Echando el Bullitre

We've been torturing ourselves by watching back-to-back episodes of No Reservations for the last few days, with the occasional Andrew Zimmern outing in between.

Most recently we watched as Bourdain floated up the Amazon in search of "the last frontier of modern gastronomy" increasingly aware that the idea for this trek might well have been a bit of a practical joke conceived by Ferran Adrià and his mates. In an obvious perma-filth from pain in his lower back, he did rather pointedly encounter a cluster of wild geese at the end of this Herzogian quest. ("Canadian ducks" observed his guide.)

Bourdain had spent most of his time at Adrià's fabled three-star eatery in a fanboi daze. At the end of the meal José Andrés was red in the face and blubbering, but by then they'd consumed a number of solid state cocktails, wine, champagne and some gin and tonics, the latter surprisingly standard-looking in their preparation. The best moment of this paean to El Bulli occurred when a little plate of baby octopuses was placed in front of the intrepid chef and he announced a need to take a picture of it "so I can look at it later and touch myself".

His long overdue trip to the Philippines turned into an extended disquisition on why these islands and their gastronomic treats are not more well known on the international scene. I've never been (too complex from a cartographic point of view?) but I did try a delicious Adobo in Costa Rica last year, at San José's commendable Tin Jo. I have to say I do like the idea of these dampas that Tony visited in Manila; part market, part open-plan restaurants, where you buy the ingredients for a meal over on one side, and then watch as they are fried up in front of you on the other.

Colombian grub appears to be no great shakes meanwhile. Think of the stuff on the typical Guatemalan menu with the largest quantity of saturated fat...and add more grease. Even on the coast, where you's think you can hardly go wrong with lobster and red snapper etc., there's an awful lot of deep frying going on. That said, Bourdain did get led up to one little culinary Xanadu in the hills above Medellín called Quearepaenamorarte, where the resident chef concocted a dreamy little cornless tamal, filled with fish and shrimp embedded in a masa made from plantain, milk and coconut.

Bourdain's exploration of Cuban restaurant food was not altogether encouraging either. OK, it's not going to be like the USSR in the eighties, but some ingredients are scarce and the food culture seems to be as rigid and conservative as it (mostly) is here in Guatemala. The biggest issue is one of mood and morals however. As Bourdain put it: either you are subsidising the locals' dining via the semi-private paladares or you are gorging yourself in state-run restaurants which very few Cubans could ever afford.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention the excellent Dubai episode, which was a superb exercise in presenting the viewer with the opportunity to read between the lines.

Over the years I've had plenty of opportunities to note that there's hardly anything creepier on this planet than the wealthy, Western-educated Arab. Beyond a condescending manner, many are self-involved and seem to have some nasty atavistic switch at the back of their inner selves. But as well as unearthing some fine examples of the type, Bourdain located and dined with an even slimier individual, a British banker patsy, duly coaxed into making grotesquely amoral statements about the virtual slavery which has underpinned Dubai's growth. He only had to set him up with a few carefully couched questions and off he went. Jeremy Paxman should have a go some time.

Much of the early section was led by a more sympathetic Indian finance bod who'd clearly signed up to a rather distasteful Faustian pact, but was making the most of it. Then there was time for deliberately mixed messages about Ski Dubai. "There's an aesthetic sensibility going on here," Tony conceded (as Milton might have noted of Satan's Pandemonium in Paradise Lost), having just observed that the venture must be the most eco-hostile in a city already dishing out an on-going environmental disaster.

There was irony to prised out of another scene in which Bourdain visited the owner of a stable of racing camels who informed him somewhat pompously that 'our race' could not have survived without these animals. Bourdain, taking race in this context to mean human race, duly lectured him on the role of the international trade routes to the Italian Rennaissance, while the Arab, for whom it obviously meant 'Arab', looked on with a blank, me pela expression.

The English abroad No2

Freya Stark...

"We English rely almost desperately on the breaking of rules, and it will be a poor day when we forget to do so, for this idiosyncrasy may rescue us in a deluge of the second rate. It incidentally gives us an advantage in the understanding of traditions other than our own, which more logical nations find difficult to master "

Cuba Travel Diary - Anticipations (2)

There's nothing under heaven so blue,

That's fairly worth the traveling to.

(Robert Louis Stevenson)

Dr Johnson famously said of the Giant Causeway, that while it was worth seeing, it probably wasn't worth going to see. I think that in the end I felt something similar about Machu Picchu and my journey to it. Stevenson had also observed that tourism is the art of disappointment, and while there was nothing the least bit disappointing about my experience of being in Machu Picchu, it's hard not to reflect back on the getting there as a trail of not quite satifying experiences.

I suppose this may be because I undertook that journey in August at the rather late-in-the-day suggestion of V, who had suddenly blurted out that I ought to go and see Machu Picchu. Thus, the going to Peru and the being in Peru presented themselves as collateral concerns.

The biggest psychological hurdle turned out to be my arrival and departure point; Lima.

Since the last cholera epidemic it has acquired something of a reputation as a trendy gastronomic destination, but no amount of yummy food can compensate for the relentlessly doom-laden aspect of the Peruvian capital.

It's a desert city perched on a bluff above the kind of sea that makes you want to make a B-line for the high ground. And when I say desert, I don't mean some eye-catching variation on aridity, the likes of which one comes across in parts of Central Mexico. Here the outlying terrain looks like the rest of the planet will when we've finally finished murdering it.

As for the cloying coastal fog — la garúa — it prompted Melville to describe Lima as "the saddest, strangest city thou can'st see" and native writers such as Vargas Llosa and others have since described the prevailing ambience as leaden, ashen, cold and tenacious, "a floating powder" (Salazar Bondy) and like being inside "the belly of a dead whale" (Alfredo Bryce Echenique).

Why are Central America's problem-laden capitals less dismaying? I think it's because they're in the tropics. There's hardly a grisly indoor domestic space in the world which cannot be improved by the judicious deployment of a pot plant or two, and so it is with our own concrete jungles here: that they often seem on the verge of being reclaimed by the real thing can only really be totted up on the merit side.

It's fitting that the most diverting site I came across in Lima was the Convento de San Francico (pic below) with its underground bone dump. These catacombs became the final resting ground for 25,000 Limeños up until 1851, when the practice of mass burials beneath major churches was deemed insalubrious. Upstairs, the former monastery's library, with its 25,000 crumbly tomes, would make the perfect setting for a thought piece on the death of the book.

Cuzco was lovely, but I was out of breath even in my sleep.

Arequipa was also pleasant enough, but not as deeply interesting as nearer equivalents such as Oaxaca. With its three looming volcanoes it presented itself as an odd amalgam of places already digested, Antigua itself, Mexico's various 'colonial gems' and even Tapachula. It wasn't until the third day that it started to reveal its underlying selfhood, and by then I'd seen nearly all I wanted to see and could think of little else to do other than sit around and drink coffee.

Across this land, the juxtaposition of the strikingly familiar and the strikingly strange was always to be a tad disconcerting.

For the trip to Havana I shall be back on COPA — in part because I would rather collect their miles than TACA's, and in part because the cheapness and shortness of the flight from Cancún was offset by the cost and hassle of getting up there. I also had no desire to reacquaint myself with Soviet-built airliners.

Still, Guatemala to La Habana via Panama City is hardly the most carbon-conscious route. I was tempted to take advantage once again of COPA's ongoing invitation to its passengers to indulge in a night or two in the Panamanian capital at no extra charge, but decided against it as I want to get stuck in to Cuba as quickly as possible.

I wonder what kind of fellow travellers I will encounter there. Well, as I will be sauntering towards to my nephew's wedding on the beach at Guardalavaca ('Keep the Cow') at some point I'm going to have to scrub up for an encounter with a chunk of my own family.

One supposes that, across the island, there will be fewer Yanks, more Canucks, and, horror of horrors, a load of Brits. They were thick on the ground in Peru too, where one comes across more of the socks and sandals sort of traveller than one does here in Guatemala. But it was August, so the Frogs outnumbered them all.

One of the real downsides to being a tourist in Peru is that the relevant authorities seem to want to make it the most regimented experience possible. When I came across a museum in Cuzco where photography was actually permitted and I didn't have to spend fifteen minutes talking myself out of the company of a fetching female student guide, I was frankly flaberghasted. I very much doubt whether the average sightseer has to jump through quite so many hoops in communist Cuba as one does in Peru.

Perhaps the aforementioned French tour parties have to share some of the blame on the demand side. For Peru seems to attract a lot of visitors who are not what you would tend to regard as natural travellers (or even tourists for that matter.) Specifically middle-aged French couples who one suspects have rarely partaken of a vacance outside their own borders, and seem to be on the verge of some sort of unseemly outburst at any given moment. They certainly seem to look as if they might need regimenting, and may even crave it.

The English abroad No1

We export two chief kinds of Englishmen, who in foreign parts divide themselves into two opposed classes. Some feel deeply the influence of the native people, and try to adjust themselves to its atmosphere and spirit: To fit themselves modestly into the picture and suppress all in them that would be discordant with local habits and colours. They imitate the native as far as possible, and so avoid friction in their daily life. However, they cannot avoid the consequences of imitation, a hollow, worthless thing. They are like the people but not of the people, and their half-perceptible differences give them a sham influence often greater than their merit. They urge people among whom they live into strange unnatural courses by imitating them so well that they are imitated back again.

The other class of Englishmen is the larger class. In the same circumstances of exile they reinforce their character by memories of the life they have left. In reaction against their foreign surroundings they take refuge in the England that was theirs. They assert their aloofness, their impassivity, the more vividly for their loneliness and weakness. They impress the people among whom they live by reaction, by giving them an example of the complete Englishman, the foreigner intact.

T.E. Lawrence, introduction to Doughty's Arabia Deserta.

Travel Bites 2011: No2

Peru, at once sufficiently similar and sufficiently different from Guatemala, such that I was never quite certain whether I was in my comfort zone or not, a state of affairs which quite often resulted in a truly disconcerting travel experience.

These points of intersection and deflection could be either heartwarming or disheartening.

I could list a number of seminal Peruvian experiences which are emblematic of this conundrum. Take the cebiche for example, just like a ceviche, but tomatoes are out and sweet potatoes are in.

Travel Bites 2011: No1

Tocumen International Airport in Panama, aka 'the hub of the Americas', plays host to some five million passengers every year, two million of whom pass through in transit. It may not be as swanky as Guatemala's Aurora, but it's certainly better connected, linking major cities in ten different Latin American countries and with its rather messy blending of arrival and departure spaces, one always seems to be caught in the middle of a frantic steeplechase, as passengers hurry from one end of the terminal to the other in order to make their rather tight connections.

The major carrier operating from here is Panama's Copa, part of the United-Continental group, and as a consequence Tocumen bears a passing aesthetic resemblance to George Bush Intercontinental in Houston, though without the pervasive smell of popcorn.

One of the first things I spotted after disembarking the flight from Guatemala was a man wearing a Panama hat. I doubt whether it was purchased inside the airport however, because Tocumen, unlike its equivalents in Guatemala and El Salvador, appears to lack one of those emporia of local souvenirs selling all kinds of Panama-badged nic nacs. Though if all you want to remember Panama by is a bottle of Ron Abuelo Añejo, you should be fine...

Abusadora

This wonderful chap was making the most of a community Xmas party in San Sebastián de la Gomera that we sort of crashed a few years ago.

Just love the way he manages to integrate a repeat order for another chela into his dance moves...

I guess that in both temperament and to some extent accent, the people of La Gomera are closer to the tropical Hispanic model than Iberians proper.

This clip has always been a favourite souvenir of mine from that trip and I recently rediscovered it on an old 2003 Mac external drive that I managed to fire up again. As this was one journey we made without a digital camera, the Mini DV camcorder tapes I'm currently processing through Final Cut are a real treasure.

Tallest

Yesterday's grand opening of the hastily re-christened (re-mohammeded?) Burj Khalifa in Dubai involved a truly spectactular display of luces:

One big coffee shop

This was, regretably, my impression of the recent fate of the historic core of Cambridge when I visited over the bank holiday weekend. Still, in a little back lane where no Costas or Neros are to be found, I spotted in the window of a traditional University photographer this marvellously over-posed image in which the seated girl in the foreground chatting on her mobile struck me as inspired.

Tom Conti had just whizzed past me on his bicycle. He's currently appearing in Romantic Comedy at the Cambridge Arts Theatre.

Tabasco

Of The Proposition, Surfer said this afternoon, that it is one of those films that makes you glad you weren't around in 1880. It is; yet it's also one of those that makes you wonder whether it's worth being around at all.

He also pointed out the similarities with Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of my favourite films from the days of my adolescence, and one which also intimates that the ancient, alien landscape of the Aussie outback is relentlessly hostile to non-natives with their empty dreams of civilisation.

By coincidence, the last two novels I have read have been about Tabasco, another region seemingly guided by an enduringly anti-humanist spirit.

The first of these was The Power and the Glory, which was one of those rare books which is almost too good to blog about. Merely good reads have digestible meanings and this blog is the plate where the consumption is supposed to start. But the best literature is in a sense indigestible. It goes in but it doesn't come out - it stays with you, becoming almost a part of your metabolism. I used to read more of that kind of book. Graham Greene's tale of a 'whisky priest' fleeing the firing squads of the red shirts in Tabasco is still rattling around in my gut...

Max Frisch's Homo Faber on the other hand is a novel I want to blog about before I've even finished it. It's narrator leaves La Guardia bound for Caracas. He is an engineer, a typically literalist Swiss called Faber. When his plane comes down in the Tamaulipas desert in Mexico he observes of the moon he has to watch for four nights that it is "a calculable mass circling around our planet, an example of gravitation, interesting, but in what way an experience?"

One of his travelling companions is heading to northern Guatemala to address the future of the German cigar. During the games of chess they play while waiting to be rescued, Faber discovers that this man is the brother of one of his oldest friends and that this friend ended up marrying the woman that he once loved. He abandons his trip to South America in order to follow the German to the plantation owned by his old mücker.

From Campeche they take the (long lost) train south and are the only passengers to get down at Palenque. There they find but one "ruin-lover", an American that initially fails to persuade them to join him in his daily clamberings over the remains of Maya palaces.

Rather like Surfer and me back in '89, the pair become "suspended" in this Tabasco town.

"Every step set the sweat pouring, which immediately had to be replaced with beer...we were suspended in hammocks, with beer within reach all the time, sweating as though sweating were our purpose in life, incapable of coming to any decision, quite contented actually because the beer here was excellent, Yucateca...we lay suspended in our hammocks and drank so that we could sweat better and I couldn't think what we really wanted." (Surfer and I also wound up briefly in another town nearby called Tempisque, similar in all respects except there appeared to be no beer on sale at all!)

Faber laughs aridly when his new pal suggests they go out to the movies together. "Lightning flashed every evening, it was our only entertainment in the evenings. Palenque had a diesel motor that generated electricity but it was turned off at 9pm." The American Maya-enthusiast is a musician from Boston, another of those artist-types Faber observes, "who think themselves loftier or more profound beings because they didn't know what electricity is."

And so they are poised for a journey across the border into what even today is one of the most inaccessible parts of Guatemala. Surfer and I bumped into a similar duo of middle-European sense-of-humour failures on this very route, which is just one reason why Frisch's novel is resonating so much with me.

We had been told that it would be "impossible" for us to reach Palenque from Flores without either going south west and out via Huehuetenango or back into Belize, up to Chetumal and along the northern limits of the Petén to the nearest border of Tabasco. For some reason we took this as a dare and set off on a bus full of prostitutes and gnarly old men with even older rifles (members of the PAC) all bound for the distant military outpost at a place called El Naranjo...

Third World taster

I love the way Guatemala is placed ahead of the Congo in this post!

So, Republican Tom Tancredo thinks Miami is an outpost of the Third World. You certainly feel you have one foot in the chaos of Latin America when you pass through its airport. But when compared to the neo-fascist experience that is George Dubya Bush International in Houston, that's maybe not such a bad thing!

Yet more expedient information

Almost forgot...when purchasing flights from the likes of expedia.com never accept the first price that is offered. I've noticed that these services like to drop a cookie and will sometimes award you with a cheaper price for the same flight the second time you search for it.

Sniffing into a bag

Frode has sent me this abcnews article on the current state of oversensitivities on America's airlines:

"One passenger on a Delta flight from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City was
arrested for leaving his seat to go to the lavatory less than 30 minutes before
landing (due to the incident, air marshals ordered all passengers to put their
hands on their heads for the rest of the flight)...In September, Seth Stein, a
London interior designer returning from his vacation in Turks and Caicos, was
put in a chokehold and physically pinned to his seat by another passenger on an American Airlines flight. Stein's crime: He used an iPod, went to the lavatory and his tan made him appear 'Arab.'"

Blinkered travelers

Dr Eammon Butler of the Adam Smith Institute is challenging Paul Holmes for the title of blinkered airline passenger of the year. The various inconveniences he suffered on a recent trip to Guatemala prompted this unseemly upchucking of over-simplistic suggestions:

"If America did not have such generous welfare benefits, it would not have to spend so much effort (and cause so much grief) trying to keep people out. If US airports were privatized, they would find ways of letting people change planes without standing in immigration lines. If airlines managed their own security, it would be quicker and more sensible."

Ebookers v Expedia

This weekend we were exploring costs and options for our Christmas visit to Guatemala.

Over the course of the past couple of years it has become clear that online at least, Expedia and Ebookers have the most competitive prices, though the final choice has tended to depend on the season. Expedia were best over the summer for example, but in winter Ebookers appears to have the edge. (Travelocity and Opodo are generally around 20% more expensive.)

A couple of years ago, around March, I bought a return via LA with United through Ebookers for just under £400. That looks like a bit of a one off. The best price for a return flight in the middle of next month is around £670 and a month later the same flight costs almost double. This is where we usually need to get creative with our routing.

One thing I have learned this year however is that the Expedia fares have a significant catch: you cannot, at any price, change the return date on the ticket once you have purchased it. (On the same flight on the same dates EBookers will permit a change for £100. )

This can be a huge problem for V whose time out there is often dependent on factors she cannot predict with 100% accuracy when making reservations online from London, and caused her much grief earlier this year when she discovered the restriction on her Expedia fare and had to return to the UK leaving some of her projects half-finished. It looks like Ebookers now stands alone in this sector!

TWOV

Before V went to the trouble (believe me) of getting her 10-year multiple entry visa she used to have to go TWOV − Transit Without Visa − when flying to Guatemala with a US connection in Miami or Houston.

On one occasion she found herself locked in a stand-off with the Immigration official asigned to shadow her at Houston. He refused to speak English and she refused to speak Spanish. He got very worked up about this, she later reported: "Por qué NOOO??....no te gusta hablar español...?"

It's my choice she insisted, "this is America and I choose to speak English."

Neither budged from their position so they spent a generally silent hour or so in each other's company with one or two curt bilingual exchanges. When at last they approached the gate, V turned and asked him if he had ten cents. His eyes flared with incredulity at this apparent final act of impudence, she related with a giggle.

"Por qué?" he hissed.

"Because that machine over there just swallowed my $2, but if you add your ten cents you can have yourself an ice-cream". Off he went with a parting smile of resignation.

Surf's Up

Today might be the longest day here in London, but tomorrow will surely feel longer: 5452 airmiles await.

I had sworn I'd never take the AA route via Miami again after the engine fire in 2000, but the Iberia return leg on the 8th of June would involve missing the World Cup Final the next day and the Houston route is prohibitively expensive at this time of year.

There's always one thing on the list of things V gives me to take over that proves to be a bit of a challenge. I have now found and purchased a suitable lemon squeezer, but the canine nail-cutter is still eluding me! One final schlep to Selfridges at lunchtime...

It's the wet season right now in Guatemala, and so far it has been very wet. It was reported yesterday that a storm 2000 miles away has been pulsing 15 foot waves towards Central America's Pacific littoral. In Guatemala dozens of homes have been destroyed by these surges and in Sipacate the waves wrecked the 10-room Rancho Carrillo hotel...now the 2-room Rancho Carrillo hotel. "The sea took away eight rooms and part of the restaurant, which was made of wood," manager Brigido de Paz was quoted as saying.

Weather experts have warned that Guatemala could face an on-going battering this year from natural phenomena. The current season has a scheduled line-up of 18 storms. Hugo Hernandez, executive secretary of the National Disaster Reduction Coordination (CONRED), thinks hurricanes could be lo peor....followed by quakes, volcanoes, freezing temperatures and drought. He reckons that 25,000 people reside in high risk areas: 3,000-6,000 in mudslide zones and up to 400,000 in flood-risk areas.