Same Same But Different

Same same but different. It's a phrase many people who've travelled through southeast Asia will be instantly familiar with, where the pidgin English of the local touts isn't nuanced enough to incorporate the word "similar". The phrase is equally applicable for travels in Hispanophone America. The common language and shared colonial history unites the 18 countries and almost 400 million people. Yet despite the very obvious similarities, there are many differences, both profound and frivolous. The profound are the subject of many a book (I'm guessing) and scholarly essays. I, instead, would like to take a closer look at the frivolous and arbitrary.

Although maize is the basis of much Latin American cuisine from Bolivia all the way up through to Mexico the way it is prepared varies significantly. As you get closer to Mexico the slap slapping sound of tortillas being moulded becomes ever more ubiquitous.

South America In 20 Photos

I thought I'd share with you some of my favourite photos from South America that didn't make it into a blog post. I hope you like them and don't forget that they (and many more) can be found in the country albums on the right hand side of the blog.

Ladies shooting the breeze by a window in the colonial quarter of Cartagena.

A yucca-type plant in one of the many ephemeral ponds that form atop Roraima.

Mind The Gap

There are a number of famous roads whose names alone evokes exotic, dreamy images amongst all travellers: the Karakorum Highway, Route 66, the Transfăgărășan, the Pamir Highway and the Panamaerican Highway are all the stuff of legend. The latter extends all the way from Prudhoe Bay, in northern Alaska, to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego ... well, almost. The Panamerican is rightly famous for crossing the length of the Americas and traversing a multitude of landscapes and climates. But what is less well-known is that it's incomplete. It has a chink. The road doesn't link North and South America, instead there is a gap of about 160km across the Panama-Colombia border where there is nothing but impenetrable rainforest. This is the Darien Gap and is one of the world's great travelling challenges. But before I figured out how to get past it without flying, I had one last stop in Colombia.

Colombia's Twin Crops: Coca And Coffee

Before Shakira came along with her truthful hips and waka waka'ed her way into the global consciousness, the most famous Colombian in the world was probably Pablo Escobar. Even though he was shot dead in 1993, when I was only 12 years old, the iconic image of him with his moustache and 70's pornstar hair are deeply seated in my popular culture unconscious. Perhaps because he has been used as the template for every Latin American drug baron in every single film since then, from the low budget El Mariachi, to big, Hollywood blockbusters. Often they'll have an exotic eccentricity, like a a killer pet iguana, just like Pablo who kept a small menagerie of hippos (who have since escaped and become a feral nuisance on the lower Magdalena river).

The modern image of Medellin that the authorities want to promote: vibrant, affluent and cutting edge.

I Heard It Through The Grapevine

Getting information about where to go whilst travelling is always an interesting process. The first port of call for many (including myself) is some sort of guidebook. These are useful places to start, with a lot of info in a single place. A mistake many people make though is to view guidebooks as some sort of Bible, as the sole, unquestionable, infallible source of facts. Mistakes can, and often do, arise and should be expected. Not only that, but in limiting yourself to a single, popular source of data you end up following a well-worn path taken by many other travellers (an entity known as the Gringo Trail here in Latin America, and the Banana Pancake Trail in Southeast Asia), staying in the same guesthouses and hostels, and perhaps only interacting only with other tourists. Instead you should spread your net wide in your search for travel tips: trawl the net, talk to friends, other travellers, locals, read books and articles and generally keep your eyes and ears open.

Sometimes more than one source of information is required.

Western

You don't have to spend much time in Colombia to notice that there is a sizeable middle class. More so than anywhere else I've been in Latin America, except for perhaps Argentina and Chile. On the one hand this means that things are generally more expensive than in other countries, but on the other hand there is a nascent internal tourism culture with a reasonable number of camp sites to be found throughout the country (Colombians aren't so much into hiking and camping, but prefer to drive to the camp site and unpack from the comfort of the car boot). Colombians also seem to take pride in being the most Spanish and Western of the Hispanophone countries of the Americas. Following a series of discussions with my wonderful hosts in Bogota (Tristan and Jenny, who are my brother's friends), I started wondering more closely about what it actually means to be Western. It's a term I use quite often in this blog (with a capital so as to differentiate it from a purely geographical adjective) and feel instinctively that I know what it means, but do I really? or is there a consensus about what it truly is.

The royal Spanish coat of arms of Castilla-Leon hangs proudly on Tunja's town hall. Such a flagrant symbol of Spanish colonialism would be hard to find anywhere else in Latin America.

Sweet Introduction To Colombia

You might change money, political system and even the time on your watch when crossing borders, but geography is hardly ever that abrupt, and so the fertile, green slopes of the Andes continue their northward march into Colombia. The mountains are a little lower, the valleys a little deeper, the vegetation a little lusher, and the indigenous presence a little less noticeable, but apart from that much the same. The southern mountains of Colombia house the country's most important archaeological sites, at San Agustin and Tierradentro, and so I decided, for the sake of completeness, to put on my Indiana Jones hat (which happens to be a rather funky kangaroo leather cowboy hat) and investigate.

The Rio Magdalena valley near its source at San Agustin. The Magdalena is Colombia's largest river and bisects the country neatly in a south-north line before it reaches the Caribbean at Baranquilla.

Festival Of Colours

I started my South American by sticking to the Caribbean coast, visiting first Cartagena and then Maracaibo, the major ports of Colombia and Venezuela respectively, though their histories and characters are quite dissimilar. Cartagena was, for over two centuries, the most important Spanish port in the Caribbean, with imposing sea walls and fortresses protecting a sheltered lagoon port (not that that stopped it from being sacked by Francis Drake in 1586). Long regarded as the Pearl of the Caribbean it enjoys its status as doyenne of Spanish colonial culture and is one of the most visited tourist sites in the region. Maracaibo, on the other hand, was long nothing but a provincial backwater. Quite literally as it sits on the shore of Lake Maracaibo, South America's largest lake. It wasn't until the late 19th century, when substantial petroleum deposits were discovered beneath the lake, that the town's fortunes changed overnight, turning Venezuela into one of the world's leading producers of the black stuff. The town has little to recommend itself to passing tourists who rarely stop, except to change buses for somewhere more enticing, where it is not so hot or humid.

Cartagenas old fortifications looking out across to the modern, upmarket Bocagrande neighbourhood.

Groundhog Day

Just a quick, initial message for those who surf on in and don't receive Facebook or e-mail updates this is to let you know that a) I have added several posts about New Zealand that can be found below (although they were written after I left New Zealand I have placed them before so as to be in the correct chronological order) and b) there are new photo albums, of East Timor, Australia and New Zealand available to view from links on the right hand side of the website. But now back to the blog:

So, here I am, back on dry ground. 21 days, one ocean, 12,000km, a new continent, and a new hemisphere later. It was certainly an interesting experience. There was nothing for me to do, the views were about as monotonous as you can get, one day merged into another, each indistinguishable from the next. In one case that was more true than usual. On Monday the 4th of February we crossed the international date line and so we had the (dubious) pleasure of experiencing two Mondays in a row (the crew were not impressed, although in the other direction they get a 4-day week). And yet the time, if you'll forgive the pun, just sailed past. I suppose that I get along quite well with myself and took the opportunity afforded me to catch up with some reading, writing and working on my knowledge of pop culture by watching a slew of films that have accumulated on my hard drive. And I also discovered what life is like for a modern-day sailor.

Not another Monday! we just had one today.

Contained

Dear readers, you may have noticed that I've fallen somewhat behind with my blogging of late. Sorry. Unfortunately that will continue to be the case for the next three weeks when there will be no more updates. The reason is a happy one though, because I will have succeeded in my plan to cross the Pacific without flying. I will be aboard a container ship bound from Australia to North America, embarking here in New Zealand, and alighting in Cartagena, Colombia, just past the Panama Canal. Many people have asked me how I arranged such a thing and whether I will be working aboard. Sadly, gone are the days when you could just turn up at a port and ask around the ships to see if they would be willing to take you as a deckhand for free passage and board. These days the sums of money too large and bureaucracy too stifling* to allow anything like that to happen. Instead you have to pass via dedicated freighter travel agents who facilitate the booking of a limited number of berths on regular cargo routes (and when I say regular I mean that there may be only one or two sailings a month) plied by transcontinental container ships. The number of available spaces is small, but then again not many people want to travel in this manner. Not only does it take substantially longer than flying (19 days instead of 19 hours), but it's even significantly more expensive. My ticket to Colombia is costing roughly twice the equivalent air fare. Instead container ships are for those who stubbornly refuse to fly, are concerned about their carbon footprint (an extra person aboard a container ship has no effect on the amount of fuel used), or perhaps have a shed-load of stuff to take with them (I get 150kg free baggage allowance - it's just a shame I'm going to Colombia rather than from, otherwise I could have defrayed my costs by taking along some of the country's choice export products). Nevertheless I am sure it will be an adventure and certainly a unique travel experience, though perhaps somewhat monotonous. Yet I have prepared myself for that and have several hundred books with me and over a hundred films as well, so should be able to while away the hours at sea. I suppose it's also a good opportunity to see whether I really get seasick or not...

Distance marker in Auckland. So I will be covering a little over 12,000km in the next three weeks.

*Among the hoops I had to jump through to book this passage (the process was started back in the start of December) was to prove I had insurance, have a medical certificate, and even have my name sent off to the US Department of Homeland Security. I'm now on their books and am looking forward to the American visa application process.