Catching up - some photos

After a prolonged silence, some photos. In a slightly jumbled order...

Chimborazo
Mark at Chimborazo a few weekends ago. Chimborazo is behind him in the fog. We did a hard cold wet cycle from 4000m up to 4900m to the refuge. (Although I did more walking and complaining than cycling...)

Illegal logging and trip to Esmeraldas

I went with Luis to check out the location for a new development worker in Esmeraldas in the north west of Ecuador. I wanted to do some interviews with communites affected by illegal logging, but people were too scared to be seen talking to a strange foreigner and preferred to come to our office in Quito to talk. Took some photos of logging activites though...

Esmeraldas - the city:

Unplanned invasion housing:

Borbon:

San Lorenzo:

African palm plantations:

Huge areas of forest are being cut down and replaced with monoculture palm plantations

Logging

Bananas:

Photography class

Trip out to Plaza Foch: night photography

Mindo

Amazing lush leafyness and lots of rain

Mark climbing up very steep ladder (sideways - cant seem to turn it over)

Peru Development workers meeting on the beach

Last week was the DW meeting on a beautiful beach Punto Rocas about an hour south of Lima(It's a hard life)

The house:

The beach:

The meeting:
The sunsets:

Interviewing farmers in Huaral

I went to Huaral, a bizarre lush river valley in the middle of the desert to the north of Lima. A new Progressio development worker, Bruno started work there this month with our partner organisation Cepes. He'll be doing environmental work with the small scale farmers there.

Some of the ad-hoc housing in the desert (communities established through invasion/squatting of land with no planning and no services):

A tall white gringa with some farmers: (I was interviewing them about terminator technology, GM seeds and their own seedsaving or buying habits). None of them had heard of GM technology, some thought it sounded dangerous, others thought they would like to try it...


The view from my flat in Quito

by day...

and night:


Playa Escondida

For Carnaval, we went with the South American Explorers club to a beach in the north of Ecuador near Atacames. Beautiful with lots of cycling, eating, drinking and scrabble and not nearly as much rain as there might have been.

Paracas

Last weekend I went to Pisco to go and visit the nearby Paracas National Park and the Ballestras Islands. They are wierd desert islands totally covered in birds - in colonial times one of the main sources of Peru's income because the hot dry conditions mean that the bird dropping - guano - are preserved perfectly. It was collected in huge quantities and exported as fertiliser.

(The tiny black spots on top of the hill are thousands of birds and the white is all guano. Below on the beach are loads of sealions. The mother sealions were swimming around teaching the babies to swim. )

Lots of birds. Even though it is desert and really hot there are penguins because the humbolt current makes the sea very cold.

The lumps under the arch are sealions.

The candelabra (The guide didnt really explain what this is - its huge and he said it was either linked to the Nazca lines, or made by sailors as a compass/map, or an ancient holy symbol related to the halluconogenic cacti or made by aliens.)

Pelicans on the beach in Paracas

Pisco

Being in Picso was depressing. It was very near the epicentre of the earthquake in August and, six months on, looking at parts of the town, you'd think it had happened the day before.

Heaps of people's possession and furniture.

A service in the remains of the church which collapsed in the earthquake killing 200 people.