Maps And Figures

It probably won't come as a surprise to people that I love maps. From an early age I pored over them, and on our biannual family drives from Scotland to Czechoslovakia I would study our route and navigate for my dad. As I grew older I understood how maps could display so much more information than simple topography and place names: climate, industry, agriculture, ethnography, linguistics, politics - all are made clearer and more immediate with the help of a good map. I'm particularly fascinated by historical maps, with their imprecise coastlines, challenging handwriting, and flights of fancy (here be dragons). But especially because they show a reality that once existed and which isn't necessarily acknowledged today. Sure, London and Paris have been around for over 1000 years, but if you go back 2000 years then they disappear, only to be replaced by Londinium and Lutetia. Borders, which, today, feel immutable and permanent, ebb and flow, disappearing and reappearing with metronomic regularity. Names and national identities, for which people go to war and innocents die, are in fact ephemeral and subjective. Belarus epitomises this (un)reality perfectly. Attempts to find (the name) Belarus in old maps will more than likely come up blank; and if you do find it, it won't be where it is today.

Maps have a strange power. This map of China, from 1735, was recently given as a present from German chancellor Angela Merkel to China's president Xi Jinping on a state visit. A nice present you would think. However it caused huge waves on the Chinese blogosphere because it doesn't show Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan or Inner Mongolia as being Chinese, despite the Chinese official narrative of these being immutable parts of China since "ancient times". [For a more detailed analysis see this article.]

Guat's Up?

Of all the countries of Central America Guatemala is hands down the richest in terms of cultural heritage. Not only was its territory was the cradle of the classic Mayan civilisation but, what is less known, it was also the seat of the Spanish viceroyalty that consisted of the entire region, from southern Mexico all the way to Panama. This is where the rich and powerful of colonial Central America lorded it over their indigenous subjects. Even post-independence Guatemala was the dominant country amongst the small statelets of the region. It wasn't until the inevitable civil war of the second half of the last century that pitted left wing intellectuals, reformists and guerrillas against US-backed right wing genocidal military dictatorships and death squads that the country became a byword for violence, danger and rural misery. Things have quietened down a bit over the past 10 years (a lot less violence but still plenty of rural misery as the right wing military elite are still in power) and the tourists have returned to see what they had been missing out on.

Quiche Maya lady in traditional costume selling embroidery to tourists.

Meeting The Maya

Ever since leaving Peru and its rich archaeological heritage the historical remains on offer have been somewhat underwhelming. All that has changed now that I've reached Honduras and El Salvador, whose western edges mark the easternmost limits of the Mayan empire. Of the "Big 3" indigenous American civilisations (from north to south the Aztec, Maya and Inca) the Maya are undoubtedly preeminent both in terms of longevity and cultural achievements. The Maya first appeared around 2000 B.C., were still around when the Spanish conquered the Americas, and are still here today (although not doing human sacrifices anymore). The Aztecs and Incas by comparison were mere flashes in the pan, existing for no more than a couple of centuries, and whose culture has almost completely disappeared today.

Spotting the main temple complex of Copan through the trees.

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.

Ignore The Inca

Peru has, undeniably, the richest history of any country in the New World. Everyone has heard of the Incas, of Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail, and they are (quite rightly) very popular destinations for visitors to Europe. And although the Incan heritage is interesting, I don't find it that special. Many of their technologies had already been developed by previous Andean cultures and the Inca did little more than refine them a little. The reason for its lasting impression in the popular consciousness is that it was the final, large, South American civilisation and the one that the newly-arrived Europeans had to contend with. But it had only been in existence as a larger empire for a mere hundred years and was conquered by a mere 168 conquistadors. Not really all that impressive, especially considering its global contemporaries:  the Ming dynasty was building the city walls of Nanjing and reinforcing the Great Wall north of Beijing; the Sistine Chapel was being painted in Rome; the Ottoman empire was at its zenith; the Duomo of Florence had been completed; and Granada's Alhambra palace was already old. For all Cusco's fancy stonework (and it is remarkable) and Machu Picchu's mystique, the Inca's had already fallen way behind the civilisation race. It wasn't always so.

The obligatory photo of Machu Picchu taken when I was last in Peru, back in 2004 (and I still had a crappy little 35mm film camera).

Missionary Opposition

You don't have to know me (or read my blog) for long to know that my views of organised religion are sceptical to say the least. I have seen far too much intolerance, violence, fear, hatred, bigotry and plain ignorance stemming from religious faith for me to want to have anything to do with it. Sure, it can be a force for good, though it seems to me that those are always individual cases that probably occur in spite of religion rather than because of it. Paraguay's history, however, provides one example of a religious organisation living up to its promises of fairness, justice, betterment. Sadly the temporal success of the Jesuits amongst the Guarani provoked the jealousies of the stronger colonial powers. Nevertheless their achievements still live on in today's Paraguay and form an integral part of the national narrative.

All that remains of the vast Baroque church at Jesus de Taverangue, a church that would have been considered grand even in a large, European city of the time, but built  entirely by Guarani.

Brazilian Gems

Brazilwood and then sugar cane may have been the initial sources for Brazil's wealth, but they did not last long: you can't build an economy on a pretty tree and the uptake of sugar cane in the Caribbean was far more successful. To understand Brazil's success you need to head inland from Rio to the hills and mountains of Minas Gerais. Initially all development was along the coast, but soon explorers, the so-called bandeirantes operating out of São Paulo, moved further inland. The initial motivation was to find indigenous slaves, but soon the bandeirantes found that the vast interior was home to unimaginable mineral wealth. The gold deposits in and Ouro Preto were discovered in the late 17th century (they were hard to miss as gold was found in large nuggets in the streams) and soon people were flocking to the region to get a piece of the action.

View of Ouro Preto, once the richest city in the world and the epicentre of the world's largest gold rush that formed the basis of Brazil's wealth.

More Than Just Samba

Travelling through the northeast has helped shatter two preconceived, stereotypical images of Brazil, of landscape and culture. Brazil is often viewed as being synonymous with the Amazon rainforest and perhaps, for those who have a penchant for nature documentaries, like myself, with vast wetlands like the Pantanal.  But there is far more to it than that. The wetland theme started off well as I left Belem, almost all the way to São Luís, but as soon as my road turned inland, into the heart of the northeast that soon gave way to the dry savannah of the cerrado and the scruby, caatinga forest of the sertão. This vast, dry hinterland is reminiscent of the American wild west, and the small, dusty towns towns that dot the rolling hills need only a couple of gunslingers to complete the picture. This is cattle country and last year's drought was tough, as evidenced by the verges populated by rotting carcases and their attendant flocks of vultures. Lonely escarpments and odd rock formations dot this forgotten landscape, until you finally approach the coast again and sugar cane plantations take over.

Brazil isn't just the Amazon and Pantanal. There are some incredible landscapes, such as the multitude of crystal-clear pools amongst the white coastal sand dunes of Lençóis Maranhenses national park.

Lost World

The name Roraima may not be familiar to most people, yet nevertheless it is a place that is famous throughout the world. It is one of the largest and tallest of the hundred or so tepui that are found in southeastern Venezuela, spilling over into neighbouring Brazil and Guyana. Tepui are geological formations unique to the area (known as the Guyana Shield): large, sandstone mesas that rise many hundreds of metres, vertically, out of the surrounding countryside. When they were first 'discovered' by European explorers in the mid 19th century they fired the Victorian imagination. The remoteness and inaccessibility of these 'islands' in the jungle, along with the exciting new theory of evolution, led to fevered speculation as to what may live on their summits. The most famous example is Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World where a group of explorers finds a surviving population of dinosaurs (or a more recent incarnation in the animated film Up). When real life explorers finally did make it to the top of some of these tepui they may not have found any dinosaurs, but what they did discover was no less incredible...

Roraima (to the right) and Kukenan (to the left). Still quite a long way to walk to get there.

Profits Of Doom

Whilst I was tramping in Fiordland I quickly realised that the month I had given myself for New Zealand was nowhere near enough. Certainly not enough to do half as many of the hikes as I would have liked. But, not being the master of my destiny on this occasion, there was little I could do but return quickly to Christchurch, retrieve my belongings, say my last goodbyes to Liam and Eila, and make my way to the North Island.* Although I was reluctant to leave the south so soon I was, at least, glad to experience the genuinely aestival weather of the north that allowed me to finally stow away my jumper.

Two ways of getting to Wellington: the Interislander ferry from the South Island (on the left), or on a huge cruise ship from Australia (on the right).

Sounds Good

As pleasant as New Zealand's towns might be, a visitor to the country would be severely short-changed if that is all they saw. There is less than a handful of buildings that surpass 150 years. In terms of style or architecture there is nothing that doesn't mirror some British style (except for a few Maori offerings, but more on that later). New Zealand's true allure stems from its natural beauty, dynamic geology, and unique flora and fauna. If you don't like or appreciate the outdoors then don't even bother coming here. And of all the wild places in New Zealand, the southwestern corner is the wildest, ruggedest, harshest, and undeniably the most breathtaking.

Views like this are what draw people to New Zealand. The Routeburn valley of Mount Aspiring national park.

Old And New, And Maybe True Blue

With my brother gone my father and I could revert to sleeping in the back of the car. We had a week to get down to Sydney for my father's departure and so we decided to forgo the well-worn coastal route through the beach resorts of Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast, and instead we headed inland over to the dividing range before heading south into a part of New south Wales known as New England. The gently rolling green hills, quaint, tidy towns, and burbling streams, so uncharacteristic of the archetypal image of the vast Australian outback, dry, inhospitable, and probably out to get you.

The vast, untamed expanse of the Great Dividing Range at Gibraltar national park.

Here Be Dragons

My jaunt to Sumba completed I returned to Sape to join the well-trodden path to Labuanbajo. The town constitutes Indonesia's eastern outpost of mass tourism, as people from around the world flock to visit the islands of nearby Komodo national park, home to the eponymous dragons, the largest extant species of lizard in the world and dive in the renowned reefs in the surrounding national marine park. Being the wannabe naturalist that I am I couldn't not go, so I signed up and joined the queue.

A Komodo dragon in full swing, long, forked tongue out tasting the air.

Which Bali Do You Want?

"Have you been to Bali yet?" is the question that I've been asked by almost every single Indonesian I've met in the 3 months I've been here. Although Indonesia is a vast country comprising over 17,000 islands, 300 ethnic groups and 742 different languages, I am white and ergo I must be going to Bali. If any foreigner has heard about Indonesia it is invariably about Bali. For many Australians it is their equivalent to the Spanish Costas for sun-starved northern Europeans, and their way of holidaying there is not at all dissimilar. Yes, I was planning to go to Bali I would reply, but also Sulawesi, Ambon, Flores, Sumatra and Java. There is more to Indonesia than just one island. Bali's overwhelming presence on the tourist trail through Indonesia made me resent it even before I had set foot on it. I was sure I wouldn't like it and wasn't planning on staying long.

My nightmare image of Bali.

Java Man (aka Where Are The Muslims?)

Of the little we in the West know of Indonesia, the fact that it's the most populous Muslim country in the world, with over 200 million officially registered adherents (more on this definition in a later post), is probably the most widely known factoid, helped by the odd Islamist bombing and display of irrational intolerance that make great media headlines. However it is an Islam that wouldn't be recognised in the Middle East. Islam came relatively late to the Indonesian archipelago, some time in the 12th century, by which time Hinduism had already been there for a millennium and Buddhism about half that, and it wasn't until the late 15th century that it became the dominant religion. Such a long legacy of Indian religions cannot but fail to leave a trace, a trace that is most evident in the Javanese heartland, which, paradoxically, is also considered to be among the most conservatively Muslim parts of the country.

Smoking Mount Merapi (one of the most active volcanoes in the world) towering above the ruins of Borobudur (visible in the centre-right of the picture as a small point, though trust me, it's big) in the pre-dawn mist.

Climbing Kerinci

Travelling down the interior of Sumatra you get a good sense of its size and relative wildness. The Trans-Sumatran highway is a joke: barely wide enough to let two trucks pass, winding along the hilly spine of the Bukit Barisan mountains and potholed, you'll be lucky if you achieve an average speed 40lm/h. It gives you plenty of time to watch the surrounding countryside go by. Small, dusty, farming villages with their adjoining rice fields, vegetable patches and banana trees alternate with large chunks of forest spilling down to the roadside from the wild, green mountains. Encroachment onto virgin forest is a problem as the human population of Sumatra increases and demands greater space and resources. Nevertheless this is still a haven of biodiversity and is the last refuge on earth of some of the world's largest and most majestic animals: the Sumatran tiger, Sumatran orangutan (slightly different to its Bornean cousin) and Sumatran rhino are found nowhere else on earth (actually there is a small population, estimated at 25 individuals, of Sumatran rhinos in Sabah). Naturally it's difficult to get out to the places where these animals live, and a sighting is as likely as winning the lottery. Instead I decided to just go for a hike in one of Sumatra's three main national parks.

Statue of a harimau (Sumatran tiger) guarding the road that snakes through the tea plantations to the Kerinci National Park and the iconic volcano that lords over the surrounding countryside.

Slivers Of Quicksilver

For most visitors to the Philippines there are two main attractions that draw them to the tropical archipelago: the beaches and associated diving and snorkelling activities on the one hand, and the mountains and tribes of the north of Luzon on the other. Seeing as I was already in Luzon, and that I'm not a huge fan of beaches, the decision as to where to head to after Manila was really a no-brainer. North to the mountains it was, with a little side-trip to the beautiful colonial town of Vigan on the coast, which still displays some faded splendour of bygone days. My little detour accomplished I finally made it to Baguio, the self-styled capital of the Cordillera.

Cute kids vying to have their photos taken by the beach in Vigan.

Chinese Landscapes

I remember, as a child, seeing traditional Chinese landscape paintings. I remember thinking to myself that they didn't look real: they were permanently misty and the mountains looked like caricatures, sort of ideal mountains that a child would draw, but far more "mountainy" than any real mountain. They didn't look like anything I had ever seen in Europe and so I simply dismissed them as fantastical make-believe landscapes ... how wrong I was.

Yangshuo's iconic karst scenery and idyllic rivers make it one of China's most popular tourist destinations, and for good reason.

Cradles And Graves

500km inland from Qingdao lies Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province. The province's name means "south of the river", in this case the Yellow River, and is without a doubt the cradle of Chinese civilisation. Within a relatively small radius lie the remains of over a dozen capitals of previous dynasties and kingdoms, most of the buried under countless layers of silt deposited by the continuously flooding river. For archaeology buffs it is the region to visit in China.

Zhengzhou itself is a large, hectic city of over 8.5 million people (more than Greater London) that, despite its long history, has little to show for it. But as a major railway junction it is a handy base from which to explore the surrounding region and travel back in time. If you want to work chronologically your first stop should be Anyang to the north of Zhengzhou, a rather nondescript and drab city, but sitting atop the ruins of the ancient Shang capital. Dating back to 1400 BC the ruins represent the very start of Chinese history as well as the origins of the Chinese writing system. Thousands of bones and turtle shells have been unearthed bearing the characters that would give rise to modern hanji script, and although most of them are too far removed to be recognisable, the few that have traversed the millennia almost unchanged elicit goosebumps as you feel the ancient world communicating directly to you. The succeeding Zhou dynasty moved the capital to Luoyang, west of Zhengzhou, where the historic remains include more than just excavated earthen walls and tombs with ritual sacrifices. The most noteworthy are the Longmen Grottoes, stretched out along either side of the Yi river. Here generations of Buddhist monks carved shrines and temples into the rock, from the tiny to the grandiose, with the central Buddha reaching over 17m, over a period of 300 years. Most of them survived unscathed until the beginning of the last century when the combined effects of Western collectors, Japanese invaders and the disastrous Cultural Revolution defaced the majority.



The main temple of the Longmen Grottoes with its 17m central Buddha carved from the cliff face.

8:15. The Time It's Always Been

The name Hiroshima will forever be linked in the consciousness of the world with the events of the 6th of August 1945, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, ushering in the nuclear era with a bang. A bang so large that it destroyed 90% of the city and killed almost half of its population and helped precipitate the end of the Second World War (although some academics argue that the USSR's declaration of war against Japan and invasion of Manchuria on the 9th of August was a far greater reason for their surrender). The effects of the atomic bombs on the world were momentous and too great to mention here, but in Japan it led to the pacifist constitution and a widespread national desire for peace (not that Japan doesn't have its militarist nationalists, and its continued inability to admit and apologise for, rather than regret, its World War II atrocities doesn't help make it any friends in the region). The epicentre for the peace and nuclear disarmament movement worldwide is undoubtedly Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park where a museum, shrine, cenotaphs and statues pay moving tribute to those who perished on that fateful day. The symbol of the complex is the A-Bomb Dome. The building was an exhibition hall before the war and was almost directly below the bomb - the hypocentre, or ground zero - when it exploded (the bomb was detonated 600m above the ground so that the destructive heat and shock waves would not be impeded so as to cause maximum damage) and so its vertical walls survived the devastating blast since they were perpendicular to the shock waves. Its preserved skeleton serves as a grim reminder to what happened on that fateful day.

The empty shell of the A-Bomb Dome serves as a stark reminder of that horrific day 66 years ago.