Indiaaaaaa

India India India. Everybody seems to have a lot of opinions about India because it is such a land of extremes. I made my efforts to investigate the political situation here by reading Arundhati Roy’s Broken Republic – three essays on corruption, communism, environmentalism, and the overwhelming battles the people fight here every day for the most basic of human dignities. Beautifully written and clarifying but it just didn’t pique my interest in the way it could have because I haven’t come to India to understand it or its politics. I have come for the far more cliched reason to understand myself. Or rather, understand who I am not. All those who thought I was Emma Schlee – guess what – I’m not! I’m you! And that tree! And Donald Trump! 
I’m kind of joking and kind of serious. Maybe it’s a phase…maybe it’s reality… Either way, doesn’t matter. Life goes on merrily. 

As a result of my indifference to exploring the ins and outs of the country I spent the first three and a half weeks here in the same place: Rishikesh. This is a delightful town on the banks of the Ganges stuffed to the gills with ashrams and chanting, bead-counting, orange robed yogis. There were hundreds of yoga and meditation schools and bookshops full of spiritual reading and Indians and westerners all desperately pursuing their own spiritual quests. But the surroundings were of secondary importance because what really mattered was being back with beloved Iola, my dear friend who moved to Melbourne and whom I haven’t seen in almost two years. We proceeded to utterly disrupt the peace of the area with a constant stream of talk talk talk laugh laugh laugh. We must have set a good number of people about four months behind on their spiritual path, filling their heads with our inane drivel. The joy of each other’s company was boundless. 

Once she left to run an ultra marathon in some far flung part of India I learned more about Advaita Vedanta at a retreat at a very tranquil and civilised ashram. Advaita is a school of Hindu philosophy that concerns itself with self-realisation through understanding the non-dual nature of the universe. I also did a workshop in Tantra, which, contrary to popular belief, is not all about sex, rather balancing male and female energies. We did a lot of staring into strangers’ eyes. It was quite intense. 

Eventually I had to tear myself away from the harmony of life in Rishikesh to attend the Vipassana meditation course I was booked into. I had heard about Vipassana from a traveller three years ago in New Zealand who raved about it and said it was life changing, and since then everyone I’ve talked to who’s done it has spoken of it in similarly superlative terms. Previously I was a regular meditator but not very disciplined and never really felt like I was getting much out of it except a worrying insight into the boring churning of an average mind. But I believed based on the testimonies of so many others that meditation could become a tool to master the mind and so I wanted to give it a proper shot. 
I defy anyone to come up with a more intensive programme than this one. This was our daily routine:

4am: wake up bell

4.30-6.30am: meditation 

6.30-7: breakfast 

7-8: rest

8-11: meditation 

11-11.30: lunch

11.30-1: rest

2-5: meditation 

5-6: dinner

6-7: meditation

7-830: theory and explanation of the practice 

8.30-9: meditation 
Over ten hours a day of meditation. The majority was in the group hall but to spice things up a bit sometimes we got to go to our cell. 

The entire first day we watched our breathing. The entire second day we felt our breath in our nose. The entire third day we felt sensations on our upper lip. The rest of the time we observed sensations in the whole body and tried to keep equanimous. Through the bitterest of knee pains, you just watch objectively, knowing it won’t last forever. This too shall pass. Sitting still for each hour at a time was at first utterly torturous and by the end somehow easy. 
The experience was brutal. Definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done. So much self control needed to not jump up out of my position and run for the hills. Although it wouldn’t have been a jump up, it would have been a creaky old woman ascent because my legs were in no fit state to be making fast movements after being beaten into passive submission by my mind. 
You don’t speak at all during the course, nor look anyone else in the eye. This is to keep you looking inwards and not be distracted by others “progress”. Why is she getting pleasant sensations and I’m stuck with stabbing pains?! Etc. Doesn’t help with maintaining equanimity. And the progress isn’t measured by what sensations you feel, rather by how equanimously you react. I often felt smug when others would change position while I was still statue-esque and feeling warm tingles so I didn’t do that well at the non-comparison thing. Telling others in my head I was a better meditator than them is absolutely verboten, so unfortunately I’d go back to the bottom of the class after that initial smugness. 
I couldn’t really tell as the days went on if anything had changed, if I was getting any benefits. Everything looked and felt the same and the voice in my head was as incessant as ever. Sometimes a smile would pour out uncontrollably and I was undoubtedly very peaceful but it’s not hard to be peaceful when you’re isolated in the hills, away from the phone and real life. 
It was only once I’d left the course that I started to truly feel the difference. Right now it feels that if someone were to rob me of all of my possessions and money, leaving me destitute in the middle of nowhere with not a friend in sight, it wouldn’t matter. I would be safe and happy regardless. And the famous love and compassion for all living beings sometimes makes an appearance in my heart, before retreating again under my pile of me-ness. 
The pile of me-ness is very much in full force, I ain’t going anywhere soon! But I do feel very free and it feels gooooooood. 

Nepal Part Two

Nepal Part Two
You have to be careful what you wish for when you say you want to live in nature. I didn’t think there was such a thing as too much immersion but that was before I got woken up in the night in my little hut by a mouse running over my body and then across my pillow and down into the corner. It was a tiny little thing and didn’t mean me any harm but it was quite tricky to fall back asleep after that. My hut was also home to multiple varieties of insects, geckos and frogs. I saw a snake right outside it but as far as I know it never ventured in. 

Apart from the slightly compromised sleeping conditions, life as a volunteer on this Eco Park in a random Nepalese village in the flatlands was very pleasant. I was up at 520 every morning for yoga and meditation as day dawned, then after some tea we’d have two hours of farm work. Occasionally this involved going to the rice paddy and weeding out the long grasses from amongst the rows of crops. You are permanently bent over, bare feet squelching in the mud, the sun rising higher and hotter in the sky, and all you can see is miles of rice paddies and the jungle of undesired grasses that infests them. It was hard work but your wet feet kept you from overheating and the rice plants seemed relieved and grateful to be liberated from their suffocating neighbours. And anyway, it was only a couple of hours and we knew we’d be returning to a large, hot, nutritious meal, as well as feeling safe in the knowledge this was a temporary activity. Our livelihoods do not depend on working these fields day in day out for time immemorial. I now have a newfound respect for grains of rice. I always used to cook too much and wouldn’t mind throwing out the leftovers but I will think twice about doing that now. 
While working in the rice paddy Isa composed a poem, which I’ll post here to prove that manual pursuits are not devoid of artistic creativity:
The Hourglass by Isabel Schlee
When you are five, there’s a whistle

Egg balanced on spoon 

Foot itching over the starting line. 
Years later, the teacher points at you

The class turns, there is silence

You must answer.
‘Time is up’ the examiner says 

Hand cramped, fist sweaty 

You are free.
Now the tightrope ahead is endless

You are teetering, you may tumble

The line is not taut.
Look up, the ceiling is misty 

Look down, there’s sand from an hourglass 

To catch your fall.
So what are you waiting for?

There’s the box, grab a match

And strike it.
It’s your life, after all.
Get analysing, people! 

The other farm work was cutting the grass by hand with a little scythe and feeding it to the buffalo or weeding and digging up the vegetable patches to prepare the land for planting that never quite seemed to happen, leaving the patches to reweed and restagnate. It was a good lesson in doing tasks for the sake of the task itself and not for any obvious impact. Process not outcome, innit. 

After the rice, lentil and fresh vegetable breakfast eaten with my right hand, I commenced the daily repose, a (non) activity I took very seriously. The temperature during the day was prohibitively hot and there was nothing for it but to lie on your bed under the fan, reading, sleeping, journaling, writing emails, or thinking for hours and hours. At first all this downtime made me uncomfortable and guilty. I felt that I should be doing something. But there was really no need – the owners would be equally grateful/indifferent if you spend hours dropping sweat into their fields or lying spreadeagled on your bed like a beached whale. I’ve hardly encountered such a hands off approach to life and people. It’s the exact opposite of “helicopter parents”. 
Isa (who was there with me for the first of my and a half weeks) had the vision to clean, paint and decorate the mouldy and dank shower room and when she left she bequeathed me the job, having done all the hard, monotonous work herself, leaving me the fun arty part. I’m not a gifted paintbrush wielder but I had hours of flowing contentment and joy designing and attempting to implement my designs on the walls, listening to music as I went. I had to drown out the constant Hare Krishna chanting dirges that floated over from the village. At first they were soothing, but my western attention span grew weary after the 80th rendition. 

What struck me about Nepali people, families and houses is that they seem to have more permeable membranes than ours in the west. People were constantly parading through the garden, through the open walled kitchen, loitering around, listening to tinny music from the smartphones that never leave their hands, old women trudging through at the end of each day with a huge bale of hay in a basket on their backs supported with a thick band across the forehead. Every day there were new people sitting around, but it wasn’t particularly sociable. The teenagers and kids played video games on their phone the whole time or watched YouTube videos, while they weren’t staring at us in intrigue. 
My time coincided with one of the biggest festivals of the year, Dasain. The family who owned Eco Park couldn’t celebrate because the guy’s dad “expire” (in his words) last year and in Hindu tradition your family cannot celebrate any festivals for a year after your death. His widow has to wear white for a year and no one is allowed to touch her. One of the other volunteers helps out at the local health post (delivering babies every few days!) and the head nurse invited her to join her family for the celebrations so I tagged along too. Considering this is their equivalent of Christmas and I took Hinduism to be a fairly ritualistic religion, Dasain was rather underwhelming. We got blessed with red rice smeared on our foreheads, a couple of cornflowers put in our hair, awkwardly accepting 100 rupees ($1) pressed into our hands with a couple of chunks of apple and then force fed rice and lentils and vegetables and poppadoms. Being vegetarian I was able to refuse the blackened squares of goat meat also on offer. The family didn’t eat with us, just kept feeding people in dribs and drabs as they came along for their blessing. It was all very sincere and generous and I was unable to stop marring the whole meal by constantly saying to myself “ooh how authentic. I’m having such an authentic experience.”

(I write this in hour 10 of the bus ride back to Kathmandu indulging myself in an entire packet of utterly unauthentic McVities digestives. And a cucumber. I’ve had enough of the Nepalese crackers whose ingredients include “permitted additives class 2”.)
 Every evening the sun set in a glorious haze of lilac, peach, orange and pink until the banana tree leaves were nothing but silhouettes. The parakeet symphony gave way to the piercing vibrations of cicada song. It was a pleasure to live a routined life and to try (rather unsuccessfully) to make my own membrane more permeable. 

Nepal

And the blog resumes, to my multitudes of fans who have been impatiently awaiting updates from afar. Here commences the Asian part of the programme, in tandem with my current traveling companion, I Schlee, who is piping up with her observations on Nepal’s culinary offerings. 
My initial impression of Kathmandu was that it was a shitshow, and I mean that as a compliment. Isa and I were determined to take a bus from the airport which involved standing in the middle of a highway shouting our destination at overstuffed minivans until one eventually allowed us to squash in, sweating profusely. Most of the roads were potholed and muddy, there were motorcyclists and cars and buses and people streaming in all directions, and the occasional cow wandering around. Everything was extremely cheap. 
After a pleasant recuperation period in the hills Isa and I relocated to a guest house in the grounds of a Buddhist monastery in a different neighborhood. We did two magical yoga sessions with a pregnant goddess called Pema. Afterwards we ate street food and drank beer and each bite and sip was explosive. Pema had worked wonders on our senses. And her general heavenly aura made me want to be pregnant too. Sadly a Buddhist monastery is not a place conducive to achieving this goal. 
The guest house was next to a ginormous stupa, which is a huge white dome, around which buddhists walk clockwise spinning prayer wheels, fingering prayer beads and chanting. A few particularly diligent devotees went around it prostrating themselves fully on the ground every few steps. They were wearing special hand and body covers to protect them from the dirt and gobs of spit on the ground. 

A couple of days later we joined forces with our friend Georgie in Kathmandu proper and continued sampling street food and admiring temples. Or in Isa’s case, avoiding temples in favour of coffee shops. Georgie and I nearly had the corncob stolen from out of our hands by an aggressive monkey as we attempted to view another stupa so maybe Isa was onto something. 

Having been inspired by Pema to do more yoga, Georgie and I went to a class one evening, which would have been quite pleasant except the teacher kept laughing out loud each time I attempted to do a position. He was in shock at how a person could have such tight hips and kept trying to find an explanation: “Maybe you don’t drink enough water?” “I drink a lot of water.” 

“Maybe you run a lot?” “I never run.”

“Maybe you don’t stretch much?” “I stretch daily.” He was flummoxed and amused. 
Eventually we escaped the hazardous chaos of Kathmandu for the lakeside mountain town of Pokhara, which is the starting point for many treks, including all of those in the Annapurna region. It’s been my dream to hike here for years, ever since reading a harrowing and inspirational book about the first ascent of 8091m high Annapurna back in the day by Maurice Herzog and his crew. Because Georgie had to get back to England we could only do a six dayer but happily that included beholding the magnificent Annapurna and many of her sister peaks.

 Trekking around here is basically glamping. Hot showers, fresh bread and buffalo butter for breakfast, beds, beer… It’s ridiculous and very pleasant. Every menu is exactly the same so we ended up growing rather weary of good old dal bhat (rice and lentils) and variations thereof but spirits were lifted by the fresh mountain mushrooms we added to every dish. And the stunning views when the clouds cleared. We were slightly traumatized by multiple leech attacks but it was all in the name of supporting the local ecosystem with our blood, sweat and tears. 

After the hike we enjoyed a few days relaxation back in Pokhara, including splashing about on a boat in the lake. We were staying in the ecohostel of a really cool guy who used to work at IBM and then quit to learn how to do sound bowl therapy. He was unbelievably friendly and welcoming and calm, and we subsequently learnt he’s done multiple Vipassana courses (silent meditation, just sitting all day every day, minimal food), the most recent of which was 45 days long. He told us about how traumatic the 2015 earthquake was. How he and his friends were about to climb a tower but at the last minute decided not to, and that saved their lives. How he knows 90 people who were never seen again, no bodies recovered. How corrupt the Nepalese government is. How it’s illegal to build tall buildings with no earthquake protection but the owner of a future hotel opposite his hostel bribed the government and is building a huge building that will collapse and kill anyone in it and also crush his own building if there’s another quake. How rich in resources Nepal is but incapable of harnessing them (hydropower, minerals, gold) because the political party in power changes every six months or so so there’s never enough time to get anything done. How in the whole country there is only electricity available for 5-10 hours per day so everyone needs their own generator or solar panels. 

To end this blog post I will type up the Ode to Breakfast that I wrote while on the trek. As some of you may know, I reap great enjoyment from that meal and wanted to let some words fall out in its honour:
I think about you last thing at night

And first thing in the morning. 

Basking in the day’s first light

The joy of now is dawning. 
If there is bread straight from the oven

I think I’ve died and gone to heaven. 

Couple with fresh buffalo butter

My mind at last is free from clutter. 
The most amazing thing to me 

Is eating fruit straight from the tree. 

Apples, figs, bananas, dates;

Pile them all straight on the plate. 
Now I look up and meet the eyes

Of my dearest sister friend

We smile because we have the prize

Of breakfast breakfast without end. 

Freelance Food column by Isa

One month of eating, observing and exploring Nepalese food has left me ready to eat, observe and explore elsewhere. This isn’t to say we haven’t eaten well – the adjective that sums up our eating experience has been Whelming (copyright J Sherwin). 

Nepalese food is partway made up of dishes from neighboring countries with a few local features. Their signature MoMos (steamed dumplings) are cousin to the gyoza – served with buff, cheese or vegetable. Initially Emma and I condemned buff as beef to then learn it was the local buffalo. Dhal bhat is everywhere and a reliable choice: a lentil soup poured over a mound of rice, accompanied by a poppadom, spoonful of potato curry and a chilli chutney. Chowmein is another menu classic, the Nepalese spinoffs being Thukpah and Laphing. Thukpah is noodle soup, often quite spicy, whilst Laphing more remarkable. It’s a bowl of rubbery, bright yellow strips of pasta which are served cold with tangy sauce and a dollop of chili. We shared one for 40 rupees (40 cents) followed by pistachio kulfis, miniature creamy ice lollies. 
High points came almost exclusively from street food. After a wave of food poisoning (or my feeble immune system/stomach adjusting to the country) Emma and I tried to try each new thing we came across. Eem the fruit lover was in paradise – papayas, Nepalese apples, citrus pears, endless bananas. Fresh coconut cracked open and eaten on the spot confirmed my undying loyalty/obsession with it. We loved the carts of dried beans, roasted nuts and corn popping, second only to the memory of the sweetcorn stand. A woman would be stoking coals, a few flames licking out the grill where she roasted the corn. Being handed a piping hot, charred husk wrapped up in newspaper was human pleasure at its peak. 
Another repeated favourite was naan. We got pulled in by a man kneading fresh dough into circles and pressing them against the walls of a huge clay pot, heated by coals. We watched him rip open the steaming naan to slather on oil and crushed garlic and there was no going back – paneer naan, butter naan, naan for breakfast, naan for extra afternoon bant.. 

Looking for authentic Newari dinner, I learnt to avoid anywhere clean, with a menu or well-lit; local food meant an uninviting curtain covering the entry and a couple of tables with family members lounging around. The smug ‘We’re eating with locals’ feeling tended to trump the lack of variety on offer (inevitably dhal bhat or momos). 

Never was the whelming aspect of our Nepal meals more overwhelming than the Annapurna trek week. On the first day the huge menu (which appeared identically lunch after lunch, dinner after dinner) seemed full of potential. Rice, pasta, potatoes, chapati bread, served in many forms with token veg thrown in. As the days wore on, however, the many forms all started to look and taste the same. Mid way through the trek we saw guest houses with fresh mushrooms laid out to dry in the sun and I took to asking a typical Cale question: ‘what do you make best?’ and ‘which fresh vegetables do you have today?’

Next stop for the food columnist: Vietnam! Am highly looking forward to bathing in spring rolls. 

Adios to South America

For my last days in South America I left the boys to their own devices on the coast and headed back inland to do one final stint as a volunteer. The place I was working is a sustainable community called Monte Samai. It consists of five little cabins, in varying states of completion, spread around a beautiful patch of land in the hills. Five families live there more or less full time, dedicating themselves to off the grid, natural living. They hold workshops in permaculture, carpentry, bioconstruction and sell home made/home grown products and food to make money. The kids are home schooled. Every Friday everyone convenes at the house or herb garden of one of the others, in a rotation, to lend a hand to whatever project needs doing and then they all eat together. It’s all very happy clappy hippie jolly. 
You reach the farm by walking 2km along an abandoned railway from a tiny little village. The tracks weave around the mountain and there were so many butterflies and little colourful caterpillars. It is an excellent approach, accompanied by the sound of rivers rushing over rocks. 

The volunteers spend a few days with a family at a time, eating meals with them and working in the morning on whatever needs doing. The first few days I was with Adrian and Carolina and their cute five year old daughter, Mimbi. We did some hardcore weeding of the little corn field. You could barely see the little corn stalks through the wilderness of weeds and it was very satisfying to rip the roots out and hack away with a machete. 
It got quite awkward at one point when Carolina was washing clothes in a sink and I asked her if she missed a washing machine and she started crying and saying how much she missed her mother and family and having a proper house and electricity… turns out the whole rural life is Adrian’s idea and although she would be into it, he never consults her about anything and takes all the decisions himself (following Colombian machismo culture, very different from the much more gender equal culture of Argentina where she’s from) and she feels like a prisoner. She said her grandmothers used to be peasant farmers back in Argentina and she feels that she’s become that way now, enslaved. But she wants to be with Mimbi, Mimbi is very happy in the countryside, and wants to be with her dad too. It was terrible! I didn’t know how to comfort her, especially because we were speaking in Spanish. It was a good lesson that not all hippies live in paradise. 
I was in paradise though. The manual labour really agreed with me. Later on in the week I was digging foundations for the house of another guy, Hafid, and I could have gone on pickaxing and shovelling all day. I think I was a miner in a past life, but not one of the ones who went dolefully in and died shortly after of lung disease. A more fulfilled one. 
They have all sorts of spiritual ceremonies and are very into appreciating mother earth and being grateful and loving and all that, and you could really feel it. All the time I was there I felt that they really cared about me, and that I was special and interesting (even though I was mainly speaking Spanish and I am a crippling bore in Spanish), but also that no matter what kind of lazy imbecile would have come, they would have received the same treatment. I have a tendency to be more exclusive in my approbation and acceptance so was quite inspired by their way of being. 
On full moon we had a women’s circle, which involved building a fire and playing the guitar and singing and chanting for a couple of hours and then smoking a sacred tobacco thing (not a cigarette, thank you, some sort of fatter contraption) and then everyone went round and talked about their feelings. It wasn’t at all the way I’d spend a night usually but everyone ended the night in a kind of ecstasy so I recommend it if anyone’s looking for a bonding activity. 
Another day we all, men and women combined, gathered to read tarot cards, do a “five rhythm dance”, which is dancing to five songs, the first with flow and fluidity, then structure building/robotic, then chaotic to break down the structures, then creative, then calm, and then give massages to each other. So interesting seeing how unselfconscious everyone was during all of these activities. 

Another quite bizarre ritual I got to witness was a woman burying her placenta and planting a tree on top of it. At first I was utterly repulsed because the placenta looked like dead guts in a bowl and I didn’t know why we would be going through this, but then we all threw handfuls of dirt into the hole on top of it and said all of the material and spiritual things we hoped for the baby and there was more guitar playing and more incense and flowers laid around the tree and the baby looked cute and happy and it was actually a very nice ceremony. 
On my last day Hafid and I went into the village early in the morning to buy provisions and while we got a coffee he suggested that we go to the larger town because I said I needed to go to a cash point and he fancied stopping in on a friend. So off we popped (in a shared taxi thing that was full, but still stopped so that a woman and her daughter could squeeze into the passenger seat along with the random man who was already sitting there) and strolled into this hippie house belonging to a woman called Girasol (Sunflower) just out of the town. It turned out that it was the 50th birthday of Girasol’s friend, Gary, who was from London, and he was over the moon that someone from London had come to visit him on his birthday. They showed me around the place, Gary was building a bamboo house in the garden, and they had a special long room divided into seven by coloured curtains overlooking the valley where they meditated every day on a different day. It was all very spontaneous and slow moving and chilled and friendly and fun. 

Now I’m at Orlando airport on my layover, in between rounds of a bird board game with a cute family from Maine who are my new friends. Sad to leave South America but happy that I’ll be returning in January. 

Holidays cont.

I had a delightful time touring the north coast of Colombia with my old pals Josh and Iain. There’s not too much to report – no one needs to hear the details of our multiple delicious meals and hours spent chilling on beaches or in giant hammocks so I’ll limit myself to some pictures. 

The only thing I will write about is the four day trek to the Lost City (billed as the Colombian Machu Picchu) that Iain and I did while Josh got his scuba diving qualification. It was another reminder that I love nothing more than extended marches, preferably in adverse weather conditions. Rain fell like you wouldn’t believe. We were at one with water. 

The city was built in around the year 500 and abandoned when the Spanish conquest came, because even though the spaniards never found it, they brought diseases that spread and felled almost all of the inhabitants. Since then it hasn’t been used permanently by the indigenous tribes but is still used annually for special celebrations like weddings. 

The land in this area was used from the 60s to grow marijuana and then from the 70s to grow coca leaves, all to export to America. It was more or less unpoliced. (Any police there were part of the process). The harvesters kept finding stone relics and then dug them up and found gold and treasures beneath so alongside the drug industry grew a graverobbing industry. Eventually the government cottoned up that this was happening and started controlling the area better, opening it up to tourists in the 80s. No one seems to really know the history and it’s fairly certain there are many more relics that the indigenous people aren’t sharing but it was amazing to see this huge city, incredibly well preserved (the stone structures in any case. The wood and mud huts did not stand the test of time) and to bathe under the waterfall where they baptized their babies.

 

Colombia part one

My lifestyle has changed drastically from one of extremely well fed slave to one of extremely well fed queen. I’m now in the holiday portion of the programme and unsurprisingly it is very pleasant. 
I met up with Josh in Bogota and we spent a couple of days exploring. Saw some great Botero paintings at a gallery, who is Josh’s favourite artist. He has one of Botero’s fat, gormless faces staring out at him from his phone background every day so it was nice to see them in the flesh. (Or in the canvas I suppose). 

I got a haircut which went horribly wrong. I asked for a few centimeters off and I have ended up with very little hair left. He went mad with the scissors! Half way through I had a mullet so I asked him to get rid of the hair at the back to avoid that look but now I just look like a cute little curly haired boy. This is putting my aspirations to be post-appearance to the test. But very convenient re lack of maintenance at least. 
Josh and I make a concerted effort to avoid making friends in the hostels we stay in because we far prefer each other’s company to asking randomers how long they’ve been travelling for. When we got to the coffee region, however, our enforced isolation was broken and we joined forces with a nice Canadian girl, Mia, and and Argentinian guy, Manque, who we met on a tour of the coffee farms. 

At the beginning of the coffee tour you drink about 4 cups of different coffee so the whole thing is spent in a kind of high daze. We also drank tea made from coffee bean shells which was delicious. When we were at the coffee bean farm we went into the fields to “help harvest” and then saw all the various machines and people which sort the beans and shell them and dry them and decrust them and roast them and grind them. It is quite a laborious process. The farm also had a gargantuan pig and a litter of phallic piglets. I was particularly interested to learn that they ferment the pig poo to make methane gas which is how they power the oven in the kitchen. Excellent permaculture.  

Manque didn’t speak English so we were in Spanish the whole time which was great for language progress but he seemed to overestimate our abilities and spoke incredibly quickly and for long periods of time at a stretch which meant I understood only about 40% of the content. But I guess it’s better than the usual English/American thing of shouting slowly at foreigners as if they’re both stupid and deaf. 
The four of us went on a jungle adventure and clambered over rocks and up cliffs to reach a beautiful waterfall and stood under its massaging power and felt at one with the world. Then we shared four different slices of cake in the village square. A passionfruit cheesecake was a highlight. 

Eventually Josh and I tore ourselves away from the beautiful countryside to make our way to Medellin. The way people talk about Medellin you’d think it was Oz. Everybody is unequivocally obsessed with it. “Best city, best people, so beautiful, so fun” etc etc. And yeah, it was very nice and had a good array of restaurants and there is a remarkable amount of greenery in the city (in the rich tourist area anyway) and you can reach a beautiful jungle-like wilderness by taking a couple of cable cars up a hill, but at the end of the day, it’s still a city and it seems to me that often what people like about good cities is their proximity to nature, so you may as well just be in actual nature. Food’s cheaper when it comes directly from the tree as well. 
But this is just me – Josh loved Medellin and could have stayed longer. I spent a day going to the fruit and vegetable market, the botanic garden, and the cable car jungle park, and he went to various restaurants and coffee shops and read and wrote. Our various passions expressed themselves quite clearly. Josh also loved the owner of the hostel and spent hours talking to her about life and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and politics. We bonded with her when we accidentally checked into a party hostel full of 20 year old British boys and had to abort immediately. She moved us to a separate house and fed us chamomile tea in hammocks to help us get over the trauma of encountering our compatriots. 
At one point we were sheltering from the sun in a random government building and got chatting to a middle aged Colombian woman who ended up inviting us to her house for lunch. She was extremely nice and fed us soup and avocado from her garden and fresh juice and we chatted away very merrily but since then she’s been bombarding my whatsapp with YouTube videos and memes of Jesus and other various blessings. 
We left the city to go to a little town called Guatape which was most congenial. We rented scooters and explored around a big lake and up little tracks until we found a delightful ecohostel who welcomed us in for the night. They offered morning yoga and a big breakfast and had two hammocks next to each other for our post brekker reading and general discussions. Then we sallied forth on our vehicles and took part in a very calming church service at the local monastery. We were just trying to meditate for ten minutes in the chapel but we timed it wrong and half way through all the monks came in and started singing, which ended up actually being conducive to our peace. 

We had a spectacular lunch at a cafe in town run by an ex-pat from Bristol who’d left her office job in England after the 2008 crisis and traveled the world until setting up there making homemade food “hecho con amor” (made with love). We had to have three desserts, after our baba ganoush, soup, bread, quiche, salad and empanadas because it was all so bloody good. 

Now day is breaking after a night bus to Cartagena, from where we will start the coastal part of the holiday, joined by another friend of mine from uni, Iain. 

Permaculture

I write from the second part of a five leg, almost 48 hour bus odyssey from the middle of nowhere in Ecuador to Bogota, Colombia. I am keeping entertained by reliving the blissful moments of the past two weeks and by the constant stream of vendors who get on and off the bus selling coconut water, fresh juice, corn tortillas, yucca bread, hot banana cake, and more. I would be doing the local culture and economy an injustice if i didn’t sample all of their wares. 
I have just left my third consecutive volunteering stint and I really had to rip myself away. If I weren’t leaving to meet a most beloved friend, who knows when I would have been seen in public again. This time I was working on a permaculture farm for an Argentinian guy called Leo who moved here four years ago after living eight years in Europe, doing a year trip around South America and realizing the importance of protecting nature and creating a self sustaining food haven. 

Summing up permaculture is hard because it consists of many principles, but to put it as succinctly as possible, a permaculture farm will need as few as possible resources from outside to function, will fully sustain all who live there, and also will be very little work. Working a huge monoculture is hard because you and your machines have to do everything yourselves: till the soil, plant the seeds, distribute the fertilizer, distribute the pesticides, harvest, replant etc etc. The wilderness needs no chemical fertilizers or pesticides to thrive, so the aim is to copy the natural balancing of the ecosystem to create a productive food system for humans. 
For example Leo plants nitrogen fixing plants around the place to harness nitrogen (a key element for all plants) from the air and distribute it through the soil, he puts all the dead banana tree leaves and trunks over the plant beds to decompose, the pile of poo and sawdust from the dry toilet is left for six months and gradually dries into nutrient rich soil, and various other fertilising techniques. 
The huge diversity of plants and insects means that no destructive species thrives excessively and you have so many different crops even if you lose one to a particular pest one time, you still have 99% of the farm still producing, unlike the usual farming situation which is the opposite. 

Leo’s aim is to create a “forest garden” which is basically an edible woods. He has 85 different species of fruit trees, all planted in the correct place to provide shade to plants and bushes on the lower level which don’t agree with direct sunlight exposure or more spaced out to let the sun into those plants who need that. Trees are a very self sufficient form of food producers because they just keep on fruiting and fruiting unlike cereals and grains which need replanting once harvested, and bushes and shrubs and vines can live in harmony with them. You want to have a well designed natural chaos, producing food from root to leaf, home to all kinds of microlife, insects, animals and birds. My head is full of the constant symphony of daily bird song and nightly insect chant. There were also howler monkeys in his forest but I kept failing to hear them. 
The work was farcically hard. At times I felt like a slave from ancient Egypt because we’d be pushing incredibly heavy boulders through the river with all our might and then rolling them up the river bank, while trying to avoid getting crushed by them. His farm is separated from the road by a river and we needed to build a wet-season-proof platform and ramp out of stones, as well as widen the river so it would get shallower so the car could cross. This involved carting bucket load after bucket load of various sizes of rocks from boulders to gravel from the river bed to its new home, as well as hours and hours of shoveling mud and sad and stones and carting them across the river in buckets to deposit on the side of the river we wanted to build up. We’d work from 8 til 12 with a quick break to eat about three bananas and then for another two hours after lunch and nap. My body was very confused during the first couple of days about why it was being pummeled so mercilessly, my fingers and hands were covered in blisters, the outsides of my legs were chafed from the heavy buckets hitting them repeatedly and every muscle ached and pulsed. But I have never felt so good. 

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Working outside surrounded by more shades of green that I could describe, feeling the freshness of the water against my skin and seeing it glisten over the shiny stones, seeing the gradual progress of the ramp and platform in correlation with our physical efforts, working together to move stones that were too heavy for one person, knowing that having tired arms at that moment is just a temporary feeling of physical discomfort and will be balanced out by the pleasure of falling physically fatigued into bed at the end of the day, and in general to be working on a farm that I believe in and care about, was truly heavenly. Sometimes while I was digging my hands into the river bed for another round of gravel I would laugh out loud in joy and gratitude that I got to be there. 

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And if you think I’m gushing excessively already, just wait until I get started on the food. For breakfast we’d have ginormous bowls of oats with mashed and heated bananas, half normal banana (although actually far superior to any banana bought in a shop because they’re organic and picked that day/week from 20 meters away) and half maqueño, which is a different variety of incredibly soft and sweet banana, with chopped papaya, mint, and occasionally passion fruit or almonds. All from the garden. For lunch and dinner we’d have rice with garden ginger and dill, yucca (a potato like root) and some sort of salad – I spent many a blissful moment harvesting baby tomatoes. I found a huge explosion of them quite far away from the house in the wilderness part of the food forest and spent ages lifting up the spreading vines, then spotting a dash of bright red and claiming my prize and being unable to go back in because I kept finding more and more and couldn’t stop filling the bowl. We also ate loads of leaves from various shrubs and bushes and even trees. He had a moringa tree, which is a major superfood, curing a ridiculous amount of ailments and bloody expensive in the supermarkets, and we’d hack off a branch and spend an hour or so plucking the little leaves off and into the bowl. A nice meditative pre dinner activity. 

And the figs. Oh my god the figs. I used to think that if I could have homemade bread for breakfast that’s all I needed in life. And now I say homemade bread or fresh figs. The fig tree was getting very productive during my last few days so I would eat about four or five incredibly sweet and soft and fleshy figs per day and the unbelievably delicious nature of them made me think that at the end of the day, despite all the evil shit out there, the world must be a good place because figs exist. 
There was a moment when I was sitting in the passionfruit vine gazebo area after lunch one day when a hummingbird came along and whirred around me from flower to flower and I got so overwhelmed by how beautiful it was and life was and how peaceful and happy I was that I burst into tears. Then I started laughing because I was being so absurd so it turned into a weird kind of happy sob. I’m either losing it or finding it. 
I’ve learned so much about nature and food production and sustainable farming and am very inspired to start a life like this. Apparently when Leo bought his land four and half years ago it was only $800 a hectare…and we were eating like kings with loads to spare off just one hectare. (He has 19 more that he’s keeping as wild forest). He wants me to come back next year and I think I will, after going back to the other farm/spiritual retreat for a few months. Can’t get enough of these places. Pending any new information/revelations in the meantime. 

Apart from working in the river I also transplanted plants, planted corn and yucca, chopped down a papaya tree with a machete because it was the wrong variety and would cross pollinate with the good ones and ruin their genes (although irksomely I can’t actually say I chopped down a tree because papaya is actually a giant herb. Its trunk is hollow), rescued a passion fruit vine by cutting off its dead roots and surrounding the stalk in new sand and soil, as well as harvesting countless types of fruit, familiar and new. Also I caught a fish with my hand! I was picking up rocks and pulled out my hand with a small fish in it. It looked at me gaping and confused and I looked right back at it with the same expression. We let it swim around in the bucket for a bit before releasing it. It’s been a dream to catch a fish for ages but I always imagined it would be with a rod. Very happy to have actually caught caught one. 
There was a German girl volunteering with me the first week, who was great, and an American guy the second week. He was 22 and an ex college football player and I unfortunately had prejudiced preconceptions about what kind of person he was going to be but I was proven utterly wrong. He was amazing. On his last day when we were floating in the river cleaning the dirt and sweat off after work and talking about my plans to be in Asia later on in the year he did a little spasm and said “I just nearly threw up joy for you” and I laughed and laughed because in my opinion that’s one of the cutest things anyone’s ever said. He said it was a physical reflex. I’d like to nearly throw up joy for someone too, so if anyone has particularly happy news, please share! 

Galápagos

I never thought I’d be able to go to the Galápagos Islands because I’d heard that they are prohibitively expensive but with workaway, the amazing volunteering network thing, it suddenly became perfectly affordable. I have been volunteering for two weeks at a new eco campsite/farm on Santa Cruz Island. The animals are just as mental as I imagined. All around the farm were wild giant tortoises wandering around and eating, utterly indifferent to our comings and goings. I would lie in the hammock and read and one would be chewing away merrily one metre away from me. The birds were equally friendly. Often finches and warblers would fly right up to your face and hover in front of you with their head tipped inquisitively to the side. 

For the first week it was only me and Camila there, the 25 year old daughter of the owner of the camp, and we cleaned everything up ready for her mum and the first two guests’ arrivals. I washed a lot of windows. In the afternoons I’d cycle all around the island, go to the beach, read (I was reading Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle in honour of my location, and had to get through a lot of Darwin waxing lyrical about Patagonian geological formations before getting to his observations on Galapagos finches but it was worth it to see how wonderfully passionate and observant he was about every creature, every stone, every plant), make bread, and enjoy life. 

The first weekend I took a trip to another island, Isabela, for some exploration. Camila had strongly recommended a snorkeling tour which I consequently booked, and was sent into a fit of bitterness at the haemorrhage of money that was occurring. The flights, the $120 tax to enter the Galapagos, $60 return ferry to Isabela, $10 foreigner tax, and then they were charging $120 for half a day of snorkelling. It was completely outrageous. I haggled it down to $100 but was still at a loss to how that could ever be worth it. When you’re spending a lot of money you want the amount of fun you’re having to increase proportionally, but I had left a place where I was staying for free and having the time of my life so was struggling coming to terms with feeling just normally happy and spending so much. I consoled myself by recognising that I would give every penny in my bank account for the lives of my family and/or my physical health, and actually I have all those things for free, so the snorkelling trip is just an added bonus. 

And as hard as it is to believe that a $100 snorkelling trip could be worth it, it really was. We all jumped in and were aimlessly floating about and then right in our grills appeared three giant turtles out of nowhere and I felt that that was what I’d came for. It was magical. Their shells were patterned so beautifully, each one totally distinct. Many, many fish and then a sea horse floating in the mangroves! A sea horse! Madness. 

A little family of sting rays swam by and then we investigated a cave where we saw 14 sharks sleeping with their teeth grinning out at us. One went swimming around which was a bit alarming but they’re harmless apparently. 

Later we got out of the boat and wandered over some lava tunnels, watching a blue footed booby doing its funny mating dance, stomping its big feet up and down, and another one sitting on its egg. Their nests are just right on the ground, no materials at all, but somehow they’ve retained the instinct that little sticks are a good thing so males will bring the female little sticks as a present, which then sit there uselessly. 
At the next snorkelling stop we saw a penguin standing sentinel on a rock and swam with the jolliest sea lion. What a playful and fun creature – we tumbled around and around in the water together. It had so much joie de vivre, to even think about harming it was heartbreaking. That was one of the amazing things about the Galapagos that I’ve rarely experienced elsewhere – such close interaction with totally wild animals. It really drives it home that animals are living, complex, sentient beings, just like humans and so worthy of protection. Humans are not masters of the universe, we are one little part of a ginormous, connected web and need to get off our invented, destructive high horse. 

The second week the owner and builder of the camp Monica, two friends of hers as clients, and four new volunteers came. I was relieved from cleaning duty and Camila and I started working with clay instead. We made shelves for the bathroom and many little hooks. I made a bird hook, a snake hook, a chilli pepper hook and a few other patterned ones. It was so incredibly pleasant to work creatively with my hands I started getting carried away and imagining a life for myself as a professional potter. But I had the same feeling with I was assembling a bookshelf a while ago and thought I’d start a career as an IKEA furniture putter togetherer which is in no one’s best interests because all the drawers of my project fell apart after two months. 

We also gathered and broke up rich soil to plant tiny seeds in. I have a little family of future spinach plants, lovingly nurtured. 

On my last day we spent the day making jam. We harvested loads of guayaba (a fig-like fruit), boiled it and added loads of sugar and made many many jars of jam and syrup. We also harvested yucca from the fields and make yucca pancakes. Someone bought a fresh fish from town and we cooked it with house lemons and herbs in a big clay pot in the embers of our bonfire. Exquisite is an understatement. 

As much as I enjoyed the solo time and the low key existence when it was just me and Camila, when we were a bigger group, it was much more fun. Turns out I’m a community person. 

Cabanas Osho

My time in Quito, as described in the last blog, was pleasant, but my experience over the past eleven days has confirmed that my time in cities is over. I have been in a most paradisical place deep in the verdant mountains of Ecuador where I was volunteering in exchange for food and board. 
I found the place on this amazing website called workaway, which sets people up with local businesses who need volunteers: organic farms, hostels, language schools, surf schools, permacultures etc all over the world. 
Two Saturdays ago I set off on the bus to Cabanas Osho, about 3 hours northwest of Quito. The road was extremely dodgy and as I peered out the window at the road eroding away beneath me down a steep cliff I thought my last minutes were upon me. And then I thought that if I accidentally died everyone can just imagine I’ve gone to join a silent wifiless visitor-free Buddhist monastery for the rest of my life. You can’t contact me but you know I’m peaceful and happy. No more blog from the monastery though – sorry. 

But anyway, I survived the journey and arrived at a very odd sort of place. Its supposedly a hotel with ten little cabins for guests and a restaurant, but there was only one guest the whole time I was there, and she ended up sleeping in the room I shared with another volunteer! When it was time for her to go to bed the owner of the hotel asked her whether she wouldn’t prefer to stay in the main house with us because it was dark and raining… we’d bonded a bit already because we did a long dance meditation with her earlier but I was still extremely surprised she wanted to spend her holiday sharing a room with two randomers. We also went skinny dipping with her in the pool at night. It’s an unusual kind of hotel. 
Anyway, the place was built from scratch thirty years ago by Ameeta, an extremely jolly and impressive lady of about 70. Her daughter, her daughter’s daughter and her daughter’s daughter’s daughter were also there for the first few days. No sign of any men. 

The place is huge but the majority of the buildings are neglected and falling apart and out of use. The only place that is constantly full is the kitchen which provides a constant supply of truly incredible meals, 90% of which comes directly from the fruits of the farm. For breakfast we’d have bananas, oranges and papayas with yogurt, and bread, marmalade and cheese (all homemade, and the milk from cows down the road). For lunch and dinner we’d have soups, yuca, lentils, rice, salads, popcorn, crepes, tabouleh… I can’t really do it justice but it was amazing to eat so many fresh foods, harvested that day, no packaging. 

My second day another volunteer and I went hiking to visit some caves a few kilometers up the hill and ended up getting a full tour of a farm by an old farmer called Hugo who gave us more oranges than we could carry and cracked open loads of macadamia nuts for us to eat. We bathed in a sacred waterfall. Hugo showed us all the ancient artifacts he’d found on the land – axes and pots and fire makers and artworks. Pressure cooker pots which were burnt on the outside and ornate dishes which were decorated on the outside and burnt on the inside from holding burning sacrifices up towards the gods. We could pick up and play with these amazing objects from many hundreds of years ago and human history felt much more real when liberated from within the usual glass cabinet. 

At the peak of volunteers we were seven: three solo travelers: me, Lau from Holland and Janni from Sweden, a French couple and an Irish/English couple. Our average day would start with yoga down by the river at 5.45am, led by me, then stuffing ourselves at breakfast, then five hours of manual labour. One day we cleared a field so later we could plant peanuts, we harvested oranges, we painted the house white and blue, we painted the orange tree trunks to protect them from ants, we cleaned out the random meditation halls and karaoke bar, we weeded the corn fields…various things, all very satisfying and fun. After stuffing ourselves again at lunch we’d swim in the river, a waterfall or the pool, practice Spanish, read, walk, and basically hang out until dinner. Some afternoons we did some interpretative dance meditations, pretending we were a river etc. Very cleansing. The boys did not attend. 

Ameeta told crazy stories about miracles that have happened there, including one time when they had half a chicken and half a pound of rice and managed to feed seventeen people with leftovers for forty. She must have been exaggerating a little but the place felt so magical I wouldn’t have put it past it. 
About half way through my time there Ameeta pulled me aside and asked me if I’d like to return there next year after my travels to take over the place as her partner. The hotel has so much potential as a spiritual and natural retreat but they have no notion of promotion or attracting guests and most of the time it felt like the work we were doing was for our own benefit (i.e. harvesting food that we would eat, cleaning rooms only we would use). I mean, I don’t know much about promotion or attracting guests either but I’m sure it can’t be that hard to make a functioning website… Mainly I just want to share the magic of the area with others. Life proliferates there. I felt like a new person after a couple of days, and just now when I passed through Quito on my way to the Galapagos I could barely breathe through the fumes and my eyes felt dulled by the various shades of grey everywhere after the explosion of color I’d left.