StampCollector

When a serving president cannot visit the capital of his own country because of fears for his safety, something must be rotten in Denmark.

A week ago Sucre, the constitutional capital of Bolivia, was about to celebrate the most important day in its calendar, 25 de Mayo, the day back in 1809 when the first calls were heard for freedom from Spanish rule.

Normally, 25 de Mayo is a joyous day, a time of parades, candy floss and family fun in the whitewashed streets of the colonial city.

But this year was different. The memory of how three students were killed by national police amid protests last November hung over proceedings. And then the nation’s president, Evo Morales, was coming to town for the first time since their deaths.

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Winter is coming to South America; within weeks the ski resorts of Chile and Argentina should receive a welcome blanket of snow and the first of the season’s skiers and snowboarders.

In Bolivia, though, home to the world’s highest ski resort, things are a little different.

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“Personally I see journalism like a mission of service to humanity in general… In reality the journalist is like a priest… one of the most dignfied offices there is.”

The delightfully high-minded interpretation of journalism highlighted above was what Augusto Davilo Sanabria, founder of the Syndicate of Press Workers in Oruro, Bolivia, had to say about his vocation on the occasion of El Dia del Periodista - day of the journalist - over the weekend.

Sr Davilo’s rhetoric proves the rule that if there is one thing journalists are good at around the world, it is talking about their trade.

In the pubs and bars of London, at least, most of those conversations quickly turn a little sour. Journalists, for some reason, are great moaners. Give two journalists a couple of beers and you’ll soon wish you had never got them started.

If you believed everything you heard, you would think journalists truly suffer for their art.

And some do. But those are not, by and large, the hacks of what was once Fleet Street. Low pay and poor management aside, few journalists in the western world face real danger as they go about their job.

The same cannot be said, it appears, for Bolivia’s press corps. Here, El Dia del Periodista was a big deal.

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They came in their thousands, dressed in their finery, placards at the ready, as sure as ever of their devotion to the cause.

More than two years after former coca farmer Evo Morales was elected as Bolivian president, and with opponents in the gas-rich eastern province of Santa Cruz holding a referendum on greater autonomy, the Indians of La Paz filled the streets to give voice to a simple message.

“Viva Bolivia unida!” they shouted - “Bolivia lives together!”

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As I’ve mentioned before, it has rained a lot in Ecuador this year. As we travelled through the country a few weeks ago I read each and every day in the newspapers about the chaos caused by the severe and apparently endless “invierno” - winter in English, but used to refer to the rainy season in Ecuador.

After spotting a Red Cross appeal for volunteers to help with emergency relief I got in touch with the Red Cross based in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city. They agreed to let me accompany them on a relief mission to the flooded plains of Guayas province.

I wrote this piece speculatively for the BBC News website, where I work when not on six month vacations in South America, but because of boring administrative reasons they have been unable to publish it.

I reproduce it here and hope that some people will read it and get to hear about the floods, even if it’s not the thousands who visit the BBC each day.

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The world looks different through a macro lens.

This post is a new one for me - I’m not even going to try and tell a story, weave a narrative, or dazzle you with a rhetorical flourish.

Instead I thought it was time to post a selection of the pictures I’ve taken using my trusty old Nikkor 60mm f/2.8 Micro lens, the pocket-sized close-up demon which, sadly, has been the most under-used lens in my bag througout this whole trip.

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Proof that somebody actually reads this blog - British photographer Andrew Gibson, who blogs about his work at Beautiful Argentina has interviewed me by email about the photography and writing I’ve posted during the past few months.

http://beautifulargentina.wordpress.com/2008/04/19/a-stamp-collector-in-south-america/

Andrew’s blog is a very interesting chronicle of his own work photographing Argentina, and tidbits and tips relevant to his own interest in photography. He’s been very nice about me online, so please give his site a visit if you have time and want to read the full interview.

By the way, the picture at the top is one of my first from our new country - Peru, and sunset by the Pacific Ocean at the northern beach ‘resort’ of Punta Sal. A nice way to start a busy few weeks on the road.

Getting to the Quilotoa volcano was the easy bit.

We should have known that hiking 14km back to our hostel across rugged Andean terrain would be harder work than we had first anticipated. The crater itself was the kind of natural wonder that renders intelligent folk speechless - “Wow,” we said, again and again, with a depressing lack of critical insight - and we had reached it rather too easily, sat in the back of a pickup truck and driven along a wet and bumpy road to the volcano rim.

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The volcano showed its face in the end - just once, mind you.

Amid a weekend of relentless rain and low, low cloud, the snow-capped cone of Cotopaxi, Ecuador´s most famous volcano, emerged just once.

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Words are hardly necessary. As the holiest week in the Roman Catholic calendar comes to a close, here are a selection of images from our travels throughout Semana Santa - from Popayan, Colombia, to the border town of Ipiales, home to a staggering cathedral of pilgrimage, and on to Quito, Ecuador’s capital.

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