Beware the Otter

Posted on July 13, 2021July 13, 2021 Posted in EcuadorTagged Adventure, Amazon, Cuyabeno, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Otters, rain forest, travel, Wild Creatures, WildlifeLeave a comment

Today we have left the motoroised canoe behind and we are progressing upriver Indian style, by paddle, at dawn. We are on the trail of the giant Amazon river otter.

Diego has a lead. He has heard of a suspected otter nest a few miles upriver. We will approach it by stealth, paddling silently through the swamp waters and hopefully catching a sight of this rare mammal.

The giant otter is the largest of the mustelid family, a beast that grows to roughly the same length as Menna (though at 35kg, it is somewhat more svelte). Over the last few decades the population of giant otters has been decimated. It is the usual story of encroaching humanity: fur hunters, mercury poisoning, loss of habitat. It is now listed by the UN as an endangered species.

A ‘few miles upriver’ turns out to be a couple of hours of hard paddling. It is a fairly intense early morning workout. We make our way up the main Cuyabeno, then we branch off to follow a section of smaller tributaries and channels deep into the jungle. Branches hang down all around us, bromeliads spurt up from the banks, occasional orchids hang down and there are some bright red flowers I don’t recognise. We find ourselves paddling through wide muddy pools then punting our way through interconnecting passages that are really no more than muddy ditches.

“Quiet!” says Diego, as he so often does. Our kids are arguing and hitting each other, they need a swift kick. There is a hoarse shouting sound somewhere up ahead. “We are close.”

We pull through a curtain of branches and suddenly there they are: dark shapes rearing out of the muddy water, spinning and slithering around in the sunlit shallows. It’s hard to count them because they are in constant motion, but there must be five large adults and a couple of tiny pups.

The otter group spots our canoe and they collectively freeze for a second. Then a delegation of three males turns and heads over towards us.

Otters are like pretty much the cutest animals in the world right? Furry, intelligent, playful. They float on their backs and hold hands. They slide down mud banks. They have expressive eyes and funny whiskers.

But not these frickin otters.

These ones are large and scary.

Diego mentioned the other day that the giant otter could take on a jaguar, but I didn’t really get the implications of this. Now I very clearly see what he means.

They come straight for the boat, rearing up out of the water like aquatic prairie dogs, barking and shouting in a very unfriendly way. Their teeth are yellow, their eyes are red and and their claws look sharp enough to rip your stomach open with a single swipe. The Spanish name for the giant otter is lobo de agua, the water wolf.

“We are too near the pups. We will back off gently,” says Diego quietly. “They can attack the canoe from underneath and sometimes they are strong enough to turn us over.”

Images of the seven of us thrashing around in the dark waters while sinewy fur streaks slip and swirl around in the gloom, scratching, biting, butting. Blood clouds, bubbles, piranhas clustering, alligators slipping in from the shores.

We retreat back some meters and then the otters all submerge, and unsure whether we are about to get torpedoed from beneath, we brace. The rest of the family melts away back into the mangroves. The sounds of the forest return. No otter faces emerge and we are left in stasis, silent, slightly shaken, awestruck by this close-up encounter with such an magnificent mammal.

Onwards we paddle down these lost waterways, heading deeper into the wilderness, or so it it feels though I have no cardinal reference points. Have we crossed into Colombia or Peru? I have no idea how Diego can navigate in this world, so far away from our lodge, where trees are dense and prolific, where water and land merge into unsubstantial floating vegetation, where secret channels hide beyond curtains of hanging foliage.

We push our canoe through gaps between tree roots and bushes, we duck low branches. “Careful!” Diego whispers, “Don’t touch!”

There is a seemingly impenetrable wall of leaves that Diego wants us to pass through at one point. We paddle the canoe straight for it and then like magic we glide right through to find ourselves in a deep and silent black pool encircled by the most ancient looking buttressed trees. It is the stuff of fairy tales. As we look around awestruck, absorbing the enchantment, there is a noise. A yelp, hoarse and high, then another louder one. What is this?

It takes me a moment to realise that this cry is not an aquatic mammal guarding its territory, but my daughter. She is sobbing in high gulps and tearing at her top. The foliage that we just brushed through is home to a colony of fire ants and many of them are now trying to colonise Matilda. They are roaming inside her clothes, biting and stinging her back and chest. She screams.

Then I feel it too. I have several inside my collar and they really fucking hurt. The bites burn, like, like… fire!

We settle, we moor up, we console Matilda, we scratch our wounds. We are tired from paddling so we fish for piranhas, using old bacon on handheld lines. The fish are too cunning for us though. Within seconds of putting the line down into that febrile water, there are tugs and shivers, the bacon is surgically stripped away, but the hook keeps comes up empty. Down in the murky depths beneath us there is a lot of movement.

Matilda is still whimpering and writhing. Menna is bent over her like a mother chimpanzee, stroking her, grooming her, pulling off ants. We have spotted a huge spider lurking immobile on a tree root right next to our canoe and it’s mildly freaking everyone out. I need the loo. We are stiff but we cannot stretch out, any attempt to leave this small craft means stepping into a hostile quagmire, sinking down into a seething mulch of hungry creatures.

This right here, I think to myself, is what exploring is really about. Unimaginable beauty, true wilderness but it must be paid for in the currency of discomfort, fear and danger. I feel proud that my children have paid the price and will take these moments back into the world with them. We go adventuring to collect vivid memories and experience the rush of extreme sensations, but it is not always fun in the moment. No-one is relaxed in our canoe right now – except Diego who is impervious to discomfort.

On our way back we come across another otter lodge. This time we are at just the right distance. Close enough to see the full antics, far away enough not to pose a threat. We see the otters climbing up the bank and slithering down, playing, messing around. They are submerging themselves and rolling, wallowing in the muddy shallows. Sometimes they appear to be laughing.

From this distance they really are quite cute.

Night Walk

Posted on July 10, 2021July 10, 2021 Posted in EcuadorTagged Adventure, Amazon, Cuyabeno, Ecuador, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Nightwalk, Off-grid, rain forest, travel, WildlifeLeave a comment

Humans are not well equipped to deal with the nocturnal environment. This becomes ever more apparent as we grope our way along the jungle path; leaves, creepers, spider webs tickling our faces in the darkness. We inch forwards following the intermittent light of Diego’s torch somewhere up ahead, weaving through tangled silhouettes like a willow the wisp.

We have seen frogs and spiders tonight – lots of spiders – mainly venomous. Scorpions too. We have watched seething lines of ants devouring cicadas on a thorn tree. I have come face to face with a snake (type unknown) that uncoiled itself and slithered away between the tree roots with impressive speed, leaving me frozen, crouching in an awkward unbalanced position, unnerved and very glad that it had chosen not to insert its fangs in my unprotected nose. There were slithery movements in the rivulets that could have been caimans or anacondas or perhaps they were just forest rats.

Despite Diego’s requests for us to stay together and stay silent, the two Ecuadorean girls in our party are doing a lot of nervous whispery chatter and occasional screams. I am worried that their noise will scare away any of the more interesting nocturnal sightings: armadillos, tapirs, big cats.

Diego stops to give a hushed lecture about a chrysalis and I wander on a few paces ahead. I slip round a corner and then I am alone. I hold my torch clenched in my fist, so my hand glows red and thin spears of light emerge out from between my fingers. It is dim enough to protect my night vision but just enough to make out a ghostly path.

I can still hear the group talking behind me and I have an urge to get away from the voices. I push on down the track. I have this vision of slipping away and communing somehow with the forest, silently becoming part of the ecosystem. A witness to prowling shadows as they slip through the glades. Perhaps I will come face to face with a jaguar. We will look into each others’ eyes and share some timeless moment of mutual understanding. I will come back wiser and wilder, with the faraway look of the forest shaman.

And now suddenly the daydream is real and I am totally alone. No sounds, no lights. I switch off my torch and stand there silently in the utter darkness. I can see a few faraway stars through gaps in the canopy, but their light does not penetrate to the forest floor. I wait to see the jungle come alive.

And all around life surges forward.

In the absence of sight all noise is magnified and takes on a layered texture. Slithering, rustling, croaking, calling, twitching, scratching, trilling, growling, chirping. It’s like a three dimensional world builds suddenly outwards, like a radar view or a heat map. A contoured living landscape all around me, seething and moving.

Then a heavy foot cracks a twig not far away and at the same time there is a significant squelching sound to my left. Something else runs across the back of my neck and immediately all my zen is lost. I am suddenly very scared. Everything around here is predatory or poisonous. I am the only creature here without decent teeth or claws. I have no finely calibrated flight reflexes. All I have is a finely-tuned imagination and it is going wild right now.

I remember Diego’s story about a guide who took a wrong path and was lost in the jungle for three weeks. He emerged like a skeleton, half-deranged, with broken fingers, fungal infections and supporating insect bites.

I switch my torch on and shine it around wildly. Too fast! Was that glittering the reflection of eyes in the torch beam, or was it moisture dripping off leaves? I run back down the track. But is it back? Which way did I come from?

And then I round a curve and I have found a kind of safety, clattering into the group who are now discussing a fungus. “Shhh!” says Diego. I pant and edge my way into the safety of the herd.

“Are you scared Daddy?” Says Matilda. “It’s ok. You can hold my hand”

The Shaman

Posted on July 3, 2021July 3, 2021 Posted in EcuadorTagged Adventure, Amazon, Ayahuasca, Cuyabeno, Ecuador, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Shaman, travel, WildlifeLeave a comment

Diego played a trick on us yesterday. “Press this root to your forehead,” he told us, handing around something like a small spongy potato, “You will feel a tingle, but then the ancient wisdom of the forest will flow into you.” This morning we all have indelible purple stains on our foreheads yet none of us are any wiser.

It seems that we must seek the wisdom of the forest elsewhere. So today we will go to see the shaman.

There is an indigenous community that lives half a day’s hike away, deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. There, away the flow of modern life, Siona tribesmen and women still maintain the old traditions.

“But will we corrupt them with our gadgetry and western free-market ideology?” I whisper to Diego.
“They are not children. And they are not so isolated any more,” he says, “they go to upriver to the town sometimes when they have money, and the government have even given the village a computer with internet to educate the kids. Also los petroleros are often there.”
“Really? Oil men? I thought this was a nature reserve”
“Yes, it is. But still there is drilling. Much of the forest here is supposed to be for the indigenous communities but the government is greedy, they squeeze the territory and the oil companies come in. You know about Texaco?”
“I know they have a load of gas stations in the UK.”
“They were the big oil company here, they built Lago Agrio, the town that we passed through. They drilled in the Amazon for many years and during this time they spilled many millions of gallons of oil in the forest and created crazy amounts of pollution. Toxic waste pits, villages abandoned, whole rivers contaminated. In 2011 there was a law suit against them and they were ordered to pay nine billion dollars of damages for the pollution they had caused. But they had already pulled out from Ecuador. They left nothing behind except mess, and still not one dollar has been paid.” I have not seen Diego angry before.

We head out of the back of the lodge, straight into deep vegetation. We cross a tributary river in a small canoe, Arthur and Diego acting as ferrymen for the rest of the group. Then further and deeper into the forest we go. There is muddy path and there is marshy path, and there is the quicksand path which Diego tests with a stick before deciding to take a detour.

It is humid as we walk – oppressively so – we are soon sweating. Mosquitos and flies attack. The jungle buzzes and trills and rustles all around. We must be careful never to grab branches, even when we slip. There might be thorns or poison ivy on those branches, there might also be bullet ants or fire ants, tarantulas, wolf spiders, eyelash vipers, vine snakes or bushmasters. This place is beautiful but deadly.

At one point Arthur screams and we all freeze. He has kicked at a branch that lay across the path, and a cluster of fine thorns have punctured his Wellington boot, going straight through the rubber into his toes. He cannot take the boot off, it is literally pinned in place. Diego has to remove more than twenty needles before Arthur can wriggle his bleeding foot out. I consider what protection our feet have from snake fangs if thorns can slip through so easily.

We make the village by early afternoon, damp with sweat, muddy, scratched. We find a rudimentary set of wood buildings randomly placed around a grassy clearing, some wooden canoes tied to a jetty. Most of the huts are thatched but some have aluminum roofs, “Given by the oil firms” mutters Diego. The local kids run and hide when they see the rabble of muddy ecotourists that have invaded their village. We hear them giggling from behind bushes and outhouses. Someone throws a tamerind over at us.

Diego leads us to a long building in the village centre. There are no windows and it is dark and smokey inside. Despite the heat outside there is a fire burning, red embers heaped up and glowing upon a raised platform. The air is thick with smoke, we see tendrils curling up to the roof illuminated by sparse light beams that pierce the thatch.

An amerindian lady is waiting for us in traditional dress. She says some words of welcome then promptly puts us all to work. Under her grave instructions we pick yams, we peel, wash and grate them, sift and pat the flour into balls which are then flattened out and cooked over the open fire. The result is a dry chewy cassava pancake, which we eat with tuna salad and chili sauce. It’s really good.

The shaman comes in after lunch. He is small and stocky but light on his feet, decked in jaguar claws and floral wreaths, his face lined with druidic wisdom and years of ayahuasca. He takes his place in the centre of the hut, and we, poor sinners, arrange ourselves cross-legged at his feet.

The shaman talks long about the spirits of the forest and cures to modern ailments that might be found in realigning the spirit and balancing natural energy flows. Diego translates for us. He speaks about his peregrinations in time and space. He touches upon Covid and how it ravaged the Indian communities and then he shows us the antidote that he has concocted. A dark jar is passed around in which lie various roots and leaves, some foul smelling liquid, the body of a scorpion. It has stopped the infection and saved many lives we are told. We may buy a bottle for $10.

The shaman shows us his art. He performs purification rituals on many of us. It is a eerie process involving chanting and dancing, hand movements that channel the air around, gentle beating with sticks and leaves, then a finale that involves an iron grip on my temples and long rasping inhalations, as if the shaman is sucking evil vapors right out of my skull. I have crazy tingles running down my spine.

We are all given a thimble full of ayahuasca from another brown bottle that the shaman passes around. It tastes of bitter cough syrup. He tells us about the role of this powerful psychedelic drug in the indigenous community. It is taken as part of a ceremonial passage of manhood and it brings truth and self-knowledge to the tribesmen. As a healer he takes ayahuasca regularly to diagnose conditions of the spirit and understand hidden illnesses. We are not given enough of a dose to trip out properly, no-one journeys to the ethereal plane. The kids are disappointed not to even have any mild hallucinations, but we have a long jungle hike ahead and I suppose it’s for the best.

The shaman asks if anyone among us needs healing. Arthur’s hand shoots up immediately; the shaman gives him a long silent look. “What ailment troubles you child?” he asks wordlessly.
“I have… a bad knee,” Arthur says and limps over to the healing stool. The shaman looks grave. He stands behind Arthur and peers into his soul for a while. Then he starts to chant, placing hands upon Arthurs leg, drawing out the evil. He pulls out a selection of herbs and leaves from his bag, which he ties up into a bouquet. Then he proceeds to beat Arthur’s leg and knee, softly at first and then harder and harder, singing loudly. For a long time this goes on until Arthur is grimacing in pain and his eyes are shiny with tears.

Later outside Arthur shows me his leg. It is red and sore, covered in grazes. The astringent herbs have left a violent rash of raised white bumps like nettle stings all over his knee and thigh. “It burns!” he tells me.
“Artie, I never knew you had a bad knee,” I say with sympathy. “You managed that hike well.”
“Huh, oh yeah. Well. It’s pretty painful.”
“Even worse now I bet!”
“Yeah!”
“You made it up to get some shaman magic didn’t you?”
“No.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Ok. Yes.”
“Foolish child! You thought you could trick him? His ancient eyes can read the secrets of your soul as if it were a kid’s comic! Of course he knew you were faking it. He has beaten you with poison leaves to teach you a valuable lesson in life. Never lie to a shaman!”

Amazon

Posted on July 2, 2021July 1, 2021 Posted in EcuadorTagged Adventure, Amazon, Birds, Cuyabeno, Ecuador, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, rain forest, Surf, travel, Wild Creatures, WildlifeLeave a comment

When morning breaks we are stiff and grumpy. We have been tossed around on dirt roads all night, jolted over speed bumps, woken by angry motorbikes buzzing past us in the darkness. We’ve passed through roadblocks and forded rivers, squirming all the while, trying to find comfy positions in the back of the bus while the children’s heads loll like pendulums with each turn. I feel like every spring of that worn seat has scored its curved imprint into my buttocks.

We all spill out into the village at dawn. Buildings on stilts list heavily over the river, peeling paint, warped boards, lianas tangled round gables. The water moves past, thick like treacle. Somewhere above us we hear the metallic skiffle of iguana claws on corrugated roofs.

We eat breakfast in a dusty wood space looking out into jungle: rice and beans, guava juice, a small cup of instant coffee. Talk is limited. There is an outhouse with a toilet back in the woods, but it doesn’t flush and everyone needs to go.

Deep in the Putumayo region, somewhere near the Colombian border, this village has no name on the map. It is merely a stop off point on the Cuyabeno river, a jump-off point into the Amazon, a backwater in the truest sense of the word.

A motorized canoe glides up and moors on the jetty. We board clumsily. We are handed lifejackets and ponchos, our luggage is stowed under tarps. I look around at my companions properly in the daylight. There is my family, looking dazed and pale, two Ecuadorean girls chattering, a young looking boy from Norway and our guide, Diego, a slight, elfin character, alert and bird-like. At the tiller is Carlos, our local riverman. He has broad impassive indigenous features, a wide white-toothed grin, bare feet.

Then we cast off and we enter a new world.

The river is bronze and torpid (“Café con leche water, rich in tannins and sediment,” says Diego) but then we skim through patches of black ink (“Agua negra, poor sediment. See how it is thin…”). All traces of mankind disappear behind us, we see no more villages, just thick curtains of leaves. The canoe glides along with a growl, banking around the bends in smooth lazy curves. Occasionally we cross another canoe and sometimes Carlos waves or shouts a greeting in local dialect. Mainly the river runs slick and silent around us, bubbling and swirling, merging into low hanging branches and shrubbery that in turn blend up into endless stories of green primary growth.

We see many wild things on that first voyage. Diego runs a low commentary, voice rising to signify the rarity of the target, pointing and calling, directing Carlos from one side of the river to the other, doubling back for a missed monkey troupe or to investigate a rustling in the bushes. Six or seven types of monkey we spot, deer, Ananinda birds, ancient prehistoric turkeys, kingfishers, spiders an eagle? Arthur wakes up, becomes more and more animated, pointing and chirping like a little cricket: “Is that a white-throated toucan Diego?”

At one point the grey skies above us open up and we cruise on through a deluge, everyone scrambling to put on black rubber ponchos, peering out from under dripping hoods. All sounds recede beyond the drumming of droplets on wet tarp. Birds disappear, movements on the river are masked by the splashing. Carlos grins and guns the boat forward through vertical sheets of water.

Our lodge is a fairly rudimentary affair. A boathouse by the riverside with a couple of hammocks and some bare wooden steps. A raised duckboard trail leads around a square of cleared grassland wherein lie piles of lumber, home no doubt to various highly venomous snakes. There is a feeling of jungle torpor, the smell of decay and lethargy. A basic canteen area houses a long single table and benches. There is a row of thatched cabins with dormitory style rooms. We have a double bed and two singles in our bedroom, each tented with a mosquito net. The walls are bare, there are no shelves, no chairs, a basic bathroom out back. No electricity of course, except for two hours in the evening when the diesel generator is switched on to charge cameras and essentials. There is no phone signal, no hot water, no WiFi. This is the Amazon. “We are explorers!” I tell the kids, “Not poolside lounge lizards.” Matilda gives me one of her most lizard-like looks:
“I am not an explorer,” she says, flicking out a forked tongue, “long live lounging!”

We’re back in the canoe a few hours later, venturing down sinuous tributaries, spotting an anaconda curled on a submerged branch; pink river dolphins breaching in the distance; a mother sloth with cubs on her back. “Is it a Hoffman’s two-toed sloth Diego?” asks Arthur.
“Show-off” I mutter.

And then we round a bend and we’re at an unexpected lake. It is vast, lost somewhere deep in the forest, encircled by ancient woods. A flood plain, Diego tells us, those floating bushes we see are actually the canopies of tall submerged trees. We dive off the canoe and swim. The water is sweet to the taste and I imagine it rich and dense, teeming with a million bacteria, microbes, nematodes, wild diseases that they don’t even have names for yet. The sun is setting and the lake water is dark around us. We see dolphins breaching in the distance, I am sure that they are not the only creatures splashing here. Arthur and Matilda turn into river otters, they dive in time and time again, duck each other, scream, laugh, try to pull Diego into the water, dive down to find river weed. I am happy to return to the boat after a few minutes. Menna does not go in.

Later over dinner, Diego asks us to guess what creatures were swimming with us in that lake.

Piranhas?
“Of course! The piranhas are everywhere in the river. Maybe we will go fishing for them tomorrow.”
Crocodiles?
“Caimans in fact. Especially the black caiman. It is the largest one – up to six meters long. He will grab you with his jaws then twist and roll to break your bones. Then he pulls you down under to drown. For large mammals like you, he would probably store you underwater a while to rot before eating. What else?”
Anacondas?
“Yes too. They will be hunting once the sun falls. We saw one once the length of three men, round as a barrel in the middle where it was digesting something… big. There are many snakes there in the water too, coral snake, water moccasin, maybe boas.”
Beavers?
“No. River otters though, very aggressive. Will fight a jaguar.
Other reptiles?
“On the mud bottom you will find electric eels. They use low voltage electricity to sense and to hunt, kind of like a radar. Then they can generate a high voltage charge, enough to stun a tapir. They have a suction bite so they clamp on to their prey, then they can shock again and again. No charger needed!”
Oh good. What else?
“The most dangerous of all… the candiru, the toothpick fish. Never pee in the Amazon! He will swim up your urine and right up into your, ahem… penis! And he sticks out his sharp umbrella spines so you cannot pull him out again. Then my friends, he will start to eat…”

When the conversation dies down we go to bed, for there is nothing else to do. It is dark and there are no lights in our cabin. Despite the overnight bus ride and the long day we have just had, sleep does not come easily. We lie for some time under our mosquito nets listening to the sound of the jungle around, imagining snakes on the floorboards and tarantulas under the pillows, feeling river-borne parasites squirming in our guts.

Our dreams when they come are slow and heavy: brown waters and submerged coils, shadowy shapes moving in the murky depths, the lighting flash of the electric eel, that first agonizing bite of the bloody toothpick fish…

A Mental Breakdown. Part III

Posted on June 30, 2021June 30, 2021 Posted in EcuadorTagged Adventure, Breakdown, Car Rental, Ecuador, Escape, family road trip, Fraud, Lockdown, Off-grid, travelLeave a comment

From: Will Nicholl <willaccio@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2021 at 01:58
Subject: Criminal conduct.
To: customerservice@ExxxCar.com.ec; and CEO Caroline Pxxxx <caroline.Pxxxx@ExxxCar.com>

Dear Customer Services,

We have had the worst experience that is possible with your company. It is bordering on criminal. You have stolen money from us. I’m not sure if ExxxCar Ecuador is genuinely part of ExxxCar or some dodgy franchise, but it is certainly bringing the ExxxCar brand into disrepute.

This is what happened to us:
1. We booked a Chevrolet Vitara SUV for 17 days from ExxxCar Ecuador (19th March to the 2nd April) at a very expensive rate. We wanted to go with a reputable brand so we chose ExxxCar – big mistake.
2. When we came to pick it up we were told you only had a Kia Rio saloon instead. We complained. The office then exchanged our vehicle a day later for an old Hyundai H1 Minivan.
3. This vehicle was ancient. The right side door didn’t open, it had rust spots all over. It lacked power, the gears stuck, the alarm kept shorting. It had 207,000 km on the clock.
4. We complained twice about the poor quality of the vehicle and the agent said he would raise our complaint with Customer Services. We didn’t hear anything back.
5. The vehicle then abruptly broke down on the side of the road near Quilotoa. This was 30th April. I had to leave my wife and two children alone on the side of the road as evening fell and hitch hike off in a melon truck to get help. It cost us $70 to get the broken van towed back to our hotel. A ExxxCar agent then came the next day and exchanged it for the SUV that we had booked in the first place – two days before our rental period finished (also very old and in bad condition.). We finished the contract and left the country.
6. On the 6th April, $2,000 was deducted from my credit card with no warning. When I enquired I was told it was a charge to ‘replace the full motor’ in the minivan. The agent somehow inferred that it was our fault that the ancient vehicle had chosen that moment to die.

ExxxCar gave us the oldest most unroadworthy vehicle I have EVER seen in a rental company. It died on the side of the road. Now you are trying to charge me to replace the old worn-out motor. This is not moral or legal. It is clearly a cynical attempt to get an old vehicle refurbished at my expense. YOU should be paying ME compensation for this appalling rental experience.

I am writing to give you a change to make this right and refund the $2000 that you have taken – and also add on the $70 cost of the tow truck that I had to pay.

Otherwise we will have to take legal action.

Best regards,

Will

——————————————————————————————————

On Thu, 22 Apr 2021 at 17:50, Will Nicholl <willaccio@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Gina,

Thank you for your email and your investigation. I cannot accept the findings below however. There are some clear and obvious mistakes:

1. “No issues had been reported to ExxxCar prior to the incident on 31.03.2021.” This is completely incorrect. As soon as we took possession of the vehicle we made a complaint about the poor quality and unroadworthiness – including, critically, it’s inability to go up hills (ie a clear indication of an old and worn out engine that lacked power). Please the see attachment below. We were told at the time that our complaint would be escalated to Customer Services. I can now see this was not true.

2. “The vehicle’s engine and crankshaft was damaged as a result of the vehicle being driven across a dirt road as well as over-revving.” This is patently incorrect. We are a family of four driving with two small children in the car. We are not some hooligan offroad drivers! At no point did I ever leave a paved road. I have attached a picture of the car at the time of the breakdown. As you can see it is on a normal highway. The roads in Ecuador are in very bad condition but we as tourists cannot be held accountable for that! If the inspecting mechanic has any proof, please provide this.

We drove safely and carefully at all times. If the crankshaft was damaged then this was already the case when we received the car. I would like to receive proof of your allegations in the form of a pre-rental inspection of the crankshaft.
We revved too hard? Ludicrous! I am a driver with 20 years experience and two small children in the car – not a rally car racer. There is no mechanic alive who would deliver that allegation with a straight face. Again I would like to understand how the inspecting mechanic can substantiate this claim.
May I point out that if you are claiming that the engine died when I revved it, then you are admitting that the engine is old and worn out and has underlying problems.

3. I note that you have not addressed our point about the age and condition of the vehicle. We documented these concerns when we first took possession of the vehicle. It was covered in rust! The doors were jammed! It had 207,000km on the clock! This is not a new vehicle that has been destroyed by bad driving, it is an old rustheap that has been already driven into the ground by hundreds of preceding renters.

At the moment it seems like the local office is making up speculative reasons so that we have to pay to replace an worn vehicle motor which died of old age and overuse. Dirt road driving and revving too hard? Seriously?

I would like to see the evidence requested above please. I’m afraid you must reconsider this clearly fraudulent charge.

Best regards,

Will

——————————————————————————————————

On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 at 22:23, Will Nicholl <willaccio@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Gina,

Thank you for your response.

I notice that you have dropped the ridiculous charge of ‘over-revving’. This is a step in the right direction. I’m afraid that once again though you have been duped by incorrect information from your Ecuador ExxxCar colleagues.

Let me put this very clearly: at no point did we ever leave a paved highway. I don’t understand on what possible basis the Ecuador lot could suggest that we did this. I am bewildered. Please can you tell me on what evidence this accusation is made?

You say we drove up Volcano Cotopaxi. This is totally incorrect. We had been travelling northwards from Cuenca towards Quilotoa where the car broke down. Cotopaxi is some distance further North than this. Again, the information that they have given you is completely false. Please could you ask them exactly how they have formed these assumptions? It will show you that they are simply making things up. We can provide a detailed itinerary of our movements – you will see that at no point did we ever leave the highway.

I simply cannot accept a charge of $2000 when we have been careful drivers and have not infringed our rental agreement in any way. I am sure you would be equally frustrated if such an outrageous charge had been take from you.

If we have to go down a legal route then it will be time and expense for both sides. There is still still time for you to do the right thing here.

Did you get a chance to look at all the reviews that I sent you about ExxxCar Quito? There are clear patterns of fraudulent charges and old unfit vehicles there.

Best regards,

Will

——————————————————————————————————

On Wed, Mon, 10 May 2021 at 16:10, Will Nicholl <willaccio@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Gina,

Thanks for your response and apologies for the delay responding. I have been travelling home.

Once again though this response is not adequate. There are several basic mistakes in your statement below that I must correct:

1. As I have told you before, at no point have we ever driven the Hyundai H1 on anything but a paved road. As you admit, there is no tracking information to contradict what I say. Therefore on what evidential basis can you say I am in breach of my terms with regard to this vehicle?

2. Please take a look at both the Kia and the Vitara tracking data you sent me. I do not see any evidence of driving on unpaved roads. You keep bringing up the Cotopaxi volcano as if we were dirt-roading around the edge of the crater. Cotopaxi is a huge region with paved roads all around the base of the volcano. We had a brief picnic by the visitor centre (as you can see from your maps). Take a look at the satellite imagery freely available from Google – the route we have taken is all tarmac.

3. Please can you show me the Terms and Conditions that say that the car cannot be driven ‘’in rural parts of the country”? Are you saying that your cars can only be driven in the city? Is it against your terms to leave Quito then once the rental car has been picked up?

4. You say: “the car was fully checked prior to your hire and was fully drivable for 12 rental days. Therefore, it is clear to us that the engine damage could not have been pre-existing when your hire took place”. This contradicts what you have said below. I quote: “We are unable to supply you with the pre-rental inspection of the crankshaft as this would not form part of the pre-rental inspection check.” It was the crankshaft that failed and you are clearly stating that this was NOT checked.

5. You say that if there had a pre-existing condition “the vehicle would have been undriveable and the breakdown would have occurred much earlier.” On what basis do you say this? I have spoken to my mechanic in the UK and he tells me that any crack in the crankshaft might have been dormant for weeks, getting steadily worse as we drove along.

6. Looking up crankshaft damage, you will see that driving is not ever listed as a cause.
“Far more frequently, broken crankshafts can be attributed to:
-Mechanical overload of the crankshaft through abnormal combustion, water hammers, etc.
-Sudden jamming of the engine due to a faulty gearbox, loose counterweights, etc.
-Excessive rotary oscillation, e.g. faulty vibration dampers, faulty flywheels or couplings.
-Material weakening due to previous bearing damage or annealed bearing journals, etc.
-Unreliable modification work to the crankshaft bearing.
-Mechanical damage to the shaft before installation”

7. Once again you have not addressed the fact that you rented me a vehicle that was ancient with more than 200,000km on the clock and rust all over – and clearly a damaged crankshaft that you had not inspected. This certainly against the rental vehicles code of practice and I believe this makes ExxxCar negligent. The car broke down on the side of a mountain road in the evening when we were far from mobile reception. I had to leave my wife and children alone at the roadside in a dangerous area and hitch hike for over two hours to find and return with a mechanic. I believe that ExxxCar put my family in significant risk here and the psychological after-effects are still being felt.

8. Did you get a chance to look at all the reviews that I sent you about ExxxCar Quito? As I mentioned before, there are clear patterns of fraudulent charges and further evidence of old unfit vehicles there.

This is a clear cut case. I was rented an old and unroadworthy vehicle which should never have been allowed in your fleet according to the regulatory code of practice. The vehicle broke down due to a crankshaft fault, probably caused by age and overuse. The local ExxxCar office tried to profiteer from the situation to have the car refurbished at my expense. In fact it seems that ExxxCar should be paying me damages to compensate for the distress and risk caused.

Awaiting your reply.

Best regards,

Will

——————————————————————————————————

On Wed, 16 Jun 2021 at 10:59, Will Nicholl <willaccio@gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Gina,

WHY HAS EXXXCAR TAKEN ANOTHER $1750 OFF MY CREDIT CARD?

ExxxCar Ecuador is acting in an immoral and illegal manner. They are a den of thieves! This is so clearly apparent no matter how desperately you try to cover up for them.

One of the ExxxCar company values is: “Integrity: we are open, transparent and honest in our decisions, actions and delivery“. What a joke! You rented me one rusty old van for two weeks with 250,000km on the clock and now you have stolen over $5000 from me.

Do I have to cancel all my credit cards so your colleagues in Ecuador stop stealing my money? Will they help themselves to another couple of thousand every month?

Your explanation below for the first $2000 charge falls significantly short of credible – you have no evidence of off-road driving and you failed to inspect the crankshaft which then broke. Yet you refuse to take responsibility for your poor quality vehicle and hide behind false accusations which you can’t substantiate.

Now you have legitimized this initial fake charge, they have been emboldened to take another – again with no warning or explanation.

Please can you urgently explain this new charge?

Will

——————————————————————————————————

On Fri, 18 Jun 2021 at 07:59, Will Nicholl <willaccio@gmail.com> wrote:

SEE YOU IN COURT ASSHOLES.

A Mental Breakdown. Part II

Posted on June 29, 2021June 28, 2021 Posted in Ecuador, UncategorizedTagged Adventure, Breakdown, Ecuador, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Quilotoa, travelLeave a comment

We pace around the van discussing next steps as the sun sinks in the west. All options seem to involve me trekking off alone into the sunset, either up or down the mountain, for 20km or so. But before I can set off, salvation arrives. And salvation looks like an old and battered pickup truck full of melons. I place myself in the middle of the road and flag it down enthusiastically. It grinds up the road at a walking pace and eventually clatters to a halt pretty much at my feet. Two small Inca faces peer up at me from under woolen bobble hats, eyes barely visible above the dashboard.

“We have a problem! The car is broken. Much smoke, much bang bang! It won’t start any more” I tell the driver in a rush.
“Ah,” he says and nods.
“And our phones do not work here!”
“Oh,” he says and blinks.
“Do you think you can help us?” I add. He gives me a cautious look.
“But I am not mechanic…”
“But you can take me up there to the village. Perhaps I can find a mechanic there who will help.”
“I am not sure. I don’t think so,” he turns his dark eyes towards his wife and a look of reluctance passes between them. This gringo will only cause us problems, the look says, we need to get our melons to market. “The village is very small,” he tries.

There may not be another car for hours and the sun is falling fast. The melons will keep. I open the back door and hop in.
“Let us try!” I say brightly.

I look out at Menna and she gives me a small nod. “Don’t be too long!” she says in that cheery voice she uses when she finds herself stranded in the mountains as darkness falls but is trying not to worry the kids.

Conversation doesn’t exactly flow in the melon truck as we rattle our way slowly up the road. My attempts to engage my rescuers are met with grunts. I find out that the driver’s name is Edgardo, or maybe Gerardo or Eduardo, his wife does not have a name. She mutters quiet things to him, occasionally dials numbers on a cell phone and holds it to his ear, while he grunts and nods and says single syllable words that do not correspond to any version of Spanish that I know. They are heading to a place that sounds something like Loochattychooga. I cannot find it on my map.

It takes us forty minutes to reach a small collection of adobe plaster houses that is the nearest village. We cruise straight on through.
“Wait Edgardo. You are not stopping! I need to get out!”
“Small village. No one here to help you.”
“But where we will go?”
“There is another town. Will go there. My brother can help.”
“Help how? Is he a mechanic?”
“No. But… a friend… a truck”.

Another half hour later we are parked on the roadside in an equally tiny town. I am not sure what is happening. No-one is saying anything.“Is he coming Edgardo?”
“We will see him soon I think.”
“My friend, I am a little bit worried because I have had to leave my wife and my children on the mountain and it is getting dark and it might be dangerous.”
“Yes.”
”Is it dangerous you think?”
”Yes.”
”When do you think he will come?”. He thinks a little.
“Ahorita…”

Ah, ahorita, ahorita, that word so beloved by the Latin Americans. It means now-ish; a little while ago; soon perhaps; at some vague point in the future or in the past. When did your car break down? Ah ahorita… When will you rescue your stranded family? Pero ahorita! When will you grow up William? Beh, ahorita?

Five minutes pass slowly.
“Edgardo, I think I might leave you now and see if there is anyone else who can help.”
“No-one else.”
“I just feel that I must go back to my car before it gets too dark. Maybe we will leave the car and get a taxi back to our hostel”
“A taxi?”
“Is there a taxi here do you think?”
“No.”
“Ok, maybe I will just go and talk to some people. See if someone will give me a ride,” I get out of the car and look around the deserted town for some people to talk to. There is a sad looking guy sitting on a bench across the road and that’s about it.
“Where is the best place to go and find help?”
“Is ok Don William. Tranquilo. My brother…help you.”

Edgardo whispers something on his phone and passes it to his wife. He gets out and walks across the road to the man on the bench. They exchange a sentence or two, then they stand in silence for a while, looking at the floor, both nodding slightly. Then he walks slowly back to his melon truck.

“Soon now.”
“Oh ok. Are we sure about this? How do we know?”
“My brother’s friend… the truck.”
“He will come… Ahorita?”
“Si. Ahorita!”
“So your brother will come together with his friend in the truck?” Edgardo looks confused.
“My brother is there Don William…” He waves a hand at the quiet man on the bench opposite, who looks back but does not make any sign of acknowledgment.
“Oh, I see.”

I have lost control of the situation. My family is abandoned on a hillside far away and I am kicking my heels in an empty town, waiting for a melon farmer’s brother’s friend to arrive in a truck – probably some ancient beast. And I don’t see how a truck is even going to help anyway, unless it contains a new minivan engine. We need a mechanic. Or a taxi. And I don’t like being called Don William, it makes me feel colonial. I consider abandoning Edgardo and… what? Walking another 20km to the next town?

A small group of ladies come walking past and attracted by the pile of melons they stop and cluster round the van. There is some excited chat. Edgardo’s brother comes across the street and the men stand together in silence while the nameless wife haggles sharply and sells a few melons.
“Hey at least you’ve got rid of some melons hey Edgardo!” I say, feeling isolated, wanting some chat. He looks at me, then says something to the crowd and there is a burst of chatter and laughter. For the first time I see my new friend smile.
“Not melons Don William.” He says with an exaggerated slowness, as if taking to an infant, or a naive western tourist clearly out of his depth, “They are squashes!”
And the laughter erupts again.

Then with a sudden roar and a cloud of dust, a tow truck bursts onto the scene. It is like the cavalry sweeping into town. The truck is shiny white with polished chrome, exotic wing mirrors and the name “Rafaelita” written in ornate Italic script on the windshield. RESCATE! it shouts from the door panels – rescue! It gleams with the promise of salvation and redemption. A powerful winch is mounted on the yellow flat-bed. It is driven by a gum-chewing lad of about fourteen.

Knowing now that I will return victorious to my family, riding this roaring chrome beast, I swell up with emotion and gratitude. I try to press a twenty dollar bill upon Edgardo but he throws his hands up in horror, refusing to take it. “No necessary Don William!” So I pump him by the hand and give it instead to his wife, whose hand flickers out like a cobra and secretes the note away before I can blink.

I feel even more like a colonial now. I doubted the locals, I did not trust them. I was unable to understood their quiet patient rhythms. All those secret muttered calls, that silent brotherly communion, discrete SOS messages pulsing through the mountain network. As I thought myself lost and neglected they were working to save me! Rescate!

The fourteen year old driver is called Mario and he is has a welcome no-nonsense attitude. After a brisk negotiation we settle upon a $70 pick up fee, and off we skid, waving fond goodbyes to all of my new friends.

And so, some forty minutes later, I return to my family riding high in the pickup cab, like a returning general at the head of an armoured artillery column. And they haven’t been mugged or murdered but are sitting playing I-Spy in the car, Arthur’s bush knife placed on the seat within easy reach, just in case.

In no time at all Mario has expertly winched up the minivan onto the back of his truck and we are homeward bound, roaring confidently round sharp bends, back to the hostel and our safe beds. Matilda and I drive with Mario in the cab and Menna and Arthur get to ride up back in minivan, swaying around the corners and giving us excited smiles and thumbs up signs through the rear view mirror.

As we drive we watch the last of the sunset disappearing in lurid blazes behind the immense peak of Volcano Cotopaxi. “Sky like this, Don William, we call it is the Ecuadorean flag,” says Mario, who I realise is not chewing gum at all, but tobacco.

He points out at the sunset “See! The bands of gold and blue and red. Like the flag.” He thumps his chest. “This is our country. This is Ecuador”

A Mental Breakdown. Part I

Posted on June 22, 2021June 28, 2021 Posted in EcuadorTagged Adventure, Breakdown, Ecuador, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Quilotoa, travelLeave a comment

The Quilotoa crater lake is mind-blowing. It glows with a strange blue luminescence as if some nuclear reactor lies hidden beneath that menacingly still surface. Perhaps it hides the subaquatic lair of some supervillain. Perhaps it truly is a bottomless gateway to the underworld, as the locals believe. We trek right down the crater to make sure, but it does appear to just be a lake. We have a picnic beside it and try not to think too much about the impending hike back up the sheer goat path to our car at the top. We are at over four thousand meters of altitude here and breathing is not easy.

Eventually we have to face up to our destiny. The hike up the cliffs is every bit as lung-busting as we feared. Every hundred meters we halt and pant and suck on one of the old Lifesaver sweets that I have found in my jacket pocket. Around one bend in the path we come across a toothless old indigenous lady brewing tea. She commutes here by bus from a far away town, she tells us, and walks down the mountain to this lonely path every day – with all her cooking equipment on her back – to sell refreshments to passing hikers. This is how Ecuador works. We bought a couple of cups of coca leaf brew with my last dollar, and thus fortified we find strength to make the summit.

You can trek the Quilotoa Loop over about five days. It is a meandering circuit through a string of traditional Andean villages that encircle the crater. We are short of time though, and we have wheels, so we decide to drive around the loop over the course of an afternoon.

The landscape is fascinating in the way that photos and descriptions can never quite capture. It’s something about the altitude, the beauty, the excitement, the lack of oxygen, the proximity to the sun. It all combines to give a bubbly visceral feeling, a heightened sensory awareness. Or maybe it was just the coca tea. The pastures are greener than we have seen before, the canyons deeper, sudden drop-offs loom where there is nothing beyond the road-edge but air and gravity. We take in winding rivers, winding roads, huge birds of prey, prismatic sun effects. We pass through tiny villages of white plaster where livestock wanders out of yards and onto the roads. We see men in traditional dress working those chilly sunlit mountain top fields

For a couple of hours we meander along hairpin roads where every turn shows the mountain in new light, folded like origami, some faces bright, others in shadows. We roar down steep descents and then inch up long climbs, grumbling in the low gears. Vultures float on the updraft. The wind roars.

Then we hear a new sound through our open windows. A throaty gutteral whine, a cry of distress and pain.
It grows louder and more urgent.

Our van is singing a sad song, choking and shuddering.
The whine becomes a roar, a scream, then a metallic death rattle.
Smoke pours out of the bonnet.
There is a grinding vibration, a cough, a muffled explosion.

The engine cuts out.
We coast in sudden silence.
Birdsong flows back in through the open windows.
Acrid fumes of burnt oil and solvents float around us.

The wheel gets very heavy in my hands and I have to drop one shoulder and wrestle it.
We roll back down the hill and onto the verge, leaving a mess of oily tracks smeared on the tarmac.
The wheels crunch over gravel. Then we stop.

We hop out and take a look under the bonnet, as if we understood engines, as if we were going to perform some miracle roadside repair using twigs and stones. All we see is a mess of black pipes and pistons shaking and smoking and smelling, a fan still turning, oil dripping down onto the road.

We are in a fix. This is remote mountain territory and Menna’s phone has no signal (mine has not worked for weeks). Our map shows the nearest village is about 20km away and the bunched contour lines suggest that this will be a steep uphill trek. We are on the equator, so the sun sets just after six o clock every day. It is now approaching five. We know that darkness will fall very quickly once the sun drops below the mountain line.

Ecuador is not the most dangerous of all the Latin American countries but it is certainly not somewhere you hang out alone on the roadside after dark

There is a shared memory that floats unspoken between Menna and I. We have been here before. It was back in 2005, up in the northern Nicaraguan badlands near the Honduran border. That day we had driven down from El Salvador, twelve hours straight, with still another four hours to go before we made Managua. Darkness was falling then too when I crashed our jeep into the back of a truck which had abruptly stopped on a hill top and had no brake lights. The impact left our front grill and radiator smashed, the bonnet crumpled, the axel off kilter. The truck had no plates either and it took off again soon after, once the driver had given me some frank opinions on my driving.

We were left deep in bandido territory with all of our worldly possessions in the car. There was no other option but to leave Menna guarding our stuff – armed with our machete and an iron bar we carried for security – while I headed off down the road to find help.

This time we have no iron bar with us, nor a machete. Arthur has his bush knife though. This will have to do.

Ave Maria

Posted on May 5, 2021June 29, 2021 Posted in EcuadorTagged Adventure, Andean Cock of the Rock, Antpittas, Birds, cloud forest, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Tanagers, toucans, travel, WildlifeLeave a comment

“Maria!” calls Angel in a high falsetto. “Hola! Maria.” There is the sound of water trickling over leaves, wind in the canopy, far off birdsong. The forest is breathing around us but of Maria there is no sign. Arthur and I shuffle awkwardly but Angel gives us a reassuring smile. “Sometimes she is far away. She might need some time. Oh Mariiiia!” He cups his hands at his lips and lets out a mournful quavering hoot. “Venga, venga, venga!”

We walk up and down the forest trails following Angel. He rattles the tub of maggots, our gift. He makes his haunting calls. A perplexed note enters his voice, “Maria ¿donde estás? Yesterday she was just here,” and he indicates a thicket of vine leaves, as if we might pull aside that glossy curtain and find Maria crouched there, a wing coquettishly folded over her eyes. You found me!

“Who or what exactly is Maria anyway?” murmurs Arthur again. I shrug, I have no idea. Twice I have asked Angel this but he always responds in his birdwatcher’s whisper which, together with the thick Andean accent, makes things difficult. We should have done our research before the tour.
“He just said something about pitta,”
“Do you think you can just call a bird and it will come like a dog?”
“It doesn’t appear that you can.”

Angel seems crestfallen. Our sighting of the prized Andean Cock of the Rock was only a flash of scarlet tail feathers and now Maria has let him down too. The tour is going badly. Angel Paz is a titan of the birdwatching world and he has a reputation to uphold, even if it’s only in front of two gringos who clearly know little about birds. We might still write disparaging things on Trip Advisor. He mooches along for a while, then he pulls himself out of his gloom, he smiles. “There is still the quails to see,” he says waving at the wooded ridge above us, “We will find the dark backed wood quail here. Very rare. Very beautiful. Come, come!” Onwards and upwards we trek.

But wood quails will not come out to play today either. They are away with Maria. We squat for a long time on a little mountain trail above a clearing where they ‘always’ come. Angel makes new bird calls; lower with staccato throat sounds.

Arthur and I have a moment of mild excitement when it seems that his calls are answered. The response draws closer. The creature that emerges from the bush is no quail alas, but clearly cut from Angel’s genetic cloth. Stocky, dark, dressed in forest green, eyes like woodland pools. “Mi hermano Rodrigo”, Angel mutters to us, and they converse for a while in low voices, pacing, shaking their heads. Then Rodrigo melts back off into the jungle, his clucking and whistling soon lost amid the leaves that rustle in the wind.

It is nearing ten o’clock now and we have been out here in the woods since half past five. Slow dawn hours watching for birds, but all we have actually seen so far is a single fleeting blaze of red tail feathers through a gap in the trees.

We have not had any breakfast yet, no coffee even. I am getting grumpy and Arthur is bored, snapping twigs and hurling pieces into the undergrowth, badly imitating Angel’s bird hoots. Angel himself is reduced to showing us videos on his phone of other more successful tours when rare and beautiful quails pecked around camouflaged ankles as real ornithologists tower serious and awkward above them, bristling with long lenses and military-grade optics.

After we have had enough of staring at leaves we drive up to the mountain lodge and Angel’s wife brews us a coffee. “We have a bird watching hide somewhere over there,” indicates Angel sadly, “perhaps you might see something. There are plenty of tanagers and hummingbirds who come. They are not rare of course but they are pretty…”

The bird hide blows our mind. Strange crucifix wood sculptures are staked out in the woods with bananas tied onto them. A vivid blizzard of birds swarm around, wheeling, landing, jousting, swooping; fighting balletic midair duels for a peck of gloopy banana. We see a toucan barbet, tanagers of all colours, golden orioles, a fairywren, cotingas, trogons. I fumble around with Menna’s camera, which I have borrowed, but the autofocus can’t cope with the frenetic motion and I give up quickly.

Later Angel and Rodrigo march us back into the forest, down to a gully where to their delight we see both Shakira and Beyoncé. We are told with some reverence that they are rufous antpittas: small round brown birds, neckless, tailless, long blue legs; quite plump and cute as they hop around on the forest floor, but perhaps a little unflattering to their namesakes.

Arthur and I try to look interested but really we just want to go back to that rainbow glade, sit with a coffee, watch those hypnotic streaks of colour shoot across the mottled green like a Jackson Pollock painting in motion.

Angel sits himself down on a stump and a kind of calm settles on him. We have seen antpittas. He has delivered. The trip has been redeemed. Now it is time for a tale. It is about a child from a poor family, one of seven. He has little schooling and is destined for a life of labor in the fields, but a love of birds saved him. A tourist paid the young urchin ten dollars to lead him into the forest to find the Andean Cock of the Rock. A dream was born. A business was started

Then one day tracking deep in the mountains, our hero spotted a strange bird. A giant antpitta. So rare! So misunderstood! “I decided this bird with long legs and a big beak should be my friend” says Angel dreamily. So a strange courtship began, Angel calling and singing deep in the forest, bringing gifts of worms; shunned at first, his resolve tested, before the relationship began to bloom. “The forest was my new home. Day after day I try so hard to make friends with her…”

I later look at Angel Paz’s website where this exact story is repeated almost word for word under the bold heading Antpitta Man. He has built a life and an identity around this small nondescript bird. He is famous in ornithological circles. He has created a bird sanctuary on reclaimed farming land. A true legend of the cloud forest.

I look at Angel’s crucifix necklace and think about his faith, his acts of devotion deep in the woods.
“You named her after the Virgin Maria?” I whisper, “Because of her purity, her spiritual nature? She is a miracle!”
“No! Maria I am naming after my wife. She is like this bird!”

I nod solemnly, appreciating the gesture. No greater love can man show his woman than to name a small fat bird after her. God willing I too may one day bestow this honour on my wife.

Maaarriiiia!

Brazilian Road Trip. Day Five

Posted on April 21, 2021May 6, 2021 Posted in BrazilTagged Adventure, Desert, Dunas do Rosado, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Sand Dunes, travelLeave a comment

We are deep in the desert. We left our car some way back and now we are toiling forwards on foot. We have no water left. It’s about 40˚C and the air roils and shimmers with oily heat. Menna raises a shaking finger to point out some mirage on the horizon, but it is already too late for Matilda. She lets out a long gasping moan, drops to her knees, then collapses dead to the floor.

“I think your death rattle should be louder.” Says Arthur, “Like gargling and choking at the same time. Let me try.”

After we have practiced our desert deaths, we climb pyramids and race down their faces, bounding, falling, rolling, sliding, filling our pockets and pants and ears with sand. We take perspective shots of Matilda holding tiny people. We carefully dig up the bones of a dead snake like paleontologists unearthing a ichthyosaur. We climb the highest dunes and stare philosophically out at swirling sand vistas.

There’s something primeval as we look out on the dunescape, no evidence of civilisation in any direction. We talk about nomadic people – Bedouins, Aborigines, Touaregs, Berbers, Tusken Raiders – and imagine their harsh existence. A slight frisson of fear grips us all. We are deep in the desert and we have no water left. Something could easily go wrong: the car might not start; Arthur might break a leg; I might have to stagger back to civilisation with the snake-bitten corpses of my family draped over my shoulders.

It is films that have shaped our perception of the desert. We have all cried at that bit in English Patient when he leaves her in the cave and treks off for help across the sands. Those nightmares I got after watching Frank Herbert’s Dune are still buried somewhere deep in my cerebellum. Arthur remembers droids wandering in that endless desert of Tattoine, carrying Leia’s hologram onwards to Luke.
“How did we get into this mess” C3PO whines, “We seem to be made to suffer”.

The car does start. It’s like a furnace inside though and we nearly pass out before the air-con kicks in. We still have no water left but it’s ok, we’ll top up in the next town. It’s only ten klicks away. First we must navigate this worn sandy B-road though that winds around the edge of the desert. It’s tough driving – the sort I was born for: slaloming the pot holes, swerving drifts, hitting the sand bank with my back wheels to skid the car pleasingly around that tight corner; off-roading round ridges of sun-buckled asphalt. I judge my limits by the colour of Menna’s knuckles as she grips her roof handle. Faster! Find the apex! BRAKE!

A dune has swallowed the road. It is of a size that will not be summited by our fake SUV that shamefully doesn’t actually have true 4×4. Can we go around? I watched Laurence of Arabia when I was a kid, I found it long and boring but what stuck with me is the immensity of that desert landscape. Once you were in it, it went on forever.

We leave the car and scout on foot. We test the firmness of the terrain. All around us are ridges, folds and valleys of soft fine sand that sink underfoot and probably hide the rusted skeletons of a whole junkyard of sunken vehicles. A small patch of tarmac re-emerges on the far side of the dune but it leads only to the foot of another sand mountain, and after that all traces of road disappear. The highway has been entirely reclaimed by the desert.

It appears we have no option but to retrace our steps for a good 30km and then take the long road northwards around the desert. It will add three hours onto our journey, which was already due to take up most of the day. Our mouths are dry and it’s annoying that we have no water.

But what is this? A saloon car in the distance, pulling off the highway, taking a direct line into the heart of the desert. Madness lies ahead! We roar forwards, flashing headlines, waving, honking. The desert traveller stops and slowly reverses. A creased hardboiled type emerges from the driver’s door, all burnt skin and wild hair. Shadowy faces peer out of the darkened rear windows. We talk.

‘We are lost. The road disappears. We cannot go on! Is there another way to Natal?’ I say in Spanish.

The response comes in fast, elliptic, take-no-prisoners Portuguese. It is entirely incomprehensible. His hands move with his words though and I try to read their story instead: ‘There is a path,’ they seem to say, ‘It is long and dangerous. Listen carefully. You must go somewhere over there, then curve at this point here. Make sure not to take the wrong fork when you see this. Go on for a long way until you come to that. And then you will be safe my friend. God speed.’

Then he climbs back in his car and zooms off into the desert.

‘Obrigado!’ we shout. We wave, then we turn to each other and have a hurried conference. A decision is made. We leap back into the car and set off at full speed on the tail of our newfound friend. We have no idea where he is going, but we know that we don’t want to lose him. He is a local Bedouin, a man of the desert, and he alone can navigate these shifting sands. We, on the other hand, have no water and if we get lost here we will certainly die.

For an hour or more we wind our way deeper and deeper into the desert. We follow a winding path between sand drifts, just firm enough to support our vehicle but with no room for error. Our wheels spin at times when we stray too wide on a curve and sink into soft sand. We have to stop and rev in order to make it over ridges. Conversation dries up inside the car. We are all fixed on the guide vehicle, floating somewhere ahead, a ghost in the shimmering heat.

In the Good the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood is a prisoner dying of thirst, dragged deep into the scorching sands by an outlaw with a pink parasol. His cracked face is like a desert landscape in itself as he slowly dries out with every step. And here we are, hitched to a white sedan, lines of thirst starting to etch themselves on our faces too, as we are driven deeper, deeper into the desert.

We see skulls half buried in the sand. We have no water. We neither know the way forwards nor nor the way back. Onwards we go, following strangers down invisible roads, our destination unknown, our time running out. Small players in some grand sweeping epic.

Where do we go, we who wonder this Wasteland in search of our better selves?
Mad Max

Brazilian Road Trip. Day Three

Posted on April 19, 2021April 18, 2021 Posted in BrazilTagged Adventure, Brazil, Dunes, Escape, family road trip, Icari, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, travel, Waves, Wind, WindmillsLeave a comment

We spend the morning trying to solve the key conundrum. The sullen guy at our car rental company is approximately nine hours away and it is a Saturday. We agree that he is unlikely to be our knight in shining armour. We go and talk to a smiling lady who seems to be part of our hostel and ask her to find us a local locksmith instead. Maybe something got lost in translation because the guys who show up a couple of hours later are carrying a hammer and chisel.

We watch with some consternation as the lads set about levering open the top of the driver’s door with a screwdriver and then force in a wooden stake. Lots of slips, lots of grunts, a fair amount of sweat, this is not the refined lock pick I was expecting. A long wire (coat hanger?) goes in and then an hour of fumbling around, poking it down into the car, trying to hit the unlock button on the driver armrest. The alarm goes off long time before they hit jackpot and this is the soundtrack to the morning. It brings various onlookers and advisors from the road, so there is soon quite a crowd.

The lads force their way in eventually, but leave some wicked dents and scratches on the roof. It is a brand new rental car and these seem very conspicuous. I pay them $20 and they lounge around the hotel drinking coffee for many hours, hooting with laughter, telling stories of hapless tourists.

We are long past checkout at this point so we agree to stay on another night in Icari.

Menna has heard of some huge sand dunes nearby which hide exotic water holes. These will be deep and clear, she tells us, like an oasis in the Sahara. They will be surrounded by shady vegetation where we may string up hammocks and relax after swimming with the frogs in the agua dulce.

So off we head, in search of this desert mirage. The rural hinterlands of Brazil’s Nordeste region is not where Google Maps excels but we don’t have any alternative. Iguanas and ibis meet red herrings and wild geese as we blunder our way down back roads that are really no more than muddy tractor tracks. We drive through wind farms and cattle farms, down white grit paths, into little shanty towns. We inch past wobbling bicycles loaded with family members, we stop for goats on the road and we end up totally lost.

Eventually after squeezing several kilometers down a narrow flint track we find ourselves at a little house made entirely from flotsam, sitting among a mess of fishing nets. Various astonished dark-eyed children peer at us from hiding places in the shadows but no adult appears to offer help or directions. I am faced with a long winding reverse back up the track. Ahead through a plastic-strewn yard is an open gateway then a blue ribbon of sea.

I make a silent decision and gun the car through the gate before Menna can tell me not to. Down a small step we bump and then we are on the beach, dodging rocks, slaloming our way down the wide hard-packed sand, wheels spinning a little. Menna is freaking, thinking we’ll get the car stuck, the kids are screaming: Go faster! Hit the dunes! Drive into the waves! I turn up the Brazilian House Grooves album which I am seriously digging at the moment. And along we fly.

Eventually the sand gets softer and deeper and I feel there is a real danger we’ll sink our wheels so I bring the car to a stop. We spill out and run around, eat a late lunch up on a dune, vaguely worried the tide will come in and cut off our escape route. We find a giant bleached turtle shell and some skeletal flipper remains. In front of us the sea stretches away to Africa and behind is a never-ending landscape of undulating sand dunes and towering white windmills. We are ants lost between endless horizons.

We finish lunch and turn the car around then drive three kilometers at full speed along the flat sand, over rivulets, waving at fishermen and kids in the dunes. Some wave back, most ignore us.

As we rejoin the tracery of cross-country trails that lead homewards (we hope), we can’t help trying a few other blind alleys in search of these mystical pools. We take service roads that lead us to rows of silent monolithic windmills. We go and lie at the base of one, looking upwards, watching huge blades whirling silently against the hard blue. With no peripheral reference points this creates an optical effect, it feels like we are rotating too, lying on shifting ground, moving through immense orbits. Gravity ripples and slips. Stretched out in the dust we gently swing like Focault’s pendulum, proving the earth’s motion.

“The lakes in the dunes?” asks the smiling lady when we get back to the hotel, “Oh, but they are only there in the wet months. Perhaps in December you will see them – if you come back!”

Over a takeaway dinner that evening we teach the kids the meaning of the word quixotic: Committing yourself whole-heartedly to wild escapades, we say. Being idealistic but naïve. Chasing impossible dreams. Tilting at windmills.

Shadow of the Volcano

Posted on March 11, 2021April 1, 2021 Posted in NicaraguaTagged Adventure, Armadillo, cloud forest, Clouds, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Maderas, Nature, Nicaragua, Off-grid, Ometepe, travel, volcano, WindLeave a comment

We are on the island of Ometepe to climb a volcano. Though the kids are still small and the volcano is big, we have decided that it is one of those elemental experiences that we should go through at some point in our travels. Unknown to Matilda we have been training her up for just this moment. Those long cliff top walks, that 15,000 daily step target, the steep forest trails. We have chosen Volcán Maderas, the smaller and more dormant of the two volcanos on the island. It is going to be a ten hour round hike with an elevation of around 1400 meters.

When we awake on the big day we find ourselves enveloped in a blanket of cloud. It isn’t quite raining but it certainly isn’t dry either. Our guide Abel waits for us in reception. He is clearly a man of the mountain, slight, weatherbeaten, his eyes dark portals to another dimension.

Breakfast in the lodge comes slowly and perhaps we are not as organised as we should be, so we leave an hour later than planned. I sense Abel’s disapproval at the delays and the many rounds of pancakes we have eaten, but we laugh it off. By eight o clock we have shouldered our packs and we set off into the gloom.

The trails are overgrown and we are barely out of the gates when Abel already has to pull out his machete and hack a path through vines and shrubbery, much to Arthur’s delight. We march through a densely wooded valley and then up through coffee fields and abandoned cocoa plantations on the shoulder of the mountain. Then the climb starts to steepen.

There are various microclimates stacked at different altitudes up the mountain. All of them involve varying levels of moisture and low visibility. I imagine we are working our way up inside different cloud banks: first the nebulous mists of the low stratus layer, then into the dim white glow of cumulus. Higher up it is humid and dense as I imagine cumulonimbus to be. Then we hit a new kind of rain with a sharp wind that chills our sweat, and I figure we must have found cirrus, as this is the last kind of cloud I can remember.

The terrain underfoot changes from grass to dirt tracks and fallen leaves, to ferny vegetation, then mud, then rolling rocks and scree. For an hour Abel leads us up a stream in full flow, hopping stone to stone, splashing through muddy pools, crawling through rock tunnels, ducking under snatching branches. Matilda is the only member of the team who has proper hiking boots, the rest of us push on in wet trainers.

Abel turns out to be a guide in the minimalist sense: someone who is simply there to indicate the path to a destination. He is not a tour guide, we do not learn about the history of the island, the eco-system, local traditions. If anything he is like a silent spirit guide, floating in and out of the mist ahead of us, leading us along some metaphorical inward journey. He shows no signs of tiredness, he never stumbles. He slips away to scout the path ahead and some minutes later we round a corner to find him squatting immobile on a rock, face raised, communing silently with the ancestors. He pushes a fast pace.

I am using behavioural psychology tricks picked up over some years in sales management to motivate my poor daughter. We have anchored past successes (remember that time you climbed the cliff in Madeira with hardly a moan). We have engaged a sense of competition (and you got there before Arthur…). We’ve visualised the route ahead, we’ve established intrinsic motivators, we’ve set goals and we’ve quantified rewards (gummy bear every half hour, bar of chocolate at lunch, two puddings tonight). Now she is powering up the mountain, bouncing along chattering away to Abel who doesn’t say much back. She has found a ski pole in the lodge and she fiercely stabs it into the mud with every step. In fact it’s uber-fit Menna, who runs twenty five kilometres without fail every week, who is the first to start struggling. She is sliding around and lagging behind the group, sweating and frowning fiercely.

Arthur’s style of movement is not slow or steady. He jumps and bounces, slips and crashes, tries to make difficult jumps, falls a lot, wastes energy. He is always in danger of turning an ankle. He cycles through emotions from elation to dejection and offers a constant running commentary on his progress. He is the next to crash.

When it is my turn to hit the wall, it is intense. We’ve been climbing solidly for about three hours, I am wet through and I have a dull percussive ache in my quads which flares every time I have to lunge up another thigh-high rock. My backpack contains eight litres of water, it digs into my shoulders and catches on tree branches as we squeeze through gaps. My breath is short, my heart is hammering, my feet squelch. I am very glad when Abel calls a halt and I wolf down half a pack of peanuts and a secret handful of gummy bears.

We make summit just after one pm. There are no life-changing views or blinding moments of self-revelation, my spirit animal fails to materialise. Instead Abel indicates a point of cloud-covered rock like many others and tells us that this is the highest point. We nod and puff, then wind our way between various smokey outcroppings before sliding over the other side, through a series of steep and slippery faces, down into the crater.

An hour later we have reached our destination. We stand around uncertainly at the edge of the crater lake which stretches away into the mist like a grey shroud. A few stakes reach up ominously out of the water. Abel won’t confirm that they were used for ritualistic sacrifices, but one has an old skull on it, an oxen I think. We half-heartedly throw a in few stones, which land with muffled plunks and stir up some sullen ripples. We have literally no idea how large the crater is, how high the walls that surround us. How deep are the netherworlds that lie beneath that lifeless surface? We stand in a cold wet marshland with the silhouettes of mossy trees and bromeliads above us.

I was expecting Abel to light a fire at this point, start chanting and brew up the ayahuasca, but he just stands around wordlessly. It is too wet to sit so Menna and I crouch down and make sandwiches on a tree stump, then we all stand around in a circle stuffing in ham and cream cheese, chorizo, mango, oranges, chocolate. Abel doesn’t seem to have any food with him. No doubt he was intending to lunch on dew and wild berries, or perhaps just to chew on hallucinogenic tree bark. We feed him a sandwich or two, then he transmogrifies into a bat and flies away to the spirit world for ten minutes while we digest.

We haven’t managed to sit down at all, so our trembly tired legs are hardly rested when we have to shoulder our packs and turn back for home. Abel clearly thinks we have energy to spare so he takes us on a longer, more perilous route out of the crater that involves a long stretch of hand to hand climbing up a mudslide. We complain but he no longer hears us, he is tuned into the low rumblings of the volcano, drawing energy from magnetic fields deep beneath us. He floats across the slippery mud face, each touch gentle and tender. We lumber after him, stumbling, sliding, occasionally screaming, making a chain with our hands so none of us slip into the abyss.

Then we are over the summit and back into the cirrocumulus landscape. The return journey is not the gentle downhill ramble we had hoped for, but a slippery losing fight against gravity where each downward step places stiff demands upon tired knees, the falls multiply, the chatter dries up.

I have nothing much to say about those three nightmarish hours. Arthur spots an armadillo, Matilda doesn’t once moan and Abel himself slips over a couple of kilometres from home, which cheers us all up immensely and gives us the psychological boost we need to complete the trip.

The next morning we are greeted by the manager of our lodge in a state of high excitement. He tells us that as far as he is aware, Matilda is the youngest person ever to make it up to the crater lake and return alive.

He asks for a picture for the hotel notice board.

Masque of the Red Death

Posted on January 7, 2021January 7, 2021 Posted in Costa RicaTagged Adventure, coatis, Corcovado, Costa Rica, Escape, family road trip, La Leona, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Osa Peninsula, rain forest, travelLeave a comment

The blood coughs became more frequent over our stay in the Corcovado. I tell Menna but no one else. Her hypothesis is that I have a minor laceration somewhere in my lung. I managed to inhale a mouthful of nuts last week and I was bent double in an epic coughing fit that lasted around twenty minutes. Perhaps my lung tissue has been nicked by a sharp fragment of peanut. I like this theory, because we are a very long way from civilisation right now, so I certainly wouldn’t want it to be anything more scary like tuberculosis or lung cancer. Once I tell Menna about a medical problem there is a sense of delegation, a transfer of ownership, and I generally cease to worry about it. Whatever the cause, I have developed a deep melodious cough with a frothy gurgling undertone that isn’t entirely unpleasant, a bit like blowing bubbles through a straw. It brings a salty iron taste to my throat. The blood I spit out is profuse and shocking in it’s red glow; freshly oxygenated, it looks so vibrant – so healthy!

We go on a long jungle trek and see herds of peccaries in a hurry; they are being pursued, we are told, by an invisible puma. We see groups of coati with glossy black fur, striped tails held high, hunting the purple and orange halloween crabs that infest the sandy walkways at the forest’s edge. We watch a rare white hawk circling silently through the branches of a huge Guanacaste tree, flitting round and round like a jungle phantom. She was hunting howler monkeys, waiting until the mothers slept to snatch a baby from their grasp. We waded across rivers that may have been frequented by crocodiles, although we didn’t see any – which I suppose is the way with crocodiles, until they have a hold of your leg. At the end of the walk I take myself away quietly and cough for a while on the beach. Menna pats my back. Matilda comes up to us and is very disturbed to see a wet pool of blood between my feet in the sand. We pass it off as a cut lip. She nods silently and wanders off.

When we surf again that evening I am caught inside by a set of waves. Held underwater and unable to breathe for a long while, I splutter as I surface and then my gasping causes more coughing. I try to swallow down the blood as I am scared that I will attract sharks.

The fourth night of our stay in the jungle is the worst yet. I cannot lie flat without gargling and choking. I drift in and out of sleep propped up on pillows on my single camp bed.

In the darkness I relive old M*A*S*H tv episodes where sweating soldiers bleed out in tropical field hospital tents; I float down the oily jungle waters of Apocalypse Now in thrall to some undefined twilight danger, pulled towards horrific moments of dark self-realisation. I think of the descent into fever and tropical madness in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; I retrace Allie Fox’s tracks in Thoreaux’s Mosquito Coast, knowing that I too have dragged my family deep into the jungle on a wild quixotic quest that can only lead to death and disaster. I think of Kafka slowly dying of consumption and Yeats, Orwell (did Camus go this way too?).

I piece together fragments of poetry and worry away at scraps of lines: piecing together Dulce et Decorum Est in the early hours, dwelling on the blood that comes ‘gargling forth from froth corrupted lungs’, repeating the line over and over to myself. I remember the masked figure that moves silently through the ball in Poe’s gothic tale Masque of the Red Death. Prince Prospero and his men were hiding from the plague too, I remind myself, naively thinking they could lock themselves away and outlast the disease – but the chime of midnight brought darkness, ‘and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all…’

Menna is awake most of the night of course, watching me cough and bubble and mutter to myself, staggering up to spit blood into the loo and replace my damp clutch of tissues. There is no electricity in our tent and we don’t want to wake the kids, but when the sun rises at 5:30 she examines me. One side of my chest is no longer rising as I breathe, the lung is hard and full of blood.

We agree that it is time to get to a hospital.

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall… And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all
The Masque of the Red Death Edgar Allen Poe

The Landlord

Posted on January 6, 2021January 7, 2021 Posted in Costa RicaTagged Adventure, bull shark., Corcovado, Costa Rica, Escape, family road trip, La Leona, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Osa Peninsula, shark, Surf, travel, WavesLeave a comment

On our second day in Corcovado I wake early, around five am, and go down to the beach to look for nesting turtles before the sun rises. I walk for a couple of kilometers but see nothing, so I creep back into camp, grab my surfboard and paddle out for a sunrise surf. I make my way through the break and out to deep water, and then there is a moment when the sea softens and quietens, flattening like a mirror as the first rays of sun break over the horizon. I am totally alone in the limitless ocean and it is one of those quasi-religious experiences. It is briefly marred by another round of coughing, and there is the blood again. I spit it out in bright red swirls that float on the water’s surface. There is no pain and I feel physically fine, it is just like my body has decided to remove some excess ballast. It passes. I float on.

A couple of minutes later a fin slowly breaches the water dead in front of me, very close. It glides along silently for a few metres and then sinks back under the surface. I am mentally far-away in that moment and I watch it with detachment. Dolphin or shark? I ask myself. How amazing it would be if a bottle-nosed dolphin was to suddenly jump out of the water and maybe come to play. I lie down on my board and carefully lift my legs out of the water. I see the fin again a few seconds later, now five meters to my left, gliding smoothly away. It is a substantial fin, not sharp at the tip but slightly rounded, a deep charcoal grey and matte; sunlight does not seem to reflect off it. Then a third time in the distance it breaches again, still on the same bearing, heading away up the coast. I lie and ponder things for a minute, but then the swell picks up and the set comes through. I catch a long ride through many rolling sections, right in to the beach. It is a good enough wave that I decide to paddle back out for more.

I catch another three or four waves until I see Meg on the beach, waving furiously at me and beckoning. I can see that she is anxious and I paddle in hurriedly, thinking that one of the kids had been bitten by a snake. It turns out to be no less of a tragedy: Meg has seen an anteater being savaged by one of the guard dogs in the camp. The dog was pulled off, but the wounded creature has limped away along the beach into the undergrowth by the water’s edges to die. We can hear it panting and rustling in a nest of fig vines that tangle back into the sandbank. I am very keen to see an anteater and we attempt to lure it out with coaxing noises, thinking perhaps that we might nurse it back to health, tame it, adopt it. Unsurprisingly it does not come out.

After breakfast we meet Alvaro, a local guide who we have booked to take us deep into the Corcovado jungle. I tell him about my fin story and he chuckles.
“Dolphin? No! A dolphin is swimming with leaps and jumps. No, no, no. My friend it is a shark that moves in straight lines with the fin like this,” Does a gliding move with his hand. “It is mainly bull sharks we have here, but he will look at you and think you are too big. He is going to the river mouth. A tuna or mahi-mahi is nicer for him. Bueno! It is worse for you if you get a crocodile in the sea moving between the rivers.”

Josh and I check this out on the internet later and got a stern list of shark risk factors: surfing alone, at dawn, near a river and various others. It seemed that I had broken every single rule. Nonetheless the three of us go surfing again that evening, but this time we take Arthur along as bait.

I never got a sense of threat from that smooth gliding fin, rather an insulting lack of interest, as I think back on it. There was no change of course as it cruised past me. We simply cohabited for a moment in the waves.

In surfing slang, sharks have many names: ‘the men in grey suits’ sometimes or the ‘Noahs’ (a cockney riff I suppose on ‘Noah’s arks’). My favourite term though has always been ‘the Landlord’. It has the gravitas that this apex predator is due. We humans are out of our milieu in the sea, we float and submerge ourselves temporarily for kicks, then we return to dry land. As unreliable short-term tenants of the ocean we might get our eviction notice at any point. We must know our place, make sure to pay our dues and never disrespect the Landlord.

Avoid swimming at dusk, dawn or night since some sharks are more active during these times.
Avoid entering the ocean near a river mouth
Avoid entering the ocean with a bleeding wound.
Do not surf, dive or swim alone
“How Common Are Shark Attacks in the Beaches of Costa Rica?” The Costa Rica Star

Island Madness

Posted on December 7, 2020December 9, 2020 Posted in PortugalTagged Adventure, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Madeira, Nature, Off-grid, Portugal, Storms, travel, Waves, Wind1 Comment

When I was younger I spent a year on Réunion, a volcanic island out in the middle of the Indian Ocean. I remember it as a place of mighty green mountain-faces and cloud columns, battered by ferocious waves and patrolled by Great White sharks; full of creole superstition. I was young back then and impetuous. I got myself in some trouble and left the island with a broken arm and a hostile crowd at my back, my name bandied around on local radio.

I am a respectable man now but there is something about the cliffs and mountains of Madeira that is very similar. It brings back memories of that wild year and makes my heart run faster. Last time I was here, in the grip of island madness and suffering from blood loss, I accidentally proposed to my girlfriend on a mountain pass. Now I am back with her once again and our two children.

Madeira gives us a typical island greeting. We land into a thick sea mist and drive blindly across the island in fog and darkness, late-night reggaeton playing on the car radio, kids sleeping in the back. Overnight the mist becomes a squall and we wake to drumming rain and the banshee howl of the wind. When we venture out for breakfast our car is nearly blown off the cliff road. ‘Come to me!’ the Atlantic shouts at us far below, pounding the rocks in anticipation, throwing up spray as our wheels skid on the roadside. We have other plans though and we drive on; we eat breakfast in a warm bakery on the mountain top, then return to our house to do some half-hearted schoolwork and pace out the day.

By nighttime the storm has passed and the next day is absolutely stunning. We are high on a cliff, with ocean below us and mountains behind. A series of vertical escarpments curve around the headland like folds of green corduroy, each ridge slightly more faded than the one before until they melt away into haze and shadow. Kestrels hover over the gorge.

Some way down below us the village of Paul do Mar is a series of pastel bricks tossed down at hazard behind the sea wall. It is only about three kilometres away as the crow flies, and so we decide to stroll down after lunch, using the rambler’s trails that zig-zag down through the vegetation. For the crow a 25% gradient is just wind and freefall, but we however are chained by gravity. We set off on the hike full of excited chatter, but soon we are blowing hard and conversing in grunts. The views are amazing, but our legs are properly shaking once we get to the bottom – and that was just the walk down. It requires a cool-off period, some beers, passionfruit mocktails and a serious pep talk before we are ready to attempt the return leg. We make it home though and Matilda doesn’t even moan once. Encouraged by this we drive off to a waterfall, then on to a lighthouse for sunset.

This sets the tone for our week in Madeira. There are too many beautiful things to see and it feels like we are racing against time, trying to capture the island in a week. We march to the rhythm of invisible drums. It is a novel way to travel after months of lazy meandering down the Portuguese coast. The frantic pace becomes a game. How much can we do in a day? How many sights can we see? Schoolwork becomes shouted quizzes that take place in the car as we traverse the island.

We spend a day in the capital, Funchal, bombing down vertiginous streets in strange sledges pulled by goat-like men in straw boaters. We go swimming off the quay and dress up for a colonial tea in Reid’s Hotel for a special Matilda treat. We do a 10km hike to a famous waterfall in the interior and try to swim under it, but it is too glacial to stay in that dark mountain pool for more than a few minutes. We spot the mighty Madeiran Buzzard. We take a cable car down to a deserted ghost town in the northern tip of the island and we eat a picnic on the rocks, then get drenched by huge waves as we try to paddle. We climb up the kind of cliff path that would give Indiana Jones second thoughts, scrambling over rockslides and slithering along wet ledges where all that lies between you and the abyss is wind and fear.

Arthur and I go rock-climbing in the cliffs in the south and Arthur astonishes our guides with his monkey abilities. I don’t astonish anyone, except perhaps by not injuring myself, but the challenge of man against rock speaks to something deep in my soul, and I resolve to do daily strength exercises in future and climb El Capitán with Arthur before he is eighteen. Straight afterwards, still soaked with sweat, we hike up the highest peak on the island and Matilda treats us to a glorious meltdown at the summit.

Amid all this motion I find some hours one morning to hide myself away and have a long chat with a lovely lady from BA. Then at lunch I am able to casually mention to the family that I have bought us one-way tickets to Costa Rica next week. It is a complete bombshell and it sends everyone into disbelief then squealing and dancing. I am puffed with triumph at my own largess, the modern day hunter-gatherer of airmiles and companion vouchers.
‘We are going to Costa-Coffee Rica-pica!’ the kids sing as we rattle over mountain passes and along cliff roads in our pathetically under-powered rental car.

They are distracted now, their heads far away, but as we drive along every curve brings a new wonder and I start to wish I had held back the news until later. I can’t help thinking that even the majestic Costa Rican cloud forests may not top this wild and beautiful island.

Away from it all

Posted on September 30, 2020October 23, 2020 Posted in PortugalTagged Adventure, Bee Eaters, Birds, Camping, Eagles, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Portugal, travel, Wild Creatures, WildlifeLeave a comment

Our stay up in the São Mamede plateau was the closest yet to how we had imagined this year to be. Off the beaten track. Out in the wilderness. A simple life, miles away from the rush of the city – both physically and figuratively. It was an antidote to those moments of regret and mournful rhetoric about our altered plans (but we should be beside tropical waterfalls right now!) The self-pitying mindset is insidious and Portugal is an epic place.

The Terra Sangha project still felt in the early stages but was underpinned by a conscious attempt at slow living, traditional farming, sustainability, a rejection of digital life. It was a rugged and beautiful place, and it clearly took some work to maintain. There were olive groves, walnuts, figs and lemon trees to tend, terraces to clear, rutted paths to pave, irrigation channels to divert, log buildings that needed building. In one dusty terrace Ben had cleared a sparse vegetable patch where tomatoes, courgettes and pumpkins grew along with a few hardy flowers but full self-sufficiency still felt some way away. There were dogs, chickens and donkeys roaming around, and a fat pig called Madam Chestnut who captivated our children with her greedy charm. I couldn’t work out at first how she fitted in with the vegetarian eco vibe, but she was a long-term resident, not a food source, a survivor of the pig farm that once stood here. She reared up on her gate and grinned at us whenever we walked past and soon had the kids eating out the palm of her hand – only it was the other way around. Clever pig!

Aside from the domestic animals the place was teeming with hidden wildlife. There were the rooting marks of wild boars under the trees and we heard that pine marten and otters tracks could be found in the soft mud down by the river (though we didn’t see any). Porcupine quills and snake skins lay tangled in the scrub. We saw no traces of the Iberian Lynx but it was out there somewhere. We imagined a nighttime procession of creatures slipping and slithering down from dry hillsides to find their way to the river. Behind Ben’s farmhouse was a watching spot, a flat stone shelf by the water where he had an old mattress underneath dream-catchers, candles and other esoteric paraphenelia. He told me he had seen kingfishers there, hoopoes, egrets, a rare stork, golden orioles.

One day we drove out on a reconnaissance mission. Matilda called in an early sighting: red-green-orange swirls, gliding around and eventually solidifying into a flock of bee-eaters (or perhaps a cannonade of bee eaters). They perched for a while on a telephone wire overhead and we hung out there on the roadside beneath them, eating figs from a nearby tree and watching them through binoculars. Half a kilometre later we had to pull the car over again, as three Bonelli’s eagles (or golden eagles even?) emerged from behind a hillock right next to us, and wound their way up on the thermals, followed by maybe twenty huge griffon vultures, indistinguishable from eagles themselves but for their long necks. For a few minutes the sky was full of these huge tawny birds circling above our heads, and we were frozen there in awe, maybe a bit scared of talons and hooked beaks, like prey transfixed. We watched in silence as they drifted lazily upwards, until as tiny specks they were blown far away over the plains.

We drove on that day to Marvão, a mediaeval town perched high on the mountain top. It was a maze of glaring white houses, steep cobbled streets, a ring of churches and an old Moorish fort at the peak. There are layers on layers of historical masonry in this part of the world and this was another epicentre. Marvao was a breakaway rebel enclave in the ninth century, revolting against the moorish Emirate of Córdoba. It became a strategic stronghold through the Christian Reconquista, the war of the Spanish Succession and several exotic sounding wars I’ve never heard of (The Fantastic War! The War of the Oranges! The Peninsular Wars!). Away on a far off peak we can see another white mountaintop town, Castillo de Vide, flashing it’s battlements competitively at us. Perhaps there is a string of these fortifications all the way down the border, grimly holding back invaders.

High on the battlements of Marvao we found ourselves with views that stretched for hundreds of kilometres in every direction, and there again, against the hard blue sky, we picked out eagles patrolling the plateau below. We had been talking about how these stone ramparts were over a millennium old, but now it felt like this symbol of military power was undermined somehow by those overlords of the skies, circling, watching, enforcing their more ancient dominion over the land below.

Our week at Terra Sangha was over in no time. It was a proper adventure. Rough living. A fend-for-yourself kind of environment that suited us just fine. Crockery and cutlery were in short supply, there was no means of refrigeration, the water was suspect. The clean bedsheets waiting for us had disappeared from the washing line. The solar panels were out of action and we had no power. Although the website alluded to sunrise yoga classes, vegetarian dinners served by candlelight with homegrown ingredients, none of this seemed to be available and we found that we weren’t bothered. Instead of organised activities there were endless woods to explore, mountains to climb, a river that you could trek up for miles and stone ruins to poke around in. There was a a stone citadel where you could play guitar and watch the stars. The simplicity was part of the charm. Terra Sangha was a primeval place that and to have too many comforts would have diminished the edge.

There’s nothing like answering a call of nature as nature keeps on calling all around you.

Stone and Water

Posted on September 24, 2020October 7, 2020 Posted in PortugalTagged Adventure, Camping, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Portugal, Sao Mamede, travel, Wild CreaturesLeave a comment

We spend several days exploring Terra Sangha and the mountains around. We climb up ancient terraces that are carved into the hillsides and buttressed with lichen-covered stonework. Further walls criss-cross the land like a maze and the ghostly outlines of old, old buildings can be seen in certain clearings. From the hills above we can clearly trace the foundations of the Roman and then Moorish settlements that must have dominated this landscape for miles around. This was once the heart of a thriving civilisation, but nothing beside remains, only a stone farm with a few outbuildings, some olive groves and a couple of wooden hunting lodges that now house occasional travellers like us. Poking around under the ground we find pottery and iron fragments that we think might once have been arrow heads.

When one evening we climb the mountain behind us to watch the sunset, rather than risking snakes in the the bracken, we balance our way upwards on top of one of these creaking ancient walls. It is a simple thing of dry balanced stones with no cement, and clearly hasn’t been touched in centuries, but is so carefully fitted that four of us in succession pass up safely with barely a stone moving.

In this dry land we become obsessive about water, and from our cabin, the chatter of the river is a siren call. We find shade down at the river, we swim there to cool off, we use it to chill our milk and beers, we make complicated dams and stone towers. Arthur is in his element here and irrepressible as a water rat. He splashes, hangs from trees, throws stones, catches lizards and chases dragonflies, carves a bow, whittles arrows, makes elaborate snares in the bushes, diverts water into a series of fish catching pools. Matilda meanwhile sits on a sunny rock and sings to herself.

Our cabin has an outside tap with water that is pumped directly from the river.
“Don’t worry. The water is filtered,” Said Ben when we arrived “and the pressure is pretty good right now because I’ve just changed the filter.” He turned the faucet with a flourish. It hesitated, shuddered, coughed out a spray and then subsided to a dribble.
“So we can drink it then?”
He thought a while. “No-o. I wouldn’t advise you to drink it. It can be drunk. But I don’t think your insides are ready for it.” Looking at our worried little faces. “Don’t worry though. We’ve got a spring on the site. You can fill up bottles from there. It’s very pure.”
“Oh right. A mineral spring. Like your own Evian?”
“Um yeah. Like Evian.”

We don’t want to use our car unless we have to, it seems against the subsistence ethos of this place, and who can argue with a natural mountain spring? Arthur is dispatched cross country to fill our water bottles every day. He doesn’t complain, but when I go with him to fill up at the spring one evening in the half light, I find it teeming with worrying wildlife and full of over-rich organic smells. You must descend down some steps to a dank pool that is full of frogs and mosquito larvae, thick spider webs and who knows what else. The ancient donkeys of Terra Sangha come to water here and the air is pungent with the smell of their piss. The precious spring water trickles out of a mossy pipe inches above this dark pool. Your water bottle must be slotted onto the pipe with some dexterity to avoid contamination with the stagnant water beneath, and then you must push downwards and submerge it in the slime to find an angle so the bottle will fill. You squat there for several long minutes, hunched in the darkness, waiting for the water to trickle in while sly reeds pretend to be spiders on your neck, frogs splash around and small biting creatures drone in your ears.

A few days into our stay I have a wild and feverish night, roaming and tossing in the darkness, creatures running over me in strange smothering dreams. For some hours I battle my demons until at 5am I give up and leave the cabin to wait for dawn. I wrap myself in the Indian rug that I call my bearskin and take myself down to the river. Crossing the stepping stones to the far side I wedge myself between two tree roots that trail over the water and settle in for sunrise, hoping to see kingfishers. I have a strange hallucinatory time there in the half light, immersed in the sound of the river. I find myself slipping beneath the surface to slither through pebbles and submerge myself in the silt. Reborn slippery and grey in the ancient coiled roots under the river bed I take on many forms. The kingfishers don’t come.

When Menna finds me some hours later I feel very cold and have a sickness deep in my stomach.

I face down the illness. I am determined that I will not lose a day with my family in this special place. It is just some food poisoning from the chicken kebabs I barbecued last night (they did taste mushy in the darkness) or perhaps a small stomach upset from swimming in the river, a germ from dirty hands. It will pass.

We go out walking in the late morning climbing up to the eastern peaks that face down onto the property. We have been told about a high viewpoint from which you can admire the topography of the São Mamede plateau. I lag behind on the ascent and sweat a lot. We make it up to a high point and see an undulating landscape of yellows, browns and deep greens. The trees bring life to this dusty world: sage colours of olives, walnuts and twisted corks up on the higher mountain faces, the deeper greens of oaks, limes, poplar, birch and hazel amassed around the hidden river below.

We try to make a homeward circuit and get totally lost up there in the hills in the midday heat. Our landmarks for safe return are strange rocks and twisted trees, a sunken path, a certain hilltop ringed with white stones. These milestones shift and change from different perspectives; similar features trick us and take us clambering up false paths. We end up following circular goat tracks that end in impenetrable thickets, always convinced we can hear the river close by and will somehow overcome the banks of thorn and brushwood to find it; that one true path home. We have no water and the whole thing is slightly nightmarish though I am determined not to indulge in further dream cycles of death and rebirth. One mustn’t panic in front of the kids.

We are on the mountain for a couple of hours until we find a path that leads to the river and finally we see the Roman bridge that means safety and I nearly cry. We make it home, bruised and scratched. It is 3pm and kids are hungry for lunch while I collapse into the hammock and pass out for hours. The kids take secret pictures of me asleep. It is a horrible sight.

Two days later Menna looks at our water bottle as it is illuminated in a shaft of light. There, in the ‘Evian’ spring water we have been drinking all week, are tiny nematodes, long as a finger nail, furiously alive and hungry. They coil and twist like malevolent worms. I feel mixed emotions: a resurgent nausea, vindication at a bona fide parasite to blame, slightly bitter that I was the only one to fall sick. Am I now the weak member of the herd?

We don’t drink any more water from the spring and when we leave at the end of the week, Menna doses us all with her most potent antiparasitic medicine.

Off Grid

Posted on September 22, 2020December 12, 2020 Posted in PortugalTagged Adventure, Camping, Escape, family road trip, Lockdown, Nature, Off-grid, Portugal, Sao Mamede, travel, WildlifeLeave a comment

The Serra de São Mamede is a spur of the Toledo mountain range, sitting high above the Alentejo, dividing countries and climates. On the eastern side you have Portugal and the Atlantic terrains, and on the west is Spain and the Mediterranean. We are staying deep in the protected national park that nestles on the Portuguese side of the mountains, and it takes us five hours driving cross-country to get there.

There is a symbolic aspect to the journey as we gradually leave civilisation behind us and wind our way up mountain roads into the wilderness. Towns become villages, vegetation thins out, roads get pocked and increasingly rutted until finally the asphalt ends and we bump the last few miles down a red dirt track, squeezing between rocks. Then we have arrived – that is to say there comes a point where we can’t drive any further and we abandon our car in a scorched sandy clearing and proceed on foot as the sun begins to set.

The domain of Terra Sangha stretches out over the hillside like a dusty crumpled blanket, seamed with dry stone walls and scored by a river’s crease. There is an simple farmhouse in the middle of it all and that is where Ben resides, cooking on wood and lit by candles. He has no power at the moment, the solar panels have been out of action ‘for a few weeks now’, but Ben does not let such worldly matters affect him. It won’t affect us either, he tells us as he takes us to our cabin, we didn’t have solar panels to start with.

After some months of relatively civilised living on the Iberian littoral, we are now going totally off-grid. That means living with no electricity, drinking water, flushing toilet, oven, shower, tv, window-glass, wifi, phone signal or refrigeration. “There’s a cool box somewhere if you need it. I can bring you ice.” Says Ben vaguely and disappears off into the dusk, leaving us alone in our glade.

Our car, full of the heat-sensitive provisions that we have purchased for this week, is about a kilometre away and darkness is falling fast. The evening is dry and windless, the temperature still sits obstinately in the low thirties. We have some work to do.
“Does anyone know where the head torch is?” Asks Menna pointlessly.

We toil backwards and forwards to the car, laden with many (un-eco) bags full of (non-vegan) provisions, (unsuitable) clothes and (unchargeable) electrical items. We leave surfboards and bikes dumped on scrubland by the car. We climb walls, stumble over hidden obstacles, get scratched by tree branches and curse a lot. The night falls quickly once the sun has dipped behind the mountains and the darkness is complete and unequivocal.

Dinner is a basic pasta, cooked by torchlight outside on a rusty two-ring gas stove. Around us the night comes alive with wild calls and rustling that may be leaves in the breeze but may equally be prowling paws. The Iberian lynx still lives in these remote mountains I tell the kids, maybe bears too, certainly wild boar. They have both gone very quiet and don’t venture outside the safe sphere of light that the solar lamp throws over our trestle table. Matilda screams occasionally as flying creatures suddenly zoom past her head. This is a sanctuary for bats as well we remember, and our cabin has no window panes. They will come in and sleep in the rafters.

By ten o clock we are all tucked up in our single room, wide eyed in the darkness, listening to the forest breathing around us.

The best thing about arriving somewhere after dark is that you get to arrive all over again in the morning. Our cabin sits up on a flat terrace and when the dawn sun emerges over the shoulder of the mountain opposite, it throws beams between the tree tops and through our windows. The light illuminates the dust motes floating in our dark wooden room and falls across our faces of our sleeping children in their driftwood beds, making them look unwashed and strangely angelic. I stumble to the window and stick out a squinting sun-scrunched face to take in our new world. A glade of yellow grasses, a wall of poplar, cork and lime trees, the mercury flash of running water glittering in the shadows, mountains ahead and behind, forest all around us. Birds flitter through the foliage.

We can live without wifi for a while I think.

Mutant Skies

Tag: Off-grid

Beware the Otter

Night Walk

The Shaman

Amazon

A Mental Breakdown. Part III

A Mental Breakdown. Part II

A Mental Breakdown. Part I

Brazilian Road Trip. Day Five

Brazilian Road Trip. Day Three

Masque of the Red Death

The Landlord

Island Madness

Away from it all

Stone and Water

Off Grid