[Shef2venez] (no subject)

Sat Jun 4 20:48:01 BST 2005

hi

The last attachments were too low-res to read details... these should be
good enough to print off. I'll get several thousand printed for the June 11
demo & P in t P.

cheers

JS

An interesting article from today's FT

Get away from it all - except Chávez
By James Harding 
Financial Times: June 4 2005  HYPERLINK "http://news.ft.com/c.gif"

Venezuela is a country in the grip of its own peculiar Tourette's Syndrome,
a nation incessantly compelled to utter the most inflammatory word in its
vocabulary: Chávez.

Among Chávistas and the colonel's opponents alike, the compulsion to speak
his name seems irresistible. This verbal tic is, doubtless, more pronounced
in the company of a foreign journalist. Still, it is one of those few places
where conversation is dominated by one man. In its day, China had Mao, Cuba
Castro, the US OJ. Venezuela today has its president, Comandante Hugo
Chávez.

Politics passes for introductory small-talk. When you meet a Venezuelan, you
often first hear about Chávez's discount supermarkets for the poor or his
plundering of the country's oil fortune, his uplifting of Venezuelan morale
or his packing the courts.

Only later, the conversation might drift to what they do for a living, where
they went to college, how many kids they have and so on. It is a monomania
akin to the inevitable discussion in 1980s Cape Town about apartheid, 1990s
Berlin about the "Ossies" and contemporary Hong Kong about its rivalry with
Shanghai.

There is an element of time travel, then, about a visit to Venezuela. While
much of the rest of the world has been consumed since 2001 by Samuel
Huntingdon's Clash of Civilizations between the west and Islam, the
Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has been hashing out the debate between the
left and right theoretically put to rest by Francis Fukuyama's The End of
History.

It is, nevertheless, an invigorating argument, fuelled by the guilt of the
gross inequalities in abundant evidence in Caracas. The Venezuelan capital
has pockets of luxurious living - the jungle overhang is exotic, an early
morning walk up the Avila is a pleasure, the seafood at the Atlantique
exquisite, the steaks smoky and the sangria plentiful at the Maute Grill -
but the dilapidation of downtown Caracas is simply depressing. (The city
used to boast the best collection of modern art in Latin America, but a fire
in a towering office block nearby has left a charred urban carcass looming
over the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and prompted the government to close
the place down. The art has been scattered among other museums and
exhibitions andsome, it is muttered darkly, has simply disappeared.)

Still, one of the more underrated aspects of international travel is moving
into a fresh conversational orbit. And, on that basis, there is much to
recommend a trip to Venezuela simply to be part of the Chávez debate - on
the distribution of wealth, land reform and carrying forward Fidel's mission
to counter the American hegemon.

If that doesn't sound much like a holiday, though, fear not. Venezuela, a
country blessed with the under-exploited Caribbean on its northern shore,
miles of undisturbed Amazonia to the south and vast, largely unvisited
plains in between, has much of the timeless on offer.

There is that land-that-time-forgot quality, for example, at Hato Piñero, a
huge ranch and wildlife reserve 40 minutes flight south of Caracas, which,
among other things, is home to the hoatzin. This is a bird as big as a
pheasant with red eyes, a dishevelled crest of feathers, a wheezing call
and, intriguingly, a prehistoric lineage, an echo apparently of the first
known bird, the archaeopteryx.

Now, I need to come clean: I am no twitcher. But, it must be said, my visit
to Venezuela opened my eyes to the mature wisdom of bird-watching. This, in
fact, chimes with a creeping realisation reinforced on holiday, namely that
I am embracing middle age. I have outgrown the Lonely Planet guides, their
"high end" section being too sparse and, often, too spartan for my indulged
tastes; I no longer pack a padlock and a torch, but, just in case, a tie and
cuff-links; and while I used to fantasise about a short wheel base Land
Rover, now I want flying lessons and my own second-hand Beechcraft.

The adolescent excitement of big- game safari is one thing, but looking at
the hoatzin nesting over a murky pond of lazing alligators - and, on
horseback the next morning, seeing the curassows bustle across the fields,
the saffron finches pecking on the ground, the little kiskadees in the
trees, the scarlet macaws (the name does scant justice to these
multi-coloured parrots) flying in their twosomes, the scarlet and white
ibises scavenging for food, the deranged-looking vermilion flycatcher
darting and dropping on the hunt for insects, the roseate spoonbills, the
tiger herons, and the muscovy ducks - the gratification of bird-watching
seemed both subtle and infinite.

To be exact, Hato Piñero has the potential to pleasure the bird-watcher in
just over 350 ways. That, at least, is the known number of birds on the
reserve. There are bigger sightings to be had, too, on the top of an open
truck: the tapirs, the foxes, the jaguars, the anteaters and the world's
largest rodents, the capybaras.

Hato Piñero does not pamper its guests with the five-star creature comforts
you might find at those top-end Kenyan safaris or the jungle hideaways of
southeast Asia. The lodge is stylish but simple. It has a rancher chic,
decorated with buffalo skulls and tortoiseshells, saddles and spurs. Lovers:
this is a good book-reading opportunity - the beds are, with one exception,
twins. The food is good, not least because you are hungry. And, the service
- not one of Venezuela's natural strengths - is helpful, but laissez-faire.

The natural splendour of Hato Piñero, though, can only take you so far from
the Chávez conversation. In fact, the ranch is in the middle of an argument
with the government. The Branger family, which owns the place, is wrestling
a government effort to appropriate the land, nationalise it and lease it out
to landless Venezuelans.

And so our host, Jaime Branger, an English-educated Venezuelanas as big as a
door who played rugby in his youth and still looks as though he would be
useful in a ruck, welcomed us to the ranch with warmth, generosity - and
purpose. Carving up the ranch, he said on a drive in his pick-up truck past
the watering holes, between the laden mango trees and alongside the
scampering little deer, would only put the wildlife in danger. (The
government's plan, he also argued, would undermine the rule of law, reduce
agricultural productivity and fail to enrich the poor.)

At Los Roques, there is no such political talk. Drenched in sun, surrounded
by turquoise-green-blue waters, the 300-odd rocks, outcrops of land and
spits of sand which form the Los Roques archipelago offer each and every
visitor his or her own desert island.

After a flight of just over 30 minutes due east from Caracas, visitors land
at the Gran Roque, which as its name suggests, is the biggest stone in the
middle of the sea. On the island, there are a host of small, pastel-painted
boarding houses or posadas. They are almost all bungalows, each with half a
dozen or so rooms. They are mostly much of a muchness, but regulars to the
islands enthuse most about Mediterraneo and Caracol. (Courtesy of Jaime
Branger and his partner, Carlos Morales Faillace, we stayed at Bequeve,
which was very comfortable.)

Gran Roque operates on a low wattage: there are no cars, it has a sandy main
square with a bank, a couple of stores and a bar for locals. The most
frenetic inhabitants are the pelicans, dive-bombing for fish. A couple of
bars on the water's edge are a great place to watch fishermen bring in their
catch, mostly little'uns but often a few impressive barracudas. You get the
picture - it is the Bacardi-ad lifestyle, without the upscale glitz.

At the quay, you can hire a water taxi which will take you to your own
island if you choose, or one of the couple of islands which have a bar and
restaurant on them and a scattering of tourists under umbrellas or cooling
in the water. (I was there in low season - I imagine it is a little busier,
but hardly jammed, in the busier months from July to September, December
through January.)

The snorkelling is fun, the diving is good - it is the largest marine
reserve in the Caribbean and, thanks to the relatively low number of
visitors, an easy place to see nurse sharks, moray eels, stingrays,
barracudas and a host of other fish swarming around its relatively
unexplored reefs, pinnacles, drop-offs and caves. It was calm on our visit,
but I was told it's a terrific spot for wind-surfing and kite-surfing.

But here is the health warning: Los Roques is for the devout sun-worshipper.
I brought Factor 30 sunblock, bought Factor 50 and came back burnt, wishing
I'd got the Factor 100 I'd been told about. As the sun went down, I revived,
sipping mojitos overlooking the perfect Caribbean waters. But through the
bulk of the day, I was an asylum seeker from the sun.

As I walked across the square one morning, the sunscreen and sweat dripping
into my eyes, my shirt sodden with perspiration, my feet in flip-flops
sun-burning like two juicy burgers, I even found myself yearning for a
return to air-conditioned Caracas and a heated conversation about Hugo
Chávez.

James Harding is a former FT Washington bureau chief and is currently on a
year's leave to write a book. He was a guest of Hato Piñero and Posada
Bequeve

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