I went north to the finest silver city of all: Guanajuato. Totally over the top, set astride a high, dry mountain valley, ordinary local housing is prismatically painted and the split level centro historico is jammed with intricate, period piece architecture, plastered with sculpture. The streets are full of students any time, but a festival was in full swing. In Mexico that means street theatre, especially comedy. Not too far away lies San Miguel de Allende, another very cute place. Before I left California I primed myself by reading ‘Mexican Days’ by Tony Cohan; a philosophical travelogue covering much of my intended route. His other well-known book was ‘On Mexican Time’ about his move to San Miguel in the nineties. Unfortunately for Tony, whether or not due to the success of his book I don’t know, the town has, in the interim, become a haven for other Americans retirees – and lots of them. They swarm the streets patronizing over-priced eateries and laze in the sunny plaza watching musical performances by generic “indian” musical ensembles – those that play flute and shell rattles over synthesised atmospheres while chanting “hey-wah-hey”. Since I had had my fill of colonial architecture in any case, I hussled along.

It was a hard days’ travel, under the influence of a fresh, virulent cold, to get to Zitacuaro; base for visiting the monarch butterfly reserve. There was a fiesta in town the next day with a big parade. Unfortunately this meant I couldn’t find a hotel room. I padded the streets wearily in an increasing state of anxiety being turned away by a half dozen establishments. It was a sketchier town that I was used to in Mexico, with sweaty residents slurring directions and brats shouting “rico, rico” at me (rich, rich). I didn’t want to be on the street. One off-centre hotel was being used as a base by a huge squadron of flack-jacketed, helmeted Federal Police, bristling with weaponry as they mingled amongst seven or eight armoured vehicles. I assumed they were there to oversee the parade. While Michoacan has seen its’ share of “narco” problems, this miniature army seemed utterly ludicrous. One of their number gave me a tip for another hotel in a friendly, American-tinged voice, which actually panned out. I found the place far up the same street and, surprisingly, it wasn’t too bad.  Due to a forecast of inclement weather on subsequent days, I had to go straight up the mountain in the morning, despite my illness, so I took a taxi, and then a horse. The steep pine forest was lovely but my little horse Oscar just wasn’t into it, tossing his head around, stubbornly stopping, and then trying to kick me when I remounted after giving him a break on the severe inclines. My thirteen your old guide kept impressing on me that I had to give Oscar a good whacking to make him go and after a while I got over my initial qualms. It took about ninety minutes to reach the monarchs. They winter in these mountains at the end of their famous migration from the northern USA, arriving in such numbers as to weigh down the fur tree branches in huge clumps and blankets, thousands taking off into the sky at a hint of sunlight with the sound of forest wind emanating from their wings. It was a lovely sight, although park services rope off the roosting area so you can’t get very close. Upon returning, I rode with one of the staff (on a new horse, thankfully) to the other park entrance, at a much prettier village, where I was fed excellent local trout in his mothers’ rustic restaurant, shaded beneath a large plant-bedecked porch. During my meal Vicente told me of his four or five attempts to cross the border to the states with a “coyote” guide. Finally he succeeded, after great expense. He hid in a car under the wide skirts of a lady who posed as pregnant to explain the presence of his head under her blouse. According to local tradition, Vicente continued, the butterflies are spirits of the dead. They start arriving shortly before Mexican Halloween, Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) on November second. As Vicente had it, the butterflies flit around in a disorganized fashion until precisely on Dia de los Muertos when, en masse, every year without fail, they alight on the trees for the first time. Back in town the post-fiesta come down involved some pranksters setting off great quantities of enormous, solitary firecrackers (M-80 explosives?) that kept shaking the hotel room while I was trying to rest and watch the movie “Vantage Point” (with also involves innumerable explosions). Perhaps it was intended to tease the Federales. It certainly got me going.

From the mountains it was only two hours by bus to Mexico City. I was surprised that the urban sprawl was not as vast, nor as dilapidated, as I had been led to believe, at least not approaching from the west, and that the air quality was not that awful. For 75c I jumped on the metro which was quite full of groggy looking capitalinos this Monday afternoon and rode about ten stops to near the centro historico where I checked into the cheap yet stately Hotel Isabela. I got a third floor room overlooking some heraldically emblazoned cupola. Everything appeared to function and the toilet paper was all concertina-folded on the end.  For the first time in weeks I had a good bowel movement – chopped a log as my friend says -and headed straight out. The street leading to the Zocalo, the vast central plaza, seemed something like Edinburgh during the festival. It was mobbed with shoppers and families engrossed in their ice-cream, organ grinders (that’s music), comedians, religious nuts, Barcelona style human sculpture. The plaza is surrounded by great historic buildings including the enormous and eclectic cathedral (it took hundreds of years to complete and incorporates styles from all the colonial periods) and the Palacio National with the offices of the President and the treasury. Cortez famously destroyed the Aztec (more correctly Mexicana) Plaza Mayor and had the cathedral built on top. Excavations of the Aztec site, heart of the pre-Hispanic Mexican world, lie off to one corner. Inside the plaza which was also, of course, thronging with humanity, there was a massive stage where dancers were leading about a hundred of the crowd in an aerobics work out, tents giving out free trees to help improve air quality, a wrestling ring full of feisty children, a free-for-all volley ball court, medical services and multiple groups of “Aztec” dancers trying to evoke something of the spirit of the past but looking more like package holiday makers giving it a go, despite the impressive feathered head dresses. Step outside the confines of the plaza and enter a world of extreme street vending with every conceivable type of junk being hawked at top volume, and yet more Aztec dancers. If this was an overcast Monday afternoon, I couldn’t wait for the weekend.

Guadalajara is a big city packed with amazing colonial architecture, broad plazas and lots of activity. Tuesday afternoon shopping seemed like Saturday anywhere else. At night the bar scene was also animated with grunge rock and low-brow techno blasting into the street. My first dinner was in one of the central plazas adjacent to the golden spires and domes of the enormous main cathedral. It’s an imposing and beautiful 17^th-century structure, all gilded, melodramatic iconography and towering ribbed arches reminiscent of the inside of a whale. Mexico is full of such jewels. The sheer beauty and sanctity inside makes even me want to kneel and pay homage. You can pick your idol, but Mary always seems to be front and centre. Seated outside at restaurant La Antigua I was presented with a sizzling meat stew in a pumice pot that appeared to have been freshly cooked in one of the nearby volcanoes. The plaza was full at 9pm but I was expecting a bit of old-time ambience. I was therefore perturbed when a classic rock cover band started up at the adjacent eatery. They were pretty good, but tastelessly scheduled. Such clashes of eras are common. In another antique plaza we were assailed by tympanum-perforating techno-pop beamed directly at families waiting in line. Later in the small city of Colima, I was pleased to find a festival of traditional music and dance underway in the plaza but bars on the periphery continued blasting Abba covers during the performances. But then that is Mexico; a jumbled volcanic mélange of contradictions: ancient and modern, sweet, religious and respectful, oppressed and lawless, virgin and whore (as Mexican women are proverbially and prejudicially seen).

Perhaps it is the Mexican identity itself that has to contain such contradictions. The contradictions of a colonial land where the majority are mixed blood mestizos. Young people in Guadalajara look like they just hopped in from Barcelona but move out of the fashionable centre and people rapidly get darker, poorer and rounder, evidently enjoying a less that healthy diet, but not so for want of calories. Semi-officially, however, modern Mexico has come out in favour of los indios – in favour of itself, essentially. Cortez the Conquistador is viewed as a scoundrel and the heroes are Mayan chiefs and fomenters of revolution like Hidalgo and Pancho Villa. Nonetheless, most Indian descended folks you see in the city are sitting around trying to sell luridly coloured candy and corn puffs, which is itself also a rather poignant and demeaning fate for the great Indian maize. The indigenous people of the south in fact are known as “people of the maize”. Nobody really understands where maize came from. It was created by the natives somewhere around here but scientists remain baffled as to what miraculous feats of bio-engineering could have produced it.

Despite the bad graffiti, Guadalajara felt modern, clean and safe, however clearly all is not well in the heart of Mexico. The well-known American inspired drug wars have been causing great stress in the society. As the main shipping route to supply America’s unquenchable appetite for cocaine, Mexican drug gangs became so powerful as to operate with impunity while murdering huge numbers and corrupting the social fabric. Drugs are a 13-billion dollar-a-year business here. President Calderon launched an all-out war on the gangs and deaths went up 500% while guns, flowed south from the US market, supplying the gangs with their armoury. Of course, the US government had to sell lots more guns to their Mexican counterparts in order to counter this. Nowadays, there are an amazing number of police on the street. They drive around with their lights flashing like some outdoor discotheque while beat cops patrol the plazas. Many are atypical – middle aged or female –and not to speak disparagingly of their ability it appears almost anyone can get hired since they need so many new recruits. Even at the quaint festival in Colima, the plaza contained a dozen cops with sub-automatic weapons. Army trucks roll around country roads and at the little beach resort of Barra de Navidad, they were busying themselves searching peoples vehicles. According to my taxi driver informants, the soldiers are far more trustworthy, being new to the game and less crooked. It certainly doesn’t look good for civil liberties south of the border but then they never have been very well respected. The party of the revolution “institutionalized” itself 70 years ago, remaining in power until 2000. This led to predictable and intractable corruption. In ’68, just before the Olympic Games, the government response to peaceful student protest was to massacre them by the hundred in the square. A glance at one day’s front page of the English language paper in Guadalajara provides a snap shot of the problems facing the country. 1: Drug gangs posted notices around the city stating that they were going to kidnap school children to hold ransom against one of their number who was residing in the slammer, causing parental hysteria and massive school absenteeism. 2: A bus on the freeway “spontaneously” burst into flame. The driver drove off the road then ran away and was still missing. 3: A sick puppy found in the suburbs had been confirmed as rabid. All the vampire bats by the lake were marked for extermination.

Despite such challenges, Mexicans really know how to enjoy life. While much solace appears to be taken from junk TV shows which are ubiquitous and loud, family life and partying make for abundant enjoyment. There is definitely no shortage of cheese, meat or beer. You could die from the cheese alone but then it is a good way to go. It is very hard to find an American style veggie burrito. If snogging in the plaza was an Olympic sport, Mexico would be world champions. Whilst so engaged both of the pair sneak glances to see who is watching while the guy shields his less than faithful seňorita from the world using his body. Carousing starts young and despite successful family planning programs, there are still plenty children around and the whole extended family comes out to delight in them, gathering together in the plazas. Half the time there is some ridiculous clown performance. It all seems quite wholesome.

Music is everywhere though not always, to my mind, the best of most genres. I wouldn’t put Mexican traditional music at the top of the world music rating, though certainly that’s a pretty suspect scale. While some of the sounds at the festival in Colima were entrancing, typically the arrangements of traditional tunes are reminiscent of Bavarian “oom-pah” music except that the band is even more drunk. In place of lederhosen we have wide-brimmed sombreros and frilly cravats. Later, however, I was really impressed by the live rock bands I saw in bars and the street. The best thing I saw in Colima was a group of a dozen teenagers playing traditional forms combined with a tap dance which incorporated bullfighting as courting metaphor – with the boy as the bull, the girl used her skirts as a matador’s red muletta. Instruments included guitars in various sizes, a drum, cow-jaws used to produce both a rattle sound and washboard effect on the teeth and a something like a gigantic African thumb piano for bass. After the stage show, they did an informal gig in front of the highly ornate bandstand typical of plazas in this region.  The plazas I have seen were all lovely places, often filled with tropical foliage. Not so for the beach where the wreckage of over-development was evident, providing a backdrop of broken concrete and twisted rebar like the bones and ligaments of some great, stupid beast.  Mexicans love their visual arts too taking the mural to its apogee. Public art fills the street which is very impressive for a poor country.

Just up the road from Colima, I visited Comala, and old whitewashed village almost in the shadow of the suitably named, 3,800m, Volcan de Fuego. Here working in a beautiful old hacienda that provided a taster of the magical Mexican countryside, the Spanish descended painter Alejandro Rangel Hidalgo worked to produce his immaculate and charming gouaches that seemed to me to capture something very Mexican. With a peculiar magical realist vision his works often depict little Indian child-angels, naïve but authentically detailed. Around the same village, a great stash of 1,500 year old antiquities was discovered in shaft tombs apparently belonging to a peaceful agrarian culture quite unrelated to its more famous and warlike neighbours. The artist collected the finds and created a small museum. Judging from the collection, the culture had a great penchant for making all kinds of ceramic chihuahuas.

Driving mountain roads in Mexico the verge is decorated with so many white crosses and floral memorials marking the sites of fatal accidents. Machismo kills. The luxury coach I had previously ridden was exceedingly comfortable with headsets provided for those foolhardy enough to watch “Fast and Furious” as we zoomed along. I had already seen this movie on a bus in Indonesia where the driving is truly insane. It must be some kind of in joke played on the passengers. Now headed to Puerto Vallarta the bus was a grade down, still comfortable, with a continuous soundtrack of accordion music at a sensible volume. The western highlands of the Sierra Madre were forested, greyed by partial winter leaf-fall (winter is the dry season) but also brightened by occasional, huge, subtropical blossoms. Lower down, the range of cactus species like organ-pipe and giant prickly pear extends down from the north and intermingles exotically with the woodland. Up in the higher reaches, the forest had that incredible tropical mountain diversity with everything from palms to pines, stately hardwoods and bouganvillas. Vallarta itself has a lovely natural setting, backed by jungle clad mountains, with an island-split river passing through shady reaches downtown and emerging at the rather spectacular, art-adorned waterfront. It’s a fun party place. Luckily for my liver I was only staying two days.

I had to return to Guadalajara for my second dental appointment with a friendly, almost-retired dentista, recommended and very well-qualified, who had already drilled a big hole into the corner of my lip. She was so sorry about that but didn’t give a discount, just some calendula to help the healing which worked. Saturday night saw a big, high quality craft fare on the main drag, packed to the gills until 11pm and featuring street musicians that included a sizzling electric blues band, so hot that my face involuntarily warped in response to the guitar licks, hurting my lip. Next day I was ready to head east, further into history and the lovely volcanic landscape of Michoacan, where I would begin to see the rather shabby indian villages that demonstrate why Mexico is still a “Third World” country.

LA is famous for its Chicano murals. Strictly speaking, the term Chicano refers to U.S. citizens of Mexican descent but clearly some of these creatives are outside artists and aliens – a heady mix that makes for powerful concretions of radical politics and Aztec mythology. Some of the works are clearly inspired by the great Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and occupy various public spaces like freeway overpasses, but many are collaborative works; community property depicting alternative histories and the shared experiences of life in the barrios and the fields. One that we came across in Silverlake, near Hollywood depicted some kind of urban Aztec mushroom shaman with accompanying proverbs extolling spiritual transformation as the gateway to political change.

We headed north through the San Gabriel Mountains. Immediately, you pass into the high Mojave Desert, rather bleak in December. We stopped in the non-descript town of Victorville. After breakfast in a genuine 1950’s diner, replete with gleaming soda fountains and such, we went in search of the bottle tree ranch. It wasn’t easy. The place is not famous on the scale of our two later destinations. Eventually we did get to its location with a Route 66 sign out front. Created by a redneck hippie dude, the roadside property has been entirely given over to welded iron “trees”, rather like giant clothes hangers. A copious collector of brick-a-brack, the artist, whos name I didn’t get, managed to find hundreds of coloured bottles; clear, green, brown and blue (where did he get all the blue ones?) and installed them on the peg-like branches. Filling the gaps with miscellaneous car parts, typewriters, shell casings and animal bones, his translucent, man-made forest gleams away in the bright desert sun with no apparent purpose beyond the fun of creation (and the tips he now receives from the invariably impressed visitors).

From there we made our way southeast by way of Joshua Tree National Park and over-priced but nifty Palm Springs to the fabulous Salton Sea. Once an ephemeral sink, the “sea” was created when a canal diverting water from the Colorado River to Imperial Valley agricultural land ruptured catastrophically in 1905. Soon it was attracting wild fowl and water sports enthusiasts so authorities allowed enough influx for it to become the biggest inland body of water in California. Unfortunately ever increasing salinity and fertilizer induced algal blooms have led to massive fish die offs with overpowering stench and entire beaches made of bleached fish parts. Standing by the forlorn, dilapidated marina where The Beach Boys used to play, watching tilapia dying in the anoxic water, it is quite a surreal scene. Luckily there are some redeeming features in the area. One is Slab City, a former military base that has become a winter home to flocks of weird and independent and otherwise homeless mobile home owners, freaks, ravers, art car artists and derelicts. It’s a pretty unique situation and worth a visit. Directly adjacent is the not exactly magnificent but compellingly intrepid art installation known as Salvation Mountain. Created by Leonard Knight over a 25 year period starting when he was in his mid-50s, this epic structure, made purely to promote the idea that “God is Love”, consists of a small hill extended with cement and adobe to a height of 100’ and covered in vast quantities of multi-coloured acrylic house-paint. Like some demented scene from the Wizard of Oz, a yellow path winds up the face to the tall crucifix on the summit. Off to the side, Leonard attempted to create a complete cupola out of straw bales pierced with half-trees and old telegraph poles, all garishly painted. It almost collapsed but still stands tall, curving inward, suggestive of a cathedral and thoroughly precarious looking. Unfortunately the remarkable creator was institutionalized with dementia right before we got there. Other, younger zealots appear to be carrying on the work and the state of California has made Salvation Mountain an officially protected site.

A similarly heroic installation greeted us on our return to LA.  Also jutting 100’ skywardbut this time from the hood way down in South Central, Watts Towers was the work of another one-man phenomenon, an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia, who created them over 33 years ending in 1954 when he suddenly quit and left. The 17 towers were made from scrap rebar and piping, brilliantly engineered on an ad hoc basis, and covered in mortar imbedded with glass, ceramics and found objects. How he could have created these huge structures by hand is, in much the same way as Salvation Mountain, completely remarkable. Reminiscent of works by Gaudi in Barcelona, the now deservedly famous towers have also been protected. Sadly the creator didn’t live to see his efforts appreciated properly. He wasn’t the first. Just ask Van Gogh, who never went to art school either.

Once in LA, we rented a car and Koko tackled the 6-lane, multiple interchange, 50 mph speed differential highway system. It was fairly terrifying. LA drivers overtake on either side and are usually too busy on the phone to be paying attention to the road despite anti car-chat legislation. We were surprised to learn that contrary to popular belief the LA area does have an excellent bus system some of which, remarkably, run 24-7. There is also a metro light-rail service. We wondered why we were going through driving hell, even avoiding, as we were, the massive rush hour congestion. Unfortunately, LA is so huge that any form of travel can take ages. We soon headed out to the open desert but even in the middle of the Mojave traffic can be heavy and fast. There is just no escaping cars in California, except perhaps on Amtrak.

At least we figured out where the dog came from.

A short history. First Turtle Island lived free. Then people came. They were pretty cool but they killed off all the giant ground-sloths. Eurocentric self-identity sprang into being with the crazed onset of the goldrush in 1849. Since that sudden, muddy orgasm of desperation, individuality, experimentation and materialism have ruled OK. In modern times a weird amalgam gradually arose with the native, black and Asian peoples and blood-sucking WASPs that came on the Mayfower. California is a big old bowl of Mexican rice and beans after all. Well fed, the people were fruitful and multiplied into metropolises. They suckled on homogenising media while the vampires suckled on them. The WASPs learned how to keep bees and then how to be just like bees. Everyone tasted multicultural honey. The humans jostled against each other like ping pong balls in a bingo blower so the rich raised fences and boiled their oil. Trust fund mediocrity took over the meritocracy. Whites became a minority and the scene was set to be occupied in 2011.

Few in this new land of freedom are true innovators. Consumerism breeds passivity and vice versa. All our finest dreams are commodified. If the dream is dreamable, then there’s sure to be a market. The consumer herds dream up around the soccer posts clutching some culture magazines, hopeful to poach an image-augmenting  goal.  A broad subgroup of the middle class want to get tagged with an ersatz individualist piercing. Nine out of ten young professionals long to be branded with a designer outdoor label before everybody else shows up with it on the summit. These are our soul-free adventures in the name of simulating real personality by association. The sophisticated ape pushing the known limits of mimicry. Even though originality must come from the ground of being most people move too fast to touch that source. They surf the shallows as the ever-more crowded wave rolls in, sunk in the latest shell-suit, devoid of content. Such hollowness of heart and voidness of vision spurs yet greater craving for demarcated, inviolable individuality and, by implication for pharaoh-like immortality. The perceived impossibility (or at least the current unaffordability) of that goal leads to further frantic packing in of all things artificial in an attempt to undo fate by sheer weight of illusion. The image must suffice in this battle against time.

All that artifice makes lots of money for people orphaned or liberated from historic continuums, leading, for better or worse, to both random novelty and outlandish simulacrums of old culture like Disneyland and Hearst Castle. In the dream market we create luxuries for the dreamers who are asleep at the wheel while the rest of us get the dream prefabricated. The dreamscape must conform to the necessities of mass distribution and the dream designers are at hand. The big money is in advertising, image consultancy, public relations, Hollywood and propaganda. Much of the juice is channelled back into the mainstream economy, but some is inevitably spilled like seed outside the furrow where it sprouts and regenerates like hydra’s teeth. The new growth dedicates itself to redefining the culture from which it sprang, forming a nexus that we know as counterculture. Here, as in the old formulation, anything is possible, since reformulation is the name of the game, but early results showed the need to recognise the systemic limits which had, until now been breezily blown off, externalised and subsumed in the culture project. Mind at liberty found reason to doubt the assumptions of the goldrush, policed that dream and dredged up wellbeing. This was a turn from resource acquisition to contemplation and acquiescence. Nature awoke like a sleeping giant with a vast ambient yawn. It was slowly recognised that America is indeed bound by the ocean and must consciously engage natural law. Still, most are dedicated to the enshrined “pursuit of happiness”, as opposed to being happy, so Californians are impeccably active in work and play, but often not very happy, despite even the terrific weather. Dissatisfaction continues to drive the economic machine to our destruction. Despite the stereotypical lack of differentiation of liberty or novelty or ecological principles from consumerism and mind control, the sloshing around of the California fresh juice has changed the world. Something good must be going on.

It wasn’t very far from the shores of Lake Kivu up into the highlands of the Virunga massif. It’s a cool, wet land; somewhat dismal for the folks who live there on an overcast day. The looming forms of the volcanoes themselves soon came into view, truncated by a ceiling of grey. There was the usual, occasionally spectacular terracing of the steep slopes so typical of Rwanda. The massif straddles the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and the Congo and is home to more than half the world’s mountain gorillas (gorilla berengei berengei). The unlucky ones live in the trouble plagued Congo but they don’t recognise borders and the parks that protect them are contiguous. The Parc National de Volcans on the Rwanda side is very well protected. It’s been a long time since anyone poached a gorilla. This used to happen a lot, to provide gorilla hand ashtrays and other such novelties. Excepting even the mountain gorilla’s critically endangered status, quite who would brazenly sport such an item in their house is beyond me.  .  I feel the same way about elephant foot umbrella stands. All the security required to ensure gorilla safety, plus simple laws of economics have pushed the price tag for a day’s tracking up to a rather ridiculous $500. Sometimes the trip lasts just a couple of hours. Other family groups require several hours of fairly arduous trekking to reach.

Smallish Musanze is the base for gorilla tracking. I got my usual cheap hotel, trying and failing to balance these expenses in my mind and spent a fairly boring, rainy evening there. The weather did not look too good. Transport was arranged through a tour company. You might think this would be included in the $500. I had to find people to share an $80 4×4 hire for the drive to the park headquarters and then on to the trailhead. The company came up with two American girls for company. Next morning dawn broke somewhat brighter and I was collected at 6 am. The two girls turned out to be just one. She had heard nothing of her phantom companion, but at least she was nice. It was short drive to HQ dodging early starting school students. At the park entrance we were treated to a traditional drum and dance ensemble as veils of cloud slid over the forest draped cone beyond. They were very vigorous and smiled all the time for tips. Elsewhere the sky was brightening.  Almost all the tourists, some sixty-odd, were American, in contrast to the scant Eurocentric population I had seen hitherto in these parts and clearly the fly in, fly out type. Mind you, my inverse snob reaction couldn’t really wash under the circumstances. I had joined the tourist elite for a few hours. After coffee and the performance were each assigned to a gorilla group. Visiting the largest and most distant ‘Susa’ group now requires a vehicle surcharge of 100%. Luckily we got the second most distant ‘Amora’ (peace) family; I wanted to enjoy a nice long trek.

The way to the trailhead gave me slightly more sympathy for the drivers as the road was hellacious. It took three vehicles to ferry the seven of us up the hill. Car pooling was clearly not enforced. The trail led first through fields of pyrethrum flowers which are used to make natural insecticides. Half the originally gazetted park is now pyrethrum plantation. When you are flea bathing your dog at home, the tiny spirits of unborn mountain gorillas are washing down the plug hole. We got a briefing at the official park entrance (a little creek) and plugged on up the slope. The trail was pure mud and lined with huge stinging nettles with leaves the size of your hand. We had been warned, but I hadn’t quite taken it to heart and was lucky to find a sturdy walking staff in the forest. We battled on and after a couple of hours descended a dangerously steep and slippy hillside to reach a richly vegetated plateau in the bamboo forest zone. Other than the thick copses of bamboo, the country was densly covered in low flowering trees and sweet herbage. This was gorilla country. They include around two hundred different plants in their salad based diet. News came that the trackers who follow the group day to day had found the gorillas. They had been munching bamboo shoots forty minutes away and were resting. The visit were on, thankfully. To do this trip and fail to find the gorillas would be pretty insufferable.

Evidence of recent gorilla camps is clear; flattened twisted grass, plant debris and little piles of carefully peeled and discarded bamboo shoot skin. The gorillas adore the bamboo shoots apparently due to an intoxicating effect. They get quite drunk – and unpredictable. I’ve never heard off inebriated pandas; they must be immune. When we suddenly came upon them they were obviously sleeping it off.  At an opening in a bamboo thicket Casualty was lolling in the sun incuriously. Poor guy lost five fingers to a poacher’s snare and had to be sown up by the park veterinarians when he was young. Hence the name. Inside the thicket half the group was similarly disposed in recesses partially obscured by branches and vines. Our trackers promptly hacked away the overgrowth with machetes. This action did not rouse the gorillas in the least. There was no drama like that which occured recently when the silver-back burst forth shoving away two guides with his massive forearms and stood over one terrified French girl beating his chest and screaming. The big guy was there but looked very content sprawled out with daughters wives and babies, snoozing. It was adorable really. I had wanted to do this ever since David Attenborough’s Life on Earth series in the ‘80s when he ends up in a big hug pile with the family, laughing euphorically. I really wanted to get a hug. It looked so easy to just curl up there with them. They would all open their eyes sometimes and peer at us a little. Other family members were nearby and all rather enclosed by the thick bamboo so that we had to stand close. In mountain gorilla society the sons of the dominant silver-back live in the group and don’t try to usurp his authority except for occasional cheating on females which earns them a beating. They might wander off to start their own group at some point; there are wandering females out there to be had. They are also rather handsome these black-backs but without the exaggereted head and upper body growth of their father. I was 2m in front of one when he got up suddenly to go forage. Unfortunately my guide jumped in front to protect me otherwise I could have copped a feel. The babies started cavorting around, climbing vines but it was too dark in there to get good pictures of anything moving. And as they foraged off through the thick, viney growth, young ones darting out of green tunnels and the boys back to ripping up bamboo, our visit was suddenly over, as one hour deadlines will do. We trudged back as rain came, quite elated.

It would be nice if we were more closely related genetically to mountain gorillas than chimpanzees who are stereotypically nasty, brutish and short as some Enlightenment chinwag described all of animal life, but genus Pan wins the prize for human similarity. It’s not clear if our very closest genetic sibling is Pan Troglodytes, chimps, or Pan Gracilis, the intriguing bonobo apes who smooth over all their problems by indulging in matriarchally dominated group sexual pleasuring  (any combination of friends being fine). Violence in their society is almost obsolete. Maybe we could learn from them. In a world of gorilla hand ashtrays and cluster bombs, things would seem bleak for the mountain gorilla, and all of us. As human needs multiply and we commandeer all the resources, systems  and treasures of this planet, which is our greater body, circumstances in an overcrowded world lurch chaotically and we wonder how we can maintain anything into the future. These wonderful, impressive creatures, our brothers and sisters in life, are like a bell-weather. I saw about 15; around 2% of the world population. So far, none are in zoos. Such a small population is painfully vulnerable and there is no obvious way to increase their range should their numbers increase. Barring catastrophe, their survival will be a test of human character.

Coming back to the San Francisco Bay Area after an eight year absence has been cool. I lived half my adult life here and learnt a lot during my time burrowing into the wild cultural terrain of the far west. Seismic shifts occur here all the time. The first happened before I had even properly arrived. In spring 1991 I was still located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains at the house of my current former in-laws, appraising the geology of environmental engineering jobs and listening to the local community radio station. The station carried feeds from Pacifica Radio, a national network seeded from KPFA radio out of Berkeley. KPFA was the worlds first listener sponsored station; the model for most non-commercial broadcasting in the US. Pacifica was started by anarchists in 1949 and exists to this day as a wild island of leftisms, future visions and stalwart free thinking in a nation being buried alive in capitalist dogma. Far more explicitly ‘radical’ than anything widely available in the UK, where the broader range of mainstream coverage tends to diffuse the impulse to step outside the doctrinal envelope, brief exposure to the programming content of that small local station caused an epiphany or crisis in my state of mind. What had been subliminally obvious took hold and I overstood how the oligarchs viewed the people. The bewildered herd as liberal Walter Lippman had it. Meddling kids, as they always used to say in Scooby Doo. I remember one former National Security Agency employee whistleblowing the motives of his colleagues on air. With great import he related how the nexus of vast internationalised private capital and state security apparatus were aligned for a new and very deep wave of nefarious activities designed to progressively nullify the drive towards the public good, and to privatise power. It was clear that the logical end would be a totalitarian, capitalist dystopia. This powerful trend burst into wider public attention with the severe curtailment of liberties and protections that came in the wake of 9-11.

I slipped back into the KPFA habit fairly quickly after arriving at my ex-wife Koko’s new place located about 20 miles north-east of Oakland where we used to be based. High on the agenda at this time was the gone-global occupy Wall Street movement. I was intrigued and shocked to see such large numbers of Americans becoming this politically active. The biggest ever ripoff by the financial elites, continuing now in this climate of radical budget balancing, had hit ordinary people hard and it showed. Occupy Oakland had a big camp outside city hall. Koko and I planned to go down to check it out but early in the morning of that day the camp was busted out of existence at 5AM. The cops were proactively heavy handed. Using health and safety code infractions (the standard rationale when authorities want to end a legal or protected activity), hundreds of police and sheriffs culled from numerous other districts descended on the 150 tents armed with tear gas, concussion grenades, rubber bullets, clubs, the usual W.M.D.’s. They destroyed peoples stuff and beat up resisters. They were met with eggs from the kitchen. The mayor was out of town and left it to the boys to do what was necessary. We arrived late in the afternoon. It was quiet. A few workers in dust suits were decontaminating the lawn. People wandered past the line of riot police guarding the disputed turf lecturing the cops on their pledge to protect and serve the community. Rather suddenly a huge contingent of protesters came marching up Broadway. Around a thousand strong they were intent on the grassy plaza area behind the police; their ‘village’. Very vocal but non-violent, there was quite a mix of people of all ages and races. People on bikes, people with dogs, people with black bandanas covering their faces. Numerous helicopters buzzed the scene. There was a standoff. After the police issued a dispersal order the crowd decided to march around downtown for a while. We followed along then stopped for a cup of tea (really) at one of the downtown ‘Oaksterdam’ medical marijuana shops where we met my old friend Sean. The marchers came past the shop so we all joined in again taking photos. The next time we arrived at 14th and Broadway another dispersal order was issued. Before a decision could be made, the order was followed suddenly by loud explosions, flashes and acrid smoke and tear gas rising from the middle of the crowd. We were stood just on the opposite side of the intersection and the explosions were extremely shocking. We joined the bulk of participants in running away. I’m pretty sure it was at this point that Scott Olsen, back from his two tours of Iraq with the marines which he survived unscathed, was lying in the middle of the street with a massive skull fracture after being hit by a police projectile. As the now infamous video clearly shows, a number of people ran to his aid and one of the police casually lobbed a dangerous concussion grenade right at them. The people were really pissed off but reformed and continued to march around non-violently for hours. We went home after a bit. About 100 people were arrested that day. Bail was set at $10,000!

I came up politically in the 1990’s when the main game was the anti-globalisation movement that culminated in the violence at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in 1999. The movement was deep but on the margins. Easily vilified as ‘anarchists’ and addressing issues that did not obviously impact most Americans, the actions at that time never broke through the narcotic stupor of television and standard discourse. Now the anti-Wall Street protests were using the slogan ‘we are the 99%’ referring to the fact that the 1% of richest Americans hold 70% of the wealth. In fact, according to former labour secretary Robert Reich, the richest 400 individuals hold the same wealth as the bottom 150 million. This mal-distribution is one of the main reasons the economy has become so dysfunctional. I knew when I saw the footage of the Olsen incident that the authorities had scored a massive PR own-goal but I was surprised by the result. Next day hundreds of people turned up again at City Hall. Now the numbers were even more bolstered by ‘ordinary’ citizens out in sympathy and support for the protesters. The protesters clearly were the community. Soon the under-fire mayor was offering profound apologies and the plaza was opened back up to campers. It was a rather extraordinary back-track. It seems that you can sometimes actually manifest the enshrined American rights of free speech and free assembly when you have broad-based support. If you represent a minority, well, good luck. It looked like something that had the makings of a movement. Possibly even a chance to re-establish an intelligent and attractive independent left in this country.

Two days later (Friday, October 28th) I returned with another friend to try to catch Michael Moore’s address to the encampment. We missed it but sat around to watch proceedings. There was a festive atmosphere with music and dancing but people gathered quietly for a meeting as if not sure what to do but calm and receptive. A straightforward but broad public statement had been drafted. Using interesting moderation techniques that have obviously been developed through many years of trial and error, the statement was debated, clarified and revised quite efficiently. It was a description of intent and a call for a city-wide general strike on November 2nd. The moderators had to explain what a general strike was since it’s been so long since anyone has tried one. Then there came a really powerful subsequent proposal. Since everyone would be gathered in the afternoon, and since inside contacts with the powerful long-shore workers union indicated that they would not cross a 99% picket line, why not march on the Port of Oakland and shut it down. That’s…serious. The port is the fifth busiest in the country. According to my friend, the last time a shutdown was attempted was 1968 when Berkeley-based anti-Vietnam war protesters went down and it ended in a massive police crackdown. Unfortunately for me, the same day is El Dia de los Muertos (Mexican Halloween) which we already planned to attend in San Francisco. I’m here as a tourist and I really don’t want to get arrested. Been there, done that. Jail sucks. I wait with baited breath to see what goes down.

It also felt profoundly reassuring to spend £3 on a cappuccino. Such affluence in this land, with all these clever people making enough money to do that every morning. I indulged in a pig-free English breakfast and caught the last ten minutes of the big game, as is my way. In this case, England losing to France in the rugby world cup which seemed only fair to my inner, but very real, auto-Scot mental complex. I had a second coffee and drifted into a reverie. I imagined myself in one of those Hounslow houses mowing the back lawn on a sunny afternoon; the ordained destination of middle age for smart middle-class boys. But I remembered how I never did become a doctor, quit my horse midstream and now just float around, everywhere more or less of an outsider, owning an inherited suburban house (though it lacks the ivy on the wall) but feeling disconnected from it and all the other bourgeois trappings, usually. It was a bit disconcerting. Where was my place in this world? In this new Britain? What would I do if I came back to live here? Get a decent job? I think I may have drifted into unemployability. This anxiety had me rethinking my plan to go to South America for a $5 an hour teaching job and the chance to do my painting in an obscure location. A sudden, unexpected rekindling of the socoi-genetic urge to ‘make it’ according to somebody else’s expectations. The lemon-pine toilet freshener just made it all the more poignant.

It was, at least, good to be in a country where you get your change right away. I mean coins, not historical progress. Progress takes time and struggle but in Africa getting back your balance does too. In many countries, cash money is in short supply. Probably the IMF shut down the mint. Cashiers tell you to come back later, but it slips the mind, this being absolutely the intended outcome at least half the time I’m sure. The apparently easy lassez-faire solution of getting a beer, which then ends up costing far more than planned because of inattention, is almost exactly analogous to the way the IMF makes indenturing loans to Third World countries when nobody is looking. Coincidence? Maybe. Or perhaps all these dishonest bar staff are plants; agents of the great international financial institutions. Fortunately this is not an issue back in good old Blighty. Not yet, anyway, thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s prescient genius in refusing to join the Euro zone. But the day may yet come when you or I will be refused service in a British pub as part of a World Bank enforced austerity measure. The logical progression is already there.

Inside King’s Cross station the cctv and security announcements repeat endlessly on a two minute loop, with occasional interjections to actually tell you about a train. It never shuts up. It must be designed to drive you into the street or… a pub. Ah, well, if that was what they wanted. It was 12 o’clock and I knew the bar would have change, even for the first customer of the day. The Fellows Bar around the corner had tasty Cornish Ale for less than £4 a pint. Who could argue with that? After all, it’s fully 22 fluid ounces of hand crafted ambrosia in this country which comes with a wooden floor, brass fittings and a post-modern food menu. Continuity and tradition embraces a world of globalised expectation. Outside the window, under cozy grey skies, I watched the slow stream of morning-fresh Asian girls and weary looking youths emerging limp from hangovers like wet moths from a chrysalis. It was so novel for me and yet touchingly familiar. I fell into another reverie and imagined these young lads, fresh from driving a stolen sedan through a jewellers shop window, getting pounced on by the local constabulary. Just as the cuffs are about to lock the cops point to the nearby cctv and announce to the boys: “Look out lads, you’re on candid camera” and everyone just laughs and laughs.

It was a long way from paradise beach to my here. 12 hours on the plane with a 7 hour break in the middle in Doha, Qatar. 6 more to come on the train to Scotland. Doha Airport is about the most international (and shiniest) place I have ever seen, located as it is near the geographic centre of the world’s land-masses. Being back at King’s Cross felt like I had moved to the edge. One day the Greenwich Meridian will be transferred to Peking or Delhi or Doha.

The hermetically sealed intercity 125 wooshed northward at high speed (up to 125mph funnily enough), plunging under Victorian overpasses, skitting alongside fields and finely wooded borders tinged with incipient autumn, and rushing by the saggy, drizzly cloud which obscured the belching tops of power stations. The bucolic English landscape unrolled like a green, wet blanket, but not so fast that you got whiplash injury trying to visually track a cow, as happens on the Japanese bullet train or, presumably, a maglev. We crossed the border. There were perceptable geo-energetic shifts. Scotland is even more at home in the dark and damp than England. Actually, London is virtually sub-tropical in comparison. Scotland is all worn, gothic monuments of slick, mossy stone, and parks like bogs full off mushrooms. It thrives like this and folk go around in T-shirts. They used to wear wellies too but now most Scots are far too fashion conscious. I was vaguely surprised again to remember that the people are actually quite friendly with their chirpy “hiya”s and politely informal service. It’s an admirable effort given the conditions; under a cloud but hanging on to a sunbeam. Old Caledonia is not a bad place really, unless you are trapped in some hellacious, sterile new town devoid of history, then it’s just depressing. The historical stuff is depressing too but at least it has some dark soul to it. Nonetheless, I was pretty keen to make an escape after a few days. Then I got sort of used to it, like going numb. Two weeks of October in Scotland (the first two) brought half an hour of sun and single digit temperatures. I had already missed the two day Indian summer at the beginning of October, which was the best summer they had. We watched the national football team being knocked out the Euros by sunny Spain which just added to the familiar, creeping sense of futility. I was lodged again with my biological mother and her husband, a slightly strange but pleasant and fortuitous circumstance, having a sort of replacement family after my parents passed away, with my half-sister, brother, nieces and nephews all in the vicinity. I made the most of the internet and did some serious reading. The Bible was wearing thin so I moved on to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, but that was almost equally opaque. Nick Hornby unglazed my eyes with his penetrating and straightforward yet ironically nuanced humour. I couldn’t go outside much lacking the requisite wellies.

I was about to get an expensive one-way ticket to California when I realised that a return ticket is half the price, even from Glasgow. Go figure that one out. Non-cancellable but you can get back the tax and surcharges which comprise 60% of the total. If you wait until the last minute to cancel, you can also reduce global warming by leaving a seat empty. The day of my departure dawned cold but under perfect blue skies. The bad weather must have been my fault, much like results of any football game I watch with an interest. It was scenic flying down the more rugged west side of the country from Glasgow to Heathrow; another angle on the textured agricultural skin of Britain which was punctuated by occasional rocky teeth and ragged remnants of native forest hanging on like stubs of torn cloth. I arrived at the vast, new and controversial Heathrow terminal five, site of a rousing protest camp during its development and quite a bit of runway invasion. They should resurrect 1970’s style streaking when they do that, then the authorities can’t say they thought it was a suicide bomber. On the BBC news, extensive live coverage was being given to the eviction of another huge community of travellers (politically active neo-hippies) from their ten-year old, illegal community at Dale Farm. The police went in great numbers with tasers and even the newscasters seemed to feel sorry for the habitually victimised crusties who are down by law in this crowded country. In London, the rector of St Paul’s Cathedral had given his blessing to the ongoing, anti-capitalist tent encampment on the steps of England’s most famous church with the result that the police there couldn’t lay their itchy hands on the protesters. Of course, this latest wave all started on the other side of the big pond and has spread like body-piercing to become a global phenomenon despite all the negative coverage. Even Doha-based Al Jazeera, covering this issue, called up a rabid rightwing Daily Mail pundit and, to counter the former’s insufficiently purist free marketeer credentials, a young associate from the American Enterprise Institute. This to cover the activities of (naive at best) new age lefties who could be no more than ‘useful idiots’ for failing to see the beauty of untaxed, private markets for everything. As if the perfect world would be a bunch of investment banks testing their comparative advantage through corporate militias armed with biological weapons from Monsanto. I was saddened and had to use up all the change I had collected in Britain so I went to the bar. It was intriguingly loaded with tasty American micro-brews. Two pints later and it was on to a new world, but an old one, in the belly of a bulbous 747, with wings so wide they stretched away like grey plains, which spat me out into the streets of my old alma mater, San Francisco, after a two hour hold up having my green card irrevokably revoked by Homeland Security, to see if I could find my heart where I left it still beating eight years ago, on the floor of a taqueria at 16th and Mission.

There are not actually that many hangouts in Stonetown that express the native Swahili culture well. There is a lot of Indian and Arabian influenced architecture (Zanzibar was ruled by the Sultan of Oman), private homes and private mosques. The hospitality industry spaces are mostly unevocative. My guesthouse was pretty ethnic though, being an old, rambling Swahili building with arches and shutters, big stones, spaciously cool. The lock on my veranda door (a shared space) was quite insecure but of course it never got fixed and I spent half my time taking things in and out the security deposit box. Luckily the first night my neighbours were trustworthy; a German restauranteur and his Italian mate who had the unenviable role of being the technical lead for a big EU sponsored program to digitalise the doings of the army of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, ostensibly to make them logistically viable, financially sane and transparent. Thousands of army members are listed multiple times, not that they get paid often, and they all have other jobs (miner, protection racketeer, rapist), so any degree transparency and (perish the thought) accountability would surely help but, of course, resistance was high. The guesthouse was right next to the 19^th century Anglican cathedral, a worthy structure inside and out, which holds in its grounds a memorial for the host of slaves who passed through this tranquil town, chained together men and women, alive but half sunk in a tomb.

Unguja is slightly fancied for its full moon parties but Saturday brought a new moon party, at Kendwa Rocks near the north tip. I figured I might as well hit the beach promptly. Transport was an open sided, laterally seated minibus through thunderstorms. Not the best, but the conductor did a fun performance of swinging around bars and jumping off of his rear standing plate at high speed.  Kendwa has nicely done resorts, not ostentatious, even the exclusively Italian one, with a beautiful wide swathe of blindingly bright, off-white sand abutting the turquoise. And what a turquoise, like pigmented light, simultaneously reflecting and shining a super-pure aqua-blue. Only it was too far from my banda hut to the washrooms. The partywas mostly blah. Young tourists are not much fun to me anymore and probably not to each other either. Some nasally enhanced guy got people dancing on the bar. That was probably the highlight of amusement. Next day was lost except writing. I thought I’d then check out nearby Nungwe for a day. More of the backpacker ghetto with bars and restaurants, but still small. Then one day became four.

I soon felt like doing nothing was the best possible course of action. I was getting deeply engrossed in ‘A Walk with a White Bushman’; conversation with Sir Laurens Van Der Post. This guy wrote ‘Lost World of the Kalahari’ which was huge for me and ‘The Seed and the Sower’ on which ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence’ was based. South African born, practically brought up by bushman servants, ultra-distinguished in WWII with years as a POW in Java behaving nobly, mystical writer of nature and Christ, close friend of Jung, explorer of Africa, anti-racist in his work and I soon realised, deeply conservative, it was fascinating to meet a voice I respected weaving together ideas that were both treasured and off the radar screen into the realm of unacceptability, but that carried such inner coherence that I began to sense a different reality at foot. Things that threw me included his adoration of Margaret Thatcher and St. Paul, and a marked blindness to the fundamentally nefarious nature of the British Empire, but his conservatism was so pure old school, non-condemnatory (excepting vituperation against ‘decadent’ socialists), experiential and mythic that I found myself admiring it. Outside, the sand was soft and the sun was hot, as it should be, but the cloud was around too, with heavy rain, and I had a replacement hot water boiler to pay for, dodging electrical power outages here and angry tenants there. Thank god Skype was clear. It’s played some funny tricks on me has old Skype, usually with an uncanny sense of bad timing.

I took a snorkelling trip out to Mnemba island, around the lighthouse by the headland and down the east coast a way, where a long wall of old reef forms low, undercut cliffs that run and run, embaying moon-yellow crescents of beach. The island herself wore the circling beach like a shining halo. Inside the island; a private world for $1,000 a night afficionados, she looked less well dressed in shapeless beach pine. The reef came right off the beach and was pretty rich under the circumstances. I have described these underwater scenes before, since I hold them in a kind of religious awe, yet I’m not fulfilled; I’m always looking for the perfect reef which is, in 2011, probably impossible to find. Some lost paradise, some fishy heaven. Barbecued fish on the hot mainland beach adjacent to the island followed, but the crew of Italians and Germans was less than inspiring and I sat alone watching the tide turn. The next morning I got down the shore at low tide. People trek kilometres out across the wide reef that fringes the northern tip of Unguju collecting seafood and spear fishing. All the way out to the wave spumed edge which we rounded going to the island. The trick is to wear sandals which I didn’t have, but I somehow managed to walk far through the shallow, sandy water (I felt I was killing too much coral walking on the intermittent, knobbly reef surface) without getting cut by shells, stabbed by sea urchins or stung by a venomous octopus or some other little sea monster about which I knew nothing. There were some great miniature scenes in the tide-pools with darting trigger fish, anemones and sea-squirts, elaborate starfish, echos of ferns and feathers and encrusted colour. It was really nice considering everyone walked on it. Still full of life and photogenic.

Back in Stonetown I tried to sort out with my old friend Montego if he would visit. I know Wataru (same guy) from Tokyo where he was a student. Half Kenyan Somali, half Japanese, I think he has found his African name now because he has been here for a while organising some seat of the pants solo mission to aid Somalia. Last winter he told me he would be in Africa and I forgot, miserably enough, and we were unable to meet up. Now I was procrastinating but I felt the need to end this phase, and get back to Scotland and I managed to find a reasonably priced ticket stopping in Doha. I was curious to see an oil state airport in all its majesty. Meanwhile, something bit my lip and I had an allergic reaction. It swelled like a small, pink balloon to an extent that
my face was skewed and I was self-conscious to go out, with people doing double-takes and me wanting to tell them that it wasn’t permanent. Next day it was almost better.

I finished the Van der Post book and took to reading the Bible. I’ve never done that committedly before which is funny considering the volume of opinions I hold on the topic. It’s been a sort of non-topic, actually, to which I developed a mild aversion reaction during my upbringing. Or perhaps really an ennui reaction, the idiom of the Bible being so opaque and the narrative not nearly as exciting as, say, Tolkien, although certainly it has its moments. Anyway, give it a fair shake as S. N. (Vipassana) Goenka said of his path. For me, though certainly not for fundamentalists, The Bible, as part of history, is a work in progress. If there was any fun in fundamentalism it might have a chance, but as it stands that is a dour and rigid and wrong approach. Indeed the book itself is, so far as I can tell, completely devoid of humour, so that is reasonable, but who would ever know if Jesus ended a parable with an ironic smile. I  imagine fundamental things will lumber on, in disregard of the fact of the Romanised editorial committees, until the compulsory and irrefutable ‘word of God’ finally becomes historically obsolete. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say, and the historical manifestation of fundamentalism went horribly awry before the ink was even dry on Paul’s self-absorbed epistles. The largely negative influence of the church-defined Gospels in the historical world (crusades, inquisition, cultural imperialism) spoils, in my mind, whatever value may lie entwined in the words. I guess the true message was lost, hijacked or impractical. I don’t see, perhaps for lack of understanding, how things were improved through ‘the good news’, despite its’ being the sole beneficiary of divine goodwill, supernatural intercession and the interminable repetition of eternal carrots and infernal sticks. I’m only doing the New Testament. The old is just too difficult and disconnected. It is hard enough to make sense of the amended, redacted, politically reinterpreted words of Jesus himself.

I skipped out to Jambiani on the quiet east coast. This place was more my scene; low density and within walking distance of solitude. The shining beach was drawn out to form a one kilometre wide shallow at low tide stranding boats and starfish. Lined by more bizarrely eroded and undercut limestone cliffs, the space was like a boundless mirage. My hotel had a bonfire every night and folks from up and down the beach would mingle. I became more and more peaceful, settled in the warmth of the sand, almost soft enough to snuggle, floating in the salty, body temperature water like a happy foetus, free of distraction and the tearing of worldly concerns, at one. My last day was sweetened by the company of a pretty Swahili girl called Mary. I was, by this time, fully acclimatised, a proper beach-bum, no longer bored, and in no rush to go. At last I understood the transcendent meaning of ‘hakuna matatu’- no problem. The big beach Ohm, that the ocean utters with each gentle pulse of the waves. In—out—in—, well, you know how it goes. But, of course, all things must pass. Who can stop the tides?  It was back to Dar Es Salaam for me, and then the airport next day. My god, the trip was over.