Ping! Blog level up.

Subequator has upsized to an awesome new home:

www.subequator.com

Yay!

North Island waves, South Island slopes

A beautiful Anzac day in Owhiro Bay, with the Marlborough Sounds and a touch of snow on the South Island peaks in the background.

My favourite thing about New Zealand passing the Marriage Equality Bill

OK maybe not my FAVOURITE thing. But closely following equal civil rights for all mankind comes the little weather bar on the bottom of the Dominion Post newspaper's front page today (April 18).

Their weather straps are always nicely written but this one's particularly good:

"WEATHER: THERE'S A LITTLE BIT OF SUNSHINE ON THE HORIZON AND A STRONG HINT OF A RAINBOW OVER PARLIAMENT".

Love it.

Also no, I didn't write it.

Spotted, a cockatoo in a flamenco dress

Papped in the Wellington suburb of Island Bay this week: a lady carrying her pet cockatoo through the streets. Her pet cockatoo, who was wearing a dress. A FLAMENCO DRESS. Incredible. I wonder if she ever ties castanets to its wings for fun.

Is it? No... it can't be...

IT IS! A cockatoo in a flamenco dress.

And it's definitely alive

Such intricate detail on the skirts.

Latin America, please keep your crazy version of Christianity

Street procession in Sucre, Bolivia

Ay papa! Tenemos papa! Habemus papam!

El Argentino top dog is excellent news for Latin America and its 400 million Catholics, but I hope they hang on to their crazy take on the religion.

The guinea pigs on the menu in the last supper fresco in Cuzco Cathedral, Peru. The extraordinarily bad mannequin in glitzy drag queen outfit used as an effigy of the virgin mother in a tiny white adobe church in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile. The covering-your-car-with-your-stuff-and-driving-it-through-the-streets processions to give thanks for something highly specific in Sucre, Bolivia. The emotional crowds following portraits of saints held aloft, all across the continent.

Latin Americans took a theme (Christianity) and they ran with it. What happened next is beautiful testimony to the tenacity, creativity and diversity of human beings. My one hope for the Pope is that he embraces his new underlings in all their variegated glory.

Yes, that IS a keyboard

Up / Down / Over / Under - how about just Here?

Wouldn't it seem kind of provincial if everyone here (by here I mean, in Australasia) were to refer to the UK or the US as up over? And compound that by capitalising it - Up Over? You know, 'the others' Up Over. Up over the hill. The globe hill.

I realise that Down Under is in common usage among Australians and New Zealanders. I realise this and sigh. To start with, there are plenty of other countries and people below the equator. Argentina. Chile. Peru. Most of Brazil. Half of Indonesia, South Africa. Namibia. Zimbabwe. And so forth.

But most importantly, because Down Under takes English-speaking Northern Hemisphere nations as its base reference point to which the directions of down and under are relative, is using the term not perpetuating the Northern Hemisphere bias?

Australians and New Zealanders would be doing themselves a favour if they stopped accepting Down Under so readily. Here alone is a formidable place to be.

Being angry about The Falklands: it's what we do

Nico Monti's facade for the restaurant Tegui in Costa Rica street, BA

Fiery Argentina has been in my head a lot in the past few days, for reasons good and bad.

For the good, I've seen some photos from the excellent Graffitimundo organisation's forthcoming documentary White Walls Say Nothing, about street art in Buenos Aires. As I've written before, graffiti is one of the most well-established and accepted ways in which political ideas are communicated in Argentina's capital. 

Writing on walls is ingrained in the culture, often tolerated and respected. It is the go-to method for people to convey ideas, information and agendas - as well as the more familiar “te amo, Maria”s. Graffiti here has a long-standing cultural connection with expression and activism. It's also so much more than 'graffiti', it is beautiful.

Because in Argentina street artists do not have to sneak in the shadows, or paint fast in the stealth of night, they have the time and space to be what they should be - artists. It helps that all the street artists I met were lovely.

The gentlemanly Jaz in particular blew my mind.

Four-metre bears by Jaz, Buenos Aires

In BA in 2011 I met Graffitimundo's Jonny Robson, a British expat heavily involved with the street art scene and its great that this documentary is finally coming to fruition. The photographs from the third week of filming are a tantalising glimpse of what is to come.

For the bad, I'm wondering what those artists are making of the current Falklands row. It's ridiculous that the islanders have had to go the the lengths of holding a referendum - especially as all sides must realise it has no legal relevance.

To me the point is that the Falklands or Las Malvinas is carted out, regularly, by Argentina's leadership. For President Kirchner this is just something else to give Argentinians to be riled about, or angry about, or to worry about, or to complain about, or to rally against. It seems too 1984 to be true, yet the UK and the media is falling over itself to perpetuate the angst.

Noelia Lopez, who I stayed with in the suburb of Avellaneda just south of BA's city centre, was a clever graduate in her mid-20s working for Accenture. She told me that the country's chronic shortage of coins could be easily fixed, but it wasn't - because it gave the people an infuriating daily problem to fixate on. It was an all-consuming distraction from all the other things that were wrong with Argentina. 

(When I say the coin shortage was "chronic" and "all-consuming", I mean one day I had to visit FOUR different shops before I could get enough coins for a bus ride that cost about 25p/US$0.40. Shopkeepers give out penny sweets instead of change; you don't get a choice. The bus ticket machines take only coins; they never give coins back.)

It's unsurprising populist Argentine politics: a small distraction, a small sticking plaster. "Free football on TV for all" is an actual policy. And you know The Economist's Big Mac Index? I'm probably not the first to tell you the government used to keep the price of a Big Mac artificially low: skews the data, keeps Big Mac-eaters happy.

Las Malvinas is just one more thing to keep Argentinians looking the other way. And the great thing is, since the UK is never going to give the islands back, the leadership will always have fuel for its fire.

Surfing piglet becomes naturalised Australian citizen

Matthew Bell & Zorro the piglet /stuff.co.nz

JEZEBEL.COM is an excellent website. It really is fantastic. But I and, I'm sure, New Zealanders everywhere did an internal if not external groan at @jezebel's tweet today "Let's all move to Australia and surf with this baby pig", linking to their story about CBS's story about it.

The sentiment is entirely correct: I have zero problem with the notion of moving across the globe to go surfing with a tiny porcine Kelly Slater. It's a noble cause. But what I do have a problem with is the fact THE PIG LIVES IN NEW ZEALAND.

And, all together now, New Zealand is not a part of Australia.

I know this because I live there, and there are no dingoes. Also said piglet was on the front page of my home newspaper, the Dominion Post, delivered warm and inky to my desk about 11pm one night this week. The piglet lives in Mt Maunganui, dammit.

After (although admittedly probably not purely because) I exasperatedly reply-tweeted something along this line the story's headline was changed - which is nice. What's also nice is the CBS story they wrote a story about, surfing piglet footage. Awe. Some.

Hysteria as man spits wine at Queen

A prize-winning photograph of a man tasting wine in front of the Queen has caused absolute outrage in southern New South Wales. See it here.

There really are a lot of Australians twisting their knickers about this, if the online comments left on the Illawarra Mercury's story are anything to go by ("we should not disrespect Her Majesty the Queen in this manner. This is not art."; "that is just disgusting"; "What a discusting [SIC] tasteless photo"; I am outraged ... It is MOST disrespectful and not worthy of receiving a prize for such insolence."; "just plain nasty"). What's going on?

• This is a photograph that won a competition with 70 entrants (Wollongong City Gallery's annual portrait comp).
• The man in it is a winemaker (Peter Dredge).
• He was judging wine, at a wine-judging event (the Adelaide Hills wine awards).
• The portrait of the Queen was hanging so high up the wall that Mr Dredge likely didn't realise his juxtaposition.

It's certainly a striking image. But offensive?

Flamin' West Woden Wamberal Wagga Wombats

You know you're subbing an Australian paper when...

1. You have to Google every team name in an article because none of them sound like they're from real places:

West Belconnen, Woden Valley, Wagga City South, Bathurst St Pats, Terrigal Womberal (dutifully corrected to Wamberal), Coogee Wombats, Clovelly Crocodiles, Caringbah, St Christophers Panania.

Sigh.

Christchurch's new heart

Play-a-piano Gap Filler in Christchurch

AMONG the destruction of Christchurch’s deadly earthquake two years ago, a glimmer of something good. Against expectations, the gentle exodus of young people has slowed since the disaster – and those who remain are cultivating a new, glowing little heart for the crumpled city.

In 2010, Christchurch was a pretty garden city in Canterbury, on New Zealand’s South Island. A twee river - the Avon - bisected the centre, dotted with willows and oaks and home to the Gothic stone Christ’s College boys’ school. Its main attraction was Cathedral Square and its Anglican namesake, surrounded by a busy commercial district, old churches, grassy pockets and stone bridges. In 2010, Christchurch could be happily hailed as the most English city outside of England. And now? It’s more like a recovering warzone.

The Catholic Cathedral, on Barbadoes Street

For decades the outpost nation of New Zealand has been hampered by the “brain drain” – talented and educated young people leaving for distant, frequently Australian, shores. While educated and skilled people do move to New Zealand in return, the drain has been a particular problem with more people going than coming in the ‘80s and also 1998-2000, according to Statistics New Zealand. In 2005, 24.4 per cent of all New Zealand-born people with tertiary educations were living overseas, according to an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development report, and these days skilled tradespeople are leaving too.

The country is nearly 10,000 square miles larger than the UK, but with a population under 4.5 million many young Kiwis find their home country doesn’t have all the opportunities and challenges they crave. In essence, New Zealand is small pond struggling to contain rather a lot of big fish.

Young people left the South Island hub Christchurch the same as they left the rest of New Zealand.

And then the earthquakes. They’re now being referred to as the 2010-2011 cluster because of a relative quieting since 2012, and they’ve caused well over a thousand buildings to be partly or fully demolished. The city centre became a 387-rugby-pitch-sized no-go area. In September 2010 there was the wake-up call: a 7.1-magnitude earthquake at 4.35am and two 5.9 aftershocks. Five months later, in February 2011, a 6.6 followed by aftershocks of 5.8 and 5.9. In June that year, a 5.9 foreshock then a 6.4 quake. And two days before Christmas, a 5.9 foreshock and a 6.0 quake. To be clear, these weren’t isolated shakes: the go-to seismic site canterburyquakelive.co.nz has reported more than 13,000 since September 2010 and, for every one they feel, Christchurch residents are jolted by the brief terror that it might be another big one.

The cliff fell off. The eastern suburb of Sumner.

The deadliest big one was the 6.6 on February 22, 2011 - 185 people died, 115 of them in a single building. Melissa Cartwright, 23, was in a class around the corner from that building, the Canterbury Television or CTV building, at 12.51pm when it flattened and then caught fire. It was six storeys high; within 20 seconds of the earthquake’s onset it had collapsed. “I got in at 12.50pm,” says Cartwright.  “I’d just put my jacket on the back of my chair - I never got that jacket back - I’d just sat down and then the quake started. As a class we’d sat through hundreds of aftershocks together, so nobody really cared. Then the monitors started falling off the desks. We got underneath them. A guy in my class and I were well and truly cuddling beneath the desk because, you know, the world was falling around us.”

Demolition work in 2012

Since the undoubted horror of those earthquakes, population trends have taken an unexpected direction - so says statistician James Newell, director of Monitoring and Evaluation Research Associates Ltd and his August 2012 report Indicative population estimates for Greater Christchurch post-June 2011. “We looked at what we expected to happen before the earthquakes over the past couple of years, compared with the actual,” he says. “From day one in September 2010 the effect from that was to reduce the number of young people leaving to go overseas.”

The off-limits Bridge of Remembrance, by the Avon

The report modelled the effect the quakes had on population change in Christchurch by calculating the difference between what would have been predicted to happen without them and what actually happened. It clearly shows that international departures from Greater Christchurch are now fewer than the quake-free estimate and have been heading that way since the start of 2012.

“I can’t tell you why,” says Newell. “But perhaps solidarity with families and friends.  And the student army’s effect. Quite a lot of it is the psychology of it. As more of the rebuild takes place you get a changed atmosphere. People have been looking at different ways of doing things, in terms of arts and entertainments, and young people are at the centre of that. That’s a positive indicator for the future. The 16-24s are a very dynamic, energetic group – it’s a good sign.”

That age group rallied with magnificent effect and at astounding short notice as the “student army” Newell refers to. It was an army that dug hundreds of homes out from thousands of tonnes of silt, the result of liquefaction during the quakes: the buildings go down and the mud comes up. Earthquakes can shake the water and solid particles of the ground around so much they stop acting like solid ground, and when the ground being shaken is partially re-claimed and overwhelmingly sandy it makes for quite the mess.

Cathedral square in 2012

It began with 2012’s Young New Zealander of the Year, Sam Johnson, who went to that Gothic stone Christ’s College. Now 23, he mobilised the young troops who, armed with spades, rolled their sleeves up and dug like hell. The Student Volunteer Army, now the Volunteer Army Foundation, started life as a Facebook page. To date, Johnson reckons the army has moved more than the weight of the Empire State Building in silt from liquefaction. After the September 2010 quake it shifted more than 65,000 tonnes. After February 2011 it shifted 360,000 tonnes, and helped distribute things like hot meals, clean water, chemical toilets. He’s not had any problem engaging the youth.

“Christchurch is a real blank canvas, now. You can do more or less anything,” he says. “It’s just such a change from what was a very conservative city that modelled itself on Britain. The quakes have changed the culture of the place, really.”

Could it be that a changed culture is convincing more young people to stick around?

“You get people connecting to the city, which is something a lot of my friends didn't have before the earthquakes,” says Johnson, who is still studying law and political science in Christchurch, in between running the Volunteer Army Foundation, sitting on the council’s community board and having fingers in, it seems, almost every forward-thinking pie in the city. “They came to Christchurch to go to university and to them then it was a case of, ‘Ugh, I have to go to Christchurch’. Now, they’re like, ‘Yeah! I live in Christchurch! I went through those earthquakes. I loved it.’

Prep work for colourful fern fronds to be painted on the street

“This sounds really terrible, but generally the students didn't have a bad time during the earthquakes. It is a very gross generalisation but a lot of our families live in other parts of the city or country - university was closed, and the volunteer army was actually a lot of fun. We all had a sense of purpose back into our lives, and I guess there’s a certain element of, ‘I’m sticking it out in Christchurch, I’m staying here because I love the place and I want to see it grow and rebuild’.  We’re quite proud of it, i guess, and feel quite close to it. We’ve been through so much together, let’s do a bit more.”

Melissa Cartwright’s parents’ home was demolished; so was the home she grew up in, but her dad salvaged from the garden a block of concrete a tiny Melissa had once pushed her handprints into. The land both houses sat on can never be built on again.

She did move away - to the capital - but not because she’s frightened of earthquakes: “Wellington’s not really the best place to move if you’re trying to get away from earthquakes. Wherever you live in the world, there’s always going to be dangers. There’s Australia, with fires and floods. Quakes don’t bother me that much.

“Would I move back? Maybe in four years when it’s all back together. If we decide to raise a family, I reckon we’d do it in Christchurch rather than anywhere else.”

The people who did stay - or indeed those who moved to Christchurch since September 2010 - have been rewarded with a blossoming arts scene and an uplifting atmosphere of stoic rejuvenation that is engaging the community.

Part of Michael Parekowhai's exhibition at the National

That enormous no-go area is now vastly reduced and is finally being called the rebuild zone, rather than the red zone. An outdoor shopping mall of brightly coloured shipping containers in Cashel Street is the new focus to the city centre. In Madras Street, the National art gallery used a vacant plot opposite to straddle the road with an exhibition by Michael Parekowhai: half of it inside upstairs, half of it (two life-sized bronze bulls atop bronze grand pianos) outside across the street. In the rubble outside the old Strawberry Fare restaurant in Peterborough Street someone distilled order from chaos, piling tiles in a gentle spiral and gluing a tableau of tiny toy soldiers and zoo animals on top. Some fix drawings to wire fencing around empty patches of land, or fill traffic cones with flowers. Others knit multi-coloured “warmers” for lamp-posts.

There are many projects feeding that city-wide feeling: Johnson’s own Ministry Of Awesome that gets people together to help each other out with start-ups and enterprise facilitation, or Greening The Rubble that, well, greens the rubble. With plants and things. But the stand-out contributor is Gap Filler, a volunteer-run organisation that engages the community and puts lovely, creative bits and pieces in some of the myriad blank plots left by destroyed or demolished buildings. Bits and pieces like a bicycle-powered mini cinema, or a brightly painted piano, or a dance-o-mat, or a crazy golf hole.

Comic relief in Peterborough Street

The first such site, on land that was once a picture framer’s on the corner of Kilmore and Barbadoes just north-east of the town centre, is gravelled. It has paving-flag stepping stones, a bench beneath tattered and faded prayer flags strung from branches, and a glass-doored fridge stuffed full of books that have purportedly changed the lives of those who deposited them. It’s called the Think Differently Book Exchange, an imperative that Christchurch residents have risen to with aplomb.

“There’s a lot of empty sections where shops used to be or where they’ve ripped something down or there’s a blank wall, so there’s a lot of canvases for people to express their creativity,” says Johnson.

“A lot of organisations in Christchurch - Gap Filler, Greening The Rubble, Life In Vacant Spaces Trust - we all just facilitate people being able to use these spaces, use their ideas and make the spaces more enjoyable.”
Coralie Winn, co-founder of Gap Filler, knows those transition projects are vital for the city. “I’d say the feeling here now is definitely one that’s quite mixed,” she says. “There’s a real sense of positivity, I think people are generally trying to focus on the rebuild and trying to get excited about what’s happening. I also think there are people who are just fed up, who realise that the recovery is super slow.

“Creative responses to the city and to the earthquakes are actually the lifeline of this city, I think. They contribute to the health and energy of an area. And a city is a young people’s playground. The city is where young people, teenagers, first go to establish their own adult explorations into the world, and we don’t have that right now in Christchurch. Basically, young people go hang out at Riccarton Mall. I find that quite sad. The creative things, temporary projects, street art, all this stuff, that’s the kind of thing that young people really respond to, because it is in some ways a reaction against the establishment or can be seen to be that way. I think inherently that sort of stuff appeals to young people.

“A strong, healthy, vibrant creative scene is going to keep young people here or encourage them to come here. It is so important that younger people feel like there are opportunities for them to do interesting things in the city and be part of it.

“This city is not being rebuilt for the older people. It is being rebuilt for those people who are currently 20 or younger, really. They’re the people who will inherit the city.”

“The atmosphere is very, very positive,” says Johnson. “I do a lot of travel, and I’ve never found anywhere quite like Christchurch is now. It allows people, who are willing, to express themselves. It’s not very risk-averse. It’s a place where you can be free.”

Not just any old demolition

Besides Newell’s statistics, anecdotal evidence suggests the warmth of Christchurch’s new heart is drawing people in. “I think Gap Filler projects have played a huge role in engaging the community,” says Winn. “I’ve been humbled by how many people have said ‘thank you’, and that Gap Filler has made a big difference to their lives.

“A couple of people have said that they one of the reasons they moved back or moved to Christchurch was because they heard about Gap Filler, saw what we were doing, and it made them feel positive and excited.

“One person stood up at the end of a talk I gave and he said: ‘I just wanted to thank Gap Filler, because you've made Christchurch worth being in for me.’”

At the Think Differently Book Exchange, the local newspaper, The Press, is still delivered to the picture framer’s plot every day. And every day, fine weather allowing, some member of the public will pick up that paper or perhaps a softened paperback that changed the life of its anonymous depositor. And that person will take ten quiet minutes to sit on the bench beneath the prayer flags, on the corner where the picture framer’s once stood, and read. A daily moment of peace among the ruin. A moment that contributes to Christchurch’s growing, glowing new soul.

How to roadtrip NZ: South Island #1, Arthur's Pass

Snaking through Arthur's Pass

Heading due west from Christchurch is an immediately rewarding experience. Firstly, on the way out of the wide Canterbury plains farmland you travel through a tiny town named Sheffield, revered among pie-eaters (one of many bizarre pan-hemisphere parallel universes to be found in New Zealand). Secondly you are very soon winding up, down, round and across the Southern Alps mountain range: Arthur's Pass.

Arthur's Pass is a town and a road. The town is notable for the signs outside a popular café firmly reminding patrons that food stolen by keas will be neither replaced nor refunded. The kea, also known as the world's only extremely pesky alpine parrot, is perfectly evolved to wrest from unwitting tourists both food and small car parts with hitherto unappreciated but vital functions. It is also very beautiful, with a beak curved like a sharpened sickle and velvety, murky lime green feathers that in a flap are eclipsed by the bright red plumage hiding on the underside of its wings. Although tits species is rare, the kea loves to lurk near human beings and the moving feast their lifestyles mean for scavengers. Don't be surprised to see a kea lurching improbably across a gravelled car park like a hooked bag of elbows.

Late afternoon sun lights the way along Arthur's Pass

Arthur's Pass the road is fabled among campervan travellers, a stunning hilly but not overly challenging drive from start (the East) to finish (the West coast). Setting out to Christchurch, this is a great direction in which to begin a South Island roadtrip. If the weather is grim, consider first heading south through the Canterbury plains towards Otago or Mackenzie district instead because grim weather in Christchurch means all you will see in Arthur's Pass is the inside of a cloud. Fine weather will kickstart your introduction to the Southern Alps with attractive valleys, wide and pebbly river beds, distant snowy spikes and New Zealand's clear light on rocky slopes.

The moon rises over a DOC campsite, Arthur's Pass

Paying attention to a map as you go you will come across such gems as Mt. Misery and Mt. Horrible - both actually rather lovely, and very close to one of many excellent Department Of Conservation (DOC) free campsites. DOC campsites dot NZ and are not a bad criteria to plan a journey by, zigzagging between them. They are rarely directly on main routes, but it is almost always worth the slight detour to find an extra nugget of scenery you wouldn't have seen from State Highway 1. This particular DOC site, near to Cass, was a slow 3km drive from the main road, but we had it to ourselves. All that was there was two toilets and a stone shelter with benches and a big hearth we set a fire in, all in a little grassy scoop between hills. It was free and it was all we needed.

Misty morning in Arthur's Pass

In fine weather, Arthur's Pass is a beautiful and enjoyable road to drive. In less fine weather it may be closed, or chains may be needed - check. It's 100 miles from Christchurch to Hokitika, on the West Coast. You could make the crossing in a few hours if you had to, but one very leisurely day is fully worth it to soak up the scenery and the emptyness after Christchuch. In Arthur's Pass, you'd better get used to the lack of people, because the West coast will make it seem like the Khaosan Road by comparison.

#1. CHRISTCHURCH - ARTHUR'S PASS - WEST COAST

Want to visit El Paraiso's temple? First try Caral

Caral's valley


Have you read about Peru's latest archeological find at El Paraiso? The area north of Lima is stuffed with enormously significant historical sites - like Caral: ten times as old as Machu Picchu and astonishingly under-visited.
A vast temple has been uncovered at the already very impressive El Paraiso, about 40km north of Lima, and it's thought to be 5,000 years old - that puts it up there with the oldest known sites suggesting civilisation. The rest of El Paraiso is about 4,000 years old.

Archeologists are speculating that it could be as old as Caral, which is the marvellous, 5,000-year-old sprawling site that was only discovered in 2001 and that we visited in December 2011. And by discovered I mean, somebody realised that all the small hills in the middle of the valley weren't hills, they were ancient pyramids covered in earth.

If you're in Peru and hoping to see El Paraiso - it could be tricky. But to fully understand the context of what was going on in Latin America 5,000 years ago, see Caral. It cost us about two British pounds to get into and the grounds were basically empty. But importantly it has a fantastic visitor centre and if, like when we visited, there's nobody else around, you'll probably get a personal guided tour for free. It'll be in Spanish but you can't win 'em all.

It's been called the oldest town in the New World and I first heard of it reading Hugh Thomson's excellent book Cochineal Red. At the time it was the hub of its valley and artefacts dug up there suggest groups of people would travel long distances to trade goods there - that's pretty impressive given that very little evidence even hints at a sniff of civilisation, of humans settling and living together in co-operation, much earlier than the time frame Caral sits in. The other nice thing? Despite extensive excavations, not a single artefact suggesting violence or war has been found at Caral.

It's a bit north of Lima - I won't use "just north of Lima" like a lot of news sites have because we made that journey and it was neither quick nor easy. But technically it's not that far - no more than 250km from Lima.

Re-posted from my travel blog two-lions.blogspot.com, here's how to get there

GETTING TO CARAL FROM LIMA

This was pretty difficult for us to fathom without any recent guidance anywhere on the internet or in our guidebook. So here's how we did it, in December 2011:

1. Take a bus from central Lima to Huacho. There is no central bus terminal in Lima (yes, that is nuts), so you have to know which bus company you're after. We went with San Martin, took a taxi to the office, and the journey to Huacho cost S12 (about £3) and took around 3 and a half hours.
2. In Huacho, find your way to the place colectivos leave from for Supe. We engaged the services of a taxi driver for this, but it is not far.
3. Take a colectivo from Huacho to Supe. We paid S5, it took about 30 minutes.
4. If you leave Lima very early, you can probably still get to Caral. But it will take 1hr15min from Supe and the place closes at 5pm. It opens at 9am so we waited till the next day, staying in a small place on Supe's main drag that cost S10 for a double room. The 30min colectivos leave from the main street and cost S3 to the town of Caral. From there it is a walk of about 40min (flat) to the entrance.

City light pollution? Nah.

This incredible video by Mark Gee shows the moon rising over Mount Victoria which is smack in the middle of Wellington, New Zealand's capital city.


Full Moon Silhouettes from Mark Gee on Vimeo.

Whitewashing the opposition

From November 2011.

WHEN David Cameron first saw the scrawls across the smooth-skinned, appropriately concerned face of his campaign billboards last year, he probably had a thought or two about graffiti.

The oft-parodied and defaced billboards (remember ‘We can’t go on like this, with suspicious minds’?) were, for most Brits, about as contentious as mainstream election campaigning gets. Aside from, of course, those new-fangled televised leaders’ debates. We have meticulously crafted and timed party political broadcasts, enthusiasts on your doorstep, all very above board.

But in Argentina, where a general election will be held on October 23, graffiti is one of the most well-established and accepted ways in which political ideas are communicated. It is also illegal.

But in Argentina, writing on walls is engrained in the culture, often tolerated and respected. It is the go-to method for people to convey ideas, information and agendas - as well as the more familiar “te amo, Maria”s. Graffiti here has a long-standing cultural connection with expression and activism, and now, in the final weeks before the general election, the names of politicians are splashed in five-feet-high letters across hundreds of walls in Buenos Aires, Bahia Blanca, Puerto Madryn and other cities.

As Jonny Robson, part of the Graffitimundo organisation that works with street artists in the capital, says, “The streets have a legacy here they don’t have anywhere else. The street has a symbolic power to it, it is public space.

“There’s a tradition of people writing things in the streets, to complain or just to make themselves heard. The walls are a form of communication.

“During the dictatorship particularly there was a huge amount of noise; people complaining about the police and so on, but also stuff like, ‘I love my mum’, ‘I don’t like this football team’. The use of walls as art is really new.”

It may be relatively new – it only really took off in 2001 – but wall art is rampant in Buenos Aires. Bright murals up to 20ft high adorn walls all across the Palermo and Palermo Hollywood districts. So many walls, in fact, that Graffitimundo has been running walking and biking tours of the artwork for several years.

The Argentine police will generally only get involved if a complaint is made. One police officer, upon discovering a street artist in action in broad daylight, asked him to paint his son’s bedroom. Or so the story goes, according to Graffitimundo’s effervescently knowledgeable tour guide Kirsty Ross.

An alien idea to the British mindset perhaps, but in Argentina graffiti is respected. Rather than being an expression of underground or alternative culture, painting on walls conveys popular culture and opinion here. And because artists feel comfortable painting in the daytime, the art form has developed differently. The works are more considered; bigger, brighter, more beautiful. But often even the less culturally evolved works are valued.

Robson recalls a woman who left her house one day to find that ‘METALLICA’ had been painted over the outside of it. “She was kind of pleased,” he says. “That’s hard to find elsewhere. Like her, many people who have lived through a time when they couldn’t express themselves value freedom of expression more than the right of a property owner to keep their house clean at all times.”

During the dictatorship years in Argentina, people did write on walls, but it was a risky business. “There was resurgence after the end of the dictatorship, of people saying what they thought and using their new found freedom to express themselves,” says Robson. ”All of this is from freedom of expression, writing what’s on your mind. In Argentina, people write things on walls that aren’t said in papers or in speeches.

 “When people first started tagging walls - writing their names or the name of their crew - it was seen as new and weird here. People thought graffiti as art was odd because it had previously just been for politics and activism. That form didn’t take off until the 1990s.”

When politics became popularist, for which Argentina mainly has Juan Peron to thank, and parties began to rely on the support of voters for their power, politicians began paying painters to write on walls. The practice started in the 1950s as a way for politicians to speak to their people and to make their marks on a city.

Whether the painters of today’s big, bright election motifs are working for the parties or operating independently is essentially a moot point; it hardly matters here. One thing is for sure – the painters are passionate and dedicated. They operate in teams of three, and quickly: one will whitewash the wall, another will outline the letters in black, and a third will fill in all or part of the letters in a bright colour. But it is a very temporary process. Sometimes the allegiances of walls will change three or four times in 24 hours, as rival groups whitewash the opposition.

‘CRISTINA 2011’ and ‘CFK’ dominate the walls, though there are still a fair few ‘DUHALDE 2011’s and ‘ALFONSIN’s. After taking just over 50% of the vote in August’s primaries, the current president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is widely expected to win later this month. Her nearest two rivals, the Radical party’s candidate Ricardo Alfonsin and former president Eduardo Duhalde, each finished the primaries with just over 12%.

Cristina lost a lot of popularity during 2008 after a critical government conflict with the agricultural sector, but her approval ratings – and the economy – began picking up again last year. The primary results would seem to reflect that – as do the walls.

In Costa Rica, a street in Buenos Aires’s Palermo Hollywood district, one house is covered with pro-Cristina stencils: her name, her policies, things she has said, things that have been said about her. The words are layered again and again; ‘La chica que nos gusta’, ‘Cris pasion’, ‘porque yo sola no puedo’. The overall effect is fairly arresting. The owner of the house intended to provoke a reaction and for his wall to be a conversation about Cristina – it is a familiar attitude, although so far there are no dissenters.

Cristina’s image is unavoidably linked with that of her husband and former president Nestor Kirchner, who played a large part in the economy’s improvement after its 2001 collapse. That collapse also provided the catalyst for the explosion of street art in Buenos Aires, as artists tried to brighten people’s days with enormous, smiling creatures straight from their imaginations.

Nestor died from a heart attack last October and earlier this year two street artists were each asked to produce ten stencils of the former president, which were distributed around the capital. The stencils, featuring Nestor’s face, were based on a highly popular 1950s Argentine comic, El Eternauta. “It was a grassroots campaign to show respect for the president,” says Robson. “Graffiti sometimes captures a spilling out of popular sentiment.”

A few doors down from the Cristina house stands a restaurant, Tegui. Its owner’s only marketing campaign before opening was to ask Nico Monti, a friend of the head chef, to stencil the outside of the windowless building.

Palermo is full of stories like this. There is no doubting graffiti is popular now, especially in Buenos Aires. There are tours; there are exhibitions; and one Peruvian artist, Jose Carlos Martinat Mendoza, even went around ‘vandalising vandalism’, lifting pieces off the walls with resin but without permission to put in his own exhibition. He sold one, originally by Jaz, for $20,000.

The fact remains that the graffiti is technically illegal. But before the election the interplay between different artists against the background of official campaign material provides a valuable open conversation that seems to involve everybody. Perhaps it not so different from the UK – as David Cameron knows all too well, it is amazing how easily a painted red nose can undermine the message of a campaign poster.