Libertadora del Libertador

Though it is said that you learn something new every day, most of my knowledge about the liberation of South America from Spanish colonial rule has been obtained by a sort of osmotic process over a year: statues and street names, obelisks and museums, artworks galore. I am at the point where I could recognise a silhouette of Sucre or the back of Bolivar (though the portraits of the latter by Julio Blanco (a good link to which I cannot find) were something different). 

Before noticing a museum two days ago (behind the Monastery of Santa Catlina, where she was raised after  her mother died a month after giving birth), the name of Doña Manuela Sáenz meant nothing to me, however. No feminist will be surprised to hear that the woman Bolivar called the “liberator of the liberator” (she is said to have saved her lover´s life on three occasions) had been airbrushed from history until recently. 

The tour round the museum (again, “no photos”, again, a lenient guide) was more of an attempt to insert her into the liberation story than a genuine reflection on her life (I had learned more from Wikipedia last night) but most of her belongings had been burned when she died a pauper´s death in Paita, Peru. We were told she was a brave woman, fearless: unfortunately there is little left to illustrate her heroism.

Bloody Quito

We had been warned that the Quito school of religious art tended towards the gory. Yesterday, we were guided around the Monastery of Santa Catalina, whose nun "inmates" have only one hour per day to talk to each other or watch TV,  and saw some particularly macabre examples.
There was the image of sheep drinking the blood of Christ from a trough as it poured from his wounds. Additionally, we were shown a painting of Christ skinless after flagellation, imaginatively called "Christ´s spine". I guess after seeing pictures such as these, even the nuns count their blessings.

¡Phew!

After a run of five without a win, which included the humiliation of giving soon-to-be-relegated Peterborough their first away win of the season (and the double over us since I last wrote about the Horns), Watford beat Ipswich at Vicarage Road on Tuesday to relieve a little of the fear of relegation that has deepened since I may have counted chickens at the end of 2009.

My nephew Joss will only have seen us win three times in 2010 (all home Tuesday night games, against Bristol City and Sheffield United too) but I haven´t had a text report from him now for ages. I think he needs some nagging. It also looks less likely that I will be back in the UK to shout on the Golden Boys before the end of the season.

Instead, I intend to compensate by going to see a match in Quito on Easter Sunday when the present league leaders from this beautiful colonial city take on second-placed Barcelona (de Guyaquil), who I will be supporting because their kit is the same colours as Watford´s (they have quite a name, too).

Ecuador´s Best Panama Hats

As I am sure you know, the "Panama" hat is from Ecuador, and Cuenca is the capital of hat-making. Today we were shown around Alberto Pulla´s workshop by the man himself, who has been featured in articles across the world.

Shrunken Heads

 

Forget the US thing for "shrinks", in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Shuar avenged murders by reducing the killer´s head to a tsantsa, the size of a tennis ball.

Peruvian Beers

Being vegetarian, I deprive myself of many of the culinary delights of the countries I visit, meaning, for example, that I missed out on roasted guinea pig in Peru. I do my best to compensate for this failure by trying every beer (and other new alcoholic drinks, come to that) I come across. To that end, I can report that I managed twenty brewed-in-Peru cervezas in my six months in the country, which ended Sunday.

The A-Z list is:

Anpay*

APU cerveza de coca

Arequipeña*

Barena

Club*

Cristal*

Cusqueña blonde*, malt, red, wheat

Franca*

Perkas*

Pilsen Callao*

Pilsen Polar

Quara

Real McCoy`s Amber Ale dark and light

San Juan

Trujillo*

Zenda*

The asterixed majority are same-samey bubbly lagers, the best of which may have been Club, the worst Perkas. Barena and San Juan were similar but had a Red-Stripe tang to them, a positive in my book. Cusqueña´s malt was too sweet for many but I found it and the targeted-at-women Quara to my liking, though Pilsen´s black beer, 

called Polar for some obscure reason, was my favourite. The coca-leaf beer is something to try yet not savour, though I would steer clear of Cusqueña´s “limited edition” red beer, if it is being marketed when you are in the country.

Is it a sun dog? Is it a parhelion? No, it´s a 22 degree halo.

Well, I never even knew such things existed before we got to Pimentel beach, north Peru, at noon. A bit of research later and I found out this rainbow round the sun (the pic doesn´t quite do the colour justice) is formed when light is refracted through hexagonal ice particles in thin high level clouds such as cirrostratus. Another "wow" on my long trip away.

Waterfall wonders

Last week we were in Chachapoyas and were told that the nearby Catarata Gocta was the thid highest  waterfall in the world. Naturally, we added it to our list of things to do. We have seen a fair few in the sixteen months we have been away, on walks in Australia and New Zealand, a visit to the fantastic Iguazu Falls as well as from buses throughout the Andes. I have been looking forward to seeing the world´s tallest, Kerepakupai-Merú (known since 1933 as Angel Falls), in Venezuela on this trip.

At the registration point for the falls was posted a Washington Post piece which stated that there was some disagreement about the status of Gocta, due to there not existing a universally recognized standard of waterfall measurement. It turns out that lots of factors need to be taken into consideration when considering what can even be defined as a waterfall (or what type of waterfall it can be defined as). Vertical height is one of those, slope is a second, volume a third. Finally, the question of whether non-bedrock cascades should be included in the measurement of a waterfall is an important and too-long-to-go-into-here element.

Wikipeda only deepened the confusion. On the waterfall page it said Cautley Spout in Cumbria was England´s highest. On Cautley Spout´s page, it said Gaping Gill in North Yorkshire falls a greater distance (but into a pothole). The waterfall page also names Gocta and another waterfall as the world´s third highest. Seems to me, I could do a better job of measuring them than that.

Anyway, further research suggests that Gocta is actually only the third highest waterfall in Peru. Catarata Yumbilla at 870m or 896m falls in four tiers, while the Three Sisters Waterfall has three tiers and reaches about 914m. The World Waterfall Database has Gocta at 16^th. Somehow, I don´t think this information is going to change the marketing strategy of the agencies around Chachapoyas´ Plaza de Armas.