Forty Lessons to Bring Home

At the point this blog uploads, we will be embarking on our final flight. Home.

So what have we learned? We have been to eleven different countries, twelve if you count Galapagos as a separate country (or indeed a separate planet), and now, as we prepare to return, what will we bring home in our minds, as opposed to in our rucksacks?

Over time, we have rehearsed this list verbally together, talking often about things which seem, now, like epiphanies, however obvious they might seem from a distance.

Now, as I write them down, I intend to use this entry as more than simply a concluding chapter. After all, what exactly is concluding? We are travelling now to the United Kingdom, which might seem, after so long, like a different country. We are travelling back into the world of work, which, for me at least, will have changed almost unrecognisably. We are travelling to the possibility of staying still for a while, of seeing old friends again and making new ones, of embarking on the adventure of self publishing, perhaps of buying a house or starting a family. And if you thought that the urge to travel was an itch that be scratched once and dispensed with, think again. We have a new list of countries we would like to visit, or those which we loved so much we would like to return to, albeit not for a number of years.

My point is, nothing much is ending. I feel as though I am stepping onto a flight full of beginnings. So these little lessons, from the bigger life truths to the tiny, practical adjustments, are not a thing to write down and walk away from. They are a new way to live.

1) Learning to see the colour in the chaos

Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam felt like an assault on the senses. At first the constant beeping, the roads crammed with hundreds of bikes, the lack of pavements, the screeching of cockerels, the necessity to step over market wares laid out on what little pavement there was overwhelmed me. I longed for silence. I wanted it all to stop. It was an exaggerated version of a feeling I often have in London.

By the time we left, I loved it. Vietnam remains one of my top countries on this trip, and not, as I thought at the time, only because of our brief sojourns into the countryside. In fact my key image when I remember Vietnam so fondly, is of the city at its most hectic, a particular route we had to walk to the yoga sanctuary every weekend, which bustled with markets, people, cockerels, colour and of course traffic. What I see now, what I had learned to see by the time I left, was a kaleidescope of colour.

Wouldn't it be useful to learn to skip the first stages, the dislike of the bustle, the belief that it would all be much better if it could be quieter, and look immediately for the vibrancy and life that hated bustle might contain within it?

2) Just because it looks like it will kill you, and sounds like it will kill you - doesn't necessarily mean it will kill you.

In most of South East Asia, but particularly Vietnam, the road system is such that you must simply walk out and trust that the traffic will part for you. This, when a road is twenty deep in motorbikes, is a daunting prospect. Looking at that road, from the perspective of the pavement, and a cultural understanding which relies on heavy regulation - and traffic lights - it doesn't seem possible that you will survive. Step out, however, and that apparent chaos reveals itself as perfect order in disguise. The traffic is not fast, the drivers' reflexes are quick purely because they are used to pedestrians crossing this way. The locals do it with absolute trust and without even looking.

A snorkel involves placing your face into water and holding it there. Every instinct screams against this action. And yet, do it, and it is absolutely fine. More than fine, it is beautiful.

Sharks do not necessarily attack you. Waves will not necessarily drown you. Heights will not necessarily drop you. Stray dogs are very unlikely to bite you (mostly they just want love). Bears will not necessarily maul you.

It applies to a lot more than just travelling extremes. There is so much in life which seems inevitably perilous, threatening or simply doomed to failure. But rethink for a moment. That chaos might just turn out to be wonderful.

3) Always do something, never nothing.

In Cambodia we encountered a very old woman, slowly progressing along the road, carrying an enormous and unwieldy bundle of empty plastic bottles. "She is collecting recycling," said our Tuk Tuk driver, "she will get only a few coins for it, but she does it anyway because she has to do something."

In Bolivia a lady sat, each day, on the side of the road, selling a handful of boiled sweets or a packets of travel tissues for two bolivianos. I don't know whether she made very much in a day, but she was selling rather than begging.

Everywhere we went people were struggling, but very rarely were they not doing something, however small, to earn money.

"It's not for her money," said our driver, "because still she does not make enough. But she has to for her dignity."

Human beings need food, shelter, companionship and water. But they also need a sense of purpose, a feeling of achievement. However helpless you are, however pointless the goal, you can always do something to preserve your own sense of self respect.

We are not starving in Britain, and we have a welfare system designed to scoop up those who are stumbling beneath the trampling feet of the rest of the population. But no one can hand you your sense of self. You have to work for that, and your boss is the hardest task master of all - yourself. Please that boss, however, and he or she will pay your wages in happiness.

4) Do it yourself

In Bolivia there is an empty building which used to be a factory. It's situated in a small village on the edge of the salt flats and all of the villagers earn their living harvesting, cleaning, bagging and selling salt on their back yards. The factory is empty because when some enterprising westerner asked all the villagers to come and work for him in the factory no one would come.

"Why would we work for you in a factory," they asked with genuine puzzlement, "doing something I can do perfectly well for myself at home?"

The majority of people, especially indigineous people in South East Asia and South America work for themselves. They have an idea, take a risk on it, open a small shop or a business and see how it goes. If it earns them a living, that's great. They work to their own hours with their family around them, usually out of their own homes. If it doesn't work out, there's no sense of shame, they just try out the next idea.

Now admittedly it's easier to just try something out in South America or South East Asia. The overheads and paperwork involved in setting up a business is negligible compared to the wealth of up front investment and risk taking required in westernised countries. Trying something put in England requires much greater risk taking. And benefits like pensions and paid holidays and sickness days are a wonderful privilege which goes hand in hand with working for someone else, who can better afford the new business overheads.

But what about the smaller things? Aren't we a little needlessly hesitant to try something new, or to go ahead and do something without the endorsement of a larger body?

I have a great job with fantastic perks and benefits which I know I couldn't get if I worked full time for myself. But I am also a part time writer. Why has my day dream always been to be accept by a large corporate publisher, when there are greater and greater opportunities to self publish? Why have I spent so much time thinking of self publishing as being somehow less of an achievement than handing my manuscript to a large company and letting them take it through the various mills involved in bringing so something to print? Isn't it more of an achievement to be in charge of the marketing, editing, proof reading and book design, and to have taken it through an end to end process? How much more innovative can my work be if I take the focus off trying to be a best seller, and simply aim to produce something I love? Does it matter if only three people buy it, if those three people really love it? Not everything in life requires endorsement. Some things only need a bit of hard work and some guts.

"Why would I work for you?" said the Bolivians in that salt mining village, "I don't need you. I am free."

We are free. Let's enjoy it.

The same principle holds for making things rather than buying them. In Bali they make their own clothes, in Peru they make their own furniture. In Malaysia our host was making bedside tables from abandoned old packing crates. The joy of creating something to your own recipes is worth far more than the cost of simply buying it.

5) Ditch the competition

In Penang it is perfectly fine to sit at the tables in one street cafe drinking coffee - but order your food from their neighbour.

"It is your loss," said a disgruntled westerner to our host in Thailand when she cancelled a trip due to weather conditions, "because now I am taking my business to someone else."

"Good," replied our host, "I am glad for my neighbours. We don't compete against one another here. We celebrate other's successes. It is the Thai way."

It is interesting that this absence of competition occurs in countries where the amount people are earning us usually enough to live on, rather than more. None of these small business are making huge profits. They are just making enough. Is it greed which drives us to be so small minded, so fiercely competitive? Is it the fact that we already have so much?

The urge to consider it a personal failure if custom goes to another business operating in the same area actually makes no sense except in the context of a lack of community. If your neighbour shares space or facilities with you, as many people do in Asia, or if it is a close knit community in which that neighbour might be your helpmate should you not manage to earn enough to live on, that sense of competition becomes absurd. Is it precisely that practice of holding onto excess, of considering only your own wealth, that drives us to deeper and ever more stressful competition?

Celebrate others' successes. Share in yours. It's not saintly. It's logical.

6) Practice selective sight

Wherever we have been and however large or small our joys and sorrows, it is always true that life is what you make it. Celebrating successes, small happy coincidences, little joys is enough to make even the largest mishap fade into insignificance. We have commented to each other constantly on how blessed we seem to be, how much  everything seems to go our way. After a while we realised that the same experience, viewed by another, might seem unremarkable or even bad. You will see what you look for and you will remember what you give the most airtime to. Chose to focus on the moments you would like to remember.

As my friend so wisely told me as I bemoaned my disappointment at not being able to complete the Inca trail - you are always having an adventure, even if it's not quite the adventure you planned to have.

7) Hold your family close and your identity closer

I learned this from the Vietnamese friends we made. In Vietnam family is hugely important and it doesn't stop being so no matter what age you reach. Even if you are a successful adult, living away from home, experiencing new things which the previous generations weren't privy to, you never forget your roots.

If your grown up brother turns up at your house, you shrug, grin and feed him. If your father is unwell, or your family struggling, you do whatever you can to help.

Of course there is a crucial balancing point here. You can choose to be endlessly self sacrificing but you have to make sure you don't sacrifice your self. If you lose your identity, you deny those who love you the very thing they value most. The Vietnamese women I knew were bravely fighting against the tide in a social system which relegates, particularly the woman, to a sort of family service robot, removing much of what made that woman unique. We are lucky in the UK not to be born into such a system but it is amazing how many people still give up their identity under the mistaken impression that it's necessary for the sake of their families.

Family is everything. But don't forget to be you.

8) Please remember to tie a knot in your suspender...

In Dalat and Penang we found ourselves talking a lot about Feng Shui. I had always imagined it to be simply a sort of superstition, placing your bed facing a window for the good luck to fly in or some such idea. In Penang, as we visited the beautiful of house of a self made millionaire I understood that much of Feng Shui is about placing subtle symbols of important principles in and around your living spaces to stay mindful of the concepts you believe in.

It's easy to forget things you care about remembering. This will be particularly true for us as we try to bring foreign wisdoms into a westernised culture. We can develop our own form of Feng Shui, placing moments of our travels around our home and our workplace to remind ourselves of how insignificant are our problems, and how huge and beautiful the world. We have a white torito from Peru which is a symbol of peace to remind ourselves to be peaceful, I want to bring to work a notebook with a picture of a sea turtle to remind myself of that sense of calm. It makes sense to surround yourself with little triggers, to hold onto wisdom you don't want to forget.

9) Trust in your convictions and choose your battles.

It took us four months to learn to explain our choice to avoid hiring a motorcycle (unheard of in South East Asia) without apology and without doubting our conviction. In that time we used all sorts of unconvincing excuses and even hired one for a morning, hated and feared it, and returned it within the hour. When we finally admitted to ourselves that we simply didn't want one, and took time to identify and discuss the reasons why, we grew firmer in our choices. From that point on no one questioned our absence of motorbike, the way they had constantly done before, because we sounded so much more convincing in our argument against it.

The same is true of our style of travel. Just days before we left somebody said to me with the utmost confidence, "whatever you do, don't just stay in one place for a month at a time." That phrase 'whatever you do, do not...' echoed uncomfortably in my ears for months. But whenever we explained our choice to someone new, they would be, without exception, hugely supportive and even impressed. Gradually the shadow of 'Brad' and that echoing phrase 'whatever you do, don't do it your way' faded until they became figures of fun, both phrase and fictional character.

The same is true of things you are afraid of. If you are not doing it not just because you are scared but also because you won't enjoy it, it's not a cowardly choice to abstain. If you would enjoy it, but your fear is preventing you, that's the time to make an effort to conquer your fear

You always have a reason to chose what you chose to. Examine it. If it's purely motivated by randomness or by fear, then it's worth rethinking. But if you really know and believe in your reasons, just explain them to people, and they'll understand too.

But whatever you do, don't do it purely because it isn't the thing that everyone else says you should.

10) Nature looks better in the rain

Nature makes us happy. We found this everywhere we went. Greenery, animals, natural sounds and fresh air are a free high. And whatever the weather, nature manages to look stunning, even when grey drizzle is rendering man made cities a depressing smear.

Alongside that goes the concept we saw so wholeheartedly lived in the Cloud Forest in Ecuador. All animals, large, small, slimy or creepy, are worthy of our admiration. All of them are beautiful.

11) The night sky is worth more than sky TV

By far the most enduring image of our time in New Zealand is of the unpolluted clarity of the night sky. Camping with zero facilities in our van in the middle of nowhere was fantastic, and all the facilities in the world, including saunas, hot water, flush toilets and sky TV could not match up to it.

Jemmy's unadulterated excitement because the moon was full stayed with us long after we reluctantly left his little jungle paradise, and remains with us now. We still try to take the time to mark the occasion of a full moon, to go out to admire the beauty and brightness of it and to raise a toast to the moon, that most stunning and yet most overlooked orb which sees us through the night.

12) No day is special and every day is special

Moving on each month was surprisingly difficult, each place becoming, if temporarily, home. We struggled trying to adequately mark each last day, and could never find something appropriately special. In the end we realised that the last day might be perfectly special simply because it is another day in that place.  This is just as valid in the context of returning home. We are both returning and not returning, because so much, both in us as people and in our lifestyles, will be different. We will probably settle into some kind of routine just as we did in each place on our journey. But every day is special just because it is a day of your life. And if you can keep in your mind that concept, you don't actually need an event to mark it.

13) Friendships can be made, retained and even deepened across cultures, miles, roles and languages

We remain in touch with friends from Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Chile and Peru.

We remain in touch with travellers we met in various countries from Canada, Switzerland, Britain, America, Croatia, Burma and Germany, to name only a few.

We deepened old friendships in New Zealand and Australia.

I have a friend from Brazil that I met in Chile, who sends me her poetry in Portuguese!

There is really no barrier to friendship, especially in this digital age. And really nothing more heart warming than finding that out for yourself.

14) Wherever you go, people are always people.

I remember in Cambodia our new friend N came to see us one day very upset because a trip she was arranging had fallen through. N works as a self employed guide, and the trip had been planned with travellers she had met teaching Khmer for free. It was to be a weekend away, and N would strange it and be our guide for a minimal charge. N had been looking forward to it for weeks, and had done quite a lot of work to arrange it, but one by one people had dropped out without telling her, booking a similar tour with a tour company instead. What was making N so upset was not missing out on a guide fee, it was that she had seen these people as friends, not as clients, and had been excited about the trip on her own behalf too. The message the travellers, deliberately or otherwise, were giving, was that they, in turn, did not see N as a friend but as a faceless Cambodian guide touting for custom, and therefore not worthy of the sort of consideration they might show to a friend organising a getaway.

It's so easy to forget that people in other cultures are only people. In Vietnam we realised how much we were finding ourselves replying to a friendly "hello" with "no thank you", seeing everyone as a potential pushy salesman or scamster.

It was so easy as we moved to South America, to become so obsessed with internet scare stories, that we avoided meeting anyone's eye and expected, at least in our first few days, to be constantly about to be mugged, raped or murdered.

People are mugged, pick pocketed, raped and murdered in England too. Just pick up a newspaper. It's not a South American phenomenon!

People are just people. They want to say hi, to be friends, to run a business, or to mug you in more or less the same ratios as everywhere else. They deserve the same level of politeness or consideration.

15) God is capable of looking quite different depending on where you happen to be standing

Why do we imagine something as powerful as a God would limit itself to one form? Surely a God is either so other that we can only create our own images as metaphors for our feeble human minds to follow - or so amorphous it chooses to take different forms to communicate better with different cultures?

In South East Asia, God is a light, an animal (or more accurately, all the animals together), a many armed being or an empty chair. In South America God is a mountain, a condor, a saint or an icon. In the UK God is a human, come to earth as a child and, unaccountably, given our parallel belief about where he was born, white.

Our concept of God is formed by our landscapes, our customs and our own features. Why do we argue so much about this aspect?

The more we examined other religions (which we did not do exhaustively, but enough), the more we noticed how similar are the fundamental principles, the basic teachings. God may look very different, but our ideas of what pleases him, of the behaviours he endorses, are overwhelmingly alike. (I am, for this, ignoring the extremist versions of religions, as they operate as minorities, and on rather a different scale).

The similarities between our world religions are much greater than our differences, which tend to relate less to the wider and more central principles and more to the smaller details, such as how to address God, what offerings he or she might prefer, or how many times we should wash ourselves in his or her presence.

And yet all we seem to focus on are those differences, ignoring the huge similarities so central to so many of our faiths, which build such a bridge across our cultures.

If there is a God, then he or she is A GOD. Nobody knows what a God might look like, so we do our best at imagining. All anyone is trying to do is understand his or her wisdom, and do the right thing by it. Everyone with a faith is united in that aim. The basis of most faiths is love and tolerance. Why do we forget that so ironically and so often?

16) Your faith is not a compartment

We love to slot our lives neatly into a series of boxes. At least we do in the west. Faith is something which everyone agrees should be a holistic factor, penetrating every area of our existence. No religion believes God can be put in a box.

And yet it's very easy to do so. Or at least to attempt to.

Many world religions acknowledge this and try to resolve it. A lot of them have some good ideas.

Why not use the prayer rooms now so ubiquitous in UK workplaces, for a short time at several points throughout the day, as Muslims do, knitting points of reflection throughout your waking hours? You might feel better for it.

Why not dedicate the best bits of your work to God like the Buddhists and Hindus. Give your first proceeds or products to charity each day. The Christians use a system called tithing, born from the original custom of literally giving the first tenth of your harvest, very similar to what people do in Bali and South East Asia with their market produce.

Why not take a leaf out of the book of the ancient Incas and see God in your landscape, letting the world around you constantly direct you back to your faith.

If you don't believe in a God, that's fine, but for those who do, why not learn from each other's interactions with him or her. We all face the same challenges in our day to day mindfulness.

17) Poverty is not logical

Poverty is difficult to define. Some people chose to live simply and are rich in other ways. Our guide in Peru told us a story about a small not born into a rich family whose father took him to visit a poorer farming family living in an open barn in the countryside to try to teach him how lucky he is, and that others might not be so fortunate. As they left the barn his father asked him, "so, do you see now that others have very different lives to us?"

"Oh yes!" said the boy enthusiastically, "because in our house we can only see a few of the stars out of a window, but they can see the whole universe!"

We are all poor in different ways. But real, dire poverty does exist and should not be ignored. The trouble is, quite apart from the difficulty in identifying poverty, telling real need from simple life choices or varying cultural priorities - poverty is not logical. And neither is our response to it.

The founder of the Kantha Bopha Children's Hospital in Cambodia, which provides top quality treatment free of charge to poor families, is Swiss German. He receives no funding from governmental or world wide union bodies because there is a rule which states that ant model which provides assistance free of charge can only be funded if the country or people it is being provided to can prove an ability to pay. Of course if these families had the ability to pay there would be no need for the hospital, but this is not the accepted approach. The hospital is funded purely through individual's donations because the official funding bodies visited the hospital, staying in the several hundred dollar a night most exclusive hotel in Cambodia - and ruled that the equipment being used was too modern, too good for a country so poor. Just one of their hotel rooms could have paid for a child's heart operation.

The official ruling defies logic. But so do hospitals like Kantha Bopha. Maybe, in our approach to poverty, we should throw out the rule books and start again.

18) Your privilege is more useful than your presence

Travelling left me hugely inspired by the work of certain charities, particularly the Cambodian Phare Circus, the Kantha Bopha hospital, and the Ko Lanta Animal Welfare Centre. I was also moved by the fate of the disabled in Bolivia, who exist on the streets without help or welfare benefit, though I continue to research the charities to which I might be able to donate to help.

But one of the hardest lessons to swallow was that my bleeding heart didn't really go very far. Volunteering in passing was an amazing thing to do, but provided me with rather more benefit than it might the targeted groups. I do not have a skill which can fit a skills gap and if I did it might be better used training locals to take my place. The fact is my power is my ability to earn a good wage in pounds sterling. It's a humbling lesson, and feels much less personal, perhaps also arguably less rewarding, but the best I can do for these causes is go home and earn money for them.

19) Eat like a Vietnamese

Shallow as it may seem in the light of all this pontificating, there as an enormous difference in our health in South East Asia than the rest of the world. As someone with a delicate and rather bumpy digestive system I had no problems at all, not even once, in South East Asia. Ginger, lemongrass, brown rice, chilli, chopsticks (because you eat slower), minimal dairy, tofu and coconut milk. You can't beat it. My intention, once I am back in a couple try where I know I can get these things, is to eat like a South East Asian as near as possible.  There will be the inevitable need for chips and chocolate here and there, or for good old English tea, but there will also be freshly brewed teas made with fresh ginger, herbs or lemongrass (if I can get it), and an abundance of tofu. My mouth is watering already...

20) Exercise for practicality or pleasure

We walked everywhere and ate well (apart from in South America) and we were healthier than we've ever been. Exercise works better as part of your life, not a chore. I hope to run home from work or take up hula hooping. Something for pleasure.

21) You don't need all the stuff

Perfectly obvious of course but we have existed for a year on a rucksack each, about a third of the contents of which we have nor even used. In Bolivia everyone simply scoops up what they need, be it children or market goods, and ties it up in a piece of cloth on their back. You don't need the stuff and you barely even need the fancy bags that you carry it in.

22) Physical distance doesn't matter. Emotional distance works on different rules.

Digital technology can be amazing. It really isn't always evil (as I was previously rather inclined to think). We moved physically away from family members and friends for a whole year, but there were several people with whom we grew emotionally closer, talking more over the internet than we did face to face. You might miss people while you are away, but you needn't miss out.

(There is one caveat to this. You really have to use it wisely. Too much constant contact with bone pulls you in awkward positions, making it hard to enjoy the place you are in.)

23) Multi tasking = doing more things less quickly and rather less well.

Some people are natural multi taskers. But a lot of us aren't. For many people the constant pressure to juggle numerous tasks at once leads to stress and erodes the natural pleasure of achieving something, or doing something well.

You can't always avoid it but when you can, it might just make for a more pleasant lifestyle, without necessarily being any less productive. Enjoy every task, however small, and celebrate it for itself.

24) Fuel is free under your own power

We took a lot of pleasure in walking rather than hiring a motorbike, and we saw things more freely and more closely. My friend in Thailand told me that she loves to get around as much as possible on a pushbike or in a kayak. There is something wonderfully satisfying about getting somewhere, as she put it, "using your own engine."

We lead fast paced lives, especially at work, and our own engine may take longer, so there are practical constraints. But wherever possible, and along the same lines as above, it is really quite nice to enjoy the journey.

25) We are lucky to be women living in the west.

And should realise how lucky. Women's rights are not exactly high priority in any of the countries we have travelled in bar Australia and New Zealand. Wife beating is common and not especially disapproved of, and the women do the lion's share of the work. Careers and identities are often denied.

We are lucky. We should celebrate and enjoy it.

26) Animal protection laws are a luxury

Only in the west are the rights of animals given any airtime at all under law. Abused or abandoned animals are rescued and perpetrators can be prosecuted. Yes there are still problems and a long way to go in terms of the regulation of farming and industrial practice's, but we have something and we should be grateful for it.

27) Traffic safety is a luxury. We are lucky to have it.

However much we might moan over speed limits or traffic wardens, the countries in which traffic safety is not legislated for or considered important are losing huge numbers of their population every year to road accidents. The lack of enforceable road laws and the lassie faire attitude to accidents, combine so that it feels as human life in those places is somehow cheaper than elsewhere.

A life is never cheap. We are lucky to have traffic laws.

28) Not just one kind of water, but two

Not only can we drink our tap water but we also have hot water at the flick of a switch. Only the poshest hotels in South America had real hot showers or water in any quantity (though many other places claim to, rather disingenuously). Nowhere can you drink from the tap, not in ant of the places we travelled apart from Australia and New Zealand.

We are rich.

29) We may roll our eyes at our political leaders but we can take our long standing democracy for granted.

Dictatorships and extremist leaders have dogged both South East Asia and South America for decades. A period of democracy is a bonus, but might change again at any moment.

Our leaders might make irritating decisions, against popular opinion and in ignorance of protests, but they are, and have been throughout our history, continuously democratic.

We are lucky not to live in fear of dictatorship. (Whatever you might think of David Cameron.)

30) The 'red tent' concept

Travelling with one other person is challenging mostly because the natural ebb and flow, and hours of each day spent apart are suddenly absent. The most frightening part of that is that the natural rise and fall of your emotional states are highlighted, as you are unable to ride the flow of them in private.

Dealing with this requires, above all,  an acceptance that both of you are equally flawed and that you change over time. Some of the hardest things for me boiled down to my own concern over my partner's imagined disappointment, having witnessed some of the uglier sides of my personality to an extent he wouldn't normally have to deal with. My paranoia about this made the problem much worse. A human wife he could deal with, crazy paranoia and subsequent defensiveness - much harder.

Both sexes have cycles of emotional states, albeit women's are rather more obvious due to the coincidence with the menstrual cycle.

Once you deal with each other's shocking humanity, what you need is space. You can part and sight see separately. But easier, is to learn to have space internally even whilst still in each others company.

I have never believed that your spouse should be expected to fulfil all possible roles for you. You need friends for different kinds of friendships, family, acquaintances and work mates. If they are not physically there, utilise the magic of the internet.

And finally, there is always the 'red tent'. Originally so named because it was intended as a way to deal with women's mood changes during menstrual cycles, the idea is to allow yourself a quiet space where any mood fluctuations cannot affect the other person. We used it on and off for both of us and it is a calming and useful option. Essentially all it is doing is accepting, rather than fighting, the natural changes of your moods, and limiting any aftermath.

31) Stand tall

Balinese children learn to walk tall in order to balance offerings on their heads and to learn the traditional festival dances. Vietnamese women walk tall also because they use their heads to carry things. French and Swiss women seem to walk tall in order to look glamorous. As I travelled I noticed that British women are the worst culprits for slouching. Are we somehow apologetic? Is it the great British self deprecation made physical?

Either way I started to think consciously about my posture, to walk like a Balinese.

I looked a lot better, though didn't always remember. It's something I will bring home with me to work on. Maybe we should never have abandoned that old practice of walking about with books on our heads.

32) You are prettiest when you are happy

...which for me meant when we were in the countryside. Pictures there are notably more attractive. My smile is wider. What you look like really doesn't matter. It's what you project about how good you feel.

33) Forget money. Aim happy.

There was, in Peru, a colour for nearly every kind of luck. For luck in family, in education, in health, in love. There was no clue for money. It just wasn't covered.

Studies have shown that the happiness factor lasts longest in relation to experiences, and dips the quickest and the most drastically in respect of something you have bought or acquired.

Money really doesn't buy happiness, and it sometimes impedes it.

34) You are always beautiful somewhere.

Pale skin in countries where the sun is strong and the skin tone olive, is considered deeply beautiful. In countries where there is no sun and the natural skin colour is pale everybody tries their best to get brown.

Just go with what you're made of. You are beautiful somewhere.

35) A family is a unit

We use the expression 'family unit' very often in the UK but I wonder sometimes whether we really treat it as one. South American children accompany their mothers to market. You don't see then with toys. They don't really have much. But I never saw one have a tantrum.

That might have been coincidence. But I really noticed a difference in the way the parents talked to the children, and the way the children talked back to them. After a while I realised that what I was noticing was the lack of apparent hierarchy. The parents were neither worried nor commanding in relation to their children. They didn't seem to be an to be anyone clearly in charge. Instead there was an easy, friendly comradery.

I don't know how they achieved it. I  not sure of the secret, but I did wonder if it has to do with parental experience. The parents did not seem, as with a lot of UK parenting, to assume the child to be the centre of the world and sacrifice themselves to it. Everything felt a lot more companiably, and perhaps a little less mutually resentful than I see in some of the less well balanced family structures in western societies.

36) Greetings before demands

In Peru everybody said good morning or good afternoon to everybody, even if they were passing strangers in the street. Even if there were lots of you, or of them, every single person greeted, and was greeted, often even followed by an enquiry as to your health. Even in situations in which somebody was performing a service for you, such as in a shop or a restaurant, the greeting is exchanged before the demands are made.

In restaurant situations, everybody who arrives or leaves wishes everyone else in the restaurant 'buen provecho' (good digestion). This always happens regardless of the people eating or the mood or agenda of the person arriving or leaving.

We don't always take the time to say hello before we demand things, or to say hello to strangers we pass in the street. But it's a rare and very small minded person who would actively manage to take offence if we did.

I'm going to make it my mission. Let's bring a little bit of warm hearted Peru home in our rucksacks.

37) Chicha for the workers is a crucial factor in the success of a project

When you build a house in Peru you have to pay great attention to ensuring your project receives good luck. Quite apart from the fixing of the good luck toritos to your roof, an important custom is the provision of Chicha (a fermented corn alcoholic drink) to the workers, and the subsequent hilarity that follows.

I rather support that. It's a well known business principle that the best work is done by the happiest workers, though companies vary enormously in their practice of it. I like the idea that a thing is created in an atmosphere of conviviality, and that the need for that pleasure at the close of the working day is understood and supported by the hirer.

38) Challenges are not time limited

We have a real tendency to plot our lives against a set of rather arbitrary deadlines. Why do certain things have to be done before you are 30?

My Dad tells a story of the longest time ever to complete a marathon. I forget the exact details but the gist of the story is that the man had a serious accident half way through his first attempt which rendered him lame. After years of physiotherapy he returned, picked up where he left off - and completed the race. He ran that marathon in something like three years and forty two minutes.

That's an achievement. There is a small rock in my bag which I was carrying on the Inca trail as my 'offering' to the mountain. I was taken ill one day in and could not complete the trek. But that's OK. I still have my rock. I'll be back in a few years time to complete it.

39) Whatever it is, it doesn't matter

We worry about all sorts of things. But the fact is that the society we live in, in the west, is hugely privileged. I worry about small errors I might have made in my work day, about the osdivility that a passing comment I made may have upset somebody, about my weight or my clothes, my money or the length of my current 'to do' list.

But none of it really actually matters. There is a whole world out there. Some people struggle for their lives. Others are fine but are still certainly not affected by a mistake or a clothing choice I make thousands of miles away.

40) And finally...

In the words of the Dalai Lama -

"Be kind whenever possible.
It is always possible."

Galapagos: Top Ten Memorable Moments

1) Floating on the surface of a gently undulating ocean, breathing the long slow, relaxed breaths which characterise snorkelling, in the company of a huge, green, beautiful sea turtle. Everyone else was far away, chasing sting rays, and I had a long moment, companiably swimming in the company of the calm, slow moving turtle, watching his grace and unhurried progress as he did what I can only describe as 'pootling about' in the water. It was one of the most calming moments of my life.

2) That bike ride. I never thought a bike ride would make it into a top ten list, and all Amy did was keep me company, but her kindness in doing so, and the discovery that distraction really cuts through fear was priceless. Later M apologises, concerned that he, in the past, has not successfully distracted me, but I tell him that I don't believe it's possible for him to achieve this, being, as he is, too close. Human companionship is a beautiful thing, but for distraction you need that special stage in a burgeoning relationship (platonic or otherwise) when you are close enough to be honest, but not so close as to know too well the other person's flaws and foibles. Amy and I were at just that stage.

3) The catch of my breath followed by the mingled fear and amazement as a full size shark swam, only a metre below me. The grace of its movements, the beauty of a creature so often reviled and portrayed as a bloody mobster with gaping jaws.

4) The first time I saw a giant tortoise, not in a sanctuary, but in the wild. Our guide telling us that the tortoises tended to graze in the farms on the highlands despite the rules which state that the farms are private land because, "the tortoises don't know the rules." Being able to stand so close to them, to kneel down beside them in the grass, was priceless and unrepeatable.

5) The uproarious night in which we pretended it was Lana's birthday, ate a ridiculous number of deserts and laughed ourselves to tears (or in Amy's case, snorts.)

6) Our guide, on our last night, producing a surprise video he had compiled himself, of moments from our tour, set to music, and including some amazing footage of underwater animals he had taken on his underwater camera, including the graceful movements both of sharks and turtles, and the less graceful movements of us racing each other back to shore in our kayaks.

7) The surprise entrance of a cake on our last evening, presented to us by our beaming guide, and our reciprocal presentation of an individually signed card for him, along with our tips.

8) The harbour at Santa Cruz, teeming with life, pelicans dive bombing into the water for fish, sea lions arfing and hauling themselves out of the water to sleep on the warm concrete, sting rays swimming in the clear water, marine iguanas swimming into shore and plopping, apparently exhausted, onto the rocks in the sun, piled one on top of the other for warmth.

9) The moment in our kayaking trip when, without discussion, we all happened to congregate to race each other home.

10) Seeing a sleepy little barn owl perched barely a metre away in the lava caves on Santa Cruz, peering sleepily out at us through half closed eyes but showing no sign of taking flight. That simple fearlessness in the birds, fish and animals, was unique and beautiful. Long may the creatures of the Galapagos islands continue to find no reason to distrust the feckless, reckless human race.

Creatures Great and Small: 28 and 29th August

Our last two days on Galapagos are spent on Santa Cruz island. We take a walk along a beach full of sunbathing marine iguanas to a small cove where we hire kayaks. The kayaking is quiet and reflective at first, as we row off in our pairs to investigate the turtles who intermittently poke their heads over the waves, and the herons and pelicans perched on the shoreline. At some mutually, but unspokenly agreed moment we all congregate in the middle of the lake and, amid much hilarity, race each other back to the beach. Saturday has us visiting the Darwin Centre to learn about the giant tortoises and marvel at the tiny babies, which can grow to such gargantuan sizes. We walk in the highlands, finally seeing giant tortoises in the wild, as opposed to a sanctuary or breeding centre. They eye us warily, and with some disdain, clearly despairing of us in our immaturity. We cycle back down from the highlands, feeling the breeze on our faces. In the evenings we meet for drinks, which are rather generously measured in the Santa Cruz bars, and then further orgies of eating, including, on Friday night, the consumption of five enormous deserts between ten of us, one of which is a totally undeserved birthday cake (it is not anyone's birthday) due to a misunderstanding with the waiters. Much laughter and singing of happy birthday to the innocent and rather embarrassed victim ensues, followed by enthusiastic consumption of the cake. We tip well to assuage our guilt. Saturday, being our last night together, is special and, without exception, everyone meets together to eat and to say thank you to our guide, who has facilitated everything with quiet efficiency and a ready grin.

Galapagos, as I might have predicted, is centred on the animals. The landscape, though stunning, plays rather a second fiddle to the fish, birds and mammals which inhabit it. Snorkelling here is a different experience. We see few fish but the ones we do are big fish, the kind you see rarely, if at all, anywhere else. There are not hundreds of varieties of animals or birds, but the ones there are are huge and unusual - and utterly unafraid.

But what really strikes me as we come to the end of it, is how much this trip has been made special by other mammals. After a year in which investigation of nature has generally led me to despair of human beings and their greedy interference, this trip, (though the history of these islands is no exception to the greedy grabbing nature of human beings), has been made special by the group of people we have been lucky enough to travel with.

Tour groups are usually good. Everyone wants to get along and keep themselves apart if they don't. But this group is different. From very early on we have gelled together and there is an atmosphere full of the genuine enjoyment of each other's company. We are interested and respectful of each other, and able to have a lot of fun. If I needed a reason to believe in the inherent goodness of human beings, this is it.

There are two nurses from America, Hank and Ben (pseudonyms). Hank is full of fun and energy, but is deeply serious about his work, mixing his jubilant exterior with an earnestness and depth of feeling which makes him not just entertaining, but interesting company. Ben is quietly confident with flashes of brilliant wit, leaving everyone in fits of laughter, generous and supportive and very thoughtful. It is Ben who will often notice a straggler, and fall back with them, or offer a hand to steady people as they leap off the buses. The two of them have an inspiringly easy, close relationship. They embody my belief that platonic friendship can, and should, be every bit as important as romantic partnerships (and in some cases, more so).

Jen and Georgia are blonde, tanned and immensely fit. They go for runs along the beach when everyone else opts for drinks, do yoga every morning and don't do anything by halves. When we kayak, they do it standing up, turning it into a paddle board. When we snorkel with sharks, they dive down low in the water to view the sleeping monsters closer in their underground lava cave.

Lana is practical, down to earth and intelligent. She is a German geologist, very kind and very straight forward. Her English and her attitude are both fantastic.

Amy is twenty one, and the only reason her age is worth mentioning is because she manages to have all the vitality, bounce and hopefulness of her years with double the maturity, and a thoughtfulness and outlook on life I neither had at twenty one nor have managed now. I have mentioned before our bike ride downhill from the highlands on Saturday, that I am nervous on a bike. Amy not only hangs back to keep me company, but has the psychological good sense to get me talking about writing, a subject I am passionate about. Between this and my own curiosity about her fascinating studies to be a vetinary surgeon, I am completely distracted from the cycling itself and wholly absorbed in the conversation. It is one of the most pleasant bike rides I have ever taken and I am enormously grateful to her for her astuteness and generosity of spirit.

Daniella is small, smiley and brown from her holiday recently in Spain, though she, like Amy, is British. She is full of wicked sparkle and fun but is far from being shallow. She's intelligent and deep thinking and I have some fascinating conversations with her. Her personality is a natural glue and it is she I think who starts the ball rolling to fell the group together. Socially she is gifted, but in a way that avoids the common manipulative edge which socially gifted people so often have. She uses her gift to spread laughter rather than rumours, and create bonds rather than form gangs.

Halia and Hans are from Croatia, speak several languages perfectly and apparently effortlessly, and have that quiet consideration that I recognise and so appreciate in Hank. They are newly engaged and very cosy and gentle together, but with an easy comfort both with each other and with the rest of us.

Dan is Australian, and taking a break mid career, or at least job, change. He has an easy manner, and some of the calm, straightforward nature I appreciate so much in Lana. We talk about life and work and what we feel is important. I am inspired by the way he approaches life, with an idealism tempered by common sense and practicality.

Toni, Donna and Jon are travelling together. Donna and Jon live in a different country now, to Toni, though despite being British born, none of them live in England. They have grown up children and share a sense of not confirming, of making choices based on their own convictions, unafraid of going against the flow. Each of them have lived interesting, varied lives as a result of this, and talking to them is inevitably so informative and riveting that I lose track of time and am always, once I get into a conversation with them, late for something. If this makes them sound more intense than fun, I have described them inadequately. Toni especially, is full of fun, particularly because she manages, without being offensive or thoughtless, to take her own path doggedly and unapologetically, going her own way with an honesty and a cheeky grin which is both compelling and jealousy inducing.

And that is our group. It is not simply that the individuals are fantastic, there is something else that happens, which somehow makes us immediately comfortable with each other. In the early days of our trip my most off repeated conversations with different people focus on everybody commenting on how great everyone else is. There is a proper sense of mutual admiration.

And that, with the animals, makes this trip. I enjoy my human, marine and mammalian company, and will take with me, as vivid as the memories of swimming with turtles, my memories of swimming with this particular group of humans.

Darwin Eat Your Heart Out: 26 and 27th August

OK. We are in the Galapagos Islands. Let's talk about creationism.

Darwin rather suffered at the hands of the creationists. Ironically, he actually held a very deep rooted Christian faith himself not only prior to his development of his theory of evolution and the survival of the fittest, but for quite some time after.  He saw, as do I, no problem with the concept of evolution and the concept of a creator God existing together side by side. He did not necessarily see his own theory as somehow mutually exclusive with creationism. In the end, sadly, it was the vehemence and inflexibility of the faith of others, which shook his own. I have been in a similar position myself.

I am much of Darwin's opinion here. I have never been strongly against the theory of evolution on a faith basis. In fact I have never really understood the arguments that go on around this. If the world was designed by a God, is it not all the more beautiful if he, she or it built in  the ability to adapt and evolve, effectively 'future proofing' it against the inevitable ravages of time?

Anyway, as it happens, evolution is not what I want to discuss in this blog. I want to consider the other question. The one nobody really talks about.

Assuming, as I do (and hypothetically speaking if you don't happen to believe this), that the universe was deliberately designed and brought into being by a creator/higher power/God, then how do we explain its defects?

Before you say 'Adam and Eve, obviously', give up on this blog and go to make a cup of coffee - let's just consider the ramifications.

Imagine the universe is some kind of artwork, and you've been to view it in a gallery. You see, as I did on Wednesday, the green blue sea stretched out for as far as the eye can see, whipped up into thousands of glittering white crystals in the wake of the boat transferring us from Floreana to Isabella island. You see enormous turtles, gracefully moving around in the water, as I did on Thursday, the green and yellow of their heads and fins glinting in the sunlight reflected in the water, seaweed waving on the bottom among speckled rocks dotted with small, bright fish. You watch sea lions, so lumbering and cumbersome outside the water, so graceful and sleek within it. You meet the eyes of enormous giant tortoises, moving slowly and ponderously, and eyeing you with a sort of lazy irritation. You feel the heat of the sun, the sting of the wind, the salt of the sea, the ever changing textures and colours of myriads of different plants. The individual beauty of the people around you. (Amy has a smattering of freckles on her pale skin and a bright, captivating smile, Toni's hair is a soft white blonde above a vivid face to match her strength and clever personality, Hank is tall and slim, with a mop of blonde hair and bright blue eyes, etc etc. (All pseudonyms) It is very easy to see the beauty in my group-mates).

My bet is that you'd be astounded and in awe. You would be desperate to meet the artist that created all this, to see what kind of a being could dream up all this splendour.

The trouble would come when you looked a little closer. The sea, so beautiful on the surface is treacherous and deep. What artist would create something which could kill a human with its strength, dash boats into pieces, lay waste to birds, fish, plants and people in one, overpowering tsunami? What kind of artist would design his work so that, in order to release pressure, the canvas would periodically separate, spewing out boiling sulphur, creating the huge crater we walked around on Wednesday, full of black burned out rocks, causing the giant tortoises we admired so much in this artist's palate, to flee and die in their hundreds? What kind of creator is it whose design for balanced natural processes includes so much blood and violent death, in which one creature must be the enemy of another, must consume other beings to survive long enough to be preyed upon itself? On Thursday I swam in an ocean heaving with life and death, and watched a shark the size of me swim gracefully only a metre or so beneath me, beautiful and blue and deadly. He won't attack me, (though I hear my breath quicken in my snorkel even as I marvel at how lucky I am to see him) because he has enough food here in the form of small fish and sea lions. Why would a creator make his world so fearsome? And what do natural systems which rely so heavily on mutual consumption, tell us about the character of such a creator?

Many Christians feel they have a simple answer to this question in the form of the story of Eden. The world was beautiful, but Adam and Eve's disobedience made it flawed. And thus is the pain of childbirth, the difficulty of working the soil, and the consumption of animals by humans, and of animals by animals, explained immediately.

But that only works if you see that story as literal truth. If you believe, as I happen to, in that story as being more of a true metaphor than a true history, then it is a way to reveal the difficult concept of free will and the tendency to use it against oneself, more than an explanation for those darker aspects of the design of our world.

Admittedly humans have interfered with nature historically, as Amy, a vet, comments to me, and seemingly we have never learned. Some apparent darknesses may have been caused, or exacerbated, by our actions causing change.

But other things have quite clearly been part of the design. We talk about a delicately balanced system,  and part of that system involves death. There is a natural culling of certain species based on food supplies and predators, which would have been there, which would in fact have worked better, without our human interference.

My answer to this question is that the murkier aspects of nature, that blood and violence reveals a rather more intricate character of the artist, an understanding, perhaps that some of beauty is all the greater revealed by contrasting ugliness, the most joyful moments require a counterbalance of strife, or of toil to get to them. Do we perhaps need a food chain to learn to value its victims? Do we need to be part of one ourselves, prey as we are to bacteria, or natural disaster, in order to appreciate what we have when we have life?

It's a difficult question. But it is hard not to see the beauty in destruction. The crater is beautiful, an erupting volcano, though deadly, is also beautiful. The shark could kill me but his deadly grace is part of the privilege of seeing him.

If our world was created by a gigantic artist, then what kind of person must he or she be?

A complicated one. An understander and communicator of truths. Isn't that what all great artists are?

Why do we want our Gods so one dimensional? Which of us could be described as anything other than a multitude of contradictions?

There is beauty in great ugliness (just take a look at a marine iguana for proof). There is regeneration in destruction.

There is an art show out there which changes daily. Go and take a look before it alters again.

Agatha Christie Eat Your Heart Out

Floreana Island is peaceful, barely inhabited, and almost unaltered by tourism. It is home to the original colonies of giant tortoises, although they were wiped out since, then repopulated, and now live largely on the Isabella and Santa Cruz islands.

What really sticks with me about Floreana island, however, is the mysterious case of the missing Baroness, and subsequent mysterious deaths, which reads like a real life murder mystery, though it has the annoying side effect of being real life - and therefore there is no Poirot character to gather us all in the parlour and tell us the answer over a sherry.

The island was originally inhabited solely by Dr Ritter and one of his patients, Dora, who moved there, both leaving spouses behind, to pursue an aesthetic lifestyle, strictly vegetarian and deliberately isolated. Dr Ritter wrote newspaper articles, which became best sellers back in Germany, and attracted new settlers in the form of the Wittmer family, who came here essentially because their young son had rheumatic fever and they hoped a new lifestyle in clean air and with careful diet might help him. They set up 'house' in the form of cave dwellings, Mrs Wittmer had her second baby, and all was peaceable, the Wittmers and Ritters keeping a respectful, but mutually helpful distance.

The peace was shattered, somewhat predictably, by the arrival of a glamorous sounding Baroness who arrived with her two lovers to set up a hotel.

You don't need many little gray cells to work out how well she fitted in with the aesthetic, quiet lifestyle being led by the others

Rumours abound about what happened in between, I hear tales of the baroness stealing from the other families, causing jealousy and distrust between them, and being a perfect generous hostess to her clients whilst treating her lovers and fellow islanders with spite, manipulation and disdain.

Whatever the truth was, the upshot was that the baroness and one of her lovers went mysteriously missing. The second lover was shipwrecked trying to find his way home and Dr Ritter died from eating poisoned food. And the most curious of all? The food in question, though tales do vary, appears to have been some form of meat.

And yet, my friends, do you not remember that this man was a strict vegetarian?

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice, mixing her literary references between Lewis Carroll and Agatha Christie without apology.

The Tragedy of Having Nothing to Complain About

"I really feel we are letting the side down as British citizens," says Amy (pseudonym), one of the English travellers in our group, "by not having found anything to complain about. We should by now have complained at least four times about it being too cold or too windy or too hot or too salty."

She's quite right. We are all bouncing happily about in our little slice of Galapagos paradise, and are really finding it rather hard to keep up our fair share of complaining.

And in fact it has at alternate fifteen minutes (or so) intervals, been too cold, too windy, too hot or too salty. But put together it's wonderful. And can we really find the time to notice it anyway, when there are turtles swimming beneath us, huge frigate birds wheeling gracefully above us and marine iguanas sunning themselves in between?

We are standing on a boat, braced against the prow with the warm wind on our skin and salt in our hair. We have spent all day on the boat, or snorkelling off it, or joining the iguanas to sun ourselves looking back at it from the golden sands of the beach. There has not been a lot to complain about.

We have seen blue footed boobies, white birds with grey markings and bright blue feet, and their compatriots, the red footed boobies, who I suspect you can imagine from the title.

We have watched a pelican swoop down to land on a rock, and frigate birds drop like pointed stones into the water to catch their lunch.

We have jumped somewhat nervously off the boat into the bracing water and snorkelled in the alleyway between two huge rocks which, together, look like a huge sleeping lion in the otherwise uninterrupted blue water. We have seen enormous turtles, electric blue fish, brightly coloured plants clinging to the underground rock face, and even sharks, ominous and graceful, keeping their distance like dark blue shadows in the depths.

(At this point a few of us got so excited we lost the rest of the group and had to be driven round the rock to join them by the grinning boat crew. Ahem. I may have been among that few...)

We have clambered, wet and exhilarated, back onto the boat, laid ourselves out to dry in patches on sunlight on the deck, and then eaten lunch on the water.

We have waded to a beautiful white sans beach, collapsed on the sand, followed a prancing, rather posing marine iguana, slick and spiky and the same time, and looking surprisingly furry, though we suspect these were scales. We swam next to a sea lion, apparently unconcerned at our presence or even, playfully, seeking it out.

We have briefly chased a whale, hoping for a quick flash of a tail, having spotted a blow hole in the distance, very excitingly, though to no avail.

Now, watching the shore appear again, gradually, the few buildings of San Cristobal looking odd and incongruous, we scan our minds for a suitable complaint.

"The horseflies on the beach?" Someone says.

"I don't think they actually managed to bite me though," points out someone else.

The conversation moves on. We have been defeated.

It is all just a little bit too perfect.

Dance of the Sea Lions

Standing, dripping wet from snorkelling, a pair of flippers in my hand I watch two big sea lions perform a perfectly synchronised dive, leaping out, curving round and then slicing back into the water like hot knives through butter. They are metres from me, and less than a metre from some other people who are still in the water. This, I think, is something very like paradise.

I will back track a little. Our final huzzah for our epic journey, has always been the Galapagos Islands. We booked the tour over a year ago and imagined ourselves stepping out of the sea, surrounded by giant turtles and dolphins - and more or less straight onto our flight home.

A crazy fantasy. Except, of course, we do arrive back in Quito one evening - and fly the next morning. And judging from the way this trip has started, the turtles and dolphins image might not be that far fetched.

After taking the flight out to Dan Christobel Island, and refreshing ourselves with lunch, our group, all of whom are easy to talk to and lively company, makes its way to the Interpretation Centre' to learn more of the history of the islands.

We have walked a few metres before we see the sea, an impossible blue and impossibly calm. We have not quite finished gasping in awe when our guide points out the wild life.

The rocks at the shore are literally covered in crabs. A deep red in colour they are large and scuttling, some with a sea anemone or similar creature apparently living on their backs. Nestling ominously among the grey rocks a grey octopus inches its way towards them, then ventures up onto the rock, stretching out a tentacle towards its prey. The crabs scuttle out of reach at the last minute.

Like a statue on the rocks a small grey sea lizard sits, alert, head up, watching for food.

A small heron like bird lands on the rocks, dips his beak in and brings it up carrying a small, struggling fish.

The smooth wet head of a sea lion appears and then disappears, moving with incredible grace and speed through the water. On the rocks his counterparts laze in the sunshine, waving one idle flipper as if to fan themselves.

Casually, an enormous pelican swoops over our heads and lands on a rock, gazing intently into the water.

We are all hanging over the railings, agog. Our guide has to physically wake us up to persuade us to move away from the harbour side, and walk to the centre.

Somewhat dazed, everyone continues, commenting to each other on how easy it was to see the animals, how unafraid they were, and how beautiful.

The interpretation centre tells a different story. The Galapagos Islands have not always been such a paradise. They have a chequered history. Everybody knows the Darwin story, but not so much the increase of man's exploitation of the resources, the whalers who nearly destroyed all the sea life, the settlers who drove the giant tortoises to extinction, the unsuitable viruses, strains, seeds and species accidentally transferred to the islands by trade boats. Then there were the convict colonies, tending, it seems, to either extreme, the harsh and unspeakably cruel camps, closer in nature to concentration camps, which led to rebellion, punished by the prisoners being made to build what is now known as 'the wall of tears' - and the idealistic young men who tried to build a utopia, offering prisoners redemption and ending up either bankrupt or murdered. Not to mention the mysterious deaths on Floreana, back in the 1950's, which read like an Agatha Christie novel, and involve passion, jealousy, affairs and the mysterious deaths of one player after another. No one yet knows what happened.

Thankfully someone, at some point, saw sense. Now the islands are protected, the animals are not only safe but seem somehow to have forgotten mankind's terrible treatment of their ancestors, and view man not as predator or as competitor for food.

Hence the fact that we can snorkel next to seals, can watch them turning somersaults deep in the water, as if they knew they were being watched and would like to show off. We can swim through huge shoals of blue and silver fish, and past the watchful eye of feeding pelicans, then climb out and be treated to a sea lion acrobatic display.

Wet, cold and blissful, we wander back to the hotel, go out for dinner, and fall into bed.

Galapagos, known as the 'enchanted islands', truly are both enchanted and enchanting. All the more so for their apparent wholesale forgiveness of mankind for his previous misdeeds.

Ecuador: Top Ten Moments

1) People watching in the park, being approached variously by children, students and a young lad selling roses for his uncle's treatment - every interaction being sweet and gentle, if linguistically challenged.

2) Letting the Maquipucuna love of all things living wash over me and teach me, so that even cockroaches appear suddenly beautiful, and I stop whenever I see an insect, not just to avoid crushing it, but to take time to admire it. No living thing is any less fascinating than another, none are intrinsically disgusting. I thought I already knew this. But I didn't.

3) Arriving home one day after walking past a protest demonstration in the streets of Quito. Mentioning this in halting Spanish to the lovely mother and father team who seem to run the hostal much more than its listed representative, their son - and being treated to an impassioned response, ushered to a chair in the courtyard and spending a fascinating hour talking politics and life choices in surprisingly adequate Spanglish with the father, while the mother bustled smilingly around us, with gloves, brooms and cloths, chipping in now and then - and doing all the work.

4) Standing, hushed, in the humming forest, and watching a full sized Spectacled Bear rise out of the undergrowth, climbing up a tree trunk to reach his favourite fruits, just metres from our vantage point. The mingled fear, awe, and joy that produced in me.

5) Plunging, freezing, into beautiful clear water surrounded by trees and vines, and totally hidden from passing view, in the swimming hole in the river which runs peacefully through the Maquipucuna reserve.

6) Dancing badly, but youthfully to the first and third bands at the free music musical at Ichimbía Parque, and realising our strangely aged requirement for a 'nice sit down and a cup of tea' during the second one must, purely, have been due to the music being too staid.

7) Feeling like a proper Quiteño after dropping in by chance to a live performance of an amazing jazz cum salsa band in a tiny courtyard. Dancing salsa with abandon and even a little bit of funk, to our surprise being no worse or better at it than most of the other people there, none of whom were tourists. Sitting back to catch our breath on odd occasions and admiring the skill of the scattering of people there who really were really good. Enjoying the way they danced salsa without affectation or ponce, but with an enthusiastic, dirty, jazzy vibe which is the way, we agree, that we want to dance salsa ourselves.

8) Discovering in Guayasamín, an Ecuadorian artist I can get really passionate about, and who, himself, leads a legacy of passion and fervour, against violence and in search of peace. Being moved by the art with genuine depth, and resolving to learn more from home, and to visit the works this amazing and prolific artist has scattered around the world.

9) My first bird walk at the Cloud Forest, when I gaped at beautiful, bright bird life, saw parrots and toucans, and realised, beyond my wildest imaginings, that I really was going to see this kind of bird life. For real. Up close.

10) Being woken up by an excited 'father of the house' in our hostal because the man upstairs who lives in the self contained apartment has invited us all onto his balcony because it's an unusually clear day and we can see Cotopaxi puffing out clouds of ash as it smoulders and explodes with equal ominousness and beauty in the distance. Nature, both human and animal, insect and flora - is at once terrible and wonderful.

Quito: State of Emergency - Fri 14th to Thur 20th

Quito is in a state of emergency. Matters have been spiralling since Thursday, each day adding a new complication, or sonply another day of continuing unrest.
Strikes and demonstrations against the current president and his government occur daily, with blockades of important roads, burning tyres, or marches with banners happening daily. The police are out with their riot shields, and, though we have not yet seen them use them, we are told that the main square on Thursday, as we travelled back from the Cloud Forest, was a scene of sudden violence as a small number of protestors turned in the police with stones, entailing a general chaos of tear gas and the arrest of the instigators.

In the meantime, as if in solidarity, Cotopaxi Volcano began to erupt. There has been a notable increase of activity in the volcano reported by seismologists over recent months, and, as we trudged through the forest admiring butterflies, it came to a head. Cotopaxi is spewing grey ash from small explosions, which, depending on which direction and how strongly the wind is blowing, covers its slopes and even areas of the city in a fine layer of grey ash, like dirty snow. Quito is only thirty miles from Cotopaxi, and a larger explosion is now predicted within the next four to give months. It is not likely that such an explosion would be large enough to endanger the main areas of Quito, but many people live on or near its slopes. Some have already been evacuated, the Cotopaxi National Park area is closed, trains are unable to penetrate further towards it than Machachi and must find another route and everybody simply hopes that Cotopaxi will, through this series of minor explosions, somehow reduce the underground pressure enough to reduce or prevent the expected eruption. Tourism is suffering, evacuation talks and plans are continual with respect to the villages nearest to the volcano, and the president is being called on to take action.

As suggests, given that a significant proportion of the demonstrations are by unhappy indigenous people, it is as if the mountain is colluding with a people who have always been close to it, to protest in solidarity.

So Quito is in crisis.

Not that you'd notice. We return on Thursday night to a Quito which is as 'quiet' as Quito ever gets, going about its business just as usual. As we have own own 'state of emergency' in respect of my, still misbehaving, stomach, we have a very quiet weekend ourselves.

When we go for a walk on Friday we see a few notices on walls and hear some talk of a 'paro' (strike) but everything seems to be open. We see no signs of disruption, if anything the streets are more deserted than usual.

On Sunday we have a ticket booked on the train for a day long 'volcano tour'. One of the volcano's is exploding, so we can't go as far as we normally would on such a tour, only to Machachi. But we ride perfectly smoothly through idyllic scenery, far belying its dangerous undercurrent (most volcano's are classified at least as partially active), and smiling locals come running out of their houses to wave at us, touchingly, as we go past. The train only runs for four days a week and seems to be something of a celebrity. Everybody seems to be behaving just as normal. We pass through Tambillo, the village where they still stir food with human bones and make their 'Guarapo' liquor with a small human bone inside each bottle. An expedition to recover the hidden Inca treasures, supposedly buried around here, famously failed due to the mysterious disappearance of all GPS signal and the sudden and unprecedentedly dense cloud cover which descended low over the ground. We chuff our way past and visit Machachi where we see no ash, despite one party of tourists who have  gone to great lengths to purchase face masks against the sulphurous air, of which there is not a whiff, and subsequently are themselves the only indication that any eruptions - or indeed disruptions - are happening.

On Monday we take the teleferico, (cable car) to the top of Mount Pichincha where , in the past, the fierce battle to gain independence was fought. There is no battle now though. It's very peaceful. We can't see Cotopaxi due to cloud cover (one rarely can see Cotopaxi). We encounter two gigantic birds of prey, sitting calmly less than a metre away from us. Below us Quito stretches out, glittering and calm.

On Tuesday through Thursday we go to a series of short, dance related film showings as part of a festival of film and dance. People are chatting earnestly about the art, or just enjoying themselves for free. A group of young actors perform absurdist theatre skits. Large numbers of salsa dancers enter the country to compete in the championship competitions, which we are lucky enough to have secured a ticket to.

On the streets, apart from the increased police presence, standing around, leaning on riot shields, piles of helmets against the wall, eating pancakes and laughing, no one is batting an eyelid.

And then we read the press reports and they tell us that Quito is 'at a standstill'.

The 'state of emergency' seems a technical definition only. Why aren't people reacting more? There is political unrest, recent violence and a volcano waiting to explode. Why is everyone not in a permanent state of panic.

Because, whatever the newspapers say, this is life. People have to carry on. What good would it do them otherwise?

I used to wonder how people did it, when they lived in countries with permanent war zones. How did they keep themselves from entering a constant state of shock, from being cowering messes, huddled in corners, afraid to go out, jumping and screaming at the distant sounds of bombing, starving with their families in their houses because of the very real possibility that if they stepped outside they, or a family member would die, caught in crossfire, or deliberately killed.

Then I met a couple in Dalat, who lived in Isreal, and they told me that you just have to carry on. You even get used to it. That lady, living with death and bombs daily, was still afraid of heights. She was shaking with fear when she went canyoning.  Famously, people who have endured terrible persecution, violent wars or terrifying political dictatorships, when offered counselling, are still, at least to some extent, preoccupied with their love lives.

We live life in a bubble shared by our loved ones. We notice, and are affected by, the flash and colour of our own small lives, our immediate circles. It is hard for us to get perspective on a pressing work deadline, a sick child, or am argument with our spouse over toothpaste. But world events, even if they directly affect us, often remain on our emotional periphery.

Of course this is not always true. There are brave leaders of revolutions, passionate believers in causes and people willing to sacrifice the contents of that bubble for the wider good. But in those cases, is it not the case that the bubble has simply changed? The outside events have been admitted inside?

This sounds rather depressing. I am not accusing human beings of being wholly self obsessed and politically apathetic. Clearly they are not. The people of Quito are holding demonstrations every day, sacrificing their financial comfort by striking. Every day, the father of the family who own our hostal tells us, people join the demonstrations after they finish work.

People do care. They do think wider than their immediate lifestyles. But at the same time, they have to carry on. It is neither useful nor possible to maintain a constant state of panic. What is interesting though is the, apparently worldwide, human tendency to understand this, to carry on through all kinds of wider situations, but simultaneously lose sleep over trivia. Are we utilising a clever protection mechanism, like the Cotopaxi volcano, releasing pressure gradually through the minor traumas, to deal with the greater ones we know less how to deal with? Or is it simply a case of how immediately we are likely to be affected by the various stimuli?

Of course it depends on the ability of the cause to penetrate your circle, and this is never better demonstrated than by an exploding volcano, when it becomes, literally, a case of proximity.

The people who live in a small village between two volcano's and near to Cotapaxi perform an annual festival to thank the volcanos for their protection from the elements - and from the larger one a little way away - to appease and honour them and to ensure safety from their wrath. The festival is faithfully adhered to every year. It is deeply important.

On the top of the slopes of Cotopaxi, we are told that some villages have been evacuated. But others, only a little further down, are refusing to move. Within the next four to five months an eruption might occur which would hit the village in fifteen minutes. Experts say that even with the most efficient evacuation protocols, only half of the inhabitants could be brought out to safety in that time.
Fifty percent of that village could die.

But the villagers liken it to crying wolf. For months now the experts have been talking about ominous increased activity, now about a big eruption. But no one knows for sure, four to five months is a long time, especially when added to nearly a year of other warnings, and they simply cannot live in a state of constant panic. They are reluctant to leave their houses, their businesses for a certain disruption of their daily lives and their daily loves, in case an uncertain natural disaster might occur, perhaps, at an unknown time. They can live with the threat. They have for decades.

Everybody adjusts far faster than you would imagine, to living with any situation. Human beings are enormous adaptable. We can accept a daily nightmare, purely because it happens daily.

As for the people in the main town, thirty miles away, nobody really seems to be discussing it.

The political situation, of course, is different. The demonstrations, the strikes and the activities of the government seem to affect everybody. Watching a demo station march past, we see banners requesting better rights for women, protesting against the hugely inflated taxes, the governmental corruption, the prejudice against the indigenous people and the associated injustices, and the current attempt by the president to pass a new law which will allow him to continue in power beyond his usual cap of two four year terms, via an election system potentially swayed by the rich and powerful close to him.

The streets of Quito may not be at a stand still, but everybody is involved in the demonstrations, everybody is out there, marching for their cause.

Because the volcano is a force of nature. But the political system is something the ordinary Quiteño could, quite possibly, manage to change.

And so the demonstrations, though fuelled by genuine anger, are dogged, rather than violent. Far from the South American reputation in Europe for uncivilised rioting, the violence on Thursday is, even admitted by the press, an anomoly created by 'about twenty people'. Such an anomoly exists at any political demonstration, and is a phenomenon well known in the UK, though our media is rarely so balanced in its reporting.

We find ourselves pulling up chairs in the courtyard of our hostal to chat in Spanglish with an impassioned Carlos (pseudonym), the father of the family who run the hostal, about the situation with the president. The key problem, he tells us, is that by trying to pass the new law, allowing himself freedom from the usual cap in term length, he demonstrates a preoccupation not with the country, but with himself. He is losing popularity anyway, the oil price falling, general feeling being that he has lost his original principles.

"But it would be alright," says Carlos, "if he just saw out his term (he has another two years to go) and then gracefully retired."

Quito has a rather chequered history in relation to presidents who have outstayed their welcome. At least two were assassinated, though in fairness this was quite some time ago and methods for the public to express their displeasure runs rather more towards a march than a machete.

And so the people march.

Meanwhile we all go upstairs to the balcony of one of the rented flats to casually view the volcano pumping out ash.

Perhaps the people of Quito have simply learned to put into practice that old adage - to have the courage to change the things they can, and the wisdom to accept what they cannot.

The Cloud Forest: 12th and 13th - Up and Out

Having spent all night suffering with yet another of the constant stomach bugs I have been plagued with while in South America, I spend Wednesday resting and trying to put my internal organs back into some sort of working order. I am given a tea made out of  'hierba del perro' ('dog herb') which is known to be very good for stomachs. It does indeed seem soothing and helpful, and I sip it throughout the day and shelve plans to walk to the Cloud Forest itself for the next morning. The walk to the Cloud Forest is longer than the other tracks and, whilst i would not describe it as 'tough', it does involve fairly constant uphill climbing in humid conditions and  at a higher altitude. It's not something to attempt while you are scuttling behind a tree every few minutes.

I am a little disappointed but not too much because I know I can do it on Thursday, before we go home. As the day draws on the bug seems to be waning so I cross my fingers and hope to awake bright eyed and healthy.

I awake bright eyed. I don't awake healthy. My stomach is cramping and aching and there is nothing about my insides that suggests that they are in working order.

Even so, I grit my teeth a little and get out anyway to see the birds.

I am well rewarded. We see more of my favourites, the bright blue tanagers, a 'whiskered puff bird', whose name alone is fantastic and who is, in reality, a small fluffy fat little brown bird with white markings, sitting like a little pom pom high up in a tree. Four bright parrots, blackly silhouetted against the bright morning sky, do a flt over for us, though they don't have time to stop and pose for our binoculars. We are visited once again by the beautiful motmot bird, with his red chest and his long blue tail with white markings. He has already been to see us the day before as I languished in my hammock, perching on the banister metres away from us without a care in the world.

The highlight though, as if to reward me for my pains, (literal and metaphorical), are the three big toucans, who fly close above us and perch in a tree, uncharacteristically low, so that they can be seen even without the binoculars or huge telescope which our guide normally supplies. They are bright green, with big black beaks with a line of bright yellow. They stay in the tree for a long time, happy to sit and caw. I did not imagine, before I came to Ecuador, that I would have such a chance to see these sites of birds in the wild, and so close.

We are so lucky.

I tell myself this as I limp back to the lodge clutching my stomach, to be treated with lemongrass tea, ginger tablets, bitter umeboshi plum - and prayer.

Having attempted a rather desperate bargain with God in which he keeps me well enough to see and appreciate his creation, the Cloud Forest - and then I can be as ill as my body dictates after that - we set off on our walk up to the Cloud Forest proper.

And actually I do feel better. God may have rolled his eyes at my melodrama, given that I am after all only one of the full 50% of travellers who get stomach bugs in South America and very unlikely to expire as a result of it, but I think he must have taken pity on my desperation to actually see the Cloud Forest, because my stomach does not even whisper, let alone explode, all the way until we get back to Quito this evening.

On the way up, we encounter another of my favourite birds, known locally as 'the lazy bird' because it doesn't make any kind of a proper nest, just seemingly lays its egg anywhere it likes on the ground. We see it there, after the bird has flown away, a small, delicate pink egg, unprotected and oddly close to the path, overgrown as it is to preserve the natural feel of the forest.

But the lazy bird has a secret, which makes it all a lot more sensible. The lazy bird is basically invisible.
 If you saw the James Bond film in which his gadgets include an 'invisible' car, you'll know what I'm talking about. When the bird, which is a mottled brown with leaf like markings (you see where I am going here), sits among the browning leaves that cover the forest floor, especially in this part where the path interrupts the forest and new green shoots are less common, it is literally invisible. We 'see' it twice, once on the way up, once as we come back - the first time I only just make it out with the binoculars after a long and patient endurance on the part of our guide and his infrared pointer. Even then I only just manage to discern its shape among the leaves before it senses our presence and takes flight - and then I can see it. On the way back neither M nor I can make it out at all despite the guide insisting it is there. We stand for a very long time, unable to see it even with the handy infrared pointer. Eventually it flies off in frustration, an option which perhaps was beginning to seem tempting to our guide.

As we continue to climb it grows, to my surprise, more humid. Somehow I had expected the usual cooling of the air as the altitude increased. No such effect here. The trees grow denser, the air closer and hotter and the biting insects more voracious. Our guide turns to show us things, sweat dripping on his face. M swats at mosquitoes. I think fondly of South East Asia, with all its clammy, soaking, humidity and its tiny mosquitoes with elephantine appetites.

Above us, and to the right, vultures wheel above a tree, silhouetted against a peculiarly white sky, in a break in the trees. Something, below that tree, has died or is dying. We don't think about it. We watch the vultures.

We hear the loud, insistent call if the Cock of the Rocks bird, which we haven't been lucky enough to see, but which is enough of an experience simply to hear. It is a gutteral, almost hyena like 'ha ha haaaa' call, interrupted every now and then by a trilling scale. I try to video it, to capture the sound. As soon as I turn on my phone it stops. When I give up it begins again. The Cock of the Rocks isn't called that for nothing. It knows what it's doing.

We watch a huge butterfly, each wing the size of a mans hand, flutter down in front of us and perch, briefly on a leaf. It is black and white with lacy ridges and holes on its wings. It looks like a woman's party dress.

We see a huge caterpillar, so furry it's body appears about three times the size it is, perhaps part of it's defence mechanism.

As we move further up the birds grow scarcer as the tree cover grows denser. Birds need space, our guide tells us, though we hear the distant trilling of various kinds of wild turkeys, stomping around deep and invisible in the undergrowth.

The bears are ever present, we hear their huffing and the low gurgling they make in their throats, and see the flattened sections of forest which are their trails from fruit tree to fruit tree, but, at least on the way up, we do not see them.

We see the tracks of pumas, hunting last night in the forest, and a dead porcupine, the inside of which has been scooped clean by the creature (probably a puma) that killed it.

"I am sorry," says our guide, looking genuinely sad, and talking, apparently, to the porcupine. I am surprised, expecting a man so passionately knowledgeable about nature and natural processes, to be rather au fait with the necessary death and food chain mechanisms which sustain animal life. But then that is what characterises the Maquipucuna lodge in the cloud forest, that sense of real gentleness, of love for each creature.

"Mind out!" says our guide, stopping suddenly to gently pick up a large black beetle, and move it into a leaf at the side of the path, where it is put of reach of our trampling footfall.

Nothing is too small to be important. Nothing is too small to notice. Our guide points out crickets, a giant guinea pig and the tracks made in the night by armadillos with equal intensity.

We make it to the top. Its a mass of huge trees covered in a trailing lime green moss. It looks unreal, too beautiful and strange to be natural. It seems like a film set or a computer game.

On the way back we hear the bears again, this time closer. Ever eager to see bears, despite having worked here for over twenty years, our guide goes on ahead, fighting his way through dense, jungly, undergrowth to see if he can find a vantage point to see him from.

"Did you see him?", we ask as he fights his way back.

"Yes" says our guide, "he is angry. Those were mating sounds we heard before. What you hear now - it is anger."

"Why is he angry?" We ask.

"Because he wants to mate with the female," says our guide, "and he needs his privacy."

There is a pause.

"So... He is angry with the female?" I ask, "or with us?"

"With us." says our guide, simply, "maybe he will get aggressive."

"OK" we say, tremulously, "er...perhaps we should be getting back?"

"Perhaps" agrees our guide and starts making his way back down the track at a much swifter pace than we have ever known him move AWAY from the wildlife.

We don't need telling twice.

"Run away, run away!" whispers M in my ear, "run away from the horny, enraged bear..."

"Shhh" I tell him, "he'll hear you."

We slip, stride and slide our way back, pausing only at the bottom to 'see' the lazy bird.

And then that is it. Our time in the green and teeming cloud forest, 'my Ecuador',  is up. We bid farewell to the gentle, expert staff, the beautiful, open, bamboo lodge and the preying mantis leaf insect which has been ineffectually trying to 'catch' us every time we pass its perch on one of the tables (where it is not even slightly camouflaged, but does (it hopes) stand a chance of netting a really, really big snack in the form of these huge insects with no antenna which are wandering around nearby).

On the way back our driver stops for us at the centre of the world, the monuments at the equator. We straddle the line which divides the northern and southern hemispheres (conceptually - because the earth moves, the point of exact latitude 0,0,0 also moves, and that line is only exactly true on 21st June every year).

Standing at the equator is something which we couldn't muss doing, having travelled to Ecuador. But the tourist shops and museum buildings seem just a little inauthentic to me, even, dare I say it, dull.

Poor equator. It never really had a chance.

What could possibly be more exciting, or match the thrill factor of a horny bear?

Or a butterfly the size of my hand?

Or a humming bird whizzing past my ear or dribbling nectar on me while I eat lunch?

Bears, Tarantulas, Piranhas

Back at the very beginning of this trip we were told, at the Shivananda Yoga Centre, about Prana, Shivananda's word for positive energy, which he believed to be more abundant in the countryside than the town. We instantly christened it 'piranhas' between ourselves.

I rather agree with Shivananda here. I think there is more positive energy to be gleaned from natural surroundings. Certainly throughput this trip I have often commented on the difference in my own mood in cityscapes versus treescapes, for example. Here at the Maquipucuna reserve in the tropical and cloud forests I feel calmer, more relaxed, sleep better and generally find that my reserves of patience, cheerfulness and 'get up and go' are far more plentiful than I have noticed them in Quito, where I have found myself more tired and prone to fretting over nothing, than I had been otherwise in this trip. It is a separate thing to health, in fact by this evening I find myself  dealing with yet another of the ubiquitous sickness and diarrhoea bouts which have characterised South America for me, instead it is a mental agility, an adaptability and a freedom from the more pointless pressures like physical appearance or money. I feel beautiful here, less because the climate or mirrors agree with me, more because I  so surrounded by natural beauty I am just better able to perceive it in myself, less critical and harsh in my self judgements.

The idea that life of any kind is beautiful is never more obviously demonstrated than here. Bugs, bears, birds, wasps, plant life, everything are regarded here as being worthy of study. I am surrounded by people who, like me, will not kill a spider, will step over ants rather than crush them, and will admire rather than recoil when faced with insect life. There is no room for harsh self judgement.

And so we are up at six thirty to begin our day with a bird walk before breakfast. Armed not only with binoculars this time, but a powerful stand alone telescope. We see a big Toucan, the highlight by far for me, sitting far up in the trees, honking and hooting to himself and to our guide, who honks and boots back. He is bright with a yellow and black beak and despite us all being too excited to keep as quiet as we should, he is perfectly composed n his perch. We see a ruffled red tummied Collared Trogon with a long black and white tail, and tiny bright blue and bright green Tanagers, landing to nestle their heads together and kiss on the black peaked roof of one of the huts.

What we don't see, we hear. We listen to the call of a Toucan Barbet, the rumble of a turkey, the cry of a vulture, and several other trills and whistles from birds which stay hidden but sing for us like the dawn chorus that they are.

After breakfast we take another route, but get completely side tracked less than half way into it because, unusually, the spectacled birds have moved down even lower into the primary forest, and seem to be attempting an up close and personal interaction with us.

Walking along we pause suddenly, hearing the cracks and rustles of a large animal making its way through the undergrowth. Seconds later we spot a bear, on all fours, its black and white face unmistakable in the greenery. We all hold our breath and watch. We have never seen one so close, or on the ground before. The bear ambles forward, catches sight of us suddenly and then gives a panicked start and bolts back into the forest.

We breath again. It seems surprising that the bear would show such panic at the sight of us. These are protected bears who have never experienced any negative interaction with humans, other than to be gawped at by them every year when they come down from the clouds to mind their own business and eat fruit. Also, the fact cannot be escaped - these are bears. Large bears with claws sharp enough to shred bark and teeth sharp and strong enough to rip off branches. If anyone ought to be running off in alarm, it should be us. And here we are focusing our cameras.

This realisation stays with me as we come across a bear climbing a tree literally yards from the path we are on. At the top of the tree is a juvenile bear, her cub, says our guide, and the best now climbing up to join him is a big mother bear. Although the bears we have been seeing are big, they have mostly been juveniles - this is the real deal. And she's huge. Moreover she is huffing and blowing and making low gurgling noises in her throat.

"She is angry" says our guide, casually.

I am not sure I want to be standing this close to an angry bear with a cub, and when the bear comes back down the tree again, heading straight for us, I find myself scuttling a little way up the road. But she simply reaches the ground and wanders off, not bothering to waste her claws and energy on us.

Later, when, with great excitement the rest of the staff at Maquipucuna Lodge join us, one of them explains to me that the bears are not at all aggressive.

"When she comes down," she says, "she is telling you 'don't you dare touch my cub' and she us huffing on the way up to tell her cub, 'don't you dare come down out of that tree till I am sure it is safe."

She recalls a time another year, when there were two cubs who were really still quite small, who were playing - running up and down the tree trunk chasing each other. The Mother bear came back, saw the humans and got really upset with the cubs, huffing at them and growling so that they scurried back up into the tree and stayed there.

I ask if the bears have any natural predators. She tells me it is possible that a mountain lion might try his luck in the very top mountain forests, or a puma might try to take a cub. But she remembers an incident years before when the bears were in the trees eating the fruit, and the mother bear with two cubs was puffing and growling a lot. They were nervous, concerned that their presence might be disturbing the bears, and that she was huffing at them when, out of nowhere came a hawk which made a swipe for the cubs. To this day she doesn't know what exactly happened but the mother bear somehow managed to just grab both cubs and pull them downwards, deeper into the tree.

We stay for a long time watching the bears. The lodge staff are triumphant and full of excitement though, ironically, once they join us, we never have such a close encounter with the bears, who stay safely in the tree tops. This is not a world in which humans are fearful of animals, be they bears or tarantula. This is a world in which violence is inconceivable. It reminds me a kind of Eden, a lost time in which there are no living beings not worthy of wonder, and in which nothing has anything to fear from another. It seems to me that the animals themselves have an instinct to avoid the humans, however, which is sad. I long for a time when the language barriers between humans and animals are broken down and it is possible to simply communicate our intentions, and reassure each other that our children are safe. Perhaps this time will never come. Perhaps it has never been.

After lunch we leave the bears in peace and go to visit the lodge's organic garden and coffee business, where we learn just how labour intensive the process of turning beans into coffee really is. Then we take a walk to the nearby waterfall and the swimming hole, where we strip off and plunge into perfectly clean, clear water, surrounded by overhanging trees and gleaming rocks. It feels lovely. We absorb piranhas galore.

We chat over a drink before dinner, with a young documentary maker who has been with us earlier on the trails. We talk about faith and travel and the consequences of having time outside your normal world to think about what is important to you. He tells us we are wise. We keep seeming to convince people that we are wise or admirable in some way and I feel a little guilty, as though we have been somehow disingenuous. In turn we find that what he has to say is wise, though he protests. Perhaps it is simply an extension of that feeling, that everything and everyone is previous. The lodge is filled with that feeling. I want to bottle it and bring it home.

Our night walk, after dinner, is more giggly than before, M and I being joined by two others and there is much good natured scaring of each other. The phrase 'ten minutes' or 'fifteen minutes to live' becomes rather bandied around, and there us much talk of 'this being a jumping spider' or of pumas attacking people with beards. I think this bears no small debt to the fact that we are all, male or female, large or small, a little scared. It becomes clear that we are literally walking through a forest which is scattered with silent tarantulas. As we move our torches they seem to be waiting on every leaf. These are smaller spiders than usual, though no less hairy, and of the tarantula family, rather than tarantulas exactly, but they are poisonous, however many minutes they may or nay not give you to live.

I am struck once again, by how different the forest is at night, the creatures who inhabit it taking turns to make it their domain. I have glamorised the lodge and the lifestyle in it, but in the forest life still plays out with bloody necessity. There are still predators and their prey, life or death on every corner. It's still beautiful, but it is given part of its beauty by that darker edge.