Saturday 16 January 2010

Jolly Nice Outing Has Moved!


I've shipped the blog over to Wordpress, having become a bit tired of Blogger's occasional random selection of font sizes, typefaces, paragraph formatting and general clunkyness.

You can find the new blog at jollyniceouting.wordpress.com. There should be a few new entries there already for you to enjoy, which aren't up here. I hope you like the new format!

The Management
16th January 2010

Monday 21 December 2009

Meanwhile, On The Rest of The Web...

Here's a couple of the best bits from the various blogs that I keep an eye on from the last month...

The first is a jaw dropping video sequence that I found on The Adventure Blog which was made for the Hayden Planetarium in New York City that puts into scale just how large the Universe is. The video begins in the Himalaya and slowly begins to pan out, past the moon, the solar system, and so on. It does a fantastic job of making you feel very, very small.



Also recieved a great post from Made In England about the latest movie from the very cool Woodshed Productions; 180° South. It's a film about surfing, sailing and climbing, but generally it’s a remake of a legendary trip and film from 1968. There's an interesting slide show of the trip here too, simple but well put together.


Apart from all the slick modern production stuff, the really exciting thing was the original trip; Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia & Black Diamond) and Doug Tompkins (founder of The North Face), plus three other chums set off in an old camper van to surf, ski and climb their way through South America, on their way to be the 3rd team to climb Mt. Fritzroy (Cerro Fitz Roy) in Patagonia (it’s that iconic granite slab used on the Patagonia logo).

Unfortunately the only evidence of the original film (Mountain of Storms) online is this short clip (voice over is hilarious). Feeling like I'm so close to all that Patagonia has to offer, the temptation to jump into a van and scoot down south is overwhelming...but I suppose I'll have plenty of time to do it.

Cusco, Peru
21st December 2009

Sunday 20 December 2009

Motorbike Excitement

Our friend Fredy has two motorbikes, and in an act of generosity that surprised me even by the incredibly high standards that Lou and I had experienced in Vilcabamba thus far, lent me the keys to his 4 month old Honda so that we could ride up the valley to Vilcabamba Real to see the sights, based on my obviously insubstantial comments that it had been "about 3 years since I last rode a bike"; try 7 years (and that was for 2 days...)

After a bit of mangling the clutch to get going and a few stalls, we wound our way up the mountain, Lou wisely riding pillion behind Fredy instead of me. My face, according to Lou, set in a grim mask of concentration, I wove the bike around muddy switchbacks occasionally cutting out the engine with my ineptitude, Fredy waiting patiently for me at sporadic points up the hill, seemingly unconcerned with the damage I must have been doing to his engine.

It was all worth it though; the motorbike buzz soon overcame the fear, and I got better at the gear changes. Before long we were zooming along tracks in the back end of nowhere, crossing river fords swollen with rain and dodging languid dogs in little towns as we navigated the rutted and winding streets. Eventually we ended up at a the top of a waterfall at some incredible altitude overlooking a lush mountain pasture being grazed by cows, whose owners were hiding from the driving rain under ponchos, balefully staring at the manifestation of a pending task and chewing coca leaves to delay the inevitable.

Vilcabamba, Peru
20th December 2009

Saturday 19 December 2009

Fun With Plantlife

Ingredients:
Old Man's Beard x1
Camera x1

Vilcabamba, Peru
19th December 2009

The Monthly Shopping Trip

Mule train; if you stand in one spot in Vilcabamba for acoupleof hours, a ton of these will go past,entering the village unladen and leaving as you see, with tarp-wrapped bundles containing sugar, flour and rice (and,occasionally according to our friend Fredy, a few kilos of coca paste intended for dishonourable uses),staplesthat do not existin the far flung corners of the mountain region, and that the incoming drivers trade in exchange for the potatoes that they carry from their fields; cash features in no part of this process.

Stopping one of the drivers, I asked where he was going. "Choquequirau", came the answer. "But that's eight days away!", I responded. "We can do it in three", he replied, before turning and trudging away up the path to the hills (crossing the Inca bridge out of town), beginning his three day walk, the midway point of a six day shopping trip.

Try to remember that next time you throw a strop in Waitrose when you can't get the balsamic vinegar that you were after...

Vilcabamba, Peru
19th December 2009

Ancient Civilization 1, Peruvian Government 0

This is one of the two bridges leading from Huancacaya to the Rosaspata ruins. It's Inca design, stone support pillars holding up a structure of heavy wooden beams and wooden cross struts. It's been outside the community for hundreds of years.

The photo is taken from a big concrete bridge, built in the last 10 years, painted in the blue and white colours that feature on all municipally funded projects. No-one uses the big, expensive concrete bridge. The spanning section is made of sheet metal, supported by thin, springy metal rods,that make it bounce when you walk over it. This means that mule trains, which constitute the majority of passing traffic and form the purpose for such a bridge, can't use it. They use the Inca one next to it.

Vilcabamba, Peru
19th December 2009

Wednesday 16 December 2009

A Visit to The Campo; Death To Furry Small Animals

I popped out to the countryside this week to visit a couple of the farmers who are partners in the COCLA cooperative with whom Lou and I are writing a business plan at the moment to try and learn a bit more about the organisation from the producer end of things. Tagging along with a routine trip by two of the techical assistants who work for COCLA training farmers on recent agricultural practice and performing internal organic and fairtrade accreditation inspections, it was an interesting experience to say the least.

I got a chance to look around the farms and see the variety of cash crops grown along their subsistence counterparts, learning in the process about the renovations that were happening to the coffee bushes, some of which were over 40 years old and long due for replacement; a worrying exercise when you consider that a newly planted coffee bush can take anything up to 3 years to get to cherry bearing status, expensive in time and money from plant purchase and loss of income from the replaced plants in the short term. It was interesting to hear about how all the neighbouring farms chipped in to help each other with maintenance and harvesting and the strong sense of solidarity in the campo, and also good to hear that after decades of the farmers having to support themselves solely through self organised cooperatives, the municipality was finally helping out by providing some of the new coffee plants that were due to be used in the renovations. Better late than never...

One fairly interesting sight that I stumbled across was the farm guinea pig collection. These small furry creature seen scuttling around the floor of the farm kitchen are normally exclusively used as family pets to be sacrificed to over zelous children in the UK; not so in Peru. These little blighters are reared for droppings (used in natural fertilizer) and consumption. Yup, they get skinned, split open and roasted instead of cuddled in rural Peru. It's hardly compensation to know that there 'aint much meat on a cuye.


Quillabamba, Peru
16th December 2009