"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."

Katherine and I are happily ensconced in our Venice Beach apartment. In the mornings we eat breakfast watching the Pacific Ocean crashing against the sand. In the evenings, tranquil, we watch the vibrant and spectacular sunsets listening to the waves break against the shore. I have no exciting news or interesting trips to tell you about. I go to the clinic, I hang out with friends, I watch the Super Bowl... It's a bit like living here only I don't.

I told you that I got myself a penpal buddy from the clinic when I was in South America. We wrote for 2 months while I was away and eventually met properly face to face when I got back to LA four weeks ago. Over the next few weeks I bumped into him a few times, in corridors, between meetings, etc. I went to the acupuncture college I was originally going to apply to last year to have an informal chat about studying there and as the admissions officer was showing me round the teaching rooms who was teaching but my old penpal buddy. I then bumped into him at lunch and again a few hours later as I came out of my acupuncture treatment. At this point he uttered the immortal words... "Are you stalking me?"

I have sinced explained to him just how unintentionally funny this was. I didn't recount the full Martina Navratilova and Nicolas Massu / Fernando Gonzalez story, and thought better of following up with the Viggo Mortensen Spain/New York double whammy as well. Just for the record he does understand that I am not a stalker. He was joking. OK! Then guess what I found out?

I discovered that one Mr.V.Mortensen lives in Venice and is one of many locals who donate to the clinic. If Nico turns up here I will be utterly spooked. This will be the climax, the culmination and honing of the finest observation, pursuit and stealth skills: my nirvana as the High Priestess of Stalking.

So...two roads...wasn't that what Robert Frost said?

So I came here to confirm my decision that studying in London was the most sensible thing to do. And obviously I was going to hate LA because I have stubbornly, and yet groundlessly known that for decades. I don't need to expand on this statement really, do I? You, all know that once I have that gut feeling, however difficult or turbulent the ensuing course of action may seem, that really is it and I will not be content until I am doing what feels right. My original, seemingly unfounded and surprising decision last year, was to come here to study. I talked myself out of it because every logical atom in my soul was crying out that I should stay in London. Fancy this! I was right first time.

So now I have to decide what I am going to do and that leaves me with quite a bit to deal with before I leave, kicking and screaming, in two weeks time. I am going to need an awful lot of friend stroking when I get back. Just warning you.

I Have a Dream

Monday was Martin Luther King Jr Day. If I had a dream, it would be for a Ritz Carlton chef to cook me a delicious lamb dinner, when all I had to do was chat to him as he was cooking and to keep pouring the red wine... and so it was, and it was good. Well done, Dave. Is that shallow? That's a rhetorical question...

But come now, you all know I'm a bleeding heart liberal and that actually I will have whole heartedly embraced this day, fresh from my Iraq war dead memorial visit on Santa Monica beach the morning before. It was also the day of the Golden Globes. I escaped LA and headed for the mountains and Jill's house.

It has been a leisurely 10 days in LALA land, catching up with Jill and Dave, doing a bit of yoga. I started back at the clinic and everyone said how well I looked. I restrained myself from gloating and stating the obvious... I have been on holiday for over 5 months. It has been really good to meet up with people again and there's still a few more people to see. At the clinic Arron and I swapped stories and laughed until the back of our ears hurt - weird. I also met up with someone at a meeting that I had been emailing while I've been away - the emails began when I asked his advice about an acupuncture related question, and we just carried on writing. Now that was a VERY strange experience: to not definitely recognise someone you are sitting opposite in a small room when you actually feel like you know them rather well from 2 months of email contact!

It's fairly cool here at the moment and there have been some bracing winds, but the sky is blue today and the sun in shining eventhough it's weak. I have two nice roomates, Katherine (French Canadian) and Penka (German) and we sit and drink wine, chatting on the balcony and looking out over the Pacific Ocean. We have decided to spend a little more money and stay somewhere a bit more private, so from Thursday Katherine and I will be renting an apartment right next to the beach for my last month here.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Martin Luther King Jr.

A Few New Views

Bernie and Milly atop the Castillo at Xunantanich, Belize.



Milly on the equator.







Christmas socks from Claire B.










A few more photos have been loaded onto the flickr photo page (link on right hand side of page). Enjoy!

The Unceremonious Exit of Nico

Folks, this is going to be a really quick, pedestrian some might say, posting, because I got really behind and I'm now sitting in LA writing Mexico City blogs, and frankly that feels wrong. I am also struggling to get new pictures up but I will try again tomorrow.

Mexico City - what a lovely surprise! I thought it would be a smoggy, trafficy nightmare, but actually it was only a smoggy, trafficy, let's say, nap. It was much cleaner and calmer, the people were great. We were right in the Historic Centre behind the cathedral, so it was a lovely place to be. The Centro Histórico has some of the city's finest buildings, the Templo Mayor archeological site, the Plaza de la Constitución or Zócalo, with the Palacio Nacional where the original Moctezuma palace was, and the twin buildings of the Mexico City government.

We arrived on 6th January, the day when all the Christmas gifts are given to children and everyone eats the Rosco de Reyes, a big icing covered fruitcake ring. So it was a real festival: the Plaza was bustling, bands (not just pan pipes either), native dancers, Bernie and I were blessed by the shameny type woman with the dancers, all good. Susan looked on with her logical brain shaking her head at us...

I've been giving you loads of mayan facts, so here's something more modern from Mexico City. The Tlatelolco Massacre took place in 1968 in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas just before the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The death toll remains a matter of debate. Some estimates place the number of deaths in the thousands, but most sources say 200 to 300 (Government sources say 4 Dead, 20 Wounded). The event was preceded by months of unrest as students demonstrated and rioted the world over during those heady highly politicised days of 1968. The official government explanation of the incident was that 'agent provocateurs' began the firing. Suddenly finding themselves the targets of shootings, the security forces returned fire in self-defence. In October 1997, Congress established a committee to investigate the massacre and Echeverría , a former president, admitted that the students had been unarmed, and also suggested that the military action was planned in advance, as a means to destroy the student movement.

We also went to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most visited catholic church in the world. The guide was really interesting, telling us about the strategy the spanish employed to convert the aztecs to catholicism, very cleverly integrating aztec beliefs and symbolism to aid the transition. Hence, the iconic image of the sacred heart of christ which you will find in every catholic home and church the world over, was originally aztec symbolism.

We visited the aztec/mayan ruins of Teohutican. I've seen a lot of ruins this trip. They are unceasingly impressive nonetheless. These I climbed on my own. I did not have Bernie, my ruin climbing partner from Xunantinich and the medecine trail in Belize, which I think I forgot to tell you about. They are documenting and researching all the plants and trees and their properties, ensuring they save all the knowledge from local healers before they die and this wealth of information is lost. There is a tree on the medecine trail called a Poison blackwood. It has huge signs saying DO NOT TOUCH. If you touch it the only cure is to bathe in water soaked with the roots of the tree that always grows next to it. Forgotten the name of that one unfortunately. Other people there were studiously writing cures and experiencing the power of the natural healing world. As we walked past we both did that pushing each other into the tree thing, you know how you do on the edge of a huge cliff, such as Beachy Head, laughing like drains...combined age of almost 90...we really should grow up.

Susan was very happy in her day of shopping in artesan markets and she and Bernie bought an absolutely beautiful huichol tapestry. It's fantastic to see these ancient crafts surviving. Anyway...that bit of the hols over, I headed off to the airport to go back to Los Angeles, a little teary eyed leaving S and B at our hotel for their flight back to London about 4 hours later. I later discovered that as I was sitting in a Venice Beach winebar having a solitary but very pleasant welcome back Milly pinot noir, they were discovering that their pilot had been sick, and that they had to stay another night in the airport hotel, eventually getting home about 36 hours later.

Final comment...obviously the Australian Open has started and Nico was knocked out 6-1 6-1 6-0. He his stretching my support capacity to it's limits. Roge is looking good and I predict it will be his year for the grand slam of grand slams. What do you reckon?

Long Ago...High on a Mountain in Mexico...

I'm going to continue, if I may, with the travel theme. Tobacco Cuay was wonderful but we did have really freakish weather. I woke during the first night because the wind was so strong it was blowing my bed clothes off. Obviously in my sleep I was only able to hang on for so long. On the boat ride to Tobacco Cuay, the waves were so rough our boat lost it's spare motor. Being a natural to sea travel as I am... anyway... the weather was still awful as we left Tobacco Cuay for the mainland. It was pretty shocking! Bernie and I had bruised butts for days but we managed to keep hold of breakfast. We got to the mainline and the driver cheerfully announces, "Arrive alive". As if this weren't enough, we went to Dangriga airport for a flight to Belize City. I don't like flying at the best of times and I will post the photos of the airport and the plane at some point. I am saying no more than that Susan and Bernie gave me a bravery prize.

We then covered the whole of Belize, giving a number of lifts to Mayan women with children along the way - my only opportunity to speak bad spanish in this country. There were wonderful beaches in Placencia, the Mayan sites of Xunantanich (which was beautiful and perhaps because it was quite free of tourists, very spiritual) and Nim Li Phut, Belize City, and we stayed with Susan and Bernie's friend, Jan, in St Ignacio. Belize has a very caribbean feel, is predominantly english speaking (it was British Honduras until 1984), and there are still mayan communities, mixed groups, and garifuna, from african and caribbean extraction.

Belize is snail paced. Like so many things, you have to be there to really appreciate it, but believe me, Belizians are so laid back it hurts. This didn't just happen once. In a restaurant you might ask, "So the chicken wings...what are they like?" The answer you will get is, "Well...they're like...(pause...incredibly long painful silence, unbelievably long actually...)... they're like...chicken". Ditto the question, "What's in the vegetable burritos?"... really, really, really long pause..."well...vegetables." There's not a hint of irony, I swear.

Just a quick thank you to Jan for putting us up. You were the perfect hoster. Jan likes tortoises, probably more than I do, so we spent many a pleasant hour looking at Galapagos snaps and talking about poor Lonesome George. Susan has known Jan for about 9 years. The day we arrived at Jan's, in fact probably within the first 30 minutes, I saw a plaque on her wall. Now Jan has a very unusual last name. "Jan", I asked, "Do you have a son called John?" "Yes", she said," He works at...". Susan and I have been on a working group with him for about three years. How did Susan not realise that, you may well ask. Much ribbing took place of our canadian chum.

Back on the travel theme for a moment...I forgot to tell you about the bus from Pelileo. I wrote on the blog a few weeks ago about the trial that was my journey with Taiga from Ambato to Banos: this bus goes through the town of Pelileo. When I met Susan and Bernie in Guatemala they informed me that a bus in Ecuador had come off the road killing a number of people. This bus...yes you guessed it...Ambato to Banos via Pelileo. You heard it here first.

And so our journey continued into Mexico. It all went swimmingly across the border as we headed for a few peaceful days by the beach in Tulum. When Susan and Bernie went there 8 years ago it was a hicksville, throw your tent down wherever you want to sleep kind of place. I asked in 18 hotels when we got there and there was absolutely no room at the inn. The hotels stretched the entire length of the beach. It has become a mexican Sandals resort. So we got on another bus, and after a full day of travelling, settled in for an overnight to Merida. Exhausted, now having been on the road for 26 hours, we arrived in Merida and we weren't a bit sorry. It is beautiful. If you get a chance do go. It is a gorgeous colonial town, with leafy streets, great places to eat on lovely squares and very friendly people.

Bernie and I had a day at Chichen Itza. While we were in the midst of the Dark Ages the Mayans were creating the only true writing system native to the Americas, mastered mathematics, invented the basis of the Gregorian calendar system we use today, and understood astonomical positioning better than any other civilisation until after Copernicus. They were also skilled farmers, weavers and potters, and cleared routes through jungles and swamps to foster trade networks with distant communities to strengthen the Mayan Kingdom. Pretty impressive...even if they did think that the world was flat.

The Mayan Calendar, beliefs about the underworld, gods and godesses, and numerical patterns and rituals, has been really interesting to learn about. Their architecture represented all of these beliefs: 9 underworlds and 13 lords of heaven, 9 x 13 = 52. The pyramids had 9 or 13 steps and were rebuilt after 52 years. The structures were built to show, for example at Chichen Itza, the snake god climbing up and then down the side of the pyramid on the spring and fall equinoxes respectively.

And so in the year 7 rabbit, on the day of itzcalli-ceh cuauc nublado (January 6th), we headed to Mexico City.

Forget Finding the Perfect Man...Get A Dog

Trudi went home and I had a few days in Quito, the beautiful Ecuadorian capital. The old town is a UNESCO heritage site with bright but tastefully painted old colonial style buildings and rambling streets. There are many splendid spanish churches in the city. They are beautiful but many are built over the top of Inka sites, which is still not openly discussed with tourists unfortunately. I went to the new ecuatorial line which has recently been moved by a few degrees, benefitting from the development and application of satelitte navigation and tracking systems. Once this new position was set, they discovered an Inka site a few miles away, perfectly placed on the correct equatorial position, with monuments set for both equinoxes.

Ecuador is a beautiful country: stunning mountains touching the clouds, rainforests, crystal clear lakes. And so it was with a touch of sadness that I left South America, but eagerly looking forward to meeting up with Susan and Bernie in Guatemala. We had a few lovely days in Antigua (another UNESCO heritage site with bright but tastefully painted old colonial style buildings and rambling streets...spot the theme...) and the magnificent Lake Atitlan. I went to the Mayan site of Tikal, the centre of the Mayan Kingdom. What an amazing site - the top of the Temple of the Jaguar poking out from the top of the humid Guatemalan rainforest.

Central America definitely has a different feel to South America, but one thing remains the same: public transport - there's always a story! First of all, there are obviously a team of people employed for the sole purpose of putting enormous pot holes in roads. This team also creates strategically placed discolourations and lumps which almost totally obscure the hole until you are inches away. They also have specific equipment to put huge cracks in windscreens in the direct eyeline of any potential driver. A second team is designated to try to overcharge tourists and to take them off buses at 4am in the middle of nowhere, pick them up and transport them to a private bus station in an attempt to overcharge them to get over the border. Fortunately, said tourists told them where to go, got a taxi and went to the official bus station, which also tried to overcharge...but let's not 'overegg that theme pudding' by rehashing that story.

Then you get the trial of Belize directions. If you are ever in Belize, lost and thinking of asking for directions from a local...just don't bother. They will tell you to 'gooo straaaight'. We eventually realised that drivers never indicate because they are just 'goooing straaaight'. However, if you look very very closely, as they say 'gooo straaaight' you will notice an almost imperceptible twitch of the finger to Sou'Sou'West, or the raising of an eyebrow by a nanometre due East. This is your clue to the actual direction in which you are to 'gooo straaaight'.

So Christmas Day was spent on Tobacco Cuay - bright green sea and white golden sand(Thanks to Wandsworth lot for cards and the lightweight gifts...the santa socks came in very handy when we had freak winds and drop in temperature!). Peaceful doesn't describe Tobacco Cuay: no shops, no roads, Lana cooking all our meals...I snorkelled every day and saw some beautiful fish, rays and a crab laying it's eggs.

I take up the Kate DB challenge to write a song about the place you are in to the tune of, "Is this the way to Amarillo?". Here's my offering...your turn, Kate.

When the day is dawning
On a Christmas Belize morning
How I long to be there
Tobacco Cuay is waiting for me there

Midday sun upon me
Sand between my toes
Eat my fill at lunchtime
Reading and a doze

Is this the way to Lana's beach shack?
Morning chicken, beans and fried jacks
Is this the way to Lana's beach shack?
A tree slung hammock waits for me.


And finally, Susan and Bernie bought me a silver bracelet for Christmas. It is enscribed, "Forget Finding the Perfect Man...Get A Dog". That's what you get for hanging out with loved up cat lovers... they don't understand that the perfect man will HAVE a dog. Rumour has it that one Mr V Mortensen has a new puppy... yet another spooky coincidence, Maria?

Photos to follow - Happy New Year(Prospero Ano Neuvo)

Fa La La La La La La La La

This is my Christmas blog from Guatemala, but if you want 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' stop reading now is my advice to you.

You know that I have been fairly 'Scroogy' about Christmas all my life. Being here and thinking through the experiences I've had really hasn't left me feeling especially full of ´good will' - for 'good will' read wanting to spend piles of money on loads of stuff for people who already have enough/too much, myself included, and eating too much rubbish full of chemicals whilst watching tired BBC film repeats.

I want to send you my best wishes for this time because you are my friends and family, and I love you. So whilst I do wish you all the very best, here are some thoughts that are more in tune with mine at this time. And really do not read on if you don't have a bucket handy...it's just how I'm feeling!


All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
Noam Chomsky


What could my mother be to yours?
What kin is my father to yours anyway?
And how did you and I ever meet?
But in love our hearts are as red earth and pouring rain:
Mingled beyond parting.
-Cempulappeyanirar


Thinking of those who are imprisoned for their beliefs, the Amnesty International site is linked here.click here

And just to show some things never change...
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring