I Done a Holiday

We're Doing Another Holiday (definitely)

2011-09-13T17:00:00.000-05:00

So our unlikely year has become even more unlikely (actually it's now much longer than a year) as we have won/been selected/fluked the top prize to work for three months as Travel Volunteers in Japan.
We'll be visiting all 47 prefectures in the country and writing about it every day. You won't find much about it here, though. Nope, now I'm contractually-obliged to put all of my musings here: http://travelvolunteer.net/
Expect less swearing and more positivity. Will still be updating this site occasionally, though, including a post about a recent press trip to Scotland. Look out for that next week.
In the mean time, I strongly advise you to read this, which was written by a friend, is brilliant, and is a big part of the reason I applied for this Japan gig in the first place. Just don't expect me to be so eloquent in the coming months.

We're Doing Another Holiday (maybe)

2011-08-25T03:30:00.001-05:00

Yeah, so, this then. Mon us! Mon Japan!

Thus Spake Lafferty

2011-08-08T06:43:00.003-05:00

While backpacking, I learned that:

Anyone who starts a sentence with the words “Hello my friend...” is absolutely not your friend.
Making sweeping generalisations about nationalities is a stupid, dangerous and inaccurate business.
Contrary to popular belief, the English are not the most obnoxious species of traveller.
Israelis are.
In fact, the English only claim a bronze medal at best: the silver goes to the ever-reliable French, who are every bit as pompous in, say, Vietnam, as they are in Paris.
In accordance with popular belief, most Canadians really are quite nice, if a little stupid.
The vast majority of Americans you meet on the road are smart, engaging and enthusiastic. The really special ones stay at home, hating people, shooting things and voting Republican.
You will never see an Asian in South America with a backpack on his back. They wear them on the front, like a precious child.
Anywhere in the world the Irish are great company, but then I knew that already.
People who moan that life in the UK couldn't be worse have absolutely no fucking clue what they're talking about.

Photo: Wee Mo
It is very hard to get used to putting arse-paper in the bin, especially as a man. After 14 months, it still strikes me as weird.
In large parts of the United States, the tap water tastes like mould.
If you don't carry a gun in San Salvador, you're in the minority.
There are few things in the world more wonderful than the British supermarket, especially at Christmas time.
Britain has meddled in the affairs of almost every country on the planet. Sometimes it advanced a nation by centuries; sometimes it was a shameless invasion, but I will never again think that the UK is nothing more than a daft wee country that's shit at the Olympics. The modern world – for all it's ugly faults – wouldn't be same if we hadn't been so ambitious, organised and cruel.
There are few pleasures on Earth that outweigh listening to a Frenchman grumble that the English language has spread all over the globe. Tell it to Napoleon, Dickface – tell it to Wellington!
The passion of British football fans is to the passion of South American football fans as Stephen Hawking's boxing skills are to those of Manny Pacquiao.
The fame of the Scottish Highlands, when compared to mountain ranges around the world, is also a total mystery.
There are a long list of cities that you've never heard of that have more people in them than all of Scotland. Many of them are in China.
Lucky 88 Chinese takeaways are not so named because, as I thought previously, they are all coincidentally located at number 88 on their respective streets. No, it's means more than that.

Photo: Wee Mo
Walkers shortbread is available globally, as is Scottish whiskey. Alas, the tattie scone hasn't quite spread its wings so far. Yet.
Roaring alcoholism has.
Air conditioning is likely humankind's greatest invention.
There are few more disheartening sounds in nature than the pneumatic screech of a mosquito in your ear at 3am.
No one outside of Britain and America makes good music, and the former considerably out-performs the latter, and always has. If you need evidence of this, listen to an 80's compilation CD, several of which can be heard on Chilean buses.
Si absolutamente necesario, puedo hablar une poco Español.
People are fundamentally good, especially once they accept the fact they can't sell you anything.
An hour on a bus is not a long time; in fact only when a journey stretches past a solid day will I now regard it as “long.”
Travelling long distance on a bus in Argentina is far, far more comfortable that travelling with a budget airline in Europe. The buses include food, wine, movies, and a piss-pot, AND usually feel a lot less like they'll kill you.
Backpacking is essentially like being at a very, very long festival: unexpected things happen all the time; disgusting things also happen regularly; it is almost completely unforgettable, save for the bad bits; you'll probably run out of money; and it's best to accept the fact that you will fucking stink for most of it.

Photo: Wee Mo
People in the countries of South East Asia are not part of a homogeneous, like-minded whole: the Vietnamese are as different to Thais as the French are to Germans.
Not every country is worth visiting. Exhibit A: Brunei. Exhibit B: Paraguay. Exhibit C: Honduras.
In the UK, crisps advertise having “20% less sodium and fat”; in America, “chips” advertise having “20% more chips.”
Argentina, Peru, Chile, Colombia, every country in Central America, Malaysia and Singapore all have vastly superior bus networks than America.
If I owned a hostel or restaurant, I would strive for the Lonely Planet's recommendation. I would also massage HostelBookers and HostelWorld reviews to ensure I was top dog and that my rivals always had something unsavoury as their most recent comment.
A visit to any major Asian city will bring with it the virtual guarantee of seeing vermin. In Vietnam rats can also be found on the menu.
I'll say it again: the condition of idiocy is not restricted by colour, age, creed, sex or anything else.
Q. What happens when you cross the good looks of Spain with those of Italy?
A. Argentina.
Anyone seeking their fame and fortune should head to Patagonia and become a perfidious purveyor of peanut butter. £12 a jar, I shit you not. Alternatively, sell Marmite in Asia - £11 a go.
There are many things I would now deem essential to a round-the-world trip. An underwater camera is one; a laptop is another. Oh and Skype, too.

Photo: Wee Mo
Being afraid is a terrible thing. The sooner you can overcome it in places like Buenos Aires, the sooner you will have a better time. However, in places like San Salvador, it can be quite healthy.
"The only thing stronger than this moonshine is Mother Nature, motherfucker."
A visit to Antarctica or the Galapagos is like a trip into human-free pre-history.
Travelling for a year does not require membership to a secret society, nor any kind of exclusive club. Anyone can do it, you just need money and dedication. It's worth it, too.
Our jobs are more interesting than approximately 88% of people we meet.
There is almost certainly no one guarding Israel – every bastard is in South America, cluttering up the joint, pushing, shoving, shouting Hebrew, laughing at any concept of manners, and generally annoying people. No one likes to be excluded from a group; Israelis exclude everyone, ergo no one likes Israelis. I cannot believe it is because they are born bastards, nor that it's something inherent to Judaism. Instead I think it's because they're literally trained to be c***s in the world's most despicable army. After three years of being told what to do, they are unleashed on the world, and spend a year letting their ids take over. The rest of the global backpacking community has to deal with the fallout, all the while tiptoeing around any conversations that point out that, y'know, if any country needed a PR boost, it'd be theirs.
Being seen as the big man matters in Asia. This can range from refusing to back down in an argument, to literally sitting on a cushion to make themselves “bigger” than everyone else at the table.
There are too many dogs in the world and not enough swallows (assuming that swallows eat all biting insects).
Whoever is behind marketing the English Premiership as a global brand has done a ridiculously good job and is doubtless exceedingly rich. In every corner of the planet there is someone who will happily watch Blackburn vs Stoke. Amazing.
When it comes to telling someone your nationality, Scottish>European>British>English.
The moment you tell most foreigners that you are Scottish, they will reference Braveheart, whiskey and/or kilts. Pre-1995 they must have had 33% less to say. That would have been nice.
Humankind is utterly and irreversibly fucked, because no matter how little money people have Sexy Time is always free.
Visiting religious sites around the world is a great way to spend time, even if all they do is underline the certain non-existence of any god from this era or any other. So many monuments, so few results.
It becomes surprisingly easy to turn down a child beggar surprisingly quickly.
Having blonde hair and blue eyes, in many parts of the world, is tantamount to walking around with a sign saying “I have more money than you, please harass me.”
As you travel picking up bits of the world's history, you learn that religion has certainly scarred humanity more than it has healed. So many persecutions, inquisitions, wars... Then you realise that you could learn the same thing by picking up today's newspaper, let alone looking at history. Then you begin to feel very glum indeed.
It's worth going to Argentina for the steak alone.
It's worth going to Argentina for the Iguazu Falls alone.
It's worth going to Argentina for the Fitz Roy range alone.
It's worth going to Argentina.
Of the many spurious things that have been said about seeing the world, probably the most accurate is: “There is no better form of education than travel.”
There are sights in the world too large and beautiful for my brain to fully comprehend e.g. The Perito Moreno glacier, the Iguazu Falls, Yosemite National Park, and all of Antarctica.
There are few clichés more accurate than a smug diver saying: “It's a different world down there.”
There's probably quite a strong argument that says the world today would be better off if America had done its time as a British colony, rather than going and winning the War of Independence.
No nation on Earth makes films so resolutely focussed on misery as Britain.
Contemporary American drama is so good that even in a windowless, sweaty hell-hole in, say, Cambodia, watching it can transport me to a very different place.
There are few more heart-warming sights than watching an elderly couple dance the tango to the music of a hastily assembled busking band, simply because they have a spare five minutes and are still in love.
In their more generous moments, some parents say that breeding is the best thing they've ever done. Time will tell, but I'm guessing most of them haven't been travelling.
Westerners hate to know where their dinner comes from and go to great lengths to make sure it looks like unrecognisable food and not the source animal. Everyone else is quite happy to buy this or that with the head still on, its death mask frozen in anguish, then feed its feet to their kids.
If you go into any internet café abroad, 80% of people are looking at Facebook. Part of me wants to believe that it's because Facebook a wonderful communication tool, a way for people to maintain relationships as they further their minds and nourish their souls.
But most of me accepts that it's because every narcissistic bastard simply wants to scream: “Wooo! Raarrr! Look at me! I Done A Holiday!”

Photo: Wee Mo
Not all bananas taste like banana.
Bob Marley can be heard on every continent, even Antarctica. And I do not like Bob Marley.
If you want to get steaming, high and chase tail, there's not much point in going backpacking – blow the money in Ibiza et al instead. You're less likely to get a doing, and you won't feel so guilty about shitting away your money on beer, drugs and fanny.
There are many poorer counties on Earth, but few as clatty as Bolivia, the lofty toilet of South America. Annoyingly, there aren't many more naturally beautiful either.
This is largely down to the fact that the colonial-era Spanish cared little for digging sewers. On the other hand the French and British did – that's why you can go somewhere as shockingly poor as Cambodia today and flush away your jobbies, paper and all, with glee.
A pandemic/climatic catastrophe/zombie apocalypse that reduced the world's population by 30% - 50% would not, overall, be a bad thing.
There are places where ordering McDonalds really is the healthier option.
It takes approximately seven minutes to learn how to ride a motorbike.
In Central America, it's worth hastily pointing out that you're not American, even if you are. After 50 years of death squads here, puppet governments there, and now a vast ocean of gluttonous pensioners, it's no surprise that they're not exactly popular.
English is a larger, more complicated language than Spanish. Its endless combinations, accents and variations must be a bastard to learn. But in the refining of it – the artistry, the flexibility – it becomes more beautiful.
Reading in a hammock is one of the world's great pleasures, and one of its great sedatives.
Mexican food is better than Tex Mex, and it's important to know the difference.
I can now list surfing and snorkelling among my hobbies and interests.
If the rest of the world implemented MOTs like the UK, approximately 70% of the planet's cars would be taken off of the road.
In Laos, the Toyota Hilux is the corrupt government official's vehicle of choice.
The people in America gave me absolutely no surprises in nearly seven weeks in their country. The countryside, though, made a mockery of my expectations
Nurseries in America are loud enough to cause industrial deafness. If anyone else has an explanation as to why so many of them talk so fucking loudly, please write in.
For their respective populations, there are a quite ridiculous number of Dutch and Swiss on the road.
Being a backpacker doesn't make everyone more interesting, in fact it can often make them considerably more inane.
No five star hotel is ever worth the money. I say this having stayed at Hiltons, Sherratons, Le Meridians, Six Senses, Raffles, Four Seasons, Ritzs, Langhams, Shangri-Las, Crowne Palazas, boutique independents and half a dozen others I can't recall. Thank fuck I've never actually paid for one.

Photo: Wee Mo
The British royal family still matter terribly. I know this having watched a group of 20 gruff-looking men huddled round a TV watching King Billy's wedding in Bogota.
A Staffordshire terrier can spend the night in the luggage hold of a coach and come out not wanting to eat faces, it can even be relaxed, almost.
Cockfighting is troubling to watch, but as normal as horse racing in dozens of countries around the world – and much more normal than racing dogs.
The Mayans and Incans weren't merry tree hugging innocents, but brutal, systematic killers who wiped out all their competitors before they were dealt the same hand by the Spanish.
That said, they had a fine eye for architecture and location.
There really isn't any bed in the world better than your own.
Like bread and cheese, most beer outside of Europe is crap.
I prefer cold weather to hot. But warm, once in a while, is very nice.
Travelling for a long time is bad for almost every relationship you have; except, if you're lucky, the one you have with yourself.
“And there may be ten thousand roads over the land, but they shall never confuse me, for my heart's blood will ever return to its beautiful source.”
In the end, travelling alters your brain permanently. It changes your perception of the world – it is a period of endless learning. It requires work, patience and dedication, even after you've saved hard to afford it. Some things depress you, but more amaze you. It gives you new eyes to look back on your old life with too. As you remember them, your loved ones by turns appear fantastic and fickle. It becomes understandable that some people never readjust to their old life, something you probably thought ridiculous before.
But then you spend months, years, exposed to things that at home would make the news. You frequently see things that are beyond explanation, enormous, staggering things; things that you've never seen before – not even on TV; things that you really had to be there for.
But – lucky you – you were.

Photo: Wee Mo

America And Me - Part Two

2011-07-26T20:19:00.017-05:00

As my own mother accused me of racism in my last post, I feel compelled to write some nice things about America. Starting with this rambling blurb about music east of the Mississippi, for which we have almost no relevant photographs.

Clarksdale, Mississippi

A fat man who I presume to be the manager of a band sits chain-smoking by the stage in the Morgan Freeman-backed Ground Zero blues club in Mississippi. He sits through the first instrumental unimpressed, distracted almost. Then, after a song and a half, he hauls his massive frame onto the stage and picks up a guitar that looked comically small in his hands. His name is Big T and he's here to play the blues for us.

Photo: Wee Mo

When the big man gets going, his gyrations are unmistakeably phallic. His mouth moves in involuntary spasms in time with the music, too. It's not the first time I've seen a performance like this, but that doesn't mean it's anything short of fucking incredible. The band rattles through Mississippi blues standards with aplomb, stopping regularly so Big T can get back on the cigs.

After the third or fourth break, with the crowd good and oiled, Big T introduces another musician, a suited Methusela called Johnny Billington. The 77-year-old is crumbling by the minute, but has just enough control of his faculties to clamber onto a chair on stage, fold his legs over themselves like a muppet, then grab a guitar and perform just two songs – eight of the most unforgettable musical minutes of my life. When Mr Billington plays the blues, there's no doubt he's lived through every hardship he describes, and probably some he's forgotten. His crumbled face hasn't, though, nor has his scorched voice. It's hard to believe he's got many miles in the tank, but hearing the engine in its final sputters is nothing short of a genuine privilege.

Memphis, Tennessee

Al Green is much younger than I had imagined. When singing perhaps the world's most tender, lovely balad, he sounds old, weary. But that was in 1972 when he was just 26. Now 65, he has been a church man for the past 34 years.

Still, it's not unreasonable to expect big things at the First Tabernacle Gospel Choir, a couple of miles away from Graceland. This is Memphis, he is a goddamn soul legend after all.

After a slight delay, when the reverend comes out, he sits on a leather-bound throne, being nothing short of a nuisance to the others on stage. He talks over a deacon at the lectern, makes jokes when a steward goes through the announcements, and sits sipping at a bottle of Gatorade, for all the world looking like a fat, truculent teenager.

Photo: Wee Mo

One of the choir steps forward and launches into an almost implausibly enormous hymn/anthem. It starts slow and is irritatingly repetitive: “God is marvellous, so marvellous, marvellous, marvellous...” But after a few minutes, the music builds and the singer becomes more animated. Soon he's doubled over, screaming and sweating. Eventually, he retreats back to the rest of the choir, sobbing in rapture. It's an astonishing and almost unsettling few minutes – indeed too much for one German family who walk out mid-screech in apparent protest.

At the height of the fervour, most of the congregation is standing, desperately trying out-do their neighbours in a display of religious ecstasy. The winner is a gigantic woman in a purple frock who launches into full body convulsions, moshing in the name of the Lord. God must be on hand to stop her from having a goddamn embolism, as well as her pals, who are there to fan her and sit her considerable ass down.

It's also finally enough for Green to snap out of it and take the mic from his distressed clergyman. After a bit of mumbling, the band picks up again and the suddenly the man of God is out his fucking nut on the Holy Spirit.
He runs out in front of the lectern and looks briefly ridiculous doing a lizard-in-a-dessert quick step, as though the very fires of hell are burning his holy feet.

The entire thing goes on for about 15 minutes, after which everyone feels quite exhausted. Well, almost everyone: “I know you probably got some of my CDs in your car – ain't no shame in that. Heck, I got some of my CDs in my car, to remind me of the old me. To remind me of who Jesus saved! Somebody say 'amen!'”

If someone was doing an impression of a demented preacher, they'd likely come out with Green's chat: “Testify! Sanctify! Can I getta witness?'” He screeches, he wails – he's a sequence cape away from being James fucking Brown. He warns us that at any moment he may start speaking in tongues (he doesn't).

Photo: Wee Mo

Make no mistake about it, this is a performance first and ego-outing second. Some brief, delirious chit-chat is then followed up with a full-on funk arrangement, complete with wawa-pedal guitar, and soul-saw keyboard.

Unfortunately, after that, there are no more delays before the full-on god-talk. Large sections of the eulogy are total nonsense; incoherent noise even if you could understand every word through his thick accent. Even when reading scripture directly from The Book, the reverend distracts himself, railing against credit cards and mobile phones. Naturally, Jesus is the answer to everything and god is apparently a kind of benevolent loan shark: “We got dark days ahead of us, with this deficit and budget and what not... But American wouldn't have no deficit if it just leaned on the everlasting arms of the Lord!”

This shit goes on for two hours. There are no more songs; there is a collection plate. At the end of it all, I'm left with two questions: “How much of all of this is genuine? And if it's not, does it really matter?”

Nashville, Tennessee

Like Memphis, Nashville isn't really a modern home of music. It's more like a living museum. Yes, the bars and clubs are full of live country music, but almost none of it is new. The crowd wouldn't want new even if it was offered to them either. Instead, everyone is happy to throw money (and shapes) at any act willing to trot out any of the “classics” – play it, Sam, so long as we know the tune. As the majority of country songs sound idiotically samey – and the lyrics seem to cover only heartbreak and mundane daily activities, like truck driving, or hitting the pub after work – Wee Mo and I are quickly bored by the whole thing.

Photo: Wee Mo

That is until we accidentally discover Clay Canfield. Imagine Sam Elliot at a Halloween party, dressed as a country and western singer – that's yer man. He's not playing country, though, in fact I wouldn't know how to properly describe his style, other than singularly impressive. Playing the moothy (harmonica), singing and simultaneously attacking the strings and drumming the body of his guitar, Canfield's is a hypnotic, powerful performance. As he's half-steaming, every song is sandwiched between a rambling, half-funny, half-sad story. Like Johnny Billington, Canfield lives his music. The country crowd don't really know how to take it all, especially when he borders on letting his emotions run away when describing a beautiful song written by his dead friend. At the end of performing it, perhaps to avoid getting more upset, he rolls it into All Along The Watchtower. Without exaggeration, I tell you it's one of the best covers I've ever heard, by anyone. Ever.

Unfortunately, for us we only get to see the last half hour of his extraordinary show. Worse still, he is followed by Woody and the Tremendous Bores, a six-piece of professional dullards who trot out several dozen utterly forgettable country classics. They are one of the whitest, most frigid bands I have ever seen in my life. The hissing steam from Clay Canfield powerful, warm post-gig piss had more soul than this lot.

But hooray for Clay Canfield! Hooray for what he does!

Asheville, North Carolina

Clay Canfield was the most talented individual we saw during our musical week in the States. Johnny Billington was the most moving. Al Green was perhaps the most unforgettable. But the best overall performance? Like a good music festival, that came totally by surprise, at an expected venue from an unexpected band.

Asheville is one of those towns where weirdos congregate, some relieved to be able to express themselves, others intent on being weirder than their weird neighbour. What's the difference between this and neds trying to out-do each other with louder tracksuits and more garish trainers? Answer: a postcode. You get this kind of thing in places like Brighton, and art schools across the world. Personally I find the whole thing a bit fucking wearisome.

But, for all that, creativity of all kinds is encouraged. Out on the street there's a ramshackle percussion group with around 50 people participating. Some are even in time. Up the road there's a juggler, and a fiddler, and a clown, and a double bass, all fighting for tourist dollars.

We duck into the Jack Of The Wood, which for those who know it, is not unlike the Uisge Beatha in Glasgow's bohemian West End. Within a couple of minutes, Pierce Edens and the Dirty Work pipe up.

Though it's a widely-known musical fact, I will repeat it here: any band featuring a double-bass player is a sure-fired fucking success. When that player looks and performs like System of a Down's Serj Tankian, then all the better. And when he's backed by a drummer that looks like Ronnie from the Shield on eccies, and a guitarist that looks like the ever-creepy Mr Lizard, then better still.

Not Pierce Edens, nor Asheville for that matter

Thus the Dirty Work, the grungy, old-New World sound for Pierce Edens. I once wrote about Sigur Ros playing in Scotland, describing my amazement as the frontman shredded a bow on an electric guitar “sawing away like he's slaughtering a troublesome hog”. I think of that again when listening to Edens singing, where his vocal chords are the bow. He looks 30-ish, but sounds like smokes a 1,000 a day and gurgles gravel in the morning. The sound is something like the throaty one from Gomez singing Nick Cave tunes, but that's probably doing the band a little disservice. I've got no doubt they listen to the eclectic Australian (they've probably never heard of Gomez) but Edens's songs are original works, and Cave's influence is no more than just that.

Anyway, with a bourbon in hand, it's their end result that impresses me the most – them that I can imagine playing a tent at some far flung festival, being covered in pints of celebratory beer and piss. Fingers crossed it happens for them some day.

What Happens In Vegas... Is Published Elsewhere

2011-07-18T10:50:00.000-05:00

Click to read.

America And Me - Part One

2011-07-14T21:32:00.000-05:00

As I've stumbled around the world over the past three years, I've picked up a fair bit of our recent history. I mean the stuff that's fallen awkwardly between the Second World War and the First Gulf War – the bits that I was too young to experience, and the sort of stuff they avoid at school. In other words, the parts that cover America's desire to dominate all life, Sauron-style.

Photo: Wee Mo

Now, as a Brit (it's no use playing the “Well really, ah'm Scottish” card), I can hardly complain about Imperialism. A third of the planet was under our yoke at one stage, and our life today – thanks in part to the malignant spread of the English language – is far better because of it.

But when I look at the old countries of the Commonwealth, I can't help but notice that despite the theft of their resources, the enslavement of the people, etc and so on. Despite all that, there were some positive legacies left behind. We built roads and rail; we developed a legal and educational systems; we brought medicine. We introduced sandwiches, and cricket – WE GAVE THEM CRICKET.

What of America? What can they say is their legacy? New York Yankee baseball caps? McDonalds? Fucking Walmart? And that's with their allies – have diabetes pal; take obesity, friend.

There have been few more depressing moments on the road than the day I learned what Agent Orange really is. That dioxin exists at all is disturbing; the pictures of what happened when America weaponised it and dropped it, and napalm, on Vietnamese farmers still make me feel a little unwell.

So Vietnam got mutant children for generations, while Laos, next door, had so many bombs that dropped on it that the combined force outweighed that of Little Boy and Fat Man in Japan (more on that shortly). And in some cases, the bombs were dropped just so the pilots could go back and justifiably ask for more. Another fun fact? Since Nixon's Secret War ended, 10,000 Laotians have been murdered by American land mines.

You'd be tempted to say that little Cambodia actually did get off lightly compared to its neighbours (after all they only dropped more ordnance in six months here than they did in three years in Japan) until you find out that America silently backed Paul Pot's Khmer Rouge rather than have Chinese Communism take hold.

That was then, but the economies of all three countries remain in the shitter.

Closer to home, in Central America, The States interfered with every single nation, installing puppet governments, backing rebel coups who invariably turned out to be fucking mad dictators (Britain, and all colonial powers have been equally guilty of this in Africa on a number of occasions too) and sending in CIA death squads to butcher the locals when things didn't go the way they wanted.

All that without mentioning the Middle East and crazy soldiers scratching scripture into their bullets.

And for what? So America could enjoy a certain type of lifestyle at home. And what a lifestyle it is.

With all of the advantages they could possibly ask for America has developed one of the most gluttonous and wasteful societies in human history. The Romans and Egyptians shat away a fair amount, but that was the moneyed few indulging in excess – here even the most base scumbag can, and does, spew away a fortune in food and fuel. With the possible exception of China, no other country has such jolly disdain for climate change either.

It's little wonder that they couldn't give an recycled fuck for the environment when you look at what they do to their selves. Within seconds of arriving, a foreigner can see that the reports of American greed have not been overstated – in fact they might have been downplayed. Men and women waddle unsteadily from one counter to another on rhino-carcass legs, tubes in their noses, gasping out orders. This miracle of survival is made possible by the sugary pish they have for blood, ripping through arteries like shite in a Victorian sewer.

The other half of society, meanwhile, flex their hard-won bodies, content in their neuroses, believing without doubt that they are God's chosen people in the best society on Earth. So smug and content are they with this status, that when random tragedies like the Japanese Earthquake come along, a handful can reach for their iPhones, admire their Facebook profile picture, and come out with delightful quips like: “Remember Pearl Harbour, bitches! LOL!” Neatly skipping around the fact America already tattooed remembrance into the collective psyches of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945.

When speaking in real life, they are no less vapid. One peculiar American trait is the need to share conversations with the general public. I don't mean exchanging small talk, I mean the forced need to broadcast the garbage direct from their brains, in the desperate hope that a stranger will hear their call and say: “Oh that does sound interesting, tell me more.”

And the thing is, other Americans actually might do that. They might actually pretend to care. The insincerity is as widespread as it is nauseating. Do not wish me an “absolutely wonderful day”. You don't mean it, I know you don't – I certainly couldn't give a rosey red fuck how yours is. Give me my change (which is less than it should be because your tax has just robbed more than advertised) and say nothing. Have some dignity, for fuck's sake.

Photo: Wee Mo

And then there's the Republican Party, who half of the country actually vote for. To me, that'd be like living in a Britain in which half the voting populace gave their X to the BNP, if the BNP were in charge of nukes. Then you get novelty sub-species of mentals, like the Tea Party, who in an ordinary world, would be treated as seriously as the Monster Raving Loony Party. But no, instead, they're nurturing potential presidential candidates.

Of course, they're all religious too. And, like their sports, Americans aren't content to simply worship older established traditions. Instead, they come up with their own, like the Mormons, invented by a convicted con-man and polygamist just 180 years ago. Or like Scientology, which was invented by a science-fiction writer just 50 years ago.

Photo: Wee Mo

So because of all this stuff, and more besides, by the time I get off the plane in San Francisco, I'm ready for goddamn war.

But almost as soon as I step onto the runway, I realise that here none of it quite tallies. Or at least if it does, it's miles away from northern California. The people aren't racist, gun-toting maniacs. The food isn't all double-fried bacon and peanut cheesecake. No one talks about the wars – or if they do it's only to convey embarrassment and regret. There's recycling, public transport, and a friendliness that's measured and genuine. San Francisco is smart, and cultured, and diverse like a goddamn Michael Jackson video.

Photo: Wee Mo

The people are political and savvy and have a bold history of protest against the depraved behaviour of their establishment. They're comfortable with the uniqueness in the country: leave the violence to the South, leave the posers in LA. It's somehow beyond America, international, a world city. There are genuinely excellent restaurants from every corner of the globe – and the wine is fucking good, too. Plus, the entire thing is set beautifully around a colossal bay and the weather is cool, cold even. In fact, San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in the world in terms of its natural setting – I'd rate it up there with Edinburgh, La Paz and Cape Town, I really would (Wee Mo adds Vancouver to that list too.)

So instead of complaints and cynicism, I feel only my heart thudding in my chest. Try as I might to ignore it, I feel myself falling in love, so I buy a New Yorker, a Vanity Fair, a National Geographic an Atlantic and a Dan Fante novel to celebrate. But that night, rather than read, I find myself imagining a life for us there, working for a local magazine while Wee Mo sells crafts, photos and art on Haight Street, the two of us getting half-cut on wine nightly, trying to ignore what our tax dollars might be spent on.

Damn you San Francisco! Damn your perfection!

Photo: Wee Mo

Your Guide To Latin America

2011-07-01T23:05:00.001-05:00

Argentina

Q: What happens when you breed the good looks of Italy with those of Spain?

A: Argentina.

So face porn is one reason to visit, and perhaps the most immediately obvious thing on arrival. That and the passion – especially if you land in Buenos Aires. Half of these good-looking bastards spend most days winching the face off one another, while on the roads, buses of football supporters are carted around the city, hours before the game, for a sing-song. The flick their hands out while they chant, as though they're drenched in their own mania and want to share some of it with you.

Geographically, it's a vast miracle of a country with frostbitten toes falling off the end of the world, and a sweaty heid in the swathed in jungle. There are sights so huge here as to make a slevering mess of those who witness them. Just after seeing them I wrote that the Iguazu Falls looked "like stars weeping" – time has only exaggerated this in my mind. Then there's the Perito Moreno Glacier.

Yeah, the scran may be up and down, but Argentina, fucking hell, go there.

Photo: Wee Mo

Chile

The world's longest, thinnest country is also one of its continents most expensive. From frozen Patagonia, to sandy San Pedro, finding a cheap bed in Chile is virtually impossible – it's cheaper to find a hostel in London or Edinburgh. And when the natives recommend a pastie as the best example of their country's cuisine, you don't need to worry about writing down too many recipes.

But the people are friendly, the scenery stupendous and the sheer variety of life over 2,500 miles of varied latitude make it a winner.

Photo: Wee Mo

Uruguay

Uruguay has a town called Fray Bentos. This is perhaps its most remarkable feature.

Paraguay

Few people bother to include Paraguay on their itineraries, now we know why. Somewhere between the sinister edge brought by poverty, the unfriendliness of the people, the heat and the mosquitoes, we failed to fall in love with it. There's basically no compensation for that lot, their border control isn't up to much, either, and Asuncion, the capital, is one of the worst cities we've visited in the past year.
Don't go.

Photo: Wee Mo

Bolivia

There may as well be a sign at all Bolvian border control saying “Gringos not welcome”, so warm are the people to the white man. Given their history, and the enormous indigenous population, that's perhaps not a surprise.

That's only half the story, however. The most frustrating thing is that Bolivia could be anything it wanted to be. It has natural beauty most countries would go to war over, ranging from the world's highest settlements in the Andes, to the plunging depths of the Amazon basin, visiting the weird, wonderful Uyuni Salt Flats along the way.

And yet it's all tainted, right to the brink of being spoiled altogether, by the Bolivians seeming delight in living in their own filth. So instead of being one of our favourite countries, we'll remember it as the lofty toilet of South America.

Oh, and it can be a wee bit dangerous too.

Photo: Wee Mo

Peru

Some might say that in contrast to Bolivia, Peru has sold something of its soul to suck at the white man's tit. Still, with people choosing to shit in the bog (rather the street) wide-spread English speakers, and idiotically amazing sights like Maccu Piccu, it's hard, as a gringo, to come away feeling anything other than affection.

Photo: Wee Mo

Ecuador

I can't speak much to what likes is Ecuador, other than to say that Ecuadorians are immensely friendly until it comes to the subject of money. As soon as a disagreement is reached, their soft eyes roll black like fucking sharks and arguments ensue.

But, hell, they could stab me in the guts and rob me blind in exchange for another trip to the Galapagos.

Photo: Wee Mo

Colombia

As we travelled north through South America, people we met coming the other way consistently told us that, when we got there, Colombia would be one of our favourite countries.

I now strongly suspect that most of these people were cocaine fiends.

It's not that Colombia isn't nice – far from it – but it's just not life-changingly great. The scenery is consistently staggering, and the colonial towns are among the most beautiful on the continent. But it can sometimes be hard to enjoy them when the former are interrupted by endless numbers of armed guards/police/army/mercenaries boarding your bus and demanding ID; and it can be hard to enjoy the latter when everyone from granddads to weans trying to punt you coke.

The guidebooks etc would have you believe that Colombia now is infinitely safer than it was 10-20 years ago. If that's true, it must have been bloody terrifying before. Take this story: when in Bogota (the only South American city in which we were too intimidated to take our cameras out) we took a trip from the Candelaria area, to a mall in the north of town.
Rather than get a cab back, we jumped on the first collectivo (mini bus) that said “Candelaria”. We sat on that bastard for an hour, getting increasingly odd looks from others on the bus. At the 90 minute mark, as the roads got more narrow and all recognisable branding had dropped away from the shops, a local finally asked us if we knew where we were going. We explained. He frowned and said that the city has two Candelarias: one is the cultural and historic hub of the city; the other is a dangerous scheme. So dangerous, in fact, that he was going to escort us from the bus and quick-march us to the closest police station, who would then in turn call us a taxi...
We survived, which was nice.

Panama

Though it was never technically under American rule, Panama – and especially its eponymous capital – is a mosquito's pube away from being Puerto Rico, or Florida. Panama City is a soulless, dangerous place filled with dead shopping malls and a zero charm. Thankfully for its sake, on the outskirts, the Panama Canal is definitely worth the visit, if for nothing else than just to take the time to consider how incredibly unlikely the whole thing is.

Two other points of note: Panama is one of the cheapest countries in the world for buying branded... stuff, no doubt a bi-product of the Canal; and Panamanians like their coffee idiotically strong. If you can't get any, get half a gram of speed, mix it with half a gram of senna, and blast away for a similar effect.

Costa Rica

Long an American holiday-home-destination of choice, Costa Rica has given a lot/had a lot taken away to/by the big bastard in the north. It's easy to see why the Yanks want to recolonise it too – the weather is good, the coffee is great, the people genuinely welcoming.

But for a backpacker? It's expensive, a bit too Americanised, and occasionally populated by expat c**ts, none of whom bother to learn a word of Spanish and whose behaviour can make you embarrassed to be white.

Photo: Wee Mo

Nicaragua

Earlier in our trip, we met a couple whose earliest memories were of growing up in Dresden, during the last few years of East Germany. Of those hazy recollections, they clearly and distinctly remembered a call [demand] from the government for youngsters to give toys to their “brothers in the socialist republic of Nicaragua.” America had given the Latinos the cold shoulder, and was trying to squeeze them into submission, so it was up to similarly impoverished nations like East Germany to try and stop the weans greetin'.

On arriving there, it's clear that many of the towns are still tainted with the crushingly dull functionality of the socialist/communist philosophy. But like a lot of nations who've been shat on the in past, these days the folk are somehow particularly friendly, which just about manages to detract from the fact that their food is pretty god-awful. But then, who's to say that's not something to do with making a little go a long-way too?

Click Picture

Honduras

We were told that Honduras wasn't worth going to if we weren't divers. We aren't, so we didn't for anything longer than a two-hour bus ride en route to El Salvador.

El Salvador

“Outside, on the stadium slopes, the scene was like one of those lurid murals of Hell you see in Latin American churches. The colour was infernal, yellow dust sifted and whirled among crater-pits, small cars with demonic headlights moved slowly from hole to hole like mechanical devils. And where, on the mural, you see the sins printed and dramatised, the gold lettering saying Lust, Anger, Avarice, Drunkenness, Gluttony, Theft, Pride, Jealousy, Usury, Gambling, and so on, here after midnight were groups of boys lewdly snatching at girls, and knots of people fighting, counting the money they had won, staggering and swigging from bottles, shrieking obscenities... They trampled the dust and howled. The car horns were like harsh moos of pain – and one car was being overturned by a gang of shirtless, sweating youths. Many people were running to get free of the mob, holding handkerchiefs over their faces. But there were tens of thousands of people here, and animals, too, maimed dogs snarling and cowering as in a classic vision of Hell. And it was hot: dark grimy air that was hard to breathe, and freighted with the stinks of sweat; it was so thick it muted the light. It tasted of stale fire and ashes...”

Paul Theroux describing San Salvador after an international football match in 1978 (El Salvador had just lost 6-1), although it could be most nights of the week in 2011.

Photo: Wee Mo

Guatemala

OK they may be prone to a little bit of brutality themselves (and perhaps they always have been) but Guatemala is an absolute star of a country. It's got everything a backpacker would hope to find: world class tourist attractions, good food and drink, and gorgeous scenery as standard. All this for goddamn pence.

Naturally, we avoided Guatemala City like the plague, and as such we felt nothing but secure – but like every other country in this part of the world, getting steaming is a huge precursor to landing in the shit. The only difference in Guatemala is that, if you're unlucky, drunk and out alone at night, it might just be the police themselves that rob you.

Belize

I cannot every remember crossing a border as dramatic as that into Belize. In other parts of the world, it would take a flight of several hours to find such a massive, dramatic change in people, lifestyle and language. Tiny Belize is essentially a Caribbean island that has been sucked back onto the mainland: the people are predominently black and they speak something approaching English. An extremely flattering picture of Auld Betty is even on the money.

People say it can be dangerous in the capital here, too (it is in every capital, but people stealing grenades from the army and chucking them around the joint is pretty extreme, even for Central America) but we got quickly out to Caye Caulker, for an unexpected chance at Caribbean perfection.

Photo: Wee Mo

Mexico

Four or five days in the Yucatan barely afforded us the chance to say we've been to Mexico, but it did give us a chance to enjoy some of the best food on the trip, to see some of the world's most idyllic ruins, and to swim with whale sharks.

Unfortunately we also had to go to Cancun, to leave Latin America for the last time. The place is like a giant compound for American fuckwits to come and forget themselves, and frustratingly it meant less and less chance to speak Spanish at the time when I was most fluent.

But it'd be wrong to criticise Mexico because of that – here's hoping the next time we're back (and we will be) we see it's part of an elaborate plan to keep the arseholes in one place, in order to let the rest of us enjoy more.

Killing In The Name

2011-06-08T18:24:00.004-05:00

For a mink-eyed-mink with barely two pence to rub together, I've found myself in the company of some pretty rich, successful and occasionally famous people in the past few years. To my pleasant surprise, the majority of them haven't been bastards, either – in fact, some of them have actually been Quite Nice.

Inevitably though, working with so many people, especially moneyed types, has to churn up some shitbags. And lo and behold! Here are some at Our Unnamed Fishing Destination (OUFD, pronounced “ooft”). OUFD is a specialist fishing lodge on the Pacific coast of A Central American Country. We are here for work, to earn a bit of money, save some more money, and generally help to promote the joint. As usual with an arrangement like this, there should be no losers.

But before we even got here, OUFD was telling us how much we should be tipping the staff. It began as a mistake – and we should have known that more bother would be on the way.

It started yesterday when we found ourselves getting off a bus, which according to the press pack was just a few miles away from OUFD. In reality, it was more like 40, around a peninsula – a $90 taxi ride away, or $50 by boat. OUFD refused to send their own, so a local fisherman got lucky.

However, despite being quite genuinely furious with the whole thing, the ride through mangroves proved to be lots of fun. Then, just as we felt our moods brightening, we met OUFD's owner.

Before we'd even finished the handshake, I could tell he didn't really want us there. Their failure to pick us up was our fault: why hadn't we said we were at the border with Another Central American Country earlier? Why didn't we have a rental car?

Again we tried to put it all to the back of our minds. This was free accommodation, which on my own scale of excellence, was probably worth about three stars. There was air conditioning, cable TV and free shampoo. There were mosquitoes too, but, truth be told, we'd not stayed in anything so plush since Brunei, way back in October last year. We were made to feel like assholes at dinner too, but kept our cool and thought about what was to come the next day.

Photo: Wee Mo

It's 1991 and I am shivering on the deck of a small fishing boat that's bobbing around in the Firth of Clyde. We are knee deep in mackerel, fish so stupid they are hooked by nothing more than fluorescent tape; fish so weak that even I, an eight-year-old, can pull up three at a time on the line.

My father and brother are on board too, all of us merrily murdering the morning away, catching more mackerel than my mother will know what to do with, and even one or two rare cod.

We don't need to cast the line, we simply drop it overboard, wait for the familiar tug, haul up the unfortunate fish, then quickly try to brain it before it thrashes around too much. It's all terribly predictable, but free of cynicism and full of blood lust, it keeps we children entertained for hours.

My father drops his line into the cold water for the hundredth time to bring up his hundredth mackerel when suddenly the line becomes impossibly heavy. The tension is unreal, he has to quickly adjust his footing. There's something down there... The fight with the leviathan is brief: dad makes a little progress and it stays on for about 30 seconds before snapping the line and disappearing. Perhaps it was a conger eel, perhaps it was a harbour seal or - as my brother and I prefer to think - perhaps it was Nessie on a rare sojourn south.

In the intervening years of (occasionally) fishing in Scottish waters, that was by far the most dramatic thing that ever happened to me. For the most part, my time was spent in drizzle, timidly impaling translucent worms on hooks that had no more chance of catching fish than the worms did of growing hands and freeing themselves.

Photo: Wee Mo

All of which now seems like a world away as we bounce across the sparkling waves of the Pacific Ocean, heading 20 miles into the big blue. We've been going for an hour, and have already been fishing once. I didn't tell The Captain that in catching a nine inch blue runner earlier I was probably beating my personal best. The small fish, along with about seven of its kin and a handful of herring, is only on board to be used as live bait for something much bigger.

Wee Mo spots some commotion on the horizon. A large pod of spinner dolphins are hurling themselves from the water in apparent glee. To my genuine astonishment, they're even more acrobatic than their cousins in the Philippines.

Photo: Wee Mo

The Captain moves the boat ahead of the crowd and gives me instructions while threading a line through the eye-sockets of one of the blue runners. The wee thing barely seems to bat an eyelid (assuming it had eyelids and we didn't disable them), still full of life as I drop it into the water and let the line out. Between the little fish trying to flee and the lead weight, the line makes steady progress, before suddenly speeding up.

“There you go, you've got a fish on there,” says The Captain casually, flicking my reel to Strike. I move to lift the rod, but can't because the line is snagged.

“Move round to the bow of the boat,” he says, not realising the mistake. Meanwhile, the line just gets heavier. I want to cry out, to point out the error – I seem to have hooked a car. Then the car starts its engine and starts to drive away.

The line unravels further, forced out despite being locked. Stumbling, panicking, I try to steady myself by sitting back into a half-crouched position. There is an apocalyptic amount of swearing. “Round to the front,” I'm told again, but it feels like gravity has been amplified.

After five minutes I'm sure I won't be able to last. Words of defeat start to form in my brain and I get ready to ask for the line to be cut. The Captain realises I've had enough and mercifully doles out a belt to root the pole. Later it occurs to me that he deliberately sent me to battle unprepared – this was my Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The apparel stops me stabbing myself in the gut, but doesn't ease the weight. Another minute or two later and I'm gently guided to a chair on the bow of the boat and The Captain attaches a harness, making me a strained link in a chain between the boat and My Enemy.

Just before I left the mainland, OUFD's asshole owner had told me: “Real men stand up,” metaphorically grabbing his crotch and opening a beer with his forehead. He's the sort of guy who's main line of chat is belittling others with zero self-deprecation. It's impossible to tell when he's joking and when he means to be genuinely abusive. I doubt even he can tell the difference any more.

Anyway, as I park my arse, I instead think of Ernest Shackleton's quip: “Better to be a live donkey than a dead lion.”

Photo: Wee Mo

Sitting down affords me a chance to breathe and to try and mop the torrent of sweat from my brow, while also noticing just how much Wee Mo is laughing at my misfortune. This scene plays out for another twenty minutes or so, me and My Enemy both tiring in the morning sun. I'm told to reel in as much line as I can between waves, rather than stick to a fair fight and, another ten minutes later, they say there's a flash of sliver somewhere near the surface.

The Captain leans over the side and drives a hook through the fish's head to get him on board. Wee Mo takes a picture. I collapse back into the chair and look at My Enemy.

At almost four foot long, the yellowfin tuna bleeds like a hog and kicks like a mule. It's weighs somewhere in the region of 70lbs (five stone) and, wounds and all, still fancies a fight. Even when The Captain has dragged it into a death bag, disembowelled it and replaced its innards with ice, it's thrashing around so much that it sounds like a helicopter taking off. William Wallace went quieter than this.

“That's tuna fishing,” says The Captain, triumphant.

“There's quite a lot of blood,” I pant.

“Well, better to have a messy boat than a clean one.”

Photo: Wee Mo

There's barely a chance to recover from the ordeal before I'm told to put the line back in. This time, a brilliant gold and green dorado leaps from the water, my hook in its mouth. It puts up plenty of fight too, but compared its rottweiler predecessor, it comes in fairly easily, shimmering different colours as we bring it on board.

Photo: Wee Mo

Wee Mo passes me a well-earned beer from the cooler, after which I try to take some pictures of the ever joyful dolphins. Unfortunately my biceps, such as they are, have gone into spasm and I can barely raise the camera.

Photo: Wee Mo

Later in the day, I catch another tuna*, which nearly kills me again, and have a sailfish infuriatingly slip the hook having taken the bait. Just before getting back to OUFD, I also catch and release a roosterfish (with a cyberpunk mohawk for a dorsal fin), which I actually can stand up to land.

Photo: Wee Mo

That night, a boisterous group of Californian surfers, also staying at the lodge, enjoy our catch as we all sit down for sashimi and tuna steaks. A couple of the older ones like to talk about money; the youngsters describe most things as “sick” or “insane.” They also construct complete sentences out of single words: “Right? RIGHT? Right.” They unanimously talk too loud.

But still, if you can learn to ignore the weird speech patterns and somehow turn them down from an 11 to a steady seven, then they're a pretty good bunch. Plus, being American and prone to hyperbole and falsehood, they also make a big show of literally toasting my skills as a fisherman, something that annoys the asshole boss no end.

It's nonsense, of course – I simply did what I was told and held on for a dear life. But that doesn't mean I don't like it; I raise my glass with my working arm and smile.

*The next day, against all odds and the laws of physics, Wee Mo landed her own tuna, a 80lb monster that nearly tore her arms out like nursery trees from loose soil. But somehow she held on and wore it down, before The Captain eventually hauled it on board. The bloody bastard spat out the bait on landing, like an apology that had come far too late. It was a heroic, hideous ordeal and, depending on who you listen to, it may have been the biggest fish we caught on both trips. Best of all, if she held it at the right angle, it looked a bit like a tuna bra.

Indiana Moans

2011-06-01T07:42:00.000-05:00

For a colonial force that ran around robbing, raping and killing a continent for over 300 years, you have to say the Spanish were pretty shitty explorers. I mean, OK, the jungles of South America could absorb all of Europe, but the amount of stuff they didn't find during their rule is quite incredible. Famously, Macchu Picchu went under the radar until almost exactly 100 years ago when an American went to the trouble of bribing a local school boy for its location. Hardly needed Indiana Jones, did it?

The Peruvian site is the most famous blackspot in Spanish discovery, but it's not the only thing that escaped their. Off the top of my head, there's the Nazca Lines, also in Peru, and, beneath the bottom of my aching feet, there's the Ciudad Perdida, the lost city of Colombia.

It's taken three and a half days of walking to get here and it's rarely been easy, though it's been a walk in the national park compared to the toil of the bastards who first rediscovered it in 1973. The nameless men spent weeks in the jungle, fighting off clouds of mosquitoes and poisonous snakes, and eventually discovered one of South America's most important archaeological sites.

Unfortunately, they then immediately set about ruining their chance of greatness by stealing everything of value. Indeed, they didn't stop until almost three years later when news of the find filtered back to the real world. Fortune? Maybe. Glory? Definitely not.

Twenty-five years since it's “official” rediscovery, the Lost City receives hundreds of visitors a month which, as my legs quiver beneath me on the first day, seems like an awful lot of masochists. Half an hour after leaving humanity behind, having crossed a river twice, we are half an hour into our first big ascent.

Tours have been taking place since 1994, but the route has changed little since the early days: the ruins can only reached via a five-day hike over 50km of testing jungle terrain. The ferocity of the mosquitoes remains as undiminished today as it was when the ruins were built by the pre-Colombian Tairona civilisation some 1200 years ago.

To combat the insects, we are doused in Repel 100, a diabolically powerful repellent that claims to be made from 98.11% DEET. The others in my group marvel at its toxicity: the brand seems to be only available in America – and is likely illegal in several states there. It often feels like using nuclear waste as sunscreen, such is the burning sensation on our skin.

Now we're trekking uphill, out above the canopy, this heat is joined by humidity. I can feel every vein in my body bouncing to the same rhythm, I know my face is glowing crimson – this, I presume, is what it's like to die in a microwave.

After an hour of climbing, we stop at a clearing to listen to our guide, Edwin Rey, talk about how this area inside the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta National Park is changing. Just a few years ago, this vista would have looked over a sea of coca plants (until recently, you could even go on a tour of a cocaine laboratory – journalists fucked it for everyone by running an exposé... Fucking journalists) but then hardcore killer President Uribe implemented a plan to pay the farmers a subsidy to grow something else. Don't let any of this kid you, though. Just because America throws fruitless millions to prevent it and a few alleged baddies get shot, Colombia is still the world capital of the white stuff and every town along the northern coast may as well be fucking ski resorts.

The second day starts with another enormous hill, and legions of army ants that bumble across the muddy path with neatly-cut leaves, like wind-surfers struggling with little green sails. Thankfully, they're not the only distraction from the pain. Unlike in many of the world's other wild places, here the jungle theme music is almost exclusively pleasurable. Some are tuneful, some are comical, and one tumbling-then-crashing cry sounds uncannily like an 8-bit computer sprite losing its life.

We clamber over the nameless summit, skirt across a plateau, then plunge back into the jungle, taking hourly breaks for fresh fruit and water. As on the first day, we reach our destination after just four hours of very intense, impossibly sweaty walking. Literally every stitch we wear is soaked and with the permanent humidity of the jungle, nothing will truly dry until we are back in Santa Marta, our starting point.

As the region's most experienced Lost City guide, Rey leads our group as a merciless pacesetter who is only joined by dedicated hikers and speed merchants, an international group that often includes everyone except us.

It's not until the close of our third day of hiking, as we find our spartan accommodation just on the outskirts of the Lost City, that I get a chance to sit down to talk with Rey properly.

His surname translates as King, but that's about Edwin's only regal attribute. He talks a lot with his hands, and with sound effects, to cut down on the amount of translation required. Despite the language barrier, I like him immediately. The fact that he is happy to criticise the awfulness of Israeli backpackers (he says you can spot the women because they are fat and the men because they're muscular and high) helps too.

Edwin has officially been coming to the Lost City since Turcol Tours pioneered hikes here in the mid-1990s, but his connection to the place goes back way beyond that. His father was with the original anthropological and archaeological groups who studied the place and, Rey volunteers, was probably here before anything “official” was going on at all.

Rey junior (Prince?) was working as a financial controller for a construction company in Santa Marta until Turcol opened their route. He then immediately changed careers to literally follow in his father's footsteps. Other than fairly normal perils of the journey (fucking idiot Israelis high on coke and hash falling into ravines, snakes, fucking idiot Israelis erroneously thinking that eating wild mushrooms will always result in magic etc.) everything went smoothly until 2003.

Ostensibly, Edwin Rey's involvement with the infamous kidnapping of 15 people from within the grounds of the Lost City was the briefest of everyone. Back then, groups spent at least one night sleeping in huts inside the ruins. On this particular day eight years ago, an armed group of guerillas approached the trekkers, escorting them away under the pretence that there had been killings nearby; the group needed come with them if they want to live.

The ruse didn't last long: soon Rey was tied-up, taken away from the rest and locked in a hut. Alone in the dark, he quickly reached the conclusion that if he hung around, he would be dead. A poor local guide is not worth much political currency.

So this being real life, and Edwin not being fucking Rambo, he did the only logical thing he could – he freed himself, scrambled out of the hut and ran for his life. He spent the following three days in the jungle believing the kidnappers to be hot on his tail, and followed a circuitous alternative route back to Santa Marta to throw them off the scent. On the first day he survived by drinking from rivers and eating wild bananas and guavas. That night, unsure of where their loyalties may lie, he tentatively approached an indigenous house with the story that he was looking for a lost tourist. They gave him shelter, as did another house on the second night. By the end of the third day, he limped into Santa Marta to tell the police what had taken place.

To his amazement, he got there to find that his fellow guide and five hostages had been deemed politically unimportant enough to be released. Having taken the direct route back to town, they had already raised the alarm.

Any relief Rey felt at their safe return was quickly extinguished when he was handed over to the notoriously brutal paramilitaries for questioning. How was it he had escaped alone? Why hadn't he hung around? Why didn't he have any tourists with him?

The eye of suspicion weighed heavy on the married father of one, so much so that after 45 days of retirement (the other guide never returned to work), Rey found himself back in the jungle to appease the investigators. Not that this gave him any comfort: the guerillas were still in the hills somewhere with eight hostages. They knew Edwin's face and, thanks to local newspaper reports, his name too.

Eight years later, arseholes like me still ask him to tell the story so many times, he couldn't forget it even if he wanted it to. And I get the impression he really wishes he could.

Now we're sitting in the Lost City proper a man with a machete has just walked past our hut. He didn't answer Rey's first four or five calls to get his attention, which clearly didn't sit well with our jug-eared host. Sitting bolt upright, trying to get a better look, on the brink of panic, Edwin was a vision of discomfort until the man offered a casual “hola”.

Mark Henderson, a British hostage who was one of the final five released by the guerillas (all were done so without being harmed) recently made a feature-length documentary about his experience. Rey refused to take part in the making of My Kidnapper and when the production team offered to send him a DVD of the final edit anyway, he refused that too. Even for a king of this jungle, some traumas evidently run deep.

The number of people trekking to the Ciudad Perdida is increasing every year, partly because of the post-kidnapping security shake-up that took place along the route, and partly because there is an increasing feeling that places like the phenomenally busy Machu Pichu have evolved into some kind of shite Incan Disney Land.

But as it stands, the numbers will always be limited because it's such a bastard to get here. Even from the gates of the city, you have to scramble up a flight of 1,200 mossy, slippery stairs. Before starting we heard one story of a couple of fat South African ladies who literally collapsed at the top and demanded the military helicopter take them back. It took them two days of being told “no” to get off their arses again.

And is it worth it? Well it's certainly a lot less touristy than Machu Piccu. One of the Mountain Battalion soldiers sells a couple of drinks from a cooler almost-apologetically, but other than him and a few camouflaged comrades in the background, we are the only people here to explored the ruins. Sticking it's balding head out just above the trees, Ciudad Perdida looks like something halfway between the mountainous settlement of Maccu Picchu and the jungle-fodder of Angkor Wat, but in truth it's not as spectacular as either. And the final twist of the knife is that the first three days of walking are then crammed into just one and a half on the home stretch, turning death by microwave into death by boiling.

But when you're home all the tragedy and self-loathing and thoughts of death subside - and then you see it...

The Amigo

2011-05-25T13:10:00.001-05:00

Now, it'd be wrong to say that the transfer to the Amigo was exactly seamless. For a start, at our first meal, I had to send back a knife on account of it being covered in the chef's blood. A couple of hours after that, moments before we were going to raise anchor and finally get the fuck out of Puerto Ayora, a three-strong contingent of Aussies who we'd met on the boat all left in disgust. Having moved down into their rooms to unpack, they pulled back the sheets to discover the beds covered in “big bugs.” They promptly turned tail and left for good, vowing to complain to the tourist commission and get full refunds.

Thankfully, those problems were contained to the rooms down in the belly of the ship. We ex-Angeliquers, up on the lower and upper decks, didn't have to suffer such indignity.

And after that early drama, if you looked at it in the right light and accepted that the food perhaps wasn't quite as good as it'd been on its predecessor, you could make a pretty strong case for saying that the Amigo was actually an upgrade.

A totally different size and shape of ship, it still wasn't the most handsome in the harbour, but it worked, which was certainly an improvement. The guide also spoke better English and knew his subject matter to degree level.

The next morning, we were even treated to sunshine when we finally landed at the fabled Floreana Island for a quick snorkelling session, and then onto the beach for a look at some pretty crabs.

Photo: Wee Mo

The rain, though, would not be denied, and just as we were about to set off for our afternoon session, the heavens opened. This made our already questionable decision to go into water-filled cave seem quite daft indeed. But round these parts, no one seems to give much of an equatorial fuck for practicalities like safety, nor show the slightest bit of sympathy for someone who is hydrophobic, like Aman, one of our new pals. Instead we were led into a dark, cave, and made to wade in the gloom, with icy water whipping past our collective shrivelled balls.

Against the odds, we survived and were taken out to Floreana's other major attraction, the so-called pirate postbox. Back when people slightly more disreputable than the current mob visited this islands, they would leave messages for their fellow skulduggerous skull-and-crossbone crew to take around the world e.g. “To anyone travelling to Plymouth, tell One-Eyed Boab that his brother is dead... And to his wife: 'Hello'”

These days the tradition kind-of continues. Now people leave crushingly dull messages on postcards (“Hey maw! Look at me! I done a holiday!”) for other moneyed shitbags to pick up and take to the addressee. The whole thing is supposed to be done by hand, though rarely is, with people preferring to simply send it by mail when they get to their native country. We shuffle the deck and find one addressed to the Rasmussens who live in Glasgow's bohemian west end. Being a narcissist with questionable amounts of friends, I replace it with one addressed to myself.

After that, the days tumble past to our departure without much incident. I mean, plenty of interesting things happen, but by Galapagoan standards, it's all pretty sedate: we get eaten alive by obscene numbers of mosquitoes on Espanola; the sea-lions continue to make us laugh, when they're not terrifying us; and it transpires that the American girl on our boat actually goes to university with my brother, which is so unlikely I avoid thinking about it too much to avoid brain damage. Also, Wee Mo takes a picture so good that I seriously doubt the blog is able to handle its perfection – I've tried uploading it a few times, but get the message is the same: too tremendous for public consumption. It was summed up by Rhys, our Canadian friend, who described as "fucking retarded."

And then suddenly we run out of rope, with barely enough time to say goodbye to our new friends and jump on a plane back to the mainland.

Photo: Wee Mo

There's so much to admire about life in the Galapagos, that it's hard to know how to define it. For me, though, I think it's the feeling that a person can walk around and observe how things could have been if humans had never popped into existence. Here, you can get as close as you like to the animals, watch them, talk to them, like some invisible time traveller sent back into prehistory. They just don't care. For them, for now, we do little more than block the sun – and we're probably not as annoying as the mosquitoes.

Photo: Wee Mo

The Dark Days

2011-05-08T16:20:00.000-05:00

The Curse sits across from me at breakfast, a great, smug sneer spread across his c**t mouth. Slevery Stoner Face, the guide, emerges to tell us something we already know: the Angelique has gone nowhere; we are not anchored off Floreana Island as we should be.

SSF says that, while repairs take place (and he says they'll definitely be complete by nightfall) we can get head off on a day tour to Floreana instead. We look at the clock, then the itinerary. It's already 8am and we're three hours from Floreana - we were supposed to be on land an hour ago already. As a group, we reject his offer wholeheartedly.

Instead, we propose that we go to nearby Santa Fe, which, being a fucking moron, he also rejects.

But an hour later, having looked at the fucking map, he realises the sense of our proposal and agrees, before sloping off to commission a speed boat for the task.

Before long, we're racing across the waves, watching flying fish take to the sky to escape the jaws of murderous tuna below. It's a bumpy ride, but one we're happy to take, if for no other reason than to escape the sweaty, stricken bowels of the Angelique.

Again, our first activity is snorkelling. SSF says that we can swim in three directions: right for marine iguanas, straight for reef fish, and left for sharks. 90% of the group duly heads left.

Wee Mo and I chunter along, vaguely hopeful of laying eyes on the local Galapagos shark and, to our surprise, see two turtles near the ocean floor. One is clearly junior to the other, which is weird as turtles are famously abysmal parents.

We look down for a few seconds, then look up to see some of our group titting around on jagged rocks. We shake our heads – what the hell are they playing at? In truth, we don't really care, instead looking back at the two turtles for another 30 seconds or so.

When we look up again, we have been transported 200 yards around a peninsula and into open sea. The waves are high; the current powerful. The rest of our group weren't playing: they were trying to escape.

I'm sure The Curse lurks somewhere nearby in the water, I only wish he would come up for air so I could tell him how unreasonable he's being. Bad luck is one thing: but murder on the high seas? Come on Curse!

Photo: Wee Mo

I make enough progress to help a couple of the Irish girls who have never been snorkelling before and who are finding the whole thing traumatic. SSF leaves me to do his fucking job for him while he tries to swim back to the boat to raise the alarm, but not before passing me his spear. (Until this point, he had been floundering around the peninsula, unsuccessfully trying to spear-fish. We later found out that, in the presence of tourists, this is completely illegal.)

I accompany the Irish to the rest of the group, which is now about eight-strong, drifting further from the shore. Rhys, one of the young Canadians, mentions that he's seen something in the water. Everyone gets a little more tense, but I know what's out there.

I swim out with the spear, to meet The Curse head-on. I struggle further out into the stoney-grey water searching for my enemy.

At first, he's nowhere to be seen and I even think about turning back. But then, at the very limit of my visibility I see the big bastard, about 2.5m long, swimming away.

I speed up and present the spear...

“Shark!” Up goes the cry! I speed up again, trying to get closer, then very nearly lose control of all bodily fluids when Wee Mo, unannounced, brushes against my leg. Somehow the boat has snuck up behind us too and retrieved the rest of the group. SSF stands on the deck asking what I can see.

I'm shouting, but can barely force the words past the adrenaline.

“Hammerheads!” He reports back to the group. One of whom, Jonas the Swede, jumps in at the news.

Soon he joins Wee Mo and I, the three of us gawping at one, two, three, then four of the weird, brilliant beasts as they venture ever nearer.

But not too near. SSF whistles and tells us to get back on board.

When we get a look from his vantage point, it seems that, for once, he's made the right call. The four sharks we saw were just a fraction of their gang, which from above looks like it has at least 20 members.

Photo: Wee Mo

Some time later, we're back in the water – this time in the safe seclusion of the bay – to be entertained by the miracle of sea lions swimming. On land, the fat bastards are at best cantankerous, and at worst downright aggressive. As Werner Herzog said about grizzly bears: “What haunts me, is that... I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.”

Underwater, however, they couldn't be more different. Perhaps they're contented by the knowledge that they could quite easily kill a man down here. Not that it's easy to spot the malevolence, instead it's all dancing and flirting and glee.

It's powerful stuff, it really is, and all thoughts of The Curse drift from my mind. Most people spend the trip back grinning, trying to preview pictures and speculating how many sharks really were in the water.

When we arrive back at the Angelique, the weather has worsened as we tentatively get back on board for dinner. SSF heads off for a minute, then comes back. To my horror, I recognise the person standing next to him.
“The machine cannot be repaired,” sleavers our guide. “I am sorry.”

Confusion rises, anger follows. And there, in the middle of the room is a trace of triumph. Fuck you Captain Curse!

Photo: Wee Mo

The following day is spent fighting agents in the Galapagos, and back in Quito and Guayaquil. Absolutely no one wants to give any kind of refund. There are threats and counters, offers and refusals. Somewhere along the line it emerges that the real cause of the boat's paralysis is so ludicrously contemptible as to be genuinely funny: on their night out, the engineer had got so superbly steaming, that he returned to the boat and duly let the generator over-heat and eat itself. On the day he was supposed to repair it (presumably with a chronic hangover) every time he removed one singed piece, he discovered something even more mangled. Thus the Angelique wheezed it's last, at least as far as we were concerned.

While money-men and agents and owners argue the toss about who was the blame and what the compensation should be, we veterans take the relative newcomers to the Charles Darwin centre for a squizz at the giant turtles, and then for a mad, near-pointless dash down to Turtle Bay, for a glimpse at the sunset.

As the sun rises on our third day at anchor, confusion is served for breakfast, with lies for lunch, but some time around mid-afternoon it becomes clear that the group will be broken up and spread between three other boats.
The Irish girls head for a first-class boat (at a higher cost) to tour the missing islands; the Swiss trio will wait for another couple of days before getting on a new boat of their own (also at higher cost); and us? Wee Mo and I are joined by our British-Indian pals Harp and Aman, Jonas the greedy Swede, and the youthful Canucks.

We are to transfer to The Amigo, a boat so bad we had been told to specifically avoid it. A sea-dog with such a scurrilous reputation that many agencies refuse to work with it at all.

But at least it doesn't cost us anything extra.

Photo: Wee Mo

The Angelique

2011-05-01T13:48:00.001-05:00

So what if this one can barely cut through the calmest of waves? It feels good to be back on a zodiac. And what do we care if the driver is scarcely an expert on shoe-lace tying, let alone wildlife? This is fun.

On board the Angelique, the cabins are small but comfortable, and come complete with some brilliantly fierce air conditioning. We've hardly got time to enjoy that, though, before we're being bundled off the boat again for our first activity – a quick tour of Bacchas Beach and the chance to go snorkelling for the first time. Unfortunately, the only animals anyone really cares about are the clouds of mosquitoes and the infinitely more-painful sand flies. (If you've never had the joy of meeting a sand fly, it has the tenacity of a Scottish midge and the sting of a wasp. In short, it is a right c**t.)

We toss ourselves into the water to escape the winged fury and quickly find that the water here has been so churned by wind and rain that we may as well be swimming in porridge.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I begin to reconsider the Curse.

Photo: Wee Mo

We wake the morning up having had a torrid night with the air conditioning. While some (Wee Mo) would blame it on my lack of common sense, I blame the fact that I tried to adjust it while half asleep and the remote was old and not very good...

In any case, despite the sweaty evening, our trip to Genovesa island is the first time we really feel Curse-free. This little spot in the north east of the territory is a teeming sea bird colony, home to red-footed and Nazca boobies, petrels, endemic owls and – the stars of the show – the frigate birds. It was their weird, two metre silhouettes we saw hanging over Puerto Ayora, but whereas they looked like eerie pterodactyls there, up close they are perhaps the most handsome birds on the islands.

Photo: Wee Mo

Frigates are not true sea birds, instead they scavenge from the surface, or – more often – attack other birds in mid-air for their food or nest-building materials. The moment it has secured one of these, it is typically set upon by a number of its kin. So begins a game Quidditch where, unusually, I don't want all of the participants to die.

On the ground, they're no less interesting. As in the human world, it's mating season and amorous males are attempting to attract females with their colossal, red sacks. Unlike in the human world, they also do this:

Video: Wee Mo

Our afternoon activity is to be snorkelling again, and again it is ruined by fading light and torrential rain. Annoyingly, the moment we call it off, the weather clears up and we're treated to some exquisite light and a bonnie sunset.

The sun hasn't disappeared by morning, even though we're back south of the equator again, now moored just off the islands of Bartolome and Santiago. So far as the history of the world goes, the Galapagos are fairly young, born of lava spewing from the ocean floor. On these two islands, we're shown how the whole unimaginably violent process would have taken place. To paraphrase Darwin (who was either the most important person to ever visit the islands, or just another dude who said “wow”, depending on who you listen to) it's as though the ocean has been petrified in one of its most tumultuous moods.

Once again, this is followed by snorkelling and for the first time we get the chance to see what all the fuss is about. The sun has faded, but the water remains tremendously clear. Importantly, we also get lots of time to explore. Initially, this doesn't reveal much – and I'm not helped by the fact my mask is so scratched and clouded that I may as well have been given cataracts and a snorkel. But being engaged to the best person on the planet has its perks, and so Wee Mo gives up her mask and takes a break and leaves me to it. The change is like going from watching Channel 5 in the countryside to glorious HD in London town. Also, my Luck, hitherto absent, comes back to my side. So while everyone else is either having a rest or swimming elsewhere, I stumble into this tranquil motherfucker.

And a few moments, tranquillity deserts me altogether. Having let the ocean drift take me back around a corner and I decide to check the turtle video. Then I look up and see this.

The afternoon comes and we're taken to a lava field in the heaviest rain yet – a total washout. Pfft! What do I care? I stand, bare-chested and Lear-like in the pouring rain. I laugh at the Curse. Haha!

Sanity restored, we journey back to Santa Cruz to learn about perhaps the Galapagos' most famous inhabitants, the giant tortoises. These poor bastards are only just recovering from the initial devastation mankind brought with him. Pirates quickly worked out that the the tortoises were A) tasty and B) could survive for an entire year on their backs beneath the Jolly Roger without needing any food or water.

The tortoises also had to deal with introduced species including such pleasures as feral dogs, rats and bastard cats, which called a truce between in each other to focus on slaughtering the locals. Thanks, man!

Photo: Wee Mo

The fourth day on the boat is also a day of change. Our guide is leaving to take his first holiday in four months and is replaced by a gormless stoner for whom communication in any language seems a challenge. We also lose our two Argentinians and have them replaced by four Irish girls with skin white like paper, two affable Canadian teenagers and two giant (one horizontally, one vertically) Americans.
Though ultimately we have the least to do with this final couple, they do provide the most immediate entertainment, specifically when the tall man left a dump of such vast, vile proportions that it was deemed unflushable by the boat's feeble sewage system. On discovering the beast lying in the shadows, his wide partner immediately vomited, only breaking from the chundering to admonish her partner's devastating sphincter. He, a qualified doctor, simply replied “Well it's better out than in.” I suppose he would know.

That night, having been at sea for an entire four days, the crew decide to reward themselves with a night out in Puerto Ayora. Despite being a rag-tag gang of ruddy-faced, fat-fingered rascals, no one really grudges them their shore leave.

Instead, the majority of us stay on board, drink a little ourselves, talk a sizeable ream of shit, and go to bed. Tonight we sail to Floreana, the first of the southern islands.

But then, some time around 3am, the air conditioning dies and the boat becomes unbearably hot. People become agitated. Something is amiss.

We Interrupt This Service...

2011-04-28T10:53:00.002-05:00

To bring you this important announcement.

Arrivals

2011-04-25T15:32:00.000-05:00

Some time in the past three years, I worked out that so long as you ask the right person in the right way, it's possible to get pretty much anything in the world for free. Increasing confidence led me to ask for all kinds of things, and every time I did, it seemed I was met with nought but acquiescence. Before long, it was five star this and seven course that – and rarely, if ever, did it cost us anything.

It was almost limitless, and with that kind of power/luck/brass-neckery a person could get to thinking that they were somehow invincible.

So when the chance to go to the Galapagos Islands came up, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to ask for – nay, expect! – it all for free. What's more, by pitching the right story in the right direction, there'd be the added cherry of the chance to finally write for my favourite paper.

But it was some time around then that my luck changed.

Wee Mo and I were all set to travel to the Galapagos to write about a new diving school when disaster literally struck – the Japanese tsunami may have been greatly diminished by the time it reached the Ecuadorian islands, but not so much that it couldn't wipe out an unfinished pier and damage some buildings at our would-be destination.

However, by this time, the seed had been sewn in our brains. We wanted to go to the Galapagos – we had to. So in a break from recent tradition, I dusted off my credit card and went wild in the aisles to book the whole thing.

The next hiccup was that on attempting to check-in for our flight, we were told we didn't have seats after all. We looked at the tickets, amazed and immediately angry, and saw that sure enough, we'd been booked on a flight for the following day. A person could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps the trip to the Galapagos was suffering from some kind of Pirate Curse (which, according to Wee Mo, are worse than ordinary curses).

Photo: Wee Mo

It's possible to spend ludicrous amounts of cash on seeing the islands by booking an expensive boat in advance. However, travelling there first, staying in a shithole, waiting for the right last-minute deal to come up and playing a couple of greedy tour agents off against each other certainly helps reduce the damage.

Unfortunately, there are certain costs that cannot easily be avoided – namely the inflated flight price for gringos like us (it would have been $30 extra each for their mistake had Wee Mo not been so outraged), and the $100 national park fee as all of the islands are protected.

Photo: Wee Mo

Yet, within minutes of leaving the airport, it's clear that everything is worth it. Gigantic pelicans plunge endlessly into the azure water that separates Baltra (the airport island) from Santa Cruz (the most populated, tourist-driven island) and come up with a hearty mouthful every time.

There's more of the same in Puerto Ayora, the Galapagos' biggest town, too. The whole place is a bit sterile, with virtually every shop punting tat and every restaurant over-priced (and that's before an obligatory 22% tax and service is added at the end).
But humans moving in steadily over the past 100 years hasn't resulted in the local wildlife being evicted. So where back in the real world a cat would be sunning itself on the pavement, here's it's a marine iguana; where at home an unreasonable drunk would be harassing bar staff for another drink, here it's a sea lion badgering fisherman. Above, terrifying, prehistoric shapes move menacingly across the sky (more on them later).

Photo: Wee Mo

Having booked our tour, we decide to head along to Bahia Tortuga [Turtle Bay] to see what lies beyond the town's borders. In fact, the beach is one of the few areas we can walk to unaccompanied: on Santa Cruz, as on most of the islands, idiotic tourists can't simply wander around without a guide.

The walk is longer than we'd bargained for, and the beach a good deal less developed than we had expected (our water is gone before we've even got there). None of that really matters, though, because what is there is one of the most perfect beaches I've ever seen, with sand white and soft like flour. The water is beautifully clear and there's not a hint of waste in sight – this is the kind of perfection that only comes with a near-absence of humans.

Photo: Wee Mo

We march along the beach, roasting merrily in the sun, before setting up to take some pictures on a rocky peninsula named Pelican Point. The animals make for contented models, unafraid to pose and posture, surprisingly happy to eat.

Photo: Wee Mo

Hours pass and by the time afternoon rolls round, we are feeling dehydrated and sun burned like a pair of goddamn amateurs. Still, the walk back to town along the winding path passes gangs of lava lizards, bolshy mocking birds and a smattering of the fifteen sub-species of Darwin finches, which may or may not be gazumped by the bottle of cold Gatorade at the end.

Booking a tour last-minute may be cheap, but doesn't include some of the bells and whistles enjoyed by anyone who's paid the brochure price. Our first day at sea starts with a mad dash across land, all the way back to the airport on the other side of the island, to meet our guide and the others who will be joining us for the eight-day tour on the boat.

Three of the group we know already: a British-Indian couple and a Swede who had coincidentally been at the same hostel as us in Guayaquil, back on the Ecuadorian mainland. They are joined by a trio of Swiss (Swissers?) fresh off the plane, and an Argentinian couple who have already been on the boat for four days and have just four remaining, versus our eight. Everyone is around the same age and no one has paid the brochure price. As such, we move quickly past the awkward school disco introductory pish, stop staring at our shoes, and head off to the coast.

An Ode To The Man

2011-04-08T12:34:00.001-05:00

Fake sunshades man when we first meet

You insist on calling me friend

I don't know why you bother when

You want my means to meet your end

Your starting price is always distorted

Because you say your shades are designer

I look at them, cheap flimsy things

And know they're made in China

“No!” You say, they're genuine, real

When they're made of shitty plastic

But you persist with your tall tales

Evidently taking me for a spastic

But I still need something, anything

To protect my eyes from the bright sun

And while I swither and try to decide

You smile and offer me two-for-one

You say they're magic, that I'll look cool

That they'll protect me from UV rays

When we both know in fact they'll be dead,

And broken, within a matter of days

I've paid in dong, dollars and pesos

The results are always the same:

What you claimed were bespoke and reliable

Turned out to be awful, shit and lame

Oakleys pop and Raybans snap,

Nike and Versace bite the dust too

I swear and want my money back

But now I've no hope of finding you

And if I could find you, what would I see?

You in some squalid foreign heap

Nah, in the end I don't hold any grudges

When I insist on buying shades so cheap.

Folk 3 or Pals And A Lack Thereof

2011-04-02T00:17:00.002-05:00

*The following pictures are taken in Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley outside Cuzco, Peru, home to some of the most stunning archaeological sites in South America, if not the world.

Photo: Wee Mo

Assuming a person is not motivated entirely by money, and assuming that they are not in fact a giant, cold-blooded lizard, there is little reason they would enjoy living in Dubai. With no live music, no history, no outdoors, no culture, no comedy, no sport, no locals, no reality, brutal weather, inflated prices and endless, gnawing guilt to deal with, about the only thing a person can do to keep themselves from going fucking mad is to talk to the people around them, usually while drinking heavily.

This, in turn, brings a whole raft of new problems. Firstly, with a turnover of staff I hadn't witnessed since McDonalds, I would typically find myself in the pub having the same conversation every week, for months on end: where are you from? What are you working on? What did you do at home? How long are you going to stay here? From there, it would degenerate into an endless bitching session about unintelligent or incapable bosses, for many of whom, quality daily output could only be quantified by their slimy, 11am shite.

So pathetically repetitive and frequent were these chats with new-found friends, that it often became impossible to tell what had been said before. And so people would say the same things again. And the whole scene was so fucking pitifully inane that no one seemed to notice, or care about, the endless spinning of the wheel.

Photo: Wee Mo

There was another problem too. It is best summed up by the last sentence in this brilliant quote from A.A. Gill in his eerily accurate piece on Dubai for Vanity Fair: “[White shit-bags] come here to be young, single, greedy, and insincere. None of them are very clever. So they live lives that revolve around drink and porn sex and pool parties and barbecues with a lot of hysterical laughing and theme nights, karaoke, and slobbery, regretful coupling. In fact, as in all cases of embarrassing arrested development, these expats on the short-term make don’t expect to put down roots here, have children here, or grow old here.”

And, like a chemistry teacher who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer and decides to break bad, when someone thinks the end could come at any moment, they generally tend not to give a tax-free fuck about how they conduct themselves. If you don't really know anyone anyway, why be sincere? Why be honest? Why not spread gossip? Why not shag him/her/it? Why not order that other drink? Why not call him/her/it a c***? Why consider the consequences?

Why, in short, care?

Naturally, not everyone was a shitbag - I even made some pals - but overall the whole thing made me terribly homesick. Months, years, after leaving home, I still felt dreadful knowing that I had friends at home with whom I could share as much or as little as I liked. People who I didn't have to introduce myself to every week. People who didn't give a cat's cock about what had happened at work. People who'd seen me at my lowest point and scraped me off the floor – and some for whom I'd done the scraping. Good folk who I could talk to about global conflict, or a memory from school, or the outcome of a bloody dog race. As time passed, so my confusion about why I'd shunned all that familiarity grew.

But, I thought, it's OK because all this shit in Dubai is temporary, and if nothing else, I got to see a bit of the world, and I met the girl I'll marry and so, overall, despite how lonely I've felt, I'm a goddamn winner.

Besides, I thought, I'm going travelling, and I'll get out of all this. And I'll meet new people.

And then I did.

Now things can be as temporary as half and hour, and they might not even speak my language, and we might have nothing more in common than being in the same fucking room for 30 seconds.

The conversation now runs as follows: where are you from? Where have you been? Where are you going? What's been your favourite place? What did you do at home? When are you going back?

It's impossible to escape it either – in a way, we need it. It's not like Wee Mo and I have days apart at the end of which we can compare and contrast notes. We know everything about every moment of each other's day.

Perhaps worst of all are those fleeting moments when we feel that, y'know, perhaps we could really get on with this or that person, but then their bus arrives and they leave after just five minutes. In fact, the only time we've had a break from all this transience was on the boat to Antarctica. There, trapped for 10 days, everyone could get past the introductions and the tired anecdotes, get out and see something, share a real experience. Leaving felt like fucking crap, really it did.

Photo: Wee Mo

So the strangers come and go (most don't even bother with their names; we don't either) and we keep travelling, together and alone, wanting to cry with gratitude on the rare occasions Skype affords us a grainy image of a familiar face.

I'll be home in about 125 days, home for good after two years and 11 months of travelling.

I just hope to hell my friends recognise me when I get there – and that they fancy a chat.

Photo: Wee Mo

The High Road - Days Two and Three

2011-03-21T09:48:00.000-05:00

For the past nine months, we've found ourselves almost universally opting for the cheapest version of everything. And yet, for some reason, when it came to picking our tour company for this trip, we opted to spend a little more.
Never before have we been so grateful for a minor investment.

We speed off in the morning towards a rocky outcrop that juts illogically out of the middle of the desert. But just before that, we notice a sickly-looking Bolivian being ferried around in the back of another 4x4. At the time we don't think much of it, but, as it turns out, his malady is nearly fatal to another group who had gone for the cheapest option.

The jaundiced little man was in fact another driver who had come down with some kind of horrendous food poisoning (though others claim to have seen wine stains on his trousers) and, without a backup or any co-drivers, his passengers are forced to drive themselves for six hours, sans road, bypassing all kinds of geological weirdness.

So, sucks to be them, but for us, the first part of the day lives up to the ridiculously high standard set on day one. It also gives us plenty more photos.

Photo: Wee Mo

But as my grandfather used to say, “a blind man on a galloping horse” could take decent photos around here, so long as you pay attention to the basic rules of photography and don't ruin the shots by sticking your stupid-looking face in the middle of them.

Photo: Wee Mo

And that's another thing. I still don't understand people who insist on thrusting themselves into every picture – are they so narcissistic that they need to have their own heid in every shot they take? Are they so incompetent a photographer that they need to have something to fill the frame? Does their family have a history of early onset dementia, hence they need to document the fact that they were there, man? In all instances, we find it chronically boring – the most uninteresting thing one can take a picture of while travelling the world is their own, gloating mug.

Photo: Wee Mo

Anyway, from there we set off on a drive through pure desert which rivals anything I ever experienced while living in an actual desert. The odd thing here is that while the four wheels fight the slipping sands, in the background the horizon is filled with snow-capped peaks.

Photo: Wee Mo

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all this geological freakishness does bottom out after a while, although how much of that is down to the now grey skies, I cannot be sure. After lunch, the groups struggles to feign interest in yet more lakes, stripped of flamingoes and colour as they are, and though the shapes of the rocks continue to baffle, there is a lingering doubt that this is something of an anti-climax.

Photo: Wee Mo

After one final stretch along a dull highway, with llamas now grazing in every field, we stop in a ghostly little town called Culpina K, the only discernible reason for which is the availability of cheap guesthouses. Wee Mo and I head out to try and take some more pictures, which is a pretty tough job, save for the presence of two unsettling cats and a couple of playful kids.

Photo: Wee Mo

The guesthouse puts on llama for tea, which is halfway between lamb and beef, but covered in so much seasoning that it's hard to put a finger on the actual taste. Then one of the Dutch girls busts out a bottle of Brazilian cachaça, which is so vile that taste becomes irrelevant. Still, we all launch into another big, long discussion about pretty much everything, including religion. Thankfully, no one makes any objections when I make my views clear – in fact most people agree, which is reassuring, given we are all under-30 and represent a broad mix of cultures.
And before long, the bottle is gone.

Our last day starts with a lot of driving before a brief stop at the “graveyard of trains”. As Bolivia's rail network was increasingly ignored and left to ruin, so these engines – some allegedly over 100 years old, although we find nothing that dates before 1950 – were abandoned to the elements.

And this, unfortunately, is what Bolivians choose to do with all the crap they no longer have a use for, whether that's a train, a plastic bag or a shitty nappy.

(We travel for another three weeks in Bolivia after this point and nowhere in the past three years, nowhere in the other 41 countries I've been to – many poorer than Bolivia – have I ever witnessed such nauseating squalor and neglect for the environment. And I've been to Kilmarnock – I've been a few times.)

The vast planes of the altiplano, soaring more than 3000km in the sky, are home to fierce winds that carry waste for miles. When it reaches points like the train graveyard, it encounters little brush bushes that grow no more than a couple of feet. As you approach almost any town in Bolivia, then, these little bushes – hundreds of thousands of them – find themselves wearing this waste, like little faecal jackets.

From the graveyard, we make a short transfer into the town of Uyuni and quickly find that the utter lack of dignity and laughable contempt for hygiene isn't banished to the wild. No, here in the heart of tourist town, there are people pissing everywhere, kids fighting for elbow-room with dogs to shit in the street, and no one – not a soul – gives the tiniest recycled fuck about what they drop at their arse.

Photo: Wee Mo

On the plus side, just outside of Bolivia is one of the entire planet's most remarkable quirks. Apparently, if you ingest enough psycho-active chemicals, some humans experience a phenomenon known as synesthesia, a condition where senses become intertwined and confused; some people report tasting sounds and hearing colours etc.

Alas, I've never been so tremendously high/psychotic to experience that, but the experience at the Salar De Uyuni provides my brain with a similarly bizarre conundrum: namely, what is sky and what is earth?

Even for someone with such a tiny mind as I, should normally be able to work that one out, but standing here on the world's biggest mirror, it's genuinely a tough task.

Photo: Wee Mo

During the dry season, this same, brilliant landscape provides tourists with endless opportunities to make a tit of themselves with sly perspective shots: allowing themselves to balance their loved ones on their shoulder, or crush them underfoot, and all manor of other fucking hilarious hijinks.

But as its the wet season, before bidding each other farewell, our group settles for dicking around like long-retired Power Rangers, which, y'know, is kind of fun too.

The High Road - Day One

2011-03-14T10:41:00.000-05:00

Having spent the best part of three months in Chile and Argentina, the cost of living and transport are beginning to take their toll. Our meagre budget of just £45 a day is frequently blown and, were it not for the money we banked by scadging Antarctica, we'd be almost £800 in the red.

With that in mind, a dedicated tourist town in Chile is pretty much the last place we should be, and yet we find ourselves inextricably drawn to San Pedro de Atacama, an oasis in the middle of the world's driest desert.

Photo: Wee Mo

On the plus side San Pedro is an eerily fascinating place – one of our favourites in Chile. That, added to the benevolence of a host who upgraded us to a double from the dorms for free (he charges £12 per person per night for the bunks, without breakfast, but with a straight face) means that our final few days in Chile will be some of our most memorable.

Strange that we enjoy it so much, really, as the whole place has an unreal feeling about it. It's as though it's been created in the image of what tourists expect a desert town to look like, rather than something that's evolved naturally. The majority has been tossed up in the past 10 years or so, but the authentic look is convincing enough to make it genuinely difficult to tell what is original.

Outside of town, however, everything is a good deal more genuine and ridiculously photogenic.

Photo: Wee Mo

However, the real reason for being here isn't to blow money – or even to take photos – but so that we can get a ride to our next country. There are many ways to get to Bolivia from Chile, but by far the most interesting is a three-day, off-road Jeep tour that ends in the bizarre, ethereal gleam of Uyuni. And no, we can't really afford it at almost £110 a head (plus another £20 each to get into a national park) but being spread over three days and including food and drinks, we can just about take the hit.

Photo: Wee Mo

Given our recent problems with border control, arriving at a shack at 4000m above sea level to get into Bolivia doesn't really fill us with excitement. Nor, in all honesty, does the prospect of being stuck in a 4x4 with six other people for the entire time.

But ramshackle as the little hut is, we are stamped-in quickly and, thanks to the honesty of the Cordillera Tours, our journey is comfortable too. Rather than cram everyone and a driver into one vehicle, they spread the eight of us (variously representing Scotland, England, Bosnia, Switzerland, Brazil and Holland) between two.

Plus, what was somehow left out of the blurb is that what lies ahead is the best non-road trip of our lives.

Photo: Wee Mo

The general rule for altitude sickness is that once you go beyond 3000m above sea level, you should only ascend 500m a day. We start at 2500m in San Pedro and within a few hours pass Laguna Verde and Laguna Blanca at 4000m, then bump through a literally breath-taking valley at 4500m that is said to look like a Dali painting.

Click picture

Finally we top out to watch the weirdness of some prehistoric mud-geysers somewhere around 5000m. That's three times the height of Ben Nevis – hell, it's more than double the height we reached in the Himalayas. The dryness, altitude and radiation from the merciless sun make life up here pretty difficult, even in the short term. We feel endlessly thirsty, despite the water flowing right through us, and are the new owners of gnawing headaches. Standing up too quickly or trying to scale slopes in a hurry feels like running and ultra-marathon with a hangover.

Photo: Wee Mo

The ancient, Inca way of coping with this is to chew on coca leaves – as in Coca Cola, as in cocaine. Alas, chewing these little green things taste like a cross between raw tea and the sickly, earthy rankness I imagine magic mushrooms might have. There's scant trace of the numbing, euphoric sensation I imagine cocaine might have, either. Suffice to say one in the group observes that they “prefer it the white way”. As for fighting off the altitude sickness, I barely notice a difference, feeling no better or worse than those who opted to simply guzzle water.

Photo: Wee Mo

The first day ends at Laguna Colorada, somewhere around 4000m in the sky. Here a great flock of skittish flamingos feed and flee most attempts to take pictures. Luckily for us, a Jeep arriving late chases some right towards us.

Photo: Wee Mo

While it and another 10 Jeeps head to a sprawling borstal-looking place half a mile away, our two park up at private accommodation. It's still not posh – it's barely more than a bothy with curtains – but they serve warm food, and give us two rooms to share.

Photo: Wee Mo

After dinner, we lead the group out onto a nearby hill. Being this far away from humanity, and with only a few weak lights running from car batteries to illuminate our refugio (bothy) there is near perfect darkness up here, which, if you know what you're doing (and Wee Mo does) allows for some pretty spectacular pictures.

We call it a day at just 10pm, with everyone exhausted by altitude and excitement, then head to bed, steal as many free blankets as we can and concentrate on not freezing to death.

Party Time or How I Decided To Pace Myself

2011-03-09T06:42:00.008-06:00

This blog entry was supposed to be all about carnivals in South America. As Wee Mo and I couldn't stretch our budget to go to Rio – and quite frankly didn't fancy the danger – we managed to arrange things so that we would be compensated by three other carnivals in three other countries.

I was going to start by telling you about the Gualeguaychu edition, in north east Argentina, and how polished it was, to the point of feeling a bit sterile. I was going to describe how, despite our dreadful hostel, we had a pretty good time watching expensive floats and lavish costumes swagger past us to the samba bounce. I was even going to comment on how everything seemed to move except the rigid, terrifying tits of the dancers who, for the most part had bodies from Baywatch and faces, well you know the rest.

Photo: Wee Mo

Then I was going to tell you about the Paraguayan version, held in the sketchy town of Encarnacion. I was going to say how it hardly had any money spent on it by comparison, but that it was a lot more fun, mostly because of the people in the crowd and the cans of spray foam that made the whole place a goddamn battlefield. Then I was going to put up this wee video and you were going to have a laugh at my expense.

But then we went to Boliva, to Oruro, and everything changed. So instead, you're getting this:

When my brother and I were young, we were asked to solve a crime. Hehe! Our father had been assaulted and we were to go to the scene of the attack just around the corner from our flats and work out what had happened. A feral alcoholic at the time, he had absolutely no recollection of what had happened and we were to try and find out more on his behalf. Haha. My brother and I headed out and sure enough we found his jacket – a cream thing, dirty and wet from the previous night's rain – lying on the floor, next to a half open garage door. So far as anyone could tell, he had simply walked into the it, blinded by the bevvy, then somehow contrived to strip himself of his jacket. We brought it home and reported our findings, but not before we'd checked the pockets for money. There was none. Ho. Ho.

I'm thinking about this sorry scene as I lie on a comfortable mattress, staring at the ceiling, trying to solve my own crime. First, I try to fathom the extent of my agony. This is relatively easy to do: most things hurt, but my back and legs are particularly painful. Alarmingly, I also have a small chip out of one of my front teeth.

I sit up gingerly, trying and failing not to disturb Wee Mo. The second step is to work out exactly what is missing. I know my wallet is gone, but what else?

Just what the fucking hell has happened to me?

Unlike the other carnivals that took place every Saturday and Sunday in February, the Oruro edition is spread over a single, extremely long weekend at the start of March. Having arrived in town via a hellish overnight train from Tupiza, we decided to skip out Friday night's festivities and start early on Saturday. By early I mean before noon, but the Bolivians were out dancing by 7am. By the time we were in the centre at around 11am, the tickets for the stands that fringe the central plaza were already sold out.

Most alleyways were already full of semi-conscious bums or those who had seriously misjudged their capacity for booze too. A huge number of people were pissing all over the place, though this is the Bolivian norm, while one or two were actually shitting right in the middle of the street. We quickly realised that this wasn't the quaint cultural event we'd thought it might be, but instead the Bolivian T in the Park, without the open fields to absorb the piss, shit and puke.

Photo: Wee Mo

So we held our breath here, and gagged a bit there, and tried to find seats, which was virtually impossible. When we did finally find a tout, he was asking for £50 for both us us to sit on a wooden plank for two days. And bizarrely, that was pretty much the set price. Despite Bolivia being by far and away the cheapest country we've been to (seriously, it costs £1.60 for an entirely edible four-course meal) the cost of its carnival is ridiculously high. By comparison, the Argentinian equivalent was under a tenner each – and the Paraguayan one half that.

However, being a natural born mink, I somehow sniffed out some free seats for us, allowing us to take some portraits for the best part of four hours before we were rumbled and hustled out of there.

And up-close the Oruro carnival is indeed spectacular. These people may live in the poorest country on the continent, but they are clearly decent tailors, competent musicians and skilled prancers. The fact that they actually play their own music (rather than have it played over loud speakers as in Argentina and Paraguay) gives the whole thing a sense of authenticity too.

Photo: Wee Mo

But like I say, our ruse only worked for so long before we were hunted elsewhere. It was around this time that I started drinking at an accelerated rate. It's not just the scran that's cheap in Boliva: three cans of acceptable German brew costs just about £2.30. This became the fuel to my fire as we stood around trying to peer over the top of locals and gringos alike to see more of the 12 hour parade.

Unable to see much, the whole thing descended into another mass foam fight. There's something about that stuff that brings out the Worst Wean in me – I have scarcely had more fun in the past three years than when spraying a gaggle of boisterous Israelis directly in the eyes.

But despite hitting perfection somewhere around that point, I kept drinking, and drinking. And by the time nine cans had come and gone, not much was making sense. Then I noticed that Wee Mo had run out of drink and I offered to go get her some. She refused, but as I wanted to keep drinking myself, I lurched off to get more. I turned a corner and there, waiting for me as always, was the familiar abyss of a blackout.

The first sensation after that was pain. Pain and suspicion of the small Boliviano trying to help me. He spoke virtually no English, and in my state, my Spanish was utterly miserable. The pain, though, translated pretty well – searing hands gripped my spine, ribs and kidneys. Even through the booze it was excruciating.
I knew I should be making my way back to Wee Mo – how long I'd been away at this point is anyone's guess – but I could barely walk. The Boliviano, Jose, offered to take me to hospital. I accepted.

Over the next few hours I went back to black a few times, and what I do remember comes with Vaseline smeared on my memory's lens. I know this: the ER was packed, mostly with people in much worse condition than me; the pain was constant, until they gave me a jag in the ass; and when it came time to pay the bill, I couldn't find my wallet. A bag of beer and spray-foam I'd had was gone too. Thankfully, whatever had transpired, I still had our camera bag, with almost £5000's worth of equipment intact.

When I finally got chucked out at 12:45am, Jose was still with me. Somehow his family had arrived too. They took me back to the hostel in a taxi and paid everything, with me promising to reimburse them the next morning. I literally couldn't explain my gratitude.

Photo: Wee Mo

I shambled into the room and found Wee Mo distraught with worry, then quickly furious. She had spent hours looking for me and had gone through all kinds of hassle and distress in the process. Evidently Bolivianos aren't simply content with pissing all over their streets and businesses – Wee Mos also make for targets. Add that to finding someone's hand in her pocket (looking for the wallet I was carrying) and getting hit with a firework earlier in the day and, for Wee Mo, it was comfortably the worst day we've had on the road.

And all I could offer was that I was in pain and that I'd been in hospital. The rest was a mystery.

Photo: Wee Mo

When Jose arrived the next morning, I paid him and asked if he had any idea what had taken place. He didn't – he'd just found me limping along the road, holding my side.
I crawled back up to bed and spent the rest of the day a paranoid mess.

Perhaps I was mugged, but then why didn't they take the camera bag, and why was my back so sore, but not my face? Maybe I was run over, but then why wasn't I more hurt, and why were the cameras all fine?
Ultimately, the most likely scenario was that I simply fell over and landed awkwardly. The missing wallet was probably stolen earlier in the day, or just lost by me, deep within the grips of uselessness.

But with a chipped tooth and a trace of blood in my first painful piss of the day, it must have been some fall... Without any evidence, we decide to try and put the whole sorry affair behind us.
The next day, circumstances force us to leave Oruro 24 hours earlier than we had planned. Some genius decided that as the Tuesday after carnival is a national holiday, absolutely no buses should run. This makes for a grand panic as everyone tries to get the fuck out of town.

With tickets bought, we head to the station – me still feeling glum, Wee Mo justifiably pissed off – and join the scrum to find our bus. I've accepted the fact that I will never know what happened to me because, just like my father before me, I'm no witness to my own crime.

Photo: Wee Mo

But then, out of nowhere, a small family comes up to us.

“You! You! Are you OK?”

The boy offers me his hand, I shake it and put my other on my wallet. This reeks of a scam.

“We saw you on Saturday – are you OK?”

“Hold on, do you know what happened to me?”

“Yes, you were drunk,” he says and sends my heart sinking.

“Yes, but did you see what happened to me?”

“Si, si! Are you OK?” Offers the mother.

“I have a problem with my back, but I spoke with a doctor and I am OK. What happened?”

“There were three men,” says the boy. “They were in your jacket.”

“They got my wallet... Were they hitting me?”

“Yes, and one of them had a knife.”

Silence.

“We shouted: 'Polizia! Polizia!'” Says the mum. “And they ran away.”

I offer them things, pathetic tokens, by way of thanks. They refuse it all.
So maybe my back and ribs are sore because I was protecting the camera bag while they wailed on me. Perhaps my tooth is chipped because I bit someone (I have a history of biting). Maybe I fucking murdered someone. But really that's all speculation.

All I know for sure is that I got a doing, I'm a lucky bastard it wasn't worse, and that the blackouts must end.

The Guays, Part Two: Para

2011-02-28T09:51:00.000-06:00

Once we'd picked up the drenched little bits of ourselves and moulded them back together, we decided to venture onwards to our 41^st country: Paraguay.

In theory, the trip for Puerto Iguazu, Argentina to Encarnacion, Paraguay should have been a simple one, requiring nothing more than a single change of bus.

But as we quickly found out, virtually nothing in Paraguay is simple.

We were stamped out of Argentina quickly, but owing to some complicated border-design, in order to get to Paraguay, one must pass through the southernmost tip of Brazil. (Without actually getting off the bus it didn't count as country 42: pish.) And then the bus goes through the border at Ciudad Del Este, the first town in Paraguay.

Imagine a cocktail with two parts Mos Eisley, two parts The Barras, one part Deadwood, add a dash of acidic diarrhoea, shake well, and you've got something approaching Ciudad Del Este. The place is so lawless, we spoke to Buenos Aireans too afraid to go. It's so lawless that any and all contraband in South America is said to be available there. So lawless, they don't even bother to check passports on the way in...

And it was this, lastly, that began our sorry tale. We sat on the bus and kept waiting, and waiting, to be stamped in.

It never happened.

Apparently, no one in Ciudad Del Este gives a cross-border fuck where you're from, who you are or what you might be carrying, so long as you've got money to spend/steal. So instead of having another stamp squeezed into our ever more clustered passports, we got off one bus at the terminal and were immediately hustled onto another to Encarnacion.

Photo: Wee Mo

This, as it turned out, was a mistake. Paraguayans don't take too kindly to people sneaking into their country and the penalty is a substantial fine (OK it's only $50, but like Mr Wendell, it's a big deal to us).

We decided to throw ourselves on the mercy of the immigration officer in Encarnacion, to see if we couldn't weasel our way out of the whole mess. One thing you should know: people in Paraguay are very normal looking, which, having spent quite a lot of time gawping at the beautiful people in Argentina is on one hand quite reassuring, and on the other a little bit dull.

Subsequently we were greeted by a tall, surly, unattractive secretary and brusquely informed that Señor Vega would see us when he was ready. Promptly we saw a small man milling around in the office beyond. “Oh he's just lit a fag,” said Wee Mo, despondent.

At which point we were shepherded into the office.

There sat the little man, smoke in hand, behind a brown little desk, in front of a yellowing wall. Faint light coughed in through the window onto his scrunched little face, wrinkled like a shar-pei, caught halfway between triumph and failure. While he sucked on his cigarette, I couldn't get another Señor out of my head.

I relaxed my sphincter and let forth some woeful Spanish but only had to get as far as “Ciudad Del Este” before the wee man's anger peaked. Theatre ensued, he coughed, grabbed a phone, and barked a couple of questions in our direction.

“What is your country?” he asked in his native tongue.

“Great Britian, but I'm Scottish.” I said.

Nothing.

“Scottish.” Said Wee Mo, picking up on the fact he hadn't heard.

“Scottish? Hmm.”

Where we in trouble? It was impossible to tell.

Then he had a look at our passports while waiting for one of his phones to ring back.

“You have a lot of stamps,” he mostly likely said in Spanish.

“Oh yes, many countries,” I maybe said in return. “Many in Asia.”

Again silence was the reply. He flicked through every page, and seemed particularly disgruntled by the Laos visa, a cheap-looking full-page thing for which we had to pay baksheesh to a detestable little runt many months before. Señor Vega grabbed an UV light and had a closer look. Still he said nothing.

Now we were filled with dread. It seemed that something was going badly wrong. I was about to suggest we pay a fine [bribe] just to get the whole thing over with. He reached our picture pages and seemed surprised to find that they have been reinforced with laminate. Lifting up the passports, he started flicking the sturdy pages with a yellow finger.

“Come here,” he said, beckoning me to a picture on the wall.

“This was us at a course to detect document fraud,” he approximately said with a sudden smile on his face. “This guy was from Scotland Yard in the UK, he was very nice.”

I laughed, “Really? Cool,” all the while belting out Flower O Scotland in my head.

A few minutes later, Señor Vega was giving someone on the end of the phone a ladle of shit for things not working as they should and writing us a letter to take to Asuncion, exonerating us of any blame for border skipping.

Photo: Wee Mo

Some days later in Asuncion and amazingly, everything went according to plan. The capital itself may have been chronically boring, dirty and utterly infested with mosquitoes, but their immigration department quickly swapped our letter for another, more menacing one to take to the border.

We spent two and half days in the capital – about two days too long – sweating, giving millilitre after millilitre to the blood-suckers' cause, bored, but finally able to relax that we could get out of the country, vowing never to return.

So what can we learn from this whole episode?

That going off the beaten track doesn't always bring rewards. And that unless you're dealing with anyone named Thatcher or MacKenzie, telling people you're Scottish will almost always pays off.

The Guays, Part One: Uru

2011-02-20T20:57:00.001-06:00

We floated across the mouth of the Uruguay River towards Montevideo genuinely excited to be visiting a new country for the first time in two months. How different would it be? How would Montevideo compare to Buenos Aires? What would the Uruguayans be like?

The answers, as it turned out, were variously: not very; less favourably; quieter, boring, even.

The rapid arrival of an enormous electrical storm and the exploitative price of a pretty dreadful hostel in the capital perhaps coloured our view a little, but the fact remains: there is a good reason people bang on about BA and rarely mention its northerly cousin. Montevideo isn't the worst city we've visited on the trip – not by a long shot – but it's homely, rather than spectacular; cosy rather than exciting. Plus, in the piss-pouring rain, nothing looks too crash hot.

So less than 48 hours after arriving, we decided to move on, west to the much-lauded Colonia Del Sacramento.

It was pish too.

Or if not pish, exactly, then just unremarkable. An old port town, back in the day a lot of goods were shipped here from Europe before going on to Buenos Aires (it had something to do with tax). As a result, Colonia boomed when people had some classy ideas about architecture. The results are grand old buildings, quaint little squares, haggard forts and absolutely nothing that you wouldn't find in about 10,000 towns across Europe.

We're spoiled, you see – what the rest of the planet (America, Australia, all of the old New World, really) pays top dollar to witness or emulate, we have in spades at home. We barely think anything of it, so what is a national icon in Uruguay is utterly unremarkable to your average man of Kent.

Photo: Wee Mo

So almost a week in Uruguay and scarcely anything interesting happened. But then we headed for the border.

About four hours north of Colonia lies the amusingly-titled town of Fray Bentos. What is one Uruguayan's homestead, in a Kentish man's lunch etc and so on.

Fray Bentos (the town, not the tinned pies) shares a border with Argentina that was closed for a number of years owing to a long-standing dispute about the further ruination of the river.

Now, for reasons unknown to me, it's once again functional, which made it our quickest escape back into the gigantic, glamorous neighbour. Alas, on arriving at the bus station we quickly found out the next bus to Argentina was at 8.10am the next morning. We looked at our watches: 12.10pm. So fuck that, right in the eye.

Instead we worked out that we could get a taxi to the border for a decent price, or one all the way to our next destination for a fortune.

We were dropped off at immigration 15 minutes later, stamped out of Uruguay, into Argentina, and began making our way over the giant bridge back to the promised land. Or at least we were until border police stopped us.

It's not possible to cross on foot and with no taxi, no bus and no friends we quickly found ourselves deep in the shit.

However, once upon a time, back in the distant mists of the 1990s, before he was a racist drunkard (or at least when he hid it better), Mel Gibson made the single best advert for Scottish tourism the world has ever seen. And so after mentioning that, the fact I have a kilt at home and that I could name at least one famous Uruguayan, suddenly we found ourselves in the unlikely position of having the gun-toting border guards hitchhike for us.

About 15 minutes later, we were loading our bags into a plucky little car, owned by a plucky little woman who spoke even less English than we do Spanish. But necessity is a funny thing, and we managed to garble a conversation about our travel plans and various tedious personal details too dull to repeat. So rather than just take us across the bridge, she took us to our final destination, Gualeguaychu. (As you might have guessed, it's pretty tough to pronounce the name of that town, but it's approximately said: Walie-wai-choo and fits neatly into the infuriatingly catchy Birds of a Feather theme tune. “Wallywaichoo, when you are far away...” We sang that bastard for weeks.)

Photo: Wee Mo

We spent a few days there for Carnaval (more on that in a couple of weeks) before heading up to the implausibly awesome Iguazu Falls. With apologies to Mogwai, they can put a human being in a trance-like state. They're bigger than words and wider than pictures. If stars were weeping, they would look like this.

Iguazu, they say, is the place where the clouds are born.

Ahem

2011-02-16T09:27:00.003-06:00

Owing to a lack of decent internet connection and things to write about, the blog will return next week with some monumentally witty things to say about the Guays, Uru and Para.

The Scran Situation

2011-02-08T05:56:00.000-06:00

Pizza, pasta, sandwiches, steak, sandwiches, pasta, steak, pizza, pizza, steak, pasta, sandwiches, steak sandwiches, pizza pasta, steak pasta, sandwich pizza, pasta sandwich? Thus eating out in South America – a fat bastard's dream.

But not only eating out. Visit any supermarket and it will dedicate entire aisles to the same crap. One side pasta, one side tomato sauces; one side oil, one salt; big bakery, big butcher. The next time you're feeling glum about being at home, take a walk around a Great British supermarket and say a little prayer to thank the gods of Tesco, Asda, Sainsburys and Morrisons for their vast international variety. (OK, not Morrisons.) You, son, don't realise how good you've got it.

Here in the southern half of South America, for all the excitement, warmth and tremendous character of the people, the seeming lack of interest in what they're eating really is amazing. So long as it's heavy, oily and contains absolutely no vegetables, then 't will serve. (As I type these words, I aware of the crushing irony that a nominal Scotsman, of all people, should be making such complaints.)

Photo: Wee Mo

It's not like we've mutated into mung bean munching culinary snobs who wouldn't eat that filth, darling, but unless you are specifically seeking to gain weight or die of coronary complications, then it's pretty hard to stomach the fab four for every single meal. The real problem – with one, glorious exception – is that no one round here really seems to know how to cook them either.

The Bad

Pasta

We've ordered pasta approximately once since arriving in South America two months ago, and have since downed tools in protest. The first problem – that it was a bit shit and inexplicably tasted like fish, even though it was supposed to be chicken – can just about be forgiven, but the second practise seems standard, and is therefore unforgivable.

The rancour is caused so: you sit down in the ubiquitous little restaurant, flick past the pizza, sandwich and steak selections, and – lo! – see that not only do you get to choose the type of pasta, and meat (if you want it), but you then get to mix and match with a choice of sauce. Hooray! It's like Subway, but with pasta! How miraculous!

Except it's fucking not. Because at Subway they don't charge you again for the bloody sauce.

In conclusion, I don't give a rigatoni fuck if the best pasta this side of Rome lies in wait somewhere in South America, I refuse to pay for it. Twice.

Photo: Wee Mo

Sandwiches

We are generally unlikely to order sandwiches in restaurants on account of it being much cheaper to make them ourselves. It also helps that, budgetary constraints or not, we have the first fucking clue about how to put a sandwich together.

Pizza

The primary reason pizza became a global phenomenon is its simplicity. A bit of dough > left over pasta sauce > things you have at hand > fire. (For those who may be reading outside of Scotland: at home we have a variation on this. Rather than going to the bother of sticking it in an oven for 20 minutes, we speed things up by taking the pre-prepared morsel straight from the freezer and dumping it in the deep-fat fryer for a few seconds. As it comes out, seeping lava-fresh grease from every one of its crusty pores, some people then opt to fold it and put it in side a bread roll, thereby creating what one ingenious foreigner friend of mine dubbed “an edible glove”.)

Yet, despite this moronic simplicity, isn't it amazing just how many places in the world make such a total roaring, angry arsehole of preparing the simple pizza? In Argentina and Chile, the problems are manifold, but the primary one is American. Somewhere along the line, someone thought the key to a good pizza was suppressing the entire thing under a leaden jacket of cheese.

As we know from glorious, empirical experience, when ordering pizza in Italy, you'll rarely find cheese. And if you do, it's simple, delicious buffalo mozzarella.

Not so here. Instead it's like ordering ice cream and finding it covered in ketchup: fucking stupid.

Maté

While on the subject of rank menu items, a few words on maté, South America's idea of a nice cuppa. Maté's popularity varies from country to country (per head of capita, it appeared most addictive in Uruguay), but the method of consumption is the same: a wee cup full of dried, loose yerba leaves, a metal straw with a filter to keep the bits out of your mouth, and a wee flask with which to endlessly top up.

Consumed in staggering amounts by men and women, it's said to be high in caffeine and full of various health-giving bits and bobs. It's also said to be quite bitter.

In fact, it tastes like a couple of ounces of tobacco, briefly stewed in warm, earthy piss, served with two pungent rabbit droppings.

We will not be bringing it home.

The Good

Steak

It's not news, but yes, the steak in Argentina is at least as good as you've heard. Indeed, it's so good, it's hard to really know how to begin explaining its superiority. The key, so I have read, is that the cattle here are lovingly fed grass (rather than corn), don't have growth hormones stuffed down their gluttonous necks, but do have a farmer gently tickle their balls while whispering nightly lullabies into their twitching ears. All of that TLC lasts right through to the plate, too.

It took until we got all the way back to Buenos Aires before we had a chance to genuinely enjoy steak, largely because we had shied away from its price on the menu. By European and American standards, it's laughably cheap; for a couple on £45 a day while the value of the pound is in the sewer, it's still prohibitive.

What no one had told us is that the offerings of fillet in Argentina are the size of a generous sirloin back home, but twice as thick. These things are eating-challenge big, far too much for a single person, unless that person has an overwhelming urge to feel like they are giving birth to a fat calf.

But it's worth feeling like that. Earlier in the trip, in Shanghai, we were treated to quite possibly the most expensive beef either of us will eat in our lives. It was a multi-award winning thing from Australia that, naturally, we weren't paying for. It was said to be the best beef outside of Japan.

Having had both, I can only assume that the judges haven't made it down to Argentina.

Wine

What better to force down those hunks of torn flesh than a fine red wine? Luckily Argentina and Chile are vast producers (the former consumes more than it exports; the latter keeps less than 25% for itself) meaning that cheap wine does not translate as bad wine, and that if you spend a tenner, you can expect to be in for a goddamn treat.

So, if you're willing to work your way through kilos of cow carcass and swill barrels of wine like a demented mediaeval laird, then come on down to South America – you shall not want.

Photo: Wee Mo

On Being Afraid

2011-01-31T06:34:00.000-06:00

Having long accepted the sad, boring truth that most Asians are not expert in any marital arts, I was never afraid of anything going wrong on the first leg of our trip. Not even hearing a former colleague's tale of being stabbed in the chest while in Malaysia (nor his near-fatal tussle with an orang-utan – seriously, he fought that bastard for ages) frightened me. Put simply, that's because if it came down to it, I would fancy my chances against someone shorter, lighter and eminently headbuttable.

Not so in South America. Firstly, most people are my size or bigger. Secondly, they're far more likely to carry a knife or gun, both of which trump a headbutt, even with a cranium as weighty as mine.

But having spent a month in the rural south of Chile and Argentina, we've not had much occasion to feel afraid. All over the world country folk are largely affable types, and surrounded by such gorgeous scenery, these particular bumpkins don't have much to be angry about.

In tourist towns like Pucon, they're comparatively rich too, so even when following folk up a smoking volcano, for example, we felt far from danger.

But our road from now until August stretches ever north, inexorably through some of the continent's most notorious cities and alongside an unquantifiable number of bandits.

Ahead of arriving in Santiago, we looked to the reliably bland Lonely Planet for advice. As usual, their ladie-da attitude wasn't much help. I wonder if they give out anti-depressants at the Lonely Planet HQ? Things are never that good, nor that bad. It reminds me of Stephen Fry's excellent, uncomfortable documentary about manic depressives. It featured famous faces – and more memorably some deeply disturbed plebs – who, having had their peaks and troughs levelled out by a narcotic saw, described looking at life through a letterbox. Thus the Lonely Planet – afraid to criticise or eulogise, content with the mealy-mouthed middle ground.

They describe Santiago as “generally safe” and flag up one or two areas in which to be more cautious. In reality, most hostels are full with horror stories about life on the mean streets. One guy was victim of misdirection and lost his day-bag containing his passport and camera; a girl was extorted by a cab driver; the squares are full of marauding Peruvians... And so on.

Photo: Wee Mo

People prattle on about it so much that by the time we leave the hostel for an extensive photography day, we're both a little unnerved. And I hate myself for being like that because of course nothing happened. Yes people stared at our cameras, but then I would have done the same in Glasgow – it's unusual to see a big SLR camera and lens, let alone two of them.

Speaking of the Dear Green Place, many people we meet seem to be a little wary of it, afraid that violence and skulduggery could pop up at a moment's notice. For the most part it's just lazy English types bleating out-dated stereotypes in lieu of having anything interesting to say; other times it's foreigners who believe Braveheart is the greatest documentary ever made.

Photo: Wee Mo

But in all cases, it seems ridiculous to me – I know Glasgow, I love it, and it never frightens me. Yes I may once have had a half-brick bounced off my shoulder by a scallywag. And OK, so maybe I did once bite someone in the head. And yes, I did see a woman get booted square in the fud on Sauchiehall Street that time. And so what if my cruciate ligament was ripped asunder, and a visiting friend's nose unceremoniously relocated to his cheek during a street fight with strangers?

Glasgow is safe, it really is no mean city. Most likely, most Santiagoans feel the same about their city too and, by the time we left, we did too. Kind of.

However, on moving out to Valparaiso on the coast, the threat level rose considerably. Home to the country's highest level of unemployment, and a quite staggering number of subsequent jakies, Valpo is dirty, dangerous and – inexplicably – reeks of piss.

Incongruously, it is also home to a sprawling UNESCO World Heritage site and the most jaw-dropping graffiti we have ever seen. I've been places where the street art is lauded before, but nothing compares to Chile. The work is detailed, vibrant and unquestionably bonefide art and – scary or not – makes travelling to Valparaiso worthwhile.

Photo: Wee Mo

Unfortunately, it was quite hard to enjoy all that because within 10 minutes of stepping off the bus downtown, alarm bells were ringing. Cameras out, we had just started to take pictures when a man made a grab for mine. Turns out he was just trying to warn me – beware in case people try to swipe that. Reassuring, it was not.

Next, having seen a couple of shady figures doing something up an alleyway, elaborately disguised as bin men, tinkering with an actual bin, we decided to head up into the lauded UNESCO are of the town. A few steps uphill and another man approached me, waving a badge and proclaiming to be a policeman.

“HA!” Thought I, “I can see your game.”

“Please,” said the man, “I am an undercover policeman.”

“Pfft!” Thought I, while wittering something about not being interested and trying to walk away.

“That is my partner,” he replied, pointing at a policeman on a bike.

“Um...” Thought I, realising that perhaps I was in the process of being rescued from mortal danger.

“I am a good man, but it is not safe for you to go up there. Please, your cameras are very expensive and it will not be safe.”

“Oh.” I said. And we walked back down.

That, as you might imagine, royally fucked our day. In fact, it ruined the rest of our time in Valparaiso. We still took pictures – hundreds of them – but everything, every moment, was tainted by fear. Simple things started to carry menace and we became endlessly burdened with foreboding.

A teenager whistling up a hill to his friends suddenly became a secret signal for them to attack.

They didn't.

A businessman asking for the time was a ruse to separate us from our wallets.

It wasn't.

A tramp asking for change would lash out with a dirty needle if we said no.

We did; he didn't.

Photo: Wee Mo

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Fuck up, Franklin, you don't know what you're on about.

Ruta 40

2011-01-24T06:36:00.000-06:00

Over the next few months, I'll give you dozens of reasons why South America is fucking great, but none of them will be the cost of living in Patagonia. In places like Ushuaia, it's no surprise that people are held to ransom – it's not like there's an alternative. But it's disappointing when the cost of things like a simple bus ride spins out of control. Take Ruta 40 for example, the world's longest highway. It costs the best part of a hundred quid to bump along a boring road for 24 hours, with a night in a dusty nowhere town in the middle. In every other part of the country, long-distance buses are surprisingly comfy, with movies, hot scran - steak, no less - and pleasant air-conditioning. For Ruta 40, they use their old, knackered buses, including none of the above. The fucking road isn't even paved.

On the plus side, we now get to wear the chocolate medal that says we have ridden along the longest highway in the world – or at least part of it. And though the bus journey itself was tedious and travelled through some of the most sterile countryside we've yet seen on the continent, some of the stops along the way were OK.

Maybe better than OK.

El Calafate

Ironically, there's something about how obviously manufactured Calafate is that I don't like. There's a faux-Wild West feel to it, all wooden shop-façades and “authentic” handicrafts from “indigenous” peoples, none of which is genuine. I say that's ironic because the reason Calafate has risen to prominence is absolutely not man-made. Enough of my prattle - watch this.

If anything, though, the three-mile wide, 19-mile long, Perito Moreno Glacier is a work in progress. One of the world's last advancing glaciers, it's enormity – like some of the sights in Antarctica – was quite hard to capture in a camera lens. Still, between my shoddy video and Wee Mo's reliably excellent photography, I think we did a decent job.

But trying to take pictures of the beast as it cracks and smashes is like playing catch with an invisible ball. By the time the noise – and what a noise! – of a rupture reached our stupid human ears, the ice had already fallen. Curse stupid, slow sound. Despite being hindered by physics, we spent six hours on Christmas Eve staring at the glacier, trying to capture what we could of its awesome force.

El Chalten

In the Chilean part of Patagonia, the town of Puerto Natales is famous because of its proximity to the stunning Torres Del Paine National Park. This, to us, is false advertising – the bastard is almost two hours drive away.

So on arriving to El Chalten, which also purports to be close to a national park, we were a little worried that the situation would repeat itself.

It felt good to be wrong: Chalten is actually in the park, and its best treks were only a couple of minutes walk away from our shit hostel.

We spent our first day getting battered by the strongest winds I can ever remember experiencing. Walking anywhere was difficult – walking uphill sometimes felt impossible – but it was a helluva lot of fun too. The afternoon whipped past, watching clouds speed across vast plains and literally having the spit blown out of our mouths.

It was all just a warm-up for the following day's nine-hour Los Tres hike, a trek to the very feet of the impossibly Mordorian Fitz Roy range. We've been lucky to see many of the world's most famous mountains – Wee Mo has seen considerably more than me – but nothing has ever looked so dramatic as these. If you asked an excitable three-year-old to draw mountains, they might look a bit like the Fitz Roy range.

Photo: Wee Mo

Perito Moreno

OK, so not everywhere was spectacular. We stopped in this dusty little town overnight to break up the journey through the non-paved section of the road north. It was shit.

San Carlos de Bariloche

Neither of us much liked Bariloche on arrival. The most tourist-driven town in the Argentinian Lake District, it was also the most populated place we'd been since leaving Buenos Aires almost a month before. Coming back to all those folk, and the colossal, rank tip unfortunately placed on the edge of town, left us feeling quite uneasy.

Still, this is where we were to spend New Year, so folk would almost certainly be a good thing. Before that, though, we decided to get outdoors again. Our current lifestyle means that its beneficial to be reasonably fit. Alas we are not – although we do have a degree of bloodymindedness and not a great deal else to do, so we found ourselves embarking on another extreme physical challenge.

In Bariloche, that took the form of mountain-biking, over and around the feet of Actual Mountains. However, because of our masochistic love of photography (there's a phrase you have to proof-read) before we started our 27km bike ride, we scambled up a virtually vertical hike for a couple of hours.

The 360 degree view from the top was undeniably excellent, and some of the macro-shots we got were pretty dainty, but the price for seeing it was being drunk on fatigue and powering through our water supply before our feet even touched a pedal.

Trek or no, the cycling was a virtual impossibility. The bikes had a few dozen gears to choose from, but, in truth, we almost walked as much as we cycled. A hot day, questionable stamina, dwindling water and some demonic horse flies, meant that we also spent about as much time loathing the trip as we did enjoying it.

But we only had to stop and look around in the glorious sunshine to see how sickeningly beautiful it all was.

Fate led us to take a break next to a Swiss guy who was cycling the same demented route as us. "This looks a bit like Switzerland, though, right?" I panted.

"Well, a little," he said, "but we don't have this many lakes."

Photo: Wee Mo

The Seventh Continent - Days Ten and Eleven

2011-01-17T07:58:00.005-06:00

Us kids know
No cars go
Where we know
Between the click of the light
And the start of the dream
Between the click of the light
And the start of the dream
- Arcade Fire, No Cars Go, 2006

Deep into the second day of crossing the Drake Passage, the sea seems at least as unhappy as we are. On the way south, the force four conditions had been enough to send most people to bed puking. Today it is force ten and when it's not scaring the shit out of us, it's pretty good fun.
House-sized waves come from two or three directions at the same time and, depending on how they catch the Antarctic Dream, will occasionally have us gripping the bolted tables for dear life. More than one chain snaps underneath the chair it is supposed to hold to the floor, and once every 15 minutes or so, there's an almighty crash from the kitchen. And yet neither of us feel anywhere near as crook as we did on the way down, even though the view out the window alternates between sky and gargantuan wave.

Amid all this, not that we deserved it, a wandering albatross – the biggest bird in the sky – comes over to take an amused look at our toiling ship. The moment anyone reaches for a camera, it disappears. No one complains – best not to piss off the albatross.

When I head up to the deck, I feel a good deal more relaxed: although many of these waves are bigger than our 50-year-old vessel, only one in every 100 will break over the bow, and even then, they look no more threatening than a snowman would to a Sherman tank. The captain, the suave, braw bastard that he is, isn't in the least concerned by what he's seeing.

Still, the numbers in the restaurant are pretty sparse, allowing time for people to reflect, some of them with my dictaphone stuck in their face. The task of writing about the whole thing professionally is a daunting one, so as much as I can offload the burden to them, I do.

There was a moment earlier in the trip when everyone who was travelling to their seventh and final continent was asked to pose with a hastily-constructed banner that simply said: “7”. As unlikely as it seems – to me at any rate – I was one of the people who went forward. Disappointingly, I wasn't the youngest person to do so, but I doubt anyone else would have visited them all in just the past two years – and I'm virtually certain no one else would have done it all for free.

If that sounds like a boast, it's not supposed to – I'm just trying to contextualise how ridiculous life can be. For the large part of my childhood, our holidays were planned according to what deals we could get in The Sun's annual caravan-parks-for-£9.95 offer. As a result, I was amazed by the bright lights of Blackpool; blown away by a virtual reality machine in Great Yarmouth; and, over the years, spent over a month in war-torn Berwick-Upon-Tweed, the family favourite. Other times, the Metro Centre was a mecca of happiness, and London was an enormous, exotic miracle.

It's not that we didn't go abroad at all. We spent a few hot, mad weeks in Turkey with Actual Turks; we almost got caught in Hurricane Michael Fish coming back from visiting other family friends in Germany; and we spent a tragicomic week or two in Bulgaria, the highlight of which was having jellyfish fights (they didn't sting) with my brother.

But you don't grow up in a housing scheme and leave feeling particularly worldly. The closest I really got to globe-trotting was staring at a big map we had on our bedroom wall, until it could take no more of sharing with two boys and finally fell down for good.

This thing was old – Germany was still Two, USSR a very big One – and from what I can remember, the Antarctic Peninsula stuck up at the bottom like a bony thumb. The Weddell Sea was there, so were the South Shetland Islands and, most probably, Deception Island.

Given that America felt about as close as Neptune at the time, I'd be lying if I told you I thought I'd end up visiting those places. Nor would I have imagined going to Melbourne, or Hawaii, or Manilla, or Cape Town, or any of the other weird corners of the world Fate has taken me – especially if you told me I'd go to them all without spending one red cent.

Now, with 40 countries under my belt, and having set foot on every continent of our blue planet, I feel I can begin to understand what belonged where on that old map. There are still vast swathes of it I haven't been to – and I suppose that I shall never go to – but I can at least guess at them now. I at least know what, and where, I do or do not like.

It's impossible to get away from grading things, and given my predisposition to negativity, I usually find myself reaching for the shit-stick. Everywhere can be criticised, and most places deserve it. But (and this is perhaps the most misanthropic thing I've ever written) then I went somewhere that was free of humans.

Photo: Wee Mo

Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – I watched a documentary about doyen of chess-come-political agitator Garry Kasparov and his duel with Deep Blue, a computer that had been designed to best the wily Russian. The battles took place in 1996 and 1997 and were seen as the ultimate contest between the logic of man and machine. It's well worth reading about if you know nothing about the whole thing (failing that, Arcade Fire have handily just written a song about it, although it's not actually any good). Anyway, what really stuck with me from the documentary was one of the talking heads.

He was trying to convey just how great the Russian's abilities were at the time, and said something like: “Understand that Kasparov was not just the best player in the world, he was the best player there has ever been in the world. When you play chess there are experts, masters and grand-masters. And beyond that was Kasparov alone.”

I can think of no better way to analyse how I feel about Antarctica. It's utterly pointless to compare it to anywhere I've been before, so conclusive is its superiority. Comparison would only make the other look small and inferior.

If in the future you ask me what was the best place I visited, I will give you a list of two or three that I've enjoyed immensely – great places, all of them – but none of them will be Antarctica. Because it is something beyond.

It is my Kasparov.

Photo: Wee Mo

The Seventh Continent - Day Nine

2011-01-15T08:41:00.003-06:00

“I tell you I was born on the seashore! I bathed in the waters of the sea! It gave me food and it gave me peace, and its fascinating distances fed my dreams... I have to smile for the salt of the sea is in my blood, and there may be ten thousand roads over the land, but they shall never confuse me, for my heart's blood will ever return to its beautiful source.”

Arturo – Ask the Dust, J. Fante

“To come to Antarctica was one of my dreams – it's such a pristine place where animals are untouched. That was one of the reasons I wanted to come, to try and get the essence of this pristine place.”

“I think I'm still digesting it all. It was hard to be professional at the same time – I need to go again”

Cristina, debut crew member/trainee zodiac driver/photographer, Santiago

“The most amazing place I have been to. The place by itself is extraordinary, but the fact that most of the passengers are cool people makes it nice too. The fact that the crew and food are good... Together it somehow feels like a family cruise. I'm a little lost, overwhelmed by everything that's happened. Now I have to somehow try and convey that on film and give a little something back.”

Bertrand, film-maker, Paris.

“My first trip was incredible – I felt like an explorer. It was very difficult to do my first landing especially. I think it was on Aitcho Island, I landed first before the passengers and I had in my head this song: Vangelis, The Conquest of Paradise. I couldn't believe that I was going to land there. I was snow blind looking at the landscape, then I got there and I saw the penguins. It was like they were receiving me. It was very nice – very emotional.”

Rodrigo, photographer/zodiac driver/crew member, Santiago

“I was filming a couple of penguins and another one walked right up to me. I shut the camera off because it seemed so much more immediate to be with this little being next to me than with the camera. It just stood and stared at me for the longest time, cocking its head, opening its wings and eventually walking away. It was the most amazing thing... like being with any animal when you realise that they're very curious about you too – a little afraid– but that they want to stand next to you and just watch.”

“I've been travelling for two months now and it's absolutely the highlight of my trip so far. I think the people have been absolutely extraordinary – people who do vastly different things from me have been great to listen to. Everyone has been thrilled all the same.”

Beth, artist, California.

“It's completely different to sail down here. Everything changes every trip, every day, every hour. You feel the conditions change very quickly. For example, when we were in the Gerlache StraitXX it looked very nice for sailing, then we get there and there is a big storm, ice, brush-ice... You need a lot of attention. Every trip, every schedule, has to be very flexible because of the weather. We exchange information with other ships nearby, to compare weather conditions and see if we can get a good forecast. The principal thing is safety.”

“I sleep when it's possible. With Antarctica, I sleep maybe 2 or 3 hours, sometimes not at all. It all depends on the ice. When the ship is very safe, anchored with no current or wind or ice, I can take breaks.”

Ernesto, ship captain, Santiago

“The size was just unbelievable, the enormity of the landscape was phenomenal, the richness of the land... I think I had this thing in the back of my mind that there are different parts of Antarctica that you can see, but it's fixed at a certain point – I didn't expect that I could go on a zodiac and see five different landscapes in one bay and experience the essence of it, and the quietness. I had seen enough documentaries on penguins to know what the colonies looked like, but when you see it live it's overwhelming. I thought some of the scenery was overwhelming too – it was so big, to see it all...”

“For me this was something else, something spiritual – this was the soul reaching out. I almost thought I had been here one time before, because it drew me back. I can't compare it to any place.”

Frank, print guru, Toronto/Paisley

“I try not to manage expectations – my job on that side is easy, because Antarctica does it all.”

Pablo, expedition leader, Bariloche (Argentina)

“I love the sea. I spent my life near the sea and the sea is in my soul. When I was a child, I went to the beach and I met an old sailor who told me about this part of the world. He had travelled around Cape Horn by sailing boat. I always had this dream to see this part of the world. Next year I will be 50, so this is a present for myself – the trip of my life.”

“In my mind I have fixed an image of a white mountain and the colour of the sea. It's an image that relaxes me... This place is unique. To see this land, to experience the silence, you understand that the world is great – huge – and you are just a spot in the universe. You can see the largest of nature... I'm sorry, I don't have the English for the sensations...”

Fabio, chemist, Cervo (Italy)

I Done a Holiday

We're Doing Another Holiday (definitely)

We're Doing Another Holiday (maybe)

Thus Spake Lafferty

America And Me - Part Two

What Happens In Vegas... Is Published Elsewhere

America And Me - Part One

Your Guide To Latin America

Killing In The Name

Indiana Moans

The Amigo

The Dark Days

The Angelique

We Interrupt This Service...

Arrivals

An Ode To The Man

Folk 3 or Pals And A Lack Thereof

The High Road - Days Two and Three

The High Road - Day One

Party Time or How I Decided To Pace Myself

The Guays, Part Two: Para

The Guays, Part One: Uru

*Ahem*

The Scran Situation

On Being Afraid

Ruta 40

The Seventh Continent - Days Ten and Eleven

The Seventh Continent - Day Nine

Ahem