Bike, riding gear and helmet GFX I worked on for KTM.

Writing this in a hut made out of bamboo with the most exquisite construction. All materials found, or sourced locally. A hut at perfect ease in it’s environment. A seemingly perfect extension of the plants and life overlapping and becoming one with it’s completely open structure. the sounds of the animals blending with the sounds of the sea and wind passing through the hut and me. Everything moving, being born like the new flowers that frame the path to the sea, dying like the fly being eaten by the huge spider beside the path. The dead bug being eaten by the hundreds of tiny insects on the deck of our cabin which in turn give them life.

Nature never hurries and yet everything is accomplished.

The same feeling of having a front row seat into the nature of the cycles of time and life and death, which I felt in Montezuma remains and reinforces itself. What part do I play in this? As the observer? The destroyer? The creator? As inconsequential as a single ant? As a drop of water in a river flowing to the sea? A grain of sand on the beach? I feel at the same time immensely small and yet part of it all. Both timeless and fleeting. All things have their place in nature. Being at this lodge in the jungle reminds me how far outside the natural order of things modern life has moved. It’s an interesting place to be at the top of the food chain. I am reminded of a tattoo I saw on a dude in California. “Now that you can do anything you want, what will you do?”.

Sitting within a table, framed by glass and wood, on a sawdust floor, is the ferocious matt black chainsaw which was used to chop down much of the wood used to construct the huts and furniture around me. The irony that such a destructive machine was used to create such a place of beauty seems a fitting metaphor for the power for good and bad we all hold in our hands.

Twenty five bucks a night gets you a big room on the beach down here. A dirty, moldy, run down room with cracks in the walls, but a room with a curious amount of charm. You can see through the high bamboo ceiling to the world of insects and Gecko’s, partly shielded as we are from the pounding rain by the rickety, leaking roof, the roaring of the waves sounding like they are inside the room itself.

A death has taken place; A mysterious death. When we came back from dinner a huge dead cockroach was on the floor in the middle of the room. The cockroach had been almost cut in half. A Gecko was moving in and out of the shadows of the rafters, the not so silent cockroach assassin, shrieking his victory cries. The Gecko must have gone for the cockroach which then fell onto the wobbly but fast spinning wooden fan hanging from the ceiling.

It looks like the weather was bad in a lot of these photos, but to be honest it was really good most of the time, and the temperature never deviates from a humid 28degrees so the rain is actually quite nice as it freshens things up a little. We were on our way to Manuel Antonio (which we just blew through in the end as it was too touristy) and liked Dominical so stopped to catch a few waves and spend the night.

Arriving back in Europe today, it was grey and cloudy.
Felt like all of the color had been taken out of the picture after being surrounded by the jungle for 3 weeks, so below are some of my favorite greenery shots from the trip.

We saw a lot of Howler monkeys but on this occasion they were going nuts, throwing branches at us, jumping through the trees to get above us and pee on us, howling like crazy the whole time. They are really territorial, was pretty funny.

Sitting on the edge of the world, looking out over the sea to Jaco in the far distance across the peninsula, it felt like we sat at the center of the universe. The dark illuminated by the stars, with clouds stretching from east to west in giant horns in front of us, beaches and forest dimly lit but still visible into the distance to our left and right. The stars were framed by the arc of the converging clouds and the edge of the land upon which we sat, while the sea was hitting the rocks in front of us where the river came down to our left to meet it. The three very bright stars of the southern cross ran horizontally through the picture, surrounded by galaxies and the depths of time. Images of people spreading back into the ages who had seen the same sight and wondered the same things on this exact spot, who had been privileged to the same insights, filled my thoughts. Sitting here, laughing with Jule.

The next day we were heading deep into the jungle.

The pounding rain on the German Autobahn reduced our speed from the normal 160kmh+ to an annoyingly slow 100, so the journey to Munich took much longer than usual and we only just managed to catch our first flight.

A couple of days, 4 countries, 2 flights, layovers, taxis, buses and a ferry later and we were bumping down the potholed road of the Nicoya peninsula in our tiny 4×4 rental car. As the tarmac changed into gravel and then dirt, with the occasional knee high river to drive through, the road started to deteriorate rapidly and our speed was reduced to no more than a crawl.

Santa Teresa, a remote surfing town on the pacific coast of Costa Rica, was the first proper destination of our trip, and despite the jarring bumps and stifling heat, as we got progressively closer, time began stripping off all layers of urgency; I was starting to enjoy myself.

A couple of phone photos from Mr PT in Costa Rica – I’m guessing he will have a whole lot more to post from his proper camera when he is back next week…

We went to listen to a talk by Stephen Venables, who is doing a book tour in NZ. He was the first Brit to climb Everest (by a new route) without oxygen, and has some epic climbing stories and photos. He has many first ascents in the Himalayas, and lived to tell the tale after breaking both his legs when an abseil anchor failed on Panch Chuli V.

He also survived an unplanned bivouac at 8600 metres on Everest, and during one part of the descent he climbed for 16 hours without stopping.

It made our 1 and half hour snow hike out of the powder bowl behind Cardrona yesterday seem pretty tame…

More here

PROPAGANDA VS REALITY

Just today, typical rubbish commentary came from the New York Stock Exchange floor. As preface, note that over 75% of all NYSE trading volume is traced to Wall Street program trading. Their handy high speed, high frequency trading, also known as insider trading that taps into stock trade orders before they hit the exchange, now dominates the majority of trading activity. If that does not qualify as brokerage pit masturbation, what does??? The commentary went like this to explain the gold price runup, which is still early and still not significant yet in its jump. The charlatans on the NYSE explain the gold price moves up as technically based (therefore not real), as owing to the weak USDollar (not true in the last couple weeks at all), as a safe haven (intriguing if an epiphany is in progress), and as the result of light volume leading to high volatility (the ultimate in lame excuses). The Wall Street gang has really lost a lot of credibility. Why anyone even listens to them is a good question. When they run out of advertisement revenue to spend, we will be forced to listen to them less. Then they will use USGovt budgets to fund their statements in advertisements on financial networks. Ooops! They already do, from the USDept Treasury, when they were given control in 1992, and have commandeered it ever since.

Full article here

We’re growing Silver beet – first attempt…

I was thinking about the post I put up on growth, and the effects of Peak Oil and overpopulation on food production and distribution, and came across this:

How far does an average piece of food travel before it goes in your mouth?

Apparently between 1,500 and 2,500 miles (2,500 and 4,000 kilometers) from farm to table. A new study by the Worldwatch Institute details the lengthy journeys that much of the nation’s food supply now takes, finding a growing separation between the sources and destinations of American food.

The distance that food travels has grown by as much as 25 percent, according to the report by the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental and social policy research institute based in Washington DC. The nation’s reliance on a complex network of food shipments leaves the United States vulnerable to supply disruptions, the group argues.

Real? Fake? The guy claims it is all real (check the link at the bottom for more info)

I dunno but I’ve watched it 5 times and I’m still finding it ridiculous…

More info…

“The world is not a static thing, we all know it grows and contracts as the flow of life meanders”.

The media hologram shows countries in recession or achieving positive growth, depending on how the data has been massaged. Consumer confidence is often closely related to the particular position of any given state. As a result all governments claim their economies will return to positive growth in the “near” future. None would dare state that in fact the economies of the world have over extended themselves and the debt fueled growth of past decades will never been seen again, despite the likelihood of this as a stark reality of our future due to debt, Peak Oil and over population.

This September/October is setting up to be a very interesting period for the worlds economy.

Meanwhile, we should take faith from the fact that in the real world growth of some kind or other can always exist, even in the most improbable places…

Economic growth can either be positive or negative. Negative growth can also be referred to by saying that the economy is shrinking. Negative growth is associated with economic recession and economic depression.

Five major critical arguments raised against economic growth include: