Speed Bumps

Ode to the Tope!

Oh little lurking lump
That makes my cargo come all unstuck
When I spot you way to late
With anguished cry of "Mother F**k!"

Call them what you will.
Speed bumps, Silent police men...
Down here they are Topes or Tumulos.

Whatever you call them, I ride over literally hundreds of them every day here. They dont have them on the toll highways, but on the free highways that go through all the small towns there are lots.
Usually there are warning signs that say you are entering an area with them (populated areas). And then often, each one is also indicated by a road sign right at the spot. But thats just usually!
Sometimes there are road signs saying they are there but they are not. Sometimes there is no warning sign at all but there are lots of them in the populated places. And, just occasionally, there is no sign, no town (maybe just one old abandoned house) and one of these dastardly little lumps is waiting there!!!

And, just to add to the challenge, they have lots of trees right near the roads here. So what you say.... Well, when the sun is not high in the sky, these trees cast lots of shadows on the roads... And the tree trunks cast very linear shadows... And this is PERFECT camouflage for a speed bump. The speed bumps can be made of anything from plain old dirt to concrete to asphalt. But its the ones made of asphalt (same as the road surface) that are the real problem... They are already very hard to spot, and a shadow in the right place does the trick!

At least three or four times a day I manage to spot the little blighters before Ive hit them but to late to slow down gently... So, I slam on the brakes and then release them just as Im about to hit. This means the suspension rebound as I release the brakes helps to "float" the bike over the lump... but its hard on the brakes and the bike still takes a pretty hard hit.
But, just occasionally, I dont see the speed bump at all, and the first thing I notice is a massive jolt!
Fortunately, I raised the suspension of the bike and that helps a lot but its still really hard on the bike.
The other day, one "got me" and I was going at a pretty good clip (say 80Kmh). Fortunately also, it was one of the wider but more gentle type, and I ended up being thrown up out of the seat and the bike rear-end went significantly higher than the front.
It felt like forever, but I was balanced there with the big heavy bike barrelling along the road with the back wheel in the air and the front wheel down for what seemed like quite a few seconds... Very exciting :)))
The rear wheel eventually decided to come back to the road and I didnt fall off or lose any luggage etc, but it definitely "woke me up"!

Im sure I have many thousands more of the little blighters to cross on my travels, so there is no sense getting frustrated with them... Its just part of the game :))

Natures Solutions - Humans Problems

The thing about Nature, is that it absolutely never has "problems"... Actually, it only ever has Solutions!
Natural systems are very complex balancing mechanisms... They respond to changes, and they do it incredibly efficiently and spontaneously... Nature is the supreme problem solver.

And this algae bloom on Lake Atitlan is no different. Nature is simply responding to the changed conditions in the most efficient way it can... If conditions have changed so that the fish and crabs and pond weed are no-longer the most efficient operators, then those creatures will become less prevalent (or totally absent), and whatever form of life is best suited to the new conditions (in this case Cyano-bacteria) will become far more prevalent.
At present, the system is out of balance so we can expect that there will be fluctuations in various populations until a "stable flow" of energy has formed. Its like a pendulum. If you give it a whack, it will swing back and forth for a while till it settles to its new balance position.

So, for nature, the algae is a solution, not a problem.
For humans however, we see it as a problem.... And thats the trick. If we try to fight the algae, then we are fighting nature, and its a losing battle.... Every Time!
The trick is that the Algae is the effect, Not the cause.... And, if we dont like Natures solution to a problem, then we better remove the need for nature to behave this way.... ie we need to target the cause, not the symptom...


And in this case, the cause (well, by far the largest component of it) is, to use the vernacular... "Bleedin Obvious"!!
There are about five HUGE contributors that I think should be dealt with before we start worrying about the more subtle issue.
I mentiond that the algae need Light, Warmth, and Nutrients to grow... The natural environment provides the light and heat to the lake, and there is precious little that people could do with these even if they wanted to.... But, the nutrients issue is the exact opposite! Humans have far more control over this than Nature does at the moment.... And the humans are doing a REALLY bad job with it!

The five largest contributors to Lake Atitlans algae problem that I see are are as follows:
1) Detergents
Huge amounts of modern, non bio-degradable detergents are being poured directly into the lake every day. I estimate that there are about 200,000 people living in the catchment area of the lake, and there are probably 50% of those people washing their clothes and bodies directly in the lake or the streams that flow into it. The other 50% are using the same detergents but the washing water goes into a septic system rather than directly into the lake... (By the way, Im just making these percentages up from my instictive, observational based gusesses).

2) Artificial (and to a far lesser extent, natural) Fertilisers
Again, about 50% of those people in the catchment have plots of land from say 100m square to maybe 1000m square, and they pretty much all grow maize for their own use or coffee trees for a cash crop. Every single maize plant that gets planted every season also gets a handful of modern, artificial fertiliser planted with it. Every coffee tree also gets regular fertilisation... Thats a lot of fertiliser... and artificial fertilisers are highly water soluble and all the water goes very quickly into the lake (The slopes are very steep around here)
On the "natural front, the soils in the lake catchement are naturaly high in Phosphorous and there has been quite a lot of roud building activity which exposes the subsoil and a lot of errosin takes this soil into the lake... and land-slides in rainy season do the same thing)

3) Pesticides and Herbicides
Again, the coffee and maize, (and fruit and vegetables) gets more"modern treatment"... After the simple hoe, the local farmers next most valuable piece of equipment is their spray backpack... I see them everywhere walking around spraying each and every plant with pesticides. Im less sure about herbicides but I believe that these also get a fair bit of use for the vegetable crops. Again, these are highly water soluble and they easily get down the steep hills and into the lake when it rains.

4) Coffee Bean Processing
When the coffee is harvested, the beans are processed using large amounts of water. So, the locals put the processing plants right on the lake shore if they can. More importantly, the coffee beans, when harvested are covered in the skin and "meat" of the berry. The processing peels off this skin and meat that is very sweet (full of sugars) and these skins are left in a huge stinking pile right on the lake shore where they compost for a few months, releasing all those nutrients straight into the lake water.... And believe me, there are hundreds of tones of this stuff here every coffee season.

5) Domestic Sewerage
And finally, there is the sewerage effluent of 200,000 people here. There are no functioning community sewerage systems (ie that have processing plants) here that I know of. I would estimate though that probably 3/4 of the people here use toilet systems that drain into septic tanks. Its the other 1/4 of the toilet systems (both community and individual homes) that dump their waste water directly into the lake rather than a septic tank system.

So, those are the major contributors. Now what are the effects?

Well, first a little bit about how waste nutrients are processed by nature... My limited knowledge on this (I am a qualified "landscape technician" by the way) is that bacteria and microbes and fungus and nematodes etc. process these nutrients and complex chemicals before they can be used by plants... (This is what goes on in your compost pile and the general top soil) The soil biology is I believe a far more complex and diverse system than the plants and animals that we humans see as "the biological system" going on above the soil!
Actually, the simple compounds of synthetic fertilisers can be directly used by plants but nature doesnt care if the plant involved is the tomato plant you put it there for, or an algae or a bacteria...whoever gets it first will use it. Nature doesnt care if the "processing" happens in the soil at the tomato plant site, or in the lake where the dissolved fertiliser washed to... And thats the problem.... The nutrients dont get processed in the soil, they get processed in the lake.

We cant avoid having the nutrients processed somewhere, but we can avoid them being processed in the lake. Actually we desperately do want the wastes processed... just not in the lake.
Those septic toilet systems actually do a great job.... In fact they are specifically designed to do this. The septic tank is the "processing plant". All the nutrients in the human waste get processed in the tank and the water that then seeps slowly back to the water table through the soil is more or less clean and inactive. The only down side (in arid climates) with septic systems is that they use lots of water.... but we've got lots of water here at the lake and huge amounts of it falls from the sky each year.
And this septic system is also more or less what modern sewerage processing plants do too... They just accelerate the process by providing lots and lots of aeration (for the preferred aerobic bacteria to process the nutrients) and lots and lots of mixing (again so the processing is thorough and rapid)... and then the more or less clean water is released back into the environment.

So, what we actually want is for the bacterial processing of fertilisers and sewerage to happen in the soil or in treatment plants rather than in the lake water. The post processing water can then go straight into the lake. :)

And what effect do the pesticides and detergents have in the story?... Well, that Im not well qualified to be certain of, but Id put my money on them degrading the natural systems in the soil that do the "processing" and thus nutrients and wastes that pass through the soil are not processed nearly as much or as well as they would be if the insecticides etc. were not there. Also, I suspect that this particular cyano-bacteria is the current dominant user of the nutrients in the lake because its a really tough critter and can tolerate the detergents and toxins in the water far better than other plants... like water weeds.... They would love all the nutrients too, and they dont stink like this stuff, but I suspect they cant tolerate the toxins and detergents (not to mention that they are currently being over-whealmed by the cyano-bacteria), so there are virtually none of them on the lake.


So, these five big problem areas are very large issues for the communities here... For them to make significant changes to the habits of a life-time (actually, the habits of many generations) will be virtually impossible.
"We need to educate them" I hear you say, and I totaly agree, but I can tell you for sure that the process of education and change will without a doubt take many years.... a decade or two if the process happens "quickly"! ... And that just isnt fast enough for the lake.

But why cant they see that what they are doing is bad for the lake?
Well, the people here are I believe, just as intelligent as you and I.... Its not a matter of intelligence. They simply dont have the benefit of the education and exposure to uncorrupted information (corrupted by advertising and lobbying etc). But even if they did have those benefits, it would still be a tough job to convince them... The problem is that they have had these "bad behaviours" for generations and this has never happened to the lake before... So they just cant see the "cause and effect" relationship. And on top of that they resent the "rich Americans and Europeans" who always come here and tell them what to do all the time and treat them like they are stupid etc. etc...
So, in my opinion, changing local behaviours will be slow and difficult. There is no doubt that the effort should be made and persisted with too, but we need some other action as well. Some action that circumvents the old behaviours.

What to do then?
Well, here is what I would do if I could (not that I would ever get the chance though... for which we probably should be greatfull !)
... note here, that at the moment, opinions around here are very much like ass-holes!... Everybody has got one!...and some people seem to have more than one!!!

Note here also: I obviously think there are plenty of people who know lots more about this sort of thing than I do and I do and will continue to listen to their ideas whenever I can get them. But here is my current outlook...

So, "If I were King" :
1) Id simply ban the use of synthetic fertilisers, insecticides, and detergents in the entire catchement by federal law (volcano crater plus a similarly sized area of an adjecent valley actually). And there is no point making laws if you are not going to enforce them, and in this case it would be relatively easy... There are only four roads that come into the valley. Id have the valley declared a "special environmental protection area" or some such by federal law. Id put check stations on the four roads and Id train and employ 100 people to operate those stations (need to have anti-corruption systems in place too). Those stations would check all trucks for synthetic chemicals entering the valley... I think you would stop 90% of the stuff ever getting into the valley that way and it would completely resolve the problem of local habits. If they cant get the stuff, then they cant buy or sell it and then they cant use it.
In effect I would instantly make the valley, the worlds largest "organic community" over night.... And I think that would have massive tourist attraction potential as well as attracting all sorts of international environmental funding, and making the local communities "world leaders" rather than world followers.
Yes, its "Draconian" but it would be an effective and relatively cheap solution for three of the five main offenders... (But then of course; Id just be another "dictator" in the locals eyes regardless of good intentions or otherwise, so I guess we should be greatfull that Im not "the King" :)... On with the story...  )

2) Coffee processing, natural fertilisers, and natural detergents.
Well, the problem here is that the nutrients from these things are getting into the lake. So, for the natural fertilizing, detergents and coffee processing problems, under the same federal "special environmental protection area" laws, Id ban these things within 100m of the lake and 30m of any surface water and water courses (streams, rivers, lakes). This would be tough on the local vegetable gardens which are all down on the lakeshore (which is why I say 30m and not 50m or 100m) but I see no other way. The theory here is to try ensure that the nutrients that do dissolve into the water when it rains, move through the soil...slowly, giving them time to process, rather than flushing directly into the lake via surface water flow.
Likewise this would be tough on the coffee processing plants... They would have to move, away from the lake shore... Id say 100m or more... But, again, I see no other way. The up side would be for the tourist industry in that the huge stinking piles of coffee bean skins would no longer be right in the middle of the tourist areas like they are now.
Again, you need to police this, and its definitely harder to do. The Lake shore line is easy enough to police... Again, a few dozen or so people could cover it, and perhaps another hundred or so for the water courses and the rest of the catchment. But if you want it to work, the "bad habits" need to be changed and quickly.

3) Sewerage...
Well, obviously direct dumping of sewerage into the lake needs to stop! ASAP!
Real sewerage processing plants need to be built... And these things are seriously expensive and power greedy... Like many millions of dollars! Again, I see no choice if the lake is to be saved. The good thing about this is that there are in fact only a couple of towns on the lake with any sort of public sewer collection system (and the two that I know of do dump directly into the lake) so there are not many of these beasts that need to be paid for.
Now, the bulk of the valley population use septic systems, and these work... But the valley population is rapidly increasing , and there are absolutely no regulations about these ad-hoc septic systems... So while its working today, it will not be for long... But, the obvious "build communal sewerage systems and processing plants and enforce regulations etc." solution will take time to implement and Im OK with that.

4) You would still need to get the stuff that is already in the lake out!
Yep, once you stop filling the system up with crap, you can focus on getting the old crap out.
Its not that hard. If it was all dissolved chemicals and nutrients, it would be quite hard to get out of the water. But, nature is helping with this, and the algae is capturing the nutrients and turning it into a solid form. And now you can get hold of it more easily.
I would suggest the same systems we use in aquariums and combine a mechanical filter system with a "foam fractionation" system (protein skimmer we call it in the aquarium world). These things are made in "industrial" sizes and could be installed in a couple of places on the lake... Like say where the wind naturally blows the algae too (The winds are very predictable here and you can see the algae collecting where it is blown). Again, these systems cost millions of dollars, but I say do it slowly... It will take a few years for the whole bio-system to stabilise, so you can take a few years to harvest out the muck... And, I suspect that the harvested algae, could quite easily be composted and used as a very effective organic fertiliser to replace the synthetic fertilisers currently being used ! (Though you would need to do some study on that one to ensure the by-products of the decomposing algae are not toxic)


So, thats my take on it... You can do it all as slowly as you want or as fast as you want. The longer you take to implement, the longer it takes for the lake to recover.
There is I believe a significant environmental and in fact economic up-side to what I suggest.
The catchment area of the lake is actually quite small, and the land is steep, and there is lots of rain fall here. So there is not much "accumulation" of the toxins and nutrients, and if you acted quickly Id guess it would only be a couple of years before the lake was well on the way to recovery. But if you go slow, it will be decades (or never!) before you can swim in the lake again!


Well, thats a huge post, and like I said, "there is no shortage of opinions" around here at present. But thats my take on it and a short version of more or less what direction I would head...

If I were King! :)))

Pea Soup

I left them here with a perfectly good lake just four months ago, and I come back now and its all full of stinky green algae!

Honestly!, You cant trust anybody with your valuables these days!

It seems that lake Atitlan has had enough of the terrible treatment that it gets by the people that live around it. Just six months ago, I swam across the lake. It took me a couple of hours and I swallowed my share of water but it was no problem then. Likewise, every day there were dozens of local women washing their clothes, children and them selves in the lake, every day.

But, not now... There is not a single person swimming or washing, and the lake is full of a stinking green slimy filamentous algae (actually, its a cyanobacteria... but algae is near enough).


But this has been coming for a long time, and it was obvious to me when I first saw the lake two years ago... I just didnt expect to see such a dramatic change so quickly.

... Refer back to my blog post of "A Lake with Problems" from April this year.


What happened?

Which is to say, Why has it changed suddenly... Why is it full of algae now, in a way that has never happened before but the people have not changed what they are doing for many years?


Some people say its because there was not very much rain in the wet season this year.
Some say its due to Global warming and the lake temperature has risen just enough.
Some say the lake pH has changed
Some say, God has decided it should happen...
etc. etc. etc.

Well, in my opinion, it is without doubt because of a combination of many things, but I am sure there has been a combined change in the lake environment of about 10% or more over the last year.
I believe that the most likely candidates are Light, Temperature, and Nutrients.

Before I go further, Ill justify my qualifications for my opinions and predictions.
They are amature qualifications but I think they are highly relevant.


Over the past ten years , I have personally spent somewhere between 10 and 20 thousand dollars on experimenting with a bio-system with a volume of about 500 litres of water...
In layman's terms, I have been keeping a marine aquarium!

Further; I was keeping a miniature version of one of the most complex bio-sytems on the planet, and I kept it in a unique way. It was a "reef system" which means that it had many many live corals and shrimp and crabs and fish... and basically everything in it.
Now, lots of people keep these systems and lots of them are far prettier and nicer and more densely populated than mine was... But, I was the only person I know that kept the system in such a "low-tech" and low maintenance way. Most people keep their systems going by feeding their tanks lots and lots of specialist foods and chemicals... and consequently they also have lots of specialist filtering equipment to get all the waste products from the food and chemicals back out of the tank.
My system however had No filtering, and I put almost no food into the tank... and it worked very well. But it took me ten years to be able to do it, and I had plenty of failures and lessons along the way, and lots of them looked EXACTLY like what is happening with this lake!!!.

So, I believe I know roughly what is going on, and I believe I know what happens next, and I believe I know how to fix it... Sadly, I also believe that even though things here can actually be fixed quite quickly....They wont be!

What we have here is a classic "algae bloom".
The alge in question are not new to the lake... Its been there for many years, but the conditions for it to "bloom" have not been right. The algae are single celled critters that can "breed " (by cell division) extremely quickly given the right conditions but if conditions are less "opportune", they breed only slowly and no one notices that they are there at all.
Once conditions are right however, and they start breeding fast, you get an avalanche effect and before you know it youve got more algae than you know what to do with - and then people notice!

The main things that the algae need to breed, are nutrients, light, and warmth... The more of each, the faster they breed.
So, this is why I say that there has been a change of about 10% (Though it may be as little as 2%).

Now, the nutrients in the lake have been there for years, Im sure of that... Though Im also sure that every year there are more, and I suspect that there is a a new and significant contributor somewhere in the lake catchement. The most likely candidates are a new and significant user of chemical fertilisers in the area, and the direct dumping of a significantly large supply of human waste into the lake (Like say from a town sewer system that they just decided to stop processing because the old plant was small and old and didnt make any difference anyway...etc)

Light... Well, this year there was apparently far less rain in the rainy season (climate change or whatever). This probably also means that there was far more sunlight for the last couple of months and that can make a huge difference. On my aquarium, I had experiences where the system was healthy and stable, and I just replaced an aging light bulb with a new one. Two weeks later I had a bloom like you would not believe... The new light was producing about 10% more light and it was enough to tip the scales!

Warmth... Well, the lake is always quite warm, so I dont think this one is a big change, but...
The rains that fall here are very cold. And the deep water in the lake is very cold. If there has been less cold rain, causing less river flow that mixes the surface and deeper waters then I can see that we may have a degree C or more of temperature difference than is usual in the top layer of the lake... and that could definitely do the damage.

So, thats what I think is happening. Now, for what I think will happen next!

With my aquarium, Algae blooms are almost always "a very bad experience". Once thay start, there is not much you can do till the system has got its self back under control.
First the algae starts to show up. Then it starts to smother the corals... Takes the light and grows on the rock... Then the corals die and release nutrients and toxins in the water... which kills the shrimp and crabs... which releases more nutrients and toxins... which kills the fish... which all releases more nutrients into the water and grows more algae.... In my experience, you lose the "weaker" elements throughout the entire system ... between 30% and 70% of them!!!
And it matters little if you try getting as much of the algae out of the system as possible as soon as you see it... Once its happening, you are just "along for the ride" so to speak.

Now, for the lake, I actually dont see this as being too terribly bad.
Thats because its been a corrupted system for many years. Any native fish have long since been replaced by introduced Perch and Black Bass (Maybe there are still a few natives in there but if so they are really quite tough critters). These introduced fish are very hardy, fast breeders, and easily reintroduced if you have to. There are some mid-sized crabs here, and they may be native, but I suspect if they have survived in the pollution for this long, that they will be OK.
So, for the moment, we have algae... And there is a lot of it... And it stinks and is not nice to swim or wash in .... and I suspect (though am not sure) that soon there could well be a "die-off" of a bunch of the fish in the lake, but not all... but its really probably only going to badly effect the Humans on the lake..... And very well deserved that is too !!

What I dont know is if this bloom will remain long term, or if it will dissipate in the next month or so as the seasons of the lake change and conditions change in an annual cycle.

But, I'll make this prediction...

The lake will continue to turn green (or will stay green) until the people living around the lake "turn green" instead!

Which is to say, that this problem will absolutely not go away until all the people that live within the lake catchment change the way they live to being significantly more environmentally responsible!


Next post I will describe how I think the "problem" can be solved - quite quickly actually.

Zapatistas

Last leg of the journey in Mexico.

I headed for the boarder with Guatemala.
Nice riding, nice day, two hours from the boarder.
But I got to the last little city in Mexico and had a bit of an unexpected problem.

On the highway out of the city, there was a "blockage"... As I got closer I could see that the blockage was not moving at all.
When I got right up to it, it was apparent that it was some sort of protest. There were large trucks parked side by side across the road. There were people sitting shoulder to shoulder near the trucks. There were lots of people standing around in large groups and a few with placards with stuff written on them.

I looked at this, and asked someone if they though itd be OK if I went through... They shook their head and said nop!
Hmmm... I looked at my map and my GPS to see if there was any other route to the boarder... No, doesnt look like it.
So, I decided Id try to get through... There were plenty of people walking through the blockade but no vehicles. I paddled my bike through the pedestrian gap in the trucks and then came to a stop next to a group of 4-5 people on the other side. I asked one young guy (one of the protesters) if he might speak a little English so that I could understand the protest issue, but he had less English than I had Spanish. But it didnt really matter, the simple act of riding the big foreign bike near to a crowd of men here is enough.: within 30 seconds, I was surrounded by a hundred men. They were mostly quite polite and listened to me asking questions of the young guy about what was going on. But a few of them were a bit more angry... with their government rather than me, but they definitely didnt want me breaking their blockade. I didnt really understand the details of the situation, but this is Chiappas state... Its very poor... Most of the population are Campesinos who live a subsistence life... The government has a bad history of dispossessing and exploiting these people and they have frequently in the past felt that "armed resistance" was the only solution... And that resistance movement has been known as "Zapatistas".

So, this is basically those same people and they have the same problems with their government as usual. At present they are peacefully protesting by blockading the highway...
I explained as best I could that I knew very little but that I supported the way they were protesting (peacefully) and that if they said no, then I would not pass.
There was some back and forth, and a couple of people were quite angry and wanted me to know that I was very lucky living where I lived and that I should try living where they lived etc.
I agreed and stayed very polite and it seemed to dissipate the anger (I think they just wanted someone to see their anger). Anyway, after a little while, the young guy who I had started talking with (he had been quite for a while as others talked with me) spoke up again , and he kinda asked the greater crowd if itd be OK if they let one foreigner through their blockade... The crowd was a mostly yes, and I waited till it seemed that they "were sure" and said thanks very much, Ill only go through if you are sure, good luck with the protest, and I think its great that its peaceful. At one point someone asked me for a "donation" for food and drinks (which I was willing to entertain), but before I could do anything about it, others in the crowd had said no, thats a bad idea and insisted that I should not... So, they were honest people, and they were not trying to exploit me, and though I didnt really get to the details of the issue, my sense of it was that they probably had valid concerns for their government.

I rode gently on.
The blockade was repeated at least five more places in the next 5km or so, but since the front line had let me through, the others did to.
I was the only moving vehicle... everybody else had to walk if they wanted to go through.
Again, I was glad that my bike looks beat-up and dirty (as do my riding clothes) and that I am relaxed enough these days to not be fussed if I get where I planed to go in a day or not. I think it really makes for a far more open and understanding impression with others. I think the older, less relaxed, more "intense" me may well have accidentally said the wrong thing at the wrong moment and I may not have got through. (not that that would have mattered).

Anyway, I came out the other side of the protest and had clear empty highway all the way to the Guatemalan boarder. The boarder stuff for Immigration and Customs was quick and easy (half an hour) and I was riding again through the winding road that climbs up into the mountains of Guatemala...

Great, Ill be in San Pedro by the lake before the day is done :))

Palenque Again

Palenque is just down the road from Villahermosa, so I stayed in the town over-night, and had another walk around the ruins before I left in the morning.
Its almost two years to the day since I was last here.... I feel so different these days.

Small Cages and Big Heads

I came to the Gulf coast specifically to visit Villahermosa and to see the giant stone heads carved by the Olmecs. Apparently they were the first large meso-American culture and predate the Aztec, Maya, Inca empires. There is a park in the city that has the large stone artefacts... Apparently, these people didnt so much build the giant stone temples/pyramids, but rather, the rulers would solidify their status as ruler by having a likeness of their head caved in stone, as large as possible... What ever makes you feel good I guess!













Anyway, there were about five or six of the large heads and they are quite impressive I admit. There were also a few other large stone artefacts, but not much else in the way of remains of this culture.

But, located in the same park was a zoo.
It was not as bad as the old zoos that I recall as a child (tiny concrete and steel cages for big animals), but it definitely left me feeling very sad for the large cats and the large birds... Not a happy life!
But here are some pictures of the critters anyway:

Feeling Lilliputian!

I stayed in Oaxaca for a day and then headed North for the Gulf coast.
The road climbed steadily and was one of those classically windy Mexican highways that I am now used to. The country is so mountainous that driving from the coast inland just about anywhere will result in half a day or more of constant left-right-left steering for the driver, and almost certain nausea for any passengers!

On the climb up, the country stayed quite arid (mostly scrub and pine trees at higher altitudes.) up to about 2700m in altitude. Then it was into the clouds and the vegetation started to change rapidly. It wasnt technically "cloud forest" but it got a lot greener.
Then it was down the other side of the mountains to the Gulf coast, and you can tell that this side of the mountains is where all the rain falls.

Very rapidly, the scrub became temperate forest, and things smelled damp and alive.
Pretty soon I was descending (with the same old left-right-left steering game) through very lush forrest. And the plants just kept getting bigger and bigger.
There was grass that was 2m tall, and Bracken ferns that were 3m tall, and huge tree ferns that were 10m tall... I was beginning to feel a bit like a Lilliputian from "Gulliver's Travels".
There were some "Taro" like plants that were enormous... The up side for the military is that if you need camouflage, then you only need to use one or two leaves rather than the whole plant :)
I couldnt quite figure out how to attach one of the leaves to the motorbike.... It would have made a great sun shade :)))





The descent continued and the temperatures climbed and the forest became jungle... I dropped from nearly 3000m altitude down to about 30m altitude and that equates to 25degC of temperature change or more... So I was really sweltering by the time I got to the bottom. If you stand still here for more than a few minutes, something will try to either eat you or grow on you. The jungle is a "ferocious celebration of life and diversity".... Everything is huge and growing or moving rapidly.





There was something moving across the road at one point, so I stopped to look at it.... HUGE tarantula with a pretty orange abdomen.... As I was trying to frame the second picture with my hand in it, the damn thing made a "run for it"... right across my hand!... I havnt seen my own hand move that fast since I was desperately trying to slap a hand hold on a 5.11b rock climb with my last piece 3m below! (Sorry, lotsa rock climbing jargon there for those who dont climb).





I rode on, and the jungle seethed around me :)))