London Tourist Type Things

The Eye

Big Ben and Regular Angie

The Tate Modern and some of the biggest graffiti-type paintings I've seen

Camden

Hyde Park, where the overgrown grass made some of the park goers look like big cats waiting for a kill

The Magic Garden

This is the kind of thing that a person can do when they acquire a house, a bunch of tiles, glass and mirrors and a couple of decades to put it all together

Museo San Francisco

This musuem is a cute collection of random artifacts, artworks and displays housed in a building far too large.

These are papier-mache people performing a kind of game played by the indigenous people around the area of Granada. Disturbingly, they don't have faces, and they hang stiffly in a featureless beige room like Francis Bacon paintings caught in 3-D.

Little Granada from above

The Botero Museum

These guys are a constant worry here. This painting is The Thief.

This is a city we recently visited, Popayan.

Angie getting silly with Miro

Statues of San Agustin

Early baseball player

Behind these figures there is a tomb (which has been excavated)

San Agustin

Our Tepee

San Agustin is a small town in an area inhabited by a mysterious collection of stone statues left by an even more mysterious civilisation. We arrived via an inordinately bumpy road- our seats performed distressing impressions of catapults as the bus stumbled for five hours in first gear down the cratered mountain pass. The last leg was covered in the back of a ute, and I discovered that I have developed a slight phobia of this kind of travel, undoubtedly a result of my birthday mishap in the Ecuadorian milk truck.


We made it into town without falling out and found our hotel at the top of a murderously steep mud hill. It was a simply horrible journey that managed to encompass the worst aspects of travel, but, as is usual in Colombia, the scenery was fantastic. Retiring to our tepee we put the ordeals of the day behind us.


The stone statues that draw people to the area are leftovers from an unknown civilisation that had disappeared by the fourteenth century. We spent a couple of days exploring sites and parks, looking at some pretty fierce rock guardians keeping watch over excavated burial sites. The nice thing was that the majority of the sculptures were outside, rather than in museums, which actually made them much more interesting to eyeball.

The park that houses most of the statues is heavily patrolled by heavily armed soldiers.

The Disposable

La Paz is fairly tame as far as South American cities go. Crime only seems to happen to those who are very careless, very unlucky or very drunk. Still, pulling out a couple of grand’s worth of camera to take a shot isn’t a great idea (it’s very careless), so I bought a disposable to get some of the shots I was too afraid to take the big camera out for. The lens isn’t quite as sharp, but it’s nice to be able to take photos without worrying about losing a backpack full of electronics around the next corner.

These are road safety zebras. They tell people when it's safe to cross the road. The police try to do the same thing, but nobody takes notice of them.

A La Paz bus stop.

Bolivia is the abused runt of the litter that is South America’s countries; at some point in history, Bolivia has tried to assert itself in a warlike fashion against most of it’s neighbours, each time copping a whipping and leaving the arena with a nasty new grudge.
The unfunny repercussion is that many Bolivians have died in these wars, which have been fought over things such as the (ex-Bolivian) Chilean coast and non-existent oil in the Chaco region of eastern Bolivia. In the centre of the city is a memorial commemorating the dead. It’s a rare example of this very specific kind of sculpture, because it in no way, not even in an stealthy way, does it glorify what goes on in war. Instead, it mourns the dead people (as opposed to dead soldiers). The figure is face-down in the mud, shirtless and ingloriously anonymous while his rifle is flaccidly aimed at the ground. There’s nothing whatsoever heroic about the sculpture, it’s all about the tragedy of people dying at war, and not concerned with whatever political cause they died for.

Ink Souvenirs

Marc and Bre paid a visit to the Cusco tattooist for some long lasting souvenirs of South America.