1: A CRAPPY GUATEMALAN BREAKFAST

At 4000 metres this was the highest cloud I could reach. But the Quetzal bird was not inside.

Dear all

I hope you are well and I send my love from Central America. This is my blog.

Writing about myself on MY holidays and broadcasting the news live on the internet feels a little like placing my ego in my bottom, holding a megaphone to my buttocks and letting off a very long fart across the ENTIRE world. Attention, attention, me, me, me.

What a stink!

Having said that I'm excited by blogs. They seem a genuinely exciting media and it’s worth the risk of exposing myself in the chance of stumbling across the new. With their tight weave of text, image and nonsense blogs will surely replace dairies, group emails and family photoalbums in the near future bringing the long promised democratisation of the internet. Revolution!! Farrrrrrrrrtttttt.

Won’t they?

I want to get my hand in early. Like trying a new pen that can also be a pencil and rubber and if you press the top little wings come out for throwing it to other people. New things shine.

I am aware that while the concept of a blog may be interesting this is no guarantee the content will be anything other than tripe. In fact from a brief look online there is a high guarantee that they WILL be tripe. As I start writing I can already feel the weight of millions of other blogs pressing down on me through which mine will have to swim to reach some air. It feels like starting a marathon at the back of a large crowd, right behind the man dressed as Piglet who will hop for 15 hours and not let you pass. Everyone has a blog. Alan from Mississippi has one about a new high carb diet for low self esteem, Marcus from Austria has posted his thoughts on carp fishing and the apocalypse, Jennie from Scotland’s has a rant about Christian underage sex accompanied by photos of her prize-winning sponge cakes. I want those people to have a voice, I really do, but I don’t want them to have it near me. Put them in a room. These people are my equals in every way but may I rise far above them.

So, aware of the risks I will start with some photos. A thousand words and all that. These images will send me through the crowds, right to the front of the blogging race where the thin men are running in tight shorts pulled up too high. I am in training you see, typing so fluently and posting images so incessantly that my shorts will soon be up to my nipples.

Let's start. Here is a photo of a fat man doing up his zip.



And here is a picture of some refried beans that were served to me in the exact shape of a turd.



I can’t think what went wrong in the kitchen. Despite the assumptions of those who know me best I did not have a row with the chef. He must have got out of the wrong side of his hammock. At least no sweet corn was offered as a side. I should add, however, that the meal did come with camomile tea, the exact colour and heat of warm pee. Surprisingly it turned out to be a most satisfying breakfast for which I left a good tip.

As you no doubt will be aware from the photos I am in Guatemala. Neither of these images are cheap and attention grabbing, I can assure you, but rather serve to introduce the theme of this blog. When I travel, although I enjoy beds with good sheeting and food served with napkins I am more interested in the dirtier side of the experience. Don’t get me wrong, I never get very close to danger or misery but I do take a particular interest in the underside of the rock. Not the sunny, warm side of travelling, but the wet, mossy side which is dark and teeming with insects. Hopefully I can serve you up some tasty grubs in the next few postings.

Before I start I do feel obliged to give some very general overview of this country and what I am doing here. So here’s the science bit.

Guatemala is wedged between Mexico to the north and another country to the south. It is smaller than Britain (at least on one of those maps that distorts the top and bottom) but for all intents and purposes it is huge: travelling anywhere takes bloody ages. The days are warm but the nights are cold (towns, at least in the south are often above 1500 metres). Greeny brown stuff everywhere. If I was painting it from an average window in an average town I would need only greens and browns and a little blue for the sky. Look I'll get a map off the internet to clear up this confusion.



Very hilly, often volcanous (sp?). Lots of coffee plantations. Impressively small people with dark parched skin and strong legs that bend in the middle, just as they should. Thank god for that then. Due to the sun and the intense working conditions the average person looks at least 20 years older than they are. This makes newborns a handful.
Most Guatemalans are incredibly kindly, even when they are carrying a shotgun and a large machete and have no teeth. It’s the simple things that they do, young men waving good night in the street, kids playing ball next to you, ancient, wrinkled grandmothers (aged 35) coming over to chat, they have a simple charm.

Now, I have to stop this line of description as I sense I am about to say something patronising, offensive and deeply ignorant, I have no idea what it is or why it will be ignorant, but I know I will say it and I know it will be wrong. Why does this self-doubt accompany me wherever I go in countries with people poorer than me who work much harder than I could? It’s a feeling that I’m going to put my big white western foot in the little black pot of refried beans. The other day I was on an open truck and I tried to get 20 mayan people to start singing a Beatles song as we drove through the trees, and then, mid rendition I had a crisis of confidence. Not because it was a rubbish song, or because I can't sing, but because I had some unspoken fear that I was insulting them, their culture, and no doubt at some level myself as well. Fuck, it was only ringo’s Octopus’ Garden. I’d like to be, under the sea… in a garden of self doubt, in the shade.

I think what I wanted to say before the censor got me is that a nice measure of a cultures success is to count how many strangers smile at you in the morning. There, said it. But then I fear that someone, like Germain Greer or maybe Fran from celebrity love island, is going to say ‘Try telling that to all the people who lost their legs in the civil war, or who would happily trade their smile with an X box you simple minded western biggot’. I don’t think its simple, I think its true. People smile more here and THAT’S A GOOD THING.

But christ they do need dentists and floss. Is that the first thing that goes in a civil war? dentistry? A tooth for a tooth and all that?



I reckon that all of us, all of us from duvet-coutries at least, AND THAT MEANS YOU READER, are prone to this weird inverted inferiority complex. Why was I not born in a civil war? Why have I got access to good education? Shit, I’ve got everything I could want, I AM USELESS! I am constantly aware that if I had to live in a hut and kill my own chickens and survive on a diet of beans and no TV I would perish almost immediately upon resting my head on the straw pillow. With my addiction to duck down, wheat-free bread and 8 hours sleep a night I am an evolutionary anomaly. I should have long faded away. Place my birth any time before the 1960’s and I would not have made it. Perhaps, just perhaps, I might have excelled as a creature that had to reach berries on leaves 6 feet four inches away, but then I would have found their high sugar content displeasing, refused to eat them unless accompanied by soya milk and promptly fallen from the branch due to a mild hunger. The tigers would have got me.

Don’t laugh, as I am sure most of you are the same. A war, a flu’ or a frog would have taken us, and the gene pool all the richer for it. No, you are all lovely, don’t get me wrong, but we are white and pale and worry about our nails too much to rank beside these Guatemalan workhorse-civil-war-surviving people. No wonder their skin is so bad.

Nevertheless I am here and I am alive and I have got my hands on the very pinnacle of bio-technical evolution: the blog. So this is my blog! Revolution! Farrrrrrrrrrtttttttt!! What a stinker! Please click on blog two to start the terrible grizzly adventure.