Real Heroes and Villains (so far)

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... and because I seem to like write blog entries in pairs; TOP FIVE heroes and villains:

HEROES
1. Janet the park ranger in NZ. This spritely 60plus year old met us when we finished our second day of Kepler track having jumped from a hovering helicopter up to her waist in snow on the narrowest of mountain ridges and then spent half a day shoveling clear a series of steps called the ´Great Wall´ before hiking half a dozen miles back to the hut to get a fire going for the ´hardened walkers´who later tramped through...

2. Young girl in Panama old town who sorted us out a place to stay with her friend after we arrived late with nothing sorted and a bit jet lagged after 36hrs of travelling across ten time zones from India. Getting us off the streets at that moment meant we also avoided a small but not insignificant gun battle as I said to Hel "there´s half a dozen policeman running past with guns drawn, do you think she might just let us inside for a couple of minutes"

3. The cooks at Hebron. A lot of people at Hebron were heroes, but getting up at 4am and cooking non-stop all day, seven days a week, for 365 kids with just a couple of giant vats, a fire and a whole load of dried chillies for "seasoning" is hardcore

4. Mr Pan of Don Khone in the Mekong Islands was the most laid back super cool bloke you could imagine. His guesthouse wasn´t the most amazing but it was spotlessly clean, his kids lovely, food honest, etc. When it was perfectly clear to both him and I that I´d broken his shower in the first ten mins of arriving he just smiled and told us to have a beer while he replaced it. One night he calmly and assuredly piloted us back from the mainland through a hundred and one obstacles in a fast flowing Mekong in the pitch back. But best of all was watching him and his mates play badminton, high temp and highly competitive but a complete and simple pleasure (for him). A thoroughly happy bloke

5. Bit naff, but it has to be Hel. Don´t think there isn´t anything yet that she hasn´t eaten, jumped out of, tried speaking, trekked over, made friends with etc. All with a smile and a freedom that looks good on her! Certainly keeping me at it


VILLAINS

1. Mosquitos. I have a new found dislike after being attacked en masse in the Amazon and having learned along the way that they carry a whole load more life threatening diseases than Malaria. WHO also has some rather frightening/sobering statistics. Currently over half the world´s population is at risk from malaria and half a billion people are infected each year (no guesses where from). This figure is four times higher than it was in 1990 largely due to a warmer and wetter global climate.... mmmmmm not going to get any better in the next century then

2. Colonials. On balance I don´t feel it´s right to say any of the colonial empires were a good thing. There´s plenty of legacy based justification around education, healthcare, democracy, etc from the English in India, Oz and NZ, French in old Indo-China, Spanish in Latin America (thinking about the last 500 years and places we´ve travelled to). But they were all ultimately driven by greed and characterised by exploitation. I guess we will carry on dominating one another and likewise territories and civilisations will continue to come and go but it sucks on a big scale as much as it does when it´s kids at Hebron

3. Momentum. Just in case this was getting a little too serious

4. Khmer Rouge. Horrific genocide but unique as it was more to do with achieving an extreme ideology of setting the ´year back to zero´ and reforming a society based on subsistence agriculture. All genocide is obviously horrific but what was particularly chilling was how families were deliberately split, mistrust created and child indoctrination carried out to the degree that ordinary people were successfully turned on each other

5. US. Controversial but this is a broad sweep to do with responsibility of which the US´s foreign policies over the last 50 years or so seem to lack and as does its attitude today towards climate change, etc. From Vietnam to Panama (and with all their neighbouring countries) we´ve seen unwanted and ultimately distructive meddling. Leave alone. On an individual level we were getting slightly tired of loud American travellers usually boasting about extra money saved from hard bargaining with a much less well off local, until we meet Paul and John, two totally generous and charming yanks. They exist! Having somewhere found the time to read The Audicity of Hope, here´s hoping Obama succeeds!

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