Why is it that people keep wittering (?) on about how we are disassociated from politics? The sheer amount and the hysterical tone of much of the debate around the MPs expenses surely reflects the fact that people are interested. Isn't the problem rather that most people have no language and no conceptual framework with which to discuss issues and so can only engage when it comes down to personalities? I think so, and I think it is a part of the general anti-intellectualism of British culture, its glorification of "common sense", which is often no more than personal prejudice and anecdote disguised, and its mistrust of the innovative and the complicated.

Animals and some humans

 
 
 
 

3 at Iguazu....

 
 
 
 

...and one in Uruguay

You couldn't make it up....

 


...but he clearly did.

Buenos Aires-all this and more

 
 
 
 

It really is impossible to sum up Buenos Aires. If you haven't been yet, go!

Yes, well....

 

I guess a little PR might help...

From one extreme to the other, via Santiago

 
 
 
 

We got up close and personal with the Grey Glaciar, which is actually blue but the Lake is called the Grey Lake-in English-because it contains a lot of sediment. And then we got hot and sticky in the Atacama desert. The photo with the black sky was taken just before a storm. In between we toured Santiago which we liked a lot, despite the pollution. Those damned Andes just trap all the air....

4 favourites from Chile

 
 
 
 

The view of the sunrise is from our window in the hotel, a photo of which is below. I woke about 6 o clock one morning and this is what I saw. The animal is a guanaco. The photo of the two of us was taken at The Base of the Towers and represents something of a triumph. It was hard and it was cold!

75th time lucky

According to Mark Hughes, our manager, Manchester City FC has been linked to 75 different players since we became "the richest club in the world" (TM). At last, one of these rumours had made it into the local paper, El Diario de Cadiz, which told us on Monday that we had increased our offer (what offer? we asked), for Diego Forlan. Why he would want to return to Manchester-if indeed he does-after his brief and not very successful spell with the club up the road is anyone's guess. Meanwhile Cadiz CF, which currently languishes in a local third division, won the first leg of the first round of the "eliminatorias" or playoffs by 1 goal to 0. This was the home leg and whether it will be enough is in some doubt. The next game is on Sunday, so next week could be tough in the Cadiz supporting Pizzeria at the top of our road. We will let you know.

Catching up

We have been back in Spain over a week now and one of the things we have done a lot of, apart from sleep of course, is skype. This is something we missed in South America and although it is far from perfect, it is a good way of at least registering the changes that are going on in the babies. During one of our most recent skypes a game has developed. Jessica likes to give things to people (she likes to get them back as well, mind you!) so she will pass a pen or, most recently, some sunglasses towards the computor screen. Then Naomi will perform a sleight of hand, removing the object, while we pick up the equivalent object here. The sunglasses were great as Mike was also able to wear them, adding to the effect. Anyway, the point of this is that you can tell from the look on Jessica's face that she sort of knows that it can't possibly be happening for real but she wants to keep trying it just to make sure. Mmm my grandaughter the nobel prize winning physicist!

Three cheers for the Miraflores Park, Lima

We have stayed in some pretty wonderful places in South America, the Explora Lodges in Patagonia and Atacama, Home in BA and the Inkaterra Lodge near Machu Picchu. But of all the standard type hotels (well, 5 star international class!)in which we have stayed, we like the Miraflores Park in Lima best of all. It´s not just the ocean view (someone obscured today by an autumn mist), the enormous bathroom with walk in shower and lots of products or the squishy sofa and armchairs in our living area. What really makes us happy is the quality of service, summed up by our arrival last night. Tired and a bit grubby after our flight from La Paz, we arrived at the hotel at about 11 o clock last night to be met by the smiling duty manager who gave us a seat whilst he checked us in, told us that the cases we had left behind in storage here were already in our room and took us himself up to the fourth floor. To cap it all, they had found the jacket I had left beside the pool on our last stay here and returned it, beautifully folded,lined with tissue paper and with the ribbons at the neck neatly tied. I was sorry it was only a M&S jogging top, as I felt that such devotion deserved a better object. I must remember to lose my better stuff in future!

Today we have been on a tour of colonial Lima, which is stunning and gradually being restored, funded in part by the Spanish government (Do the Spanish know?) and then to the Larco Gallery which is am amazing private collection of pre-Columbian art. Unlike its sister museum in Cusco which displays its objects as works of art with no ethnographic informtion, this is more of a standard ethnographic museum, but beautifully done, funded (as of course was the Tate collection in the UK originally) by a fortune made in the sugar plantations. It left us wanting to find out more of what is truely a remarkable history and one that is till unfolding as more and more archaeological sites are discovered and excavated, now mostly using proper scientific techniques. What was especially amazing, in some ways, was that visitors are given access to the stores,objects that are not on formal display but simply placed in groups on floor to ceiling glass shelves. For every object on display, there must have been a hundred in these cases, emphaising just how rich Peru is in archaeological material.Then we had lunch in the restaurant. That was pretty good too.

Tomorrow we have nearly a full day in Lima and have a reservation for lunch at Astrid and Gaston, meant to be one of the city´s best restaurants. Then,at 4 o clock our car will pick us up and take us to the airport for a flight back to Madrid. It seems hard to believe that this wonderful holiday is coming to an end.....

Downtown and Down in La Paz

Of all the countries we have visited in South America, Bolivia seems to the the least accesible, or at least that was our experience as we puffed around La Paz today-we have conquered the altitude sickness but this city is still the highest capital city in the world and we notice the shortage of oxygen.

What´s this about? We managed to visit the museums we were interested in-the National Gallery of Art, the Ethnographic and Folk Museum which had brilliant displays of masks, head dresses,capes and other objects made of feathers and a quirky little private museum of musical instruments made from all sorts of bits and pieces, some of which you are allowed to play! We also went into a church and watched a group christening-the street vendors outside were doing a roaring trade in pink and blue rosaries- and back in later, by which time the rosaries had disappeared and confetti and rose petals were being sold from enormous sacks, to watch a wedding. So it is not that we weren´t enjoying ourselves.

However, the combination of the chaotic traffic, especially the taxi-buses whose "conductors" hang out the door and tout for custom as the bus weaves in and out of the traffic, and the steep streets with their cobbled pavements makes walking very hard work. In addition, there seem to be very few tourists here so its hard not to feel conspicuous and out of place-a feeling probably not helped by the fact that the newspaper headlines this morning were proclaiming the decision of the Bolivian President, Evo Morales, "to nationalise the British Company BP." Not least, this is not a coffee, not even a cafe society so we were beginning to feel caffeine withdrawal.

Then we wandered into the Cafe El Consulado and everything suddenly took a turn for the better. The building, we discovered, used to be the Consulate of Panama and is charming. The cafe is a small dining room inside but also, and this is where we ate, a pretty conservatory that looks out onto a beautiful garden with hollyhocks, roses, ferns and-damn it-lemon trees which seem capable of producing lemons, unlike ours in Spain. The food was fantastic- I had a vegetarian plate and a hibiscus juice (yes, the flower-it was delicious). We were also shown the bedrooms which are equally charming and cost 50 US dollars a night, breakfast included. We would choose one of them over our 5 star but utterly charmless Hotel Europa, which is next door, any day, so if you get the chance, do. Then, feeling restored and loved, we checked on the football results (City had won-it always helps!) and went off to buy one of the paintings from an art gallery we had visited earlier in our stay. So all´s well that ends well. Back to Lima tonight for our last two nights.

It´s the cutlery stupid...

We have discovered that you can tell a lot about the cuisine of a country by the type of cutlery routinely provided in cafes. So here we are in La Paz,Bolivia, munching away on salad and the occasional trout using knives and forks clearly designed to cut up something far more bloody. Neverthless, the trout is very good and quite different from what we are accustomed to call by that name in Europe.In addition, our hotel will make you a very nice cheese (or other type of) omelette for breakfast on a little camping stove set up in the dining room So all is well on the food front, which as you know is very important to us.

We arrived here by travelling from Cusco in Peru by train to Puno on the edge of Lake Titicaca-a 10 hour journey, although done in some luxury as the Andean Express provides an open air observation car, equipped with comfy armchairs, and lunch and afternoon tea on board as well as entertainment. Unfortunately, or perhaps not from our point of view since we feel we have seen a lot of this sort of thing, there was a strike in one of the towns that we passed through and this prevented the traditional dancers from making it to the station in time to board the train so the barman had to step in and run a class on making pisco sours. We are being fairly abstemious in order to cope with the altitude and Puno is the highest town in Peru so we decided to give this a miss although we then gave in to the temptation of the bucks fizz that was passed round in order to make up for our disappointment in missing the dancers and yet another "photo chance". Then, after a night in Puno, we travelled by car to Copacabana in Bolivia and crossed Lake Titicaca in a catamaran (fantastic!)by way of the Island of the Sun, the so called birthplace of the Inka civilization, to the Bolivian altiplano and down into La Paz.

All of this has given us an opportunity to see some spectacular views of the Andes and we shall be boring you with the photos very soon. It has also been a way to observe a little more the way in which people live-from the shanty towns on the outskirts of tourist towns, such as Cusco, to the large urban industrial and commercial conurbations and the traditional agricultural communities. I imagine the life of these rural communities is hard, especially on the altiplano in both Peru and Bolivia where growing most crops isn't a possibility. However, from what we saw, it looks infinitely preferable to the urban options. Although we saw lots of charming children running alonside the train and waving at us in the country and they seemed at least to have enough to eat, the poverty we saw in the towns made us feel uncomfortable. We hope that, on balance,people feel that it is better that we come and spend our money here than not.

On a less controversial note, this morning we have been to the Valley of the Moon, a nature reserve outside La Paz, to look at the incredible rock formations (more "photo chances") and then came back into town to watch part of the traditional May Day parade which included as well as the political parties, various groups of workers in their uniforms, miners in their hard hats, civil servants in their white shirts, bread makers, workers in the meat industry as well as, in many of these groups, women wearing the traditional dress of the full skirt and peticoats, flat shoes, beautifully embroidered shawls and..bowler hats.

More in La Paz tomorrow when we expect some of the museums to be open, then a late flight back to Lima where we shall make our farewells to South America. At least for now.