Tuesday, August 31, 2010
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Friday, August 27, 2010
Is Global Warming Getting Warmer?
Global warming causing the extinction of animals isn't a new phenomenon. According to a study published in the journal Evolution, Earth began warming 21,000 years ago; and the warmer areas became, the higher the extinction rate was. For example, Africa had a relatively small climate change and fewer species became extinct. North America had a substantial climate change and more species - giant beaver, dire wolf, ground sloth - became extinct. Although humans hunting for game would have affected the extinction of large animals, global warming affected both large and small animals - and will until human doubt becomes extinct.
Global warming is threatening lizards with extinction. Scientists studying lizards in Mexico warn that 20% of lizard species could be extinct by 2080. Lizards are ectotherms - they depend on the environment to control their body temperature. Because they don't sweat or pant, they seek shade to cool down. Because of needing more shade due to the rising temperatures, lizards have less time to look for food and mate; and because the temperatures are rising quickly, lizards don't have time to evolve. Considering lizards eat insects and birds eat lizards, the food chain is being affected. Unfortunately, humans have a slow (chain) reaction time.
One solution that is being considered to fight global warming is cloud whitening. When water vapor encounters sea salt crystals in cloud-forming areas, the water vapor condenses around the crystals, forming tiny droplets. These droplets make clouds whiter and the whiteness diffuses sunlight. Researchers want to build on this natural cloud-forming process. They want to put boats in the ocean to spray clouds with seawater mist, thus making the clouds whiter and able to reflect the sun's rays, sending them back into space. It is not a solution for global warming, but in this case "cloudy thinking" could help.
Global warming isn't destroying the world's mangroves. Ironically, mangroves - forests straddling both land and sea - generate $2,000-$9,000 per hectare annually from fishing - much more than is generated by the aquaculture, agriculture and tourism that are destroying them. In fact, mangrove forests are being destroyed 4 times faster than land-based forests. One-fifth have been destroyed since 1980. Mangroves cover about 150,000 square kilometers in 123 countries. In addition to providing valuable fishing, mangroves are a replenishing source of timber and charcoal. Mangroves also help fight global warming and provide ecosystems resilient to increasing temperatures. It's the "man" in mangrove that's destroying them.
One solution that is being considered to fight global warming is cloud whitening. When water vapor encounters sea salt crystals in cloud-forming areas, the water vapor condenses around the crystals, forming tiny droplets. These droplets make clouds whiter and the whiteness diffuses sunlight. Researchers want to build on this natural cloud-forming process. They want to put boats in the ocean to spray clouds with seawater mist, thus making the clouds whiter and able to reflect the sun's rays, sending them back into space. It is not a solution for global warming, but in this case "cloudy thinking" could help.
Global warming isn't destroying the world's mangroves. Ironically, mangroves - forests straddling both land and sea - generate $2,000-$9,000 per hectare annually from fishing - much more than is generated by the aquaculture, agriculture and tourism that are destroying them. In fact, mangrove forests are being destroyed 4 times faster than land-based forests. One-fifth have been destroyed since 1980. Mangroves cover about 150,000 square kilometers in 123 countries. In addition to providing valuable fishing, mangroves are a replenishing source of timber and charcoal. Mangroves also help fight global warming and provide ecosystems resilient to increasing temperatures. It's the "man" in mangrove that's destroying them.
Better Way to Calculate Greenhouse Gas Value of Ecosystems
Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a new, more accurate method of calculating the change in greenhouse gas emissions that results from changes in land use.
The new approach, described in the journal Global Change Biology, takes into account many factors not included in previous methods, the researchers report.
The new approach, described in the journal Global Change Biology, takes into account many factors not included in previous methods, the researchers report.
There is an urgent need to accurately assess whether particular land-use projects will increase or decrease greenhouse gas emissions, said Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, a postdoctoral researcher in the Energy Biosciences Institute at Illinois and lead author of the new study. The greenhouse gas value (GHGV) of a particular site depends on qualities such as the number and size of plants; the ecosystem's ability to take up or release greenhouse gases over time; and its vulnerability to natural disturbances, such as fire or hurricane damage, she said.
Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. The most problematic greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide (CO2); methane (CH4), which is about 25 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat but persists in the atmosphere for much less time; and nitrous oxide (N2O), an undesirable byproduct of crop fertilization.
The new approach accounts for emissions of each of these gases, expressing their net climatic effect in "carbon-dioxide equivalents," a common currency in the carbon-trading market. This allows scientists to compare the long-term effects of clearing a forest, for example, to the costs of other greenhouse gas emissions, such as those that result from burning fossil fuels for transportation, electricity, heat or the production of biofuels.
At first glance, biofuels appear carbon-neutral because the plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the carbon in their tissues as they grow, said plant biology and Energy Biosciences Institute professor Evan DeLucia, who co-wrote the paper. That carbon is released when the plants are used as fuels. These emissions are balanced by the uptake of CO2, so -- in theory, at least -- no new carbon is added to the atmosphere, he said.
But the full impact of a new biofuel crop should account for all of the greenhouse gases absorbed and released in the process of introducing new crops, he said.
Researchers and policymakers are already in the habit of conducting "life-cycle" analyses of biofuel crops, taking into account many of the greenhouse gas effects of growing the crops and producing the fuel, such as the combustion of fuel in farm equipment, emissions from the processing plant, and emissions from associated land-use changes.
But current methods of estimating the greenhouse gas value of ecosystems -- whether for biofuels life-cycle analyses or other purposes -- often get it wrong, Anderson-Teixeira said. When considering the cost of replacing a tropical forest with cropland, for example, some may look only at the amount of carbon stored in the trees as a measure of a forest's GHGV.
"What some analyses miss is the potential for that forest to take up more carbon in the future," she said. "And they're missing the greenhouse gas costs -- the added emissions that result from intensively managing the land -- that are associated with that new cropland."
Current approaches also routinely fail to consider the timing of greenhouse gas releases, DeLucia said.
"If you cut down a forest, all that carbon doesn't go up into the atmosphere instantly," he said. "Some of it is released immediately, but the organic matter in roots and soils decays more slowly. How we deal with the timing of those emissions influences how we perceive an ecosystem's value."
Using the new method, the researchers calculated the GHGV of a variety of ecosystem types, including mature and "re-growing" tropical, temperate and boreal forests; tropical and temperate pastures and cropland; wetlands; tropical savannas; temperate shrublands and grasslands; tundra; and deserts.
"In general, unmanaged ecosystems -- those that we are leaving alone, such as a virgin forest or an abandoned farm where trees are re-growing -- are going to have positive greenhouse gas values," Anderson-Teixeira said. Managed ecosystems such as croplands or pastures generally have low or negative greenhouse gas values, she said. (See chart.)
The calculations would of course vary as a result of local conditions, the researchers said, and the GHGV does not account for the other services a particular ecosystem might provide, such as flood control, improved air and water quality, food production or protection of biodiversity.
"To understand the place of nature these days, we've got to put a value on it," DeLucia said. "It's got to compete with all the other values that we put out there. This is by far the most comprehensive way to value an ecosystem in the context of greenhouse gases."
The Energy Biosciences Institute, focused on the development of next-generation biofuels as well as various applications of biology to the energy sector, is a collaboration among the U. of I., the University of California at Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and BP, which is supporting the institute with a 10-year, $500-million grant. The EBI has facilities at several locations, including the U. of I. Institute for Genomic Biology.
Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. The most problematic greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide (CO2); methane (CH4), which is about 25 times more effective than CO2 at trapping heat but persists in the atmosphere for much less time; and nitrous oxide (N2O), an undesirable byproduct of crop fertilization.
The new approach accounts for emissions of each of these gases, expressing their net climatic effect in "carbon-dioxide equivalents," a common currency in the carbon-trading market. This allows scientists to compare the long-term effects of clearing a forest, for example, to the costs of other greenhouse gas emissions, such as those that result from burning fossil fuels for transportation, electricity, heat or the production of biofuels.
At first glance, biofuels appear carbon-neutral because the plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the carbon in their tissues as they grow, said plant biology and Energy Biosciences Institute professor Evan DeLucia, who co-wrote the paper. That carbon is released when the plants are used as fuels. These emissions are balanced by the uptake of CO2, so -- in theory, at least -- no new carbon is added to the atmosphere, he said.
But the full impact of a new biofuel crop should account for all of the greenhouse gases absorbed and released in the process of introducing new crops, he said.
Researchers and policymakers are already in the habit of conducting "life-cycle" analyses of biofuel crops, taking into account many of the greenhouse gas effects of growing the crops and producing the fuel, such as the combustion of fuel in farm equipment, emissions from the processing plant, and emissions from associated land-use changes.
But current methods of estimating the greenhouse gas value of ecosystems -- whether for biofuels life-cycle analyses or other purposes -- often get it wrong, Anderson-Teixeira said. When considering the cost of replacing a tropical forest with cropland, for example, some may look only at the amount of carbon stored in the trees as a measure of a forest's GHGV.
"What some analyses miss is the potential for that forest to take up more carbon in the future," she said. "And they're missing the greenhouse gas costs -- the added emissions that result from intensively managing the land -- that are associated with that new cropland."
Current approaches also routinely fail to consider the timing of greenhouse gas releases, DeLucia said.
"If you cut down a forest, all that carbon doesn't go up into the atmosphere instantly," he said. "Some of it is released immediately, but the organic matter in roots and soils decays more slowly. How we deal with the timing of those emissions influences how we perceive an ecosystem's value."
Using the new method, the researchers calculated the GHGV of a variety of ecosystem types, including mature and "re-growing" tropical, temperate and boreal forests; tropical and temperate pastures and cropland; wetlands; tropical savannas; temperate shrublands and grasslands; tundra; and deserts.
"In general, unmanaged ecosystems -- those that we are leaving alone, such as a virgin forest or an abandoned farm where trees are re-growing -- are going to have positive greenhouse gas values," Anderson-Teixeira said. Managed ecosystems such as croplands or pastures generally have low or negative greenhouse gas values, she said. (See chart.)
The calculations would of course vary as a result of local conditions, the researchers said, and the GHGV does not account for the other services a particular ecosystem might provide, such as flood control, improved air and water quality, food production or protection of biodiversity.
"To understand the place of nature these days, we've got to put a value on it," DeLucia said. "It's got to compete with all the other values that we put out there. This is by far the most comprehensive way to value an ecosystem in the context of greenhouse gases."
The Energy Biosciences Institute, focused on the development of next-generation biofuels as well as various applications of biology to the energy sector, is a collaboration among the U. of I., the University of California at Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and BP, which is supporting the institute with a 10-year, $500-million grant. The EBI has facilities at several locations, including the U. of I. Institute for Genomic Biology.
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Thursday, August 26, 2010
8 Countries About to Go Underwater, Literally
We've all heard about the possibility that the Maldives could go underwater because of rising seas caused by climate change. But there are other nations facing the same risk.
Not that going underwater is the only form of danger: climate change is finding vulnerabilities in countries from Mexico to Russia, droughts in already-arid countries will grow worse, and the number of climate refugees worldwide is growing steadily.
Rainforests are threatened, disease is exacerbated, and hardest hit are poor populations and women around the world.
But, it's still probably fair to say that the greatest threat from climate change faces small island nations that could be washed underwater with just a slight rise in sea levels. Here's a look at a few of those nations.
Bangladesh - 20 million people are expected to be displaced because of rising seas caused by climate change.
Papua New Guinea - TreeHugger wrote last May: "The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea have become the world's first entire community to be displaced by climate change." Papua New Guinea shares an island with Indonesia, another nation threatened by climate change.
The Philippines- The water is already rising in the Philippines, not only threatening homes of people who live near the coast, but flooding rice fields and devastating other areas of agricultural production. The ILO quotes the mayor of Jabonga, a resort town in a southern Philippine province: “Before only 20 per cent of water from the lake and seaside overflow to the community, now it has increased to about 80 per cent. It has affected farm production for rice, corn, vegetables and fruit trees."
Barbados - It's not just faraway islands that Americans had never heard of before climate change started being talked about. Host of the Barbados Conference that focused on this issue back in 1994, Barbados is another of the small island nations at risk. According to UNESCO: "With populations, agricultural lands and infrastructures tending to be concentrated in the coastal zone, any rise in sea-level will have significant and profound effects on settlements, living conditions and island economies. The very survival of certain low-lying countries is threatened."
Kiribati - The highest point of land on the Pacific island nation of Kiribati "is now just two yards (meters) above sea level, said [President Anote] Tong," the Gstaad Project blog writes based on AP and IHT reports. "He said climate change “is not an issue of economic development; it’s an issue of human survival. Some of Kiribati’s 94,000 people living in shoreline village communities have already been relocated from century-old sites."
Egypt - From a paper by the OECD [PDF]: "In addition to this high biophysical exposure to the risk of sea level rise, Egypt’s social sensitivity to sea level rise is particularly high. As discussed earlier in this section much of Egypt’s infrastructure and development is along the low coastal lands, and the fertile Nile delta also constitutes the prime agricultural land in Egypt."
Tuvalu - TreeHugger has already reported on Tuvalu's plea for help: "Home to some 10,000 people, the group of atolls and reefs is barely two meters above sea level. A 1989 U.N. report predicted that, at the current rate the ocean is rising, Tuvalu could vanish in the next 30 to 50 years."
Maldives - And, of course, the one we all know, thanks to last year's underwater cabinet meeting held by Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed to bring attention to this issue.
Not that going underwater is the only form of danger: climate change is finding vulnerabilities in countries from Mexico to Russia, droughts in already-arid countries will grow worse, and the number of climate refugees worldwide is growing steadily.
Rainforests are threatened, disease is exacerbated, and hardest hit are poor populations and women around the world.
But, it's still probably fair to say that the greatest threat from climate change faces small island nations that could be washed underwater with just a slight rise in sea levels. Here's a look at a few of those nations.
Bangladesh - 20 million people are expected to be displaced because of rising seas caused by climate change.
Papua New Guinea - TreeHugger wrote last May: "The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea have become the world's first entire community to be displaced by climate change." Papua New Guinea shares an island with Indonesia, another nation threatened by climate change.
The Philippines- The water is already rising in the Philippines, not only threatening homes of people who live near the coast, but flooding rice fields and devastating other areas of agricultural production. The ILO quotes the mayor of Jabonga, a resort town in a southern Philippine province: “Before only 20 per cent of water from the lake and seaside overflow to the community, now it has increased to about 80 per cent. It has affected farm production for rice, corn, vegetables and fruit trees."
Barbados - It's not just faraway islands that Americans had never heard of before climate change started being talked about. Host of the Barbados Conference that focused on this issue back in 1994, Barbados is another of the small island nations at risk. According to UNESCO: "With populations, agricultural lands and infrastructures tending to be concentrated in the coastal zone, any rise in sea-level will have significant and profound effects on settlements, living conditions and island economies. The very survival of certain low-lying countries is threatened."
Kiribati - The highest point of land on the Pacific island nation of Kiribati "is now just two yards (meters) above sea level, said [President Anote] Tong," the Gstaad Project blog writes based on AP and IHT reports. "He said climate change “is not an issue of economic development; it’s an issue of human survival. Some of Kiribati’s 94,000 people living in shoreline village communities have already been relocated from century-old sites."
Egypt - From a paper by the OECD [PDF]: "In addition to this high biophysical exposure to the risk of sea level rise, Egypt’s social sensitivity to sea level rise is particularly high. As discussed earlier in this section much of Egypt’s infrastructure and development is along the low coastal lands, and the fertile Nile delta also constitutes the prime agricultural land in Egypt."
Tuvalu - TreeHugger has already reported on Tuvalu's plea for help: "Home to some 10,000 people, the group of atolls and reefs is barely two meters above sea level. A 1989 U.N. report predicted that, at the current rate the ocean is rising, Tuvalu could vanish in the next 30 to 50 years."
Maldives - And, of course, the one we all know, thanks to last year's underwater cabinet meeting held by Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed to bring attention to this issue.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine preview
"In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war." It's this iconic catch-phrase that introduces us to the grisly war-torn world of Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine -- the new third-person action title from Vancouver-based developers Relic Entertainment.The HD-generation, and more specifically the shooter genre has seen the phrase "space marine" earn itself something of a negative connotation as of late. What was once a simple pairing of context-related words now tends to summon the trite image of the overly buff, cigar-chomping, buzz-cutted antihero that's adorned and overstuffed GameStop shelves in every variation of the brown-grey color spectrum. Generally as deep as the bullet holes they leave behind, the idea of the space marine has, to many, become synonymous with a lack of narrative cohesion, and more often than not, an excuse to show cool stuff blowing up. In space.
These tired conventions may be one of the reasons I find myself so excited for Relic's upcoming action game, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine. The Warhammer 40K franchise is largely responsible for integrating the phrase into the gaming medium as far back as 25 years ago, yet has hardly succumbed to the same cliches many of the moniker's more contemporary carriers have. Space Marine trades brown-and-grey for bright blue and gold battle armor, chest-high cover mechanics for being the cover, and hastily constructed wartime scenarios for a fantastical universe rich with its own unique war-torn lore.I recently took a short trip up to Vancouver, British Columbia-based Relic Entertainment where I was able to see the game in action. Having already proven their Warhammer mettle with the critically and commercially acclaimed Dawn of War series of real-time strategy titles, Space Marine serves as the studio's first foray into the realm of third-person action, and even this early on in the game's development cycle, it's obvious that the studio's talents aren't limited to the isometric playing field.
Players are set to fill the massive metal shoes of Captain Titus of the Ultramarines -- a seven-foot tall, chainsword-savvy, genetically altered Space Marine with an itchy trigger finger and a general disdain for all things Ork. Relic wants players to understand exactly what being a Space Marine entails -- namely, the honor of the samurai, the devoutness of the medieval knight, the discipline of the centurion, and the relentless nature of the Spartan. Titus is meant to act as the pinnacle of all these historical warrior archetypes: the perfect soldier in a universe populated by unending war.We're first introduced to Titus as he rides passenger on a Valkyrie Gunship, speeding towards the Ork-infested bulk of the Imperial's weapon-harboring Mechanicus Interruptus. Pulse-pounding seconds pass before a swarm of jetpack-strapped Orks begin to speed alongside the Gunship, prompting Titus to man a stationary machine-gun turret in one of the game's first "set pieces" -- cinematic action-oriented segments meant to break up the core gameplay. Titus spends the next few minutes picking Orks out of the sky, blasting with reckless abandon -- so reckless, in fact, that he doesn't notice a gargantuan, skull-emblazoned Ork gunship creeping up from behind. The Orks begin to deploy onto the roof of Titus' gunship, prompting him to detach from the turret and manually pick them off with an assault rifle. A carefully placed shot hits an unlucky Ork right between the eyes, sending him flying into the gunship's engine turbine in a flurry of blood and flesh.
Moments later and the Valkyrie is sent plummeting towards Interruptus, prompting Titus to eject and safely land on the bulk's surface. From here, we're treated to the game's core third-person presentation: an over-the-shoulder camera angle, with Titus carrying two guns, his trusty melee chainsword, and an optional side-arm. Titus bears down on Interruptus' impressive architecture, blasting any imposing Orks in the way, their bullets pinging off the Ultramarine's iconic power armor. It's here that Space Marine's producer Raphael Van Lierop chimes in to answer the question on everyone's mind: no, Space Marine won't have any snap-to cover elements. As a Warhammer 40K property, Relic wants to ensure that Space Marine lives up to its title, offering up the one-man-army experience that the 40K lore boasts. "It's contradicting to the core fantasy of the Space Marine, which is to be a seven-foot tall marine encased in these amazing weapons. You don't need cover; you are the cover," he quips as Titus shrugs off his attackers, tossing a grenade into the distance and dispersing a tightly-knit crowd of Orks.
These tired conventions may be one of the reasons I find myself so excited for Relic's upcoming action game, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine. The Warhammer 40K franchise is largely responsible for integrating the phrase into the gaming medium as far back as 25 years ago, yet has hardly succumbed to the same cliches many of the moniker's more contemporary carriers have. Space Marine trades brown-and-grey for bright blue and gold battle armor, chest-high cover mechanics for being the cover, and hastily constructed wartime scenarios for a fantastical universe rich with its own unique war-torn lore.I recently took a short trip up to Vancouver, British Columbia-based Relic Entertainment where I was able to see the game in action. Having already proven their Warhammer mettle with the critically and commercially acclaimed Dawn of War series of real-time strategy titles, Space Marine serves as the studio's first foray into the realm of third-person action, and even this early on in the game's development cycle, it's obvious that the studio's talents aren't limited to the isometric playing field.
Players are set to fill the massive metal shoes of Captain Titus of the Ultramarines -- a seven-foot tall, chainsword-savvy, genetically altered Space Marine with an itchy trigger finger and a general disdain for all things Ork. Relic wants players to understand exactly what being a Space Marine entails -- namely, the honor of the samurai, the devoutness of the medieval knight, the discipline of the centurion, and the relentless nature of the Spartan. Titus is meant to act as the pinnacle of all these historical warrior archetypes: the perfect soldier in a universe populated by unending war.We're first introduced to Titus as he rides passenger on a Valkyrie Gunship, speeding towards the Ork-infested bulk of the Imperial's weapon-harboring Mechanicus Interruptus. Pulse-pounding seconds pass before a swarm of jetpack-strapped Orks begin to speed alongside the Gunship, prompting Titus to man a stationary machine-gun turret in one of the game's first "set pieces" -- cinematic action-oriented segments meant to break up the core gameplay. Titus spends the next few minutes picking Orks out of the sky, blasting with reckless abandon -- so reckless, in fact, that he doesn't notice a gargantuan, skull-emblazoned Ork gunship creeping up from behind. The Orks begin to deploy onto the roof of Titus' gunship, prompting him to detach from the turret and manually pick them off with an assault rifle. A carefully placed shot hits an unlucky Ork right between the eyes, sending him flying into the gunship's engine turbine in a flurry of blood and flesh.
Moments later and the Valkyrie is sent plummeting towards Interruptus, prompting Titus to eject and safely land on the bulk's surface. From here, we're treated to the game's core third-person presentation: an over-the-shoulder camera angle, with Titus carrying two guns, his trusty melee chainsword, and an optional side-arm. Titus bears down on Interruptus' impressive architecture, blasting any imposing Orks in the way, their bullets pinging off the Ultramarine's iconic power armor. It's here that Space Marine's producer Raphael Van Lierop chimes in to answer the question on everyone's mind: no, Space Marine won't have any snap-to cover elements. As a Warhammer 40K property, Relic wants to ensure that Space Marine lives up to its title, offering up the one-man-army experience that the 40K lore boasts. "It's contradicting to the core fantasy of the Space Marine, which is to be a seven-foot tall marine encased in these amazing weapons. You don't need cover; you are the cover," he quips as Titus shrugs off his attackers, tossing a grenade into the distance and dispersing a tightly-knit crowd of Orks.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Why the U.S. Must Make the Middle East Less Important
American foreign policy this fall will feature the Middle East: we will see a push for direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear-weapons program and the hope that Iraq will remain stable as U.S. troops leave. Experience suggests that the chances of success for all three are poor. Over the years, the Middle East has proven inhospitable, if not downright hostile, to American initiatives. Recognizing this, the two previous administrations launched signature programs to transform the region into a friendlier place for American interests. Both failed. The Obama team should try a different approach, one that begins at home.
The Clinton Administration tried and failed to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Obama Administration's prospects are no brighter, and even if it could broker a peace, it would not end the many other Middle Eastern conflicts that threaten U.S. interests. The Bush Administration tried to promote democracy in the region, concentrating on Iraq. Perhaps some day that country will become a full-fledged democracy, which could serve as an example for other Arab countries. But that day, if it ever arrives, will not come during this Administration.
(See a timeline of the first seven years of the Iraq war.)
Since no policy open to it can make the Middle East safe for the U.S. and the world, the Obama Administration should act to make the world safe from the pathologies of the Middle East. It can do that by making the region less important. The Middle East matters because the world depends heavily on its oil. Since the U.S. uses so much oil, a major reduction in American consumption would substantially lower the global total. The less oil the world uses, the less important the region that has so much of it becomes.
(See TIME's special on the World Future Energy Summit.)
Moreover, lower U.S. consumption could reduce the international price of oil, which would decrease the funds flowing to the governments that depend heavily on oil revenue to finance policies unfriendly to the U.S. Foremost among those governments is Iran's, which would have less money with which to build nuclear weapons and to support the terrorist organizations it sponsors. Another is Saudi Arabia's, which uses its oil wealth to propagate an extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism known as Wahhabism, which has inspired many Middle Eastern terrorists, including those who attacked New York and Washington on 9/11. That means that by consuming so much oil, the U.S. is in effect fighting a war against terrorism while funding both sides.
Lower U.S. oil consumption would also weaken oil-dependent leaders outside the Middle East who pursue anti-American policies: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Vladimir Putin of Russia. While the world will not be able to do entirely without Middle Eastern oil for many decades, substantially lowering the amount of oil we use would reduce the region's significance while shifting the balance of power between producers and consumers in favor of consumers — that is, in favor of the U.S. and its friends.
(See what Barack Obama needs to do to improve five international areas.)
The best way to reduce oil use is to raise the price of gasoline. People would then use less of it. In the short term, they would drive less and make more use of public transportation. Over the long term, they would demand fuel-efficient vehicles. At the same time, higher gasoline prices would make renewable fuels like ethanol and electrically powered cars economically viable.
While West European countries and Japan impose high taxes on gasoline, the U.S., the world's largest consumer, does not. Compared with what the U.S. national interest requires, gasoline is ruinously cheap for Americans. The refusal of the U.S. to charge itself as much for gasoline as is good for it (and for other countries) is the single greatest foreign policy failure of the past three decades.
(Comment on this story.)
Correcting that failure will not be easy. Taxes of any kind are unpopular, and to pass a gasoline tax, the Administration would have to compensate low-income Americans who depend on their cars. It would have to present the measure for what it is — the nation's most important national-security policy — make it the highest legislative priority and invest substantial political capital in seeing that it was passed.
Such an effort, however, would be worthwhile. Reducing oil consumption by raising the gasoline tax would once again make the U.S. a resolute and effective global leader. Unlike the Administration's fall diplomatic initiatives, it would not require the cooperation of the governments or people of other countries. Most important of all, as a strategy for shielding Americans from the dangers of the Middle East, it would certainly succeed.
The Clinton Administration tried and failed to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The Obama Administration's prospects are no brighter, and even if it could broker a peace, it would not end the many other Middle Eastern conflicts that threaten U.S. interests. The Bush Administration tried to promote democracy in the region, concentrating on Iraq. Perhaps some day that country will become a full-fledged democracy, which could serve as an example for other Arab countries. But that day, if it ever arrives, will not come during this Administration.
(See a timeline of the first seven years of the Iraq war.)
Since no policy open to it can make the Middle East safe for the U.S. and the world, the Obama Administration should act to make the world safe from the pathologies of the Middle East. It can do that by making the region less important. The Middle East matters because the world depends heavily on its oil. Since the U.S. uses so much oil, a major reduction in American consumption would substantially lower the global total. The less oil the world uses, the less important the region that has so much of it becomes.
(See TIME's special on the World Future Energy Summit.)
Moreover, lower U.S. consumption could reduce the international price of oil, which would decrease the funds flowing to the governments that depend heavily on oil revenue to finance policies unfriendly to the U.S. Foremost among those governments is Iran's, which would have less money with which to build nuclear weapons and to support the terrorist organizations it sponsors. Another is Saudi Arabia's, which uses its oil wealth to propagate an extreme form of Islamic fundamentalism known as Wahhabism, which has inspired many Middle Eastern terrorists, including those who attacked New York and Washington on 9/11. That means that by consuming so much oil, the U.S. is in effect fighting a war against terrorism while funding both sides.
Lower U.S. oil consumption would also weaken oil-dependent leaders outside the Middle East who pursue anti-American policies: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Vladimir Putin of Russia. While the world will not be able to do entirely without Middle Eastern oil for many decades, substantially lowering the amount of oil we use would reduce the region's significance while shifting the balance of power between producers and consumers in favor of consumers — that is, in favor of the U.S. and its friends.
(See what Barack Obama needs to do to improve five international areas.)
The best way to reduce oil use is to raise the price of gasoline. People would then use less of it. In the short term, they would drive less and make more use of public transportation. Over the long term, they would demand fuel-efficient vehicles. At the same time, higher gasoline prices would make renewable fuels like ethanol and electrically powered cars economically viable.
While West European countries and Japan impose high taxes on gasoline, the U.S., the world's largest consumer, does not. Compared with what the U.S. national interest requires, gasoline is ruinously cheap for Americans. The refusal of the U.S. to charge itself as much for gasoline as is good for it (and for other countries) is the single greatest foreign policy failure of the past three decades.
(Comment on this story.)
Correcting that failure will not be easy. Taxes of any kind are unpopular, and to pass a gasoline tax, the Administration would have to compensate low-income Americans who depend on their cars. It would have to present the measure for what it is — the nation's most important national-security policy — make it the highest legislative priority and invest substantial political capital in seeing that it was passed.
Such an effort, however, would be worthwhile. Reducing oil consumption by raising the gasoline tax would once again make the U.S. a resolute and effective global leader. Unlike the Administration's fall diplomatic initiatives, it would not require the cooperation of the governments or people of other countries. Most important of all, as a strategy for shielding Americans from the dangers of the Middle East, it would certainly succeed.
Australian family of five bludgeoned to death as they slept
Australia is in shock following the brutal murder of a family of five, including two children, as they slept peacefully in their beds in the suburbs of Sydney.The Lin family were bludgeoned to death at their home in the northern Sydney suburb of North Epping on Friday night.
Such was the violence of the attack, that blood spatter experts were still examining the scene on Monday, trying to map out the order of the murders.Min Lin, 45, and his wife Yun Lee "Lilly" Lin, 43, were found dead in their bed. The bodies of their sons - Henry, 12, and Terry, 9 - were found in another bedroom that they shared.
The fifth victim was Mrs Lin's sister Yun Bin Yin, 39, whose body was found in the bedroom where she had been staying.
All victims were hit repeatedly to the head and upper body with a blunt object.
The bodies were discovered on Saturday morning by Mrs Lin's sister and her husband.
Police are yet to find the murder weapon and have no suspects so far, although they said the attacks seemed targeted and "extremely personal". Murder-suicide has been ruled out and police sources believe the killer or killers gained entry to the house via the front door, which showed no sign of being forced.
Officers said the crime was the worst they had seen in years.
The Lins' 15-year-old daughter Brenda returned to Sydney on Sunday from a study trip in New Caledonia to face the fact her entire immediate family had been murdered.
"Certainly it is one of the most vicious murders I've seen for many years," homicide squad commander, Detective Superintendent Geoff Beresford told the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
"The ferocity of the attacks is certainly unusual to say the least and it's particularly tragic considering the ages of the children.
"It's hard to imagine a worse attack considering almost an entire family has been killed and police are doing everything in their power to bring this to a speedy resolution."
He told Sky News the attack was not random and the Lins may have known their attackers.
"It appears to be an extremely personal type of attack, given the level of violence but ... we're open-minded, we can't make any particular prediction this early in the inquiry," he said.
Police believe the attack occurred some time between midnight and 7am when the family was likely to have been asleep.
Police hope post-mortem examinations and continued forensic investigation of the Lins' Epping home will shed more light on how and why the horrific attacks occurred.
Such was the violence of the attack, that blood spatter experts were still examining the scene on Monday, trying to map out the order of the murders.Min Lin, 45, and his wife Yun Lee "Lilly" Lin, 43, were found dead in their bed. The bodies of their sons - Henry, 12, and Terry, 9 - were found in another bedroom that they shared.
The fifth victim was Mrs Lin's sister Yun Bin Yin, 39, whose body was found in the bedroom where she had been staying.
All victims were hit repeatedly to the head and upper body with a blunt object.
The bodies were discovered on Saturday morning by Mrs Lin's sister and her husband.
Police are yet to find the murder weapon and have no suspects so far, although they said the attacks seemed targeted and "extremely personal". Murder-suicide has been ruled out and police sources believe the killer or killers gained entry to the house via the front door, which showed no sign of being forced.
Officers said the crime was the worst they had seen in years.
The Lins' 15-year-old daughter Brenda returned to Sydney on Sunday from a study trip in New Caledonia to face the fact her entire immediate family had been murdered.
"Certainly it is one of the most vicious murders I've seen for many years," homicide squad commander, Detective Superintendent Geoff Beresford told the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
"The ferocity of the attacks is certainly unusual to say the least and it's particularly tragic considering the ages of the children.
"It's hard to imagine a worse attack considering almost an entire family has been killed and police are doing everything in their power to bring this to a speedy resolution."
He told Sky News the attack was not random and the Lins may have known their attackers.
"It appears to be an extremely personal type of attack, given the level of violence but ... we're open-minded, we can't make any particular prediction this early in the inquiry," he said.
Police believe the attack occurred some time between midnight and 7am when the family was likely to have been asleep.
Police hope post-mortem examinations and continued forensic investigation of the Lins' Epping home will shed more light on how and why the horrific attacks occurred.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
River cruise into the Amazon Basin
Nowhere is nature more creative than the Peruvian rainforest, as Simon Horsford discovers on a river cruise into a world of astonishing variety and fragility.Ricardo was adamant: “Shoot it, shoot it now.” For all the abundance of imagined dangers in the Amazon, our eagle-eyed guide’s exhortation was merely a call to point our cameras at a yellow-headed caracara perched on a tree. It was a cry with which we were to become familiar as we headed upriver through Peru’s northern jungle.
The camera may have captured that particular moment, but it could never convey the majesty of this gigantic expanse of river and forest and its mind-boggling statistics. The Amazon Basin spans nine countries, covers 2.7 million square miles (13 per cent in Peru) and houses the world’s largest tropical rainforest, producing 20 per cent of our oxygen. The river itself is said to be the longest in the world (around 4,650 miles). In this diverse eco-system there are at least 3,000 species of fish (possibly three times that number), 4,000 types of butterfly, 1,300 bird species, 110 varieties of rodent and 75 different primates. And then there are the snakes and insects?But you get facts and figures in books. The purpose of this journey was to experience the Amazon up close and personal.
Taking an early morning flight, we had flown from Lima to Iquitos, the capital of Peru’s Loreto department and chief town of the country’s jungle region. Founded by Jesuit missionaries in the 1750s, this busy tropical port enjoyed a brief boom during the rush for rubber in the late 19th century. A monument to that brief period of wealth can be seen at the silver-painted Casa de Fierro (Iron House), constructed by Gustav Eiffel for the 1889 Paris Exhibition: it’s now a café and restaurant.
At the docks we’d boarded La Turmalina, built to resemble a 19th?century Amazon river boat and looking a little like a cross between a Chinese junk and a Viking longboat. The comfortable, three-deck, Peruvian-crewed vessel carried an eclectic group of around 24 passengers, just about the right number for a river exploration.
From Iquitos, Jungle Expeditions (the local ground handler) specialises in Amazon trips and over six days sets out to explore some 600 miles of the Peruvian stretch of the river and its tributaries, the Marañon and the Ucayali. The company is committed to the environment and the region’s cultural heritage, particularly the ribereños (river people), with whom we were to have regular encounters. Certainly our two guides, Edgard and Ricardo, were to prove as passionate about preserving this fragile region from the ravages of man as they were knowledgeable about its flora, fauna and people.
The immensity of the Amazon hits you the moment you set off from Iquitos. The river is maybe half a mile wide at this point – and gets far wider – with the distance occasionally broken by “islands”. Encased by a vast canopy of trees on either side, it’s an awe?inspiring spectacle. As the 19th?century German explorer Baron Alexander von Humboldt said: “Here, in a fertile country, adorned with the eternal verdure, we seek in vain traces of the power of man.”
And yet as we learnt more about the surrounding habitat, it was hard not to be angered and amazed at how man has tried – and is still trying – to destroy an area frequently referred to as the lungs of the earth. As we heard tales of the devastation wrought by the rubber boom, cattle ranchers, road-builders, soya producers and, worst of all, the logging industry, it made us appreciate our surroundings even more. Charles Waterton, an explorer often referred to as England’s first environmental activist, would not be impressed. He toured the Amazon in the early 1800s praising the “noble trees” and writing extensively about the birds, especially macaws; he even kept a sloth as a pet.
We had numerous opportunities to take in the river and the jungle, setting off at least twice a day in motorised skiffs searching for wildlife. No one wanted to miss out. This isn’t like Africa with its big game; the creatures here are invariably smaller (though no less dangerous) and better hidden, with devilishly clever and subtle camouflage.
All except the birds, that is. The vibrantly coloured macaws, parrots and parakeets were enough to satisfy the trip’s most ardent bird-watchers. Even as a non-twitcher, I found it hard not to be caught up in the sudden rush of excitement at seeing macaws overhead, or an Amazon kingfisher, the odd, prehistoric-looking hoatzin, the rare great potoo, or a bat falcon or black-collared hawk searching out prey. In all we name-checked some 95 birds in six days – a mere fraction of this bewitching aviary.
But the most rewarding way to watch the wildlife is to get above the canopy at the crack of dawn. Such an opportunity arose after an exhilarating night in a tented camp in the Pacara-Samira National Reserve, enlivened by someone finding a boa constrictor dangling outside her bivvy.
The camp lies in a crook of the Ucayali and Marañon rivers and has been a protected region for more than 20 years. Suspension bridges link several canopy platforms up to 80 feet above the ground from where Ricardo pointed to squirrel and woolly monkeys (two of the seven primate types we were to see, including the tiny pygmy marmoset). This is a place just to listen and keep still against a cacophony of peculiar, haunting sounds.
It was a markedly different experience from the previous afternoon, when we’d embarked on a two-hour walk through the claustrophobic jungle floor. After paddling across a lake in a catamaran-canoe (spotting a family of shy capybara, the world’s largest rodent, but failing to spy – with a modicum of relief on my part – the fearsome anaconda that was apparently lurking nearby) we donned snake-proof leather gaiters. The jungle heat and the density of the trees were almost suffocating. We wondered how long we’d last if we got lost. Less than an hour, probably.
Edgard regaled us with facts about the trees as we picked our way along the forest path, being careful not to disturb anything that might mean digging out the first-aid kit. We noted the umbrella-shaped cecropia, the vast emergent, light-fibred kapok, the cannonball tree (so named because of the size and appearance of its fruit) and the multi-purpose palms, all thrusting towards the sun. Occasionally there would be a splash of bright colour from a bird of paradise flower or heliconia. Everything has its place and purpose and much of the flora and fauna has developed a symbiotic relationship; it’s like some vast, super-efficient recycling centre.
We were here in late April, the tail-end of the five-month rainy season, when water levels rise some 30 to 40 feet. River branches link to form one massive body of water. Ploughing through the flooded forest in our skiff gave us the perfect chance to explore hidden corners of this natural treasure trove.
One morning we moored among the carpet-like water hyacinth to fish for red-bellied piranha with makeshift rod and line and chunks of tuna. Piranha are so greedy they are fairly easy to catch – the trick is to flick them out as soon as you get a bite. Up close their teeth make them look unspeakably vicious, but it’s said they are not as dangerous as their reputation suggests. Even so, a swim in the river later that day took place far away.
On another trip we spotted both pink and grey dolphins; local Indian legend suggests that the creatures transform themselves into elegant men at night and impregnate unsuspecting virgins. They are considered sacred by some Indian tribes and we heard it’s bad luck to kill one. Later, in a shallow lagoon, another highlight was seeing the Amazon’s best-known flower, the huge water lily, Victoria amazonica, which can be over six feet in diameter. You can – apparently – lie across them. Nobody tried.
Not content with just taking in the wildlife, we made several visits to the settlements along the bank. My fear had been that the Amazon might be like the Nile, or even the Thames, with numerous boats ferrying people up and down. We saw none. Instead, the villagers were hospitable, vaguely intrigued by our presence and never pushed their wares (mainly bead bracelets and intricate wooden and gourd carvings).
In the busy and expanding town of Nauta, we raced around on tuk?tuks and wandered through the vast market, which sold everything from clothing and videos to strange, succulent fruits and catfish (a familiar item on the ship’s healthy menu). In Amazonas we watched women grinding palm leaves for sap, while another villager showed us the technique for binding the leaves for roofing material.
Later, in tiny Santo Domingo, I played football with the boisterous Peruvian crew against the villagers. Foolishly, I was wearing walking boots, although that may not have been the only reason I was substituted. We lost 6-1.
The ribereños make their living from farming, fishing, hunting and latterly tourism. After the ravages of previous centuries, life for the indigenous people of the Amazon has improved in recent years. The government and, in part, companies such as Jungle Expeditions have also encouraged the river people to become custodians of the forest by forgoing hunting (pig?like peccaries and tapirs are becoming scarce).
That they are the natural guardians of the forest was confirmed by a visit to a local shaman. Here in a moloka (meeting house) we heard stories of spiritualism and the mystical connection between the people and the jungle. Many Peruvians mix Catholicism and animism in their beliefs, and our shaman utilised figures of St Paul and Mary together with other paraphernalia and potions; as we departed he performed a smoky tobacco blessing for good health and luck, coughing frequently as he did so.
As we headed downriver back to Iquitos and took in the beauty and mystery of this vital region one last time, it was hard to ignore another statistic. Some 42 million acres of Amazon basin rainforest are lost to deforestation each year – a rate of destruction that gave another, particularly urgent, meaning to Ricardo’s exhortation to “shoot it now”.
The camera may have captured that particular moment, but it could never convey the majesty of this gigantic expanse of river and forest and its mind-boggling statistics. The Amazon Basin spans nine countries, covers 2.7 million square miles (13 per cent in Peru) and houses the world’s largest tropical rainforest, producing 20 per cent of our oxygen. The river itself is said to be the longest in the world (around 4,650 miles). In this diverse eco-system there are at least 3,000 species of fish (possibly three times that number), 4,000 types of butterfly, 1,300 bird species, 110 varieties of rodent and 75 different primates. And then there are the snakes and insects?But you get facts and figures in books. The purpose of this journey was to experience the Amazon up close and personal.
Taking an early morning flight, we had flown from Lima to Iquitos, the capital of Peru’s Loreto department and chief town of the country’s jungle region. Founded by Jesuit missionaries in the 1750s, this busy tropical port enjoyed a brief boom during the rush for rubber in the late 19th century. A monument to that brief period of wealth can be seen at the silver-painted Casa de Fierro (Iron House), constructed by Gustav Eiffel for the 1889 Paris Exhibition: it’s now a café and restaurant.
At the docks we’d boarded La Turmalina, built to resemble a 19th?century Amazon river boat and looking a little like a cross between a Chinese junk and a Viking longboat. The comfortable, three-deck, Peruvian-crewed vessel carried an eclectic group of around 24 passengers, just about the right number for a river exploration.
From Iquitos, Jungle Expeditions (the local ground handler) specialises in Amazon trips and over six days sets out to explore some 600 miles of the Peruvian stretch of the river and its tributaries, the Marañon and the Ucayali. The company is committed to the environment and the region’s cultural heritage, particularly the ribereños (river people), with whom we were to have regular encounters. Certainly our two guides, Edgard and Ricardo, were to prove as passionate about preserving this fragile region from the ravages of man as they were knowledgeable about its flora, fauna and people.
The immensity of the Amazon hits you the moment you set off from Iquitos. The river is maybe half a mile wide at this point – and gets far wider – with the distance occasionally broken by “islands”. Encased by a vast canopy of trees on either side, it’s an awe?inspiring spectacle. As the 19th?century German explorer Baron Alexander von Humboldt said: “Here, in a fertile country, adorned with the eternal verdure, we seek in vain traces of the power of man.”
And yet as we learnt more about the surrounding habitat, it was hard not to be angered and amazed at how man has tried – and is still trying – to destroy an area frequently referred to as the lungs of the earth. As we heard tales of the devastation wrought by the rubber boom, cattle ranchers, road-builders, soya producers and, worst of all, the logging industry, it made us appreciate our surroundings even more. Charles Waterton, an explorer often referred to as England’s first environmental activist, would not be impressed. He toured the Amazon in the early 1800s praising the “noble trees” and writing extensively about the birds, especially macaws; he even kept a sloth as a pet.
We had numerous opportunities to take in the river and the jungle, setting off at least twice a day in motorised skiffs searching for wildlife. No one wanted to miss out. This isn’t like Africa with its big game; the creatures here are invariably smaller (though no less dangerous) and better hidden, with devilishly clever and subtle camouflage.
All except the birds, that is. The vibrantly coloured macaws, parrots and parakeets were enough to satisfy the trip’s most ardent bird-watchers. Even as a non-twitcher, I found it hard not to be caught up in the sudden rush of excitement at seeing macaws overhead, or an Amazon kingfisher, the odd, prehistoric-looking hoatzin, the rare great potoo, or a bat falcon or black-collared hawk searching out prey. In all we name-checked some 95 birds in six days – a mere fraction of this bewitching aviary.
But the most rewarding way to watch the wildlife is to get above the canopy at the crack of dawn. Such an opportunity arose after an exhilarating night in a tented camp in the Pacara-Samira National Reserve, enlivened by someone finding a boa constrictor dangling outside her bivvy.
The camp lies in a crook of the Ucayali and Marañon rivers and has been a protected region for more than 20 years. Suspension bridges link several canopy platforms up to 80 feet above the ground from where Ricardo pointed to squirrel and woolly monkeys (two of the seven primate types we were to see, including the tiny pygmy marmoset). This is a place just to listen and keep still against a cacophony of peculiar, haunting sounds.
It was a markedly different experience from the previous afternoon, when we’d embarked on a two-hour walk through the claustrophobic jungle floor. After paddling across a lake in a catamaran-canoe (spotting a family of shy capybara, the world’s largest rodent, but failing to spy – with a modicum of relief on my part – the fearsome anaconda that was apparently lurking nearby) we donned snake-proof leather gaiters. The jungle heat and the density of the trees were almost suffocating. We wondered how long we’d last if we got lost. Less than an hour, probably.
Edgard regaled us with facts about the trees as we picked our way along the forest path, being careful not to disturb anything that might mean digging out the first-aid kit. We noted the umbrella-shaped cecropia, the vast emergent, light-fibred kapok, the cannonball tree (so named because of the size and appearance of its fruit) and the multi-purpose palms, all thrusting towards the sun. Occasionally there would be a splash of bright colour from a bird of paradise flower or heliconia. Everything has its place and purpose and much of the flora and fauna has developed a symbiotic relationship; it’s like some vast, super-efficient recycling centre.
We were here in late April, the tail-end of the five-month rainy season, when water levels rise some 30 to 40 feet. River branches link to form one massive body of water. Ploughing through the flooded forest in our skiff gave us the perfect chance to explore hidden corners of this natural treasure trove.
One morning we moored among the carpet-like water hyacinth to fish for red-bellied piranha with makeshift rod and line and chunks of tuna. Piranha are so greedy they are fairly easy to catch – the trick is to flick them out as soon as you get a bite. Up close their teeth make them look unspeakably vicious, but it’s said they are not as dangerous as their reputation suggests. Even so, a swim in the river later that day took place far away.
On another trip we spotted both pink and grey dolphins; local Indian legend suggests that the creatures transform themselves into elegant men at night and impregnate unsuspecting virgins. They are considered sacred by some Indian tribes and we heard it’s bad luck to kill one. Later, in a shallow lagoon, another highlight was seeing the Amazon’s best-known flower, the huge water lily, Victoria amazonica, which can be over six feet in diameter. You can – apparently – lie across them. Nobody tried.
Not content with just taking in the wildlife, we made several visits to the settlements along the bank. My fear had been that the Amazon might be like the Nile, or even the Thames, with numerous boats ferrying people up and down. We saw none. Instead, the villagers were hospitable, vaguely intrigued by our presence and never pushed their wares (mainly bead bracelets and intricate wooden and gourd carvings).
In the busy and expanding town of Nauta, we raced around on tuk?tuks and wandered through the vast market, which sold everything from clothing and videos to strange, succulent fruits and catfish (a familiar item on the ship’s healthy menu). In Amazonas we watched women grinding palm leaves for sap, while another villager showed us the technique for binding the leaves for roofing material.
Later, in tiny Santo Domingo, I played football with the boisterous Peruvian crew against the villagers. Foolishly, I was wearing walking boots, although that may not have been the only reason I was substituted. We lost 6-1.
The ribereños make their living from farming, fishing, hunting and latterly tourism. After the ravages of previous centuries, life for the indigenous people of the Amazon has improved in recent years. The government and, in part, companies such as Jungle Expeditions have also encouraged the river people to become custodians of the forest by forgoing hunting (pig?like peccaries and tapirs are becoming scarce).
That they are the natural guardians of the forest was confirmed by a visit to a local shaman. Here in a moloka (meeting house) we heard stories of spiritualism and the mystical connection between the people and the jungle. Many Peruvians mix Catholicism and animism in their beliefs, and our shaman utilised figures of St Paul and Mary together with other paraphernalia and potions; as we departed he performed a smoky tobacco blessing for good health and luck, coughing frequently as he did so.
As we headed downriver back to Iquitos and took in the beauty and mystery of this vital region one last time, it was hard to ignore another statistic. Some 42 million acres of Amazon basin rainforest are lost to deforestation each year – a rate of destruction that gave another, particularly urgent, meaning to Ricardo’s exhortation to “shoot it now”.
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Machu Picchu was not so lost after all
Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, may not be so lost after all.Historians have uncovered documents and maps suggesting the city had been lost and found several times before the man who officially discovered the ruins, American Hiram Bingham, got there.
Funded by the National Geographic Society and friends at Yale University, Mr Bingham discovered the Peruvian city of stone terraces in 1911, earning his place among the pantheon on the world's greatest explorers.
After setting out from Cuzco, he followed directions from a local man to some Inca ruins, and became the first Westerner to set eyes on the crumbling citadel.
Once there, he began removing thousands of artefacts, mummies, stone carvings and other relics of the ancient Inca civilisation back to Yale.
But evidence has emerged that German engineer Augusto Berns may have discovered Machu Picchu 40 years earlier, according to the Independent. Records show that, in the 1860s, Mr Berns built a sawmill opposite Machu Picchu and raised money to plunder the site.
An English Baptist missionary, Thomas Payne, who lived in Peru from 1903 to 1952, also claimed to have not only found Machu Picchu first.
More recently Peruvian historians found maps with references to Machu Picchu dating back to 1874. The most powerful evidence comes from a cartographer, Pablo Greer, in the magazine South American Explorer, the paper says.
He discovered that Mr Berns spent years searching for Inca sites with local guides. One Peruvian historian also claims to have found evidence in Yale University's archives of a government document allowing Mr Berns to plunder treasure from the region.
Funded by the National Geographic Society and friends at Yale University, Mr Bingham discovered the Peruvian city of stone terraces in 1911, earning his place among the pantheon on the world's greatest explorers.
After setting out from Cuzco, he followed directions from a local man to some Inca ruins, and became the first Westerner to set eyes on the crumbling citadel.
Once there, he began removing thousands of artefacts, mummies, stone carvings and other relics of the ancient Inca civilisation back to Yale.
But evidence has emerged that German engineer Augusto Berns may have discovered Machu Picchu 40 years earlier, according to the Independent. Records show that, in the 1860s, Mr Berns built a sawmill opposite Machu Picchu and raised money to plunder the site.
An English Baptist missionary, Thomas Payne, who lived in Peru from 1903 to 1952, also claimed to have not only found Machu Picchu first.
More recently Peruvian historians found maps with references to Machu Picchu dating back to 1874. The most powerful evidence comes from a cartographer, Pablo Greer, in the magazine South American Explorer, the paper says.
He discovered that Mr Berns spent years searching for Inca sites with local guides. One Peruvian historian also claims to have found evidence in Yale University's archives of a government document allowing Mr Berns to plunder treasure from the region.
Monday, August 23, 2010
South America: Thrills and spills in the Andes
Many travellers to South America take a bus, but not many journey the full length of the continent on a bus, as Michael Jacobs did. This is what he learnt...The bus was heading towards Colombia in the middle of a terrifying tropical storm. Swerving into deep mud, its wheels turned desperately for a few moments before the engine finally gave out. A few curses and the persistent rain were the only sounds at first to break the expectant silence. Then the earth groaned, and the bus and its shrieking passengers were pushed, as if by some supernatural hand, into the abyss.
The Hollywood horror film being projected on the small screen in front of me disturbingly mirrored the Venezuelan landscape through which I myself was travelling. I had only just arrived in South America, and had yet to become accustomed to the inappropriate films of terror and violence that the buses screened. I would have plenty of time to do so. I had come here to research a book on the Andes, and was intending to spend six months journeying the whole length of the world’s longest continuous mountain range. The most practical option was to travel by bus.Taking what would amount to more than 100 public buses, I would drive through seven countries, and cross, in relentless succession, jungles, deserts, green valleys, vertiginous mountain passes, dense forests, glacier-fringed plateaux and every other possible type of extreme and sublime landscape.
But buses served not just as wonderful viewing platforms. They also became for me what inns had been to travellers of Don Quixote’s generation — places for strange and wonderful encounters. There was the regular chance meeting with the same handful of fellow itinerants, and the no less frequent discovery that the person sitting next to you was somehow connected with friends or relatives of yours from other parts of the world. And then there were the constant tales, with passengers often revealing the most absorbing details of their lives, from intricate love affairs to the sort of traumatic travel experiences I had always imagined to be inherent to any South American journey.
My Andean bus odyssey began in Venezuela in the middle of the tropical summer. This is a country where everyone seems to delight in warning you about the potential dangers of travelling there. I managed to escape Caracas unharmed, only to be told that Venezuela had some of the world’s most hazardous bus drivers, and that they drove their rickety contraptions at such speeds that wheels would sometimes leave the ground. But, as it turned out, my attention on driving up into the Venezuelan Andes was almost entirely absorbed by excitement at first reaching the mountains and observing the gradual transformation from their lush lower slopes to the bleak high-altitude moorland or páramo, where the sole vegetation was the triffid-like frailejón.
The only moments of anxiety came as we neared the guerrilla-infested borderland between Venezuela and Colombia. A Venezuelan friend thought I was mad to consider continuing by bus from the notoriously poor and sinister Colombian frontier town of Cúcuta. He said that the presence of a foreigner would almost certainly be noted by some potential kidnapper, who would alert his colleagues farther down the road.
Within minutes of entering my first Colombian bus I became indeed a witness to a terrifyingly vicious attack involving masked men gunning down innocent passengers — but only on the video screen in front of me. Colombia itself, with its old-fashioned hospitality and courtesy, instantly challenged all the disturbing and negative preconceptions that foreigners tend to have of the place. I was reminded of the Spain I had fallen in love with in the 1960s, but with the difference that Colombia proved to have one of the most comfortable and efficient public transport systems I had ever known.
There were buses at almost every time of day, and of every possible speed and size. The full range was apparent on arrival at Bogotá’s extraordinary bus station, which, like Bogotá itself, was nothing like the chaotic, seedy place I had imagined. In contrast it was a model of modernity, laid out with clarity, and with each bus company having its own clearly defined waiting area, where you were obliged to remain until your name was called just before the bus’s departure. There was also a heavy presence of policemen and soldiers.
This last feature (promoted as being por su seguridad, or “for your security”) was initially slightly perturbing. But it is thanks to measures such as these that Colombia is now a far safer place than ever before. Until the advent of the current and highly controversial president, Álvaro Uribe, few people of any means travelled anywhere in the country except by plane. Today, I soon concluded, the worst that was likely to happen to you if you stuck to the main roads and avoided travelling by night was a nervous irritability caused by a surfeit of unfailingly violent films.
Wondering how much longer I could bear the sight of a blood-spattered Bruce Willis, I finally headed towards the Ecuadorian border after nearly a month in Colombia. The road south of the seductively beautiful colonial town of Popayán had, until the late 1990s, been famous for being subject to more terrorist hold-ups than any other thoroughfare in South America. The area remains what is still called in Colombia a zona caliente (a hot zone); but, as my bus made its leisurely way through mountain pastures and woods of a Swiss-like greenness, I found it difficult to believe that heavy fighting between guerrilla and government forces was taking place only 25 miles away. The passenger next to me guaranteed that I would be absolutely safe until reaching the Ecuadorian frontier town of Ipiales, whereupon I would be instantly besieged by Ecuadorians trying to get my money and belongings.
This seemed to me to be another example of the derogatory view most South Americans have of their neighbouring countries; but the man’s warning proved to have some substance. Whereas in almost every other respect moving from Colombia to Ecuador was like suddenly entering a convent, arriving at the bus station at Ipiales brought back to me early memories of Morocco, with representatives of rival bus companies manically trying to sell me a ticket and grab hold of my luggage. When eventually I got on a bus I discovered a marketplace atmosphere, with people of all ages streaming up and down the aisle offering everything from food to pirate DVDs.
The diet of Bruce Willis continued unabated throughout Ecuador, but there was something else to distract me from the country’s magnificent succession of snow-capped volcanoes. Near the beginning of almost every journey, after most of the vendors had gone, some generally well dressed person would stand up to address the passengers. Their leisurely introductions, filled invariably with reflections about the human spirit, made you believe at first that you were being harangued by some proselytising sect, while in fact you were being confronted by another and more sophisticated type of salesman, selling usually anti-ageing cream, homeopathic medicine or volumes of an encyclopedia. Some incorporated quizzes into their act, and even stand-up comedy routines. Nearly all displayed powers of oratory that held you under their spell.
It was not until I reached Peru that my mind as a passenger became increasingly fixed on the state of the roads I was on. Bus travel in Ecuador had been far too easy, with well graded, well surfaced roads, and services so frequent and obliging that you could hail a bus anywhere along the main thoroughfares without having to wait for more than 15 minutes. In Peru I could have had an easier time had I stuck to the coastal routes, which were served by ultra-luxury buses featuring fully reclining leather chairs and airline-style treatment. However, I was determined to keep as much as possible to the Andes, which meant following a meandering network of back roads in the middle of the Andean rainy season.
I began my Peruvian adventures on an over-filled bus seemingly held together by tape. From the hot and dusty lowland centre of Piura, with its confusion of taxis, motorised rickshaws and rundown, privately owned bus stations, I travelled to the distant mountain town of Chachapoyas, a place so remote that a nearby waterfall was identified only in 2006 as being the third tallest in the world. The main overland route took ages, but entailed largely asphalted roads. My true hardships began only on the return journey. Not wishing to go back the same way I had come, I was delighted to hear of a twice-weekly bus that would set me on my way to Cajamarca, where Pizarro’s conquest of Peru had begun. The bus was due to set off at five in the morning, and — if I was lucky — would cover a distance of just 100 miles by around 10 that night.
The road, a continuous dirt track barely wider than the small and inevitably battered bus, had to climb two passes of about 14,000 feet, and descend in between all the way down to the tropical Marañón river. I lost my nerve soon after beginning the first descent. The clouds had parted to reveal the road ahead as an exposed ledge clinging to a sheer drop. Mud and landslides frequently had us tilt at a precarious angle, and occasionally obliged the male passengers to get out and remove stones or push. Then one of the tyres exploded. To the sounds of brakes and screams the bus came abruptly to a halt inches before the precipice.
Predictably there was no spare, though this did not appear to bother the driver. Calmly he removed the inner tube, located the puncture, and cut out an old piece of rubber to cover it. He then pumped up the tyre, which exploded again. The process was repeated a couple of times until the tyre appeared to hold, though — as one of the passengers fatalistically commented — the likelihood of its giving way yet again was extremely high. The rest of the journey was like a recreation of the film Wages of Fear, with a climax of terror reached as we zigzagged up the second pass in dense fog and pouring rain, with the night rapidly falling, and the driver using one of his hands constantly to wipe the windscreen.
From that time onwards in Peru I was tempted to do what bus drivers invariably did at the start of any trip: make the sign of the cross. Fortunately, by the time I reached Bolivia, the dry season had begun, and a long-awaited replacement to what guidebooks always refer to as “the world’s most dangerous road” (from the high Andes down to the jungles of Las Yungas) had just opened. It was none the less with a cheery sense of having emerged alive that I left Bolivia for Argentina, and entered a world of secure roads, safety regulations and well maintained buses that provided unlimited cups of free coffee, curtained-off sleeping facilities, and even films in which Bruce Willis did not appear.
The main challenges facing me as I headed towards South America’s southernmost tip were caused by the onset of what threatened to be an extremely severe winter. Bus services, ever more infrequent, were often suspended by poor weather, and did not exist at all after April along Argentina’s celebrated Route 40, which skirts the Andes all the way from the Bolivian border down to the very end of Patagonia’s largely uninhabited wastes. Thanks to an extraordinarily complex series of often split-second timings involving interminably protracted border stops and even the odd ferry, I crisscrossed my way down the mountainous Argentinean-Chilean frontier, and was even able to enjoy, in sub-zero but brilliantly blue conditions, a long stretch of Chile’s Carretera Austral, a final continuation of the Pan-American Highway that peters out amid fjords, forests and glaciers.
But however much I wanted never to lose sight of the Andes, the limitations of winter transport forced me endlessly to return to the interminably straight roads of Patagonia’s unchanging flat and empty pampas. The buses themselves became ever less frequented, so that finally even the showing of films was suspended for lack of anyone to watch them. Seated on my own on the top of double-deckers, at times for up to 30 hours at a stretch, I found myself engrossed by the powerful effects created by the hyper-real clarity of the light. And I thought how metaphorically fitting it was that my long journey, begun in the heat and vibrancy of the tropics, should now be nearing its end like this — in the middle of winter, and alone.
The Hollywood horror film being projected on the small screen in front of me disturbingly mirrored the Venezuelan landscape through which I myself was travelling. I had only just arrived in South America, and had yet to become accustomed to the inappropriate films of terror and violence that the buses screened. I would have plenty of time to do so. I had come here to research a book on the Andes, and was intending to spend six months journeying the whole length of the world’s longest continuous mountain range. The most practical option was to travel by bus.Taking what would amount to more than 100 public buses, I would drive through seven countries, and cross, in relentless succession, jungles, deserts, green valleys, vertiginous mountain passes, dense forests, glacier-fringed plateaux and every other possible type of extreme and sublime landscape.
But buses served not just as wonderful viewing platforms. They also became for me what inns had been to travellers of Don Quixote’s generation — places for strange and wonderful encounters. There was the regular chance meeting with the same handful of fellow itinerants, and the no less frequent discovery that the person sitting next to you was somehow connected with friends or relatives of yours from other parts of the world. And then there were the constant tales, with passengers often revealing the most absorbing details of their lives, from intricate love affairs to the sort of traumatic travel experiences I had always imagined to be inherent to any South American journey.
My Andean bus odyssey began in Venezuela in the middle of the tropical summer. This is a country where everyone seems to delight in warning you about the potential dangers of travelling there. I managed to escape Caracas unharmed, only to be told that Venezuela had some of the world’s most hazardous bus drivers, and that they drove their rickety contraptions at such speeds that wheels would sometimes leave the ground. But, as it turned out, my attention on driving up into the Venezuelan Andes was almost entirely absorbed by excitement at first reaching the mountains and observing the gradual transformation from their lush lower slopes to the bleak high-altitude moorland or páramo, where the sole vegetation was the triffid-like frailejón.
The only moments of anxiety came as we neared the guerrilla-infested borderland between Venezuela and Colombia. A Venezuelan friend thought I was mad to consider continuing by bus from the notoriously poor and sinister Colombian frontier town of Cúcuta. He said that the presence of a foreigner would almost certainly be noted by some potential kidnapper, who would alert his colleagues farther down the road.
Within minutes of entering my first Colombian bus I became indeed a witness to a terrifyingly vicious attack involving masked men gunning down innocent passengers — but only on the video screen in front of me. Colombia itself, with its old-fashioned hospitality and courtesy, instantly challenged all the disturbing and negative preconceptions that foreigners tend to have of the place. I was reminded of the Spain I had fallen in love with in the 1960s, but with the difference that Colombia proved to have one of the most comfortable and efficient public transport systems I had ever known.
There were buses at almost every time of day, and of every possible speed and size. The full range was apparent on arrival at Bogotá’s extraordinary bus station, which, like Bogotá itself, was nothing like the chaotic, seedy place I had imagined. In contrast it was a model of modernity, laid out with clarity, and with each bus company having its own clearly defined waiting area, where you were obliged to remain until your name was called just before the bus’s departure. There was also a heavy presence of policemen and soldiers.
This last feature (promoted as being por su seguridad, or “for your security”) was initially slightly perturbing. But it is thanks to measures such as these that Colombia is now a far safer place than ever before. Until the advent of the current and highly controversial president, Álvaro Uribe, few people of any means travelled anywhere in the country except by plane. Today, I soon concluded, the worst that was likely to happen to you if you stuck to the main roads and avoided travelling by night was a nervous irritability caused by a surfeit of unfailingly violent films.
Wondering how much longer I could bear the sight of a blood-spattered Bruce Willis, I finally headed towards the Ecuadorian border after nearly a month in Colombia. The road south of the seductively beautiful colonial town of Popayán had, until the late 1990s, been famous for being subject to more terrorist hold-ups than any other thoroughfare in South America. The area remains what is still called in Colombia a zona caliente (a hot zone); but, as my bus made its leisurely way through mountain pastures and woods of a Swiss-like greenness, I found it difficult to believe that heavy fighting between guerrilla and government forces was taking place only 25 miles away. The passenger next to me guaranteed that I would be absolutely safe until reaching the Ecuadorian frontier town of Ipiales, whereupon I would be instantly besieged by Ecuadorians trying to get my money and belongings.
This seemed to me to be another example of the derogatory view most South Americans have of their neighbouring countries; but the man’s warning proved to have some substance. Whereas in almost every other respect moving from Colombia to Ecuador was like suddenly entering a convent, arriving at the bus station at Ipiales brought back to me early memories of Morocco, with representatives of rival bus companies manically trying to sell me a ticket and grab hold of my luggage. When eventually I got on a bus I discovered a marketplace atmosphere, with people of all ages streaming up and down the aisle offering everything from food to pirate DVDs.
The diet of Bruce Willis continued unabated throughout Ecuador, but there was something else to distract me from the country’s magnificent succession of snow-capped volcanoes. Near the beginning of almost every journey, after most of the vendors had gone, some generally well dressed person would stand up to address the passengers. Their leisurely introductions, filled invariably with reflections about the human spirit, made you believe at first that you were being harangued by some proselytising sect, while in fact you were being confronted by another and more sophisticated type of salesman, selling usually anti-ageing cream, homeopathic medicine or volumes of an encyclopedia. Some incorporated quizzes into their act, and even stand-up comedy routines. Nearly all displayed powers of oratory that held you under their spell.
It was not until I reached Peru that my mind as a passenger became increasingly fixed on the state of the roads I was on. Bus travel in Ecuador had been far too easy, with well graded, well surfaced roads, and services so frequent and obliging that you could hail a bus anywhere along the main thoroughfares without having to wait for more than 15 minutes. In Peru I could have had an easier time had I stuck to the coastal routes, which were served by ultra-luxury buses featuring fully reclining leather chairs and airline-style treatment. However, I was determined to keep as much as possible to the Andes, which meant following a meandering network of back roads in the middle of the Andean rainy season.
I began my Peruvian adventures on an over-filled bus seemingly held together by tape. From the hot and dusty lowland centre of Piura, with its confusion of taxis, motorised rickshaws and rundown, privately owned bus stations, I travelled to the distant mountain town of Chachapoyas, a place so remote that a nearby waterfall was identified only in 2006 as being the third tallest in the world. The main overland route took ages, but entailed largely asphalted roads. My true hardships began only on the return journey. Not wishing to go back the same way I had come, I was delighted to hear of a twice-weekly bus that would set me on my way to Cajamarca, where Pizarro’s conquest of Peru had begun. The bus was due to set off at five in the morning, and — if I was lucky — would cover a distance of just 100 miles by around 10 that night.
The road, a continuous dirt track barely wider than the small and inevitably battered bus, had to climb two passes of about 14,000 feet, and descend in between all the way down to the tropical Marañón river. I lost my nerve soon after beginning the first descent. The clouds had parted to reveal the road ahead as an exposed ledge clinging to a sheer drop. Mud and landslides frequently had us tilt at a precarious angle, and occasionally obliged the male passengers to get out and remove stones or push. Then one of the tyres exploded. To the sounds of brakes and screams the bus came abruptly to a halt inches before the precipice.
Predictably there was no spare, though this did not appear to bother the driver. Calmly he removed the inner tube, located the puncture, and cut out an old piece of rubber to cover it. He then pumped up the tyre, which exploded again. The process was repeated a couple of times until the tyre appeared to hold, though — as one of the passengers fatalistically commented — the likelihood of its giving way yet again was extremely high. The rest of the journey was like a recreation of the film Wages of Fear, with a climax of terror reached as we zigzagged up the second pass in dense fog and pouring rain, with the night rapidly falling, and the driver using one of his hands constantly to wipe the windscreen.
From that time onwards in Peru I was tempted to do what bus drivers invariably did at the start of any trip: make the sign of the cross. Fortunately, by the time I reached Bolivia, the dry season had begun, and a long-awaited replacement to what guidebooks always refer to as “the world’s most dangerous road” (from the high Andes down to the jungles of Las Yungas) had just opened. It was none the less with a cheery sense of having emerged alive that I left Bolivia for Argentina, and entered a world of secure roads, safety regulations and well maintained buses that provided unlimited cups of free coffee, curtained-off sleeping facilities, and even films in which Bruce Willis did not appear.
The main challenges facing me as I headed towards South America’s southernmost tip were caused by the onset of what threatened to be an extremely severe winter. Bus services, ever more infrequent, were often suspended by poor weather, and did not exist at all after April along Argentina’s celebrated Route 40, which skirts the Andes all the way from the Bolivian border down to the very end of Patagonia’s largely uninhabited wastes. Thanks to an extraordinarily complex series of often split-second timings involving interminably protracted border stops and even the odd ferry, I crisscrossed my way down the mountainous Argentinean-Chilean frontier, and was even able to enjoy, in sub-zero but brilliantly blue conditions, a long stretch of Chile’s Carretera Austral, a final continuation of the Pan-American Highway that peters out amid fjords, forests and glaciers.
But however much I wanted never to lose sight of the Andes, the limitations of winter transport forced me endlessly to return to the interminably straight roads of Patagonia’s unchanging flat and empty pampas. The buses themselves became ever less frequented, so that finally even the showing of films was suspended for lack of anyone to watch them. Seated on my own on the top of double-deckers, at times for up to 30 hours at a stretch, I found myself engrossed by the powerful effects created by the hyper-real clarity of the light. And I thought how metaphorically fitting it was that my long journey, begun in the heat and vibrancy of the tropics, should now be nearing its end like this — in the middle of winter, and alone.
Peru with children: A beano in the Amazon
Treetop walks, lurking tarantulas and women in bowler hats – Peru is full of surprises. Jessamy Calkin went with her 12-year-old daughter, who took it all in her stride.With its high-rise buildings, shopping malls and traffic jams, Lima is as bustling and contemporary as any capital city can be. It is a shock, therefore, to fly east for an hour to Cusco and find yourself transported back what appears to be several centuries, to women wearing top hats and loads of skirts, donkeys, dogs and a large variety of pigs wandering over roads covered in vast potholes and craters. It would be like leaving London and flying to Cornwall and suddenly finding yourself walking into an episode of Poldark.Admittedly, my research on Peru had been slight – I’d read Tintin, Prisoners of the Sun, and The White Rock, Hugh Thomson’s excellent book. I’d had no gap year in South America; I’d had no gap year at all. But here I was in Peru with my 12-year-old daughter, Bam Bam, who had always wanted to go to the jungle, and the Peruvian Amazon sounded most enticing.
We flew via Lima to Puerto Maldonado, a rubber outpost in the Tambopata National Reserve. The Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica is the most beautiful lodge to be found in that area of the Amazon, and it was also the first to be established. In an open-sided bus we were driven to the river port, where we waited for our boat under a mango tree by the Madre de Dios river, and Bam Bam made friends with a tailless dog that was snoozing quietly in the sunshine.
Nine miles down the river lies Reserva Amazonica: 34 wooden cabanas with thatched roofs and alluring hammocks. Ours had a plunge pool, a small, square, deep pool of cold water that became our oasis over the next few days. A word about the jungle: it is not for the bug-shy or the squeamish, not for the claustrophobic, and it is not all that great if you don’t like tropical heat and rain and mud. The air was so heavy it hung off me, but Bam Bam said she really liked being hot and sweaty. You need to bring a lot of clothes, because nothing dries. One of our guides said that after a season in the jungle, she found that all her cash had gone bright green and disintegrated.
It was Joey Koechlin who founded Amazonica in 1975. At the time it was the only lodge in the area; now there are 32. Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo was filmed there; Koechlin produced it. His company Inkaterra (his son Ignacio is the general manager) has six hotels in Peru (including new ones in Cusco and Lake Titicaca) and is a non-profit organisation aimed at conserving the country’s natural environment. It claims to be the first carbon-neutral travel provider in the country.
We joined the dusk walk into the jungle. It was the end of the rainy season, our wellington boots sank in the mud and we were trailed by a cloud of mosquitoes, like a cartoon, their constant whine adding to the drama. In Bam Bam’s journal, she wrote: 'Day 1: My first trip into the jungle. We saw some spiders and interesting trees.’ Interesting trees is an understatement. My favourites were the ironwood, which clangs like a steel girder when you whack it with a machete; the vast kapok, the largest tree in the jungle, which grows up to 230ft tall, and the strangler fig, a parasite that attaches itself to another tree in a mortal embrace and then races it to the sky.
The restaurant at Amazonica is reached by a long wooden walkway leading to an airy dining-room with palm trees and sort of thatched standard lamps. After dinner (salad, stir-fried beef and passion fruit juice), returning via the walkway to our cabana, we looked up at the central beam supporting the thatched roof, 3m above our heads. At each end, like lethal punctuation marks, there clung a large tarantula. They seemed to live there permanently, and it was only slightly disconcerting when they weren’t there. (From Bam Bam’s diary: 'There were a couple of tarantulas above the walkway. They were big and hairy and I liked them very much. I slept very well.’)
After a sweaty night and a very early start, we would begin each day in the plunge pool and follow it with fresh pineapple juice and scrambled eggs. Amazonica offers activities for both the timid and the intrepid: Lake Sandoval and its family of giant otters sounded good. After a short boat ride there followed a two-mile hike through the jungle ('In the jungle of Lake Sandoval’ sounds like a poem by Lewis Carroll) with soundtrack provided by the laughing falcon. We saw a greater yellow-headed vulture and a golden silk spider with an almost spherical web. Then we reached an inlet with a couple of wooden dugout canoes, and paddled off – and suddenly I felt like I was in Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God – into Lake Sandoval.
In the glaring, glaring sun (I had on an inadequate hat) we searched the oxbow lake for the giant otters. There was a crashing sound and we saw some bright-red howler monkeys leaping through the trees, one clutching a baby. The howler monkey is large and loud, the loudest animal in the jungle and the third loudest animal in the world (weirdly, the blue whale is the loudest). We found the otters – well, three of them – huge, sleek creatures they were, larking around and eating piranha. Sidling along the edge of the lake, looking out for caymans, we saw a tree trunk on which 14 little long-nosed bats were arranged in perfect formation – they looked like stickers. Further along we came across an Amazon kingfisher and three large vultures, which reminded me of the vultures in The Jungle Book; their official name is hoatzin, their unfortunate nickname is the stinkbird or minging bird.
The following day, Bam Bam had her eye on the Anaconda Walk and the Canopy Walk, which begins with a boat ride – as everything does (it took a peculiarly long time for it to sink in that there were no cars, or indeed roads). We hiked through the jungle passing further remarkable trees (my new favourites being the capirona, nicknamed the gringo because of its pink, peeling bark, and another relatively unremarkable tree in all but its name which is, charmingly, the moral bobo).
Led by our guide, Uriel, we were stalked by the high-pitched wolf whistle of the screaming piha. The canopy is 100ft in the air, a 1,100ft long system of seven hanging bridges, observation platforms and towers, reached by seemingly endless wooden steps. It was both glorious and alarming up there. We were delayed by Bam Bam who insisted on reading the Beano mid-bridge for a photograph so she could win free membership for reading the comic in the most unusual place, and the antics of Max, a lunky American teenager ('Mom, if you set the timer on your camera and then drop it, it will take a picture on the way down…’)
There was an unusual amount of noise in the trees, which turned out to be the wind heralding the rain. Uriel started getting twitchy – he worried that branches would come down and impale us – but we pressed on, sweltering, to the so-called Anaconda Walk. I say so-called because no one has ever seen an anaconda on this walk, in fact only one of the guides had ever seen an anaconda at all and that was in a different part of Peru. This was immensely disappointing news to me. I longed for an anaconda, especially since I had read about the indecent sigh of anticipation it emits just before a strike. But halfway through we reached a wooden platform and Max sat down on a log, and a small brown snake shot out obligingly. We hurried back to an outpost with thunder clapping around us, and as we reached it, it started pouring. This was proper rain. At first, huge random drops and then harder and harder until it was like a giant, exhilarating, jubilant power shower.
When the rain stopped we trudged back to Inkaterra for a rest and supper of fish and tomatoes cooked in a bamboo tube in the fire. That night there were unimaginable storms and we lay sleepless under our mosquito nets in our open-sided cabana, surrounded by glorious thunder, spectacular lightning and ridiculously noisy rain.
On our final day a short boat ride took us to a very jungly place indeed, the jungle proper, like a Rousseau painting, dense tropical stuff that was hard work to hike through. Each of us was flanked by a posse of mosquitoes, and Bam Bam amused herself by spraying a blast of insect repellant into each pursuing cloud and watching them drop like, well, flies. Two hours of this, and we reached Gamitana creek and our waiting canoe, and there followed a sublime and peaceful slow drift to a waiting picnic lunch, during which we saw the biggest trees so far, some of which had fallen across the river and a gap had simply been sawn through them. Their great uprooted trunks looked like fallen spaceships wedged into the earth.
That night we went on a midnight cruise, and saw owls and caymans and learnt about the opossum with a special heart, which can pretend to be dead – with no pulse – for up to five minutes to escape from snakes.
We hated to leave Inkaterra, with its tarantulas and its bright-orange furry caterpillars, but we had our sights set on the Incas.
When I told a well-travelled friend that I was going to visit Machu Picchu, he didn’t exactly sneer, but his look implied that the Incas are over-rated. 'At the same time that Machu Picchu was being built, Westminster Abbey was taking shape,’ he said, slightly sniffily. 'And the great gothic cathedrals of France were built three centuries before.’
The Incas had no writing, no wheels, and they hadn’t even discovered arches – hence the distinctive trapezoidal shape of the doors and niches. They were the world’s most accomplished stonemasons and they cut and shaped stone with uncanny precision to make formidable walls, even though they had no metal tools, and transported those stones huge distances. They built the most spectacular roads and terraces in the most unmanageable landscape, and buildings and walls that were able to withstand earthquakes and were completely beautiful to look at. I very soon became in thrall to Inca walls. But first we were going to visit the Sacred Valley, El Valle Sagrado, which turned out to be my favourite part of Peru.
We flew from Puerto Maldonado in a natty little plane and landed in Cusco, which is known to the Incas as the navel of the world, and is cradled in a valley by the surrounding Andes. The altitude here is two miles (we gulped coca tea and followed the advice we had been given to rest, and we were fine). We were collected from the airport by our chatty guide, Vida, and charming driver, Cesar. The Sacred Valley is a microclimate with very fertile soil. In every direction there was every shade of green; it was the end of the rainy season and our timing was superb. There were women with thick black pigtails and red-cheeked babies on their backs, and I became obsessed with the hats – top hats and trilbies, fedoras and bowlers. Every man, woman and child is be-hatted. We stopped at the market in Pisac and I felt as though I was drowning in its vibrancy and colour. There were heaps of gladioli, fruit and vegetables, wooden toys, woven purses and blankets, brightly coloured powdered dyes with a powerful smell of cinnamon and pears and mint and bananas. There are 50 varieties of corn in Peru, and up to 1,000 types of potato in this area alone – and it felt like they were all there in that market.
We saw children playing football by the road, and Vida expressed mild surprise at how energetically they were playing when the air was so thin but then explained that Peruvians have developed extra-big lungs to absorb more oxygen. We reached Urubamba Villas, rented by Inkaterra. Ours was called Villa Elizabeth, named after the housekeeper, who appeared in a black skirt and ankle socks and cooked fish for our supper. There was a fireplace, which was very welcome as it was cold at night – lovely after the jungle. I struggled to light the fire until Elizabeth came and got it going with her extra-big Peruvian lungs.
It was raining the following day, but after pancakes and blueberry jam and coffee, Cesar and Vida picked us up for the first of our excursions. Inca society was very organised and sophisticated, and although the Incas were completely wiped out by the Spanish, there are lots of people who still believe in the Inca religion, and they co-exist pretty peacefully with the Catholics. Lounging by a bridge over the Urubamba river, we watched the inhabitants go about their business. Small groups of children waited by the roadside with their school bags; every now and then an already full-looking car pulled up and the driver got out and opened the boot, and the children squashed in, giggling. This is an informal school bus system; people were being helpful because it was raining.
Up in the hills is Chinchero, a village known as 'birthplace of the rainbow’ to the Incas. A tiny white colonial church and terraces led up to a huge, immaculate Inca wall. All around us were mountains dipped in cloud, and green plains.
On the steps stood a little man straight out of a Bertolucci film, weaving beautiful bracelets. Bam Bam bought one from a little girl for one nuevo sol (20p). 'Thanks you,’ she said. 'I weaves it myself.’ Then we visited a co-operative or, as Bam Bam put it, 'a place where lots of ladies get together and weave’. Nearby is Salinas, the saltpans, where a hot spring discharges a stream of salty water into what looks like a beautiful paintbox with 700 compartments of salt, and Moray, a vast sunken terraced bowl, each level a microclimate. The Incas could coax a terrace out of any terrain, and a system of communal labour kept it maintained. They were brilliant administrators.
We had brought a picnic lunch – chicken, rice, corn and fruit – and ate it in a field, Cesar getting out a picnic table and chairs and napkins. ('We had a picnic in a field. It was very posh.’) Bam Bam is a dog magnet and shortly a small, scruffy dog with one tooth showed up, followed by another, then another, until our picnic table was surrounded by stray, well-behaved dogs.
Halfway between Cusco and Machu Picchu is Ollantaytambo, a fortress in a spectacular setting, and the scene of Manco Inca’s victory against the Spanish. The Incas loved a view. In the town we looked at Inca houses that have been handed down through the generations. (One was filled with guinea pigs, a delicacy here, being bred for restaurants in Cusco, to Bam Bam’s horror.) In the mountains you can make out a profile of an Inca god in the rock – with a naturally formed nose and mouth, a crown on top that had been carved and an eye that aligns perfectly with the sun. The Incas loved the sun. But they weren’t puritanical, or slaves to their religion. They liked pleasure. As Hugh Thomson wrote, 'This was a society whose runners would come in relays of thousands of miles from the coast just so the emperor sitting in Cusco could eat fish from the sea.’
On our last day in the Sacred Valley we got up early to go to the gaudy market in Urubamba, and bought a huge bunch of gladioli for 10p from a little old man. Each street seemed to be selling a different kind of produce – there was cabbage street, flower street, stationery street, all presided over by the usual array of ladies in hats. Bam Bam went for a ride along the river with Alberto, who runs Inkaterra in Cusco, and I sat by a tiny Inca bridge and watched two men repairing the railway tracks. I’d never been so close to the clouds.
At the station at Ollantaytambo – we were due to catch the train to Machu Picchu, the Hiram Bingham, named after the American explorer who rediscovered the ruins in 1911 – we were met by a dog who escorted us to the platform. ('Hiram Bingham? This way ladies…’) Machu Picchu cannot be reached by road. The ordinary tourist train (the Vistadome) costs $86, whereas the luxury Hiram Bingham costs nearly $600. Still, Bam Bam’s face when she saw the train pull in with its little lamps in the windows and its spectacular saloon bar was the most impressed I’d seen her so far. But the real luxury of the trip was the view, and that can obviously be seen even in the cheapest train, available only to local residents (price $6). The track snakes along the Urubamba, in all its gushing muddy glory. We passed the starting point of the Inca Trail, a five-day hike to Machu Picchu, by an old Inca road, where guides were laying out tents and pots and pans. It looked exhausting. (Bam Bam: 'The Hiram Bingham was amazing, but I wished we were hiking along the Inca Trail.’)
The elegant Inkaterra Machu Picchu, which Joey Koechlin developed in 1980, is next to the railway station, and the restaurant sits between its tracks. Now we were right in the cloud forest, which means essentially misty damp days and not much clarity. You need at least two nights in Machu Picchu; it is best to take two days to visit the site, but the hotel offers other interesting things to do: an orchid tour (there are 372 species of orchid, including one that smells like a fish), a spectacled bear enclosure, and a hike along the railroad tracks through the Mandora Valley, with its banana trees, busy lizzies and humming birds. That night we went on a twilight walk: we learnt about the sacred rock, to which the locals still come to make offerings, and we saw bats and birds and learnt this and that about the Incas. We hugged a walnut tree that was supposed to have spiritual qualities; Bam Bam felt it hug her back.
At five the next morning we were sitting on the transfer bus, brimming with coca tea and accompanied by Fabrizio, our slightly histrionic but very friendly guide. We descended from the bus and climbed upwards, and our first view of the city, cloud swirling around it, a single tree left among the ruins, looked unreal, almost like a model. Fabrizio, caught up in the moment, turned formally towards us and made a little speech, thumping his heart for emphasis. 'I will give my heart to show you Machu Picchu. My friends [thump], welcome to Machu Picchu!’ We explored the site and the more I explored the more impressed I became as Fabrizio told us fascinating stuff about the hidden symbolism and the incredibly sophisticated gutter system and how they filtered their water using sand and other materials brought all the way from Cusco. I got completely caught up in his enthusiasm and wanted to prostrate myself in front of the walls, so immaculate are they – huge blocks of stone fitted together like a jigsaw with no mortar! And earthquake proof! I could happily have stayed there all day, but Bam Bam had spotted a mountain she fancied. Huayna Picchu is the one you always see in the background of every photo of Machu Picchu, and they let only 400 visitors up each day. It is incredibly steep with steps carved into the rock and a distinctly tough-going pathway. Near the top you have to pull yourself through a sort of stone tunnel, and it is spectacular at the summit, except you will inevitably find a bunch of tourists and students spoiling things. On the way down the clouds parted for a second and there was the most glorious view of the ruins laid out before us – and I had run out of film.
Machu Picchu is crowded, and it wasn’t my favourite part of the trip, yet for all the souvenir sellers, Peruvian hats and Inca Kola T-shirts, I still found myself thinking a lot about it afterwards. Specifically, about Hiram Bingham, about how hard it must have been to find the ruins in this impossible terrain, choked by vegetation, 450 years after it was built.
I was glad that the Spanish never found the city. The Incas deserted it shortly after the Spanish invasion, and covered their tracks behind them. Only a few locals were aware of its existence until Hiram Bingham came along.
Back at the hotel we went to the spectacled bear enclosure; one of only five types of bear in the world. They are large, dark and soulful looking, with rings around their eyes, and in no way do they resemble their most famous specimen, Paddington. They live in the cloud forest, and are often hunted for their paws, or by farmers who mistakenly think that the bears are eating their livestock (in fact they are 90 per cent vegetarian). They are now officially endangered. There were two there – one from a zoo, where it was getting into fights with other males, and the other rescued from someone’s garden, where it was being kept on a chain.
We had a couple of days in Cusco before leaving. It is one of the most memorable cities I have been to; colourful and lively and brimming with scruffy charm. The cathedral is beyond belief. It took 100 years to build. It is filled with magnificent things: the silver altar and the painting of the Last Supper with Judas depicted as Francisco Pizarro, betrayer of the Incas (famously, the Spanish conquistador Pizarro captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa and made a deal with the Incas: they were to fill a room once with gold and twice with silver in return for his release; Atahualpa was executed anyway). We particularly loved the statue of the black Christ. Blackened by years of votive candles, it is made of alder wood and became known as Lord of Earthquakes when, during the catastrophic earthquake of 1650, it was brandished in a procession and the earthquake stopped. The statue is adorned with gold and silver and since 1650 it has been rewarded with a new skirt every week; I couldn’t find anything about this in the tourist guides but Vida assured us that the weekly skirt story is true and that all the old skirts are kept in the cathedral (4,281 to date).
Sacsayhuaman is the great Inca ruin above Cusco. So immaculate are these walls and the sheer positioning of the fort that when the Spanish arrived and saw it, they thought it must have been the work of gods or giants. In stark contrast nearby is a huge white plastic Christ in imitation of the one in Rio; it was a gift to Cusco from a grateful Palestinian Christian who took refuge in Peru. On our last day we had a final picnic at Sacsayhuaman and a record number of dogs attended, then we returned home via Lima, a city like any other with all the attendant problems but also a magnificent cathedral, with six chapels (Bam Bam: 'I didn’t like the cathedral, the bones of the traitor Francisco Pizarro are kept there, and all the statues followed you with their eyes.’) In the Plaza de Armas is the Franciscan monastery, with a library like something out of Gormenghast; its underground catacombs and carefully arranged skulls and bone-filled crypts a stark contrast to its sunny, frangipani tree-filled courtyard.
Peru, such a beautiful name for a beautiful country. We left in a blur of colour and cloth and vivid, vivid memories. I asked Bam Bam what she would take if she could bring anything home with her, anything at all, and she mentioned the spectacled bear. No, she said, the pair of tarantulas from Amazonica. For me, it would be an Inca wall. An Inca wall with a trapezoid window.
We flew via Lima to Puerto Maldonado, a rubber outpost in the Tambopata National Reserve. The Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica is the most beautiful lodge to be found in that area of the Amazon, and it was also the first to be established. In an open-sided bus we were driven to the river port, where we waited for our boat under a mango tree by the Madre de Dios river, and Bam Bam made friends with a tailless dog that was snoozing quietly in the sunshine.
Nine miles down the river lies Reserva Amazonica: 34 wooden cabanas with thatched roofs and alluring hammocks. Ours had a plunge pool, a small, square, deep pool of cold water that became our oasis over the next few days. A word about the jungle: it is not for the bug-shy or the squeamish, not for the claustrophobic, and it is not all that great if you don’t like tropical heat and rain and mud. The air was so heavy it hung off me, but Bam Bam said she really liked being hot and sweaty. You need to bring a lot of clothes, because nothing dries. One of our guides said that after a season in the jungle, she found that all her cash had gone bright green and disintegrated.
It was Joey Koechlin who founded Amazonica in 1975. At the time it was the only lodge in the area; now there are 32. Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo was filmed there; Koechlin produced it. His company Inkaterra (his son Ignacio is the general manager) has six hotels in Peru (including new ones in Cusco and Lake Titicaca) and is a non-profit organisation aimed at conserving the country’s natural environment. It claims to be the first carbon-neutral travel provider in the country.
We joined the dusk walk into the jungle. It was the end of the rainy season, our wellington boots sank in the mud and we were trailed by a cloud of mosquitoes, like a cartoon, their constant whine adding to the drama. In Bam Bam’s journal, she wrote: 'Day 1: My first trip into the jungle. We saw some spiders and interesting trees.’ Interesting trees is an understatement. My favourites were the ironwood, which clangs like a steel girder when you whack it with a machete; the vast kapok, the largest tree in the jungle, which grows up to 230ft tall, and the strangler fig, a parasite that attaches itself to another tree in a mortal embrace and then races it to the sky.
The restaurant at Amazonica is reached by a long wooden walkway leading to an airy dining-room with palm trees and sort of thatched standard lamps. After dinner (salad, stir-fried beef and passion fruit juice), returning via the walkway to our cabana, we looked up at the central beam supporting the thatched roof, 3m above our heads. At each end, like lethal punctuation marks, there clung a large tarantula. They seemed to live there permanently, and it was only slightly disconcerting when they weren’t there. (From Bam Bam’s diary: 'There were a couple of tarantulas above the walkway. They were big and hairy and I liked them very much. I slept very well.’)
After a sweaty night and a very early start, we would begin each day in the plunge pool and follow it with fresh pineapple juice and scrambled eggs. Amazonica offers activities for both the timid and the intrepid: Lake Sandoval and its family of giant otters sounded good. After a short boat ride there followed a two-mile hike through the jungle ('In the jungle of Lake Sandoval’ sounds like a poem by Lewis Carroll) with soundtrack provided by the laughing falcon. We saw a greater yellow-headed vulture and a golden silk spider with an almost spherical web. Then we reached an inlet with a couple of wooden dugout canoes, and paddled off – and suddenly I felt like I was in Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God – into Lake Sandoval.
In the glaring, glaring sun (I had on an inadequate hat) we searched the oxbow lake for the giant otters. There was a crashing sound and we saw some bright-red howler monkeys leaping through the trees, one clutching a baby. The howler monkey is large and loud, the loudest animal in the jungle and the third loudest animal in the world (weirdly, the blue whale is the loudest). We found the otters – well, three of them – huge, sleek creatures they were, larking around and eating piranha. Sidling along the edge of the lake, looking out for caymans, we saw a tree trunk on which 14 little long-nosed bats were arranged in perfect formation – they looked like stickers. Further along we came across an Amazon kingfisher and three large vultures, which reminded me of the vultures in The Jungle Book; their official name is hoatzin, their unfortunate nickname is the stinkbird or minging bird.
The following day, Bam Bam had her eye on the Anaconda Walk and the Canopy Walk, which begins with a boat ride – as everything does (it took a peculiarly long time for it to sink in that there were no cars, or indeed roads). We hiked through the jungle passing further remarkable trees (my new favourites being the capirona, nicknamed the gringo because of its pink, peeling bark, and another relatively unremarkable tree in all but its name which is, charmingly, the moral bobo).
Led by our guide, Uriel, we were stalked by the high-pitched wolf whistle of the screaming piha. The canopy is 100ft in the air, a 1,100ft long system of seven hanging bridges, observation platforms and towers, reached by seemingly endless wooden steps. It was both glorious and alarming up there. We were delayed by Bam Bam who insisted on reading the Beano mid-bridge for a photograph so she could win free membership for reading the comic in the most unusual place, and the antics of Max, a lunky American teenager ('Mom, if you set the timer on your camera and then drop it, it will take a picture on the way down…’)
There was an unusual amount of noise in the trees, which turned out to be the wind heralding the rain. Uriel started getting twitchy – he worried that branches would come down and impale us – but we pressed on, sweltering, to the so-called Anaconda Walk. I say so-called because no one has ever seen an anaconda on this walk, in fact only one of the guides had ever seen an anaconda at all and that was in a different part of Peru. This was immensely disappointing news to me. I longed for an anaconda, especially since I had read about the indecent sigh of anticipation it emits just before a strike. But halfway through we reached a wooden platform and Max sat down on a log, and a small brown snake shot out obligingly. We hurried back to an outpost with thunder clapping around us, and as we reached it, it started pouring. This was proper rain. At first, huge random drops and then harder and harder until it was like a giant, exhilarating, jubilant power shower.
When the rain stopped we trudged back to Inkaterra for a rest and supper of fish and tomatoes cooked in a bamboo tube in the fire. That night there were unimaginable storms and we lay sleepless under our mosquito nets in our open-sided cabana, surrounded by glorious thunder, spectacular lightning and ridiculously noisy rain.
On our final day a short boat ride took us to a very jungly place indeed, the jungle proper, like a Rousseau painting, dense tropical stuff that was hard work to hike through. Each of us was flanked by a posse of mosquitoes, and Bam Bam amused herself by spraying a blast of insect repellant into each pursuing cloud and watching them drop like, well, flies. Two hours of this, and we reached Gamitana creek and our waiting canoe, and there followed a sublime and peaceful slow drift to a waiting picnic lunch, during which we saw the biggest trees so far, some of which had fallen across the river and a gap had simply been sawn through them. Their great uprooted trunks looked like fallen spaceships wedged into the earth.
That night we went on a midnight cruise, and saw owls and caymans and learnt about the opossum with a special heart, which can pretend to be dead – with no pulse – for up to five minutes to escape from snakes.
We hated to leave Inkaterra, with its tarantulas and its bright-orange furry caterpillars, but we had our sights set on the Incas.
When I told a well-travelled friend that I was going to visit Machu Picchu, he didn’t exactly sneer, but his look implied that the Incas are over-rated. 'At the same time that Machu Picchu was being built, Westminster Abbey was taking shape,’ he said, slightly sniffily. 'And the great gothic cathedrals of France were built three centuries before.’
The Incas had no writing, no wheels, and they hadn’t even discovered arches – hence the distinctive trapezoidal shape of the doors and niches. They were the world’s most accomplished stonemasons and they cut and shaped stone with uncanny precision to make formidable walls, even though they had no metal tools, and transported those stones huge distances. They built the most spectacular roads and terraces in the most unmanageable landscape, and buildings and walls that were able to withstand earthquakes and were completely beautiful to look at. I very soon became in thrall to Inca walls. But first we were going to visit the Sacred Valley, El Valle Sagrado, which turned out to be my favourite part of Peru.
We flew from Puerto Maldonado in a natty little plane and landed in Cusco, which is known to the Incas as the navel of the world, and is cradled in a valley by the surrounding Andes. The altitude here is two miles (we gulped coca tea and followed the advice we had been given to rest, and we were fine). We were collected from the airport by our chatty guide, Vida, and charming driver, Cesar. The Sacred Valley is a microclimate with very fertile soil. In every direction there was every shade of green; it was the end of the rainy season and our timing was superb. There were women with thick black pigtails and red-cheeked babies on their backs, and I became obsessed with the hats – top hats and trilbies, fedoras and bowlers. Every man, woman and child is be-hatted. We stopped at the market in Pisac and I felt as though I was drowning in its vibrancy and colour. There were heaps of gladioli, fruit and vegetables, wooden toys, woven purses and blankets, brightly coloured powdered dyes with a powerful smell of cinnamon and pears and mint and bananas. There are 50 varieties of corn in Peru, and up to 1,000 types of potato in this area alone – and it felt like they were all there in that market.
We saw children playing football by the road, and Vida expressed mild surprise at how energetically they were playing when the air was so thin but then explained that Peruvians have developed extra-big lungs to absorb more oxygen. We reached Urubamba Villas, rented by Inkaterra. Ours was called Villa Elizabeth, named after the housekeeper, who appeared in a black skirt and ankle socks and cooked fish for our supper. There was a fireplace, which was very welcome as it was cold at night – lovely after the jungle. I struggled to light the fire until Elizabeth came and got it going with her extra-big Peruvian lungs.
It was raining the following day, but after pancakes and blueberry jam and coffee, Cesar and Vida picked us up for the first of our excursions. Inca society was very organised and sophisticated, and although the Incas were completely wiped out by the Spanish, there are lots of people who still believe in the Inca religion, and they co-exist pretty peacefully with the Catholics. Lounging by a bridge over the Urubamba river, we watched the inhabitants go about their business. Small groups of children waited by the roadside with their school bags; every now and then an already full-looking car pulled up and the driver got out and opened the boot, and the children squashed in, giggling. This is an informal school bus system; people were being helpful because it was raining.
Up in the hills is Chinchero, a village known as 'birthplace of the rainbow’ to the Incas. A tiny white colonial church and terraces led up to a huge, immaculate Inca wall. All around us were mountains dipped in cloud, and green plains.
On the steps stood a little man straight out of a Bertolucci film, weaving beautiful bracelets. Bam Bam bought one from a little girl for one nuevo sol (20p). 'Thanks you,’ she said. 'I weaves it myself.’ Then we visited a co-operative or, as Bam Bam put it, 'a place where lots of ladies get together and weave’. Nearby is Salinas, the saltpans, where a hot spring discharges a stream of salty water into what looks like a beautiful paintbox with 700 compartments of salt, and Moray, a vast sunken terraced bowl, each level a microclimate. The Incas could coax a terrace out of any terrain, and a system of communal labour kept it maintained. They were brilliant administrators.
We had brought a picnic lunch – chicken, rice, corn and fruit – and ate it in a field, Cesar getting out a picnic table and chairs and napkins. ('We had a picnic in a field. It was very posh.’) Bam Bam is a dog magnet and shortly a small, scruffy dog with one tooth showed up, followed by another, then another, until our picnic table was surrounded by stray, well-behaved dogs.
Halfway between Cusco and Machu Picchu is Ollantaytambo, a fortress in a spectacular setting, and the scene of Manco Inca’s victory against the Spanish. The Incas loved a view. In the town we looked at Inca houses that have been handed down through the generations. (One was filled with guinea pigs, a delicacy here, being bred for restaurants in Cusco, to Bam Bam’s horror.) In the mountains you can make out a profile of an Inca god in the rock – with a naturally formed nose and mouth, a crown on top that had been carved and an eye that aligns perfectly with the sun. The Incas loved the sun. But they weren’t puritanical, or slaves to their religion. They liked pleasure. As Hugh Thomson wrote, 'This was a society whose runners would come in relays of thousands of miles from the coast just so the emperor sitting in Cusco could eat fish from the sea.’
On our last day in the Sacred Valley we got up early to go to the gaudy market in Urubamba, and bought a huge bunch of gladioli for 10p from a little old man. Each street seemed to be selling a different kind of produce – there was cabbage street, flower street, stationery street, all presided over by the usual array of ladies in hats. Bam Bam went for a ride along the river with Alberto, who runs Inkaterra in Cusco, and I sat by a tiny Inca bridge and watched two men repairing the railway tracks. I’d never been so close to the clouds.
At the station at Ollantaytambo – we were due to catch the train to Machu Picchu, the Hiram Bingham, named after the American explorer who rediscovered the ruins in 1911 – we were met by a dog who escorted us to the platform. ('Hiram Bingham? This way ladies…’) Machu Picchu cannot be reached by road. The ordinary tourist train (the Vistadome) costs $86, whereas the luxury Hiram Bingham costs nearly $600. Still, Bam Bam’s face when she saw the train pull in with its little lamps in the windows and its spectacular saloon bar was the most impressed I’d seen her so far. But the real luxury of the trip was the view, and that can obviously be seen even in the cheapest train, available only to local residents (price $6). The track snakes along the Urubamba, in all its gushing muddy glory. We passed the starting point of the Inca Trail, a five-day hike to Machu Picchu, by an old Inca road, where guides were laying out tents and pots and pans. It looked exhausting. (Bam Bam: 'The Hiram Bingham was amazing, but I wished we were hiking along the Inca Trail.’)
The elegant Inkaterra Machu Picchu, which Joey Koechlin developed in 1980, is next to the railway station, and the restaurant sits between its tracks. Now we were right in the cloud forest, which means essentially misty damp days and not much clarity. You need at least two nights in Machu Picchu; it is best to take two days to visit the site, but the hotel offers other interesting things to do: an orchid tour (there are 372 species of orchid, including one that smells like a fish), a spectacled bear enclosure, and a hike along the railroad tracks through the Mandora Valley, with its banana trees, busy lizzies and humming birds. That night we went on a twilight walk: we learnt about the sacred rock, to which the locals still come to make offerings, and we saw bats and birds and learnt this and that about the Incas. We hugged a walnut tree that was supposed to have spiritual qualities; Bam Bam felt it hug her back.
At five the next morning we were sitting on the transfer bus, brimming with coca tea and accompanied by Fabrizio, our slightly histrionic but very friendly guide. We descended from the bus and climbed upwards, and our first view of the city, cloud swirling around it, a single tree left among the ruins, looked unreal, almost like a model. Fabrizio, caught up in the moment, turned formally towards us and made a little speech, thumping his heart for emphasis. 'I will give my heart to show you Machu Picchu. My friends [thump], welcome to Machu Picchu!’ We explored the site and the more I explored the more impressed I became as Fabrizio told us fascinating stuff about the hidden symbolism and the incredibly sophisticated gutter system and how they filtered their water using sand and other materials brought all the way from Cusco. I got completely caught up in his enthusiasm and wanted to prostrate myself in front of the walls, so immaculate are they – huge blocks of stone fitted together like a jigsaw with no mortar! And earthquake proof! I could happily have stayed there all day, but Bam Bam had spotted a mountain she fancied. Huayna Picchu is the one you always see in the background of every photo of Machu Picchu, and they let only 400 visitors up each day. It is incredibly steep with steps carved into the rock and a distinctly tough-going pathway. Near the top you have to pull yourself through a sort of stone tunnel, and it is spectacular at the summit, except you will inevitably find a bunch of tourists and students spoiling things. On the way down the clouds parted for a second and there was the most glorious view of the ruins laid out before us – and I had run out of film.
Machu Picchu is crowded, and it wasn’t my favourite part of the trip, yet for all the souvenir sellers, Peruvian hats and Inca Kola T-shirts, I still found myself thinking a lot about it afterwards. Specifically, about Hiram Bingham, about how hard it must have been to find the ruins in this impossible terrain, choked by vegetation, 450 years after it was built.
I was glad that the Spanish never found the city. The Incas deserted it shortly after the Spanish invasion, and covered their tracks behind them. Only a few locals were aware of its existence until Hiram Bingham came along.
Back at the hotel we went to the spectacled bear enclosure; one of only five types of bear in the world. They are large, dark and soulful looking, with rings around their eyes, and in no way do they resemble their most famous specimen, Paddington. They live in the cloud forest, and are often hunted for their paws, or by farmers who mistakenly think that the bears are eating their livestock (in fact they are 90 per cent vegetarian). They are now officially endangered. There were two there – one from a zoo, where it was getting into fights with other males, and the other rescued from someone’s garden, where it was being kept on a chain.
We had a couple of days in Cusco before leaving. It is one of the most memorable cities I have been to; colourful and lively and brimming with scruffy charm. The cathedral is beyond belief. It took 100 years to build. It is filled with magnificent things: the silver altar and the painting of the Last Supper with Judas depicted as Francisco Pizarro, betrayer of the Incas (famously, the Spanish conquistador Pizarro captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa and made a deal with the Incas: they were to fill a room once with gold and twice with silver in return for his release; Atahualpa was executed anyway). We particularly loved the statue of the black Christ. Blackened by years of votive candles, it is made of alder wood and became known as Lord of Earthquakes when, during the catastrophic earthquake of 1650, it was brandished in a procession and the earthquake stopped. The statue is adorned with gold and silver and since 1650 it has been rewarded with a new skirt every week; I couldn’t find anything about this in the tourist guides but Vida assured us that the weekly skirt story is true and that all the old skirts are kept in the cathedral (4,281 to date).
Sacsayhuaman is the great Inca ruin above Cusco. So immaculate are these walls and the sheer positioning of the fort that when the Spanish arrived and saw it, they thought it must have been the work of gods or giants. In stark contrast nearby is a huge white plastic Christ in imitation of the one in Rio; it was a gift to Cusco from a grateful Palestinian Christian who took refuge in Peru. On our last day we had a final picnic at Sacsayhuaman and a record number of dogs attended, then we returned home via Lima, a city like any other with all the attendant problems but also a magnificent cathedral, with six chapels (Bam Bam: 'I didn’t like the cathedral, the bones of the traitor Francisco Pizarro are kept there, and all the statues followed you with their eyes.’) In the Plaza de Armas is the Franciscan monastery, with a library like something out of Gormenghast; its underground catacombs and carefully arranged skulls and bone-filled crypts a stark contrast to its sunny, frangipani tree-filled courtyard.
Peru, such a beautiful name for a beautiful country. We left in a blur of colour and cloth and vivid, vivid memories. I asked Bam Bam what she would take if she could bring anything home with her, anything at all, and she mentioned the spectacled bear. No, she said, the pair of tarantulas from Amazonica. For me, it would be an Inca wall. An Inca wall with a trapezoid window.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
3 Fla. kids buy plane tickets, fly alone to Tenn.
hree Florida children bought tickets with baby-sitting money and flew to Nashville, Tenn., on Southwest Airlines — unbeknownst to their parents.
Fifteen-year-old Bridget Brown had $700 saved and asked a 13-year-old friend where he wanted to go.
The friend, Bobby Nolan III, suggested Nashville.
Together with Brown's 11-year-old brother, the three took a taxicab to Jacksonville International Airport and bought three tickets at the counter. The children say no one asked them for identification.
They called their parents from Nashville and immediately flew home.
Southwest Airlines says the company's minor policy covers children ages five through 11 traveling alone, and that the 11-year-old in this case was accompanied by two older companions.
Fifteen-year-old Bridget Brown had $700 saved and asked a 13-year-old friend where he wanted to go.
The friend, Bobby Nolan III, suggested Nashville.
Together with Brown's 11-year-old brother, the three took a taxicab to Jacksonville International Airport and bought three tickets at the counter. The children say no one asked them for identification.
They called their parents from Nashville and immediately flew home.
Southwest Airlines says the company's minor policy covers children ages five through 11 traveling alone, and that the 11-year-old in this case was accompanied by two older companions.
Killer vampire bats attack 500 people
Rabid vampire bats have attacked more than 500 people in Peru's Amazon, leading to the deaths of four children.The attacks occurred in the village of Urakusa, in northeastern Peru, where the indigenous Aguajun tribe lives. At least four people are believed to have succumbed to rabies as a result.
Medical supplies and vaccines to treat those infected with rabies have been sent to the tribe.Rabies, a virus that causes acute inflammation of the brain, is usually spread to humans by dog bites and has an incubation period that can last several months.
Health teams are looking for people in communities within 6 miles (10 km) of the outbreak who were attacked by bats any time in the last six months.
Jose Bustamente, a Health Ministry official, said 97 percent of the 508 people who were bitten have begun receiving an anti-rabies vaccination. It is expected that the rest -- some of whom have rejected treatment -- will be vaccinated in the next few days.
Medical supplies and vaccines to treat those infected with rabies have been sent to the tribe.Rabies, a virus that causes acute inflammation of the brain, is usually spread to humans by dog bites and has an incubation period that can last several months.
Health teams are looking for people in communities within 6 miles (10 km) of the outbreak who were attacked by bats any time in the last six months.
Jose Bustamente, a Health Ministry official, said 97 percent of the 508 people who were bitten have begun receiving an anti-rabies vaccination. It is expected that the rest -- some of whom have rejected treatment -- will be vaccinated in the next few days.
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Iran's nuclear plant to get fuel next week
Russia announced Friday it will begin the startup next week of Iran's only atomic power plant, giving Tehran a boost as it struggles with international sanctions and highlighting differences between Moscow and Washington over pressuring the Islamic Republic to give up activities that could be used to make nuclear arms.
Uranium fuel shipped by Russia will be loaded into the Bushehr reactor on Aug. 21, beginning a process that will last about a month and end with the reactor sending electricity to Iranian cities, Russian and Iranian officials said.
"From that moment, the Bushehr plant will be officially considered a nuclear energy installation," said Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for the Russian nuclear agency.
If Russia carries out its plan, it will end years of foot-dragging on Bushehr. While Moscow signed a $1 billion contract to build the plant in 1995, its completion has been put off for years.
Moscow has cited technical reasons for the delays. But Bushehr has also been an ideal way to gain leverage with both Tehran and Washington.
Delaying the project has given Russia continued influence with Tehran in international attempts to have it stop uranium enrichment — a program Iran says it needs to make fuel for an envisaged reactor network but which also can be used to create fissile warhead material. The delays also have served to placate the U.S., which opposes rewarding Iran while it continues to defy the U.N. Security Council with its nuclear activities.
After Russia said in March that Bushehr would be launched this year, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that until Iran reassures the world it is not trying to build a nuclear weapon, "it would be premature to go ahead with any project at this time."
Formally, the U.S. has no problem with Bushehr.
Although at first opposed to Russian participation in the project, Washington and its allies agreed to remove any reference to it in the first set of Security Council sanctions passed in 2006 in exchange for Moscow's support for those penalties. Three subsequent sanctions resolutions also have no mention of Bushehr.
The terms of the deal commit the Iranians to allow the Russians to retrieve all used reactor fuel for reprocessing. Spent fuel contains plutonium, which can be used to make atomic weapons. Additionally, Iran has said that International Atomic Energy Agency experts will be able to verify that none of the fresh fuel or waste is diverted.
Still, the U.S. sees the Russian move as a false signal to Tehran as Washington strives to isolate Iran politically and economically to force it to compromise on enrichment.
A senior diplomat from an IAEA member nation said Friday the Americans had "raised those concerns with the Russians" in recent weeks. The diplomat, who is familiar with the issue, spoke on condition of anonymity because his information was confidential.
In Washington, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Bushehr "does not represent a proliferation risk. ... However, Bushehr underscores that Iran does not need its own indigenous enrichment capability. The fact that Russia is providing fuel is the very model the international community has offered Iran."
Russia, in turn, argues that the Bushehr project is essential for persuading Iran to cooperate with the U.N. nuclear watchdog and fulfill its obligations under international nuclear nonproliferation agreements.
Crowley added: "Our views on the Bushehr project should not be confused with the world's fundamental concerns with Iran's overall nuclear intentions, particularly its pursuit of uranium enrichment, and Iran's willful violation of its international obligations."
Russian officials did not say why they had decided to move ahead with loading fuel into the Bushehr plant now. But the move could have been triggered in part by Moscow's desire show the Iranians it can act independently from Washington after its decision to support the fourth set of U.N. sanctions in June and its continued refusal to ship surface-to-air missile systems that it agreed to provide under a 2007 contract to sell the S-300s.
The sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft missiles would significantly boost Iran's ability to defend against airstrikes. Israel and the United States have strongly objected to the deal.
Russia has walked a fine line on Iran for years. One of six world powers leading international efforts to ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon, it has strongly criticized the U.S. and the European Union for following up with separate sanctions after the latest U.N. penalties — which Moscow supported — were passed.
Iran's semiofficial ISNA news agency quoted Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who also heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, as saying that the country had invited IAEA experts to watch the transfer of fuel, which was shipped about two years ago, into the Bushehr reactor.
"Fuel complexes are sealed (and being monitored by IAEA). Naturally, IAEA inspectors will be there to watch the unsealing," ISNA quoted Salehi as saying.
Russia has said the Bushehr project has been closely supervised by the IAEA. But the U.N. watchdog has no monitoring authority at the plant beyond ensuring that its nuclear fuel is accounted for, and U.S. and EU officials have expressed safety concerns.
They note that Iran — leery of opening up its nuclear activities to outsiders — refuses to sign on to the Convention on Nuclear Safety, making it subject to international monitoring of its atomic safety standards.
"We expect Iran to meet established international norms and practices to ensure the safe operation of the reactor under full safeguards monitoring" by the IAEA, Crowley said.
Uranium fuel shipped by Russia will be loaded into the Bushehr reactor on Aug. 21, beginning a process that will last about a month and end with the reactor sending electricity to Iranian cities, Russian and Iranian officials said.
"From that moment, the Bushehr plant will be officially considered a nuclear energy installation," said Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for the Russian nuclear agency.
If Russia carries out its plan, it will end years of foot-dragging on Bushehr. While Moscow signed a $1 billion contract to build the plant in 1995, its completion has been put off for years.
Moscow has cited technical reasons for the delays. But Bushehr has also been an ideal way to gain leverage with both Tehran and Washington.
Delaying the project has given Russia continued influence with Tehran in international attempts to have it stop uranium enrichment — a program Iran says it needs to make fuel for an envisaged reactor network but which also can be used to create fissile warhead material. The delays also have served to placate the U.S., which opposes rewarding Iran while it continues to defy the U.N. Security Council with its nuclear activities.
After Russia said in March that Bushehr would be launched this year, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that until Iran reassures the world it is not trying to build a nuclear weapon, "it would be premature to go ahead with any project at this time."
Formally, the U.S. has no problem with Bushehr.
Although at first opposed to Russian participation in the project, Washington and its allies agreed to remove any reference to it in the first set of Security Council sanctions passed in 2006 in exchange for Moscow's support for those penalties. Three subsequent sanctions resolutions also have no mention of Bushehr.
The terms of the deal commit the Iranians to allow the Russians to retrieve all used reactor fuel for reprocessing. Spent fuel contains plutonium, which can be used to make atomic weapons. Additionally, Iran has said that International Atomic Energy Agency experts will be able to verify that none of the fresh fuel or waste is diverted.
Still, the U.S. sees the Russian move as a false signal to Tehran as Washington strives to isolate Iran politically and economically to force it to compromise on enrichment.
A senior diplomat from an IAEA member nation said Friday the Americans had "raised those concerns with the Russians" in recent weeks. The diplomat, who is familiar with the issue, spoke on condition of anonymity because his information was confidential.
In Washington, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Bushehr "does not represent a proliferation risk. ... However, Bushehr underscores that Iran does not need its own indigenous enrichment capability. The fact that Russia is providing fuel is the very model the international community has offered Iran."
Russia, in turn, argues that the Bushehr project is essential for persuading Iran to cooperate with the U.N. nuclear watchdog and fulfill its obligations under international nuclear nonproliferation agreements.
Crowley added: "Our views on the Bushehr project should not be confused with the world's fundamental concerns with Iran's overall nuclear intentions, particularly its pursuit of uranium enrichment, and Iran's willful violation of its international obligations."
Russian officials did not say why they had decided to move ahead with loading fuel into the Bushehr plant now. But the move could have been triggered in part by Moscow's desire show the Iranians it can act independently from Washington after its decision to support the fourth set of U.N. sanctions in June and its continued refusal to ship surface-to-air missile systems that it agreed to provide under a 2007 contract to sell the S-300s.
The sophisticated S-300 anti-aircraft missiles would significantly boost Iran's ability to defend against airstrikes. Israel and the United States have strongly objected to the deal.
Russia has walked a fine line on Iran for years. One of six world powers leading international efforts to ensure Iran does not develop a nuclear weapon, it has strongly criticized the U.S. and the European Union for following up with separate sanctions after the latest U.N. penalties — which Moscow supported — were passed.
Iran's semiofficial ISNA news agency quoted Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who also heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, as saying that the country had invited IAEA experts to watch the transfer of fuel, which was shipped about two years ago, into the Bushehr reactor.
"Fuel complexes are sealed (and being monitored by IAEA). Naturally, IAEA inspectors will be there to watch the unsealing," ISNA quoted Salehi as saying.
Russia has said the Bushehr project has been closely supervised by the IAEA. But the U.N. watchdog has no monitoring authority at the plant beyond ensuring that its nuclear fuel is accounted for, and U.S. and EU officials have expressed safety concerns.
They note that Iran — leery of opening up its nuclear activities to outsiders — refuses to sign on to the Convention on Nuclear Safety, making it subject to international monitoring of its atomic safety standards.
"We expect Iran to meet established international norms and practices to ensure the safe operation of the reactor under full safeguards monitoring" by the IAEA, Crowley said.
JetBlue flight attendant wants his old job back
he flight attendant whose dramatic departure from a JetBlue plane at a New York City airport has transformed him into a folk hero to some wants his job back, his lawyer told reporters Thursday.
"That's his life," Steven Slater's Legal Aid defense attorney Howard Turman told reporters outside his client's home in Queens, near John F. Kennedy International Airport, where Slater's exit via an emergency slide vaulted him to national attention. "His father was a pilot; his mother was a flight attendant. That's in his blood. That's what he likes to do."
Whether Slater can regain his wings was unclear. "We're conducting an internal investigation regarding his status as an employee at JetBlue," said airline spokeswoman Jenny Dervin, who added that Slater has been removed from duty pending the outcome of that internal inquiry.
She described Slater's behavior as unlike that of the New York-based airline's other 2,300 flight attendants. "I would say this is highly unique," she said.But an internal memo sent Thursday by JetBlue Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Rob Maruster and obtained by CNN describes a company that appears unlikely to forgive. "Intentionally arming and deploying an evacuation slide for anything other than the express purpose of protecting the safety of our crew and customers is unacceptable," it says. "It will not, and can not, be tolerated."
During the defense lawyer's remarks, the 20-year flight attendant stood at his side and smiled occasionally but made only one brief remark: "Thank you all so much," he said. "It's been amazing -- the support and the love and everything that's been brought to me and given to me by my community and my friends and the industry at large. It's been absolutely wonderful."
The incident may not have appeared so wonderful when it began unfolding Monday morning at Pennsylvania's Pittsburgh International Airport where, according to JetBlue spokeswoman Dervin, Slater was one of two flight attendants aboard an Embraer 190 flight that was scheduled to depart at 10:35 a.m. and arrive 84 minutes later at JFK.
Problems began before the flight, carrying a full load of 100 passengers, took off.
"A number of passengers were competing for overhead carry-on luggage areas," Turman, Slater's attorney, said. "With great difficulty, they were shoving the bags around, attempting to get it in. Steven came over to assist and either the bag or the overhead (bin door) hit him in the head and at that point he suffered an injury."
Turman offered a more graphic description of events on Wednesday, when he said a woman "started cursing and -- based on the information -- slammed the overhead luggage bin on his head."
Then the woman said, "F--- you" to Slater, Turman said.
After the flight landed at JFK, Slater approached the woman as she attempted to retrieve her bag from the bin while the plane was still taxiing to the gate, according to a source familiar with the incident. Passengers are required to stay in their seats with their seat belts fastened until the pilot has reached the gate and gives the all-clear sign.
"We hear Slater on the intercom, 'Will people on the aisle please sit down? We're on an active runway,'" recalled passenger Howard Deneroff, an executive with the Westwood One radio network. Then Slater made a second announcement, Deneroff told CNN. "Please sit down and shut the overhead bin. We cannot move this plane while you're standing."
The passenger cursed Slater again, Turman said Wednesday. Her fury grew upon learning she would have to wait at baggage claim to retrieve luggage she had been forced to check at the gate in Pittsburgh, he said.
At that point, Slater got on the plane's public address system. Passenger Phil Catelinet wrote on his blog that Slater said, "To the passenger who just called me a motherf-----: f--- you. I've been in this business 20 years, and I've had it."
The plane was blocked into the gate at 12:07 p.m., eight minutes late.
After making an expletive-filled announcement, Slater had a confrontation with another crew member, according to passenger Gib Mendelson of Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
"We see him grabbing his roller bag that all flight personnel use. He tossed it out the right door of the plane," Mendelson, a semi-retired attorney, told CNN. "He was scuffling with either the pilot or the co-pilot. I noticed a lot of blue; there was a lot of movement in the galley area."
Slater then grabbed some beer from the beverage cart before deploying the emergency slide and leaving.
The flight crew reported the slide deployment at 12:12 p.m., according to Maruster's memo.
Turman sharply denied a JetBlue passenger's assertion published Thursday that the flight attendant instigated the confrontation.
"It's not so," said Turman.
"Sometimes, some people in our society are not courteous and are impatient," Turman said. "For 20 years, Steven has been very patient, has dealt with the passengers in each of the airlines he worked for in an effective and courteous and polite manner. Sometimes that point can be taken advantage of by others."
He added, "If you think it's easy for flight attendants to get on a plane every day and be concerned for the safety of each and every passenger -- without a tension, without a stress -- you're fooling yourselves."
Slater has pleaded not guilty to charges of reckless endangerment and criminal mischief -- both felonies -- and criminal trespass. If convicted, he could face a maximum of seven years in prison.
But Turman said Thursday he had spoken with the district attorney's office, "and I believe there will be a favorable outcome for my client that should satisfy all parties in this case."
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor did not respond directly to Turman's remarks. "We will prosecute this case in the court," said Meris Campbell of the district attorney's office. "We're not going to respond to every press conference the attorney gives."
Slater has a court appearance scheduled for September 7.
Meanwhile, Slater had amassed more than 191,000 "fans" on a public Facebook page as of Thursday evening.
"That's his life," Steven Slater's Legal Aid defense attorney Howard Turman told reporters outside his client's home in Queens, near John F. Kennedy International Airport, where Slater's exit via an emergency slide vaulted him to national attention. "His father was a pilot; his mother was a flight attendant. That's in his blood. That's what he likes to do."
Whether Slater can regain his wings was unclear. "We're conducting an internal investigation regarding his status as an employee at JetBlue," said airline spokeswoman Jenny Dervin, who added that Slater has been removed from duty pending the outcome of that internal inquiry.
She described Slater's behavior as unlike that of the New York-based airline's other 2,300 flight attendants. "I would say this is highly unique," she said.But an internal memo sent Thursday by JetBlue Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Rob Maruster and obtained by CNN describes a company that appears unlikely to forgive. "Intentionally arming and deploying an evacuation slide for anything other than the express purpose of protecting the safety of our crew and customers is unacceptable," it says. "It will not, and can not, be tolerated."
During the defense lawyer's remarks, the 20-year flight attendant stood at his side and smiled occasionally but made only one brief remark: "Thank you all so much," he said. "It's been amazing -- the support and the love and everything that's been brought to me and given to me by my community and my friends and the industry at large. It's been absolutely wonderful."
The incident may not have appeared so wonderful when it began unfolding Monday morning at Pennsylvania's Pittsburgh International Airport where, according to JetBlue spokeswoman Dervin, Slater was one of two flight attendants aboard an Embraer 190 flight that was scheduled to depart at 10:35 a.m. and arrive 84 minutes later at JFK.
Problems began before the flight, carrying a full load of 100 passengers, took off.
"A number of passengers were competing for overhead carry-on luggage areas," Turman, Slater's attorney, said. "With great difficulty, they were shoving the bags around, attempting to get it in. Steven came over to assist and either the bag or the overhead (bin door) hit him in the head and at that point he suffered an injury."
Turman offered a more graphic description of events on Wednesday, when he said a woman "started cursing and -- based on the information -- slammed the overhead luggage bin on his head."
Then the woman said, "F--- you" to Slater, Turman said.
After the flight landed at JFK, Slater approached the woman as she attempted to retrieve her bag from the bin while the plane was still taxiing to the gate, according to a source familiar with the incident. Passengers are required to stay in their seats with their seat belts fastened until the pilot has reached the gate and gives the all-clear sign.
"We hear Slater on the intercom, 'Will people on the aisle please sit down? We're on an active runway,'" recalled passenger Howard Deneroff, an executive with the Westwood One radio network. Then Slater made a second announcement, Deneroff told CNN. "Please sit down and shut the overhead bin. We cannot move this plane while you're standing."
The passenger cursed Slater again, Turman said Wednesday. Her fury grew upon learning she would have to wait at baggage claim to retrieve luggage she had been forced to check at the gate in Pittsburgh, he said.
At that point, Slater got on the plane's public address system. Passenger Phil Catelinet wrote on his blog that Slater said, "To the passenger who just called me a motherf-----: f--- you. I've been in this business 20 years, and I've had it."
The plane was blocked into the gate at 12:07 p.m., eight minutes late.
After making an expletive-filled announcement, Slater had a confrontation with another crew member, according to passenger Gib Mendelson of Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
"We see him grabbing his roller bag that all flight personnel use. He tossed it out the right door of the plane," Mendelson, a semi-retired attorney, told CNN. "He was scuffling with either the pilot or the co-pilot. I noticed a lot of blue; there was a lot of movement in the galley area."
Slater then grabbed some beer from the beverage cart before deploying the emergency slide and leaving.
The flight crew reported the slide deployment at 12:12 p.m., according to Maruster's memo.
Turman sharply denied a JetBlue passenger's assertion published Thursday that the flight attendant instigated the confrontation.
"It's not so," said Turman.
"Sometimes, some people in our society are not courteous and are impatient," Turman said. "For 20 years, Steven has been very patient, has dealt with the passengers in each of the airlines he worked for in an effective and courteous and polite manner. Sometimes that point can be taken advantage of by others."
He added, "If you think it's easy for flight attendants to get on a plane every day and be concerned for the safety of each and every passenger -- without a tension, without a stress -- you're fooling yourselves."
Slater has pleaded not guilty to charges of reckless endangerment and criminal mischief -- both felonies -- and criminal trespass. If convicted, he could face a maximum of seven years in prison.
But Turman said Thursday he had spoken with the district attorney's office, "and I believe there will be a favorable outcome for my client that should satisfy all parties in this case."
A spokeswoman for the prosecutor did not respond directly to Turman's remarks. "We will prosecute this case in the court," said Meris Campbell of the district attorney's office. "We're not going to respond to every press conference the attorney gives."
Slater has a court appearance scheduled for September 7.
Meanwhile, Slater had amassed more than 191,000 "fans" on a public Facebook page as of Thursday evening.
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