could do was shrug because he didn't understand the spanish. I was bracing myself for a riot. He was saved by the MC, who translated his shrug to the crowd as english for 'They are beautiful.' Everyone laughed.

Now we were partial celebrities and we got warned by some kindhearted ladies that we should be wary because some guys were preparing to rob us. We went back to the hotel, put all our valuables down and rejoined the crowd. I got my own moment of celebrity when a bunch of 12 year old girls asked if they could take a picture with me. Needless to say, I was flattered.

The next morning, we journeyed for an hour by collective taxi to see the ruins of Caral, recently discovered to be the oldest in South America (5000 years old). They built pyramids, had elaborate religious ceremonies and stayed around for about 1,000 years. I asked our guide why he thought this site and not others had given birth to the first American civilization. He responded that this site is close to a river, fertile lands, situated in a valley and close to the ocean but not quite on the coast. It wasn't until after we left that I realised I should have asked what were the reasons for their downfall. All the benefits of the location are still around but the civilization is gone.

PS Hi to everyone reading. Please leave any questions or comments if you have any. Say anything you want, anonymously if that helps.