http://www.warringtoncyclecampaign.co.uk/facility-of-the-month/
Here's a nice little blog about how our highways engineers cater for the cyclist....bless.....
Tuesday 14 August 2012
Saturday 26 September 2009
These Internet Bloggers' Blogs
Don’t internet entrepreneurs bug you. I mean they always seem to start their blogs by saying “Look at me I’m sitting in a café in some insanely cool part of town writing this to all you poor people who are sat in your office nine to five job bored and internet surfing! Aren’t I fantastic?”
I often think to myself that if its that easy and that rewarding being an internet blogger, then why don’t they write their blogs somewhere else? You know, somewhere more…inspirational?
For instance, and I realise that I may sound just as bad as them here, but I am sitting in the botanic gardens in Sydney writing this. Let me describe the scene., I am sitting on a bench, that for a change is actually named after someone who is…or at least was when the bench was sited, still living. There’s a path and a low stone wall in front of me and then I can see Farmers bay on Sydney harbour. To my left I can see the ferries leaving for Manly and the zoo coming from the direction of circular quay where the Opera house is. Following my gaze from left to right the far side of this modest rounded bay is closed with the far side of the park. This is where Queen Elizabeth first set foot on Australian soil incidentally in 1954. A hundred different types of trees, plants, grasses and birds are lining the shore of this silky water. Tall Palm trees interspersed with incredible gnarly ancient species that were brought here a hundred years ago or more by some keen, presumably British, botanist. The sun is I admit a bit weak today but its still warm enough and the light of the late day is slowly turning golden and casting its long shadows onto the path and beyond the trees and creating even more texture to the gentle colourful ripples of the bay.
My point is, if you are going to make people jealous by posting this, at least make it somewhere worthwhile. I’m not trying to make anyone jealous, rather I’m using this as a vehicle for describing where I am in a constructive way. The truth is that these internet bloggers are just as tied to their places of work as we all seem to be, I’m not sure why though, it cant be just the availability of internet..can it? In my opinion writing here in the gardens is infinitely better than writing in some city centre café getting high off caffeine. Next time I write might be from the top of a mountain or on a boat or maybe on the ever so cliché beach…who knows where. In the meantime, I will sit here until dark and then head off somewhere to find some wifi in order to post this thing….oooh I just realised, if you can type without looking at the keys you can actually look at the view while your typing!! Bonus!! I think we should all try it….
I often think to myself that if its that easy and that rewarding being an internet blogger, then why don’t they write their blogs somewhere else? You know, somewhere more…inspirational?
For instance, and I realise that I may sound just as bad as them here, but I am sitting in the botanic gardens in Sydney writing this. Let me describe the scene., I am sitting on a bench, that for a change is actually named after someone who is…or at least was when the bench was sited, still living. There’s a path and a low stone wall in front of me and then I can see Farmers bay on Sydney harbour. To my left I can see the ferries leaving for Manly and the zoo coming from the direction of circular quay where the Opera house is. Following my gaze from left to right the far side of this modest rounded bay is closed with the far side of the park. This is where Queen Elizabeth first set foot on Australian soil incidentally in 1954. A hundred different types of trees, plants, grasses and birds are lining the shore of this silky water. Tall Palm trees interspersed with incredible gnarly ancient species that were brought here a hundred years ago or more by some keen, presumably British, botanist. The sun is I admit a bit weak today but its still warm enough and the light of the late day is slowly turning golden and casting its long shadows onto the path and beyond the trees and creating even more texture to the gentle colourful ripples of the bay.
My point is, if you are going to make people jealous by posting this, at least make it somewhere worthwhile. I’m not trying to make anyone jealous, rather I’m using this as a vehicle for describing where I am in a constructive way. The truth is that these internet bloggers are just as tied to their places of work as we all seem to be, I’m not sure why though, it cant be just the availability of internet..can it? In my opinion writing here in the gardens is infinitely better than writing in some city centre café getting high off caffeine. Next time I write might be from the top of a mountain or on a boat or maybe on the ever so cliché beach…who knows where. In the meantime, I will sit here until dark and then head off somewhere to find some wifi in order to post this thing….oooh I just realised, if you can type without looking at the keys you can actually look at the view while your typing!! Bonus!! I think we should all try it….
Trees
The knarled trees reminds me of fairy tales. Old and curved with a thousand crevices and knots and curves. Its leaves hanging low over the dirt path, its shade has stopped the grass from growing beneath its marvellous canopy. If I was an elf or a hobbit or even a kid with a plastic sword I would hide there waiting for the monsters to retreat…. When it rains I would snuggle into my cloak watching the leaves flutter with a hundred shades of green emerging and surrounding me while smelling the fresh wet soil being dampened by the downpour outside. When the sun comes out and it is too hot I would enter the cavernous undercroft and take shade while cracking bone dry branches beneath my feet and listening to the lone blackbird above me singing the lament of the day. The tree is protector, the tree is master of the forest, the old grandparent, wise and scarred from a hundred years or life and living. Its bark is tough and flaky but creates textures of amazing interest. Its branches are tangled growing low then rising up like a piece of thick wire twisted in many directions but still growing on. Its leaves however are still as soft when they first sprout in spring. Still as green on midsummer’s day, still as gentle when they fall from the tree, still as crunchy when dried by the sun and frozen by the frost.
When one has a camera in ones face, doesn’t it just give you the ability to play the fool. Rather like being on stage except now all the world truly is a stage more so than ever before. You can jump around in public places, kiss or paint or even hit people with the justification being that there is a camera there and I’m allowed to! The camera is the license to act to let go, especially when being directed to do so by the cameraman! Who knows where it will end…I just know that it has made me loose my thread….
When one has a camera in ones face, doesn’t it just give you the ability to play the fool. Rather like being on stage except now all the world truly is a stage more so than ever before. You can jump around in public places, kiss or paint or even hit people with the justification being that there is a camera there and I’m allowed to! The camera is the license to act to let go, especially when being directed to do so by the cameraman! Who knows where it will end…I just know that it has made me loose my thread….
Thursday 3 September 2009
The Quality of a Public Life
Last night I was sitting on my own in a small run down coffee shop in central Sydney, gazing out of the window onto the bustling street outside with what must have been a very melancholy expression on my face. It was between my first and second sips of coffee that it suddenly hit me who I was at that moment in time. Gazing through the window, in a quiet world of my own taking time out from the hectic life of the city. It suddenley hit me that 'Yes, I was that person' that person who I have seen so many times before, that nameless person who you glimpse as you pass through our man made urban jungles. The person who, as David Bowie so stylishly observed, thought he saw in an ice cream parlour, drinking milkshakes cold and long. Indeed someone could have written a song about me last night and I wouldn’t even know I was in their song. I don’t know what it is that attracts our gaze to these people. They are usually poor wretches walking or sitting alone and I assume it is their stories that we are interested in, we somehow have a desire to want to know who they are and what their story is. But they are people who I always notice especially while passing by in a car, the windows up, almost immune to the dust, smells, noises and people outside.
It is an enduring quality of our urban environments that create such varying degrees of interest and cross pollination of views, thoughts and sights. For instance before I realised who I was last night I was thinking about what was on at the theatre. And I dare say if anyone did notice me while passing they could have been thinking of something equally as random. Ofcourse there is a small chance that they were actually walking around looking for inspiration for thier 70's inspired concept album but i doubt it. But with that my friend i can try to show why we love to live in cities…..unpredictability with interest and distractions on every corner. For all the faults and problems of urban living, it is undoubtably one of the most interesting places to be.
It is an enduring quality of our urban environments that create such varying degrees of interest and cross pollination of views, thoughts and sights. For instance before I realised who I was last night I was thinking about what was on at the theatre. And I dare say if anyone did notice me while passing they could have been thinking of something equally as random. Ofcourse there is a small chance that they were actually walking around looking for inspiration for thier 70's inspired concept album but i doubt it. But with that my friend i can try to show why we love to live in cities…..unpredictability with interest and distractions on every corner. For all the faults and problems of urban living, it is undoubtably one of the most interesting places to be.
Monday 31 August 2009
Australia, Land of the Free (if you don't mind being told what to do)
Australia Land of the Free.... (If you don’t mind being told what to do that is)
That’s the image of Australia that I had. Surfing every lunchtime, a bohemian, free society where the sun dictated the lifestyle, where barbies on the beach were an everyday occurrence and where you didn’t have the hassle from back home. No politicians or news programs scaring you with tales of woe, no silly little regulations like ‘No ball games, no camping or no barbeques’ on perfectly good pieces of grass...ah I couldn’t wait, Australia, here I come....
Okay, let’s get one thing straight. Australia is not sunny all the time. I repeat, not sunny all the time. Not only this but it actually rains and feels cold here! I remember my first ever trip to Bondi beach wearing my hat coat and gloves I looked ridiculous. Not only this but Australia is probably one of the most regulative countries that I’ve ever been to. Now maybe this is a slight misconception because I don’t understand Spanish or German very well so I may have missed a lot of the ‘you can’t do this’ signs everywhere on other trips but hear me out because this is important.
My first contact with those dreaded signs on buildings and at the side of roads was when I was in a camper van travelling along from Cairns to Brisbane. Now the reason I did this was because Australia is expensive and I sure wasn’t going to be paying $40 a night for a dorm bed together with crazily priced bus travel and crazily slow train travel. So I hired a van thinking that it would kill two or three birds in one stone. For instance, I had transport, I had a bed and I didn’t have to live in dorms full of ‘I’m travelling (on Daddy’s credit card)’ British teenagers. Perfect. On the sides of some of these campervans they have pictures saying something like ‘Wake up with a sea view every morning’.... Ah the freedom! That sold me, the idea of parking up at a deserted beach, watching the sunrise before having a nice al fresco bit of Aussie tucker. Yes perfect.....But no. Unfortunately this idea of freedom like so many things is not exactly what happens in real life. I mean I managed it a few times but I can’t think of anywhere where I didn’t see a picture of a tent with a big red line through it. That’s okay I thought, I’m in a camper van not a tent. However, I got woken up at 6am on two separate occasions and asked to move on by an albeit friendly officer in a fluorescent jacket. From then on I admit I started ‘noticing’ these things. I noticed that 'tiredness kills' about every three kilometres but that you can’t really pull up to rest without the threat of the little fluorescent people visiting you in the morning. I noticed that on public transport ‘people on concessionary fares’ had to give up their seat for full fare paying passengers at busy times or risk being fined. I noticed that ID is required EVERYWHERE and if you don’t have any even though you may look 40 years old, you can’t come in. I noticed that if you cause annoyance to any other person on the beach at Byron Bay you can be fined! I heard the radio playing silly little songs about swine flu and why you should ‘wash your hands with soap’ I also noticed why people never crossed the road when the green man wasn’t visible but there were no cars within view, anywhere. It turns out that pedestrians who cause a hazard to vehicles can be fined!!! Excuse me?? I thought pedestrians had a right to walk as well! However this silly jaywalking rule wasn’t the main thing that got my gripe. In a local paper, the equivalent of the metro paper in the UK, (yes I know tabloid) there was on the front page an article that I really couldn’t believe, in fact it spurred me on to write this article....It read ‘Ipeds told to unplug’ (mxbrisbane 27th August, 2009) The article was about how pedestrians who listen to MP3 players while walking ‘near roads and traffic’ should unplug because they cause traffic hazards! They could receive a $2000 fine or even jail!! How can they do this! It also says that most accidents are caused in the CBD by careless pedestrians walking out in front of cars!!! As if the car driver who could be listening to deaf metal, would most likely be confused by the amount of people, buildings and confusing directions in the city centre would have no blame whatsoever! But the lone pedestrian after waiting for what seems like an age for the little green man to appear and finally being able to cross the road, even though traffic still comes round the corner, if he or she is hit by a car and if by any chance they are listening to Coldplay on their iPod they will be to blame!
I know not the reasons for this, I only know that it makes Britain look like a very liberal country. I guess it may still be the regulatory hangover that this country has got from copied British regulations of the 1970’s and 80’s that the UK has hopefully de-toxed itself of. My only hope is that the next generation tries harder to expand the image of Australia that most people have, that of lunchtime surfing, freedom to live life to the full and cricket being able to be played underneath a turquoise sky on any day of the week while eating Kanger Bangers in the shade of a eucalyptus.
That’s the image of Australia that I had. Surfing every lunchtime, a bohemian, free society where the sun dictated the lifestyle, where barbies on the beach were an everyday occurrence and where you didn’t have the hassle from back home. No politicians or news programs scaring you with tales of woe, no silly little regulations like ‘No ball games, no camping or no barbeques’ on perfectly good pieces of grass...ah I couldn’t wait, Australia, here I come....
Okay, let’s get one thing straight. Australia is not sunny all the time. I repeat, not sunny all the time. Not only this but it actually rains and feels cold here! I remember my first ever trip to Bondi beach wearing my hat coat and gloves I looked ridiculous. Not only this but Australia is probably one of the most regulative countries that I’ve ever been to. Now maybe this is a slight misconception because I don’t understand Spanish or German very well so I may have missed a lot of the ‘you can’t do this’ signs everywhere on other trips but hear me out because this is important.
My first contact with those dreaded signs on buildings and at the side of roads was when I was in a camper van travelling along from Cairns to Brisbane. Now the reason I did this was because Australia is expensive and I sure wasn’t going to be paying $40 a night for a dorm bed together with crazily priced bus travel and crazily slow train travel. So I hired a van thinking that it would kill two or three birds in one stone. For instance, I had transport, I had a bed and I didn’t have to live in dorms full of ‘I’m travelling (on Daddy’s credit card)’ British teenagers. Perfect. On the sides of some of these campervans they have pictures saying something like ‘Wake up with a sea view every morning’.... Ah the freedom! That sold me, the idea of parking up at a deserted beach, watching the sunrise before having a nice al fresco bit of Aussie tucker. Yes perfect.....But no. Unfortunately this idea of freedom like so many things is not exactly what happens in real life. I mean I managed it a few times but I can’t think of anywhere where I didn’t see a picture of a tent with a big red line through it. That’s okay I thought, I’m in a camper van not a tent. However, I got woken up at 6am on two separate occasions and asked to move on by an albeit friendly officer in a fluorescent jacket. From then on I admit I started ‘noticing’ these things. I noticed that 'tiredness kills' about every three kilometres but that you can’t really pull up to rest without the threat of the little fluorescent people visiting you in the morning. I noticed that on public transport ‘people on concessionary fares’ had to give up their seat for full fare paying passengers at busy times or risk being fined. I noticed that ID is required EVERYWHERE and if you don’t have any even though you may look 40 years old, you can’t come in. I noticed that if you cause annoyance to any other person on the beach at Byron Bay you can be fined! I heard the radio playing silly little songs about swine flu and why you should ‘wash your hands with soap’ I also noticed why people never crossed the road when the green man wasn’t visible but there were no cars within view, anywhere. It turns out that pedestrians who cause a hazard to vehicles can be fined!!! Excuse me?? I thought pedestrians had a right to walk as well! However this silly jaywalking rule wasn’t the main thing that got my gripe. In a local paper, the equivalent of the metro paper in the UK, (yes I know tabloid) there was on the front page an article that I really couldn’t believe, in fact it spurred me on to write this article....It read ‘Ipeds told to unplug’ (mxbrisbane 27th August, 2009) The article was about how pedestrians who listen to MP3 players while walking ‘near roads and traffic’ should unplug because they cause traffic hazards! They could receive a $2000 fine or even jail!! How can they do this! It also says that most accidents are caused in the CBD by careless pedestrians walking out in front of cars!!! As if the car driver who could be listening to deaf metal, would most likely be confused by the amount of people, buildings and confusing directions in the city centre would have no blame whatsoever! But the lone pedestrian after waiting for what seems like an age for the little green man to appear and finally being able to cross the road, even though traffic still comes round the corner, if he or she is hit by a car and if by any chance they are listening to Coldplay on their iPod they will be to blame!
I know not the reasons for this, I only know that it makes Britain look like a very liberal country. I guess it may still be the regulatory hangover that this country has got from copied British regulations of the 1970’s and 80’s that the UK has hopefully de-toxed itself of. My only hope is that the next generation tries harder to expand the image of Australia that most people have, that of lunchtime surfing, freedom to live life to the full and cricket being able to be played underneath a turquoise sky on any day of the week while eating Kanger Bangers in the shade of a eucalyptus.
Little known History of South America
“South America, there’s no history there!”
I must say I was inclined to agree with my colleague on this topic. We Europeans seem to have a very narrow scope when it comes to valuing our old colonies’ histories and cultures, I suppose in lots of ways we always have. For instance even the most uninterested student who has been taught a smidgen of history will have some recollection of the mighty Incas and will of course have seen pictures of Macchu Pichu and Nazca. They will also understand perhaps that our Iberian neighbours colonised so much of South America that it is “practically Spain,” as one friend casually announced before I left. The population in general seem to know nothing however of the great pre Inca civilisation of Tiwanaku whose people devised a way of time keeping remarkably similar to our Gregorian calendar. They have little knowledge of the great convict fleets from Britain to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales that passed through Rio de Janeiro in order to maintain favourable winds, (and that the poor souls aboard often spent more time in port than on the ocean!) They are also pretty ignorant of the great mining industries in the Atacama desert where Britain and her entrepreneurial pioneers assisted Chile in its War of the Pacific against what is today one of the poorest countries in the world.
So before i left olde England i made a point of visiting all the historic places i could. I spent lots of time in York gazing up at the lofty spires of the Minster and wandering aimlessly along the ancient alleyways. Yes I stumbled along the cobbles of the old roman Via Principalis and gazed up at the statue of Constantine, who was proclaimed emperor of the known world right here. I also visited the late gothic masterpiece of Kings College Chapel in Cambridge...just to ensure, like a camel, I could sustain myself along my journey of historical draught, at least until reached Macchu Picchu.
Rio De Janeiro is a wonderful city in a truly spectacular location. Surrounded by round topped tropical hills, randomly thrusting out of the sea and backed by endangered coastal rainforest of a thousand shades of green. The physical fabric of the city however has been eroded by insensitive post war development accommodating the need for great financial institutions and terrifying gated condominiums. These rise like great concrete walls blocking the city from its still magnificent beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.
But dig a little and there you will find some fascinating facts. For instance Rio was actually the residence of the Portuguese royal family once upon a time. The colonial era also left behind some fantastic villas especially in the area of Santa Teresa where clambouring up the hill are great mansions once belonging to the rich and famous of new world society. Did you also know that Captain James Cook was most put out when he visited Rio on his first voyage around the world? Apparently the authorities didn’t show due respect which greatly perturbed the great British explorer. Even the great Charles Darwin thought the rainforest around Rio was the most beautiful he had ever seen.
Brazil is a mix of many different cultures and creeds and it shows in the faces of the people and the micro culturalism of the country. On my trip south in Brasil this mix of cultures and diversity was illustrated in a unique way. After staying in the coastal island of Santa Catarina I headed inland to explore a little bit more of this gigantic country. After an hour or so the landscape changed and the green hills, streams and cows casually chewing the grass suddenly didn’t look alien at all and when I saw a small shop at the side of the road selling ripe red apples, long sausages hanging from the eaves and giant jars of honey this place was suddenly reminiscent of a small alpine village. Even more so when on entering the lady was not dark skinned and dark eyed with the natural coco beauty of the north of brasil but she was pasty and freckled and had a rather odd accent. It turned out that I was on the outskirts of a place called Alfredo Wagner. Now that doesn’t sound very Portuguese does it? This village was a gem, nestled between some spectacular scenery and with more than a whiff of old Bavaria about it. The bars used the same calligraphic scrollwork to sell their beers and some places even sold sauerkraut alongside the Brazilian staple of rice and beans! However the strangest thing I saw here, nestled amongst a small group of modern almost suburban housing was a dwelling that presented itself with a hand painted sign as Papa Noel’s house. Indeed this was a cottage that could have come straight from Heidi and the little middle aged man who came out to great us could have been a young version of Pinocchio’s father. This man was a master woodworker and every year he opens his house for all the children in the village and dresses up as Papa Noel. Under his porch he has an entire model village complete with little handcrafted figurines all made by himself. It was a fascinating place and got even stranger when I saw the palm trees and ferns behind his house and heard that he didn’t speak any Portuguese until he was 6 as everyone spoke German.
There are a lot of German peoples in Brazil, They have cultivated the land and form some of the most wealthy and stable political areas of the country. Originally expelled from Europe in the 19th century many came here to seek religious freedom. Our Papa Noel even remembered members of the original indigenous communities here who now seem to have inter bred or succumbed to the foreign infections of the Europeans.
The second place that I at least knew nothing of, was the ancient pre Inca city of Tiwanaku. This huge area of mainly religious structures pre dates the Inca by at least a thousand years. At its peak between 300 and 1000AD this place high on the Andean Altiplano in what is now northern Bolivia near Lake Titicaca had massive implications both culturally and economically for the entire mid Andean region of South America. Its crowning and most fascinating features are perhaps the Sun and Moon gates. These substantial square structures, one of which was almost taken away by the British in the 19th century to put in the British museum, stand ominously now re erected as near as possible to their original sites on line with the solstices. The Moon gate in particular was fascinating in its decoration as our guide explained the gate actually contains divisions that represent 7 days of the week and 12 months of the year. This is fascinating in the fact that it is pretty much the same system of dates and days that we use today in our Gregorian calendar.
In the centre of the Tiwanaku complex stands a large pyramid that is currently being investigated and reconstructed using the excavated material which is formed and dried into mud bricks. The result is a 5 tiered pyramid that apparently once contained a sacred pond on its summit which the high priests used to gaze at the stars in the reflection collected in the pool. This again is remarkably similar to the technique that is used in modern astronomy whereby the image is reflected off a giant mirror.
These structures form a trinity of temples that represent the earth, heavens and underworld. Sci fi nuts will be intrigued by the temple of the underworld which is sunk into the ground in front of the sun gate and contains the stone heads of various important figures somehow associated with Tiwanaku. The oddity comes from the fact that many believe these heads do not look human and indeed one or two are resemblent of the characteristic little green men from mars!
My next port of call was the Peruvian city of Arequipa. This place feels as if it is slightly off the tourist trail and most people visit here to visit the worlds deepest canyon, the Colca Canyon. However Arequipa’s other attractions are its proximity to the huge snow capped volcanoes of the Andes, its fantastic colonnaded main square and its many fine churches, the most notable of these being the Nunnery of Santa Catalina. This huge ’citadel’ sits in the north eastern quarter of the city and was completely off limits to anyone but enrolled nuns since its foundation in 1580 until the 1970’s when the nuns were forced to open their citadel. If like me you are intrigued by the secrecy of such places and just cant help but peak through keyholes in National Trust properties just to the see the rooms that are off limits then you will love this place. The majority of the area has been opened to the public now and as soon as one walks through the huge wooden doors and into the first beautifully coloured courtyard you really do feel honoured to be allowed here. The whole citadel is divided into a series of colonnaded courtyards surrounded by streets and corridors that lead to each of the individual nuns cells. The vibrant blues and reds make this place the envy of the most pretentious boutique hotel and the carving of the columns and tiled flooring oozes that great sense of history created by thousands of years of footsteps.
The nuns cells are accessed off actual mini streets that link this initially confusing place into an ordered whole. The cells were by no means identical but mostly started with a single main room with a door onto the street, followed by secondary rooms and each had a courtyard where wonderfully blackened clay ovens still formed the centrepiece of what where once the nuns private kitchens. The atmosphere was similar to finding an old deserted building and being the only one there because the complex never felt crowded. There was also a great little café which sold such things as ‘Without remorse chocolate brownie’ along with various other surprisingly nice cakes named after the seven deadly sins! The visit takes a good afternoon to get through but my favourite time was when the sun had just set and all through the complex candles and oil lamps were lit, this caused me to have a second walk around the whole place just to soak up this magical place.
By the time I reached northern Chile the cultures and history of this amazing continent were still milling around my mind and I was struggling to comprehend the complexities of indigenous peoples and their rich culture with the colonising European culture which was in lots of ways so familiar to me but in other ways was subtly but magnificently different. However the last place I visited really had a wild west flavour to it. I was staying in Iquique on the Pacific Coast. At first this place appeared as a nice but ordinary city next to the sea with a great promenade. But on my first night after wandering around trying to find the centre I stumbled upon the old main street. All my curiosities of what old 19th century Chile was like were rewarded with the old main street containing a whole collection of wonderful timber stores, hotels and bars. It was just like walking down main street in an old cowboy film. The close boarded timber fronts mostly sported wonderful verandas and balconies simple but wonderfully decorated. This stretch of street also had a tram and extended for about half a mile. This satisfied my lust for history that in so many places was difficult to find but my main reason for coming to Iquique was to travel I inland into the driest desert in the world to visit a real life ghost town. The town was called Humberstone. It was situated about 40km from Iquique adjacent the great Pacific Highway. Whereas Iquique being next to the coast often had its fair share of fog this place always seemed dry and hot. I travelled there by bus and hopped off onto the dusty ground into what at first one might think of as a real functioning town with houses and telegraph wires and vehicles. But when I crossed the road there was only one home that was inhabited and that looked like it was the caretakers house. Beyond it was a wide street leading off towards what looked like a giant flat topped spoil heap at the end. On either side were low rise pre fab houses with corrugated tin roofs most of which still had old timber fences and others with quite ornate trellising. Humberstone was a true ghost town. It was founded in 1872 by the British owned Peru Nitrate Company and named after its founder James Thomas Humberstone as a Nitrate and Saltpeter mine. The business was a great success and a railway led towards Iquique where the stuff was exported. Such rich resources led Peru and Bolivia to declare war on Chile in 1879 in which Chile was greatly supported by the colonial powers and resulted in Bolivia loosing its access to the Pacific coast. Humberstone subsequently became very rich and the facilities on site included a swimming pool and a wonderful theatre situated within the market square. The primary school was particularly interesting and because it was built by the British it had lots of similarities with a 19th century school in Britain only it was made of wood and had basketball hoops outside. The town was finally abandoned in the 1960’s and has been left pretty much as it was. The most enticing area however is reached by walking from the town up a short slope to where the big industry was located. There’s a surprising amount of buildings still standing and because there is so little rain in this part of the world the structures and machinery are not rusted away and corroded but still in situ. The giant corrugated iron sheds where the nitrate was processed still contain dials and giant cogs and conveyer belts. The offices for the foreman and the store rooms where the employees collected their work gear and supplies are all still there and what’s more still accessible. Outside the railway lines run onwards toward on their lonely journey to the coast before being buried by the dust and sand through this vast post apocalyptic landscape.
I left Humberstone with a much greater understanding of the history and cultural diversities contained within South America. I really felt that my journey of understanding was complete. When I set out I expected to see some European style cities and was looking forward to seeing Machu Picchu and the Nasca Lines and learning more about the incredibly rich cultures that existed here before being exploited by their colonial impostors. But I never expected to see such places as Tiwanaku. I never really comprehended that the great empires of these civilisations were just as great as anything we had ever had in Europe. The new world settlements because they used locally available materials and styles and because there were inhabited by local people enabled the whole to take on its own unique culture. For example Humberstone and Iquique. Arequipa could have been in Spain but the rich culture of the indigenous peoples still shows strongly. Even the religious art in the Nunnery was painted and thereby interpreted by indigenous peoples leading to an almost covert multiculturalism that cant have been noticed by the colonial overlords or how could it have survived? The colonisation of these places arguably had the intention of wiping out such cultures, but what has happened has been an evolution into true ethnically diverse nations with their own unique culture and historical assets…enough to satisfy the most naïve ‘historically big headed’ European .
I now feel recharged on culture, in fact I’m pretty much full to the brim. Just as well really I guess, because my next challenge…is Australia!
Note: Tiwanaku and Humberstone are both listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
I must say I was inclined to agree with my colleague on this topic. We Europeans seem to have a very narrow scope when it comes to valuing our old colonies’ histories and cultures, I suppose in lots of ways we always have. For instance even the most uninterested student who has been taught a smidgen of history will have some recollection of the mighty Incas and will of course have seen pictures of Macchu Pichu and Nazca. They will also understand perhaps that our Iberian neighbours colonised so much of South America that it is “practically Spain,” as one friend casually announced before I left. The population in general seem to know nothing however of the great pre Inca civilisation of Tiwanaku whose people devised a way of time keeping remarkably similar to our Gregorian calendar. They have little knowledge of the great convict fleets from Britain to the Australian penal colony of New South Wales that passed through Rio de Janeiro in order to maintain favourable winds, (and that the poor souls aboard often spent more time in port than on the ocean!) They are also pretty ignorant of the great mining industries in the Atacama desert where Britain and her entrepreneurial pioneers assisted Chile in its War of the Pacific against what is today one of the poorest countries in the world.
So before i left olde England i made a point of visiting all the historic places i could. I spent lots of time in York gazing up at the lofty spires of the Minster and wandering aimlessly along the ancient alleyways. Yes I stumbled along the cobbles of the old roman Via Principalis and gazed up at the statue of Constantine, who was proclaimed emperor of the known world right here. I also visited the late gothic masterpiece of Kings College Chapel in Cambridge...just to ensure, like a camel, I could sustain myself along my journey of historical draught, at least until reached Macchu Picchu.
Rio De Janeiro is a wonderful city in a truly spectacular location. Surrounded by round topped tropical hills, randomly thrusting out of the sea and backed by endangered coastal rainforest of a thousand shades of green. The physical fabric of the city however has been eroded by insensitive post war development accommodating the need for great financial institutions and terrifying gated condominiums. These rise like great concrete walls blocking the city from its still magnificent beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.
But dig a little and there you will find some fascinating facts. For instance Rio was actually the residence of the Portuguese royal family once upon a time. The colonial era also left behind some fantastic villas especially in the area of Santa Teresa where clambouring up the hill are great mansions once belonging to the rich and famous of new world society. Did you also know that Captain James Cook was most put out when he visited Rio on his first voyage around the world? Apparently the authorities didn’t show due respect which greatly perturbed the great British explorer. Even the great Charles Darwin thought the rainforest around Rio was the most beautiful he had ever seen.
Brazil is a mix of many different cultures and creeds and it shows in the faces of the people and the micro culturalism of the country. On my trip south in Brasil this mix of cultures and diversity was illustrated in a unique way. After staying in the coastal island of Santa Catarina I headed inland to explore a little bit more of this gigantic country. After an hour or so the landscape changed and the green hills, streams and cows casually chewing the grass suddenly didn’t look alien at all and when I saw a small shop at the side of the road selling ripe red apples, long sausages hanging from the eaves and giant jars of honey this place was suddenly reminiscent of a small alpine village. Even more so when on entering the lady was not dark skinned and dark eyed with the natural coco beauty of the north of brasil but she was pasty and freckled and had a rather odd accent. It turned out that I was on the outskirts of a place called Alfredo Wagner. Now that doesn’t sound very Portuguese does it? This village was a gem, nestled between some spectacular scenery and with more than a whiff of old Bavaria about it. The bars used the same calligraphic scrollwork to sell their beers and some places even sold sauerkraut alongside the Brazilian staple of rice and beans! However the strangest thing I saw here, nestled amongst a small group of modern almost suburban housing was a dwelling that presented itself with a hand painted sign as Papa Noel’s house. Indeed this was a cottage that could have come straight from Heidi and the little middle aged man who came out to great us could have been a young version of Pinocchio’s father. This man was a master woodworker and every year he opens his house for all the children in the village and dresses up as Papa Noel. Under his porch he has an entire model village complete with little handcrafted figurines all made by himself. It was a fascinating place and got even stranger when I saw the palm trees and ferns behind his house and heard that he didn’t speak any Portuguese until he was 6 as everyone spoke German.
There are a lot of German peoples in Brazil, They have cultivated the land and form some of the most wealthy and stable political areas of the country. Originally expelled from Europe in the 19th century many came here to seek religious freedom. Our Papa Noel even remembered members of the original indigenous communities here who now seem to have inter bred or succumbed to the foreign infections of the Europeans.
The second place that I at least knew nothing of, was the ancient pre Inca city of Tiwanaku. This huge area of mainly religious structures pre dates the Inca by at least a thousand years. At its peak between 300 and 1000AD this place high on the Andean Altiplano in what is now northern Bolivia near Lake Titicaca had massive implications both culturally and economically for the entire mid Andean region of South America. Its crowning and most fascinating features are perhaps the Sun and Moon gates. These substantial square structures, one of which was almost taken away by the British in the 19th century to put in the British museum, stand ominously now re erected as near as possible to their original sites on line with the solstices. The Moon gate in particular was fascinating in its decoration as our guide explained the gate actually contains divisions that represent 7 days of the week and 12 months of the year. This is fascinating in the fact that it is pretty much the same system of dates and days that we use today in our Gregorian calendar.
In the centre of the Tiwanaku complex stands a large pyramid that is currently being investigated and reconstructed using the excavated material which is formed and dried into mud bricks. The result is a 5 tiered pyramid that apparently once contained a sacred pond on its summit which the high priests used to gaze at the stars in the reflection collected in the pool. This again is remarkably similar to the technique that is used in modern astronomy whereby the image is reflected off a giant mirror.
These structures form a trinity of temples that represent the earth, heavens and underworld. Sci fi nuts will be intrigued by the temple of the underworld which is sunk into the ground in front of the sun gate and contains the stone heads of various important figures somehow associated with Tiwanaku. The oddity comes from the fact that many believe these heads do not look human and indeed one or two are resemblent of the characteristic little green men from mars!
My next port of call was the Peruvian city of Arequipa. This place feels as if it is slightly off the tourist trail and most people visit here to visit the worlds deepest canyon, the Colca Canyon. However Arequipa’s other attractions are its proximity to the huge snow capped volcanoes of the Andes, its fantastic colonnaded main square and its many fine churches, the most notable of these being the Nunnery of Santa Catalina. This huge ’citadel’ sits in the north eastern quarter of the city and was completely off limits to anyone but enrolled nuns since its foundation in 1580 until the 1970’s when the nuns were forced to open their citadel. If like me you are intrigued by the secrecy of such places and just cant help but peak through keyholes in National Trust properties just to the see the rooms that are off limits then you will love this place. The majority of the area has been opened to the public now and as soon as one walks through the huge wooden doors and into the first beautifully coloured courtyard you really do feel honoured to be allowed here. The whole citadel is divided into a series of colonnaded courtyards surrounded by streets and corridors that lead to each of the individual nuns cells. The vibrant blues and reds make this place the envy of the most pretentious boutique hotel and the carving of the columns and tiled flooring oozes that great sense of history created by thousands of years of footsteps.
The nuns cells are accessed off actual mini streets that link this initially confusing place into an ordered whole. The cells were by no means identical but mostly started with a single main room with a door onto the street, followed by secondary rooms and each had a courtyard where wonderfully blackened clay ovens still formed the centrepiece of what where once the nuns private kitchens. The atmosphere was similar to finding an old deserted building and being the only one there because the complex never felt crowded. There was also a great little café which sold such things as ‘Without remorse chocolate brownie’ along with various other surprisingly nice cakes named after the seven deadly sins! The visit takes a good afternoon to get through but my favourite time was when the sun had just set and all through the complex candles and oil lamps were lit, this caused me to have a second walk around the whole place just to soak up this magical place.
By the time I reached northern Chile the cultures and history of this amazing continent were still milling around my mind and I was struggling to comprehend the complexities of indigenous peoples and their rich culture with the colonising European culture which was in lots of ways so familiar to me but in other ways was subtly but magnificently different. However the last place I visited really had a wild west flavour to it. I was staying in Iquique on the Pacific Coast. At first this place appeared as a nice but ordinary city next to the sea with a great promenade. But on my first night after wandering around trying to find the centre I stumbled upon the old main street. All my curiosities of what old 19th century Chile was like were rewarded with the old main street containing a whole collection of wonderful timber stores, hotels and bars. It was just like walking down main street in an old cowboy film. The close boarded timber fronts mostly sported wonderful verandas and balconies simple but wonderfully decorated. This stretch of street also had a tram and extended for about half a mile. This satisfied my lust for history that in so many places was difficult to find but my main reason for coming to Iquique was to travel I inland into the driest desert in the world to visit a real life ghost town. The town was called Humberstone. It was situated about 40km from Iquique adjacent the great Pacific Highway. Whereas Iquique being next to the coast often had its fair share of fog this place always seemed dry and hot. I travelled there by bus and hopped off onto the dusty ground into what at first one might think of as a real functioning town with houses and telegraph wires and vehicles. But when I crossed the road there was only one home that was inhabited and that looked like it was the caretakers house. Beyond it was a wide street leading off towards what looked like a giant flat topped spoil heap at the end. On either side were low rise pre fab houses with corrugated tin roofs most of which still had old timber fences and others with quite ornate trellising. Humberstone was a true ghost town. It was founded in 1872 by the British owned Peru Nitrate Company and named after its founder James Thomas Humberstone as a Nitrate and Saltpeter mine. The business was a great success and a railway led towards Iquique where the stuff was exported. Such rich resources led Peru and Bolivia to declare war on Chile in 1879 in which Chile was greatly supported by the colonial powers and resulted in Bolivia loosing its access to the Pacific coast. Humberstone subsequently became very rich and the facilities on site included a swimming pool and a wonderful theatre situated within the market square. The primary school was particularly interesting and because it was built by the British it had lots of similarities with a 19th century school in Britain only it was made of wood and had basketball hoops outside. The town was finally abandoned in the 1960’s and has been left pretty much as it was. The most enticing area however is reached by walking from the town up a short slope to where the big industry was located. There’s a surprising amount of buildings still standing and because there is so little rain in this part of the world the structures and machinery are not rusted away and corroded but still in situ. The giant corrugated iron sheds where the nitrate was processed still contain dials and giant cogs and conveyer belts. The offices for the foreman and the store rooms where the employees collected their work gear and supplies are all still there and what’s more still accessible. Outside the railway lines run onwards toward on their lonely journey to the coast before being buried by the dust and sand through this vast post apocalyptic landscape.
I left Humberstone with a much greater understanding of the history and cultural diversities contained within South America. I really felt that my journey of understanding was complete. When I set out I expected to see some European style cities and was looking forward to seeing Machu Picchu and the Nasca Lines and learning more about the incredibly rich cultures that existed here before being exploited by their colonial impostors. But I never expected to see such places as Tiwanaku. I never really comprehended that the great empires of these civilisations were just as great as anything we had ever had in Europe. The new world settlements because they used locally available materials and styles and because there were inhabited by local people enabled the whole to take on its own unique culture. For example Humberstone and Iquique. Arequipa could have been in Spain but the rich culture of the indigenous peoples still shows strongly. Even the religious art in the Nunnery was painted and thereby interpreted by indigenous peoples leading to an almost covert multiculturalism that cant have been noticed by the colonial overlords or how could it have survived? The colonisation of these places arguably had the intention of wiping out such cultures, but what has happened has been an evolution into true ethnically diverse nations with their own unique culture and historical assets…enough to satisfy the most naïve ‘historically big headed’ European .
I now feel recharged on culture, in fact I’m pretty much full to the brim. Just as well really I guess, because my next challenge…is Australia!
Note: Tiwanaku and Humberstone are both listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
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