Mexico No.6 - Michoacan

Sunday, May 22nd, 2015

From this distance you can't see the shore. The sea rolls away in a single perfect curl, a seamless wave machine, and when one line crashes on the sand another has already risen to take its place. Here at the mouth of the ocean, I tread water beside a jagged rock, where a pelican shyly hides its head under its wing. The craggy peninsula up which we scrambled is left exposed by the receding tide; on its southern face, a few hardy cacti boldly grow.

It feels very peaceful here. The water below me is an even turquoise, and surprisingly opaque: I can't see my kicking legs. It occurs to me that the bottom could be only four metres below, or full fathoms five. I would have to risk it in order to find out. In the same vein, I wouldn't have known about this view if I had stayed on the beach - it required the journey. The question is, how far out do you want to go? That depends on how much you want to risk. However, the difference between real risk and perceived risk is sometimes difficult to measure. The decision of whether to travel to a place with a dangerous reputation is a tricky one. With some exceptions - North Korea and Venezuela swim to mind - travelling out of safe harbours is sometimes a matter of diving in. 

                                                                                                                    

Within Mexico, the south-western states of Guerrero and Michoacán have a reputation of being mad, bad, and dangerous to know. The shocking kidnapping and murders in Iguala; the cartel violence that erupts, bloodily and without warning, in the northern highlands; the arbitrary bus raids; Harry Devert. In contrast to these lurid stories, the bus journey we took into Michoacán was muy tranquillo. Once past the border town of Coahuayana, the passengers drifted off, and beyond San Juan de Alime only three of us remained: Elodie, me, and an old man slumped against the window, his white sombrero propped over his snoring nose. The wind sped past us and we curled up along the curving route until Kilometre 153, where we were deposited beside a saturnine truckers' stop with awnings drooping in the heat.

Bougainvillea shimmered in the dusty breeze; a dog lay on its side in the shade, panting. Boys idled through town with their rickety bikes. Everywhere, faces turned towards us, curious, smiling. The everyday feel that permeated Maruata village rubbed up against the magical surrealism of the coast it bordered. We found a pearl-white virgin beach, hidden from view by fringes of corrugated sandstone. Towards the east, the stretch of sand was terminated abruptly by a jagged peninsula, which held within its rugged palm a bay: overtaken by a witch's whirlpool of seething jade waters, a cauldron from which rose a jagged stack poking out from the sea, resembling perhaps the discarded hat of a venerable warlock.

The other tourists had vanished by the afternoon, and Elodie and I remained. Throughout our stay we were approached and made welcome by the locals, who treated us with kindness, curiosity and gentleness. Dahlia sold us sweating bottles of water. Carlos graciously agreed to let us string hammocks from his palapa (a simple shelter made from tree trunks and palms). Jorge accompanied us on a stroll through town. I am afraid that we made poor conversationalists, as I had to ask him to repeat his questions at least three times over. A simple 'De donde viene?' ('Where are you from?') passed through the narrow gap of his lips in a slurring, syrupy whistle, bubbling from deep in the throat and arriving richly seasoned with the cigarette smoke of forty years. Alongside Jorge ambled four or five teenagers, stealing us quick and sharp and shy glances. One of them, slightly bolder than the rest, translated two of Jorge's many questions before they all turned, suddenly, and scattered down a side street.

                                                                                                                    

'Nosotros hablamos Nahuatl, pero hablamos más el español porque es más facil"*  he said. I asked him to speak some of the Aztec language, Nahuatl. He pronounced something in a liquid, flowing tongue, and repeated in Spanish, 'Como te llamas, me llamo Juan'. Nahuatl sounded completely different from any other language I knew. Earthy, thick, obviously but impalpably ancient. We practised words for a while, but all I learned was 'lawal', meaning man, and 'sigwal', woman.**

Juan was the best of our strange encounters. It was eight p.m.. Elodie and I had bought two Coronas and sat on the beach drinking, watching the twilight change from civil to astronomical. A slightly-built impish man approached us: did we want to see the turtles nest? We did. Well, he could show us, and he would be around should we wish to find him. Elodie and I thanked him, and he melted back into the shadows of the town. We stayed talking. It was now dark, and on the peninsula to the east a light stood out against the black rock. I supposed it was a large tent, and guessed that someone must have lit a large lantern inside it, for it glowed with a strange and hypnotic brightness. 

Some time later Juan returned. The tent had blown up over the horizon, so that it hung suspended in the air: it was the moon, rising red. We asked him why it was that colour. Atmosphere, he said, and told us that it would grow paler as it rose. Eventually it would be bright enough to light the beach like daylight. 

By the mid-morning light of 10 p.m., Elodie and I walked along the beach. The village lights diminished in strength and numbers as we proceeded. Finally, there was the military outpost, with its red light standing sentinel. Beyond it the highway bended away from the coast and up towards the mountains. Once in a while a car would pass and light the way; otherwise it was dark and silent. The sand extended in front of our feet, one kilometre, two, until it reached a rocky barrier of many dozens of hundred metres in height. There was no way we could go further. Our torch beams lay weakly on the sand, a pale reflection of the golden moon that shone like a spinning coin in the sky. It drew its trails on the black mirror of the Pacific, fluttering over little waves that broke rhythmically on the sand. I watched the psychedelic ripples, imagining that each break of black in the glass of gold was caused by the coursing back of a turtle, flippers like spatulas, swimming for the shore. It was a great moment and, at the time, I imagined as good as the night was going to get. 

We returned to the village, a little disappointed not to see turtles. It was perhaps eleven p.m. and we sat under a palapa consuming guacamole. 

'Hola chicas!' Juan came into view again, and the night got brighter. His broad grin persuaded us that there was perhaps more to be seen. As we retraced our earlier steps along the beach, Juan regaled us with stories and advice, opinions and legends. He tried to teach us Nahuatl. Next he told us about the turtles. Yesterday had been full moon, and he had seen four. He pointed out tracks that we had not noticed before. They appeared like the marks of 4x4s, marked by a central depression, and each was wider than I am. These creatures were clearly enormous. 

He was even more eager than either Elodie or me.

'We will keep going to the end of the beach until we see one, and then we will turn back and see them all on our way back!'

It seemed as if the man never stopped talking. He told us of his readings about peyote ceremonies. He told us of his mother, a Nahuatl speaker from an indigenous tribe in the mountains, and how you could hunt wild boars in the woods around her village. He told us about the high season in Maruata, when tourists would camp on the beach, and how they would wake up in terror at scrabbling noises at 3 a.m.: the nesting turtles, who would climb up the beach oblivious to intruders, and tear the trembling tents with their enormous claws. His voice and his mannerisms, the engaging flutter of his hands, all served to capture our full attention. We moved forward, all four of us - for we were accompanied by a stray dog, who had initially taken a liking to my packet of tostadas, but had soon given up and sought entertainment in hunting the crabs who hid in the sand. A short attention span; but the animation of Juan had entranced all of us, and the dog now stood looking up at the man, whiskers quivering in the moonlight.

We moved forward. The moonlight drew us to the end of the beach, and I marvelled at our strange quartet, ragged and flamboyant. I thought - and then Juan shouted, suddenly: 'Hay una por alla, está al punto de irse', and he began to run, the mutt raring after him. A line of footprints typed out. I turned to Melo and said (I remember it now clear as night) - 'I'm never going to forget this' - and then we were running to, charging towards a slick little mountain that was molten with the moonlight, and moving slowly, and approaching rapidly, and then we were there, and the turtle was enormous, a blackened trunk shrivelled and alive and with a face that was wrinkled and ancient, wise but made frantic by the dog that was teasing him, prancing around and sniffing his face. I was dancing, too - this was something magical, an enchantment conjured by the warlock who had left his hat behind. The amazing creature had climbed up the beach, ten metres in, and decided now was not the time to nest: it had turned to continue back to the ocean. But its way was blocked now by a curious bewhiskered enemy. The turtle sniffed in confusion. Wasn't it was time to go? Quickly, Juan and I acted as a team, dancing around and fencing in the turtle, batting away the dog, while Elodie snapped pictures. It was only a few steps to the safety of the water, but the turtle lumbered its way with the grace of an arthritic rhinoceros. He reached the shallows and was transformed. His lumber increased to a scrabble, and then a slither, and for a few short seconds his carapace quivered on the surface, breaking the light as I had imagined before. Then he was gone. 

We walked back after. No music, only a roaring in my ears that almost drowned out the crickets to my right and the waves on the left. I found myself unable to stop smiling, unable to attempt to answer Juan's talk. Only half-way home did I begin to pay attention to where he was pointing. A small fishing boat, a lancha, was passing us in the dark. Juan explained. They knew their way along this coast, where the rocks were, where to dive. If they were fishing for langoustines, they would take small torches with them, and jump off the boat in the dark. If they wanted fish, they would anchor the lancha and leave a small lamp at the surface, which would attract the fish that would be caught.  

We looked back to Juan, and I saw his smiling, cheerful face. There was no danger here: all he wanted to do was to pass on his knowledge, to impress us with a view that Maruata was a peaceful and beautiful place, unspoilt by its state's reputation. How could we argue? The beach, the sea, the turtle: all of it had been magical. I couldn't say for certain whether I would enter a risk zone again, but this time, I was glad to have done it like the fishermen, and dive straight in.

*'We all speak Nahuatl here, but we speak more Spanish because it is easier.'

**Did you know that Nahuatl affects us more than we think? This is fascinating. Apparently many words with which we are familiar, in Mexico and in the anglophone world, are derived from this ancient language. Avocado, chocolate, peyote, axolotl, chile, chayote, are all Nahuatl words.

Mexico No.5: Final Week

Friday, 20th May 2016

I leave Colima in one week. I am going to travel north, into the silver mines and mysterious mountains of Guanajuato, where independence was conceived in 1810, and realized in 1821. There is so much to see and to do; I can barely sit still for excitement. The map below brings it to my attention: I leave Colima in one week. That makes me think!

Plans for travel: Jalisco, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi.

In the high mountains of Ecuador there's a phrase for altitude sickness: La altura me cogió. Literally, 'the altitude has caught me'. In Mexican Spanish, that phrase is both impolite and incomprehensible - but it applies to me now, because since my high-altitude flight over Volcán de Colima last Saturday, I have been feeling strange. Drawing the map above has placed a pin on where that strange is coming from.

Time passes slowly, until it doesn't

In March and April I was caught up in the seamless flow of my day-to-day life. The days would dawn blue and bright, seemingly the same, although I eventually learned to distinguish them by details: a slight breeze from the east, a touch more haze in the sky. (I am no exception to the charming British stereotype of weather appreciation.) I would go every Monday to the grocery store to buy papaya and pan, and would notice the increasing ripeness of mangos. We drank tequila on Friday evenings and slept in on Sundays. Occasionally I found myself humming along to Pink Floyd's 'Time'. I lived on details and rhythms. Before Colima, I never considered that life can pass you by wherever you are.

I love it here. I am incredibly lucky, two-fold lucky: I get the big perks of camping on and studying an active volcano, and living abroad allows me to appreciate the small quirks of this strange and fragrant country. On every walk around my neighbourhood I notice something new. Would I ever get bored of living here? Suddenly three months is not enough time at all. And now that I have only a week, I wonder if I could have squeezed more out of my time in Colima. Did I do enough with the time that I had? I feel wistful that I didn't stop and smell the roses (or the hibiscus) more often.

Nostalgia is inevitable, and it's not all bad: what about the 'grass is greener here' phenomenon?

The flight gave me my first taste of nostalgia for Colima. I literally had an overview of my city, my state, and my volcano. I used to think it was strange that scientists could be so passionate, so protective, of a single edifice. It's just a volcano - it's an inanimate object! I understand now. The flight: wind roaring through the open window, air as freezing as a mountain burn, the eruption on our final approach. This is not just a volcano, it's mine! 

My nostalgia grew as we flew back from the volcano towards the city. There were the coloured circus tents at Villa de Alvarez. There was the university campus, and the road north. There were the pozos and termales that I hadn't yet visited, that I wouldn't now have a chance to. Every evening here is still the same, the jardins and parques bathed in golden light at eight o'clock. It's only me who sees it differently: the golden hour gilds everything in a shade of nostalgia. I'm learning that time is finite, all over again. The most difficult thing about leaving a place you love is knowing that you can never go back to it without this sentimentality; it's also one of the best things. I remember that my enthusiasm for London was so much stronger in my fourth year of undergrad than my second. I'd already left it once, and knew I would do again. The streets grew grander, the Christmas lights shone brighter, and even the grass was greener on my side of Regent's Park.

Nostalgia is dangerous, because you spend too much time in the past, or the future. 

If given the opportunity, I would travel for the rest of my life. That optimism I feel en route is matched in intensity only by the excitement I find in exploring the destination. However, the cost of travel is relentless restlessness and a yearning both for past destinations and future discoveries. Some people who propose travel as a way to 'live in the moment' will find themselves, ironically, spending more time dreaming of the future or delving into the past. I may be one of them.

So that's why the altitude caught me up there over the volcano. When the past, present and future came together so suddenly, I was bound to feel a little sick at heart. Could I have done more with my time here? I want to make the most of life - but. The problem with all those aspirational, seize-the-day articles that I devour on Refinery 29 is that they don't really apply when I have to do the ordinary tasks, like drafting and sending a boring admin email; it's difficult to persuade myself that it's a carpe-DM. These emails and those deadlines can be found in every time zone from CDT to GMT. Moreover, the seize-the-day mentality has a paradoxical effect on me, in that I find myself overwhelmed by everything that I could be doing, and relish the guilty pleasure of not doing it instead: Day Two of my plan ends inevitably in bed, gorging on episodes of New Girl. One of the best pieces of advice I was given, by one of my closest friends, is this: "your life is only a collection of todays".And that isn't an injunction to catapult yourself into living as though it's your last day on Earth. It's the opposite. You live an ordinary day, working when you can and taking rests when you're tired, appreciating the small things that happen. It's a two-fold process. First: you learn that any life, however exotic, contains some ordinary days, some filler. Second: you do things anyway. This process also involves a paradox, but this time it's a good one: while you are busy living, drinking tequila with friends and working on the volcano, things happen to you. 

So...

I still haven't fully taken this advice to heart. There are days when I wake up and think I'm going to smash it, and by four o'clock will have settled back into 'nah'. Hopefully, however, you recognise some truth in this blog post. I don't think it's perfect, or I am, and I am certainly very far from achieving the presence of mind in the present that I aspire towards. I know that it's a long process, though. In this spirit I've decided to leave this post as it stands, without additional obsessing. It took me three hours, and it's a decent post - not perfect, not terrible. I just did it. Make of that what you will.

This post is partly inspired by a post on the excellent thoughts-written Wordpress blog, which was recommended to me by a friend. I advise you to check it out!

Mexico No.4: Nevado de Colima

This is an amalgamation of two trips to Nevado on successive months: 2^nd - 4^th April and 2^nd – 4^th May. Some of the events occurred in April, some in May. I'm revisiting Nevado as promised in this blog post here. 

It is four o’clock in the morning when the regular hum changes to a whine that rises and falls. At a time when the whole of Mexico should be asleep, there are three people awake inside our small refugio. One of us opens a door to briefly illuminate a room full of screens; then enters, shutting it fast behind him. Another opens the front door. Outside it is six degrees above freezing, and the night appears black as smoke. Within a few seconds, however, my eyes have adjusted to the darkness. The stars are fantastic here; it is always easy to pick out Orion, standing watch. In the middle distance his fallen friends twinkle in an orange puddle: Colima. Despite the throbbing activity of the lights down there, I am sure that most of the 160,000 people in the state capital are asleep. It’s a quiet city town, after all, where nothing ever happens. Nothing is what we are looking for now. The orange puddle is cut off abruptly by a great, vast darkness, an enormous mass that blocks out half the rift valley. If I wait, and squint my eyes in the cool air, I can see a black plume unfurling from the summit, gradually blotting out the stars. This is the silent source of the alarm: Volcán de Colima is erupting.

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Colima city lazes at 600 metres above sea level. In May we are nearing the rainy season, and every day brings more heat. As I wrote this at seven p.m. in the park near my house, temperatures had cooled to 30°C; the swings creaked, women chattered, people were starting to wake up. Life there is swimming in a hazy mist. The refuge at Nevado, meanwhile, squats proudly at 4000 metres, in such a different environment that it seems another continent entirely, or another world. Surprising that only 40 kilometres separate the two. At Nevado, spires of pines rise to thirty metres in height, then fall away to stunted wisps as they near the tree line. The face of the mountain is bare and uncompromising. The air here is stainless and sharp, and a pristine crisp blue that stands in contrast to Colima’s faded skies. I breathe in great fresh gulps of alpine air, and imagine that I am cleaning myself from the inside out.

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Of course it takes a while to get up here. If you pay attention on the drive, it’s possible to see the world change around you. We begin at toll road 54, and cross the state boundary into Jalisco. Continue on towards Ciudad Guzman, and then towards a dusty, forgotten town called El Grullo. Just beyond it begins a track 25 kilometres long that will take us to our destination. The first few hundred metres are so deeply rutted and pitted that it’s a wonder anyone can get up the road, but get up it they do: Nevado de Colima is a popular national park, and the lower slopes of the mountain are dotted with picnic benches and campsites. We are going all the way. There’s three of us in the truck today: James and Alex and I. I’m not driving, fortunately, because this allows me to see the scenery evolve around me. On the lower slopes there are avocado farms, the trees’ trunks painted white and tufty grass growing between; in the middle, massive and dignified oaks hang drooping moss from their branches, creating a dappled shade; these give way at high altitude to tall and fragrant pines. The flowers don’t thin as we climb, but their colours change. The lowest slopes had many growing with the avocados, a bouquet of red hibiscus and starry yellow and enormous pink trumpet-flowers. At 3700 metres there are star-petalled white flowers, tiny like edelweiss, hidden between the rocks. Around here the road splits. You can turn right, down to el Playon, the saddle between the two mountains, with its pine forest and access to the parasitic domes of Volcancito. Alternatively you can go left, up to the refugio. There’s only one kilometre to drive, but the road is narrow and slippery, and the last four bends make a hairpin seem generous. In this field trip we forgo the bends, and leave our truck parked at the bottom of the split, while we labour up with our equipment. Usually we radio through to Ciudad Guzmán in advance, to let the headquarters of the Protección Civil de Jalisco (PCJ) know that we’re coming. The message is rarely passed on, however, and true enough, when we knock on the refugio’s front door, it is opened by an enormous, red-headed Mexican who regards us quizzically. His expression doesn’t clear when we tell him that we have come to stay for two nights. For a second I worry – we’re here with three boxes of equipment that we’ve lugged up, is he really not going to let us in? – but eventually he smiles charmingly, and opens the door. His name is Aaron, and he’s a bombero, a fireman who works with the Civil Protection of Jalisco state and is posted up here occasionally for duty. Aaron is a typical bombero: amiable, curious, full of fun. When I tell him my name he responds, ‘Like the movie, Frozen?’.

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We left Colima at half-past eight and arrive at Nevado at one o’clock. From now we have exactly 48 hours of monitoring to perform. Throughout the night there are generally always three of us awake: two CIIV students and a bombero. The PCJ maintain a permanent presence at the refugio, as a team of three do a 24-hour shift, changing over every day at 11 a.m.. In the mornings we see the team of incoming bomberos rolling up the track towards us, their compact 4x4 making light of the less-than-hairpin bends. The CIIV presence at Nevado is less frequent. We come up here occasionally, hopefully once a month, and our team is of three, too (if we’re lucky) or two (if we’re not). The two-team is brutal, because the night shifts are so long. The bomberos have a relatively easy time during the night: they have a series of infrared cameras, with many monitors, so all there is to do is watch the live feed in the room of screens, and radio Ciudad Guzmán if there’s an eruption. CIIV has rather more to do. We have a thermal camera and a visual one, the former of which is a primadonna and our main reason for being up at this ungodly hour. Thermocam is very particular about the SD cards it accepts, and taking photos every 3.5 seconds eats up memory. The result is that the memory card only lasts 25 minutes at some time, and someone must be on hand to change it. The visual camera needs its own TLC, with regularly changed batteries; there is also the weather sensor and notes to take in case of degassing activity or eruption. I must admit that there is something fantastic about an eruption in the dark. That alarm that is a constant soundtrack to your time here, that one-note hum, its monotony changes: the undulating wail of the siren is your call to arms. Generally the volcano itself is silent, although I know that back in January there were spectacular explosions and volcanic lightning. I like to watch the eruption unfold through the LCD display of the thermal camera: the volcano, unfamiliarly rendered in Technicolour tones, lets loose a dramatic curl of ash and gas, a glamorous cigarette. The first instant of the eruption is hottest. A white spot on the screen, a burning coal. Temperatures recorded by the camera are relative and have to be corrected for, but a measurement of 240°C is the highest I’ve seen.

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The bomberos are a friendly bunch, and because their shifts rotate, over the course of our two days here we’ll meet nine of them. It is interesting to see how they interact with each other, and with us. Some are playful, like a group of schoolkids on a holiday – the second shift gleefully hold burping and farting contests, and drag their mattresses around the fire sleepover-style. These cool kids are exceptionally warm, and turf us out to the screen room under the pretence that it is comfier there. I would argue with them – except that they maintain the wood-burning fire, which presumably means that they can lift pine trunks and handle an axe. Moreover, some of the bomberos are in a bad mood. They can’t hide their disgruntlement at being here (it’s a mandatory part of their work) and spend all day hunched in an armchair, watching The Walking Dead on tiny iPhone screens. Still other bomberos are very curious. One takes an interest in me being Scottish, and tells me about a guy called John Stevenson who used to work with Nick at CIIV and played the bagpipes. The firemen may not be interested in volcanology, but they are good sports.

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What I enjoy most at Nevado is that there are always surprises. Even when monitoring for 48 hours constantly, sharing responsibility between three people means that there is only 16 hours of work each for every day; and so when we are not marking time, we’re killing it. Alex’s pack of Monopoly Deal, played in never-ending rounds, goes down like a storm; I sketch the mountains and write about what we’re doing, which surprisingly amounts to a couple of thousand words of text. On a craggy ridge the refugio is isolated but we can wander around: to the weather station on the nearby hill, to our infrasound that we have set up below, and of course there is the mountain itself. Only three hundred metres higher than us – surely it can’t be that difficult to summit?

James and I begin at 3 p.m. of our second day, lathered in sunscreen and carrying only water. Alex is left to take care of the equipment, and we promise to return in three hours. Our trip up the mountain guarantees him the same time off duty the following day, should he wish to take it.

The first part of the route is a difficult scramble up behind the refugio, with a stack of enormous aerials ahead of us. The knife-ridge is narrow and windswept and made more treacherous by the distractingly beautiful views to both left and right – left, into Jalisco, with Ciudad Guzmán in the bottom of the rift valley and pine trees in the foreground; and right, into Colima, towards the city and home, with Volcán de Colima standing proudly in front. We clamber our way among the rocks and scramble down a mighty cliff, not falling but landing, quite anticlimactically, on soft, powdery earth. We have hit the ash fall.

There is a faint thread of path through this lunar landscape and we follow it towards the hulking behemoth of rock. In mid-afternoon sun the western face of Nevado is made rugged and handsome. After we reach the footwall of rock our path dies out, and we must create our own. We run into two other hikers, a couple of Americans who are studying in Guadalajara, and we exchange chat – all of us are mystified as to where we’re supposed to go to reach the summit. They’re tired and James and I leave them in the dust, carrying on ahead to God knows where. Suddenly, there it is: just under a rocky shoulder, a cairn, and a couple of straight poles of bamboo. That must be a sign. We ascend the final part of the mountain by these strange markers, and the top marks the same: a metal crucifix, with crumpled bracelets tied round and the tattered remains of a Mexican flag.

The view at the top is breath-taking, in many ways. At 4286 metres, the air is reed-thin. The final hundred metres of ascent were steep, and we take a few minutes to catch our breaths. The altitude has caught us, but the view makes up for it. In all directions we can see, into two states simultaneously, towards the sea to our south and to both sides of the rift valley, east and west, and even to Guadalajara, to our north. The distant hills are a uniform shade of blue, as finely cut as glass at the summit, but rubbed out to an indistinct white near the base. The sole summit untouched by the heat is the volcano to our south. Not five minutes after we have topped out, a plume of smoke streams out from the top. It’s perfect.

James and I return to the refugio, famished. It’s near the end of our second day so there isn’t a lot of food left to eat. I remember that we brought up a bag of marshmallows to toast on the fire, and wonder idly where they are. Next afternoon, just before leaving, the truth is revealed. I am doing a final sweep-round of the refugio for leftover possessions and/or tequila, and decide to check the screen room. I find two of the bomberos on the leather sofa, cuddled together under a blanket, watching an episode of Friends. Just as I ask them about the marshmallows, I spy a crumpled polythene bag on the counter, clearly recently enjoyed. I tell them they've eaten my candy. Their looks of dismay are almost sincere. There’s something rather sweet about thinking of bomberos snuffling bombónes.

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It’s three o’clock on our third day, and beyond time for us to go. We load our equipment into the back of the truck, and head down the narrow track to our ordinary world. We are swelled with our success, with 48 hours of successfully gathered footage, a mountain summited, and a fair few laughs. The sun shines and we bounce along the road, singing along to music on Alex’s phone. A few small divots on the road ahead – only minor potholes. We roll over them, spring up and sag down, and the Toyota makes the strangest squelch. The cab keels. We go out and inspect the route. Only a minor pothole, but it has sheared our axle clean off! We’re 14 kilometres from proper civilization, and the cell phone reception is patchy. As we try to contact our friends back in Colima, we prepare ourselves for a long wait; out comes the Monopoly Deal. It’s been an intense 48 hours of adventure here at Nevado de Colima, and it appears that there is more to come. 

Travels in Colombia No.5: Volcan de Totumo

On the Caribbean coast of Colombia is one of the strangest tourists attractions you'll ever find: an isolated clay pot, twenty metres high, bubbling inside with warm, scented mud. Visitors to Volcan de Totumo come to bathe in the mud, receive unctuous massages, and take hilarious selfies. I went to Totumo twice. The first time, at night on the 9th of January; the second, almost a month later, when it was actually open. Here's an extract of what I wrote about my first time.

                                                                                                                    

9th January 2016

20:18 and we were slithering up a narrow road in the fragrant, warm spice of another Colombian night. We arrived at Cartagena de Indias yesterday to meet some friends for a road trip. The meeting date meant that we had spent only a brief night in the fabulous Medellin before pelting to the coast; still, I didn't regret our haste. Each sign that appeared on the road suggested a new world to explore: Taganga, Tayrona, Totumo. This last one jumped out of the dark, too quickly. Had we seen it, or only imagined? A U-turn later, we were retracing our drive. We approached a T-junction to our right, where a timid brown sign demurred the location: Volcan de Totumo, 1km.

Off the beaten road a winding track led us steeply upwards and then down, ending in a wide clearing of patted earth. The car's headlights illuminated snack stands, Parking for 3000 pesos, an eco-hostel; meagre signs of civilization, for the entire attraction sat in civil isolation, distant from any major towns. Even within the landmark itself there was a space, a gap in the centre of the clearing. When we left the car, and the headlights dimmed, we emerged into a sepulchral silence. On one of the weather-beaten huts, wrung hands of tattered tarpaulin clapped threateningly in time to our heartbeats.

As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we saw it. A monstrous, sleeping bulge of earth, brown, pitted and wrinkled; where the torchlight shone on it, a decrepit elephant hide. We climbed the haphazard stairs carefully, this spine up the creature's back bristling with frozen mud. In the summit crater sat the mud pool. Above us, the stars revealed themselves in a tapestry of colours wilder than we could have imagined at the base.

Together we giggled nervously - schoolchildren caught in the act of trespassing. Surely no-one else was here, now? Still I felt watched; as I climbed down the slippery ladder I experienced the strangest tang of guilt, like sour milk. I dipped my feet into the pool and stirred cautiously at the fragrant stew whose recipe I was attempting for the first time. The mud was coolly warm, and released a fusty scent. 

One by one, we stuck our feet in and retreated. For a moment we stood around the crater, feet clarted with earth; the experience had begun to resemble a ritual. Now we headed down towards the lake, joined by two slippery-friendly dogs (where had they come from?). We washed our feet in companionable silence. Hanging from the branches of a delightfully obliging acacia tree, I dipped my toes in a silvery substance that danced fluidly like liquid mercury. 

Suddenly there was something in my head and underhand: the sense of the sublime. A feeling like honey flowed lazily through me. I tipped my head to the upper left, fixing my gaze on the sky as you would spin a globe and stop it with a finger at an exotic location. In this direction I could see the stars; there, far, Orion loftily holding forth as king in their midst; there, stars, strange and coloured lights like the green lights on the docks that Gatsby had loved. Here, the licking waves of quicksilver lavishing my heels, cleaning the chocolate mud off.

We returned to the car. Standing tall in the night, Totumo appeared a benevolent and dignified force; a mysterious warlock with his black cloak drawn tightly around him. He had just thrown up a handful of stardust and there it grew in the black soil above his wheezing head: cornflower, sienna, mint, in colour and stain incandescent, glowing and shining in the rich dark earth of the firmament and seemingly blossoming and putting out roots and buds endlessly until there we saw a thesaurus of stars across the sky. I imagined the infinitesimal distance the stellar sphere had turned since we had first stood here under it, and I carved out an infinitesimal piece to curate in my memory. The mud pool below, the skies above: we were all in the gutter, and looking at the stars.

                                                                                                                    

Mexico No.4: Inside My Head

16th April 2016

I think I have an idea for a new tattoo. It would include a jacaranda blossom, a twisting tree with roots that dig and grasp. That's all I know for now; but other ideas are coming, slowly but surely, nascent but growing: a pod of tadpoles in a shallow pool who occasionally wiggle their tails, creating convection currents that, now and then, reach the surface to leave a faint trace in my mind.

Why do I want a jacaranda? First of all, it's the colour. Have you ever seen a flower so uniquely blue? Jacarandas are also an encroaching sign of spring, a symbol of optimism and hope on the horizon, of warmer days around the corner. There's that quote that stays with me from Anais Nin's introduction to Tropic of Cancer: "this is a book that goes to the roots and digs under, digs for subterranean springs". The whole introduction is wonderful, a call to amours, to live the strenuous and the sensuous life: one that does not ignore shame and fear, but lets those emotions in and, paradoxically, the welcoming of negative emotions allows you to experience the positive ones more forcefully: joy, passion, generosity, curiosity (the best of them all).

Also, the jacarandas remind me of Mexico. They lend their name to my address: 968 Rinconada Jacaranda. They also grow up along all the major roads in Colima, and outside it, too. I can't forget driving along the free road to Ciudad Guzman, just before turning off to approach Nevado de Colima, and reaching that long narrow stretch of track where the jacarandas bloom. In February I first drove down this road, and the flowers were only just in season, on the cusp of ripening; a spatter of blue, like a hose spraying water droplets, was all that could be seen. Now it is April, and the trees that line the narrow avenue are waterfalls of grey-purple flowers, cascading from branches bowing down reverentially under their weight, a parade of cataracts that draw you upwards on a milky morning towards the cool mountain; and on the hazy afternoon that you return, two days later, the droplets of flowers catch flecks of golden light from the west, and draw you down a tunnels whose walls waft in the melting vernal breeze, walls of brushes dipped in blue that paint the ceiling of the sky to match their colour. The jacarandas are so bright they're almost incandescent. 

Jacaranda blossom on Calle Gonzalo de Sandoval

Sometimes I question if it's natural that I find writing flows easiest when I write about nature.  I mean, does my writing reflect what I feel; surely a moment of wonder should figure only faintly in my day-to-day writings? Instead I find the description of a sunset will swallow up the majority of a day's page. Actually, I do have an answer for this. You see, nature appreciation is easy. I think I've been gifted with a good sense of wonder: I can stop and gape at a beautiful sunrise any morning of the week, and I don't think I'll be jaded with time (unlike some, who'd put this activity on par with watching paint dry). For me it's simple: that panorama is beautiful, and it's large, and therefore I feel small, and my mistakes and worries wonderfully insignificant. With people there's fun and kindness and generosity and romance,  but these things are - obviously - all on a human scale, even if you're 6'7''. Conversely this relatable scale makes everything larger than life, and more crucial: the stakes are higher, every mistake becomes enlarged, worries inside my head seem magnified. Watching the sun fade in the valley, I'm pretty sure it doesn't worry about that time I spilled a drink on a date, but you bet I do on my next night out. I'm sure this raising of the stakes happens to most people, but to what extent? Surely not to the point where you're paralysed, as I sometimes am. I've heard it said from one perspective that you should 'feel the fear and do it anyway'; from another - less eloquent - that the 'I don't give a fuck' attitude will get you a long way in life. Both methods would allow me to shrug the world from my shoulders and throw away the atlas, adopt a smaller sense of scale and enjoy the people in front of the panorama. After all, who really gives a fuck? Most of my mistakes occur only inside my head. I suppose that's why I've been thinking of the jacaranda. I don't hold truck with the idea that tattoos should be avoided because you'd regret them later in life. If you design it well, it will be a beautiful reminder of a time in your life when you thought differently. After all, every one of us is always a work in progress.

First preliminary sketch of jacaranda; drawing ideas for tattoo.

Travels in Colombia No.4: Feria de Manizales

April 18th, 2016

The year began excellently, with a week-long stay at the 60th Feria de Manizales in the Eje Cafetero in Caldas Province, Colombia. While we were in Manizales we saw beauty queens, jugglers, birdmen, wild dancers, rappers, artists, street vendors, beggars, tourists, touts and vendors. This is a city that is painted red by the people that populate it, and I hope the two part-post I'm sharing below describes some of the colourful characters we met.


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Nineteen plates spinning in one!

The feathered man statue on the main square

Looks like one of the builders fancies catching a kiss ...

Colours captured in the Carneval parade

What would she give to be a little taller?

View of (some of) the city from Ecoparque Los Yarumos

Giddy night view of the decorations at El Cipre region

Passion at the salsa contest

The wild skirts and dancing, and the reflected glory of the folklore display

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2nd January 2016

Today was so much fun! While in the mall, faces dimly illuminated by our mobile screens, we were approached by a parce (Medellin slang for 'guy') in white uniform, who asked us if we'd like to ride his bus. This could have sounded suspicious; but his engaging manner allayed our fears, and as we left he waved familiarly at the lady who had just sold me a croissant. She seemed thrilled to see 'Don Alberto', and shouted to our retreating backs:

'Que les vaya bien!'

We followed Alberto to the road behind the shopping centre, where a small crowd of tourists were mingling in confusion in front of a double-decker bus. It seemed that we were the last of the pack: within two minutes we had been handed small cups of hazelnut lattes, and were whisked on board the bus. As we took some seats on the upper deck, it became apparent that we were the only non-Colombian tourists around. The bus took off; swaying and ambling slowly, then gathering speed; confronting a brace of taxis that blared horns threateningly, before cruising giddily around a sharp corner. The drive seemed designed to showcase all of the twists and turns of Manizales, built on the upper roll of a steep hill. We needed some distraction - and up it came, in the form of Don Alberto, bouncing up the stairs and twinkling at the passengers, before whipping out a microphone. In a rasping tenor, he gleefully informed the other passengers that there were some foreigners on the bus. A chorus of heads turned round at us. Where were we from? Scotland and England; to which the upper deck responded with a thunderous round of applause!  couldn't help laughing out loud. This was proving to be a rather good whim we had followed. For the next two hours the bus careened drunkenly around, conveying us through all the neighbourhoods of Manizales with barely a backward glance, and Alberto suavely held sway in the middle of the top deck, bellowing facts and regaling us with jokes and stories from afar. He covered the whole world within the scope of his patter! (Except Manizales itself, about which I learned nothing except that it was built in 1849.) For Alberto, the real story of the city was not in the buildings, or the street names, or any historical facts or figures: Manizales was now, Manizales was on the streets. Shop vendors were heckled at red lights; pedestrians were joked with from two blocks away. Twice more Nathen and I were applauded for being foreign tourists. Alberto began sing-songs at a moment's notice, with a chorus of thirty on the upper deck being no match for a man on a mission with a microphone. The highlight of the tour was undoubtedly in the dark: for every time that we went under a bridge a party occurred. The driver would blast his horn furiously, hidden LED lights on the bus's sides would flash, and the whole population of the upper deck would join in a cheer, 'Feliz Año! Viva la Feria de Manizales!'. Mad, fun, incredibly engaging. I was overwhelmed by the spirit of Colombia, and the joi de vivre of this incredible country.

Mexico No.3: A Sense of Scale

March 1st to March 3rd, 2015

All around the Pacific, the Earth has been sewn up. Like the stitching on a softball, a horseshoe-shaped scar curls around the outer rim of our largest ocean, a forty-thousand kilometre line of crumpled mountains and spewing volcanoes, of active faults and oceanic arcs and marine trenches which all together mark the boundary where the innards of the Earth have been sewn shut and where, periodically, the stitches fail and the inside comes spewing out. This line is called the Pacific Ring of Fire, and along its length we find over three-quarters of the world's active or dormant volcanoes.

Now, every geologist knows the importance of a sense of scale. It must be large enough to understand 'the bigger picture', and small enough to show us the finer details. Forty thousand kilometres is longer than most of us can conceive of, or than that the Proclaimers would be willing to walk. So let's look closer: the American Cordillera. Still too big? We'll divide and conquer: the American Cordillera can be split into three sections, which are the Andes, Central America, and the North American Cordillera. Although I can go further into detail, let's pause for a moment at this scale on the map.

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The North American Cordillera forms the northern section of the American Cordillera. It is not the largest section - the Andes are over 7,000 km in length - and yet the NAC punches above its weight class for both its proportion of the volcanic and seismic activity along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and for the amount of exposure in the academic community it receives - understandable, given the vast economic resources of these three countries. (Case in point: enter 'Mount St. Helens volcano' in Google Scholar and watch the landslide of papers and citations that your search generates.) 

The North American Cordillera extends from the far-north Aleutian Islands, to the southernmost tip of Chiapas, across three countries as diverse as Canada and USA and Mexico, with people with their own customs and their own thoughts, with different explanations of how the volcanoes came to be and what we should do with them now that they are here. 

Does geography influence how we create cultures and form customs? When I first studied the different cordilleras within the Pacific Ring of Fire, I thought it fortunate that these geographical divisions usually reflected differences in the local population's relationship to that volcano; a pretty naive view, because of course distance and division in geography would contribute to independent evolution - just look at Madagascar's indigenous species. However, it is interesting to note that some challenges of volcanology seem to remain there regardless of scale, problems that are encountered both in the local village and across oceans and time zones. 


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Now, earlier in this post I said I'd go into further detail. Within the Pacific Ring of Fire there is the American Cordillera, of which the North American Cordillera is the northern section; part of this Cordillera is the Basin-and-Range Province, within which you'll find the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, and at the western end of this belt sits Volcan de Colima, which we are monitoring at the CIIV.

Here we are, finally, at the volcano: take a seat, catch your breath. Have a minute to enjoy the view: beautiful, no? However, even in paradise there is trouble. A good explanation of the challenges we face every day in monitoring could be our recent trip to La Mesa.

La Mesa is a large and prosperous avocado farm on the western side of Volcan de Colima. The farm is at 1700 metres altitude, and has a generally clear view of the volcano. We plan to monitor it for two days, with the following equipment (flyspec for SO2 flux, visual camera, video camera, thermal camera, infrasound).

Over the course of the three days (1st - 3rd March 2016), we encounter the following problems:

1. Locked gates. The land around the volcano is mostly farms and haciendas, as the fertile earth is perfect for cattle-grazing and crop-growing. Attempting to approach the volcano requires navigation of mazes of wood-and-wire fences, and searching for the one person on a farm who has an access key. As luck would have it, that person has usually gone to market that morning.
2. Equipment failure. Our flyspec has its good days and bad days, and the first day is a bad day. The laptop continually bombards us with messages that it cannot locate the motors, the GPS, the spectrometer. Scans will stop after two minutes, or with no warning. Fixing the flyspec is something of a trial-and-error effort: on the second day, it works almost perfectly.
3. Volcan de Colima's behaviour. I know, funny that this should be a big deal! Changes in activity levels and weather conditions can seriously affect our plans for the day. We planned to spend three days monitoring at La Mesa. However, on the 2nd the wind changed early in the morning; any eruption plumes were driven east, away from our monitoring site. So we drove to another hacienda on the other side of the volcano, which involved taking three hours of time out of our monitoring day. 

These are a sample of the main challenges that we encounter on our everyday monitoring of the volcano. What are the solutions? Surprisingly, we find that 'local solutions to local problems' is not applicable here - solutions apply internationally, and basically comprise of two things: money, and communication. If we had more money, we could replace the old equipment. Poof! Our problems with poor data and equipment failure in-field would not be a problem. Also, having more money would not render us so dependent on good weather for field trips; we could go more often, or set up some sort of semi-permanent network for monitoring. Better communication would work well on a number of levels: between the students monitoring in-field, and those working in the lab in Colima; between different departments in the university; and between the volcanologists and the people whose land we borrow to study the volcano. Better communication could be a key to a locked gate, a collaboration on a project, or more effective evacuation plans (coming up in a future blog post). Whatever it is specifically, better communication is something that works, regardless of scale.

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This was a hard post to write, and I'd like to do more justice to the subject (or subjects) that I've brought up. I really think that the problem lies in the fact that this is simply too big a topic for a Blogger post. Personally I think it would make a fantastic book to explore this area, south to north or north to south, and see how the volcanoes change and the people too. Don't you?