UK Hung Parliament: a bit like sex, really

Nobody can know how much influence Lord Mandelson´s pre-election quip had on potential Liberal Democrat voters who did not want Etoryinans in power.

“if you flirt with Nick Clegg in these crucial Labour-Tory marginals, then you’re likely to wake up the next morning with David Cameron” he said.
“And let me assure you, that is a night you would come to regret. You would wake up thinking something had gone horribly wrong in your life.”

However, Nick seemed not to have paid heed and said he fancied David a bit more. The resulting political speed-dating made it clear that Gordon can not now qualify for the grand finale of  “Date or dump: who rules?”. If Nick is indeed “being wooed” by both parties as CNN report, then New Labour has offered to sweeten the morning after by removing Brown´s face from the pillow.

David Miliband, go on down!

Imagining Electoral Reform

I start a six-day trek to the Tayrona (or Kogi) culture´s “lost city” here in north Colombia today, which means returning when the results of the UK General Election are finally decided. Or rather, when the results of the 150 or so marginal seats are decided. The outcome in each of the other 500 constituencies is already a foregone conclusion.

The introduction of TV debates seems to have been the main catalyst for the increased popularity of Nick Clegg and hence the party he leads, the Liberal Democrats. This in turn means that a hung parliament is being discussed as a real possibility. Pessimistic in this regard, I fear that the Etoryians will get a working majority and see out a term (low expectations means anything else will be doubly delicious).

Despite the apparently increasing willingness of the electorate to use tactical voting to be more effective in our first-past-the-post system, I do not believe 2010 will be a watershed. Nevertheless, I am hoping the system will come close enough to breaking point in its disproportional representation of the defeated parties that binding promises will be made by politicians heeding the anger of disenfranchised voters. 

You may say I´m a dreamer, but I´m not the only one.

Survival of the just-fit-enough

Watford romped past Reading 3-0 on Saturday to ensure Championship survival in what every fan hopes was their nadir season. Danny Graham scored either side of a Heidar Helgusson left-footer. The Sheffield Wednesday v Crystal Palace match this Saturday will decide which of those two drops with Peterborough and Plymouth. Watford´s result at Coventry will be irrelevant for both teams.

As the manager and local paper have emphasised over and over, "survival" was all we hoped for this season as the mismanagement of the funds from an-always-going-to-be-one season in the Premiership with which this blog began left us worse off than if we had never won the single most lucrative game in world football. How the fuck does that work? Ask Graham Simpson.

Colleagues of mine who shared Friday drinks from the few years before I left London will know that I am an arrogant pedant who is too keen on the invitation “Wanna bet on it?”. My favourite win until recently was against a Russian friend who told us that she had been to the Kazakhstani capital. I won a couple of quid telling her that she hadn´t.

Watford´s guarantee of Championship football in 2010-11 along with a poor season for Oldham in League 1 means that I have won a two-and-a-half-year old wager with Luke that the Latics would (not) be in a higher league positon than the Hornets on 7th December 2010. I was sweating on it for a while but – good sport that he is – I received a congratulatory message from him following our victory.

Oh, and a hundred pounds is not to be sneezed at by someone who hasn´t had a full time job for two years.

It was all yellow...

I may have been at South America´s largest market (Otavalo, Ecuador) but despite the multi-hued blankets, belts, bags, bracelets and bowls, my mind was focussed on just one colour. 

In three weeks, Watford have lost two six-pointers (at Hillsborough and home to Palace) and drawn our other three games: two home points against Boro and Brom, one brought back from Deepdale. Three points in five is relegation form so today´s Vic victory against second-bottom Plymouth only brings temporary relief (whilst sealing Argyle´s fate). Our three main companions in the fight against ending twenty-second in the Championship (the two mentioned first, and Scunthorpe) all lost today. QPR, by beating Palace, are now probably safe on 51 points, barring some significant form-breaking results.

The bottom looks like this:

Team	Pld	GD	Pts	Fixtures
Watford	42	-10	48	QPR (a) Leicester (a) Reading (h) Coventry (a)
Scunthorpe	42	-24	47	Bristol C (h) Reading (h) Donc  (a) Forest (h)
Crystal Palace	43	-3	46	Derby (a) West Brom (h) Sheffield Wed (a)
Sheffield Wed	43	-19	45	Sheffield United (h) Cardiff (a) Palace (h)
Plymouth	43	-19	41
Peterborough	43	-28	31

Watford have three away games in their final four matches while Scunthorpe have three home ones out of four. Cystal Palace and Sheffield Wednesday each only have three matches left, with Palace travelling twice and Wednesday once. Palace are only where they are because of a 10-point administration deduction but it is already clear that the final relegation position will only be decided on the final day, when they travel to Sheffield. I am not going to make a prediction. I just hope my fingernails hold out. How do the words go? “For you I bleed myself dry”...

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.

Moche culture Union Jack earring

Well, well, well. Today in the Bruning National Archaeological Museum, Lambayeque, Peru, I saw a large earring dating from around 750 AD that clearly has a Union Jack a millennium before the Act of Union.

North Peru Around Chachapoyas

We came to Chachapoyas to see Kuélap, the mountain-top "fortress" that predates Machu Picchu, consists of more stones than the Great Pyramid and was built by the "warriors of the cloud": the Cultura Chachapoyas. We got more than that: we saw

the world´s third-highest waterfall and sarcophagi to boot.

I asked the iPeru office to send me an electronic version of the map of the region so that I could begin planning my next trip. Apparently, the museum at Leymebamba is not to be missed.

Cajamarca to Chachapoyas

Movil tours now does a direct bus (50 soles) leaving at 6am and taking around 12 hours. The views are breathtaking but don´t look down if you are afraid of heights: the road is only centimetres wider than the bus in parts, with no crash barriers to prevent that plunge.

Huánuco to Huaraz

Most places in Huánuco (we were coming from Pucallpa) told us we needed to go (backwards) to Lima in order to then advance to Chavín de Huantar, site of the ruins of the oldest civilizaton in the Americas. This seemed rather ridiculous given our relative proximity on the map and we eventually found a scenic route along the Cordillera Blanca that took in some great peak views.

• In Huánuco, we caught a La Union-bound bus from Union Transport at cuadra 4, Jr. Tarapaca. 
• From La Union, we caught a 45-minute collectívo to Huallanca (3 soles).
• From there we caught one of the thrice-daily (4a.m., 4.4.5a.m., 1pm) buses to Huaraz.

Our original intention had been to stay in Chavín, which would have meant alighting at Catac on the last bus and catching another. We decided last-minute to stay in Huaraz and that was definitely the right decision.

Huaca de la Luna

The Moche culture did a paint job that looks this good after 1500 years; worth getting on a bus for.

My Ayahuasca Experiences

For information on where to try Ayahuasca in Pucallpa, click here.
My experiences with Ayahuasca varied but not to the extent that my wife Jun´s did. Her very first time and her first time with a second curandero, Jun exhausted superlatives in her attempt to capture how wonderful she had felt. In contrast, her last three nights were not so positive and the penultimate one was especially bad, so much so that she requested the help of Don Marçial to help her get through her bad trip. This seemed to be largely due to fear resulting from a lack of physical strength. The brew overwhelmed her.

It has been said that using words to try to describe the ayahuasca experience is an exercise in futility. My worry is more related to the fact that listening to other people describe a dream they had can be painfully tedious. I will try to avoid that fate by remaining general.

My encounters ranged from feeling nothing to undergoing a mammoth horror show, which, however, I would not describe as a bad trip because at no point was I afraid or paranoid. On the whole, the adventures consisted in large part of random memories plucked from the depths of my unconscious mind and served up for my consideration; the vast majority of these were negative: incidents of violence, bullying and maltreatment that I had inflicted or suffered.

Beyond this – especially when I increased my dose on my third night with Don Marçial – the episodes included scenes of imagined horror which could have been from a film like “Hostel” or “Saw” and hypothetical dangerous or threatening situations that challenged my ability to respond. If this all sounds gruesome, I am afraid that is because it was. The fact is though that I was never “lost” to the extent that I had no control over the reels playing through my mind.

Whilst there were a few recalled memories that brought a smile to my face, the main positive I got from my experimentation was confirmation of my successful transition from child bully and coward to the man I am today. I am aware that this may seem a modest achievement but IMHO, in a very un-Peter Pan way, many people never manage to grow up.

Bliar in a nebulosity of the hypothetical

Iraq inquiry chairman Sir John Chilcot said he was “dismayed” to see Tony Blair disappear in a nebulosity of hypotheticals. The former Prime Minister, defending his war as “immoral, yes, you know, but not illegal”, was giving evidence in front of bereaved families.

Bliar said “it would have been better if headlines about the 45-minute claim had been corrected”, using the passive in a conditional sentence to suggest it was not his own job to inform the public of the truth. “After all, you know, if I had been a newspaper editor and not the Prime Minister, you know,” he told incredulous inquiry members.

With hindsight, he said, he would have made it clearer the claim referred to battlefield munitions, not missiles, and would have preferred to publish the intelligence assessments by themselves. Though the grammar he used is often accompanied by expressions of regret, none were forthcoming from the blood-splattered Catholic convert.

Asked to clarify whether he would have supported the invasion of Iraq if he had thought Saddam did not possess WMD, he explained to the inquiry, “you know, you would not describe the nature of the threat in the same way if you knew then what you knew now, you know. You know, knowing now what we know, you know, means you would, you know, know something you didn´t know when you thought you knew what you knew, you know.”

Donald Rumsfeld was unavailable for comment.

Ayahuasca in Pucallpa, Peru

Neither Jun nor I had heard of the plant ayahuasca a year ago. Hitchhiking out of Futaleufu, Chile, in mid-February we were given a lift by a fisherman who was taking Patrick – a U.S. citizen – through the Andes and over the border into Argentina. In the course of the journey, Patrick mentioned its curative properties and Jun asked him to write its (hispanicized Quechua) name down. (The plant has other monikers – most notably “yagé” as in “The yagé letters”: the correspondence between William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg that was made into a book.)
Since then Jun has spent hours reading testimonies and papers on the medicine and even gone so far as to suggest that it has become the reason for our round-the-world trip. A trip to Iquitos to try it became a “must do”. I have been less awed by the hype but willing to experiment, as ever. In Cuzco I talked to several people who had partaken of the ceremony and one who claimed to have seen her future. I was also told by one guy I got chatting to that Pucallpa is the emerging location for shamans. 
The “ayahuasca” of the ritual is usually a “tea” prepared with two plants: the B. caapi vine that bears its name and chacruna. The result is a concoction that doesn´t entice in smell or taste but that bears psychoactive properties incomparable to any others known; there are those who swear by its curative capacity too. We came to Pucallpa, on the fringes of the Amazon jungle and seved by one of the great river´s tributaries, to experience it for ourselves. Iquitos – we figure – is just too touristy and commercial for discerning cultural appropriators like us. 
Having done some research on the net, we already had our eye on Don Marçial at km26 and caught a collectivo there but my first glance at the conditions – Jun had been considering a prolonged stay on a special diet – told me they were too “rustic” for my posh-bird wife and we left with a vague (and dishonest) suggestion that we might return a few days later. The next day though – after stopping off at not-for-us Jardín Botánico Ayahuasca (near the airport, they have good maps on their Jardín Botánico FB page) – we had two encounters with people that led to opportunities and were sitting in a darkened room the very same night with a handful of locals and no other gringos.

That was arranged through Miguel Tang. We met him at Yarinacocha when looking for a boat trip on the laguna. We did that (and saw Jardín Botánico´s lakeside retreat) and he mentioned that we could do a ceremony for 50 soles each, a very reasonable price. Miguel – who is also known as “Pituco”, after his boat - is also mentioned in our Lonely Planet guide book so we knew we could trust him.  Contact him on 961928694. 
Since we knew the process involved “purging” (vomiting is usual, shitting a distinct possibility) and had heard of one guy soiling himself three times during an evening´s experimentation, there was an element of trepidation involved in our first encounter. When the ceremony began, Alejandro, our “strong” shaman, blessed the concoction (there were syncretic Christian elements throughout the event) took the first drink and I was the second to receive it. Agua de Florida was given as hard-to-swallow chaser. Jun was second and had purged within about twenty minutes and began a journey that she was to describe as the best of her life. Sitting in the dark, I had trouble getting comfortable and relaxing into receiving the “spirit” of the plant. I spent the best part of three hours yawning. Finally I got up to go the toilet and was surprised by how disoriented my body was. I subsequently purged from both ends but saw nothing.

Four nights later – after a jungle excursion - we tried again. This time I took a follow-up swig and received shallow visions and experienced some feelings of insignificance and self-criticism. My trip, however, was over within an hour of imbibing for the second time. The next day we bought some prepared ayawaska (the preferred Quechua spelling) and tried it on three consecutive nights without a shaman. Nothing to report, unfortunately.
Finally, we made the decision to go back to Don Marçial (061788754) at km26 and phoned him to arrange it. We then spent four consecutive evenings there (coming back to town in the morning to rest at our hotel) and – especially on the third night, when I increased my dose by 50% - I finally felt the concoction overtake me. Click here to read my description of my dark but rewarding journey.