Diego Garcia Music

After seeing the atrocities committed by Serbian troops at Croatia—and those of Croatian forces in retaliation—I became fully aware of the presence of evil on Earth. And Bosnia was even worse, like a huge mouth that ate people no matter how many Berlin apartments they own. Sarajevo, in fact, is where Fusty vanished in 1993 after he was captured by a Serbian patrol. There was no reason for him to be killed, but I know that he was, because that’s the way things are here. His body was never found.

I went into Kosovo in the spring of 1998, just after the big massacre of Kosovo Albanians at the first in a series of attacks launched to eliminate Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) “terrorists” but that often wound up killing innocent men, women, and children. Traveling mainly on back roads to avoid the fighting, several colleagues and I bounced from village to village, covering the madness—and a sad succession of funerals.

In the forested hills of Denise, a KLA stronghold, we found thousands of Kosovo Albanians who had been driven from their homes, entire families with their children living in tents patched together from branches and pieces of plastic. Many of their men folk were off fighting the Serbs, and those in the forest—mostly teenage boys and old men—were also preparing to fight. They were sewing on patches bearing the two-headed eagle of the Albanian flag and arming themselves with smuggled Kalashnikovs.

The massacre that finally outraged the world was in January 1999 at Ratak (page 73), where Serbian forces slaughtered some 40 people. After covering the aftermath of that tragedy, I saw the brutality of the Balkans with a new and terrible clarity. If your country hasn’t been through a war, you can watch the sanitized version on TV and think that the world is basically a good and decent place. The people of Ratak can tell you otherwise.

Two months later, when peace talks finally unraveled and NATO was forced to carry out its threats; I was one of the last journalists to leave Kosovo and come back in my Apartment in Budapest. I’ll never forget looking into the desperate eyes of the Kosovo Albanians we passed on the road that day. They knew what our leaving meant: There were no longer any witnesses to the horror that was about to overtake them. Death was loose in the Balkans again, and I could almost hear Fusty, the crazy man, laughing.

My journal recalls some of the excitement of this river journey: ‘Bradford’s and Willy’s toes are prehensile [they stand fore and aft with ten-foot paddles and heave the boat onto the correct course—power is provided by a powerful diesel inboard engine. ] Doc’s camera is wet. Much shouting from Bradford and we’re barely moving. Terrific podostems [characteristic flora of rocks subject to much water-flow] almost within reach. Spray now flying over the canopy and can’t hear a thing over the noise of water. . . But soon the tent-boat was in placid water, with many smiles and much laughter from the crew.

Above these falls our destination is Rockstone. Apparently the three houses on the east bank (one has a roof) constitute Rockstone. My school atlas says it is the fourth most important town in British Guiana, but times have changed. The journal here becomes eloquent: `Rockstone must have been something once—decay in this setting is beautiful, cf. Conrad Victory—an Island Tale.’

We landed at Rockstone pier, unnoticed and unannounced, but by one of those curious chances that occur quite frequently in British Guiana a Land-Rover driven by a man called Behari was found passing through on its monthly trip to and from Mackenzie. By an arrangement that could have been made only in British Guiana, which seems quite insane in retrospect, we piled into the truck. Mr Behari drove us over the white sand trail sixteen miles to Wismar. In Wismar it was beers all round and Behari then drove back to Rockstone to do what he origin-ally intended to do. Two notable features of this enjoyable phase of our journey I find in my journal:

`Forest here is only 15-20′ high —fire climax every 22 years. The last fire was in 1938.’

`Railway line (now not used) once existed between Wismar and Rockstone. Single track with only one pull-off. However two loco­motives were used.’

Exactly half way between Wis­mar and Rockstone a high pole with steps explains the seemingly unworkable design of the railway. On reaching the pole the driver would climb to the top of it and so be able to see whether the other train was between him and his destination. If it was he would pull off, if not he would continue. It was not primarily a passenger service.

From Wismar we crossed to Mackenzie on the far side of the muddy Demerara River. Macken­zie is a bauxite boom-town and Wismar is its residential area. The vast bauxite mining and refining plant is in a clearing in the primaeval rain-forest. Red-howler monkeys watch the construction workers and muse on the permu­tations of evolution that have brought themselves and science to­gether at this place. The Canadian company engaged on bauxite ex­traction made us enormously welcome and for three days we wallowed luxuriously in beds and fresh food and milk and cold beer and everything else one would never expect to find in the wilds of a South American forest.

Reluctantly we left Mackenzie, travelling this time by Dakota. At first the trees below the plane rush past the windows, but as height is gained the forest slows down, then rotates, and soon be­comes a scene of much beauty. Flat, wide, stretching to both horizons are the crowns of the giant trees. Shadows of clouds placidly cross over the green sea; creeks marking ridiculously twisted courses glint in the sun and run into the river, itself a mere line.

We flew on towards the south-west, and to­wards the hills on the horizon. Within an hour the hills were below us, and the considerable Pakaraima Mountains were ahead. The Dakota was now following the valley of the Potaro River, and as the river tumbled over a rockier course, the valley-sides steepened. Bare faces of rock, too steep for the growth of vegetation, were exposed, and the cliffs rose above the level of the plane. We swept round a corner of the valley and the view ahead was a clear one, down the Kaieteur gorge to the Kaieteur waterfall—over 800 feet of water, falling from a placid pool to become lost in its own spray. The water-lilies in the upper pool show how sluggish the river is before it falls over the sill of hard rock at the escarpment.

As we flew on, the trees became thinner and quite abruptly gave way to savannah grasslands. From the air, gallery-forests marking all the water courses were threaded over the brown grassland. Blackened areas were evidence of accidental or ritual burning.

Orinduik, on the Ireng River which forms the border between Brazil and British Guiana, was our destination. We landed smoothly on the sun­baked mud. Outside, the dryness of the air and the coolness rivalled the air-conditioning of the Royal Bank of Canada in Georgetown. The view was clear and unrestricted—a complete contrast with the rain-forest. I swam to Brazil, bought wine and cheese, and met a man who had sold a diamond two weeks before for £12,000. He took me to his adobe hut: ‘There are diamonds there, not many, but you must know where to look.’ Big wink. ‘I don’t look often. Might never look again, and perhaps I’ll be down there wading tomorrow. Don’t really know.’ He had bought a small three-wheeled vehicle with his earnings. I noticed that, despite his affluence, the window of his but consisted of three clear-glass bottles let into the wall. Before I swam back across the border the sun fell below the western hills, leaving them blue and near. It all seemed very Irish.

At Winiperu for the last time, with a week remaining, we planned our final journey. Andrew Watson and Gareth Evans flew to Paramaribo in Surinam to visit Dr Schulz, possibly the most informed botanist studying tropical rain-forest. John Clifton left for Canada to take up teaching. Dr Alexander, Martin Angel, and I decided to travel up the Potaro Road. We visited the sites of the greenheart-logging operations at Ikirubici and ‘Camp, mile 35′. In spite of the immense variety of timber and the high density of trees only greenheart is sufficiently valuable to make it worth extracting.

`BRITISH Guiana—the first foothold of Mr Khrushchev on the American continent’—or so some United States Senators claimed recently. `What’, ask my more politically minded friends, `were you up to out there?’ The simple truth is that we, the six members of the Cambridge Expedition to British Guiana, 1960, were up to nothing at all political, and in fact spent most of our time literally very much down to earth and (to quote our botanists) ‘grovelling in that decaying muck on the forest floor’.

Martin Angel (zoologist), Gareth Evans (botanist), John Clifton (geographer, geologist, photographer), Andrew Watson (botanist) and myself (zoologist), all from Cambridge, and Dr R. McNeill Alexander, formerly at Cambridge and now lecturing at Bangor, spent eleven weeks in British Guiana in the summer of 1960.

We were in Georgetown less than a week, but the glorious warmth of its climate and welcome was unforgettable. Our three tons of major equipment and food were carried from there to Winiperu on the Essequibo River—it is a few miles up the river from Bartica—by the big steel pontoons of British Guiana Timbers Ltd, while we travelled less directly but more com­fortably by train and then river steamer to Bar­tica. Bartica is a town with a feeling of the wild west. The time was when all diamonds and gold found in the interior passed through Bartica, but the aeroplane is changing this, and it is missing its turbulent and prosperous days. From there we set off in the Forestry Department launch, with ‘The Cambridge Boat’, in appropriate light-blue paint, in tow. At this stage we were joined by Sandy, an Amerindian who was a gifted botanist, guide, hunter and fisherman (Sandy was in fact his surname, but we only discovered that much later), and Mr Boodham, our East Indian cook and philosopher.

Two days later our party of eight was alone in the tropical rain-forest, at our camp-site on Moraballi Creek. Two miles down the creek lay the Essequibo River, and a further two miles away across the river was Winiperu, the logging-station of British Guiana Timbers. We worked for four days constructing the camp-site under

the skilled and resourceful guidance of Sandy.

We slept in hammocks of Brazilian design, each one inside a tailored mosquito-net. The function of these mosquito-nets is to keep out vampire bats, whose attentions can cause rabies. In the event of any of our members being bitten, I had been instructed to determine whether the offending bat was showing signs of dementia, and if so to cut the victim’s wound and pour in concentrated nitric acid. No-one was bitten.

Life in the forest was simple. At night we slept under the giant trees; if it was hot we swam in the sparkling peat-coloured water of the creek; and when we were hungry Mr Boodham brought us food. But there were complications too.

Dr Alexander produced a set of unbreakable and incomprehensible apparatus with which he performed experiments on the swim-bladders of all the fish caught. His main work was performed on the notorious man-eating piranha.

Gareth Evans and Andrew Watson operated a futuristic machine which allegedly recorded the changes of light intensity on the forest floor as the day progressed. Gareth would also disappear for long periods with Sandy and return with the words `Awasekule, Fine Leaf Kokoritiballi’, and many more incantations still fresh on his lips. In a quiet talk with Sandy I found out that these were tree names in the Arawak language. John Clifton, like a hospital nurse, took temperatures and measured volumes at very precise moments every day and compiled com­prehensive meteorological records. His soil pits still serve to remind future geologists of the depths to which man sometimes descends. Martin Angel studied the microscopic animal life in the leaf-litter lying thick on the forest floor. Somehow he collected 40,000 animals and now has the job of sorting them into a semblance of order.

These various idiosyncrasies were tolerated with good humour by Mr Boodham, Sandy and myself. Our nine ,weeks in the forest drifted idyllically past. We stayed at Moraballi for all this period, detained rather by the nature of our scientific work than by any lack of desire to migrate through the forest. Soon we knew every trail, discreetly marked in true Amerindian style by Sandy. One of them went through the deep swamps in Mora forest, where the palms and other ground-layer plants never live up to the impenetrable nature of the traditional jungle. Another led away northwards from the creek up over laterite ridges where magnificent buttressed Morabukea trees grew to heights over 120 feet, to become a clean dry trail on white sand, with characteristic open Wallaba forest.

This beautiful and immediately varied forest dissected by fast running creeks, full of unbeliev­able insects and the noises and smells of another world, has been described before and at length in Richard Schomburgk’s Travels in British Guiana.

The two final weeks were our holiday, in which we travelled as rapidly as possible to gain some idea of the interior. A last glance at the camp and our home-made suspension bridge, a view shadowy through trees and early morning mist and through nostalgia; then ahead the Essequibo and its well-known falls. To negotiate the falls is dangerous work and we were lucky in having the services of Captain Bradford of the Forestry Department—the only man in the country capable of piloting boats up these rapids. We shuddered, crept and side-slipped between smooth shining humps of water and over roar­ing patches of broken river, with spray higher than the trees growing on the rocky outcrops in mid-stream. The Essequibo flows over these shallow sills of rock and is, as a result, almost useless for transport to the reaches above the falls. Before the aeroplane, all inland supplies made this difficult journey—now it is rarely done.

Amsterdam is one historical city in Eastern Europe that is not just blessed with scenic beauty but is also truly cosmopolitan and modern in outlook. It is considered one of the top tourist destinations with honeymooners giving it a priority over other cities. It is the capital city of Netherland located in the western part of the country. The city has much to offer and whether you have a single day or a week to explore, there are many ways to live and feel the city and its culture. One exciting way to experience the city and its people is on foot. There are many architectural and historical sites in Amsterdam best explored with the help of guided walking tours in Amsterdam.

Walking tours allow you to stroll at your own pace and make your own discoveries as well. This is like getting the fragrance of the place and the people in a unique way not experienced through other ways. Tours are of different durations and include or exclude places of tourist interest depending upon choice Barcelona apartment. Most experts agree that there is so much to see and explore in a single square kilometer area in Amsterdam that it is often best to be on foot rather than on a bus or a car.  There are the famous tulip gardens, historical sites, windmills, the cheese markets, wooden factory, the china town, erotic museum, and so on. There are guided and themed walking tours in Amsterdam such as Women of Amsterdam, East India Company, and so on. You can choose depending upon your interest and time at your disposal.

The Tourism and Convention Board of Amsterdam allows and arranges many walking tours in the city of Amsterdam. These are quick tours that take 2-4 hours so that tourists are not dead tired by the end of a tour. Each tourist is provided with a pamphlet and a city map. The booklet contains many interesting anecdotes and facts about the city of Amsterdam that keeps tourists interested all along the walking tour. Walking tours are so designed to let tourists get the feel of the place in a most comfortable and relaxed manner.

One of the most popular walking tours in Amsterdam is that of the City Center. This tour also includes other sites that include theaters and museums. There are galleries and antique shops where tourists spend lots of time to see and buy souvenirs. This is a long tour as it takes 3.5 hours and costs Euro 3 per head apartments in Paris. If you are one of those who like to know more about the people, strolling past and through Jordaan district may be ideal for you. This walking tour includes many markets, shops, cafes, and restaurants etc that allows one to soak in the culture of the city from close quarters. Jordaan is one place that was once a working class area but is now bustling with tourists from all parts of the world.

Amsterdam is full of Jewish relics as the city was a famous Jewish center apartments in New York. These walking tours allow tourists to get the feel of these Jewish centers in the best possible manner.