Finding the sounds of my dreams: Peru & other short stories

Author and copyright: P.C. Romeijn

All beginnings are difficult

Imagine, I was only five years old and already going to heaven. This happened in Bangladesh, which at that time was still called East Pakistan. Past our house, I could see, once again, a funeral procession going by. I decided to follow it. It was already dark when I returned home. In the tropics, darkness descends quickly. At the funeral, I was treated very well and was allowed to be part of everything. A corpse of a small child was dug up from the deep pit and later buried together with the father. There was lots of singing and incense. Then I headed back to the village, which in my memory was a half-hour walk. My mother asked anxiously, "Where have you been all this time?" “In heaven,” was my answer, because when you are dead you go to heaven. That was what I thought back then. Now I know better; it doesn't seem to be true for everyone.

On the streets, close to home, it was not uncommon to see people dying, sometimes from hunger. And there were cows; those emaciated white ones whose raw milk I was sometimes allowed to drink from a saucer. Well, not by my mother, but it never made me sick and I had had tuberculosis anyway. As a baby. There were also stories about a man-eating tiger that occasionally visited the edges of the village. That idea was reinforced by our Japanese neighbour, who hunted sometimes. One day, he had shot a mother tiger and brought home the only cub that was left behind. That cub was on a chain in his garage, a fierce little beast. I fell off the wall between the gardens several times. Of course it was exciting to sneak into the neighbour’s garden, although I never petted the animal. I also never stroked the cobras of the snake charmers who sometimes performed on the path next to our house. That path was so bumpy that I never learned how to ride a bike there. The street was even worse.

A few hours' drive away in the Volkswagen beetle - which was very hot - there were forested hills. Wild elephants still lived here. The tame ones worked in forestry, but people needed fresh blood from time to time. They would capture wild ones and train them to work for them. A circle of thin poles woven together formed a fence. Attached to it was a lock and a sort of funnel to lead the wild animals into the enclosure. After endless waiting, there was suddenly a lot of commotion. With noise and fire, the wild elephants were led towards the funnel. Behind them, the lock closed. A lot of fuss and the animals did not exactly calm down. After some time, we were allowed to stand on a small walkway mounted onto the fence. The fun part was that every now and then you had to duck for a ferocious trunk and the elephants pushed and shook the fence quite a bit. My mother, of course, was beyond herself with worry and stood a long way away. It was the same at all the cliff edges that I would generally lean over in order to tease her. At that time in the tropics, they were not fenced off.

One of the elephants was a calf whose mother had not been captured. When that little animal tried to shelter and drink from a strange mother, the latter threw the calf upside down and stood on it with all four legs. Panic. The subsequent screaming of the little animal still echoes in my ears. The two largest tame elephants were driven through the lock to the wild elephants in the enclosure so that they could rescue the calf. The calf turned out to be completely fine, but the rescue was still quite nerve-wrecking. After their capture, wild elephants must first learn to beg for their food. Whilst tied to a tree, they will stand next to a tame one, which they have to imitate. Then they learn to walk along, tied between two larger, tame elephants. Later still, a handler comes and sits on their backs. This way they gradually become the seemingly tame beasts you would so often see trudging along the road with their handlers. Not until many years later would I see elephants again, in the Artis Zoo in Amsterdam. The new elephant that Prince Bernhard had donated to the zoo shortly before my visit would still greet you politely when you called out "Salam!" to him.

Peru (not yet)

When we lived in Colombia, I already wanted to go to Peru. It would take more than 20 years before that wish came true. The KLM flight from Amsterdam to Bogotá flew on to Peru and Bolivia. Oh how I would have liked to go to those mountains. Sadly, that didn't happen, but my sister did fly to Florida with my mother to watch Flipper. I didn't join them then, although I don't remember why, and as far as I know, the one and only Flipper was long dead. We had visited the United States once before, by car from Miami to New York. From there we travelled by ocean-liner - the Queen Elisabeth - to Cherbourg in France. Such a trip was already old-fashioned back then because flying was much faster. For nostalgic reasons, you could still make a boat trip across the ocean, such as from Lisbon to Curaçao, and then fly on to Colombia from there. But of course, that boat did not live up to the first-class experience of the illustrious Queen Elisabeth.

Along the way from Lisbon to Curaçao you would go ashore, on the island of Madeira for example, where you could buy lace and people would dive for the coins that the passengers threw over the railing. What I liked there was a sledge ride. We had to walk all the way up the hill instead of being carried by donkey. That was too expensive. Those sledges clattered down the steep streets over cobble stones, so not on snow but on iron skids. Madeira was green, unlike Curaçao, where it was windy and very hot. The harbour of Curaçao with the Willemsbaai was very impressive, and the warehouses with gables also stood out. You could speak Dutch and do your shopping there. They even had liquorice. With a noisy Vickers Viscount, we flew on to Maiquetía, the airport of the Venezuelan capital Caracas. Of course, we were too late for the connecting plane to Colombia. Having missed our direct connection, we continued to Colombia after an overnight stay - on several planes with stopovers along the way. In short, I had once again arrived in the highlands of South America, and the familiar smell of eucalyptus wood hit my nose again.

The real mountains of South America begin in Venezuela. From Mérida, for example, you could take a cable car to the treeless páramo at an altitude of 5,000 metres. The tropics, but with your hands in the snow. There, more than 30 years later, University Professor Roelof Oldeman told me stories about the Indians. He himself had been accepted as a member of the Yamomani, a lowland tribe. The Yamomani had a fantastic creation story, in which their Creator is asleep and can be heard snoring in the murmur of the Angel Falls (locally called the Kerepakupai-merúú waterfalls). Under no circumstances should you wake Him up! But he also told me about another tribe living in central Venezuela on the Tepui plateaus and Mount Roraima, the name of which I have long forgotten; perhaps they were one of the Pemón. This tribe has flying men, which are real shamans. But many youngsters want to have a go at flying themselves, so they jump off the rock plateaus and then crash miserably many hundreds of metres further down, which in turn explains the high mortality rate amongst young men.

Shamans, the Professor told me, are here to show people the way forward and that means discovering their place in the world. That can be taken quite literally. After all, what does the world around us really look like? According to the shamans, it is like a collection of waves. Humans are also made up of little waves, but those little waves face a different direction. The challenge for human beings is to get their waves facing the same direction as the creation around them. This can be done in special places that the shamans can discover in visions. For each individual this can be in different locations and at different times. Within such places, the waves have a different orientation than the surrounding environment.

Together with the Professor, I went for a walk in the mountains above Mérida. First, we had about an hour's drive to the entrance of a national park. There the hike started at 2,800m and went above 4,000m before descending and climbing again to 4,200m. The views are phenomenal, from here you can also see the mountain lakes Laguna Negra and Laguna de Los Patos lower down. Along a sheltered slope you descend to the tree line. The trees here do not represent much, at first glance. Until you realise under what harsh conditions they are growing. Few species are able to do that, but one of them is Polylepis. They form a fairytale setting, with their twisted branches and beautifully coloured bark. They grow only slowly and do not get large. The first trees we encountered were no taller than a human being, but further down the slope they do grow bigger. Polylepis forests are among the most beautiful I know, they are enchanting so to speak and, unfortunately, increasingly rare.

The stony path winds down with sharp loops. You have to pay close attention but that is difficult when only three days earlier you were blissfully living at sea level. Your whole body becomes languid and heavy. You walk slowly and against your heart rate and breathing, which should not increase. So I walk even slower, like a snail. And suddenly I stop, as if struck by lightning. This is one of those places! I am standing still and catching my breath. It spins and instantly my thoughts go back to the Polylepis forest near Cuenca in southern Ecuador. At that spot, in the national park 'Cajas', it was exactly the same. That location was not so far from Ingapirca, the Inca city under construction that should have become as large as the Inca capital Cuzco in Peru but that was never completed due to the arrival of the Spanish. Was this indeed a special place like the ones I had come across before? To measure is to know, so I took the pendulum and rods in my hands and, indeed, I got positive responses to my question. In Cuenca, I did not yet know these instruments or how to handle them. In special places, you are in your place. Light has a special quality, objects shine, colours seem more beautiful and, if you pay attention, sounds can also sound different. But this was not just like any special place you can find around the corner with a pendulum or rods. There and then, this was a place for me. If the story of those Indians is true, then the strong experiences near Mérida and Cuenca were two special moments for my life.

But now back to Colombia, which we ended up reaching a full day late on three separate flights. First a flight to the border, followed by a taxi across it, and then two flights within Colombia. It was quite special to follow the valleys with a DC-3 plane, which doesn't fly high enough to get over the mountain peaks. And there was considerable fog along the way, of course. We arrived in Bogotá at night, with its thin air, millions of lights and our yet unknown house to live in. The city was not very cheerful, but modern in a way. Our house was spacious and modern, with a tropical courtyard garden. Opposite us lived a colonel or general, so there was always a military police guard at the corner of the street with an automatic rifle at the ready. This sometimes went off in the middle of the night when there were threats. Fear of kidnappings kept children like me off the streets. I was dumped at an English-speaking school where I spent months watching the birds outside until I understood what the teachers and kids were talking about. My life in Colombia had begun. In short, the start of a boring period in a proverbial desert.

Then there was the Country Club where we occasionally went for a tennis match for one of the parents. Ten or fifteen tennis courts, two 18-hole golf courses with a children's course, valet parking, a bowling alley, a horse polo field with stables, an indoor Olympic swimming pool surrounded by a natural stone courtyard with separate seating areas, a cinema room, table tennis and so on. Everywhere you could order food and drinks, for which you signed a receipt. You walked around feeling quite lost as a child, but it was fun watching the horse polo or going to the ball boys' and caddies' cabin. After all, the latter was forbidden. Sometimes I would wander around the kids' golf course with one stick and one ball until it was time to leave again a few hours later. Our driver Luiz was also nice and interesting, but he was only rarely asked to drive our car for private use. He was a small Indian who struggled to see over the steering wheel of the huge black Buick. I actually think he looked through the steering wheel. One day he arrived with his face completely covered in stitches from barely dried knife cuts. Something like that does confront you with the large amount of violence in Colombian society. Nothing ever happened at home.

My grandparents came to visit. At least there was more going on during those times. We went on excursions to the salt cathedral in Zipaquirá, trout fishing in Lago de Tota or stopped at the way-too-hot springs in Paipa. Beautiful landscapes passed by my car window; we went past them more than we explored them. Unless you escaped with some friends to one of the mountain streams. Both sets of parents were told that we were with the other friend and that way you could also go into the dangerous city and walk for kilometres along the open sewers until you were chased and had to escape into them. And then I did the one thing I was forbidden to do; ask my grandfather if I could go with him to the Netherlands. My brothers were already there with family friends, my sister was a few hours away on an oil field where she attended a Dutch school, and I was jealous. My grandfather immediately said 'yes', and a few months later I was living in Overveen and going to school there. Now we had all completely separated and our family bonds would never fully recover. It took more than a year before we were reunited in Aerdenhout where we would try to play ‘family’ again. And so Peru remained the land of my dreams for a long time to come.

Aerdenhout

Aerdenhout is written with 'ae' because it is a posh place with no middle class. It is located in the municipality of Bloemendaal, which is written with 'aa' because you can find shops there; there is even a village centre. The Bloemendaal municipality lies on a strip of calcareous inland dunes sandwiched between Haarlem and Heemstede on one side, and Zandvoort and Bentveld on the other. This region is also known as the Kennemerland and in Overveen you will find the Kennemer lyceum. Kennemerland is one of the oldest inhabited places in the Netherlands. Remains of Stone Age habitation were found during excavations near Velzen. The Kaninaphates lived there before the area was taken over by the Batavians and even the Romans built a fortification there. It was considered an auspicious place as you could keep your feet dry, which was very important before the construction of dykes. Because of seepage, there was always plenty of fresh water available. Furthermore, the area offered many opportunities for fishing, hunting and agriculture. Even now, the area is special because it is free of clay or polders and you will find the Amsterdam and Haarlem water supply dunes there. So much water is extracted from the dunes that on a satellite image, a specially prepared radar image to be precise, it looks like a treeless semi-desert. This is where I used to throw the dog over the fence and go for many long walks.

The Bloemendaal municipality can safely be described as a Sea of Boredom. There is even a Bloemendaal aan Zee north of Zandvoort. You can get there via the beautiful Military Road, which in Overveen is simply called Julianalaan. This is where I once lived for a year with my grandparents after my adventure in Colombia. Even more beautiful is the trip by rail from Overveen’s station through the dunes to the sea. Close to that station you can find the ‘Brouwerskolkje’, which, together with the more northern lake ‘Halve Maantje’, must be counted among the most magical and least happy places in the country. Don't think anything ever happens there; nothing ever happens. Both lakes are fed by the same freshwater seepage that made early habitation possible. From the Brouwerskolkje, as early as the seventeenth century, clean water was piped via the Santvaert and the Brouwersgracht to Haarlem's beer brewers. The area has got plenty of history - but is not very lively.

Boredom struck at school, and beyond. School was a ritualistic repetition of moves, except for outdoor sports and physics perhaps. An unhealthily high consumption of cannabis didn't help either. My mother grew the hemp plants for me in the bay window and I also grew some in the garden from time to time. They are not difficult to grow. On my way to school, I always passed the now-demolished police station with a privet hedge in front of it. Every so often, you would sow some seeds in it, so you could look proudly at the resulting plants as you drove past them on your way home. Those plants were also invariably removed again after which the process just repeated itself. Such boring repetitions are typical of excessive cannabis use. My dreams were also very simple: I get on my bike, I get on my bike, I get on my bike, I cycle, I cycle, I cycle, ..., and so on. Only when you stop using cannabis does it become clear that dreams help with the processing of experiences. I had learnt two things: I had a lot of catching up to do, and I can't handle cannabis.

An end to boredom did not come until I was 16. That end always came in the form of music and now in the form of a moped. Shortly after my birthday, a friend of mine and I set out; we went by moped to Quiberon, in Brittany, France. That's a journey of about twelve hundred kilometres, doable in three days. Quiberon is close to Carnac, the capital of 'alignemements' - menhirs placed in rows. Menhirs are large oblong stones that stand upright. At Carnac, this occurs over kilometres - many rows wide. There are also dolmens, but the region is less known for these. In all my innocence I thought that once I'd get there it would become clear to me why these stones were put there. Unfortunately, that didn't turn out to be the case. The amount of purposeful work that had been executed there for no apparent reason aroused amazement of an unforgettable kind. This was my first encounter with 'big stones', as I call the collection of megalithic structures for myself (I am dismissing the fact that I had also seen some in Southeast Asia when I was four). Other than that, my moped allowed me to go sailing independently, visit the beach in Zandvoort and the dunes, attend far-flung parties and, of course, see girlfriends.

In Aerdenhout, you need to visit the Leeuwerikenlaan, which is as beautiful as the houses along it. This is the neighbourhood where Roel Pieper's wife was stabbed in the large backyard. This is where the young Count Van Randwijk lived before his self-chosen end at the railway station under the express train when he was 17. Playing football with us was apparently not enough; I can still see the ambulances waiting. Back then, I didn't know what had happened. Nowadays, most houses are equipped with video surveillance and recently Roel Pieper wanted to set up a private police force and his own political party of self-satisfied people. In my time, that was not yet the case. It was in this neighbourhood that I started writing my first book, which of course never materialised because I did not yet know what it was about. Only later did building blocks of it end up in this book. In a way, it is exactly the same book.

For this book, we should not be in the Leeuwerikenlaan but in the Zwarteweg nearby, at number 14 to be precise, right along the Slingerweg. Make no mistake, today another house has been added to the property, but that does not count for this book, so I will assume the old situation. The flower bulb magnate Bakker once lived here; I really liked his daughter Ellen but we never got together. Before that, the Voûte family lived here, the bankers and financiers. In the back garden, past the swimming pool and next to the tennis court are the tall lime trees that I used to think were beeches. You're a few kilometres away from the sea here, and you can smell its salty air on good days. As the sun sets behind the lime trees, you can sense that this is an old place, but also a sinister one. It is grey here, rather than black, and imaginary vapours rise from the ground. It sometimes reminds one a little of Pluto, the planet, and it is about money, lots of money, and about white powder.

The pages I wrote in Aerdenhout are long gone and only a vague shadow remains of the memory. Peru: that’s what it was related to, but also the Zwarteweg, for example. There was nothing planned at that time that would lead me to Peru, nor was I aware that 30 years later I would be writing this text in a house situated on an avenue originally called Zwarte Weg. The sinister place on the Zwarteweg in Aerdenhout resembled the sinister place opposite the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam that once housed a café. This book is not so much about those two harbingers of dark times or what they entailed, rather I will describe a long road to something utterly familiar that I did not yet know and that I had always been looking for.

Wageningen

Wageningen, the city where nothing ever happens. In the beginning, I tried to cycle through it slowly, so that it wouldn't run out so quickly. Ten years after the Maagdenhuis occupation in Amsterdam, the University's main building was occupied, and this was celebrated as the Wageningen Spring. At some point, I walked into the Student Union building, where I encountered about seven depressed people in one small room. "Is this an action meeting?", I asked as casually as possible. Well, that was the wrong question to ask because, it turned out, they had just gone out in vain to reoccupy the main building, but that action had failed because the doorman wouldn't let them in. My job was simply to leave this town with a diploma.

During the first year I lived in a student flat on a floor with eight others, mostly freshmen. It was a nice place where you could be served, for example, kale with winter carrots. Winter carrots had been invented as a substitute for smoked sausage; there were already vegetarian principles around, but cooking skills were lagging behind. When I was seventeen, I had visited Wageningen once and decided that I didn't need to be buried there. Because of my studies, I ended up there anyway. In hindsight, that was a good decision; by then Wageningen had become less terrible and I stumbled across my wife there, and she is the best thing that ever happened to me. She ended - and healed - the series of failed infatuations that I could now put behind me, and above all, we could face the future together.

A fellow resident in my flat asked me to come along to the try-out of a play performed by his Student club. They felt the need to perform the play once with a trial audience. My wife was also in it, but she was in charge of prompting during the first act, in which she played no role. Since it was only a trial anyway, she sat on the right side of the stage behind a table placed across it, with the script in front of her. About 20 people had come along to watch. As it turned out, the cueing was hardly necessary, possibly because the actors knew the first act by heart, and so it was that she sat there and only looked at me whilst I looked at her. We didn't see or experience much of that first act of the play. I was wearing white leather Bally shoes with blue piping and that's how it all came about.

Towards the end of the first year, it was a balmy and thundery summer evening, there was a lecture by the Wageningen Indian Collective (or something similar) followed by a presentation by a medicine man of the Lacota Indians better known to us as the Sioux. He called himself Lame Deer, after an illustrious predecessor but whether he deserved that title I have never been able to find out. In any case, the poor Indian was very bored during the lecture and gradually showed this more clearly by yawning, staring at his watch and finally by repeatedly setting off the alarm on his wristwatch. The presentation was very engaging and he had personality. Among other things, he explained how he became a medicine man and, according to him, that comes to you in a flash. I made a recording with my cassette tape recorder, but the recording was of very poor quality because of his distance to my microphone. Afterwards, I briefly spoke with Lame Deer.

Back home, which at that time was still in the student flat, I listened to a snippet of the almost unintelligible recording in our kitchen and, disappointed, put the device away again. In the process, I wrapped the power cord around my hand and Wham!, a spherical flash of light hit my hand whilst at the same time the light bulb burnt out above the kitchen table. Nothing was scorching, it didn't smell, and it didn't hurt. Across from me, a flatmate stared at my left hand with eyes like saucers. She had also been at the lecture and stammered, "What was that?" Perplexed, and to put an end to it, I replied, "Well, the kitchen lamp burnt out." "No, I saw a flash of light, in your hand." "Yes, me too actually," I stammered. The light bulb had turned almost completely black on the inside. After an incident like that, all sorts of thoughts run through your head, but I felt no different than before, and so there's not much more you can do with it at first then to go on living and replace the bulb above the kitchen table. Apparently, I have become a kind of medicine man and that is quite special because, generally speaking, I feel much closer to the South American Indians than the North Americans.

Suriname

Yes, Suriname does have links to the Netherlands even though it is independent. I was there before the December killings and it was still beautiful then. In the plane on the way over, I sat between two Creoles who were visiting their homeland for the first time in 10 and 17 years. Our interactions were enjoyable and we agreed to meet up later. This turned into several long nights in illegal garage pubs where I was introduced to their groups of friends. Because of these initial contacts, I kept running into acquaintances in central Paramaribo throughout my stay in Suriname who would take me under their wing. As a result, I ended up being invited to a lot of places, such as a rasta party at the women's house, lunch at the Membre Boekoe barracks and many people's homes. On the plane our bond had grown even stronger thanks to a drunken Javanese man who threw piles of 100 notes through the cabin while shouting, "I will never go back to Holland again. I don't need that fucking money anymore." We collected the notes and on a third attempt, when he had calmed down a bit, we finally managed to put them back in his pocket.

A week before I left for Suriname, my brother had run into an old school friend. She lived in Paramaribo where her husband was working on the construction of a new teaching hospital. Through my brother, I was invited to go and stay with them whilst I was in Paramaribo. This connection introduced me to the posher circles and the expat community. The very first day, I received an invitation to go to their housekeeper's Javanese wedding. It also led to evenings at the luxurious Toraica hotel with, for instance, President Henk Chin a Sen ("Just call me Henk.") and evenings with members of the CONS, the Committee for Development Cooperation Netherlands Suriname, including Ministers Van Mierlo and Van Dam. The amount of booze they could drink was impressive. Van Mierlo stood out as a great debater. This was well before his marriage to Gretta Nieuwenhuizen (yes, later Duisenberg) or his liver transplant. This was my second fortunate entry into the Surinamese community and I was truly warmly welcomed.

The third entry came through forestry. I was allowed to visit Suriname freely thanks to the contacts of former neighbour Bruynzeel and I gained access to forest research in the interior through CELOS and the Anton de Kom University, and of course Wageningen. In the forest, I still encountered Dutch students in the 1980s who addressed Indians as 'Jan' or 'Piet' because they found the actual names too complicated to pronounce. These students also happened to go to the same guesthouse in Paramaribo every weekend and amuse themselves amongst themselves without really venturing out. These same students were full of disbelief at what I had managed to experience in such a short time. As far as I was concerned, even if they had been on Mars, it wouldn't have made a big difference to them. Through my forestry contacts, I was able to admire failed pine forests that, apart from the absence of rubbish bins, looked almost exactly like the boring plantations one usually finds in National Park the Veluwe in the Netherlands. I also witnessed the consequences of an experiment by Weyerhauser, who had tried to grind down an entire forest to test its suitability for paper production. Fortunately, it was unsuitable, and so I also got to walk around in real forests that were much more like the forests you might find in the tropics. This third entry into Suriname was therefore also very much a privileged one.

On one of our return journeys from the forest, we came across a car accident. The unpaved, red-coloured dirt road was full of potholes and a van with passengers had overturned. Our car was already full, and so it happened that I was sitting in the passenger seat with an injured Indian on my lap. He was bleeding from several wounds and had broken his arm. It was clear to me that I could ease some of his pain with my hands, which was the first time I experienced being able to do so. From the way he looked at me, I understood that he understood what was happening. Fortunately, we passed the little hospital at the aluminium factory where we tried to get help for him, but we were rebuffed by the receptionist. Apparently, a forest Indian is not that attractive for them. I made it pretty clear that I had no intention of leaving before he was treated and so I eventually managed to speak to an American doctor in passing. He too unapologetically took the same stance as the receptionist, which angered me greatly. Out of frustration and powerlessness, I asked him if he had taken the Hippocratic Oath and he had to agree. "In that case you will treat him now or I will sue the shit out of you." This was language he seemed to understand: the Indian was admitted and treated, and we were able to continue our journey back to the capital.

Much to the fear and concern of the Creoles I had met in Paramaribo, I slept and walked in the forest during the week. Walk around any tree twice and you completely lose your sense of direction for lack of known landmarks. The Indians don't have that problem. By using their voice or the sound of a machete against the plank roots of trees, they manage to walk in perfectly straight lines towards each other at distances of a hundred metres. The Indians I was hiking with offered me fruits that they found in the forest and that you will never see in the market. I had been told that meeting Indians for the first time can be challenging. Apparently, they might suddenly leave you on your own in the forest and watch how you react from a distance. I was prepared for this situation but nothing of the sort ever happened. On the contrary, some time later they shared stories with me that they knew from the old men in their village, which is very unusual. None of the students who camped there more or less permanently had ever heard any of them.

Later I was told why; I had been accepted by the spirit of the place. That gave the Indians the freedom to talk about things they are normally very protective about. On my first evening in the forest, the barracks were closed after I returned from crocodile and snake watching. To avoid waking up the students unnecessarily, I decided to use a hammock in the open canteen. During a first night outside, you sleep lightly and at one point I was awake again and heard an animal on four legs scurrying around. I think it was a forest piglet but the Indians who were eating their breakfast the next morning kept asking me if I hadn't heard anything and especially, if I hadn't been scared. Well no, I hadn’t been scared. But why not - they asked again. Because if it's my time to go, then it's my time, I finally replied to put an end to it. Not even for tigers, was the next question. No, I wasn’t scared of tigers either and I told them the story of the roaming animal whereupon the whole series of questions was fired at me again from the start. This continued until they finally revealed to me that the spirit of the place was a 'tiger' that had visited me but not scared me and because of that I had been accepted. Big cats are called ‘tigers’ although, literally speaking, no tigers exist there. Quite extraordinary, and so my visit to the forest in Suriname turned very naturally into a heart-warming stay.

My visit to Suriname formed the basis for my motivation to pursue a degree in tropical forestry. Back in Paramaribo, I found a few postcards with atmospheric pictures of rhinos and giraffes and sent one to my wife of course.

Teak

Much has been written about teak and even more about investing in teak. I have been guilty of that too. In a distant and obscure country called Costa Rica, teak trees grew under the watchful eye of a large panda bear. And growing they would, if the leaflets were to be believed, at least as fast as the world record and all that without any losses. It would have been useful to have picked a good growing site to begin with. Or to have looked at the price ratios between wood from thin logs and thick ones. Or to have looked at the price - and price development - of teak wood. Or to have set up this investment scheme with people who knew something about forestry.

As it was, the scheme was an unholy marriage between a Frisian entrepreneur who had copied an obscure teakwood plan from an American adventurer, a respected Dutch insurer, and the big panda bear organisation. This partnership instilled so much confidence that nothing was ever reviewed critically, and investors could be lured by fairytale arguments and promised returns. Soon the millions started flowing in, from sweet grandmothers who wanted to put something aside for their grandchildren, to investors who were interested in the environment, to downright greedy investors who trusted the reputation of said institutions. A scheme like this could not keep on going forever, and it didn't. It became the first scandal around investments by insurance companies and an avalanche of further scandals would follow.

When things started to go very wrong, they also became really entertaining. An Amsterdam bailiff, without having any knowledge in this area, went through the plantations on horseback and wrote in his official report that everything was fine. In doing so, he was ably accompanied by a forest officer from the Ministry of Agriculture who wrote another report that was later wrongly defended by Ministers Zalm, Van Aartsen and Pronk in the Lower House of the Netherlands. Anyway, the parties were able to add the reports to a lawsuit at the last minute, and they were sufficient to impress the serving judge. There were also other games played that served mainly to solidify the credibility of the enterprising triumvirate.

Meanwhile in that distant and obscure land called Costa Rica, the trees did not grow as desired, nor did they grow to the sky. Diseases, fires and floods occurred despite promises to Dutch courts that the plantation would not suffer any losses. Above all, cash flows dried up. Unsalable timber generated by thinning practices piled up in front of the sawmill, and some executives of the insurance company that still held the investments were denied access to the plantation by armed bodyguards. The generous lifestyle of the family of diligent Frisian entrepreneurs gradually and increasingly came under pressure. In short, decay set in, without, incidentally, any form of shame taking hold of the people involved. Indeed, there was even a restart with a new sales company that did not involve either the insurer or the organisation of the big panda bear.

To make a very long story short, the insurance company put an end to the scam by giving everyone their money back with added interest. This was prompted by the publication of my PhD thesis and happened without any kind of legal process, an absolute novelty in the Dutch financial landscape. In addition, a few executives of the insurer and the big panda bear stepped down, but the big panda bear still grumbled in a press release that they regretted the fact that the insurer had compensated the investors. The gentlemen at the top of the insurance company and the big panda bear proved insufficiently stress-resilient in what they themselves have started to call the 'Teakwood War'. A phase of silent embarrassment followed, including on the part of ministries and development agencies.

Some time later, two gents from the Dutch fiscal intelligence and investigation service visited me for a chat once, obviously and fortunately for a fee. I should put my invoice above my bed again. We talked about the mechanisms behind investments in teak; they had discovered more than 40 clones of the great panda plan and that’s only in relation to the Dutch market. Surely that makes one wonder why Minister Zalm and therefore the Dutch government kept blocking any oversight of teakwood funds. The day after his departure as minister, the central bank of the Netherlands announced it would initiate such a supervisory scheme.

I mentioned the following to them for consideration. There may come a time when the funds dry up and then you will see that the distant and obscure land called Costa Rica is beautifully located in the middle of an axis between South and North America. If there turns out to be a landing strip on the plantation then that can be very helpful in fantasising about alternative sources of income. In any case, the gents have taken this insight with them to their offices and who knows, maybe something will come of it. The later revelation in the Telegraph that white powder was sprinkled around generously at the plantation-affiliated sales organisation, which has since gone bankrupt, gives hope, but for now, the big profits remain to be seen.

Latinos

My son was conceived among our moving boxes in Wageningen and my daughter in Vienna, before my wife and I settled permanently in the Netherlands. My son was born in Ecuador, but before I was able to go there, I first had to visit the World Food Organisation's headquarters in Rome, the FAO, for just over a week. Oh yes, and before that we had to attend an acculturation course at KIT, the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. A Chilean sociologist stranded in the Netherlands asked us about our expectations for the course. "It will be fine as long as we don't have to play Indians because we won't know how to do that," was my reply. Later, the Chilean confided in me that he had been shocked by my answer. One of the elements in the course was the role-playing game 'Derdiaantje' (which is a 'funny' combination in Dutch of 'Third World' and 'Indian'). We were truly expected to play Indian by the Ministry of Development Cooperation. I may have been the only trainee that year who had ever seen an Indian in the flesh, but that did not stop anyone from playing their roles with full conviction and empathy. One was a village chief or mayor, another a small farmer, and a third a large landowner. Without any hesitation, we exchanged our stereotypical views of such characters. It immediately reminded me of the beginning of my studies in Wageningen, at the Agricultural College. After a week of discussions about what women in agriculture may think and do, one of the students came up with the brilliant idea of interviewing a woman in agriculture. Everyone agreed that this was a good plan, but it soon turned out that none of us actually knew any. During our acculturation course, we also participated in a very nice evening of African dancing. To take part, you had to pass a psychological test. The main focus was, of course, to see whether you were psychologically fit. A friend of ours passed his test with flying colours, but now he can't get through a day without Prozac. The course lasted two weeks; after that we were acculturated and thus officially declared 'ready for the tropics'.

Latinos are different; they are not Indians. It was quite common for a Latino father to proudly tell the entire pub that he had taken his 14-year-old son to the whores for the first time. When my son was born in Quito, he automatically became Ecuadorian too. "He has blond hair and blue eyes!" we would hear; 'para mejorar la raza' - to improve the race. Every now and then there was an outbreak of cholera in South America. This was the case once in Lima, the capital of Peru. The disease arrived from Southeast Asia in ballast water dumped by ships in the port. The port city linked to Lima is called Callao, and I think it was one of the most depressive places on earth. The richest fishing grounds in the world can be found off the coast, but for some reason, all the Peruvians could think of was to process everything into fishmeal - and a bit of cebiche. And even the fishmeal factories went out of business every time an El Niño caused fish stocks to dwindle. Every child knows that there is an El Niño every few years, but this was Latin America, so this knowledge did not lead to any precautions.

Cebiche is a dish of raw sea food and lime, often served with popcorn in Ecuador. It is a real delicacy and the local speciality. Within no time, the cholera epidemic had spread through the highlands to the rivers draining into the Amazon basin. This also put Ecuador at risk. The health minister vowed that, thanks to his policies, the disease would never cross the border. The opposition promptly demanded the Minister's resignation if the disease did indeed cross the border. Of course, the disease did spread to Ecuador and just as naturally, the Minister never resigned. Meanwhile, Peru was still under the spell of the epidemic but fortunately there too you could find a firmly acting health minister. He swore that the disease was over, put his money where his mouth was and ate a portion of cebiche in front of live television to prove he was right and that it was safe to eat the dish again. The next day, he was hospitalised with cholera. Those who would like to further explore humour about Latinos - through the eyes of an Indian - should read the unparalleled 'Uncle Atahualpa', Mi tio Atahualpa, by Paulo de Carvalho Neto.

Finally to Peru

A week before leaving for the FAO headquarters in Rome, I had surgery to open a heart valve that had been partially sealed since birth. Everything went fine except that they had to poke around for quite a while to get the balloon in the right place. After a night in hospital to let the wound in my groin close, I was discharged. I then asked if there was anything I needed to be particularly careful with. "Oh yes, we suggest a month or two of rest." Well, they should have mentioned that earlier, so off I went to Rome. The hotel booked by the United Nations turned out to be a former home of Mussolini's mistresses. Very romantic with lots of frills, gold and Art Deco-style mirrors. A long walk would take you to the FAO on Via delle Therme di Caracalla, right opposite the Colosseum. The FAO headquarters turned out to have an interesting history: it was a former stronghold of Mussolini. He decreed in 1937 that the famous 160-ton Stele of Axum, which he had stolen from Ethiopia, should be placed here in front of the building that was then the Ministry of Colonies. This Ministry was also known as the 'Ministry for Italian Africa'. Incidentally, at the United Nations, people are only too happy to settle in special buildings like this. UNESCO, for instance, is in the former Gestapo headquarters in Paris. Anyway, according to a peace treaty signed under the auspices of the United Nations, Italy promised to return the stele to Ethiopia in 1947. However, it was not until 2002 that the 24-metre-high colossus was returned. To mark this occasion, UNESCO's website reported the following, full of misplaced pride: 'Aksum obelisk returns to Ethiopia: UNESCO to handle its reintegration into the World Heritage site. 'This highly symbolic gesture, born of a common agreement between Italy and Ethiopia, is to be welcomed by the entire international community,' said UNESCO Director-General Koïïchiro Matsuura.'

The corridors of the main FAO building pretty much feel like a torture chamber. Perhaps they could adopt some of this design in Brussels at the European Parliament. The building largely consists of endless, sparsely lit tunnels leading from one useless office to the next. All floors look the same, which is strange. Only one floor stands out, and that is the seventh. Actually, it is not a floor at all, but a truly unique roof terrace with stunning views of the Colosseum. Here they served the cheapest cappuccino in all of Rome and first-class subsidised lunches. So the way to do things at the FAO in Rome is to complete all your paperwork as soon as possible and then disappear like a rocket to the seventh floor. Once, during a heavy downpour of rain, actually more like a cloudburst, it became clear that the Colosseum used to be suitable for holding water parties in the arena. The entire square flooded, and stranded buses were submerged in water up to their steps. Parked cars of FAO employees did not stay dry inside either; there was easily more than half a metre of water that came sloshing down the hill with impressive power through Via delle Therme di Caracalla, where you can still find the remains of Roman baths. A visit to Rome is not complete without a visit to another stronghold, the Vatican. If you walk across St Peter's Square to the other side, you suddenly realise how large it is. But when you arrive at the other end you are rewarded with a view of the works of Da Vinci, for example. Beyond the large flow of tourists, there is much more to discover. For instance, there is a place where you can have all sorts of things blessed. I considered having our car blessed by the Pope, which would undoubtedly have raised its value in South America if we had wanted to sell it there. I decided against it, however. All you need for the blessing is the car papers; they have enough common sense at the Vatican not to let thousands of vehicles in. A price list on the wall neatly explained to visitors how much the blessing of various objects cost. It did not include the cost of indulgences at the time, which were only reintroduced later by Pope John Paul the Second. Shame.

I would not get the prescribed rest for my heart valve. A week's rest in Rome was all I got due to the paperwork that needed to be completed there. A diplomatic passport, insurance, a sworn oath to the UN, a dollar account to receive tax-free income, travel documents, and so on. Then onto the Alitalia flight to Madrid - after all, you have to use this Italian airline as much as possible if you work for the FAO - and then from Madrid to Quito in Ecuador and from there to Lima, the capital of Peru. On the plane, I met Molina, an Ecuadorian colonel who was also a Member of Parliament. He had been in Rome on a state-paid trip to visit the Pope on an audience. I never met him again. I also spoke with a group of Dutch travellers on their way to Peru for a holiday and with a bunch of Peruvian artists that had been in Europe on some kind of tour. The latter had been very enjoyable, it seemed. Arriving in Lima, the artists asked me to attend the press room with them, where they were interviewed by the country's largest newspaper, La República, about their cultural exchange experiences. From a distance, I was listening to everything when the newspaper's photographer walked up to me and suddenly took a picture of me. This was not going to end well, I thought, and, as it turned out, it would soon cast my visit to Peru in a different light.

My suspicions were soon confirmed. The journalists ended their interview with the artists and came over to me. Over the next few days, I was not able to find any article about the artists in the newspaper and I doubt one was ever published. However, they did publish the interview with me that I had refused to give as much as I could. I was well aware of Sendero Luminoso, the guerrilla group the Shining Path that terrorised Peru in those days. Just two weeks before my visit, the Shining Path had blown up two all-terrain vehicles from the forestry project I was about to visit, contents and all. Among them was the conservationist and journalist Barbara D'Achille, who was planning to write a report on the project. Sendero had outlawed all United Nations staff, meaning they had put them on their hit list. And there lay the crux of the interview with me. The following day, it featured prominently in La República, Peru's biggest newspaper: Despite chaos and threats, a United Nations staff member has come to collaborate on reforestation projects in the highlands of the Andes, where Sendero is ever present and at times has wiped entire villages off the face of the earth. The following weekend, in a Saturday special, La República did it again with an article under the headline Sembramos esperanza, 'Let us sow hope'. And that was what the journalists were all about, sending a message of hope in the crazy days of random bombings, killings, sabotage of power lines and general political chaos. With a nice picture of the madman from the UN who dared to do this, so this is what they used me for. They had made up the story, which apparently did not require any input from me, nor did they ask my permission for publishing the interview.

A few days after the interview, I reported to the Dutch Embassy. That was the custom for United Nations employees. A nervous taxi driver took me there in a bright yellow beetle. He tried to drive as fast as possible and would get really nervous when he had to stop at a red traffic light. At the first opportunity he would dash off through the red light; it took me a while to realise why. Not moving makes you vulnerable; you can easily get a gun pointed to your head, especially if you have a white passenger on board. At the Embassy, I was received by an extremely sour secretary who had the newspaper in question on the desk in front of him. The reason for his foul mood was revealed straight away and I will not forget it lightly. Pointing his finger at the article in La República, he said. "I have been working at this Embassy for five years now and I have never managed to accomplish this." It turned out that he was jealous and understood nothing of the dangers that the interview and photograph posed. In short, I had arrived in Peru.

Peru

Having become world-famous through the articles in La República, my first trip to Peru had begun. The Shining Path guerrillas caused quite a lot of chaos during my stay. High-voltage power lines to the capital were repeatedly blown up. Two buses carrying tourists had also been raided, with the people in one of the buses massacred instantly. Then there was the attack with dynamite on several Russian sailors who did no more than wait for a bus in Callao. They did not survive. I once asked a Peruvian why he had crossed the street twice when we were walking to a restaurant. "Oh, that's because I wanted to avoid the Aero Peru office that is located there as quite a few of those have been blown up recently." Planes coming into Lima were also attacked, mainly to discourage foreigners from coming to Peru. Just under two weeks before my arrival, two of the project's all-terrain vehicles were blown up and the occupants killed. Among them the locally famous conservationist Barbara d'Anchille in whose memory the Pampa Galeras nature reserve is named. This happened outside Cuzco, in an area that I would also visit. The news even made it to the New York Times, the newspaper in which Barbara regularly published about the destructive effects of cocaine, or ‘white powder’. As mentioned, UN workers were on the Shining Path's death list and the guerrilla group took that list quite seriously. It did not leave me untouched, especially with my pictures all over the biggest newspaper in the country.

Things had not gone according to plan from the start. At the airport, I was not picked up, even though it had been agreed that I would be, but of course, the message about my arrival had never left the FAO headquarters in Rome. Mobiles were not yet available and talking on the phone was impossible anyway because it could not be combined with the guarding of my luggage. In no time at all, I was surrounded by an army of ten or more 'helpers'. It was a weekend, and I didn't have the personal phone numbers of the project staff. Using a taxi, I went to a hotel of my choice, which meant that nobody knew where I was, and that felt quite safe. Gloomy is the first word that comes to mind when I think of the capital Lima and the port town of Callao next door, or the entire Peruvian coastal desert. It is not too hot but always cloudy, foggy and humid and yet, it hardly ever rains. The sky is grey, the earth is grey, and the sea is grey. Where there is no irrigation, nothing really grows, so grey is about the only colour that occurs naturally. Even the buildings constructed of clay are grey. Unbelievable.

I joined work on Monday morning and visited the embassy on Tuesday after a weekend of sightseeing and loafing in Lima. Two days later I was in Cuzco, the capital of the ancient Incas and the centre of the Tahuantinsuyu, the empire of the four winds. Within the city are buildings built on the earthquake-resistant foundations of original Inca structures. The famous giant stone Sacsayhuamán complex, located just outside Cuzco, predates the Incas and was built by the Killke. As soon as I stepped off the plane in Cusco, something in me recognised it as home, the thin air at 3,400 metres above sea level and the smell of eucalyptus wood that is used for cooking. But it is much more Indian here than in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia where I spent part of my childhood. Usually, I'm not too prone to altitude sickness but that morning I felt the symptoms starting in my head. Not yet recovered from the heart valve surgery, the trek continued that same morning to a village that was located above 3,600 metres but more than 300 metres down the road into something I can only describe as a ravine. On our way back up I walked very very slowly - as a precaution. We then visited a few more villages that thankfully had a slightly more favourable position relative to the road.

In Cuzco, I also visited the headquarters of the local project, of course. Located outside the city centre, it was housed in a well-maintained building. My Dutch colleague was hiding in the attic, without a computer, and he was clearly frustrated about his inability to get anything done. It was also clear that he didn't understand anything about why this was the case. Here he was, sidelined, with all his knowledge and talent; why did nobody draw upon his expertise? Within ten minutes, it was completely obvious to me what was going on. Downstairs, in the best room in the building, I found, of course, the local boss of the project. This is to be expected, and there is nothing wrong with that. Behind his desk I saw the computer of my Dutch colleague, placed in sight of every visitor, but positioned in such a way that no one could ever sit behind it to work on it. The device was clearly just for show and was a sign of prestige and power. Power also over the Dutch colleague who actually needed it to do his job properly. Once the Dutchman had allowed himself to be banished to the attic room without his computer, it opened up the opportunity for the project's number two to further frustrate him in his work. Manoeuvred into this position, the Dutchman was hopeless and incapable of ever changing it. He never understood what was really going on here and therefore, despite all his good intentions, he was already in checkmate before he had even started. Much later, I ran into him again in the Netherlands, sitting behind an anonymous desk. Alas, he never quite got over it. "No tiene huevos" is how a Peruvian colleague summed it up for me that same day. That means as much as 'He has no eggs' and thus my diagnosis of earlier that morning was confirmed.

In Cuzco, the Temple of the Sun and the Temple of the Virgins of the Sun can still be visited, as well as the cathedral built on the foundations of the Viracocha Inca palace. No cheerful places I might add; quite the contrary because they are almost as bleak as the Mayan temples of Tical in Guatemala and that is quite a statement. Repression, repression and more repression, those are the first three words I associate with it. Of course, the civilisation of the Incas is gone, but when a new building opens, it is still considered a good idea to bury a llama foetus under the front door, make a toast to it and before taking a sip, drop a few drops on the ground as an offering to Pacha Mama, the Earth Mother goddess. Quechua, Quichua as they say in Ecuador, or Runa Simi as the Indians themselves call it, has remained the language of communication and the llama and guinea pig the main pets, alongside pigs and chickens. Don't be surprised if a chicken is occasionally slaughtered next to the altar of a Catholic church.

Everywhere in Peru there are ceremonially important places called huacas, which can also be mountain peaks or just particularly beautiful places. Sometimes visitors leave behind stones that can form large mounds over the centuries. If the huaca forms a line, it is also called a ceque, like the four imaginary lines extending from Cuzco that form the borders between the parts of the legendary Tahuantinsuyu, the kingdom of the four winds that had in its navel a kind of birthplace of creation. While much attention has been paid to the Incas themselves, they had actually conquered various other civilisations and used the best artisans of these other societies for many of their creations. The entire coastal region, for example, is full of cultures that were mostly organised along the river valleys coming down from the Andes that supply the oases of the coastal desert. For instance, in the rich villa district of Miraflores in the capital Lima, there are impressive pyramids built from ‘adobe', the local grey clay.

The Chinchas are one example of a people who did not survive the Inca's expansionism. Their name still lives on in the chinchilla, the beautiful rodent I used to have roaming around my room whilst at school in the Netherlands. According to tradition, the Chincas wore clothes made from the superfine fur of chinchillas. I was lucky enough to see chinchillas - and the related viscachas - wandering around during my trips in Peru. As well as ibises and flamingos. Around Zumbahua, a village located in Ecuador's Cotopaxi province, a tribe still roams today that can be recognised by their black attire that differs greatly from what is locally customary. This is another example of what could happen to you if you resisted the Incas. This tribe originally came from the highlands of Bolivia; just look at a map to see how far that is from central Ecuador. At some stage they had been a bit unsympathetic to the Incas, with the result that most of the men were exterminated and the remaining members exiled to Ecuador. This happened before the arrival of the Spanish.

The chinchillas and viscachas can be encountered in dry, seemingly deserted mountain areas. Seemingly, because there can always be someone, barefoot or otherwise, appearing out of 'nowhere'. With a bit of luck, you will also see condors here. A project car is quite conspicuous in such an environment. The only road in the area has almost no traffic and the traffic that is normally there does not consist of new 4-wheel drive off-road vehicles. Thanks to the thin, dry mountain air, with a humidity that is lower than in the Sahara, you can see far, very far indeed. Being able to see the next snow-covered volcanic peak over a distance of 100 km is no problem at all. Sleeping in the villages - called comunidades – was therefore a bit unsettling, at least for the Indians who had to patrol this area controlled by the Shining Path guerrillas. You should know that these villages were regularly massacred, both by the guerrillas and the regular army who invariably blamed each other for such offences. It does get very cold when it freezes solidly at night and there are no windows in the grey, adobe hut. The starry sky is also unparalleled, especially when contemplating that your wife is pregnant for the first time.

After some wandering, I ended up in the beautifully located city of Arequipa. From the central square, called Plaza de Armas like every other central square in Peru, you have a magnificent view of the volcano Misti, which is perhaps even more beautiful than Mount Fuji in Japan, and of the toddlers who are taught how to march in full regalia on Saturday mornings. Coffee does taste very special in such a location. Money could be exchanged in the street; the economy was so unsettled that you did it per meal. It could happen that between lunch and dinner the rate of the Inti had fallen by 30%, which is not so surprising with an annual inflation rate of around 1,000%. As luck would have it, I stepped into a restaurant and came across the Dutch travelling group that I had met on the plane a few weeks earlier. Naturally, we exchanged a few stories and they had indeed not travelled to the central highlands because of the security situation. I had already expressed doubts about their itinerary on the plane, but they had not been told that they would not go until they got to Lima. In any case, it was clear that I was the only one of the entire group who had not yet been robbed. A few days later, I flew back to Lima, the depressing capital in the coastal desert where the food was considerably better than in the comunidades.

Anyway, I had come here to see a United Nations forestry project and, in particular, to learn from the methods they had developed with Dutch support over the previous 12 years. That turned out to be a disappointment, and it took some time for this to sink in given all the positive coverage I had already read about the project. First of all, growing conditions were difficult; soil fertility was not always optimal, there was a lack of water, and night frost was very common. As a result, you get many losses, including in the nursery. In those nurseries, I saw almost exclusively eucalyptus, which is growing everywhere in the Andes. The project was supposed to have planted a certain number of hectares, but I couldn’t see a reforested area of that size. Enquiries and independent thinking provided the solution to this apparent contradiction. What turned out to be the case? In the project documentation, they counted the number of transplanted plants, that is, the smallest seedlings of a few millimetres, or first cuttings, and then multiplied that number by 9 square metres to estimate the reforested area. The 9 square metres is the area available to each individual tree in a 3-by-3-metre planting arrangement. With an intermediate loss rate of more than 90%, you really won't reach the reported size of the reforested area, not even in 12 years.

The plan was to introduce this forestry approach to neighbouring Ecuador. But first we were to continue working on the Peruvian project in the town of Cajamarca, located in northern Peru, the place where Pizzarro first received the ransom for the Inca Atahualpa, including a lot of gold and silver from the sun temple of Cuzco, only to kill him later. My wife had already arranged a house for us there with a courtyard garden. It was a colonial villa in the centre, so near the Plaza de Armas as you now know. Cajamarca: yes, we would have liked to go there. Beautifully remote and with plenty of remnants from before the Inca days, such as aqueducts that divert water from the Amazon basin on the east side of the Andes to the agricultural areas on the west side. Cajamarca, greener than the rest of the Peruvian Andes and less weighed down by the yoke of the guerrillas. Cajamarca, where you can dream of the land of José María Arguedas who wrote the inimitable book 'Every Blood' (Todas las sangres), a book you have to read if you want to understand anything at all about the life of the Indians in the Andes and the complete arbitrariness that prevails and how little a human life is worth there. We classify a book like this under the genre of magical realism, along with the books of the much more famous Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, but that is incorrect for both, because they write mostly realistically about a world that is bizarre to us. Just read it, even if you cannot get through it, because the Indians are so closed off that there is no fun to be had for anthropologists and so you won't find anything out about them in any other way.

How little a life is worth there sometimes was made clear to me in one of the comunidades I had the privilege of visiting. We arrived there in our lone all-terrain vehicle on the third day of the local village festival, at a kind of climax therefore. After seeing the nursery, an average vegetable garden in the Netherlands is in better shape and at least twice as big, we headed to the centre of the huts, quite surprisingly called Plaza de Armas, which we found completely deserted. The Indians there were very religiously inclined and therefore they don't drink to get drunk, quite the contrary, they drink to get into a stupor or trance. They basically go for an instant knockout and they succeed quite well. They succeed even better because they are genetically structured in such a way that they have much more trouble breaking down alcohol. The village was not completely empty; if you looked closely there were still quite a few villagers scattered around in the gutters, although there was no real gutter. Any form of paving was also missing.

We made our appearance before the police chief who had also been appointed as temporary mayor. Police chief is perhaps too big a word for a corps consisting of only one man but for want of a better one I use it here anyway. He let us into the office - imagine nothing more than a mud hut - where he paced nervously back and forth with wide eyes and a drawn and loaded revolver. In a general brawl earlier that day, he had shot the brother of the leader of the village's music group, and by the sound of it, the group was coming back towards the village square while playing music. The band was not large; there were three men left who could still walk, albeit with difficulty. Our fear was that they would come for revenge, so we went outside, without the police chief who thought it was safer inside. There was no possibility of calling for back-up, he was basically on his own. He must have been very aware in that moment that he had been appointed from outside the village and was therefore not a fellow local resident. For a few minutes, I listened to the sound coming from the three-man band. Music it certainly wasn't, out of tune it definitely was, and at the same time it sounded completely alien. I had never heard anything like it before. After that we sought refuge and what became of the police chief I do not know to this day.

The reality and context of the high Andes are so different. It was not long ago that the mayor and the priest in a village would fight over whether to serve only Pepsi or Coca Cola. And that is in villages that are already so advanced that they have a mayor and priest at the same time, which was not yet the case in the comunidad I described earlier. In my eyes, the people here are beautiful, with equally beautiful dress, and I write that whilst absolutely disliking traditional dress. If you look closely, you can see their beauty, in their faces and eyes, in the smiles you may sometimes glimpse. Why this is the case I do not know, but I feel so at home and in love at the same time, and I willingly imagine that some of this is mutual.

Ecuador

It so happened that the project in Peru, which was fervently supported by the Netherlands, was supposed to get a new project leader every 12 years. A new job therefore needed to be found for the old project leader, and that turned out to be a regional project that would build on the Peruvian project and expand its approach through almost the entire Andes region from Colombia to perhaps Chile. The old boss had decided that he wanted me to join the Ecuadorian part of the programme. Because of the situation with the guerrillas of the Shining Path in Peru, the previously planned location of Cajamarca had turned out not to be feasible anyway. The good thing about this change of plan was that I would still be able to visit Peru (and other countries) from Quito, where we would be based. And Quito itself, of course. Where else can you see three snow-capped volcanos from your living room? Where else can you choose between eternal snow or banana trees on a Sunday trip? Where else can you work among mud huts in comunidades in the morning and meet the country's leaders in the Ministry of Agriculture in the afternoon? Well, where else? It had taken a while, but now I had finally arrived in the mystical lands of my youth – and not as a visitor, but a real resident.

White powder

It feels so good to take a fresh sniff of white powder before riding your moped from a summer evening party in Aerdenhout to the beach club in Zandvoort. Or, if you are a politician, head off to an interview with a white nose. Self-confidence courses through your body, and that comes across well on TV. Just ask the addicted guys from the various advertising agencies around the country. Their screaming and sometimes comically intended sales pitches suck attention like little else on this planet. A superficial vibe or tone of voice is transformed into a covetable lifestyle. Until suspicion and paranoia start to take hold of you; then suddenly the world doesn't look so friendly, and we get closer to the atmosphere I encountered around the lime trees of the Zwarteweg; those trees I used to think were beeches. If you smell really well, it is almost a flavour and once you recognise it then it becomes - almost - unmistakable.

What other truths lie beneath the successful politicians and businessmen from the world of old boy networks? An old American folk wisdom aptly puts it: follow the money. That helps, of course, but there is quite a bit of work being done to make that difficult. Instead of following the money, we can also take a stab at the origin of the resources. In the case of cocaine, we have to go to South America and, in particular, to the countries of Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador. Anyone looking at the map will see that these countries are located in the western part of the continent, along the Pacific Ocean. The mighty Andes mountain range runs north to south, and to the east of the Andes lies a humid tropical region that partly transitions into the Amazon basin. Seen from the coast, coca grows mainly on the other side of the Andes and it is quite humid and inhospitable there. There are only a few roads that cross from east to west. Compare it to the Wild West of cowboy movies but wetter, greener and generally a bit less friendly.

The white powder starts by harvesting the coca leaves, which is similar to picking tea. Indeed, the leaves are also used as a tea, which in countries like Peru and Bolivia is mainly seen as a remedy for mild cases of altitude sickness. This sickness can hit you whilst arriving at La Paz airport in Bolivia, which is at an altitude of more than 4,000m above sea level. In the airport’s baggage hall, a large heated tank with free coca tea used to be waiting for travellers, and the drink is also served on every terrace and in every pub. Loose coca leaves are available in markets and the tea is even sold in sachets by the state-owned coca company. For a stronger effect, the coca leaves are chewed together with some clay. Production of the white powder requires a refining process of which the first product is 'pasta básica'. This pasta básica is easy to transport as it is compact and non-perishable.

The pasta básica is then further refined into the white powder so popular among celebrities and others. For example, the pasta básica may be transported from Peru and Ecuador to Colombia to undergo final processing. This explains why the largest amount of white powder might be produced in Colombia while most of the coca is grown in Peru. From the northeast of Ecuador, pasta básica travels mainly towards the city of Cali, located in southern Colombia. Ecuador's northeast does not resemble a theme park. Indeed, it does not resemble a theme park at all. It is an inhospitable area with few and poor roads. Such an area is perfect for nature parks if you are looking on a map and work at the Ministry of Agriculture in the capital Quito where a friend of mine fell down a lift shaft once. Fortunately, he turned out to be ok. This way, you can easily fulfil requests from daydreaming donor organisations who would like to see 10% of the national territory declared a nature or wildlife area. On Fridays, you can possibly take their representatives there when they are sent on assessment missions again; if it were up to you, you would probably not go there at all.

Why on a Friday, you may ask. Well, that's because the people in Quito are not crazy. If one of those development workers insists on going to the northeast on a Thursday, he or she will be faced with all kinds of problems. The cars are not available or there is no driver, some necessary papers with permission for something don’t come through and if all that doesn't help, something happens along the way that causes a day's delay. Of course, this is inconvenient, because a development worker will grumble a bit but, fortunately, that usually passes quickly. The State Secretary explained it all to me during one of those Friday afternoons when he came to our office to share his misery of the past week. It is always nice to get something off your chest.

The State Secretary speaking: "Of course we know where the coca fields are, so no expensive reconnaissance flights or satellite images are needed for that at all. The thing is, I am not allowed to tell, otherwise my family will not live to tell the tale. We know the area well, after all, our military is on standby in this border zone. But, you should know, the price of wood in southern Colombia is simply higher than in Ecuador and our military are the only ones who have the heavy equipment needed to transport the huge logs from the nature reserve to Colombia. Mondays are reserved for that. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are mainly reserved for transporting agricultural products to the markets, thus helping the small farmers and Indians in the area. Then on Thursdays we keep the roads free for the transport of pasta básica and white powders that also have to go to Colombia. On Fridays, we run inspections with the forest service to make sure no illegal logging is taking place in the nature reserves and this is how we all get home safe and alive at the end of the week." In other words, he revealed the interconnections between white powder, tropical timber trade, wishes of donor organisations, interests of the military, pacification of the Indians, and Western lifestyle: all linked together in an inextricable tangle.

The chemicals needed to produce pasta básica are transported by road for the final stretch until they reach their destination. Chemicals that are made in the Netherlands or elsewhere arrive in Ecuador via ports such as Guayaquil, where they are put on transport across the Andes. Without chemicals there is no pasta básica and without pasta básica there is no white powder; the powder that sometimes causes delusions in the long run and is so popular in many places. In fact, it would be very easy to stop the white powder trade, but not in this environment. The same applies to timber, of course, and there are indeed checks, so you can regularly see a convoy of timber trucks quietly waiting for the checkpoint crew to go home or be escorted to whores. As a simple civil servant, you are not going to stop the army's international transports, you'd rather not get into an argument. Army officers in Ecuador regularly retire between the ages of 30 and 40 to go into business. By then they will have good business connections already because about 30% of the country's economy is run directly by the army. Now, we shouldn't dismiss the army completely because, as elsewhere in South America, it is quite popular. It is often the only institution that offers people from lower social classes opportunities for career progression.

The situation outlined above by our State Secretary is still relatively simplistic. To this can be added the fact that for a very long time, an area the size of the Netherlands was occupied by the Colombian guerrilla movement FARC, and the regular army pursued them all the way to Ecuador. Just north of Ecuador is Cali, a relatively wealthy Colombian city world-famous for its modern architecture. The city is beautifully situated among mountains with an equally fantastic climate. That climate is also great for the coca trade. I was there once and got to stay with a friend in his luxurious penthouse with golden taps. The flat was located outside the city centre on a hill, and from his terrace, you had a breathtaking view of the city. At about midnight every evening, you could just about set your clock to it, the rattling of machine guns belonging to rival gangs would begin. Every bullet of this is paid for by our happy sniffers from the West, just so you know. I also went along to his small finca or farm, which counted about eighty hectares and that is small by local standards. Shortly before three o'clock he said without further explanation, "Pay attention, in five minutes the neighbour will come." And lo and behold, at the stroke of three, a small Cesna arrived and left within ten minutes. I had just witnessed the daily ritual of loading the white powder. Some things do happen on time in South America, and that includes the delivery and transport of coca.

You could say that with every purchased pinch of white powder, civil war and organised crime are paid for. It has always amazed me that this argument has hardly ever been used in information campaigns on the use of addictive drugs. I'm afraid that many people just don’t care.

Back in Europe: Ireland

In the old days, planes had to make a stopover at Shannon to refuel for a trip across the Atlantic. On my previous visit to Ireland, I had arrived at Shannon and gone on to County Cork and the Dingle Peninsula. There I had admired the stone circles of Drombeg and Grange. But this time we landed at Dublin and ended up at Patricia's Lougher Farm in County Meath. You could see the imposing remains of Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange right from the bed and breakfast. And the River Boyne, of course. I found Dowth the most beautiful.

Everything in life is about proof as you know and this visit to Ireland made a major contribution to that. For instance, we managed to establish that we did not see any dragons or snakes in Ireland, as they would have been expelled by St Patrick. Of course, we didn't see any leprechauns either, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. One has to be extremely careful with evidence, especially in Ireland. Robert and Tim are my witnesses.

Lougher Farm, Dowth, Newgrange and Knowth are located in a bend in the river Boyne, the Brú na Bóinne. Nearby you can also find the site of the Battle of the Boyne, the place where Stadholder William III defeated his father-in-law, laying a firm foundation for centuries of Orangist riots in Ireland and Northern Ireland. A favourite pastime is the yearly march, i.e., the harassing of Catholic neighbourhoods by people waving Orange flags. Irish land ownership passed over to the Scots and the Stone of Destiny Lia Fial was taken to Scotland before spending centuries in Westminster Abbey under the seat on which English kings are crowned.

That stone is now back in Scotland, or perhaps it had never left Scotland, or Ireland, because in both cases the stone that was removed may have been fake. All I know is that there is a stone with the right name on the Hill of Tara, the hill of the kings of Ireland. And, as far as we have been able to ascertain, that stone no longer screams during the coronation of a good king. This for lack of Irish kings. Our St Patrick arrived at Tara in the year 433 where, to spite the kings, he lit a competitive Easter fire on the Hill of Slane in full view of the assembled kings. Today, there is a little church on Tara dedicated to him that, together with the graveyard, resembles a scene straight out of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Thankfully, that dreariness disappears as soon as you walk back up the hillside.

At Newgrange, they used to shine a light into the tunnel so tourists could get an idea of how sunlight might illuminate the stone inside this colossal monument during a winter solstice. At other monuments, such as Loughcrew, the same phenomenon occurs on or around March 21st. In my opinion, the space at Newgrange does not seem intended to be entered by anyone. There are no visible traces of leakage after 5,000 years and excavations, a sign that the stones are expertly stacked.

Did we come all this way to visit the Donaghmore Round Tower? No, of course not, but we did stop there because the tower was conveniently located on the route from Brú na Bóinne to the Hill of Tara. The monastery that originally stood there, not to be confused with the ruined 15th-century church that is still present today, was of course dedicated to St Patrick, who seemed to be following us around. About 10 metres from the tower, Tim (who said he’d "hobble after us") suddenly froze. You should know that the wildest stories circulate about Ireland's round towers. For instance, they are said to be at special energy sites or generate special energy. Tim (unprepared and hobbling along) was overcome by tingling in his arms; he had never experienced anything like it. That was his peak experience of our visit to Ireland. Now don't think that those towers are really like that because later we went past Kells round tower and we didn't notice anything special there.

The actual goal of our trip was the Hill of Tara, or rather, a specific spot on that hill. Of course, everyone passes the Mound of the Hostages and runs straight to one of the two peaks on the hill. Indeed, there is nothing to experience on that Mound. But still, if you walk along an imaginary line between the cemetery and the hilltop on the left, you will come to a very small curvature in the terrain before you are level with the mound, and that is exactly where we wanted to be. When we arrived at the spot, it turned out to be 15 metres away from the location we thought we had identified on an aerial photograph before the trip, so apparently the photographs cannot be trusted completely. Our journey was therefore based entirely on trust, as we had already booked the flights, rental car and accommodation before we had located the spot in real life. But there we were, on Tara, at the exact spot we had intended to visit.

Now, what happens in a place that is meant especially for you? In this case not much, but Robert said it was a place that was meant for him. Aside from this awareness, nothing special actually happened. It was only later that we realised that the light had become clearer again, even clearer than it had already become after our visit to Bergen in Norway. I will write more about that visit and our experience with light later, although I will reveal now that our journey there was even more remarkable. After we had reached our destination on the Hill of Tara, we were free to explore and drove to the battlefield of the Battle of the Boyne. There was nothing to do there either, so I made up a story about having heroically run away from this battle during a previous life. A few more photos were taken as evidence, clearly showing my ludicrous heroism. The next day, we went to Carrowkeel in County Sligo where we lost our way and walked for a couple of hours without seeing or meeting anyone. Fortunately, we did discover a broken noticeboard later on and managed to find the prehistoric remains of Carrowkeel after all. Wonderful. And in Navan we found an exquisite Indian restaurant, just so you know.

Expedition Bergen

North of the Netherlands lies the North Sea, and if you go a long way further north, you end up in Norway. In Bergen to be precise. Bergen is a curious place; even though it is halfway across this immense country, it has the highest average temperatures in Norway. That is indeed because of the particular course of the warm Gulf Stream. When we flew to Norway in early November, the whole country was already covered in snow, except for a small circle around Bergen. We, as in Robert and I. Robert had been pregnant with the idea of going to Bergen for years and I had always felt that I should go along. Fortunately, Robert agreed.

We took a direct flight from Schiphol to Bergen by first flying from Germany's Weeze airport to Schiphol, which suddenly made the trip a lot cheaper. According to Robert, he is indeed himself and that requires no additional proof, such as a valid passport. Customs officers think otherwise. According to Robert, this is incomprehensible. Luckily they did allow us to fly to Schiphol Airport, where an emergency passport had to be made. With about five whole minutes to spare we reached the direct flight to Bergen. Otherwise, I would have had to fly there on my own, which was not my intention, especially as our exact destination had not yet been determined.

What we did know was that a metal pole had to be driven into the ground somewhere. We carried poles (too long for ordinary luggage) and a one-kilogram fist hammer with us. Armed with those, Robert's sandals and a printout of Google Earth, we set off into the mountains. Bergen is surrounded by seven mountains, the syv fjell. Roughly which of the seven we wanted to go up was known to us, but not how to get there. On the map and the navigation system, it all seemed quite straightforward, but wherever we ended up with our car we encountered the Forest Service's ruthless barriers. Only one option remained; park the car as high up in Bergen as possible and then continue on foot. Up and up and up, with the fist hammer, the poles and a bag of other aids. We must have looked ridiculous, but if you keep walking around as if it were meant to be like that, you hardly stand out. It is quite steep there and it rains often too. It rains so often that we now understand why the Vikings went on their expeditions. The endless repetition of inbreeding, stockfish, emptiness and a harsh climate is enough for anyone to leave. Farming is non-existent at this latitude. Funnily enough, the preparation of stockfish is not a Norwegian invention; the Vikings learned it from the Indians and the Portuguese in turn learned it from the Vikings. Unfortunately, there was no salt in Scandinavia, which was all the more reason to constantly go elsewhere. Before stockfish, therefore, there was only inbreeding.

All we had was a rough direction and a point on the map that did not indicate the exact spot, so we followed a stream with small waterfalls and reservoirs up the mountain. Near one of those little lakes we thought we could find 'it'. I took a set of rods from the bag and dropped one into the small lake. Robert, who could remove his sandals faster than I could remove my shoes, fished it out of the icy water with his toes for me. Wonderful, and we were able to get on with things again. We probed with our rods and successfully found the spot and placed the pole. After this we started making our way down again and hoped that on the descent the loops of Robert's sandals would not give way. First, a photo had to be taken as proof. We asked a nice Norwegian passer-by to take one when the self-timer of our camera didn’t work. "My friend and I have been Troll hunting and would like to have a picture taken as proof for our wives. We almost caught one you know; or is it not the right season?" You should have seen the expression on his face, but we have a picture and thus proof.

Mission accomplished and no mishaps on the way down. But what had we accomplished? It had occurred to us that when we placed the pole, we noticed nothing remarkable. Beforehand, we had no objective. We did have an expected result. That result was to be found in the realm of sound reproduction quality. Through the audio forum that we were members of, we had announced that a sound improvement was on its way. When we returned to our hotel after a few hours and logged in to the forum, the first confirmations of improved quality had already been posted there. There was even a comment from someone who thought we wouldn’t be completing the action until the next day; he had been shocked by the unexpected change. While descending, it started to rain lightly and later again heavily, so the only period without rain we had had during those three days was exactly during our expedition. By Bergen standards, I think that was very positive. After returning to the city, we first had to eat a pita sandwich and it was an excellent one. You can get those sandwiches diagonally opposite the YMCA. I was able to point a group of Japanese tourists there only because I had just read the YMCA sign as we walked past – aside from that we did not know the city at all.

There were also less expected consequences. When we looked carefully, again and again, then we could see that there was something different about the water ... yes, the water sparkled a little stronger, and from the reservoir you could see that effect trickling down with the stream. And in the atmosphere, something similar seemed to be happening. After dinner and logging in to the audio forum, we went up the Fløyen, which is one of Bergen's seven mountains. From the top of the Fløyen, you have an amazing view of the city, the bay and the island opposite. It was spectacular; the water and atmosphere in the whole area had improved. Something like this has nothing to do with good or bad weather, or rain and fog; it is independent of that. You must know that both Robert and I have seen the light become of an increasingly poor quality over the course of our lives, so this was quite a relief. Especially as we saw the effects mentioned here persist and gradually move across the planet. They even got stronger, and the amusing things is that (almost) everyone experienced it as something normal, because it all seemed so natural. You understand that this was an amazing experience for both of us.

Sikkim

And then Sikkim. For a few years I had been wanting to travel to India to spend a week reflecting whilst overlooking the Himalayas. As a young child, I had already visited Kashmir from Bangladesh. At that time, we were in Srinagar, Dal Lake, and would travel on horseback to the eternal snow. This time, for inspiration, I would look on the Internet, mainly at pictures, but couldn't find what I was looking for. Until, by chance, I saw images of Sikkim. I knew that that's where I 'had' to go, but where exactly? I retrieved some satellite images and found the place, right next to the Rumtek monastery. In a way, the spot there called me to 'cure' it. I then came across a piece describing the Karmapa controversy, a hallucinatory story. Well, the particular spot turned out to be along a stream, right behind an Indian army latrine. The funny thing is that when you are banging on a rock with a fist-thick wedge hammer, all the people walking around you in India don't seem to care, as long as you act like you are meant to be doing what you are doing.

What is nice about Sikkim in general is that you can walk around peacefully without being bothered, in fact, you are almost ignored. And seeing the third highest mountain in the world in the background is no bad thing either. Back home, I had told everyone I was going to look for Jeti eggs (What do you mean? They don't lay eggs at all / what do you know about Jetis?). What I had not realised was that it was the lunar New Year, so all the monasteries were open and full of dancing and music. It was during our winter, and virtually devoid of tourists. After my hammer treatment of 'the place', I could continue my time in Sikkim as a tourist so to speak, and I managed to reach Yuksom as the furthest point. Whilst I was there in the Gupta family restaurant, I was joined by a monk who sat down next to me (he asked for my permission and spoke some English). The monk started telling me unprompted stories about what his deceased ancestors had told him about the Jetis. Wonderful. On top of that, I had woken up with the cry 'cloud nine' in my head several times before my departure to Sikkim, without knowing the meaning of the term. At the restaurant, I looked around and was stunned. There it was: the cloud nine soft drink machine. I was so surprised that I stared at it in disbelief for a while.

Sound quality - audio equipment

Let’s go back in time for a moment. The phone rings, it's my forestry Professor Roelof Oldeman. He had a special request, which was for me to go to Hilversum one day. You see, he had been talking to Mr Henri van der Heide in response to an interview he had done on the radio. The interview was about forests and how we can view them. That interview had somehow struck Van der Heide in such a way that he had contacted my Professor via the producers. In the conversation with R. Oldeman, Van der Heide told him about similarities between his work on sound reproduction and my Professor’s view on forests. Now, my Professor knew nothing about sound reproduction, but he did know that I had been working on it for years, so he asked me to visit Van der Heide. Mr and Mrs Van der Heide received me extremely kindly in their home. A conversation about recording and reproduction of sound soon followed. Then Van der Heide demonstrated a tape recording of his own through headphones and later some CDs through a home-made transistor amplifier and B&W DM5 speakers. After listening to these recordings, I could only do one thing, and that was congratulate him. A feeling of coming home washed over me. An unparalleled sound that I had sought for so many years, that deep down I knew existed, played here in full glory. It wasn't until many years later that a technician came to my house to listen and this scene repeated itself, almost literally. The same words were spoken, only by different people.

When I met Van der Heide, audio was my lifelong hobby and passion, but because I had lived and worked abroad for quite a few years, this hobby had been put on the back burner. At that time, the hobby was limited to playing CDs. The turntable and LPs, for instance, were still in storage, taking up too much space to drag along all the time. The equipment, soldering iron and parts were also gathering dust. At the time of this meeting, I had no idea about the history of Van der Heide's discoveries, his patents or his previous work as a researcher at the Dutch broadcast laboratory. This meeting would change all that and sent me on a wondrous journey.

After some time and many explanations, Van der Heide invited me to think with him and experiment myself. I cannot count the times when, after an improvement in sound, something went wrong, the intended result did not materialise, or the set had to be taken apart again. But the fascination with this sound has always remained. After a while, a comment along the following lines would come: 'Have you thought about this or that?' In retrospect, he made me relive the history of his own discoveries in this way. It should be noted that I could never, ever have discovered this path myself.

Uncle Ivan, a man of few words, always used to say, "You can either do it or you can't." There's a lot of wisdom in that, although before I met Van der Heide, I didn't know I could do it, or at least, that I could do it that well. Now, when you take a device in hand or sit down to solder in it, touching it helps the sound reproduction quality. That is, if you can do it of course. A long time ago, after my experience with the light flash in my hand and well before I met Van der Heide, I said to my wife, "I think I can do something with these hands except I don't know exactly what." Unfortunately, the effect of touching the equipment is only temporary; in about three days it wears off. However, this explains why a modification to a device can indeed seem to work, if only for a little while. When done by me, audio equipment demonstrations always sounded a lot better on the second day and I just thought it was due to completely different things than touching and petting the stuff. Thus, demonstrations may be smoother when done by some people than others. Van der Heide, Robert and I have spent many years developing various ways to improve the sound quality of audio equipment and live concerts, including the use of certain materials (e.g., copper and carbon), as well as ‘treatments’, such as magnetic fields or the action of a hammer (20x) on a gold-plated copper wire attached to an item or audio set (facing North). The challenge now is to develop methods that are both safe and permanent.

Sound quality - live concerts

One day we went to Maastricht together. There, in the Basilica of Our Lady on the site where a Roman temple once stood, we attended a performance by the Tallis Scholars. This is a famous English a cappella chamber choir specialising in music from the Romantic period, roughly between 1450 and 1600. The performance was to be recorded for a broadcast by Radio 4, the classical station. Van der Heide had been asked to be there because the acoustics in the basilica are so problematic that it is very difficult to make a good recording of it. The room looks like a dungeon, feels like a dungeon and sounds like a dungeon. Van der Heide, his wife, my forestry Professor and I set off and arrived in Maastricht a little later than planned, but in time for the concert. The fact that van der Heide did something to, or rather with, the acoustics was known to me only from stories, so now I would get to experience it in real life.

Van der Heide carried a briefcase with copper rings for that purpose. Those rings (not fully closed) came with 'treated' copper/carbon resistors inside them and were placed at strategic points in the basilica. Following that we had to wait, and the concert began not long after. This did cause some tension because I had been told that the rings could take up to two hours to make a difference. However, after about 10 minutes, an effect was already perceptible; not a gradual change, but a discrete transition. This effect continued in leaps and bounds and after the break, listening became really enjoyable. Even the light seemed to change; the gold leaf, for instance, seemed to shine more. I found it incredible and overwhelming that such an effect could occur in such a large space, 'only' because of a few copper rings with resistors. Outside was a broadcaster van that contained the recording equipment. Afterwards, I was able to listen to the recordings of the concert, both on the radio and through the audio equipment at Van der Heide’s home by using a direct copy of the master. In doing so, I noticed that the 'improvement' in the acoustics was audible, but the recording seemed to have a half-hour delay in the occurrence of that improvement compared to the live concert. According to Van der Heide, that was indeed the case, and he hypothesized that this was due to the long microphone cables. Once again, I had experienced something quite extraordinary that I had not previously thought possible.

Around that time, I would get to know the person you know as Robert. He was also working at the Dutch broadcasting organisation, as a recording engineer. He knew Van der Heide and his inventions, and Robert's name had come up several times as someone I should get to know one day. That opportunity arose in a special way; a mutually acquainted, clairvoyant friend of my mother had died and we were both planning to go to her cremation ceremony. Ahead of the event, I got hold of Robert’s phone number and called him. We agreed to see each other at the ceremony and speak afterwards. When I put down the phone, I realised that we had forgotten to agree on how we would recognise each other, but that turned out not to be a problem. Walking into the hall, I looked around, saw Robert sitting somewhere and we mutually acknowledged each other with a small nod. The encounter had something of a recognition, and we maintained good contact for several years. I often accompanied Robert when recordings were made, including once in the old church in Houten (with Roman foundations). A choir had to be recorded there and after a few rehearsals we made a tour around and through the church looking for particular spots that could be suitable for improving the acoustics. Robert simply saw them; I generally need rods and pendulums to become aware of them - either at the venue itself or long-distance over a printed map/floorplan facing North.*

And then I was allowed to place the rings (the treated resistors can also be used in a near circle shape on their own). The effect and the development of the effect followed exactly the same pattern I had previously experienced in Maastricht. Believe me, it’s an intense experience, even more so when you realise that this is something you helped cause 'yourself'. Once again, I was overwhelmed with amazement.

Consciousness

Although parts of this book advocate for special forms of perception, it seems that an ability to perceive in special ways goes hand in hand with forms of suffering. For instance, there was my mother's friend who was born clairvoyant. My wife and I visited her once with some questions we had written down on a piece of paper. "Shall I talk first or will you ask the questions first? No, I will talk first and then you can ask the questions." This was followed by about 10 minutes of narration. "What were your questions?" Stunned, my wife and I looked at each other because all the questions on the piece of paper had just been covered. This gift of perception had caused her much resistance from the church she was affiliated with, but she knew no better than to see what she saw.

Finally, a word about the special nature of special perceptions, which is perhaps not so special at all. As soon as we leave open the possibility of a quantum-physical organisation of consciousness, (all) differences between paranormal and normal consciousness may disappear, since time and place are then structured completely differently from what we usually imagine. Written down like this in a few words, this seems like a trivial matter, but it goes deep and, if correct, this line of thought eventually leads to a modified worldview in which (all) thoughts and forms of consciousness can have a paranormal character.

End

Further reading:

*Candi: Radiästhetische Studien. Briefe an Tschü.