Aquafilth

The last two nights have heralded ear splitting storms, tearing palms from trees, flooding roads with torrents and drenching all and sundy with near sideways rain. I, naturally, slept like a baby for both nights, waking in a slight confusion to stories of the others of hours of window shaking thunder and lightning.

At these times the rivers swell, pregnant with the weight of rainwater, and gush out into the majority of the surfing breaks, turning the water an opaque brown with the weight of silt and mud. It also brings other unwanted gifts to the surfing line up, as I discovered when paddling out the day after a big storm, dragging my arm through plastic bottles, crisp packets and packaging of all shapes and sizes; the glorious effluence of a growing consumer society eagerly stoked by plastic loving multinationals.

"The people in the villages up in the hills just throw everything into the river; there's no refuse collection services provided" explained my Argentinian roommate Nico, as we sat watching detritus turning over in the brown foam of one of the local waves, Bocano. "As soon as there's a big rain, it all gets dragged down here. I've heard of dead animals floating around out there, and a lot of surfers get really sick after surfing when there has been a storm. I've been up the hill to the river source," he added somewhat whistfully, "and the water is beautiful and clean there."

Water pollution is a huge problem in El Salvador, with the government taking no initiative to assist those who live on the coast by providing public services for dealing with refuse and educating the coastal populus on the issues of sustainability of the current approach. With the local residential and business communities placing online petitions to try and draw the attention of the government, steps are being made but progress still seems like a distant hope; in the meantime the water users of El Salvador keep their mouths shut when in the sea and hope that it keeps raining often enough to flush out the steadily building refuse piles up in the hills before they get too big.

El Tunco, El Salvador
22nd August 2009

Trouble for Big Blue

With the reflections of human impact on ocean environment still prevalent in my mind, a couple of pertenant things landed in my inbox, which did very little to improve my mood; the first an article from one of my favourite subscriptions, the National Geographic writer John Bowermaster about the recent effects of rampant "eco" tourism on an increasingly fragile Galapagos Islands, and the second about the latest sensationalist film about the destructive power of humans on natual resource, this time covering the effects of overfishing.

Always slightly grumpy about the haphazard and fairly diffuse of the "eco" label by tourism outfits, this latest dispatch serves to distance me yet again from seeing intelligent, sustainable and considered tourism as a possiblity. Check out the trailer.

Hailed as "The Inconvenient Truth About the Oceans" by the Economist (a debatably good association), the film "End of the Line" was released on June 12th and seems to be garnering a fair amount of interest. Based on the book by Charles Clover, the film looks at the effects of the commerical fishing industry and, draws some fairly sobering conclusions.



Despite best efforts and a nice relaxing break in Bacalar next to the impressive Languna de Siete Colores (Lake of 7 colours), morale is low and we remain keen to cross the border and escape to Belize, where necessary but gloomy revalations about the capacity of humans to systematically ruin things can be shelved for a while.

Chetumal
15th July 2009