When I left Auckland for Phnom Penh in 2023, I had no idea where I was heading or that I’d write about it. I travelled largely solo, with a broad plan to spend 6 mth’s or so getting round a bunch of colourful non-western countries on a budget. I carried bugger all, a day pack and a ukelele. Mostly one star accomodation, dorm’s in cheap hostels, grandad’s on the top bunk - great anthropology.

I wanted to experience difference, leave my comfort zone. I’m mostly curious and on a good day attentive, and the year didn’t disappoint. 2023 was a buffet of encounters, delights and challenges.

Writing the blogs was a way to share the journey with my peep’s, basic observation and reflection. And tell the story using words and photo’s rather than my stock in trade video.

The photo’s were all shot on an iPhone 11pro, the blogs written and posted on the same device. Amazing how much power we have in our pockets.

The journey was humbling, a reminder of my privilege being a westerner with a passport and funds to be able to have such an adventure. I gained much respect and aroha for my global brothers and sisters who often struggle daily for food and shelter.

Hopefully these blogs celebrate their lives - they live as a testament to at least myself, that people everywhere are wonderful, that travelling with an open heart and respectful disposition can find you the richest experiences, the essence of our connection and togetherness.

🫶🏼

“ how about something you’re really glad happened, that’s worked out, that you’re thankful for “ …

Mark was suggesting another line of questioning for the Hopes, fears n’ good ideas video project. Mark is Dunedin based now, a caring wholesome dude that in Auckland days hired me to make videos for ladies who lunch, such that they’d gift some of their money to materially less fortunate peep’s offshore. It was around the time of my piss-take irReverend™ phase, where I dressed as a guitar slinging church minister/priest performing hands-on healing in Irish pubs by night, making heartstring videos with Mark by day. We both had a hold on different takes of the jesus story, we were a fit.

So cheers bro, a grand theme, gratitude. First stop for this bus are my own personal ‘luckies’, and I invite you guys to reflect on your own. It’s a good exercise, here’s a few of mine:

I’m totally buzzed to have a New Zealand passport. Following last years travels through materially poorer countries, after returning from India for the second time, I was on my knees with thanks … by dint of birth are we blessed brethren. Fully paid up first world entitled.

A few days back I was grinning ear to ear thanks to an opiate pump that kept slipping another few mls into my neck every few minutes, a boost button for those special moments, 😂🫣 and absolute gratitude for the ACC coverage for that service, my rotator cuff Op. Ya pays ya money n’ U takes your chances. That’s the tax system, and for me I’ve scored. Broken bones, repaired shoulders, fee’s I’d have struggled to pay were it not for public health.

Another score - I’m now getting 400 bucks a week here in NZ for doing nothing. It’s cos I’m now an old codger, a geezer. I’m thinking we boomers are sitting pretty on that wee entitlement, surely we’re the biggest bludgers on the tax system, an unsustainable extravagance gifted to a growing privileged demographic. I’d love to see a ‘Boomer Give-Back’ appeal each year. I’ll put in, help out our young ones and not just our own.

I never thought my lack of birth control sensibility would bring me so much pleasure further down the line. My eco-footprint is pure greed, having had four kids and at last count 4 grandkids. That’s the beat-up. But it’s not all bad, with my two daughters completing health science degree’s, my two sons Jaz and Buster becoming among other things musicians. Who’d have guessed. And I’m thankful to have partnered with a wife who is an awesome mum and nana, and now grateful to have these new relationships with little moko’s, and you know how it rolls with the cost of living, the kids never really leave home.

And that home. I’m lucky to be part owner in a mortgage-free falling down bach on Waiheke, that’s likely now worth over a million bucks. Given we bought if for less than half of that, that’s bullshit. That’s economics … which is these days a neoliberal ponzi party. I’ve got plenty of chums my age, that didn’t wangle a rung on the property ladder and likely never will. And not because they’re not hard workers. These are peep’s who over the years have prioritised working for greater community good, over self-aggrandisement. We own nothing dudes, just our souls, though there are those amongst us that have put theirs into hock.

A tip of the hat to my parents, who if alive would be 100 or just over. They worked in public service, Dad on infrastructure with the Ministry of Works, mum as a nurse. Neither pulled big salaries and they never owned their own house - eventually a humble brick job in the Tron, till they were well into their fifties. There was a narrative during the 1950’s and 60’s of pulling together, likely a post-war thing. I’m grateful for the public service values they imbued in me. Mum knitted us all cardies and dad grew veggies and fruit tree’s, always had a compost. Dad would do pickled onions, mum would do preserves, the two of them real bottlers.

I’m grateful for life. Why I’m still here is beyond me. Depressed in my 20’s, it’s a wonder I didn’t top myself (you know, mental health and NZ, don’t talk about it - espesh back then). And I’m super happy I still have the use of my limbs (currently 3 out of 4) and my body has thus far stood up to the use and abuse of drugs like alcohol.

Grateful for music ! I never knew it was there till a couple of very stoned nights dancing to bands in my early 20’s and beginning that journey of discovery. Learning to play an instrument and combine it with my voice. Oh wow, I can sing in tune, who’d have thought. In the last few years I’ve turned onto Zumba - Dance ! Well, fitness dance. I love it and the sisterhood that do zumba have accepted me as one of them. Special shoutout to our instructor Rahman, a guy that role models the best of love and giving. We need armies of lycra clad Rahman’s in this world of polarised confusion. Maybe leave out the lycra. Sir Ken Robinson TedTalked about the importance of dance. Google him, he’s boss.

I’m grateful for the fee’s-free opportunity I had to go to university back in the day, and then the chance to get paid to work with teenagers, tell stories using video, play music in public, drink free guinness, wear a kilt and a wig.

I’ve been blessed to study some of my times more incisive thinkers, dudes like Noam Chomsky, John Raulston-Saul, Joseph Stiglitz, Naomi Klein; there’s too many of them to name. So thankful they’re out there, in print/video/online. And now thousands of well researched switched-on bloggers hitting forums like this, Substack. Thankful for some straight shooters who are not at the behest of wallet driven mainstream media, and the low-brow corporate narratives they favourably trumpet. Never bite the hand and all that. Incredibly grateful for often brave writers helping lift the veil on how we’ve been gamed.

Grateful for my early sailing days. Before NZ became big hitters on the international sailing stage, little mum & dad yacht clubs dotted the Kiwi coastline. Dinghy sailing, small affordable home-builds popped up in garages and lean-to’s. Dad’s Mk2 Cortina had to move out of our garage for a while as he and the next door neighbour built me my own P class yacht. What you couldn’t do with 4 sheets of marine ply, some glue and brass nails. Mostly hand tools then. My 13 yr old self, battling my way through the swells outside the breakwaters in New Plymouth … sheer exhilaration and adventure. In my head I was rounding Cape Horn. Such a lucky childhood.

Grateful for my numerous friends - I have too many, and my two sisters, who still keep an eye out for their little brother even now, despite their plates being full with their own whanau. Grateful for one of my sisters back-in-the-day boyfriends who taught me how to handle a motorbike when I was 13-14 yrs old. As for the opportunity to travel the way I did last year … every chance exploited to talk with peep’s who had any english, even more fun communicating with those that didn’t. Last year was humbling to say the least, and provided me some much needed context for the life we lead here in NZ. I’m totally stoked for that opportunity, and that I returned more informed and in one piece.

I get blissed out when the tui’s get to chattering in the tree’s that dot the valley out the back of our place. Even the little aviators that dig out my seedlings and fck up my garden. I might curse them but I’d never hurt them, I love our bird life. And the bees in the lavender. Little hero’s all. I’m just super chuffed to have got to (almost) 66 yrs of age, to glance back for a minute, reflect.

My (almost) 4 yr old grandson Xavi gave me a Goodies and Baddies scenario yesterday, and my scanner went into DoubleWoke mode. “Xavi there are no G’s and B’s, grandad thinks everyone’s a Goody - just that sometimes people get confused and can get it wrong”, me digging up a couple of examples.

But especially following last yrs travels, further emboldened by my ‘Hopes, fears n’ good ideas’ video interviews, I actually think that we Are all good at heart. Discovering our better selves is a journey, a quest. Tribally we can be assholes, bolstered by atrocious narratives masquerading as truths (thanks corporate media), but yeah, I reckon we’re all Goodies. Some of us just don’t know it yet.

Till next time :)

American culture and beliefs have influence, they’re in my DNA, there was never any escaping. As a beneficiary of white empire, I’ve been positioned to reap some of its baubles. Is there an invoice I have to settle ?

Going way back, my earliest remembered poo came with america. Reading National Geographic mag’s in the kharzee as a kid, gave me the States in glossy colour plates. I saw the world through america, america through america. It was the promised land, cool, groovy and with swank. Shit got done in the States, it got done good. One day, I was going to go there.

On the box, the Two Ronnies and other british schtick were getting the heave ho, while the taps opened on everything american. Big brash brassy hero’s with John Wayne accents. The High Chapparal, Mission Impossible, Donny and Marie, Starsky and Hutch.

Mum knitted me a Starsky and Hutch cardy, and downtown friday night ? Hamilton was mine and I knew it. Stopped short of doing the white flash on my fire engine red Mk2 Cortina, got as far as buying the masking tape. I was a good 60% wanker. 70% when I stretched across the bench seat in my tank top. Once i wore my seersucker bodyshirt tucked into my corduroys, girlfriend under my action gusset, Foreigner playing on AM, column shift vertical in park-up mode. Bow chick-a-wow-wow. 80% wanker.

Linda Ronstadt on roller-skates, the Eagles … The USA colonised NZ, flares, big hair, Farrah Fawcett, platform heels… we in the Tron lapped it up.

Then april/may of 1978, my heart broke. The cardy gone but not forgotten, in walks this tall southern states american dude, slick back brylcream styles, dressed like a blue’s brother, took the podium for American Civilisation 201. All my Daniel Boon’s and Disneyworlds’ down the drain … it was like I’d just been told Santa wasn’t real. Grief, sadness, betrayal. Here was a pithy America, the one with questionable policies on the home front, apocalyptic ones abroad. It was a shock, Team America as World Police. This is not going to end well I thought.

‘We must live together as brothers or die together as fools …’ Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Neil Postman, Margaret Mead, Iggy Pop, Canada’s Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, The CIA propping up fascist leaders all over the shop, genius comedian’s Bill Hicks and George Carlin, Indianapolis guitarist Wes Montgomery, McCarthyism, and in due course, SouthPark. Enthralled, shocked, woo’d, silenced, inspired, disturbed, angered, amazed, brokenhearted. Such was the rollercoaster ride of getting to know the real America. Dr Lou Fretz was his name, god fearing man from Alabama that nested for a while in Hamilton East to take up his lectureship at the Uni. Dude how could you ? You pissed all over the american dream. Fckd if I know how he made it out of the Waikato alive. Maybe he didn’t.

In november of ‘78, my Uni chum Bruce and I bought a VW in San Jose, setting out to discover the States, smell it, touch it. Just turned 20. I fell in love with the awesome people that befriended us, helped us, let us into their lives. There almost 4 mths. Bob, the Vietnam marine, made it back though his school mates didn’t. He had a lot to say about the military and obedience. I was keeping company as his builders labourer working condo’s in Ft Lauderdale. Slept in the backroom of his crib in the Puerto Rican quarter. Even the Kansas City mechanic that (I still reckon) deliberately put the timing out on our Beetle cos we had California plates. Blew the head off the engine down the rd, that’s another story. I pondered his american dream, grubby overalls under the hoist, city smog filling the oil bay.

Such beautiful people carrying the shadow past of native american genocide, african american slavery, land of creative and entrepreneurial talent, leaders in science and technology. Exceptional in many fields. And of course, so much glorious bullshit. Thanks for your efforts Ed Bernays .

I have chums in NZ who’ve lived much of their lives in the States … mostly California. They’ve lived in NZ for years, and some remember the heady days of the San Fran bay area, the 60’s and 70’s, Los Angeles. There’s reasons they’ve moved to NZ. One said to me “I think society has moved into the grieving phase Baz”, conscious or not, that’s where she see’s our western collective response to the future facing us. Grieving for what could have been, for what we know can be, but likely won’t be, for what’s been lost, for the slippery surfaces underfoot.

I’ve returned to the States for work since my student roadie, and post trauma’s (9/11, GFC etc). Much changed, and now the two capitalist bed-pal’s fear and desire are having sleepless nights. The homeless fly their stars n’ stripes off their supermarket trolley’s, parking up for the night out the back of the mall’s foodhalls. Their flags a hand on heart claim … ‘we still belong’. The collective is alive in the States, it’s not entirely every person for themselves. My dad, a WWII veteran, once said “communities will pull together in times of duress, when the duress is seen to be evenly shared”. Good point… evenly … you guys clock that ?

As a muso I have loved america’s musical storytellers; Springsteen, Nancy Griffith, Emmy Lou, Bonnie Raitt, John Hiatt/Prine - n’ that's just a handful from one genre. A lifetime of loving stateside music, absorbing everything american, I am a cheeseburger, a Denny’s diner bitch. It’s a schizophrenia of sorts, i celebrate it and struggle with it.

Because Dear America, can you plse tell me, what the fck is now going on ? Wait, hold on. I think I know. You’ve been at it for years, same shit, different day.

If, my fellow Kiwi’s, we mostly vibe with mainstream media like radio’s ZB, TV news like CNN, TVNZ, The Herald, then I’m suggesting we look and listen more closely at the language being used, take wider sweeps at proffered narratives. Where does ‘terror’ really lie ? After almost 50 yrs of studying American geopolitics, my research tells me we’ve been hoodwinked. And as tendrils of white empire, we’ve likely benefitted from it quite nicely if we’ve chosen to exploit that path.

So America, please. Cool down, back off the stance, upsize that chamomile tea. The doubling down is getting you nowhere. You’re doing some stupid shit and losing friends. There’s despots and dicks everywhere, but that’s no reason to continue to be one. Back up the bus, take your investments out of the military and put them in health and education, in food resilience and localism, in building relevant infrastructure, in some actual, sincere conflict resolution diplomacy, not the duplicitous BS you set the table with in mainstream media. Globally, entities big and small are pissed with you, so your job now is to show some contrition, reel it back in. Might take a few trips to Peru on the ayahuasca to get there; give it your best shot.

Take your 128 military bases (at last count) you have staked outside your nation, the armaments you lavish on your proxies and get them back inside your borders, please … the world and it’s resources are not yours to have and hold, and looks like this could be a difficult lesson. You can bully smaller entities like Central and Sth America, Sth East Asia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon wherever, but you now have BRICS to deal with. The two key players in cohorts are Russia and China. Modi’s India, 1.5 billion of them, they’re in there too. They’re coming for more than your petrodollar. And those guys have swagger … careful now. All of us in the west could check our ego’s into the cloakroom, take some hallucinogens, get conversational in front of the mirror. Will likely take a few goes.

I worry for the cool people that inhabit the USA, most all of them. Duped by a lifetime of their culture’s smoke n’ mirrors, they are largely at the behest of a system that has them to their necks in servitude and debt. The best of people under the hammer, beautiful lovers, individually and sometimes tribally, drowning in a systemic casual cruelty, a compassionless free for all. You get the picture.

And that cultural creep pings all of us, we are globally connected, ‘price takers’ here in NZ, tiny fish. We do not call any shots.

There’s leadership in the States, but it’s 50 shades of grey. You don’t often see the real muscle/money, a shell game by design. The cutouts we do see lack effective power, enactable humanity, vision and courage. They are bought, game show hosts, distractions, entertainment. Real leadership is not a new face, a sticker, a celebrity catwalk. It’s an ethos that runs deep through currents of people. The red or blue pill election thing they’re going through now, is shadow puppetry that will tweak peoples emotions and ideologies, but mean almost nothing to business as usual, or any significant change in Washington’s behaviour. At the moment there’s a power vacuum as poor old Joe gets shuffled into hospice … not before signing off another $29 billion in armaments and similar ‘aid’ sent to their 51st state in the middle east, and that’s just in Aug/Sept, another of their regular top-ups. Seriously dark work brothers.

Make america great again ? Dudes it only ever was for some … likely white, privileged, born into the golden years, made their moneymoves back when they could, before the ‘free market’ became so stacked with firewalled regulated oligopoly. Before insider trading, private equity and hedge fund operators - the darkest of Mordors money twisters, niftily pulled the ladders up.

It didn’t have to be this way, there’ve been a few wrong turns along the way. Nixon decoupling the gold standard, Reagan with his B-list hollywood skillset, Wall St convincing Clinton to bin the Glass Steagall act , walnut brains like Bush Jnr, and of course as Eisenhower said, beware the military industrial complex. Beware indeed.

Last year it was absolutely my privilege to hang with a bunch of young Israeli’s in a hostel for a week. Most were just out of their 18 mths compulsory military service, and we discussed the situation in their country. My first encounter with them was before the Oct Hamas uprising, the second, after. We were in the north of Peru in Huaraz, a town where adventurers go to climb in the Andes’. I just listened mostly. And wrote a blog about that encounter :

If you don’t read the blog linked here, the short form is that a lot of these guys I talked to, all in their 20’s, didn’t see Us and Them when its comes to Israel/USA (one and the same for those looking into geopolitical history) and their Arab neighbours. “We’ve been asked to inherit the vengeances of our elders”, said one to me. They’ve grown up with so much cultural mix, via friends/schooling/marriage etc that half their friends, indeed some of Them, have a Palestinian mum or dad. Netanyahu’s right wing warmongering or ’right to defend itself’ as it’s couched, is not their approach. Irrespective of those elastic narratives flung about by western media.

None wanted to go into Gaza or wherever in tanks and fight. Not one. They’d done their 18 mths military service because it’s illegal not to. Yes they lived with the fear of incoming rockets from their Arab neighbours, or the terror of suicide bombers letting rip in desperation, and they also knew why. Decades of UN resolutions (always veto’d by the US) telling Israel to quit the land grabs and retreat to their assigned borders, 70 years of punishment and theft by their forebears, such that the Palestine had become two small occupied open air prisons (West Bank/Gaza) - they were up on the bigger narratives, and this gave me absolute hope. That our young ones, jewish, muslim, christian, whatever the flavour of their saviour, do not carry those, what shall we call them - ‘weaknesses of emotionally under-developed ageing men holding power’. “ War is what happens when language fails.” – Margaret Atwood. “Older men declare war, but it is the youth that must fight and die.” - Herbert Hoover.

Obedience is the enemy my children.

The conversations in the USA now needed involve bold decisions on climate/fossil fuels, localism and downsizing, reigning in the industrial military machine, levelling wealth, ending untethered ponzi economics, investing in infrastructure, and putting back in the box the biggest multi-headed monster the USA have, their foreign policy. These round the barbie topics of conversations, never comfortable, can be Out Of Bounds, questioning the backbone of our shared pedagogy. We’re the USA’s allies we Kiwi’s. Militarily, economically, culturally, secret-sharingly, narratively….. Eeeeek.

I would love more vision, a more positive wisdom from our bigger he/she/they, some soul searching honesty and less duplicity, less rudderless reactive arse covering Brave New World bullshit. Those character flaws used to be more comfortably hidden. Now it’s all a bit in plain sight. The emperor has no clothes and here’s looking at you babe.

This is the ‘narrathon’ I think we need to engage in, talk it out. Open, honest. Rules of the game ? Play the ball not the person. Have an umpire with a taser, a Barry Manilow sing-off, pillow fights, chilli dares, whatever.

I have chums that say to me “Baz wake up you dreamer, the world as long as we’ve know it has always been adversarial, a fight for power and resource, ruthless genocidal cullings over the centuries, nothing new under the sun”.

They’re right of course. And I think it takes some big shit to go down to effect a reset in that thinking. It’s a reset I want to see. Out with Pisces, in with Aquarius. We think we own the place. We don’t, mother nature does, and, mentioned b4, she’s CEO and Chair of the Board. It’s a golden conflict of interest, and one we can’t negotiate.

A dreamer alright. A few weeks back I woke from one with a start - where the thoughts that whiz across our asleep minds, are for a few seconds still visible in the awake world. Caught out !

Here’s what i remember … A large forcefield or some giant superhero, was giving the 180 degree boomerang treatment to every munition fired, every fist thrown. Return to sender as an ultimate deterrent to aggression. Ouch. A thousand lord of the rings blacksmith’s forges ran hot, smelting soldiers guns/warplanes into spades, armies of gardeners setting to work on veggies and fruit tree’s, revering potable water. Grandma’s and grandpa’s broken out of retirement, bottling and preserving food. Beekeepers getting knighthoods 😂 (I made that one up). Borders dissolved and ownership - of land/water/sky returned to mother nature, we humans, fresh from our personal work in front of mirrors, in agreement to occupy, share and tend. Hang on, SHARE and TEND in caps plse. Peep’s from all belief’s and cultures breaking bread, growing food together. No Us and Them.

That was the general recall gist in those few seconds on waking, like following a utopian mushroom spore through the lupins. I’m such a hippie. In case another waking episode comes along, I’ve got a notepad by the bed.

Reading the news american style while doing #2’s as a kid, put me on the path to discover the Dream. My own kiwi version of adventure and possibility. America, thank you for that. The freedom and license to dream, to do shit, literally.

But now, please, see the forest for the tree’s. You have so much, given much, taken a fck-load too, i must say, more than your share, so slow it down, and don’t Completely fck it up any more than it is now bro. You have a lot of work to do inside your own borders, get back there, and sort your own domestic shit out, your in-tray is full.

Hard for me to write a lot of this cos the States, the people that inhabit it, like people everywhere in the world, is/are awesome, but the military machine is not. And domestically the country needs a lot of attention. Get Back to where you once belonged as the Beatles once suggested. I wish I still had my Starsky cardy. And my red Mk2 Cortina? It’d have that white flash on it by now. 100% wanker for sure, fully paid up member.

See what happens when the only travel I do is inside my head? Damn, gotta get back on the road again … but this shared grief we are all experiencing, at love lost, at what likely lies ahead for our children and old folk. The story of how our north american sibling lost their way, dragged us along for the ride. I think my Californian chum is onto something.

Till next time :)

… so I’m past full term, postnatal, time to give light to a few reflections. In my last blog freshly returned from India, I was on my knees with gratitude for a kiwi passport, a lucky document by chance of birth.

When my Sydney-bound flight lifted off from Bengalaru (Bangalore - pop’n 35 million - India’s own Silicon Valley), I knew I was going to make it home to NZ. Until that point I was less than certain as everything in India can be a bit maybe. Getting around - trains, Uber, penetrating soldier-fortressed airport terminals, booking accom, in fact trying to do anything without an Indian SIM card and/or a ‘fixer’… it’s almost hand to hand combat. Seriously, if you’re thinking of travelling in India, you need a brahmin Hindi speaking man on the ground. Get one and pay them good money. 50% up front, the remainder once they get you successfully back inside the airport terminal at journeys end.

India experienced 7% growth this last financial yr, nuts really. Its GDP’s risen from 400 Billion to 4 Trillion in 25 yrs. Prime minister Narendra Modi is still riding high, but now having to compromise as his BJP party took a hit in the recent election. He won’t like that.

If you believe in economic growth and GDP as a measure of a country’s health, then I guess 7% is good news. But we live on a finite planet and India is bursting with people. It is for the large part physically feral, infrastructure and utilities patchwork, recycling a formidable challenge and everywhere - save a few modern showpieces like Bengalaru, there’s roadsides and fields littered with shit and discarded plastic. India as in many countries, is exhibit A for when mass consumption of western packaged goods reaches a garish peak.

To acknowledge its’ greatest asset its’ people, I have never speed dated so many wonderfully vibrant and colourful people as in India. Many may not have much materially by western standards, but they have each other, they have the day, and they celebrate this. We in the west could well take note, what a place.

I’ve always been geopolitically nosey. In each country I’ve asked “how is your leadership ? Are you well served ? health ? education ? freedom of speech ?”

In Cambodia people would lean forward, glance around to be sure the walls had no eye’s or ears, then whisper in hushed tones “corrupt …. people get disappeared if caught doing what we’re doing now…” There were similar cautions in Vietnam, general etiquette being ‘stay out of it, enjoy our tourist spots and don’t question the narrative.’

Once, imperial powers used corporate entities to do their bidding (eg the British and Dutch used the East India Trading Company to centuries ago, nick all India’s stuff and enslave the people, divide and rule, normal colonial tricks). Now the game has flipped, and corporate entities use governments to enable themselves to nick people’s stuff and keep them obedient in a form of rentier slavery. The tail now wags the dog. Governments are lapdogs dribbling to the behest of their global multinational corporate overlords. Shame really, but that’s what you get with decades of intentional casino economics, and the use of media to both massage consent and, control what can and can’t be questioned. Bla de bla, more to come on this in future blogs, won’t be able to help myself.

And now …

Last year’s travel widened my senses, stretched my humility, further sparking intrigue and love for people. Even arseholes, wheel out your pricks, I’ll take em. The break in normal NZ transmission inspired and exhausted me, plenty of high cortisol moments, so first task back home was a lie down. Still lying down a bit 😂.

I’ve doubled down on grandad duty, connected a little with local community, bashed out some more music gigs, worked as a labourer, pitched more smartphone video workshops, got in some motorbike and van roadies, sweated through some lumpy zumba moves, and am currently working on fixing body bits - carpal tunnel, rotator cuff, shaking off a touch of bronchial pneumonia. I’ve got a few breather days, plotting the next mission - Hopes, fears n’ good ideas.

Here’s the blurb I’ve begun sending out:

‘Hopes, fears n’ good ideas is me video interviewing you on my phone. It’s a short interview, around 5 minutes of footage. The questions are, ‘tell me one or two things you wish for, something or things that concern you, and a good idea or two. ‘

Once I’ve edited your video I’ll share it with you privately so you can ask me to change anything before I share it online as part of my blog. If you decide eg in a yrs time, you don’t want your video available in public, I’ll take it down. So it’s your story, you have control over it.

This is a personal project, to share people’s thoughts and ideas, help us reflect and connect.

I’m seeking a cross-section of people to take part, firstly on Waiheke and greater Auckland, then New Zealand, asking peep’s I know and respect, others that show an interest. It will only take half an hr of your time, I’ll work around your availability and come to you.

It’s a way to be heard re stuff you feel is important. I would love you to be involved if you’d like to contribute.’😊

If you’re reading this and want to take part, get in touch. It’s vulnerable stuff putting yourself on camera, and we’re shy things we kiwi’s. But I have a premise that what unites us is bigger than what divides us, that sharing our thoughts and stories in a respectful space can help build empathy. At time of writing this I’ve completed 20 interviews, 980 to go in pursuit of 1,000 kiwi voices. In the new year, once my shoulder is motorbikeable, the plan is to hit the road round NZ spending time collecting more interviews, curating and publishing these. Of course it’s just an excuse for me to stretch my itchy travel feet and meet newbies, my fave thing. Only this time in my home country.

I’m fascinated with where we’re headed as a species, how we navigate. This excites more than scares me. My scary penny-drops came when I began studying american foreign policy nearly 50 yrs ago at Uni. Chomsky and his chums riding into town sharpening their nibs on Reagan and Thatcher. What happened to My american dream ? As post-war spawn of white western privilege, the brochure promised more. Even in Hamilton.

But that was an age ago. I feel there’s a gathering awareness now, as one would hope, that the lifestyles to which we are accustomed are getting an audit, our wings clipped or soon to be. Not before time. No matter the keypad I put on my gate, I won’t be able to firewall the pincer movements of white collar unemployment, economic, geopolitical and climatic change. And of course the punch and judy mayhem created by global militaries etc. Sheesh.

Localism will by necessity, become the new black. Which brings me to Betty.

Betty lives on a small section in Surfdale on Waiheke Island. When she and her husband bought the place 12 years ago, they barely looked at the house, a slip of a thing. She went door to door to meet the neighbours - before buying, to check out the calibre of people she was considering surrounding herself with. Followed by a check to ensure the section was north facing, at least enough to establish a few small gardens big enough to feed themselves. Imagine, community make-up and food-growing potential being the # 1 criteria for a house purchase, the actual dwelling itself the last consideration.

We should learn from Betty. She’s 82 now, her husband John 92, and her garden not only provides for most of their food, she shares with neighbours and pickles bottles and preserves like my mother and grandmother used to. Spry, young at heart and happy, she’s got to be Surfdales poster child for ageing with zest, with purpose. She agreed to take part in my Hopes, fears n’ good ideas interviews, and then proceeded to talk me round her garden, what she’s got going in these ‘the barren months of gardening’, September/October. Quite a lot as you’ll see if you click on the wee garden walkabout vid we made.

Betty’s the future.

Till next time :)

You can see it, from here in Darjeeling. After two full-on weeks south of Kolkata, lost to that part of India where you have no option but to surrender and give up control of everything, I have made it to the mountains, where the air is fresh and cold, the pace chilled, the landscapes beautiful, and the people part Nepalese. Such a contrast.

Of course this being India, our 2,500 metre climb into the foothills of the Himalaya’s, northern West Bengal, was not without issues, our carriage coming off its tracks. I’ve been derailed many times in my life, but never in an actual train. Ours was a lucky derailing, happening on solid ground - much of the track on this 10 hr journey is on the edge of a bluff. It’s understandable why Indians pray a lot.

On my first visit to this country earlier this year I mentioned a book written a century ago called ‘Passage to India’. Etched from a colonial perspective when the British Empire still had big thieving balls it wore on the outside. I remember most, one of the fictional leads becoming overwhelmed by the intensity and saturation of India, freaking the fck out and running for cover.

The novel was required reading for English Lit 101, and at the time I was more into rugby and smoking weed than reading bout the emotional drama’s of Victorian toff’s.

But there have been moments on this trip where that txt from 40 something years back, has jumped back onto my virtual bookshelf. Indeed on the train back to Kolkata a week ago, I clawed back some of my western sensibility and listened to John Hiatt’s very American country rock album ‘Bring The Family’. So immersed had I become in the colour and intensity of India, that I’d lost some of me. Truth be known, probably good riddance, but emboldened by a quick hit of western refresh, I strode down the platform at Howrah Junction, Kolkata’s central train station and home to seething masses of people, ‘re-Me’d’, a tourist made anew. I think that no matter the delight and beauty I discover in other cultures on my travels, at my core I am a four on the floor westerner. Put your kaftan away hippy. I wish I was a cultural freebird, but there it is, I have to acknowledge my roots, stuff that centres me.

Similar thing happened to me in Japan years back. Got lost on the Tokyo subway for 18 hrs languageless, and on making it back to my absent friends shoebox apartment, bolted the door and watched back to back Eric Clapton videos for two days, never ventured out. Could’ve been Barry Manilow cd’s, old Radio Waikato playlists, anything, wouldn’t have mattered.

I guess this year’s been about working on a new equilibrium, one where I can keep some of me but grow with the new, without being consumed or lost.

So for now Baz, frantic India in the rear view for a few days, it’s Darjeeling, drink some tea and breathe.

It’s a beautiful town bitten into the hills of northern India. I’m here for a few days before heading back to Kolkata then flying to NZ. Unbelievably, one of my Waiheke homies is here at the same time. Waiheke represents in the north of India ! Neal Goshal is a yoga teacher and web developer back home on the motu, but mostly I know him as a talented fluid guitarist and decent dude with a beautiful vibe. Stick that on ya CV Neal.

I’ve had the pleasure of hanging with Neal, exchanging back-stories, visions of what our planet can be, and ideas on how to get there. A perfect place to convene our own small counsel of righteousness, and we meet in the square where a thousand Buddhist followers are tuning into the blessings of one of their grand poohbah’s, up there on the video wall like the tea drinking rock star he is.

Neal travelled from Mumbai to Kolkata by train when he was 8, a 2, sometimes 3 day journey, and this is not his first time to Darjeeling. “Baz this is something of a pilgrimage”, he tells me, given his dad passed away recently, leaving an apartment on the edge of the Ganges in Neal and his siblings hands to deal with. Things happen for reasons I always wager, and to get to know my Waiheke brother in this setting is an absolute gift. I can see us conspiring a bit when we get back home, there’s music and connections to be made, stories to be told, work to be done.

Darjeeling reminds me of the mountain settlements I visited in July on motorbike. Towns like Shimla, Manali and Leh, thousands of km’s away on the other side of the sub-continent, but similarly positioned as the mighty Himalaya’s shirt tails. And India never tucks its shirt in. Tangled birds nests of wire carry power and wifi, while exposed pipes carrying what-have-you utilities weave alongside train tracks and roads. It’s so beautifully feral, Mickey Mouse patchwork, completely normal, and reason why half the time shit doesn’t work.

What really bruises my western sensibilities though, Neal’s too, is the sheer amount of plastic waste that’s accumulated on the roadside. Discarded single use plastics are everywhere in the public space, and it begs the Modi government or similar national entity to ramp up and double down on changing that narrative, incentivising recycling re-use, re-thinking packaging, and giving ecology a moral face. Given he’s a right leaning dictator largely celebrated for driving business growth in the worlds fastest growing economy (7% growth this year alone), and the rampant consumerism that partners that drive, I can see India waste deep in plastic filth in just a few years to come … unless ….

It’s already swilling round their ankles. Again it’s a numbers game, there are so many people buying so much plastic. They want what we’ve got, and they want it now.

India’s GDP growth is currently massive. It’s no overnight story, 25 years ago it was 400 billion. This year it’s 4 trillion, and on an exponential trajectory. So also is their pop’n growth, their numbers closing on one and a half billion. They’re obviously a sexually active bunch, I imagine the kama sutra being up there with cricket. They might have just missed out on the cricket world cup (a national tragedy) but they are fast establishing themselves as a demographic and financial superpower. Factor in they’re well provisioned with nukes and a sizeable military, no one anytime soon is going to kick sand in India’s face.

All that aside, it’s a spiritual haven up here in the mountains. and when I least expected it, I have found Jesus. India claim him as their own, the Middle East episode was just that. With a head full of mushrooms (the Essenes were all at, check the Dead Sea scrolls and the academic tome ‘The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross’), JC set out from Galilee, the Haight Ashbury of it’s time, on a pilgrimage to India.

Returning back home they nailed him up and on resurrection he gapped it, wouldn’t you, returning to India and living out his years in the northwest. He’s buried in Srinigar, his grave is there. I first heard this story back in Goa in July, and I’ve had it validated a few times up here. I tell you, India boasts some top shelf saviours.

It has crossed my mind to bypass the nailing bit, and return yet again to the mountains of India, set myself up as a spiritual seer and see out my years here too. I fancy a purple flowing cape, some sparkles on the hem, phone box on site. Everyone’s gonna want a selfie with GuruBaz.

Back in the mortal world, I’m soon to head down the hill, again to Kolkata and close this chapter on my year of worldly adventure. This quick 3 week hit, my own India 2.0, has been another glimpse into not just a Hindu wedding, but another run of interesting new homies, curiosities, reflections and unanswered questions… and yeah, dodgy old lower intestine. 🤮 Squits 2.0 😝

Till next time :)

Five words on high rotate. Everything I’m told here is ‘auspicious’, life in fact, no question, 100%. Especially to do with a traditional Hindu wedding, where the event is much more than the union of two people. It’s an acknowledgement of thousands of years of ancestory, ritual and prayer, predicated on more gods than you can shake a roti at. Come.

My day begins at 4.45 am with a different flavour of saviour, the Muslim call to prayer, an amplified wailing that echoes down the main street of central Rourkela … it’s a voice-only deal that lifts, bends and drops in thirds on the musical scale. The maths is not always that exact, with note sliding and discordant interpretation. Living side by side with Sikh and Hindu belief, the Muslim pop’n here is significant. Their bringing in of the day sounds nothing like western acapella. I wish my neighbourhood would wail more at dawn. Maybe they do, in silence. Might start a trend when I get back, ladder up onto the roof, piss kiwi suburbia right off. Maybe even get away with it under the cover of God. But which one ?

Several nights back, seven married women - as is Hindu tradition, took the brides clothing and jewellery to the temple to be blessed. They were led by a drumming band, and we men followed behind. Ellie was one of their number, a married woman from Glendowie. Tamaki Makaura representing.

The next morning a ceremony called Mehndi. It’s all about applying henna paste, to bring prosperity and good luck. A bit like St Patrick’s day w/out the Guinness, cos everyone’s in green, henna artists adorning the women with their little cake icing bags of the stuff. Exquisite art done at pace. Dancing, food, ear shattering DJ outside under the blazing sun.

We’re learning that events always start late. Like hours later than notified. Turning up on time there is no-one there, so we get chatting with a handful of venue staff, each encounter a rich one, I may make it yet, a chat with everyone in the world.

By the time our bride arrives there’s enough of us present to shower her in marigolds. Punjabi MC drops the bass and we’re thumped into the grass with Bollywood beats, the kids showing the adults up, me channeling my Zumba copycat moves. Around 100 guests come to this shindig, a small gathering of just some of the brides immediate whanau.

Being whitey’s from another dimension, we’re over-people’d and paraded everywhere. There are no other foreigners in this city of 600,000, I’d put money on it. We’re introduced like royalty, delightful and exhausting … I would never wish to be famous, if prey to this kind of constant attention is what becomes of you. It’s great, until it’s not.

That evening the night is given to Bollywood dance karaoke, more costumed splendour and Ellie and I are up on stage following the moves of Amyir, an IT developer from Bengalaru(Bangalore) doing our kiwi best to keep up. I’ve become a bit of a dancing oddity, men my age are not given to cutting up the dancefloor, but given I’m from the west, they cut me some slack; “you have got some very good moves, 100%”, I’m told. They would say that, but no way can I match the moves going down on this auspicious night.

As in Māori tradition where relationships are underpinned with kai, we’re called upon to eat at every instance, dismay and disapproval if we don’t. I’m just on the other side of a round of squits, it had to come, groom Kumar offering “your western bellies are not used to our foods.” No shit Sherlock. I’ve become something of a hesitant eater, but given our hosts don’t eat until we do, gotta do it !

The following morning it’s Haldi ceremony, everyone in yellow, the bride gets to be painted in tumeric paste by all her female homies.

Google tells me ‘Haldi is a cleansing procedure for the bride and groom to be. Its beautiful mustard yellow hue is auspicious in Indian tradition representing a life of prosperity for the couple about to begin their new life together. A common reason why Haldi is used for this ceremony is to rid the couple of Buri Nazar, the Sanskrit term for evil eye.’

This happens in a big yellow and pink tent that’s attached to her parents house, stretches over the road and down the hill on the other side. Cars and scooters drive through the tent, it still being a public thoroughfare. Cows amble through, it’s all nuts.

That evening it’s the actual wedding. The groom arrives with his entourage and it’s a numbers game. Here’s our big fat Indian wedding. He has a busload of homies from his small home village of Tatanagar (named after India’s most famous entrepreneur Ratanji Tata), along with friends and colleagues working in IT from Bengalaru (Bangalore). With a population of 35 million, Bengalaru is known as India’s Silicon Valley, with big presences by Google, Amazon et al. It’s considered something of status to work for the multinational IT groups here, and Kumar (who is also known as Sourav), Shraddha and their Bangalore friends are from another India, they’re english speaking IT professionals, part of an aspirational middle class globally connected. Ellie and I are living proof. There are so many layers to India, it’s complex and my small town NZ lens (cos by comparison NZ’s a small town) cannot fully compute.

100%

Shraddha and Sourav met my Waiheke chum Sean and I outside a Portuguese fort atop a hill in Goa when we were considering whacking through bush back down to our digs, or even back down the road through bush. “No no no”, they said, “there are snakes, it is not safe. Get in the car”. When we tried to pay for the beers after a great afternoon of swapping stories, they bet us to it. “You must come to our wedding” they said, only 12,000 km’s away. Their‘s is a love marriage as opposed to an arranged one, so it has been for them to ‘marry the families’.

Before, back in NZ, Shraddha’s dad Debendra’s on the phone “I will not hear of it, you organising a hotel, it would be our pleasure to host you”. And they have, putting us up in hotels and fronting the bill.

So here we are, the afternoon of the actual wedding. It’s a drawn out process that goes on all sleepless night, and very few guests wait till 4 am when the two actually get to be together in the same room. There is no “now you may kiss the bride” and shouts of elation. There is a lot of blessing of gods and creating of mandela’s, pouring of rice. There is a lot of waiting.

With no sleep we hop on a bus for a bone shaking 5 hr journey to Sourav’s village where days of prep have been put into turning his parents house into a Bollywood set that tonight will host 500 - 700 people. The party never ends. Much feasting and photo’s, very auspicious. This is where the groom’s family receive the bride as their own, in their village. No matter the two have been living together for years in their own apartment in Bangalore, this is Hindu tradition.

My daughter is treated as a princess from another dimension, and when you hang here for a while, you realise that yeah, she is, we are. The que’s for selfies are never ending and one could be mistaken this lavish gig is one big foto opportunity with westerners.

We are celebrated as honoured guests, it’s humbling. And there’s some reciprocity … in a country of just under one and a half billion, to show you have connections, even as tenuous as a 10 sec foto opp with a westerner, well that could help you, your online profile, maybe even get a foot out of the dirt, a rung on the ladder. If nothing else it’s a point of difference, especially in areas we’ve been, where westerners are a rarity. I’m happy to be poster boy to help anyone. If I show up on a sketchy Indian Tinder site, so be it.

Tonight marks the final leg in a week long celebration. In the morning we catch a train back to Kolkata to explore for a couple of days and to rest, if such a thing is even possible in Kolkata, before flying out. Ellie to return home to her husband and children, me to fly north to Siliguri, and then a train up into the Darjeeling highlands. Auspicious as, 100%.

Till next time :)

It’s a family affair, and we’re met on the platform in this city of 600,000. Just a small town by Indian standards.

Bride to be Shraddha (that’s her holding the yellow flowers), her mum and dad, waited for the mighty Gitanjali Express to pull in, it being an hr late. The station before, I’d leapt out and run barefoot down the platform, chasing the Domino’s man Ellie had spotted making off with our pizzas. TrainEats, like UberEats, means you can order ahead for a platform pizza. With stations jammo with people, landing your man with the cheesy specials requires an eagle eye and some deft footwork.

Turns out platform pizza’s an unnecessary move, given the train is full of touts moving up and down the carriage. A procession of men calling out their wares, camp kettles of chai - including one dude sucking his own out of the spout b4 pouring others theirs, yeah nah, wiry chaps selling brushes, combs, scalp massagers, headphones, powerbanks, grains, cereals, curries, blankets, daughters, what have you. It’s a mad social hubub, noisy, jostling and jubilant. Next to us a guy who’s spent 5 hrs talking rapid fire Hindi to his friend, then in a switch to elocuted English talks with Ellie about myocardial infarction’s (heart attacks). Turns out he’s doing his PhD in Germany and is home briefly for a family event, just a quick 35 hrs away in Mumbai. The train is full of colour and character. Indians seem to love stories, exchange thoughts. Heads wobble, hands wave, voices soar, the train rocks, the whole shebang an improv game show. Glorious.

The bulk of the wedding guests arrive in the next two days, so here early we get to spend some one-on-one with star of the show Shraddha. The groom is nowhere to be seen, nor can he be, given wedding rituals. He arrives with his homies in due course, days away yet. For now the couple hang with their mums and dads. As you do.

Out on the street it’s old new rich poor hard easy, same but different to July’s expedition in the Himalayas, when we set out from Delhi with a bunch of biker kiwi’s and english speaking guides.

Rourkela being a steel mill town, is not on the travellers calendar, no surprises then we’re stared at everywhere we go. The only white faces in an ocean of beautiful brown. Our kind live on YouTube, in Hollywood films. We are the west incarnate, whitey empire. Daughter Ellie is like a blonde goddess towering above the locals. All eyes are fixed on her all the time, women and men.

Shraddha is giving us the temple tour, the Hindu gods, the hopes and tropes they hold, beliefs they proffer, reliefs they offer. Spiritual delight hangs off every street vendor, proud shop owner, hotel porter. Stark contrast to we Kiwi’s skimpier nod to the gods. That’s not including our worship chain of All Blacks, property magnates and celebrity bric-a-brac.

If we thought we had costuming for this wedding down we were mistaken. Ellie at least. Women carry out multiple costume changes, blokes not far behind, and she’s swept off by the host team for more fabric and bling, a sari here, a lehenga there, shoes and nails done. This Indian wedding is shaping to be the ultimate catwalk of colour.

Does my head in that we’re rich westerners here for a big fat Indian wedding and it’s wealth, glam and splendour, exhibit A: Us. It just seems righteously wrong that the disfigured and poor are everywhere to be found on the street. That contrast of neighbourly disparity, par for the course rendering it even more heartbreaking. But you know, Brahma, Shiva, Ganesha, the gods love them all. Some are blessed more than others, how many marigolds can u afford.

We’re being hosted at the Regency Inn, just 50 mtrs of broken sidewalk, dust and haze away from the Titanium gym, a place Ellie and I have hit-up 3 times now, working off the big curry outings.

Over the road another wedding’s going off at another hotel, raucous band welcoming in the wedding car.

For our wedding we’ve had a meet n’ greet with one branch of the family tree, more to come tonight. We’ve namaste’d Nani, Nanu, Mami, Mamu and Maasi (below). We’re greeted with open arms and wonder, a welcome curiosity.

More hookup’s tonight, party time and the wedding is yet a couple of days eating and greeting away.

Namaste🙏🏽

Till next time :)

We arrive 1am, into a city sleeping with one eye open. The next morning my eldest daughter Ellie and I step out into a snaking heaving mess of honking, stinking beauty, central Kolkata.

Despite the madness of India earlier this year, my experience then of the full saturation of Delhi life, Kolkata streets still over-ran my senses. And by days end it all just seemed normal again.

It was back in July, Goa in the down season, that my Waiheke homie Sean and I met Kumar and Shraddha (above), a young couple from Bengalaru lining up for a big fat Indian wedding. We were duly invited, Sean can’t come but with a bit of travel fund left I’ve jumped on the plane, daughter in tow and we’re headed their way. Kolkata first, and it’s good to be back in this feast of human celebration.

This city is as intoxicating as Delhi. 15 million people call it home, 23 million if you count the ‘burbs’, though that’s the wrong word for the sprawl of life here. Delhi now clocks in at 32 million. India in total, 1.4 billion. Human rich you could say, we’re everywhere.

Finding our way to the Victoria memorial, Kolkata’s closest thing to the Taj Mahal, we’re swamped with requests for selfies, great opportunities to connect and get a little conversational with those that have some english.

Saddam Kahn (that’s him above with Ellie) just started walking beside us, skipping along instep, a self-appointed street tour guide. Given we were the only white people within hectares of human infill central Kolkata, he stuck to us like a spandex sari. “I like to practice my English, where are you from?” Saddam had joined the team.

Trust is an amorphous 5 letter word. On your own in an unknown sphere, you’ve just got to run with it. Reel it in, cast it out, it’s a game of suss and be sussed, take chances and play safe, be both enthralled and stiffed - maybe hit the jackpot where both happen at the same time.

Our mission is to kit up with outfits for the several days of celebrations that await us. Amongst other things that means Sari’s and Punjabi pyjama’s. Luck has it that Saddam knows just the places. Our new street tout bestie is now in the drivers seat, leading us through the lanes and corridors of New Market, Kolkata’s central sprawl of a thousand stalls and shops, all chasing a sale.

Seems he’s got cousins everywhere, and we’re donkey deep on the sari circuit before we have time to think. There’s ’best price for you Ma’m’ everywhere, and despite protests that we’re just looking, we’re under the knife, financial surgery with 3 trips to the atm, rupee’s bleeding out the wallet. Saddam is a clever man. At 29 he’s still waiting for his parents to find him a wife, and with 7 brothers, he’s got to wait his turn. “My parents will know best”, he says.

Despite India being 80% Hindu, its Muslim population is still the biggest in the world, Saddam and his family helping make up the numbers. He doesn’t read or write but speaks 6 languages. “I learn on the street, I have been doing this for 18 years”. Meaning he’d have been 11 when he first started chatting up tourists. A street kid living off his wits and his street degree in languages and charm. Saddam is the ultimate sales machine, a craftsman instep with opportunity and chance.

Next stop as the sun sets is a rooftop lookout and bar, eight stories up and a view as far as the smog allows. With a promise to meet us at 10 the next morning and take us to the flower market and train station, Saddam’s our man.

Morning comes and we’re all aboard an Ambassador taxi (they’re everywhere, old Morris Oxfords) catching cleanup, the last hour of activity in the Kolkata flower market. Our trusty guide does a check on our train tickets to Rourkela, our wedding destination 8 hrs away. He phones ‘a travel agent friend’ and reveals they are no good, “The train is full”, Saddam says, “you cannot go”. If we give him 2,500 rupees then he’ll organise another ticket and we’re all set. He wants photo’s of our passports. All sounding sketchy and I’m thinking we’ve been snookered. Trust is becoming a four letter word. In my quest for zen I enter that now familiar zone, my internal tussle between admiration of street craft/peace with redistribution of western wealth, and being fckd off at being shafted. Literally in that moment an email comes from booking.com or whatever faceless entity I’d bought the tickets through, confirming the train is full and our tickets are no longer valid. We were only ever confirmed as standby, the train oversold, the money to be refunded. So Saddam is solid. “Never buy the train online” he says, “lot of tourists it happen”.

We buy him KFC (the colonel is everywhere) pay him handsomely for his efforts and he leaves us to the 10 thousand odd people crowding in and around the train station.

We find platform 21, hidden off through a construction maze a km’s walk away, the platform itself about a mile long. The train when it pulls in is not much shorter than that. It’s crossing the continent, heading to Mumbai, 35 hrs away. Our stop, an estimated 8 hrs away, is just down the road.

Howrah Junction train station, Kolkata’s biggest people transit hub, is overwhelming. Beggars, street children (one we spotted deliberately blinded ? for prosperous begging, a known practice), homeless and people in transit, stretched out on concrete steps or wherever there is shade. It’s an intense, distressing, confusing, colour saturated all consuming scene.

Train pulls out and we’re off, next stop weddingville.

Till next time :)

Three days home I’m 65 and my grandson Xavi is dipping his giraffes in the icing, marking his big 3. It’s remarkable how quickly the picture adjusts to a familiar frame.

My kids have made me up a ‘birthday table’, it’s a thing in our family - some photo’s, scrabble, meanings and goodies. Two birthdays on the go.

Shoutout to young chums Roman and Leroy who came round home and cleared the section. Boss effort guys thank U ! Just says kindness and community.

So cool to be back and thank U mum for carking it, the travel fund that selfless act released.

For some greedy sadistic reason I took the money and ran, chasing a touch of insecurity, vulnerability and a quest to test my resilience. Only flirting mind, not the Ukraine or Gaza, and with a debit card and travel insurance. Softboy adventure.

How we humans see and conduct ourselves as individuals and collectives I find fascinating, and that pretty much framed the curiosity.

I chose Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Mexico, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. To stay on my toes I did no research or language prep, planned little so to leap a bit into the unknown and with just me to worry about. Some people’s nightmare but I was ‘yeah let’s do this’ with a side order of ‘you dick… wtf’.

I’ve been known to hit up chums newly returned from offshore with a pincer movement - what did you see and feel while away, ‘what’s the vibe’ and what’s your initial home-take, a day or two in on return ?

Fresh off the plane 1 hr in and you can hear a pin drop on the packed 7am train into the city from Sth Auckland, the cheap way from the airport that we Waiheke locals know. Me thinking ‘what’s behind this elevator silence’ … maybe just super shy kiwi’s not yet awake or it’s just how Akld folks are. Neil Finn’s Crowded House album ‘Together Alone’ springs to mind.

Rugby’s on a roll at the mo and that’s where n’ when kiwi’s cut loose, cheering up a din Together Together wherever there’s a big screen, tap beer or a sausage sizzle. Trifecta if you can manage all 3.

There’s the bright kiwi sunshine, the deep greens and blues of NZ’s landscapes, curbs, footpaths, crater-less roads and tailored infrastructure. The order and obedience of millions of road cones. Can we have like a duck shooting season on cones, thin the numbers? They’re a pest.

I’m super happy to be home, friends, family and familiarity. Some whirlwind visual memories off the cuff :

Foetal position 3 days in, Phnom Penh. Trolley scuttling part-torso men and women begging for money, landmine victims seeking recompense for their loss of limbs. The town of Stung Treng. 3-4 days living off bananas and beer, getting wasted with the police chief and his bad karaoke, alcoholic tuktuk drivers. No english speakers anywhere, languageless in poor dirt towns - Dirt dust diesel corruption and poverty.

Full throttling my hire scooter in Kampot when the Tongan weed dealer suggested a 3-way with me and his buddy, me freshly stoned.

The Vietnam highlands by Honda with my chum Google G, another couple of thousand Kms solo down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Making like Evil Knievel (there is no other option there if you want to emerge with your life), each day a high adrenaline speed trial down the centreline. Made it. More bikes in the Himalayas, India’s absolute intoxication, beautiful people, Hinduism.

Renting bunks in hostel dorms, staying youth-curious, collecting hundreds of new WhatsApp chums.

Bent cops in Mexico, my daughter Lulu joining the fray, her numerous marriage proposals (best being the Iguana farmer). The street fiesta’s that became a feature of Latin America. The publicness of life, the music, food, dance and celebration, street activities part of every day. Motorbikes in Ecuador, mountain bikes in La Paz, mountain climbs in Peru. Mavis joining me on the Inca trail.

Now home I can afford myself a cup of tea, a lie down, some cameo creams but there’s too much interesting stuff to do. I’m already making lists.😆

Since returning some chums have quizzed me on favourite places but I have none.

Landscapes all have their own beauty and borders are physical imaginations that we’ve invented to ringfence our property rights. Lol. Though my passport has stamps I often don’t see ‘countries’, I see people. And people are the thing I find most interesting of all.

There are good buggers everywhere, we just haven’t met them all yet. Connection is everything, and everyone’s stories are rich.

People are magic, simplicity love and humility win the day, sure I’ve got flowers in my hair saying this, and the variety of colour we share as global peep’s has been the winner on the day, each day. I hope to hold onto this now I’m home. That core beauty of who we are and can easily be, is despoiled only by learners that see us and them, rather than simply … us.

I’ve always been attracted to sideways thinkers, the questioners, the ones that view human pomp and progress through a sceptical lens.

Lucky dip favourites for me are population growth, consumption, duplicitous narratives across war and peace, empirical theft and the deregulated financial world. Just a light snack for starters 😝😆😆.

20 odd years ago there were 6 billion of us on the planet, now there’s 8 bill. An exponential increase of that magnitude on a finite planet calls for a systems reboot, but apart from some tinkering around the edges, nothing of significance is likely to change until more things break. I don’t think that’s all bad.

One of the major differences between NZ and the countries I visited, is how we feed ourselves. In developing countries, most dwellings out of central urban areas are surrounded by crops growing, chickens grazing, local walkable markets. Food security 101. Every bit of tillable land terraced and irrigated. People get fit and healthy doing this stuff, fully employed sorting supper. Hopefully Pacha Mama (Mother Nature) comes through with the right balance of rain and sunshine to make it all happen.

Future proofing by being close to the food source. Shows me up, reliant on eftpos and the supermarket trucks gassing up.

So dudes this is prob me on the travel rants for a while, home now, a different focus, sorting shit, earning money, getting fit again, planning next adventure travelling round NZ doing short vid interviews with peep’s on our ‘Hopes, Fears and Good Ideas’ (mentioned it back in blog # 101) I’ll be back in touch re the plan for how to take part, or watch the vids.

If you want to access this batch of travel blogs, the first 30 are here: bazcaitcheon.medium.com and the next 80 odd here: bazcaitcheon.substack.com Eventually I’ll round them up in the same place. They’re also linked on my Facebook page.

How about you guys write your own, maybe start with a trip to the dairy and back, stay observational, there’s colour in every encounter.

Seriously, you should. We’re all creative whether growing food, cooking, writing, making/listening to music, fixing a motorbike, the septic system or playing with our kids..

A final thanks to hanging in with me on this journey, your company has kept me grounded through some classic moments - seriously, and your feedback and comments have helped write them, it’s been a creative collab.

Cheese scones have come out of the oven, Mavis is on it, gotta go. So yeah,

Till next time, cos there’ll likely be one :)

Carlos on reception at Wild Rover took one look at us, “you know this is a party hostel”, our age giving him doubts. “We had a 50 yr old guy give us a bad rating on Trip Advisor cos he couldn’t get any sleep”. I laughed. I’m not your normal 64 yr old maybe, but I love drum n’ bass, can pop some dance moves and fall asleep to Ooonst Ooonst. Carlos wasn’t joking, nor was I. Saving grace was getting our own room rather than beds in the dorms, but given hostel dorms have been half my life over the last 6 mths, the energy spilling out of these has been my oxygen. And they’ve brought me into contact with numerous new chums.

Now 2 nights at the Wild Rover in Huacachina are up and we’re back on the bus, this time heading north to Paracas, on the home stretch before reaching Lima, and then home to NZ.

I’m getting pre-check in emails from Latam Airlines, the Chilean outfit that’s charging me NZ$3.5k for a one way economy ticket home to Auckland - Farrrk. A reminder that this adventure is soon to be over, a little under 6 mths living out of a carry-on bag. Next thing I’ll be pushing a lawnmower around our Waiheke quarter acre, mending the spouting and septic system (again) and hitting on the kids for leaving the kitchen in a mess, the gas tank in the van empty.

There’s two minds about re-entering orbit in NZ. One is a hunger to catch my kids, moko’s and homies, the other a hesitation about facing down the small town NZ familiarity I’d keenly departed.

Arriving Paracas, we’re onboard a big speedboat heading out to ‘the poor man’s Galapagos’. An island of seabirds, sea lions, penguins, crabs and tourists in boats. We tourists are as much a fascination as the sealife, land based mammals blasting round the coastline in a fibreglass shell, the familiar smell of outboard motors and marine diesel. Old man Attenborough has had a lot to say about our anthropology, not all of it complimentary. Bringing lots of us into the awe of the natural world has to be a good thing despite burning fossil fuels to do it ? Jury’s out on that one. Maybe if we sailed or paddled it’d be a more sincere hookup.

Mining is a significant industry in Peru, and the large ships and their tenders provide a counterpoint to the small fishing boats and the numerous ceviche restaurants along the waterfront. Paracas is a small fishing and tourist town, viewed from a couple of kilometres out at sea, an anomaly. Maybe a bit like LasVegas, a perishable habitat dwarfed by the actual landscape, bone dry vegetation-free desert.

Back on shore the hawkers and touts hit us up every 10 secs. ‘No gracias’ may as well be an mp3 loop coming out of my mouth. Occasionally I fold and happily part with dosh to support some of the better acts in feeding their kids. One guitar packing busker stood out from the rest. He strolled the cafes, permanent fixture a cat draped over his shoulder, a machete in his backpack and a ‘fck you’ tattoo etched across his face.

A hard disposition softened by wearing a kitten. I think we should all take to wearing kittens. Could go a long way towards world peace. Not so sure about the machete or the Tatt. Room for improvement on presentation but definitely 10 points for the kitten.

I guess I’m in surrender mode now, on the home straight, and Mavis n’ I find ourselves in a backstreet cafe decked out in rasta colours, reggae beats and I spot the pounamu one of the staff has around her neck. Gold ! I show her mine and 10 secs of speed dating reveals the owner of the best cafe in Paracas ‘Waiki’, is a kiwi woman. Cata (her in the selfie below) is another Peruvian coming to stay at ours when she gets to NZ. I want the world to come.

And now Lima, it’s my third time here, a hub between my challenging trekking adventures in Peru’s north and the capital T tourism exploits south, since Mrs C joined in.

For a final hurrah Meg n’ I decide on a Lima night out at Teatro Barranco (live theatre) and take our seats as likely the only non Spanish speaking audience members for a ‘Muy Muy Muy libre’ (very liberal) rendition of Romeo and Juliet. Given Latin America is given to grand gesture, this version, delivered onstage by just 2 actors, was out of the park funny, gesture compensating for that lost in language. Melodrama, farce, stand up comedy, audience participation… loved it.

For better or worse, too many late night pisco sours and shots back at the hostel bar, more WhatsApp homie pickups (I now have Hundreds of new best friends … what have I done) and it’s going to be a hangover in the morning for my all-time favourite destination(not), the airport.

Till next time :)

“The Spanish cleaned Bolivia out of silver, Peru out of gold, and that’s the reason you have passports and money to come here and I am your guide serving you”, said our Peruvian guide Edgar, (that’s him in pic above), as he gathered us around on his walking tour of central Arequipa.

Not his exact words but pretty close, we western tourists effectively being the downstream results of that colonial theft.

He was starting to piss me off a bit, marching our group around expensive tourist merchandising, part of his job as tourist guide, the fine microns of llama wool, the even finer prices on the sweaters that none of us bought.

But when he unleashed his political passion about Peru’s history, he got me. Go Edgar.

And his llama data was interesting, I learn that if you injure or kill one while driving in a National park, you get a 4 yr jail sentence and hefty fine, no exceptions. Harsh. A similar punishment was meted out to a film director up in Machu Picchu when his cameraman’s equipment fell over and chipped a historic rock on the top of the village. 4 yrs inside.

Punishment is popular here, there must be a fall guy… again a similar theme on Peruvian breakfast TV where perpetrators of crime are brought in front of the camera’s in handcuffs to appease the nations righteous need for deliverance. Catholic Jesus effigies of suffering and penance are big here, so I guess it all makes sense.

“Cest la vie” was Edgar’s outro, referencing historical theft and the culture of punishment. We all tipped him around 10 soles (NZ$5) and moved on to explore the city some more.

Arequipa, population 1 million, is Peru’s second largest city. Once again we’re holed up in a hostel adjacent to the old quarter, in the midst of safe streets and comfy cafes. And plenty of churches. It seems pretty affluent in comparison to other parts of Peru. Until like anywhere, you reach the outer suburbs. Then it’s down to dust, dirt, questionable housing and people living hand to mouth.

Meg nosed off into a 16th century high walled monastery that though open to the public, has spaces still home to a number of ‘cloistered nuns’, members of a religious order that strictly separate themselves from the affairs of the external world. Where can I sign up, sounds like a nice hideout from life’s complexities 😆 A week should do it.

Me I went wandering with my finger on the trigger of my phone’s camera. I’m intrigued by people, their faces, clothes, stance, how they hold themselves in public. Some of the pics I take are posed, I start a conversation in bad español, do my 10 sec charm chat-up and all good. Other times I just go guerilla, walking down the pavement snapping oncoming peep’s as they pass.

Often people clock me doing it, I make no excuses as capturing people in their natural state is what I’m trying for. Some people are uncomfortable with this approach, it’s theft, invasion of privacy. I think the years I worked in reality TV did some damage to my morality and ethics. However you see it, here they are, a gallery of ‘People of Arequipa’, passing faces on inner city streets:

Early next morn we’re off on a 15 hr bus ride to Huacachina, an artificial few streets of hostels and hotels, it’s own funny little fun park of bars and hawkers, centred round a smelly pond and a bunch of very high sand dunes.

First stop is a desert bakery, ham n’ cheese rolls straight from the oven. A+ breakfast!

We ride through hours and hours of desert. A lot of Peru is just that, rock and desert, and I’m always buzzed to see villages pop up wherever there is a water source, a spring, a river down from the mountains, and boom, fields and fields of crops and fruit trees. Emerge from miles of rock, sand and nothing, then suddenly there’s a lush green valley full of food. Half a km up the road and we’re back to desert again.

The morning dawns on Huacachina, this strange little oasis in the desert. Weird.

Like many towns, there’s no shortage of men’s busts on plinths - it’s a fairly patriarchal scene. Latin America seems mostly a man’s world, a women’s role being subject to that accord, whether to look hot n’ sexy or dig the potatoes, and the more even handed kiwi norm I was raised in rests a bit easier when I come across a woman’s head on a plinth. Balance the books a bit.

Mostly though, Huacachina is a party town for peep’s who want to play in the dunes. Namely hooning around in dune buggies or surfing down the ridges on sandboards. I’d normally be into the latter but tonight, watching the sun go down with Mavis from up on one of the desert’s ridges, well that’s me. Must be going soft.

Till next time :)

Last night in Arequipa, Sth Peru, I ran into 3 of my homies from the hostel I stayed with in Huaraz, northern Peru, the place I climbed out of my depth at over 5,000 mtrs and ran short on oxygen.

They’re Israeli, my childrens age, younger, and naturally distressed about what’s going on in their homeland. One of them has lost a friend in the recent attacks. They seemed sad rather than angry.

There were a lot of young Israeli’s in Huaraz, this is 3 weeks ago, before this recent round of Palestinian/Israeli violence. I hung out with them, became like a hip travel dad, older brother, friend, whatever. Lots of WhatsApp swaps and promises to come and stay at ours on Waiheke Island.

Some were kicking free after 18 mths of compulsory military training with the Israeli Defence Force, some kicking free before they entered. None I spoke to wanted to fight, and all were cognisant of both sides of the story. My new chums were uncomfortable talking about it, but we did, and I listened eagerly cos I wanted to understand their perspective on this situation they’ve inherited.

I would put the ones I chatted with at the progressive end of their countries political spectrum - they realise the situation is incendiary, and largely support a two state solution, the original edict handed down historically by the British last century, and supported by the UN to this day.

They carry fear, knowing rockets fire at their country from Palestinian enclosures, but aren’t in favour of their military’s heavy handed responses, even when they are called up as reservists to be part of it.

Their thoughts don’t reflect the hefty payback narrative I’m seeing on mainstream media here in Peru, eg CNN. Very interesting.

Some have Palestinian chums they’ve grown up with - fully nationalised 2nd or 3rd generation Israeli citizens, living, studying and working alongside them in Israel. It’s hard for them to accept their leaders hard talk, that Palestinians ‘aren’t humans, just murdering animals’. Whew, what a mess.

The girls I caught up with last night though saddened by the recent ramping up of hostility, did not seem surprised.

I worry that Shakked, the 21 yr old woman I befriended who had 4 mths reprieve from the military for her south american holiday, will be called back early to take command of her regiment of women soldiers. She was adamant she did not want to fight. She’s just a girl 😞 Thats her with me in below photo … Fck sake.

These young Israeli’s are largely unimpressed with the hardline leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. I bet they’re even more unimpressed now given the surprise attacks that just happened cos Israeli intelligence normally prides itself on being ahead of the game.

Though I find the plausibility of both Mossad and the IDF being asleep on their feet hard to believe. There could be more here at play, manufacturing consent for Israel and its backer USA to finish off the job of genociding the Palestinians, weakening sympathiser nations like Iran, Russia and China in the process. Good luck with the latter - they manufacture the arms for America … what if they choose to stop selling to their customer? … think the Taiwan situation, American warships in the South China Sea. It pays to peel the onion a bit, like this commentator does :

Simplicius's Garden of Knowledge

War strategies, geopolitical analysis, SitReps, and discussions.

By Simplicius The Thinker

I’ve barked on before about the need for old (mostly white) men to get out of the way, this predominantly being the demographic that have led the world to where we are now. Thanks guys, take a bow, times up. Greed, power, control, property rights big and small, dated ‘us and them’ views on how humans should move the pieces round the chessboard, these developments predicate your legacy.

Our legacy, cos I’m in that demographic too, a white tail-end male boomer. Creating a degree of separation from this peer group, my own subset, has been part of my life’s work.

I’m emboldened by most of the youth I come across in my travels. Like me they’re travelling cos they’re curious, want a bigger picture, some adventure, new horizons. Likely because of this they’re more often than not aware, and question the current political system’s in place. Good. I’m thinking they haven’t had the same time on earth to drink the decades of homogenous media Kool aid we older trouble makers have, that coupled with the fact they’re digital natives and able to be well informed if they choose to be, they can see alternative perspectives and pathways to navigate the future. Thank god someones working on it.

There’s some lesser investigative Jr’s in there too, 18yr old’s holding conservative views before their time, buying into the right wing reactionary frameworks proffered by their less progressive tutors. Always an easier option to go with the flow.

I get that, I’m there also at times, either too exhausted, freaked, comfortable, defensive or rigid to question.

And I’ve always loved the 80 yr old 18 yr olds - i had a Wellington yoga teacher once in that demographic, twinkle in her eye, forever young. Interestingly enough, Jewish, with a concentration camp # tattoo’d on her wrist - yep a girl that survived captivity in WW2. She also played and taught the violin … at her age ! There’s hope yet in our ageing sagging flesh, boomers - let’s get with the play. It begins by reshaping a lifetime of set narrative that is likely a bit bankrupt now. Ouch.

And wasn’t it that ageing sagging boomer Bob Dylan that once said, “if you can’t lend a hand then get out of the way” ? …  😝😝 Time to take some ‘shrooms and stand in front of the mirror. More than medicinal, likely transformative, like going back to Uni only more insightful. I live in hope.

Not finished yet 🤣

Our raping of each other and of each others stuff, whatever moniker that’s always carried, empire, communism, capitalism, from Ghengis Kahn to Wall st, has now tripped the natural world, the one we’re reliant on for food and oxygen.

So chilling out is not just a matter of negotiation between we humans, like what ideally needs to happen in the middle east, but must factor in animals birds fish waterways soil insects, orchards, forests etc.

Huge challenges needing fresh energies and approaches. I used to have a lot to say about how wretchedly Oliver Twist our outdated high schooling is or hopefully, was. At our local high school now, one of the youngest members on staff is the Principal. That’s more like it. I’m yet to hear a bad word about him from his client base, ie the students. This is what needs to happen globally - now. Our youth need to take the helm.

One more adjective packed sentence and I’m done 😊

My heart goes out to my young Israeli friends, their young Palestinian friends, their families, and every family around the world that is under-served and overrun by media backed overprimed power stacked controlling, dull minded puffed up delusional competitive war mongering dick measuring misinformed ageing men in suits, whose use-by narratives have all slipped under the radar on the banana skin’s of yesterdays hopes and dreams. Stick a fork in ‘em, we’re done.

(ok that was 2 sentences)

Till next time :)

Ps: if you want some history on the Israeli-Palestinian situation, why recent events have manifested, this article is a good starting point, might need to paste it into your browser if hyperlink doesn’t work:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/9/whats-the-israel-palestine-conflict-about-a-simple-guide

World famous in Bolivia is the suitably titled Death Road. Built in the 1930’s to link La Paz with the Amazon jungle, it used to claim 200 - 300 lives a year. It still claims a few annually, but with a new highway built several valleys away, numbers are down… it’s not used by as many vehicles anymore.

So it’s 7am, the bus rolls up bikes on the roof and we’re off. Coca tea in a cafe on the edge of LaPaz followed by a woman trying to sell me sheep’s hearts in brine at a roadside stall. A fit for purpose mountain biking snack.

We bus up into the Andes at 4,600 mtrs, and begin tweaking the bikes for our 70 km downhill ride. Changing brakes from one side to the other, seat height etc. It’s cold and we’re told by the end of the day it’ll be swelteringly hot, dropping to a mere 1,000 mtrs above sea level.

Our first few kms are on tarmac, a shakedown before we hit the gravel. When we do, the weather sets in and we’re riding in cloud, the road rocky and rough, 3 mtrs wide at best in the sketchy areas, with 1,000 ft drop-off’s. We can’t see these cos of the cloud mist, visibility is limited. I fixed my iPhone to the handlebars to take some vid …

On a clear day (footage nicked from their promo vid), the ride is supposed to look like this …

Blasting down thousands of metres in altitude on a bike, from the Andes to the lush steamy heat of the Amazon was an absolute trip. The deep indigenous features in peoples faces become more pronounced. At the end of our ride there was, would you believe it, a swimming pool, cold beers (the two lads from Aussie and I very happy bout that), and a big shared banquet. I have another bunch of WhatsApp homies coming to stay on Waiheke, like Sara who works in conservation in Guatemala, and Yohann from Paris. Christian, Luis and Willy from Bolivia. Souls often connect quickly when you’re travelling, sometimes ships in the night, sometimes more.

Mavis had different ideas, opting for a cable car to El Alto, an outer fringe town perched high overlooking its bigger sibling, La Paz. There’s a network of cable cars/gondola’s around this steeply ridged city, red, yellow, purple, blue and silver. It’s pretty flash for a poor city, the kind of thing more in situ in the Swiss alps. As part of a city tour, Meg’s guide informed her they were built by former president Evo Morales, to give residents in the poorer outer suburbs easy access to the central city. How cool.

Her tour included a cemetery - which was look but don’t touch … there’s been some skull theft, it’s a thing, you keep grandads skull on the mantle piece, and there’s a black market in skulls, not just granddads. They stack the bodies up in burial apartment blocks, great use of limited urban space. Grandma’s 4 floors up, get out the ladder.

Skulls are an offering to PachaMama(Mother Earth). Bolivian’s do an equivalent to Mexico’s Day of the Dead, where they have fiesta in the cemetery, big party-up, November 2nd, put it in your calendar. Imagine if we danced round our cemeteries letting off fireworks, toasting our ancestors like Latin America does, turning burial and cremation spaces into happy places, bringing our past loved ones back to life.

The foetus of a llama is placed under a new home also as a payment to PachaMama, and to bring protection - word has it that a llama foetus is not enough for big commercial buildings, and homeless people are gotten really drunk, snuffed and buried in the foundations to same effect. Eeek.

Pig foetus’s - both early gestation and just before birth with full fur etc, are good for new years offerings and represent prosperity. In the markets there are kitsets for sale of burners, wood and dried llama and pig foetus’s, all set for pop-up shop shamanic rituals. Spirituality has a different lens in Bolivia.

Señor Carlos almost sold me a beautiful nylon string handcrafted Bolivian hardwood guitar the other day, (NZ$250, a steal), it spoke to me, “take me with you Baz, I could be so good for you”. I didn’t. 🥲 I’m in his shop again today getting a repair to my cheapie charango I bought in Lima. He’s gold, speaks no English and I could hang out in his tienda(shop) all day, playing the amazing array of instruments.

Musical instruments always capture me, whether I’m having a crack at playing one, or taking in others playing. No matter how competent we might feel we become at the instrument, you realise that the tool will always own you, that you actually know nothing, are merely beginning the journey. Music is beauty and it’s in the streets of Latin America every day.

And would you believe it, tonight beginning around dusk, right beneath our hotel window, yet another street parade of brass bands, rock bands, fireworks processions and proclamations. It went on till 5 am.

Darcy on reception (Bolivians have all renamed themselves, Wendy, Eric, Joanna, Stephen etc - maybe just for we Gringo’s), tells me that the hotel and church next door, one and the same, are celebrating their 25th anniversary, and that’s cause for todays party - any reason will do, these guys can’t help themselves. Several thousand show up to this one, street shut off to traffic, hundreds lasting the distance till dawn. I think it could be this stuff that knits a people together. From Mexico to here in Bolivia, calenda’s (street fiesta’s) have been incessant, literally every day Latin America finds something big to celebrate in public. Of course it’s about population mass. But imagine if in NZ, the USA, the UK etc, energy spent on divisive pissing competitions like elections, was spent on this big inclusive street stuff I see here. Or even better if elections were all-in street parades and parties, a fortnight of celebrations rather than showpony TV squabbles. The peep’s with the best dance moves or trumpet solo’s get the seats in parliament. That’d sort the talent from the pretenders. You never know, dancers and musicians could likely make the best calls for the country, worth a punt. And dudes this is coming from me with an economics degree and 30 odd years of reading smoke n’ mirrors mag The Economist.

Anyway let’s finish this blog on a top tucker experience. I’m never much of a gastronome, food is fuel. I can’t get excited about overpriced food as art; hometown Waiheke is swimming in it and mostly I’m keen on a cheese toastie, filled roll, a burger n’ chips, maybe splash out on a lamington or a curry from Indy’s in Erua rd.

Bolivia is cheap, and for NZ$25 each, Mr. Baz turned a page - but just for a day. Mavis and I had the ponciest lunch I’ve ever experienced. I even took foto’s of it making me a class A social media tosser. Which I kind of have become anyway with these man-o-grams. It didn’t end well, as too much rich food tipped both our digestive systems into panic, and it’s taken a day of fasting to settle shit down. From here on it’s back to the ever present peasant offering of rice, potatoes and chicken, food for the masses, a fraction of the price and available everywhere in Sth America.

Till next time :)

Lake Titicaca is the highest navigable lake in the world. Surviving the night bus from Cusco to Copacabana, we jumped on board a boat to get to Isla del Sol (the island of sun), birthplace of the first two Inca kings and their temple that still stands, from the 15th and 16th centuries.

We’re at 3,900 mtrs, and climbing up through the donkeys, I’m getting a wee bit of a puff on despite being on the right pills.

A few blogs back I mentioned getting to 5,300 mtrs on an ice face climb in north Peru and going dizzy and stupid through lack of oxygen. Turns out I was taking pills to remedy clamydia and syphilus, not the altitude sickness ones … good to know I wasn’t going to get the pox at 5,000 mtrs, but no help at all on my oxygen intake … some insect repellent had leaked and made labels bit hard to read on my travel meds 😆 … bum steer, a second look and a google search pinpointed my mistake. Apparently those pox pills also work on malaria - that’s why they’re in my kit. Too hasty on the meds Baz.

Some peep’s love night buses, they’re not my fave. I never sleep, meaning the next days screwed cos I’m knackered, and you miss the amazing diorama of geography that rolls by the window, the exact thing one comes to catch. Still, lucky to be travelling, first world problem. We had to disembark and cross a section of lake Titicaca in a sketchy fizzboat while the bus went sans us, on a barge.

Meg n’ I have bought tickets on PeruHop(which now we’re in Bolivia has become BoliviaHop). A bit like Kiwi Experience busses in NZ, buy a round trip tkt and hop on/off wherever it suits. They pickup and drop off from your hostel, one less hassle re hiring local cabs, hanging round bus terminals with little useful español and generally being lost in the carryon. Way safer late at night, easier too.

Back to Isla del Sol and the Inca story, these guys were boss of the beach in the America’s for a surprisingly short time - 95 years, before they were rolled by the Spanish. They had three laws: Don’t be a thief, don’t tell lies and don’t be lazy. Guess that covers the range, if you kill someone you’re stealing their life. I especially like the last one. Maybe it was my calvinist presbyterian small town NZ upbringing, but I’ve always had mad respect for people that work hard at something they believe in. And with no Pakn’Save or dole back in Inca days, you built shelter, tilled the soil, tended crops or went cold and hungry. Don’t mistake my politics though, I know people that work their arse off, and not for their own self aggrandisement. Do we see me, or do we see we ? And how big is our radius of ‘we’?

Isla del Sol was at the time, all blokes. A few kms across the lake lies the Isla del Luna, and this was all women. Blokes were taught building, terracing, channeling agua(water) and cropping, women how to knit, cook and be mums. God knows how many ‘immaculate conceptions’ happened across that span of water … get the tides right and you could be in. Didn’t pay to be born pretty back then, cos if you were a fetching female, you got paddled across to bloke island to be sacrificed for the sun gods. Apparently the gods liked the babes. Brutal.

So here we are in LaPaz Bolivia, altitude 3,625 mtrs, population 2 million. A colourful political history, a functioning democracy with a leaning to the left, wise move given the majority are poor and not averse to throwing their toys when they can’t feed themselves. Wouldn’t you ? Driving in through the outskirts last night, scenes more feral and poor than I’d witnessed in Peru.

Currently the country, like Peru, is in long drought, fields are getting tilled and prepped but no rains yet to germinate crops, the soil is dry and dusty. Bring on the shamans, these guys take raindances seriously, it’s whether they eat or not.

Hotel Isabella in LaPaz is Bs(bolivars)$231 for two nights, including breakfasts (which are amazing, espesh the chocolate pudding of Waiheke artisan snob restaurant upper crust blow-your-visa standard). That equals NZ$55 for a private room with own bathroom - for two nights.

I’ve upgraded my digs since Mavis arrived, none of this sleeping in dorms school camp styles. I tell you, we’ve moved up to 3 star hotels, developing country styles. No expense spared 😆😆. Hostels here can be more expensive than hotel accom. I have a theory … peep’s want connection which hostels provide, rather than be locked away in an isolated hotel box, maybe an exchange with fellow travellers in the foyer or restaurant, but lacking in intentional social spaces where you can network the house from around the world, be fully part of a heaving travelling tribe. This is a good sign … seeking connection.

On the TV in our hotel room, some topless female wrestlers with painted breasts are standing before a Judge Judy and a studio audience, having it out in spanish as to who is the most aggrieved … or some such … just nuts.

Back home I see the voices are getting louder re NZ elections, everyone has an opinion, seems there’s some strong feelings running. I remember my first ever blog a few yrs back saying ‘It’s like once every 3 yrs the country politically menstruates — moods tip, blood flows, then realising we’re not pregnant, we pick up the pieces and move on.’

I’m a bit out of the chain on this one, but Meg n’ I will sort an o/seas vote. I’ve thought for some time now that the big levers of power and influence are not held by government, that’s more a Punch and Judy show, passionate and often well intentioned - people’s beliefs and values. But there’s not much government can really influence in a small country like NZ which is in economic terms, a ‘price taker’. Maybe the narrative, you know, the shiny spiel - worthy and October-shiny, enough to get over the line. Or mean, vapid payback sort of thing. Yeah nah.

Follow the money to the global wealth, entities like Blackrock and Vanguard, and their lapdog courtiers and enablers like Goldman Sachs, and you might be getting closer to the axis of actual power. That shit doesn’t just trickle down to NZ, when they choose to release those data packets, it waterfalls, and unless you’re on the right side of the ledger, often not in a nice way.

Not until those behemoths are split into bits will we see any righteous return of democracy or actual power to our citizenry. Of course a financial meltdown will bring most of how we live in our mod-cons world of privilege to its knees too, and we’ll all be cropping and tilling the soil, running a tab with the elements. Gardening’s a great hobby, might come the day we need to ramp that up.

Yep political stoush is a weird tunnel of love, a bit of shadow puppetry, candidates in drag, lippy, manicures and canary yellow culottes. Rob Muldoon types guesting on the Rocky Horror show, shits and giggles.

Want change? Chase the real power. Get your hands dirty serious fraud office styles and go after those big time global Rupert’s. I know, too hard, and the cookie cutter fit for purpose dialogue box that is the NZ elections, is as participatory a sport as catching an All Black test. Everyones guessing the score. Better I suppose than the winner takes all dictatorships I’ve seen in some of the country’s I’ve visited.

Anyway where’s Jesus when U need him, did he get the memo ? He could come blazing in on a racing mule, head full of shrooms, torch the money-mangers, kick over the moneylenders tables - again, then get the fck outta Dodge before the media nail him up. I dunno. But I’ve got a fair idea where our sickness lies. Just join the dots brethren, then work out how we can activate a few how do you say, ‘market corrections.’ And if we don’t get to it first, natural forces likely will. Mother nature’s stepping out of the wings.

A great metaphor for our elections perhaps, a sign in the toilet of an Irish pub in Peru pasted below. I’m particularly humoured by the images on the left. A reminder to laugh, smell the roses and have a beer with your neighbour, cos no matter how this reality TV election show rolls, we’ve all still gotta get on. Connection is what it’s about don’t you think ? There’s not a hell of a lot that seperates us when U zoom out. 🫶🏼

Till next time :)

I’ve never been big on Tourism with a capital T, expensive ques endless presentation of passaportes, being herded like cattle, but I came out of this one I think relatively unscathed - a new experience.

Our guide Jorge (pronounced ‘whore-hay’) was a passionate and funny man. “The Spanish were able to over-run the Inca Empire by recruiting the lower cast of the time, effectively the worker ants and slaves of the Inca.” These people spoke Quechua, a language still spoken in some rural areas today, different to the Inca dialect, and were effectively given the right to live and serve a different master, the Spanish. “They had to convert to the Cath-holic church, give up their pagan rituals and join forces in toppling the Inca … it worked”, said Jorge.

Machu Picchu was Megs idea. I’d invited her to join forces with me for the last 3 wks of 6 mths away. It’s a funny old game this being married near 30 yrs and then being apart 5 mths, totally recommend it. The latter bit that is 🤣. I’d taken the night bus from Huaraz about a week ago, when I did my last post, dropping 3,000 mtrs to meet Meg off her flight from NZ. WhatsApp and live video make a mockery of distance, but fantastic to link arms with my best friend and do some exploring together.

Cusco is another altitude city, 3,400 mtrs, over 4 times the size of Huaraz, and the starting point of the Picchu experience. From there via train to Aguas Calliente prices jump by the metre. You enter a Venus fly trap and haemorrhage US$. But you know that before you enter the bullseye, the goose that lays Peru’s golden egg, the jewel in their tourist crown. You just gotta lie back, take it up the arse and think of Jesus. Do your bit for redistribution of wealth to a developing country. If your wallet doesn’t reach that far don’t go. There’s loads of Peru off the tourist trail - like Huaraz in the north, that’s a fraction of the price and awesome.

I’d visa’d up a nice little package of train/bus/accom/Picchu tckts and guide cos I just needed to stop juggling each variable separately - the cheapest way and my normal modus-operandi.

And I wanted to speed-date the goss from back home with my messenger wife. You know, what’s the vibe of my country, hometown, family, our vibe. Time Out to touch base.

In the end, actually getting Picchu tickets was yes, more hrs of queuing, as was getting on the train, various busses, entry into the remains of the once-was terraced village of 500 odd peep’s in the 15 th century Machu Picchu. They do 4,000 tourists a day through those hilltop ruins, was 8,000/day before Covid.

Back up the bus a bit - coming down from north Peru to meet Meg I’m about to book a ‘Rapido’ nightbus to Lima when bongbuddy Roberto from my Huaraz hostel catches me “No, no Baz you will die, they are loco, they overtake everything, pass on blind corners, their busses are crashing!”

Rapido (the name fits) are cheaper and faster. Peru has one of the highest road tolls per capita in the world. Extreme drivers here, more the rule rather than the exception, have to be in front, they’re like heading dogs. Breakfast TV has footage of yet another bus crash on some mountain pass, every second day. So I choose the ‘Cavassa’ bus, left at 10.30 pm, got into Lima 8.30 am. Weather’s good, Meg’s flight checks out, Lima turns on a blue sky day and the police are down on the beach training their lifeguard squad, sweet deal, join the police and go swimming, aqua cops with gills and packing spearguns - swim outside the flags and you likely get it between the ribs 😆.

Cusco, like lots of Peruvian cities, is square dwellings, brick and terracotta, pecked into the hillsides. There’s a big effigy of Jesus on top of the hill, of course there is. He’s fenced off from the public by a big fence topped with barbed wire. Oh the irony.

Seems everywhere I’ve gone in Latin America, there’s big public celebrations, mostly involving street parades, parties, fireworks and loud brass/flute/drumming bands. Cusco and Machu Picchu are no exception. Their main annual fiestas coincided with our visits to both, talk about luck. Latino cultures, like in India find any excuse to costume up and hit the streets. I love this shit, it totally brings to the fore our collectivity, community, belonging, purpose, value bla bla, smoothes the rough edges for a while between winners and losers, you know, those of us without property rights and those with, the servants and the served.

Cusco fireworks are insane, locals dancing underneath the showers of sparks, the indigenous relationships with fire, summoning the gods with colour and explosion.

I find myself playing a charango, an indigenous 10 string instrument, again I find myself asking ‘donde esta atm?’ and my ukelele now has a 10 string sister.

Aguas Calliente is a sliver of a village tucked between rock faces, a river streaming through the middle and packed with cafes and accomodation. It’s where a train ride takes us to and it’s the launching pad for must-do Machu Picchu. Sure enough they’re in party mood, and it’s festivity overload, each district/community flying their banners in front of the crowd.

Last night they built a big stage on the soccer field (they’ve squeezed one in the valley, a must have for every village) and we experienced one hell of a Peruvian showband. Musical virtuosity has humbled me many times since arriving in Mexico. I wish I had video’d the whole gig cos they just got better, everyone on stage stepping fwd to take their turn in blowing us all away. Not sure I got the best song below, but check it out, along with a few vids of the street parades.

This eve we jump on a nightbus in Cusco that gets us into LaPaz 26 hrs later, pack a spare pair of y-fronts Baz, the joys of travel. At this very moment Mavis and I are enjoying a drink in an Irish pub on the plaza, and wondering just how the next couple of weeks are likely to unfold cos right now we haven’t a clue ☝🏽.

Rural Peru is agrarian, and the gardener in me would love to hang a bit and quiz them on their tricks - hewing plump crops out of stony slopes. Potatoes, beans, peas, strawberries, pollo (chicken), goat, hamster, what have you. There’s a long history, some backstory.

Peru’s home to the Inca empire, one of the globes six cradles of civilisation, dating back 15 millennia. That’s a long time, by contrast the Jesus story seems just last week.

On the coast, 100 km north of Lima, you’d have found Norte Chico, the oldest civilisation in the Americas.

Fast fwd to the 16th century when the Spanish snuffed the Inca’s and looted the house, various battles resulting in independence since.

Huaraz is nestled in the mountains, also north of Lima, and not so far from that earliest civilisation. It’s like a slice of yesterday, reaching for today. People of Huaraz, the town I’m in for one more day, have a deeper Inca intensity in their faces, not as Spanish as the mix of character in Lima. Highland Indians are predominant with ancestral lines back to pre-Columbian times. The satellite towns we drive through travelling to mountain treks, the new and old, their casa’s, man if those walls could talk.

166,000 odd people live in Huaraz, main activities being agriculture, mining, trade and tourism. It’s known as a ‘noble and generous city’, a title earned based on their support of the Liberation Army, stumping up food and guns, in the fight for independence 1821.

Huaraz is home to people like Miguel who makes the best pepito’s from his street cart, Matilde running her ceviche and beans back-bunker restaurant. I had a pepito and 3 sweet black coffee’s to finish off last night at Miguel’s. No sleep after that. I’m part of the scene on his corner now, see’s me coming and he’s already got the ingredients on the grill. Noble and generous these two definitely are.

I’ve passed slivers of stores, workshops woodworking, metalworking barely wide enough for a person to enter, craftsmen señors old school cabinetmakers, some fully pimped out with dropsaws, the smell of sawdust and pva, arc welding fumes, all packed into a 1.5 mtr hole in the wall. Hardware hole in the wall stores selling taps, washers, like 1960’s/70’s NZ, before we got Mitre10 Mega where every screw is sheathed in plastic. Original merchandising, artisanal craft, raw open and honest.

Riding the city in a collectivo is a gas, 2 solos ($1) and you swing into a vehicle, Hiace vans are big with maybe 20+ others, people embarking and disembarking at random, you wave one down, they stop anywhere go anywhere.

Roberto my hostel homie, was a lawyer for 2 yrs, thought fck this and went travelling, now delights in running the hostel, lotsa peeps through. His country is determined, his people work hard he tells me. “A lot of history here, people are very kind in Peru yes we have our problems but I like my country. If they weren’t so obsessed with religion, the cath-holic religion, it would be a better place.” Santa Maria is everywhere true, a saint for all sins, bases covered, but not a selling point for Roberto.

Hostel life is whacked. Russian, German, Venezuelan, Israeli, you name it. Swapping notes, speed dating. Less than swanky would describe a bunch I’ve been staying at, bohemian/funky definitely, odd cold showers and questionable utilities. Once or twice a la de da job but it’s not about the spiv, it’s bout connection. Pop-up families on the move, amorphous venn diagrams of travelling tribes.

Jack’s from Minnesota, wants to trek what’s normally a guided group thing through the Andes in 8 days, on his own. Boy Scout styles with a map and a compass if he has to, go Jack.

A table across, peep’s have gone in together on a pack mule for such a trip, 8 solos (NZ$4) a day plus feed. Which they have to buy and the mule has to carry. Not every day you get the chance to rent a mule. Hopefully a happy one not an emo ass.

Afik is from Israel, teaching us card games, we’re all in, I’m onto the big bottles of local beer to get my oxygen levels up and we’re TravelPak speeddating, swapping experiences. I think I’m possibly a hostel junkie, u can pick us, we have a hostelfit flow.

Last night stepping into a restaurant I spotted the promo board out front, hampster in gravy on a bed of spuds. A Peruvian staple. My tummy still a bit squiffy from the days altitude climb, I wandered another block and discovered a pizza and stabilising porter. Gonna have to work up to the hamster.

Till next time :)

Nevado Mateo stands 5,150 mtrs tall and today I got seriously drunk on its slopes. Lack of oxygen had me silly as a chook and I wobbled back down the mountain like an adult student that’s let himself go at the Orientation pissup.

Seriously, I got as fckd up today as ever I got in the Himalayas at high altitude. More troppo than my trek a couple of days back. My well abused lungs were pushing through the gears, and as I write this I’m still a bit light headed. Partway up the slope, we’re roped together, and I try to speak to Isa, directly beneath me. “Merr armbroy gurn err mugmy eelevvening”, I was asking if they were having breathing challenges, but burble came out, I couldn’t control it. Can’t at the best of times, but this was truly DIC.

When I was 14, I scampered up Mt Taranaki, 2,500 mtrs. But the boy’s a bit older now and how is the air up there? Thin as a tight deli-owners bacon slicer. Shit that’s deli-ist. See I’m still Deficit O2 Drunk. DOD … quite like it actually.

Yam Piet picked us up in the trek Safari and took us back to his for a fitting. Boots, helmets, gloves, crampons, the whole 9 yards. This was last night, and as we left around 8 pm, he reminded us of the 3 am pickup. Thinking an early night’s best, the town however has other ideas. It’s fiesta in the streets, graduation from the local university, past yrs alma mater joining in the procession. Similar to the calenda fiesta in Mexico, another university celebration, i guess the latino variation on the now very New Zealand Tame capping parade.

Celebration Peru styles is a more hesitant letting go, no cases of mezcal being shot, no fat doobies of Chihuahua Gold being passed around. A very civic family affair. Some pics and vids of this at end of blog, but back to the mountain.

3am, off in the van to a starting point some 4,000 mtrs up. Our hostel in Huaraz is at 3,000 mtrs, tucked up in the Andes, and we’ve got a 2-3 hr drive up ascending winding switchbacks before we start the climb. The first km of the climb is steep rock and we pick our way up over/thru/around, me panting for breath. The next leg is crampons on,an icy face, ridge and eventual summit of Nevaro Mateo, smaller sibling to Peru’s highest Andean peak, Huascaron at 6,800 mtrs. Out of my league. We can see this peak just across the valley from our climb.

So it’s our guide Yam Piet, the four of us roped together, Jaime, Isa, myself and Yam. My climbing partners are from Barcelona, they’re at the end of their holiday, soon returning to Spain. Says Isa, ‘I hope I can still do this when I’m your age”. Crap that’s right, I’m my age. Keep forgetting. But today it rang home to me that my lungs have served some time - have to call it on the high altitudes.

It was coming back down I really started tripping. My legs went wiggly and my torso began weaving like an extra in a Benny Hill skit. I’m in the moment, aware of it. Pulling every millimetre of focus into controlling my remaining 40%. Yam Piet’s got my number, he’s shadowing me like a mountain goat.

Feeling mercurial halfway down a steep slope is not right place right time, but I get back to base under my own steam, garbling nonsense one step forward, a couple to the side.

Guiding Alpine tours here is a thing, these are the real mountains of Peru and it’s tourism with a small t. Huaraz steals no headlines from Machu Pichu, thats ‘the’ Capital T of Peru. But if full steam ahead Andes is your thing, this is where you come. To the Parque Nacionale Huascaron, inland north of Lima, nth Peru.

Ok this fiesta last night. The streets came alive, a celebration of Huaraz’s university, and what buzzed me was how graduates from former years also joined the parade. One big familia. Some of the effigy’s were loaded with fireworks, each fraternity or yr group trying to outdo the others. One float got it’s lit fuses wrong and the whole cart blew up in a shower of horizontal skyrockets, Catherine wheels spinning down the streets. No photo’s of that one, I was running. Videos below of the shindig, just rolled the cam and walked about.

Peruvians seem more contained in their public displays of greatness than I saw in Mexico, but thats just at an initial glance. Gotta infiltrate to get the real cultural lowdown, chat stuff through with the locals. Again I so wish I had good español, I miss heaps w/out.

So that’s my last 24 hrs dudes. Ice axes and fireworks, mad crowds going off one minute, chill mountain winds and a jelly body the next. I’ve chosen a stunning place to hang for a few days.

Till next time :)

Taking a breather on this one to reflect and flick you an idea.

When I began this adventure, I imagined making a few travel vids on my phone. But I’ve done diddlee squat video, instead writing up observations, reflections and taking pic’s.

Barrelling along I’ve cracked a hundred blogs … hardly gold star material, but a moment to say thank you for reading these. Accompanying me on the journey hopefully makes it your’s too, trigger some thoughts and laughs.

Most of you I know, you’re my chums and family, to those I don’t know, hola !

One mate said ‘Baz turn this into a book’, but it already is, an online one. When you comment on substack, medium, Facebook, you’re also the authors, we’re writing reflections together. Cool as collab brethren. Again thanks.

If you’re interested in the first 30 blogs, mostly Cambodia, they’re on bazcaitcheon.medium.com

I changed to substack when got to Vietnam cos that country firewalls medium.com - too many dissident bloggers outing the country’s dictatorship, it’s patriarchy. Who knows. At some stage I’ll port those first blogs over to substack so they’re all in one place, and there’s your book, chapter by chapter I guess.

Ok, the idea …

When I get back to NZ I have a roadie planned for 2024, and would love any of U keen, to participate. Off around the country interviewing kiwis on my phone, calling it ‘Hopes Fears & Good Ideas’.

No lengthy in-depth interviews, just three short questions. Tell me one of your hopes, one of your fears, and give me a single good idea. That’s it.

Not expecting any of us to divulge anything we wouldn’t be happy for other people to know.

Plan is to publish these online, same as with blogs.

Idea is to hear from other kiwi’s, their thoughts, and get to contribute ours if we’re keen. Publish these in real time as they’re collected.

No political agenda, NZ elections well past, not seeking comments that validate my or any other entities world view. Idea is everyone’s thoughts are given space and respect. Would draw the line on personal vitriol, can’t be doing with that 🫣😊🧐 And not expecting people’s thoughts to be all mung beans peace love and happiness either.

It’s been a pet project for a while. Years ago a couple of mates and I did a pilot for Sky TV called Kiwi Voices, where we interviewed peep’s about what’s important to them. It never flew, but picking up on that Kiwi Voices thread, building and sharing cool resource, what’s important to kiwi’s? cool.

Good Idea i reckon… my hope ? Is that lots of peep’s take part. My fear? I’ll fall off my motorbike - again 🙄🫵🏼😝.

Till next time :)

Huaraz, a big town of 100,000 people, tucked up in the mountains, but hardly an Aspen Colorado. It’s the developing country mix of feral and poor, with aspirational shopfronts promoting American brands, trying to be burgerking and Walmart.

There’s the Peruvian classic, half finished buildings with rebar(reinforcing steel) sticking out of walls and roofs. If your buildings aren’t ‘finished’, you don’t have to pay property taxes. It’s a thing, dwellings are all work in progress.

Toyota Corolla station wagons circa 1996 are big here, mostly in rough shape as you’d expect 20-30 yrs in on Peruvian roads.

There’s a lot of plastic rubbish on roadsides, like I remember in Cambodia, little investment in recycling I’m guessing. And that’s my developed country lens. Single use plastic water bottles and packaging are a godsend in countries where potable water supply is iffy and sanitation 2nd rate. Drinking water ✅ growing food under endless plastic tunnel houses ✅ - first things first, plastic is fantastic, thank god for fossil fuels in developing countries - saving the planet ? What’s that narrative ?

My attempts at español, much as I love the language, still a tad clumsy and reticent, necesito español para ser entendida (I need spanish to be understood)

This morn I woke at 4.30 to get on a 5 am bus for a day trek in the mountains to a place called Kaguna 69. I’m staying at Alpes Hostel, forming it again with a bunch of 20 somethings, always a conversation to be had in passing. Most are here for trekking in the mountains and there’s a bunch of locals setup for just this.

Righteo, a hundred blogs … hardly gold star material, but a moment to reflect, and to say thank you to the 200 +/- depending on the blog, peep’s that have been reading these, accompanying me on my journey. Most of you I know, you’re my chums and family, you know who I am, my rants etc, and can always apply the Baz filter. ‘Here we go, he’s off again’😝😝🤣. To those of you I don’t know personally, hola ! Thanks for giving me your time, it’s all we really have, a valuable thing.

Connection is gold, having you guys along on this trip has kept me on the level. An anchor with my homeland and homies.

Some of you have said ‘Baz turn this into a book’, but it already is, it’s an online one, each post a chapter. Job done, and whenever you’ve commented, whether on substack, medium or Facebook, you’re also the authors, we’re writing these reflections together. Cool as fck collab brethren.

I started out blogging one a day and kept this up until the exhausting and wifi-less mountains of the Himalayas.

If you’re interested in the first 30 blogs, they’re on bazcaitcheon.medium.com I had to change to substack when I got to Vietnam cos in that country they’ve firewalled medium.com - likely too many dissident bloggers with less than complimentary things to say about the country’s dictatorship, it’s patriarchy. Who knows. At some stage I’ll port those first blogs over to substack so they’re all in one place, and there’s your book, chapter by chapter I guess.

When I get back to NZ I have a cool roadie planned for 2024, and I’m extending an invitation for you all to contribute (those in NZ at least) if it’s your cup of tea. I’m doing a solo motorcycling tour round the country interviewing kiwis using my phone’s video function, and calling it ‘Hopes Fears & Good Ideas’. I’m not after lengthy in-depth interviews, and I’m not expecting you to divulge anything you wouldn’t be happy for other people to know. It’s like ‘tell me one of your hopes, one of your fears, and give me a single good idea’. That’s it. I’m not after a lot of footage from each interviewee, just a few minutes that’ll likely edit down to 60 secs or less. I’ll publish these same as I’m doing with these blogs, prob on Substack/Facebook, maybe Insta/Linkedn, possibly on YouTube as well, given they’ll be video’s.

The idea is you get to hear from other kiwi’s, their thoughts, and get to contribute yours if you’re keen. I’ll be posting these as I collect them, so if you want to follow my journey and the people I meet, you can. It’s just me and my phone, no big TV production, just simple talking heads, people’s thoughts.

I have no political agenda on this, the NZ elections will be in the rear view mirror, I’m not after comments that validate my world view. On the contrary, the idea is everyone’s opinions are given space and respect. The only time I wouldn’t edit in a comment is if it’s vitriolic and personal. Not expecting people’s thoughts to be all mung beans peace love and happiness, anger is a valid energy, just descent into personal vitriol is a bit out of scope.

Why ? Fck knows. No-ones paying me to do it, it’ll be a savings based trip on a small motorbike crashing in cheap hostels and on mates sofa’s. Years ago before smartphones with decent video capability, a couple of mates and I did a pilot for Sky TV called Kiwi Voices, where we interviewed peep’s about what’s important to them. We didn’t get past more than a dozen edited interviews before we got a No on funding; “where’s the show pony celebrity presenter” 😆🤮, and had to go back to our day jobs to earn a living in the shallow troughs of reality TV or whatever the fck schlock was put to air back then. So in a way I’m picking up on that thread, something that’s really important to me… connection, building and sharing a valuable resource, what’s important to kiwi’s, some good ideas for moving forward.

Get in touch with me if you’re keen, WhatsApp +64 21 464406 or baz@bazzacam.co.nz and I’ll get back in touch closer to time to see if roadie schedule and your availability can connect.

Milly was supposed to be behind the bar but it was just me, fresh off the boat, newbie to the Ancestral Hostel in the spivvy suburb of Barranco, Lima. It was 2 am before I dossed down in the dorm, and she regaled me with stories of why so many Venezuelans live in Lima(she’s one), and why Peru needs more.

Venezuela is a mess economically and politically, and many families survive only by people like Milly sending money earned elsewhere back home. Assuming there is even food in the markets to buy. Former president Chavez pulled a Castro, seizing all privately owned offshore company interests, think oil and finance, and Cosy’d up to Russia and China, keeping the USA at arms length. So lots of young Venezuelans have sought refuge in countries like Peru, where there’s the possibility of work. But with low wages, Peru’s just a stepping stone and Milly’s already eyeing up Europe, specifically asylum in Switzerland. You can do that if you fit certain criteria and your own country has gone to the pack, she’s working it. She also thinks Peruvians need a bit more Venezuela in their mix - they’re more reserved and austere, the result she thinks, of decades of terrorism, and Venezuela brings smile song and dance, a jollier disposition. So thinks Milly.

My first morning in Peru I’m on a city bus heading for Miraflores, the city’s centre. Somehow I end up 10 km on the outskirts, an army base on one side, a hospital on the other. The ride has been entertaining with various hawkers jumping on board, a large thug of a man selling mints who regales his captive audience with a loud story of woe, showing us his multiple body scars, all this while the bus lurches along. It works and half the bus me included, buy his mints. Next stop he’s off and a woman with child on back hops on selling home baking. The driver doesn’t blink, there’s an understanding that people need to eat.

Back in the city Senor at La Favorita cafe whips me up a turkey salad for lunch, back on track. As in Mexico and Ecuador, I’m buzzed by the righteous street art that these cultures rock. Visual vibrance in amongst the steely locked frontages on every street.

Lima is a city of 11 million, Peru a country of 34 mil. About a third of them are here. Barranco, the central suburb I’m staying is like a high rise Ponsonby or St Mary’s Bay of Auckland. A safe place for rich, all buildings are fortresses and have guards out front, and for white boy tourists like me, easy pickings for hombres looking to redistribute wealth.

Elegance and privilege rub shoulders with poverty and neglect, like any city, and I’m looking for my next adventure. Huarez, an 8 hr drive to the north of Lima looks like somewhere a Baz could hang for a bit, in the mountains with lots of trekking options. Especially with my dodgy knee and ankle, post motorbike adventure in Ecuador 😆.

My wife Meg is coming to join me in a weeks time, our plan being to go south, the Machu Picchu trail, tho it’s pretty booked out so we might be just chilling in cafes in Cusco … reckon I could handle that tbh. I chat to Matt from Utah at the Hostel, he’s one of those hostel homies you start chatting with and next minute you’re best mates, swapped WhatsApp’s having dinner together and speed dating what life means. I love these encounters, so lucky.

Matt’s just returned from some trekking in Huarez, and it sounds like a fab idea, so tomorrow morning I’m off. Cooool.

It’s tomorrow morning. I catch a cab to the Movilbus station, check in my bag and wait for the 8am bus. My bag leaves on an early bus without me, my ticket says one hr later. No such bus says girl on desk, you’ve missed it - fckn what ? .. next bus 12 noon, gets in midnight, it’s twice the price. Of course it is. Cortisol’s on the up, will I see my bag again …

Bus terminals are sketchy and interesting places. I’m enjoying the flow of locals, and the breakfast news blasting out of the terminals TV screen. It’s a magazine roll of security camera footage muggings, dead bodies on pavements and hanging out of broken cars, police chief interviews talking about hitmen, emoting that the perpetrators will be found, there’s men in handcuffs and really graphic footage of car/bus/truck/scooter accidents, bodies sprawled in full shot. Cut back to studio presenters that offer condolences to the aggrieved families and friends, who must surely be re-traumatised with each re-run of the footage. Fck me, if that’s breakfast TV in Peru, I’m reaching for the Xanax. Finally some football footage, sports roundup, more drama, less trauma I guess, unless you’re a passionate latino and your side is losing.

So it’s a long wait in a bus terminal on the outskirts of Lima. My Waiheke chums Bill and Pete are sending through photo’s of their adventures from the Galapogos islands. Chalk and cheese, great to see the boys having such an experience after long hours in the saddle over the last fortnight.

As for my riding chum Gazza, he’ll be in Mumbai by now getting his teeth fixed - big smiles all round when I next catch him on the deck at Waiheke’s Charlie Farleys with a coldie in his hand.

My Ecuador experience was all too short. 2,400 km’s clocked up on my motorbike rental, a fortnight, not nearly enough time to get a handle on such a small beautiful country.

After my experience in Mexico, as amazing as it was, I arrived in Ecuador with some nervous reticence. The high levels of security, fortressing of buildings, open displays of arms … Gabriel at our motorcycle rental place in Ecuador saying, “so you’re staying in Attacames … be sure to have the bikes locked up before dark”. Various locals informing me to exercise caution and common sense, tourista’s being attractive mugging targets when the sun sets.

But as we moved through the country we were received with smiles, and by the time we reached Vilicabamba in the south of Ecuador I was a free man from those anxieties. Though watching breakfast TV right now in a Lima bus station, I can see how a population gets spooked.

I think all people have heart, whether rich or poor, and as I found in places like Cambodia, it’s often the poorest that reach the furtherest … less to defend maybe ? This shit gives me hope, that at our core we’re happiest connected.

As I bail from Ecuador I have some regrets. I regret I didn’t give the young guy who asked for a $1 towards new shoes - his in tatters - at the gas station in Pedernales, my $200 Kathmandu sandals. Or the young couple with a baby and ‘already sold one kidney’ scar $20 instead of $2. etc etc. Even those trite gestures are purely selfish, so as I can feel better about disparity, my privilege. Dress it up anyway you like, but imbalance of opportunity is a bunch of arse. I’m either too porous or not porous enough. It’s not how shit should be. Take that a step further and realise the arrogance of how we live consumptive lives as western humans - exhibit A: me, burning Avgas on flights, petrol on motorbikes, yada, that we’re in effect stealing one of mother natures kidneys, not even paying. If you join the same dots as me brothers and sisters, you can see we’ve got some work to do. But will we? Can we ? My hope is that I can use my understandings I’ve gleaned on this overseas jaunt, this ‘research trip’, to inform some useful activity next, that aggregates to more than middle aged hedonism. Speaking of which …

Back here on ground zero, at the Lima bus station, I was sensible last night to make one last purchase at my hostel. A happy brownie, and the minute I’m sitting on that bus, I’m eating the entire thing. Purely medicinal.

Till next time :)