It has been a busy few months. Since September I have spent more time abroad than in Ireland, which I’m assuming is a very good thing considering how things have been. In January, I came home to chaos and ruptured roads layered in the Grade ‘A’ grit (specially imported from Spain). The huddled masses of Cork like a scene from ‘Children of Men’, mumbling obsessively about government incompetence and Judgement Day weather conditions.
Leaving the dazzling Cork sunshine behind
Singapore
Saigon
Bali, do not make eye contact with the evil monkeys, especially the small ones
Sydney, just a quick look around
New Zealand. Fly-fishing in the sunshine on Christmas Day in Tongariro park. Helicopter trip to White Island (greatest thing ever). That green lake in...
Hello from London, here for another few hours then back to Dublin, then over to Galway, back to Dublin and then Cork for a little bit of work and a long bit of rest. 2009 has been a cracker and a killer of a year. More on that in later posts.
So anyways, London. I was here for another MeasurementCamp which is an event with some of the brightest minds coming together and sharing information and insights around social media. Real social media done by real genuine people. We should have one of those in Ireland … oh wait.
There were three speakers this time and all three made me consider how people do social media but two in particular fueled an epiphany (or two) for me. Two Johns, John Griffith and John Willshire talked about social media but from different angles yet both were honing...
Space filler while I go away and do that dayjob thing:...
For the first time in maybe 7 or 8 years I’m going away and I will not be checking my phone or email the whole time I’m avoiding thunderstorms. No Twitter, no blogging, no leaving dumb comments on YouTube videos as Jake256ard. I think I might become smarterer from being away from it all.
I’ll see you all in 12 days.
Photo owned by fotographix.ca (cc)...
This is the view from my room for the next few days:...
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Some videos from Paris so far:
Eiffel Tower sparkling at night:
Hall of Mirrors in Versailles:
The Mona Lisa, the most photographed painting in the world and the crowds capturing her essence:
And best:
A rotating Swarovski crystal Jesus for sale for €1500 in Notre Dame Cathedral:...
So RTÉ have the list of visits junkets for St. Patricks Day. Because of cut backs, some Ministers have to visit two or even three places. Don't you feel so sorry for them. This of course does not include Local Councillors heading off for it. Here is the full list.Taoiseach (Brian Cowen) and Minister for Foreign Affairs (Dermot Ahern) – New York and Washington D.C.Minister for Finance (Brian Lenihan) – LondonMinister for Agriculture and Food (Brendan Smith) – Munich, Berlin & DusseldorfMinister for Transport (Noel Dempsey) – TorontoMinister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources (Eamon Ryan) – San Francisco and New YorkMinister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs (Éamon Ó Cuív) – Sydney, Brisbane & MelbourneMinister for Arts, Sport and Tourism...
Yes, Yes I am a big child and I am counting down to going to Dublin on Friday for TeenCampIreland on Saturday between 1 and 7pm in the FilmBase, Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin. Will Knott has a great post for any who is attending a tech/blog event for the first time and I say I will be looking at that again on Friday or Saturday morning!If anyone is looking for company on the train to or from Dublin. I am on the 19:30 to Dublin on Friday night and the 21:30 back to Cork on Saturday night!I am hoping to meet a few people in Dublin before the event too, so it should be fun!In other news... I got my tickets for...
Today I was trading notes with a friend who spent some time in New Zealand. Before ever we left, he and I had talked a little about his time there, spent exclusively on the South Island. Interested though I was back then, it was an entirely different conversation this second time. Once again, being there makes all the difference. The abstract concept that I had mentally filed and labelled 'New Zealand' a year ago has been erased, and in its place are memories of a real country.I never did find the time in South America to come back to the topic of New Zealand on this blog, so I hope you'll indulge me in a little reverie and soapboxing now.Two images come immediately to mind when I think back on our time in NZ - especially on the South Island - that were constants in an otherwise...
I've started translating Letizia's Italian blog into English. She started out trying to maintain two blogs, one in each language, but this didn't survive the demands of packing and travel. If you are interested you can check out Why Bother and see our journey in replay though the eyes of my...
I posted a couple of months back about another family, based in the US, that planned to sell up and travel the world for a year. Well, the Cooney family have taken off, just 5 days after the Lawlors returned. They are currently in Mexico. You can follow them here.I'd like to wish Mike and his family every good wish as they begin a journey that they will never forget, never...
If you ask Nina what were her favourite places we visited, she would answer Sydney and Cusco. Nina and I are very alike.It's been two weeks since we left Cusco, and I haven't yet blogged on the town itself, even if I have mentioned it obliquely a number of times. Time and distance, if I give them the chance, are waiting to rob me of my memories of this wonderful town, and so before that happens I'd like to take you on a walk.When you turn left at the door to the Hospedaje San Blas, you walk downhill on the narrow and impossibly slippery footpaths of Cuesta San Blas. The cobbled road is wide enough for one car, and it's rarely free of traffic. At the end of the road, you cross to the pedestrianised route that leads past the famous 12-cornered stone, expertly set in place by the Incas and...
Now that we're back, and we know how much we actually spent (as opposed to what we had budgeted for) I can publish the finances for the trip. I've taken out some details - in particular the home running costs which vary for everyone (and in any case are none of your business thank you ;-) ). Before clicking on the link, which will bring you to a Google spreadsheet, there are a few things to note about how we organized the budget.The first page of the spreadsheet is the most interesting one. The main section shows our predicted breakdown of costs by country and category. Then to the right there are the more sobering columns: actual expense and difference between it and the budgeted amount.The bottom line? We spent EUR 58,400 (US$85,700/GBP46,800), not including costs of keeping things...
A 4-minute tour of the world, to the music of New Zealand band Shihad (the song is called Vampires and it was playing a lot when we were there). It might take a while to load - best to let it load and watch it all at once....
I spent the first 24 hours back in Cork debating with myself whether I was dreaming I was home, or whether the last 8 months had all been a dream. Five days later, I have not yet come to any firm conclusion, but for the sake of not looking nuts to my neighbours (be they real or imagined) I have decided to put this issue to one side in the hope that it will resolve itself one way or the other in due course.The flight back was not as terrible as we all thought 15 hours in an aeroplane would be. Take note: 15 hours with British Airways is easier than 10 hours with LAN. It helped that we stopped off in Sao Paolo. This not only broke up the time into more humane chunks, it also added a third language to the list of announcements. And nothing beats listening to Portuguese for straight-up...
Tonight is the last night. I can scarcely believe it. I know that I have said in previous posts that I was ready to come home, but it seems we have barely arrived in Buenos Aires and now it is already time to leave. This time tomorrow, all going well, we will be on board a British Airways flight to London, and with a connecting Aer Lingus flight we'll be in Cork at about 11am on Wednesday morning. The level of anticipation, and disbelief that the moment is here, is almost equivalent to that of our first flight, almost 8 months ago, to Beijing.If you have enjoyed reading this blog, please stay tuned as I will be posting for a few weeks to come. I have memories of Cusco, Lima and BA that are still to be recorded, and of course even the homecoming itself and the effect it will have on all of...
Remember the Black Babies? If you are of a certain age (and perhaps Irish) then you will remember being told as a child that the Black Babies were starving in Biafra and you should be ashamed of yourself not eating the delicious meal that your mother slaved over for hours (taste that guilt). You might have come back with the priceless retort that the Black Babies were welcome to your cabbage and tapioca pudding, if somebody would be so kind as to provide a serviceable postal address and a grease-proof envelope.My point is (yes, I have one) that other people's suffering and deprivation is largely a matter for our brains, while our own tribulations are projected in technicolour detail against our hearts. Especially if those other people live a long way away. Like Tipperary for example...
Since arriving in South America, every time the girls have been tempted to buy something, we've told them to keep their powder dry until Cusco. We've picked up small things here and there on the way, but generally managed to keep our Pesos and Soles in our pockets. For Nina and Sara, the second day of our use of Padre Nicanor's pickup truck (Sunday before last) was the only one that counted: we were heading to Pisac.Every now and then, Livia would point out a feature of the landscape, or a town that we could see in the distance, and hazard a guess at its name. No dottora, Natalie would reply from the front passenger seat, sometimes but not always following up with the correct name and never taking her eyes off the road ahead. This happened so often that by the end of the day Nina and Sara...
It's a well-known tip: when you want to see if the turbulence you've just hit really was something to worry about, you look into the face of the air staff. If they look unhappy, then you should be too. On the journey from Lima's Jorge Chavez Internation Airport to the centre of Lima, I looked into the faces of one or two pedestrians that our driver almost decorated the front of our minibus with. I could see in their expressions that this was not standard turbulance.We had read, and been told, that Lima was not an interesting city to visit - just another big city with all the disadvanges that go along with that. But having heard the same things about Auckland, and found them not to be completely true, we were prepared to suspend our judgement for a while. That suspension of judgement...
Livia, my mother-in-law, thanks to her good works and excellent connections in Cusco, was given free bed and breakfast with the Carmalite nuns on Plazoleta San Blas, less than 5 minutes walk from our hotel. Every evening would begin with Livia joining us in our hotel, before the five of us would journey out to eat. The journey didn't take long: Of 12 nights in Cusco, we spent 8 of them dining in La Granja de Heidi, a restuarant run by Karl-Heinz from Ulm, across the road from our hotel on Cuesta San Blas (it would have been 10 nights, but Karl-Heinz and crew are closed on Sunday). I know this sounds very unadventurous of us, but let me remind you that less than 24 hours into Peru, I had become, in the words of Brian Friel, tethered to the toilet. Bound by the bowels. Anchored by the ass....
I was named after my uncle the priest. At the time, Father Brendan was blazing an ecclesiastical trail in the US, hotly tipped (at least within our family) to be the first Irish pope. The reasoning behind my name was that I would inherit the fortune of the parish priest (at least). But shortly after being honoured with a namesake, with not a thought for the future of his nephew, Father Brendan left the priesthood, and all of a sudden I had to make my own way in the world.Now, many many years later, Father Brendan is once more a priest (you can take the boy out of the God, but...) and finally the fortune of the parish priest is starting to faintly show its lustre. Last weekend, again through Livia's good offices, Padre Nicanor gave us the use of one of the Medical Centre's 4-wheel-drive...
I can say three things in Spanish:I would like to rent a car. Completely useless as I have no plans to hire one in South America.May I pay with a credit card? Completely pointless as almost nobody accepts them in Peru.Look out for the shit. Well, I've used it once.It's a start. These phrases are varied, though a little too utilitarian. In a social context, there's not much there by way of conversation openers, though the last one can bring a conversation to a swift end. Communication is still possible across the language barrier, providing you find the right person. José is just such a person.I met José and his family on the confetti-strewn evening of our arrival. Livia worked with his wife Concepción in the medical centre, and even though Conceptión no longer works there, they have...
We are not alone. For the first time since saying goodbye to Giovanna waaaaay back on the South Island of New Zealand, we find our family unit once more broken open. It's not just because Letizia's mother Livia is with us. Our cast of characters has expanded much further. Before I begin to introduce you to them, let me explain a little further.Cusco has become a home from home for Livia over the last 10 years. Back then, she was introduced to Padre Nicanor, the mercurial parish priest of Belen in Cusco. In a ramshackle building, this man had managed to put together by sheer force of will and strength of personality, a medical center for his flock. The Peruvian economy is rapidly improving now, but back then the state was woefully absent when it came to public health. Livia is a doctor,...
Cusco is not our last stop on this 8-month journey, but in many ways it is our ultimate destination. After here, we have Lima and Buenos Aires to look forward to, but in both cases they are necessary stopping points on the way home. Cusco (and Macchupicchu) have been in our sights since the start. As a destination, it was all the more meaningful because waiting for us at Cusco train station was Livia, Letizia's mother. She's been coming here for 10 years or so, working on a very special project. But more on that in a later blog.Being such a significant point in our trip, we travelled to Cusco in style. There is a train service operated by PeruRail called the Andean Explorer, which runs three or four times a week from Puno to Cusco. We booked it while we were still in Chile, and while it...
It was always part of the plan. The first two days in Puno were supposed to be all about getting an altitude attitude. The third day was to be all business: Onto the Lake Titicaca to see the floating Uros Islands, and then by land to the so-called Temple of Fertility in nearby Chucuito.It was clear as soon as we arrived in Puno that it was nothing like Arequipa. If Arequipa is the White City, then Puno is the Brown City. Its bleak look is reinforced by the universal use of corrugated iron roofs. Nothing says shanty-town like those wavy lines. But we weren't here for the city - we were here for the lake. Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world, shared between Peru and Bolivia. Its most curious feature, at least for me, is the group of 42 islands floating half-an-hour off...
There are more ancient civilizations in South American than I can hope to remember. They all had their time, location language and culture. Some of them spread out from their points of origin and submerged others, like the waves I watched racing to the sand on Iquique beach a few days ago. The winners are the ones that we tend to remember. In Peru, the last two big winning waves were those of the Inca and the Spanish Conquistadores. On my one healthy morning in Arequipa we got a close up view of the faces of both of these cultures.Juanita, as she is known to us today, was an Inca noble. She was about 12 years old when she walked hundreds of kilometers from Cusco to the volcanic mountain called Ampatu, about 100km from Arequipa, in the company of adults. Priests. They all climbed this...
Perhaps I can get the ball rolling (npi) with "Spot the Difference".(Get stuck in - this chance will hardly come...
I've been a bit quiet for the last few days - at least on this blog. In real life I've been making quite a variety of noises, most of which are associated with an infection of the digestive system. Yup - not twenty-four hours into Peru, I suffered the revenge of Atahualpa and two days later I'm starting to recover. The problem was made worse by a sequence of misdiagnoses. After a fantastic morning in Arequipa (more on that in a moment) I started to feel aching muscles and fatigue. Arequipa is at almost 2500m so I figured that this was the beginning of altitude sickness. I took one of the pills we had bought in Chile - the nuclear option of soroche remedies. It did absolutely nothing but demonstrate its most clearly posted side-effect as a diuretic. I then moved on to the sunstroke theory....
The Valley of the Moon doesn't need any words from...