Jason Devitt

At the end of August I realized that everyone I was trying to reach on the phone was on vacation, so I figured I may as well go myself. Summer and I took a week off and flew to Kauai, one of the Hawaiian islands. For the first time since we returned from our long honeymoon we went scuba diving, and Summer decided to try her hand at underwater photography. She spotted this turtle on our second dive.   

Early last year I wrote about the Balang Dam in Cambodia: how an accidental breach in a twelfth-century dam had condemned 20,000 people to poverty.

Summer and I learned about the Balang Dam from Tobias Rose-Stockwell. Just 23 years old, Tobias is a one-man NGO who has spent the last three years working to relieve poverty in Cambodia. At dinner one night in Siem Reap we overheard Tobias talking about his work at the next table and butted in. America’s reputation abroad may be at an all-time low, but not in that corner of Cambodia, thanks to Tobias.

Ten days ago we saw Tobias again, at a charity dinner in the Napa Valley. That evening he raised the balance of the money necessary to repair the Balang Dam, and more. Just thought you’d like to know.

On the last day of our nine-month honeymoon in Cartagena, Colombia

Summer and I got back to the U.S. very early this morning, after a 24-hour journey from Cartagena in Colombia to Portland, Oregon, via Bogota, Miami, and Las Vegas.

The immigration officer at Miami airport peered at the box on our customs form marked ‘countries that you have visited on this trip’, where in very small letters Summer had written: Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, French Polynesia, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia.

"That’s enough for a lifetime", he said. "Yes", we lied.

We’ll be spending the next month on the west coast, visiting our family in Oregon and then exploring the Bay Area to see if we might like to live there and so that I can explore some opportunities. If you would like to meet up, please email me.

It is good to be back.

At the Museum of the Spanish Inquisition in Cartagena

For the last two weeks of our trip, we wanted to go somewhere peaceful and relaxing. Naturally we chose Colombia.

Colombia gets a lot of bad press. Bogota is a modern industrial city with a sparkling new public transportation system, stylish restaurants and bars, and lots of pretty redbrick buildings around a very pretty colonial core. Yes, the security guards at your local supermarket have bullet-proof vests that look thick enough to stop a shell from one of their own pump-action shotguns, but it’s safe. At least the northern and central parts of the city are safe. In the daytime.

But the real issue turned out to be whether I was safe enough for the Colombians.

Just before 9/11, three alleged members of the IRA were arrested on their way out of Colombia and accused of training FARC guerillas. It seemed a strange, magical realist sort of retirement job for Irish terrorists. Their own story, that they travelled on false passports into the Colombian jungle in order ‘to observe the peace process,’ was never very credible, but it also seemed odd that the rich and well-armed FARC, a state within a state that controls half of Colombia, should have anything to learn from the IRA.

They were tried, acquitted on the main charges, and released. The prosecution appealed and the ‘Colombia 3′ were convicted the second time around. But in the meantime they had fled back to Ireland. Ireland has no extraditon agreement with Colombia and won’t negotiate one, citing Colombia´s poor human rights record. (For the same reason U2 refuses to perform there, which seems to bother ordinary Colombians a lot more.) Ever since then Irish citizens, alone among the citizens of western Europe, have required a visa in order to enter Colombia.

I was reminded of all this when I tried, unsuccesfully, to board a plane to Bogota two weeks ago.

I had gotten complacent. Colombia is the 14th country that we have visited on this trip, and the only other place where I needed a visa in advance was communist Vietnam, where everyone needs a visa. An Irish passport is normally a free pass. Oliver North used to carry one, apparently. But not in Colombia.

The staff of Taca airlines offered to let Summer board without me. She considered leaving her idiot husband in Peru, but decided to stay with me. I did what any man would do in the circumstances: got down on my knees and begged for forgiveness.

We checked into a hotel in Lima and I started researching the visa process while Summer worked on the forgiveness, a task that became even harder when I learned that it usually takes two weeks to get a visa, if you get one at all.

So I am extremely grateful to the Colombian consulate in Lima for granting me a visa in one day. I showed up at opening time with all of the paperwork they requested, got an interview with the consul within two hours, and had my visa at 5 p.m. (Note to other Irish citizens thinking of trying this - it made a big difference that I have a U.S. greencard.) They saved the last two weeks of our trip, and my marriage with it.

This is one of my favorite photos from the trip. Summer and I spent three weeks in Peru, visiting the major sites around Cusco and spending three days in Lima (unintentionally - more on that later). We also spent five days in Peru´s part of the Amazon rainforest, near the great natural reserve of Parque Manu.

Early one morning we visited a macaw clay lick. Macaws are wonderful birds, highly intelligent, big, raucous, long-lived, and often fond of people. They make good pets - so good that the pet trade is the biggest threat to their existence in the wild, along with habitat destruction. As they become more rare the problem gets worse. Prices go up, attracting more trappers. The red-and-green macaws seen above are safe for now, but that is thanks in part to a captive breeding program.   

Macaws eat clay because it trace elements that they need and because a lining of clay in their stomachs helps them to digest food that would otherwise be poisonous. But it is dangerous for them to descend from the canopy where they spend most of their time to the handful of river banks where the composition of clay is just right. Here they are exposed, vulnerable to predators like eagles, jaguars, and humans.

We had to wait three hours to get this picture, while hundreds of macaws gathered in the trees above. They flew reconnaissance missions, swooping down in ones and twos to check for threats. A gust of wind, the sound of a twig breaking, at one point a single red squirrel sent them back to the safety of the treetops.

When they did finally come down, we only had our point-and-shoot cameras, the Casio Exilims that we´ve used for every photo on this trip. But the macaws were about 200 feet from our hide. So this picture was shot through one lens of a pair of binoculars carried by our guide José Antonio. He and I took a few dozen shots each and this one, which he took, was the only shot that worked. Thank you José.    

The view from outside our hotel room on the Isla del Sol.

We entered Bolivia in the remote south-west and crossed the Salar de Uyuni; we left by the far northern route, crossing Lake Titicaca.

The Salar is the largest salt lake in the world. Not to be outdone, Titicaca is the highest navigable body of water in the world, one of the world’s deepest lakes, and the largest freshwater lake in South America.

Even now during the Bolivian winter the temperature never drops below zero at night, and during the day it was a very pleasant 18°C . The Isla del Sol - supposed birthplace of the founders of the Inca Empire and so the most famous of the 70-odd islands scattered across the lake - is green and fertile. Foreign backpackers and Bolivian daytrippers from La Paz sip coca tea and watch the sun go down from one of the many terraces built a thousand years ago, long before the Incas, to irrigate the soil.

Yet Titicaca and the Isla del Sol are two or three hundred meters higher than the Salar and its bizarre Isla Pesca, pictured at the bottom of my previous post.

In this satellite image of Bolivia that I robbed from NASA, Titicaca is the blue patch at the top and the Salar de Uyuni is the white patch at the bottom. There is a smaller salt lake above the Salar de Uyuni called Coipasa, and the light grey area above and to the right of them is the very salty Lake Poopó.

To give a sense of the scale in this picture, the Salar de Uyuni is over 10,000 square kilometers in area - about the same size as Lebanon. Neil Armstrong could see it shining from the moon.

The western half of Bolivia is dominated by two parallel ranges of the Andes. Between them lies a depression called the altiplano, the high plain where we spent almost all of our time. This corridor of land, larger in area than Ireland, slopes gently downwards from Titicaca in the north to the Salar in the south.

12,000 years ago, as the last Ice Age came to an end, the altiplano was entirely covered by a vast inland sea that geologists call Lake Ballivián. (This lake in turn may originally have been part of the Pacific Ocean, cut off by the great forces that pushed and folded the Andes into existence.) Glacial meltwaters emptying into the northern end of Ballivián gradually diluted it, carrying the salt south; rising temperatures caused it to evaporate. As the water level fell, two new, smaller lakes were formed: Titicaca in the north, and Lake Minchin in the south, connected by rivers. Finally, Minchin evaporated completely, leaving the shallow, salty Poopó - into which Titicaca still drains via the River Desaguadero - and the 10 billion tons of salt we call the Salar de Uyuni.

This is a story of climate change, and not just steady global warming following the end of the Ice Age. The desert coastal regions to the west of the altiplano get less than 100 mm of rain per annum, the Amazon rainforests to the east more than 1,500 mm; slight changes in those rates of precipitation and in the rate of evaporation have significant effects on the levels of the lakes. But the lakes themselves have a profound effect on climate. Titicaca is so deep that its temperature is near constant, and it regulates the climate of the surrounding area - which is why the Isla del Sol is fertile and never freezes and the Salar de Uyuni is a barren place where temperatures can fall to -30 °C on the same night, the question that bugged me in the first place. So climate change even in this relatively small part of the world can be extremely complex. Yet it can have drastic effects on human life. Changes in the level of Titicaca were partly or wholly responsible for the collapse of the Tiwanaku civilization, two hundred years before the Incas.

The Kalasasaya temple at Tiwanaku, already a ruin when the Spanish arrived. It used to be on the shores of Lake Titicaca, but the lake is now 20 kilometers away.

I don´t understand why some people think that science undermines our sense of awe and wonder. I don´t know of any story of gods or monsters throwing up mountains or gouging out lakes that is more extraordinary than these theories, or that carries a more potent moral - for those who take climate change for granted today.

The burned-out tourist bus at the border between Bolivia and Chile is not a good omen.

Chile and Argentina are two of the richest countries in South America, and the road from San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile to Argentina via the Paso de Jama is well-paved and signposted.

About forty minutes out of San Pedro there is an unmarked dirt road on your left. This is the road to Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. But in three days and just 500 kilometers of driving along that dirt road and off-road to Uyuni in south-west Bolivia, Summer and I saw some of the most beautiful scenery that we have seen anywhere in the eight months since our trip began.

Sol de Mañana geyser field

The landscape changes every hour, from high desert to fields of stones scattered by volcanic explosions, from geyser fields to salt lakes. We saw mountains and lakes colored red and green and white by minerals. And we saw pasture and marshland and stone houses that might still shelter families or might have been abandoned a hundred years ago.

All of this was in the Bolivian altiplano, a high plateau between the twin cordilleras of the Andes. We were never lower than 3,500m and at one point we reached 4,900m. (For the sake of comparison, Mount Whitney is about 4,400m high and Mont Blanc 4,800m.) And crossing this almost deserted land meant spending one night at 4,600m in a ranger´s hut that had no electricity or heating.

Two kids stand by a frozen water tank in an abandoned railway town near the salt lake.

The problem was not, as I had expected, the cold. Temperature swings in the altiplano are extreme, from highs of 28°C during the day to as low as -30°C overnight. That night it was maybe -25°C outside, but the sleeping bag I’d hired at the border and the six densely-woven Bolivian blankets provided by the rangers kept me very warm. (I did forget to take my clothes into the sleeping bag with me and some fell onto the stone floor. For a similar effect, try putting tomorrow’s clothes in the fridge before you go to bed tonight.)

The problem was the altitude. Different people react to altitude in different ways - headaches, vomiting, even diarrhea. My heart began to beat double time. I tried breathing deeply and evenly but my heart felt as if I had left it a thousand meters below and it was still climbing. I could not sleep, and nor could Summer or the other people in the room. One had an altitude-induced headache and moaned all night long. It was one of the worst nights of sleep of my life, but it was worth it to see places like this.

There is so much ochre in the water of Laguna Colorada, above, that the whole lake is colored a fiery red. Llamas graze on yellow-green paja brava (brave straw), one of the few plants that will grow at this altitude and in the mineral-rich soil. The flecks of pink on the surface of the lake are flamingos, which feed on micro-organisms in the water.

The Salar de Uyuni, above, is the world´s largest salt lake. I took this photo on Isla Pesca, an outcrop of rock near the center of the lake and a surreal version of the tropical islands that we have visited elsewhere on our trip. The sun is blazing, but in the morning it is still freezing cold; instead of white sand and reefs, rock and petrified coral; instead of coconut and palm trees, cactuses, some more than a thousand years old; instead of blue waters lapping the beach, a solid white ocean; instead of little fishing boats, four-wheel drive cars and trucks criss-cross the salt.

More photos from this leg of our trip here.

The Esteros del Iberá or Iberá Wetlands are a national reserve in the north-east of Argentina. They cover about 16,000 square kilometers. That´s about one quarter the area of Ireland, but most of the Argentinians we met have never heard of the place. It´s a big country and hard to get around.

To get there we had to fly to the little town of Posadas, and then drive for five hours over mostly dirt roads in a 4WD to the much littler town of Carlos Pellegrini, where 500 people live in the center of the reserve. A man from C.P. swore that the roads are left unsealed in order to deter visitors, particularly hunters. Ecotourism isn´t supposed to be easy.

Summer and I spent two days in Iberá, touring the marshes in a motorboat. The water is no more than six or seven feet deep and everywhere there are dense mats made up of aquatic plants, knitted together. Animals as big as deer graze on them, swimming gracefully from one to the next. In some places wind-blown soil has been trapped between the plants and the result is an island dense enough to bear the weight of a person. It looks like land, but wobbles underfoot like a trampoline.

The main attractions are the birds; 300 different species live in this little reserve. (There are about 800 species of birds living in the whole of the United States.) We saw dozens: herons, storks, humming-birds, kingfishers, vultures, cormorants, woodpeckers, cardinals, woodrails, southern screamers. All stayed a little too far away for a poor photographer like me. Less wary of us were the black caimans and the capybaras, the world´s largest rodents. The one above looked as if he weighed about 40 kilos.

And then there were the spiders.

In the reeds along the water´s edge we often saw great nests of spiders, hundreds of young wrapped in a sac of web. In other places, larger, adolescent spiders had built a web several feet wide, so that each had a few square inches of space. Teenagers always want their own room.

On the second day Summer spotted a pampas deer, a stag, six points for those who like to shoot them. Our guide Marco gunned the engine and took the boat right into the reeds for a closer look, but the stag bolted when we ran aground.

I turned around to look at Summer and she said simply "you are covered in spiders."

I looked down. We had run into one of the larger webs. My coat and hands were coated in web, and there were spiders everywhere. Strung out along their lines of silk, the bright red patches on their black abdomens blinking into view as they span around, they looked like Christmas lights, scary little Christmas lights that crawl off your tree.

For a moment I thought about jumping off the boat. But I knew that the spiders were not dangerous, while the dark marsh water was cold and home to black caimans, yellow anacondas, and several species of piranha, so instead I began to brush the webs off my coat. About fifty spiders fell into the bottom of the boat and started marching towards Summer.

Summer loves animals. Really. She has swum with sharks; she adores bats; she once owned a pet rat; she can even tolerate snakes. But she cannot bear spiders. To her credit, she stayed calm while I spent the next fifteen minutes bailing spiders out of the boat. (Marco was too busy driving and laughing.) Every time I thought I was done another one popped up, bearing down on Summer.

I quite like spiders. Had she been standing at the front of the boat, this would have been much less funny.

The view from the highest point - about 10,000 feet - on the Bishop´s Road in Salta Province, Argentina.

Travelling around South America is unexpectedly harder than travelling around South-East Asia.

I say unexpectedly because Asian cultures and languages seem so much more remote. Religion, food, and customs are all different. You understand what it means to be illiterate when you are surrounded by signs written in Khmer or Thai. Western tourists are awkward and obvious.

In South America we feel much less strange. Buenos Aires is so European that people usually assumed I was a local, until I opened my mouth. We took three days of Spanish lessons in Santiago. I speak a few words of French and we both grew up watching Sesame Street (SA—LI—DA; SA-LI-DA; ¡SALIDA!). Now we can understand about a quarter of what people say to us.

But cultural differences are superficial, and half a dozen muttered words of Spanish in a Chilean accent may as well be Vietnamese. Practically speaking South-East Asia is much easier to get around.

The distances here are much greater. Thailand has four times the population of Chile and twice as many people as Argentina. But Chile, that little ribbon of land on the map, is 50% larger than Thailand and Argentina is the next largest country in the world after Australia. Both are dwarfed by Brazil. The main population centers are hundreds of miles apart, often separated by deserts, rainforests, rivers so wide that you cannot see one bank from the other, and the second highest mountain range in the world.

Both a cause and an effect of these great distances, transportation is pretty poor. Unlike most of the rest of the world, there are no discount airlines. Flying from Salta in north-west Argentina to Buenos Aires costs more than $600 return; not cheap for us, and more than two weeks´ wages for a salteño. (In England it costs about one day´s wages to fly from London to Frankfurt on Ryanair.)

Almost thirty years ago Paul Theroux wrote a book called The Old Patagonian Express about a journey by rail all the way from Boston to Patagonia. It was a crazy journey then; the trains were hot, filthy, and chronically unreliable. But today much of the rail network has been closed down, and the Great Patagonian Express itself hasn’t run for more than ten years.

That leaves road. People in the U.S. often forget that the government not only subsidizes gas prices, it built and continues to maintain the interstate highway system - $80 billion in tax dollars every year. Nobody down here felt the need to move ICBMs around the continent at short notice. Argentina and Chile have decent roads, but only 5% of Bolivia´s roads are even paved, and through much of the interior there are no roads at all.

If you don´t speak any Spanish, language is more of an obstacle here than it is in South-East Asia. As in the U.S. and China, Latin Americans are surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who speak the same language they do, and have no strong incentive to learn another. In South-East Asia - as in Europe - people in neighboring countries speak mutually unintelligible languages, and so many have to learn a second language for trade. And pretty much everyone who works in the tourist industry in South-East Asia speaks English.

To be clear: I am not whining that people in Chile should learn English for my benefit. They speak only Spanish for exactly the same reason that I speak only English. I am just stating that as a consequence, it´s easier for U.S. tourists to visit Vietnam.   

So why come? Deserts. Rainforests. Rivers so wide that you cannot see one bank from the other. The second highest mountain range in the world. Colonial cities that rivalled Paris and London when New Yorkers were still trading beaver pelts. A native American culture that hasn´t been extinguished. Ruins to rival Angkor. I´ve been enjoying myself so much that I haven´t updated this blog for three weeks. Sorry.