The bit where we tick boxes and reflect on our skills for the research councils (or is it?)

Balcony plants…still alive!

Chimborazo: One of the expedition destinations

Emerging from my zombie state I find that not only have I managed to keep all the plants alive, pay my bills, stay on top of readings, and participate in the planning of an expedition,  but that I also now have a new member in my household.

I am also half way through the Career Skills Portfolio which is a required part of the Graduate School programme for PhD students.

How is that going? You ask. Well, I will admit that at times my participation may have been a little cynical (but as it is online, nobody was there to be stung by my attitude, or get burned by the acid dripping from my one raised eyebrow). Confronted with the information that the ‘Skills Audit’ is being replaced by the ’Researcher Development Framework’,

Nemi (Nemesis) discovering that she is indeed her own worst enemy!

I felt a short burst of sadness and nostalgia, mixed with just a pinch of frustration at the knowledge that all the work that had been put into filling out the reams of evidence demonstrating the skills that various government bodies feel we should be able to demonstrate at this point in our careers is now obsolete. So much for convincing my fellow PhD students last year that it could be a useful tool if used correctly, and that we should take the time to fill it in properly. If I don’t take the time to export the audit files into one of my own, it will be lost in this new step in the march of progress. But what is this new opportunity? (note the positive twist). Well, let us take a look:

The Researcher Development Statement divides required skills and attributes of a productive researcher into four main domains (and comes with several nifty diagrammes):

Domain A: Knowledge and intellectual abilities – The knowledge, intellectual abilities and techniques to do research.
Domain B: Personal effectiveness – The personal qualities and approach to be an effective researcher.
Domain C: Research governance and organisation – The knowledge of the standards, requirements and professionalism to do research.
Domain D: Engagement, influence and impact – The knowledge and skills to work with others and ensure the wider impact of research (Vitae).

But that is not all. Not only do my preferred personal qualities (PPQ? Can we start using this in conversation please) come with a colour scheme, but each domain has three sub-domains, accompanied by descriptors covering different aspects of being a researcher.

The full Researcher Development Framework adds phases for each of the descriptors that will allow researchers to plan their personal development in selected areas.

(Note the phases do not correspond to different categories of the research career as it is recognised that people can progress with very different strengths*).

In case anyone is getting worried about their future at this point, Vitae provide a Personal Planning tool for use with the RDF and a screen-cast to help researchers to begin with the tool. Am I the only person asking “what is a screen-cast?” at this point?

The question is now obviously: How was this designed? Who designed it? How will it affect my (UK University attending PhD student) life? Do I have to fill out more forms asking the same things as the Skills Audit but using a different format, incompatible operating system and wording each question slightly differently so as to make all previous answers useless?

“The Researcher Development Framework was based on research work that surveyed the views of successful researchers (definition please) of all disciplines and types of institutions (hmmm), based around the question “what makes a good researcher?” (ie: describe yourself please).

A phenomenographic approach was used in the analysis to help establish a range of key characteristics. The results were then clustered into common groups and the work was enhanced from the literature, consultancy with specialist groups (including employers) and sector feedback”.

For further information

Ok.

“The PDR Skills Audit was based on the Joint Skills Statement and is now optional. The PDR is being revised (with an expected completion date of Autumn 2012), and the new version will explicitly reference the Research Development Statement/Framework.
We have provided an online introduction to the Researcher Development Statement for new students, which will be used in the First year workshops and the Online Skills Course.
The resources in the Vital module for Postgraduate Research Students are aligned with the sub-domains of the Researcher Development Statement”.

Hmmm. Well, ok. I suppose that I can do this. But will we have to make a giant colour coded interactive poster demonstrating competence and understanding of all the different aspects of the domains and phases?

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPPPPPPPPPP

Well. I am still awaiting a response to those last questions, so in the meantime I have continued working on the skills portfolio. In Self-Awareness week (take these online tests if you would like to recreate the experience: Careers Report; Know your personality; What motivates you – I actually quite liked the whole feel of this one, but unfortunately did it after a lot of others so have made a note to go back to it), I discovered that I don’t really fit. Not one to give up entirely, I relied on guided (or planned) serendipity and listened to the world, to my concerns, and to the creative side of my brain and was rewarded with a stream of fortunate events. One of these was the introduction to coworking, and therefore the realisation that there are many other people out there who also don’t fit, and that the answer is to make square holes, not to sand down your edges. Others more specifically to do with my fieldwork will appear in the next post but I will leave you with a post by Alex Golub on Savage Minds. This is about a site called Wunderkit that is all about getting what you need to get done, done. It is about working in teams or by yourself, you can create sections for different projects, or just for your daily life. You get the satisfaction of ticking things off the list, it tells you what you have to get done, and you can share all the work you are doing with those on your team (for each project). I have been using it for a day now, and think that they may be on to a winner!

So there you have it. Back in the room!

*whew! I was beginning to get worried that we all have to fit into a tiny schematic that effectively plans our entire career using a colour by numbers approach.

Black dogs and other useless metaphors

Possibly the only thing that I have in common with Stephen Fry (apart from the current messy mop of hair that I honestly don’t care a fig about. Who is looking? Same goes for my nails…who the fu&k cares whether I bite them or not? We all know I am not a society princess and never will be. I am bashed up and messy and probably covered in blood or ink or mud or a combination of the above. It washes off each day, I smell nice, the colours mostly coordinate and I have a mac. Enough said, rant over). But I’m not famous so my talking about it will not help anyone. It most definitely will not help me. So why am I mentioning it? And what is ‘it’?

Black dog.

Pull yourself together.

Don’t waste valuable time.

Maybe taking a trip would help?

Remember why you are there, focus on what you need to get done.

Nope. While everything is still dark I cannot pull myself together, and I am completely and utterly aware and very conscious of the fact that I am wasting valuable time, and that doesn’t help either. Actually it makes it worse, because it adds that edge of panic to the situation, and pushes me that extra micrometre towards the drop on the other side of the razor’s edge.

Taking a trip: That would entail leaving here. Confronting masses of people and negotiating ‘THE CITY’. I don’t want to see my doorman, I want to be able to slip out the back without being seen. But there is no ‘back’. I don’t want to have to talk to anyone or remember societal norms or structure sentences. I couldn’t even face going to Suesca and I know the way *shudders*. Conversely, I do want people to come here. I want sounds and smells and human presence within this space.

Focus: Get out of bed. Make coffee. Remember to drink it, if not, throw it away and pretend you drank it. At some point during the day leave the house for at least 2o minutes (yes, sitting on the balcony does count). Make a list of things to do and cross something off: Put on clothes. Is that enough focus? I’m exhausted, I want to go back to bed.

The blackberry becomes a curse because it calls my attention, demands responses or PINGS me furiously if I don’t give them. I glare at it and try to ignore it but it flashes at me sassily…helllooooooooooo. But then it stops and it is worse. I feel distance spiralling around me and the world gets farther away yet louder and louder and faster and scarier. Do you have any friends Hannah? Is this a multiple choice question? Can I come back to you later?

This is why I am not the right person for you or for anyone. I never will be.

At times I can fool myself and others into thinking that maybe I am, because when I am me, I can hold sparkling conversations and be thoughtful and witty and fun. I can climb and write and bike and not be banal. I rise to challenges and exceed them always. But there are crevasses. And I cannot expect anyone to be constantly on the alert, ready to rescue me, or wait while I rescue myself (autorescate en hielo…good skill to have). Because I probably will (rescue myself). At least until the last time I always will. And no-one will see the difference and I will be a good investment and will produce exactly what was desired/required/requested, because I can do that in less time than I am given.

I am just passing through you see.

Poster day! (or poster-three weeks)

So…

I have a poster in the online poster day event. I tried to upload a copy of it here but apparently blogging from a mobile phone cannot quite handle pdf uploads (they don’t fit into the categories of photo, video, or voice note), so instead I am going to ask all of you to please visit the site and comment, vote, or ask a question on poster number 23 in Arts and Humanities! (Oh, you have to download it to get the full picture, otherwise it is just a thumbnail).

It feels a little strange to be participating from the Guajira, luckily from my base I do have an Internet connection at certain times of day. So I can step out of my ethnographic framework for a moment and sign on to the University of Liverpool site and continue with the responsibilities that come with doing a PhD. But obviously I am right in the middle of this experience so my understandings are changing and developing constantly. Theoretically this will make for some fantastic discussions, and I only hope that everyone gets involved. The only issue that I have with the practical side of things is that the VOCAL system only lets me sign in about once in every 12 attempts, and even once I get it there is no guarantee that it will actually let me respond to a comment or just kick me out again to start the process all over. So if they tell me that I didn’t respond to comments fast enough I may have to learn the dark arts of hacking and destroy VOCAL!

The instructions from the graduate school are thus:

There are several ways that visitors can access your poster:
• All University staff have access to the event and can log onto Vocal at: https://vocal.liv.ac.uk/sites/posterdayonline/2012/

• External colleagues can access the event at https://vocal-external.liv.ac.uk/sites/posterdayonline/2012/  and login in usinguser-name: pdo2012;  password: Liverpool

The whole process has got me thinking about the way the credits and responsibilities system works while PhD students are doing fieldwork, especially when a funding body is involved (with all the extra pressures to tick the right boxes and meet all the requirements). I know people who just waited to come back and then tried to sort out the credits they were told they needed at that time, but I have to admit that the thought strikes horror into my very heart…I imagine arriving from Colombia and having to do multiple presentations, participate in poster day in my final year, Career Development course for a couple of months, attend as many seminars as possible and write them up to make up for not going while I was away, take advantage of any Grad School courses available AND complete writing up *shudder*

But the alternative option is this: doing as much as possible in Colombia (attending seminars and presentations in Bogotá, teaching, conferences, courses etc) and participating in the online versions of required activities whenever I can. But this returns us to the dilemma of the split research personality. And obviously you have to plan well ahead. The poster was prepared and uploaded well before required, meaning that fieldwork findings could not very well be included, my time in the desert has also been planned around those moments when I will need to be more in touch, I have a blackberry so that I can have chat supervisions in order to stay in touch but also to complete the number of required meetings by the end of May. The list goes on.

Does anyone else have these concerns or am I just thinking about everything too much?

I look forward to seeing what comes out of this- a connected world of research taking shape before my eyes!

In the meantime, I have been working on several new blogs so they should be here soon. Take care!

in Memorium

Message from the Head of CLAS: Remembering Dr Steve Rubenstein:

Dr Steve Rubenstein

It is with great sadness that I write to inform colleagues of the sudden and unexpected death of Dr Steven Rubenstein, Reader in Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool, UK. A graduate student at Columbia University and a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, Steve worked for eight years as an Assistant and then Associate Professor at Ohio University before joining us at the University of Liverpool in 2006. In Liverpool, Steve served as Director of the Research Institute of Latin American Studies, and was also programme director of our MA in Latin American Studies. He was instrumental in developing an interdisciplinary research network in Liverpool devoted to Children, Childhood and Communities. Steve will be remembered in particular for his passionate interest in the Shuar nation in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and for his commitment to the defence of the Shuar people’s rights to determine their own culture and identity. A Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2008/9, Steve was planning fieldwork later this year to complete his collection of life histories of Shuar women. He was developing a series of ambitious projects that would have continued to challenge prior notions of indigenous politics, culture and identity in the Amazon and beyond. Steve was a valued colleague and an exceptional interlocutor who will be greatly missed by all those whose lives he touched. I am sure that those who knew Steve will wish to join colleagues in Liverpool in remembering his family and friends in your thoughts and prayers at this very difficult time.

PLEASE DO NOT HESITATE TO DIRECT ANY ENQUIRIES TO CHARLES FORSDICK, HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF CULTURES, LANGUAGES AND AREA STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL (CRAF@LIV.AC.UK).

Steve was my supervisor. We didn’t always see eye to eye. In fact, he is S1 of previous posts fame…what can I say? We didn’t agree, we argued about everything, I got frustrated and angry. But I read everything he sent my way. I took on his suggestions and since I got to my fieldwork site our discussions have constantly been present in my mind. Themes from papers he had me write in the first year of my PhD are coming alive before my eyes and helping shape this amazing experience.

So for all of that I thank him, and send my thoughts and wishes to his family and to all of those in the department who are feeling his loss in this moment.

Arrivals and such

Dear Ryan Anderson,

I was planning to write back to you in this blogging loop, something about adapting to new realities, the heat, my multiple roles, organising my thoughts and moleskine diaries in the midst of sand and wind. But then I actually arrived.

I arrived in this dream world. I stepped through the looking glass and the wardrobe door and climbed the faraway tree and any other variety of magical modes we have to describe the moving from one reality to another, where usually we become ‘the other’ once we arrive. I was arriving from a place that is not really my own, but a place where I have been taken in and protected and loved and challenged. A place where I am building relationships of trust and futures. Where recently I have been given so much I don’t know how to reciprocate. I thought that I could adapt to this new location in much the same way (and I think I possibly will in the end).

In Ryan’s dispatches from the field, he quotes that classic Malinowskian arrival story:

Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight (Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1961[1922]:4).

What is my version?

Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by some of your gear, in the middle of the desert, 13 hours from your starting point, in the crossroads of two dirt tracks flooded by moonlight. High power automatic weapons are pointed at you by extremely jumpy ‘soldiers’ and then the jeep that brought you here zooms off carrying them to the (unknown) destination of their choice. Did I mention that these are very large high calibre automatic weapons. Not for hunting rabbits. Not for arguing with.

Just then my phone rang. I could either pretend that all was fine and just be happy that he called (which I was), or crouch behind a cactus and let him know what was happening in case things got worse (which I did). I felt safer and calmer for it, and began to observe, and observe myself observing. Right at that moment I realised that I only wished that I was wearing trousers and not shorts. It wasn’t so cold, but I felt exposed and unready for action. What action I don’t know, but it should have been in keeping with the plan: The plan is not to die (that’s always the plan).

A surreal scene. Three alijunas and a Wayuu, stood in the moonlight smoking a cigarette to calm their nerves. Clouds scudded across the stars as we debated the merits of this as the opening scene of a film. Headlights approached so we hid behind a giant cactus, not wanting to explain our presence, not really knowing how to explain our presence as everything to this point had happened in Wayuunaiki.

Surreality increased (I don’t care if it is an invented word). We received a call that one of them had lost their phone and could we please look for it. So now the four of us were walking up and down a dirt trail in the middle of nowhere, scanning the ground without much enthusiasm, wishing we were anywhere but here.

When our ride returned, hours later, everyone now in the vehicle was pissed. On chirinche. The approximate translation for this (as far as I can tell) is paint thinner.

The tension could have been cut with a machete.

Unfortunately mine is in a cupboard in Bogotá.

One of the guys turned to me and asked ‘so little girl, were you afraid of the men with guns?’ I smiled and rebutted ‘its just that they were a little on the large side Don *********’. Everyone laughed, the ice was broken, and he began to explain why, while this was not his affair, there was no way he could have done anything but what he did.

All fine and good, but they kept getting drunker and drunker. The gentleman to my right kept laughing to himself and muttering ‘smells like Alijuna’, and the driver kept trying to take my hand and grope himself with it. Wonderful. Luckily he finally fell asleep at the wheel and drove off the trail, so we could swap drivers and continue on our way…

We arrived at the village at 2am, 16 hours after setting out. We slung our hammocks from posts outside the radio station and settled down to 3.5 hours of sleep before being dragged to breakfast at 6am. WHY? No really…WHY?????

Needless to say, things are going a little better now. I am adapting to the desert and finding my feet.

Dispatches will be sent soon. And yes, I believe that we can call it a dispatch even if it is sent along the invisible lines that make up the Internet, and not the more solid, traditional modes of sending information.

Over and out.

Diary of an Anthropologist (or, what books to take to the field)

A mirror to my soul?

In theory at least, I separate everything out into ‘things I write in my blog’, ‘things I write for my thesis’, ‘things I write for other people in general-letters, papers, and the like’, ‘fieldnotes’, and ‘my moleskine diary’. Of course there is some overlap. I continuously toy with the idea of printing out the blog and attempting to insert it into the corresponding cream coloured pages of my bulging and warped notebook. And then of course the Anthropologist’s tool is her Self. The boxes cannot therefore be completely exclusionary. But at the same time, this is a longterm habit, and I am not willing at this moment to hand myself over so completely and utterly that this becomes part of my field report.

That said, recently several different people have had reason to peruse the diary. Only selected parts of  it I must stress (travelogue sections), but even so, it was terrifying. I felt naked, exposed and strangely concerned with what they would think. It is more of a scrapbook/thought repository than your traditional ‘locked with a key, dear diary I’m in love with the boy with the baseball cap, cross your heart and hope to die’ notebook. The narrative voice changes according to my mood. My mood changes according to butterflies stamping in outer Mongolia, and the whole thing combined is a mish mash of ideas, stories, constructions of self that are being tried on for size, excess emotions that need to be tied down on paper so that they cannot intervene in my life, and attempts to talk myself out of self-harming activities. That in mind, imagine my surprise when everyone seemed to love it. ‘This is what a real field notebook should look like’, ‘can you do one for me?’, ‘how many hours do you spend on this? Its amazing’. I was taken aback. It is just something I do. It is how I deal with things when I cannot go running or hiking or climbing. It is filled with the parts of me of which I am both proud and ashamed. It is immediate, and the only censoring that happens is when I just don’t write at all.

But why am I writing about my journal if I am not (currently) intending to use it for my research? It has to do with a blog post by Ryan Anderson that I recently read on what books to take to the field. His final (?) list was heavy on the textbook/methods guide side and I must admit that it brought to mind the stories of Claude Levi-Strauss’ entourage making their way across Brasil whilst laden down with, well, everything. Unfortunately with the bags that I will be taking with me to the Guajira (the large and the medium Osprey bags have made the cut), there will be no space for such a list to accompany me.

The post ends by asking:

‘If you are planning on heading out to do fieldwork, what books do you have in mind?  Are you bringing the classics?  Only the latest methods texts and ethnographies?  Or, on the flip side of all this, are you some techie hipster who has gone entirely digital, thereby completely eliminating this whole issue?’

The responses are great: I loved imagining the relationships that these researchers have to books, the different ways in which they are using them: take a stack of texts and then feel guilty when you don’t read them until you return? take a bunch of brain candy or hard hitting gritty americana as a form of escapism? À la recherche du temps perdu, because now could just be the time you have to read it? Take nothing and see what happens when you get to your field site? *shudder*

Am I a techie hipster? Hmmmm. I have an iPad and solar charger (not much electricity in the Northern Guajira) which has been loaded with Murakami’s 1Q84, Kristof and WuDunn’s Half the sky, Thomas’ The end of Mr. Y, Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, and now Emerson’s Writing Ethnographic fieldnotes (as well as a series of mountaineering texts and pdfs on community media). But I am also taking a bound photocopy of a Colombian friend’s fieldnotes and a tattered and annotated copy of Guber’s La etnografía from his original fieldwork. I’m not taking Proust. I know myself too well, I would get lost and would not have Aomame‘s ability to only read twenty pages a day.

I have my mini-moleskine notebooks for fieldnotes, a selection of pens (and a pencil), and an open mind (as far as I can). But the diary didn’t make the cut. Its big, I really don’t want to lose it or have it get damaged, and I cannot be writing both fieldnotes and journal or I will not have time to do anything else and everything would get confused. So there will be a hiatus, filled by these tiny notebooks, and they will have to take on the multiple roles that are currently filled by various other media. That will be strange.

At least I am now thinking about travelling. I have not been well and therefore everything has been censored as I have not engaged with the world or anyone in it. Everything is broken, but that is when you have to pick up the pieces and try to tidy up as best you can.

Any more suggestions for reading material would be welcomed. I will be in Bogotá for a couple more days and am stocking up:-)

House of the Spirits

In a land far far away (unless you happen to live there, or be visiting of course), there lives a woman who is blessed with the gift of amazement. That is, she is capable of being amazed at the beauty and wonder that surrounds her and at the wonderful people who come into her life and share that beauty. I don’t know if it was a good fairy that bequeathed this gift in the cradle (there are no family stories that would make this seem likely), and sometimes it can seem to be more of a curse than a blessing, but the end result is a life lived in technicolour, and a series of wonderful experiences that attempt to brighten any dark moments.

The latest in this series was lived in the second largest cloud forest in the world. We asked ourselves in passing where the largest is, and without being bothered to search that replacement brain that is google, came up with ‘Africa’. Yes, the continent. Somewhere. Our minds were on other things at the time. Our minds were on: THE PLAN. As you can see, the Swiss version of the plan was extremely detailed, and mostly involved sharp instruments and climbing gear.

My version involved finishing all the bits and pieces that remained before my trip to the Guajira, and Juan wanted to reach the crag that had been calling to him since his childhood summers spent at the finca that served as our base camp. 

 

 

 

 

 

The finca is a magical place, filled with memories, giant spiders (that part is more terrifying than magical), overwhelming scents and the constant presence of water…water in all its forms; lulling you to sleep as it streams past in the little brook, entering the house as a cloud in the evening, pouring down from heaven and shutting out the rest of the world, or covering every blade of grass and petal and spider web with shining drops of dew in the morning. The people who have lived and loved in this place are still present. Their ghosts walk the bedrooms at night and visit those who now have the privilege of waking to coffee brewing on the balcony. Their emotions can catch you at any moment, filling your heart as the cloud fills every nook and cranny of the air about you. Sometimes I had to walk away from the others and just focus on the present, because they pushed their way into my mind and shouted to be felt. This was where the space craft landed. Walking down from the road to the jungle below…

The ‘relative humidity’ was a little too high to set off on day one, so we settled in to life in the cloud forest, watching the mountains on the other side of the valley for signs that the clouds might lift. We played some tejo, did some work, listened to Adrien play the guitar and resolved to set off the next morning come what may.

We are merely dream facilitators

Set off we did. The final preparations were made, extra machetes purchased (because everyone needs a machete!), Swiss transformed into ‘Supersona’, and rolls of plastic were draped over our backpacks. We loaded everything into a tiny passing bus, and wound our way down the valley to San Antonio de Tequendama. From there, an equally tiny bus took us up the next valley to a bend in the road from where an ancient path wound its way up to the rocks above. We had noticed a couple of promising cracks, and intended to set our hammocks up somewhere near them so as to be able to set off early in the morning.

Several hours walk brought us to a field strewn with boulders (giant boulders), that had obviously been hewn from the rockface above. We picked our way gingerly past them and crawled up the mountainside to the edge of the jungle proper. Rocks covered in vegetation rose up before us and getting to the obvious cracks seemed more and more difficult. Adrien wanted to slash everything with his machete, Juan wanted to gaze at the promised land, and I was hungry. Hmmm, food. That wasn’t on the list this time it would seem, so the plan changed to ‘set up camp and hike back down into the valley to hunt and gather’.

Thus hammocking was born. The new extreme sport that is sweeping…umm, us? The idea is to set the hammocks up one above the other (preferably doing so in the most precarious manner possible). They are then used for every aspect of life: cooking is done  from the bottom hammock, games can be played (for example, upside down hammocking, diving from one to the other, hide and go hammock), giant monkeys dodged…you know, the usual.

The local villagers took an active interest in everything that we were doing. They knew where we were camped, what we had planned, what we ate…One morning we hiked up the side of the mountain through the jungle to the top of the crag, rising up above the perpetual clouds and (in Adrien’s case) hacking our way through the Jungle vines. The giant spider was very much present in my mind as I avoided touching anything more than absolutely necessary (have you ever tried walking through a jungle without touching anything?). We had been told that at the top we would see a main road – la via a la Mesa, and that about 200m further on we would come to a restaurant. After

several days of bread and coffee, this sounded amazing. Needless to say it didn’t happen that way. We finally found the road as the sun was setting over the hills. Clouds filled the valleys below us, turning the hill tops into islands in the mist. Half an hour walking straight back down the mountain on the other side, we came to the promised restaurant.

It was closed.

Plan H awaited us. Beer and arepas at the top of the hill (its all training right). It was now fully night time and the political situation in the region in the not-so-distant past means that people are wary of heading out after dark. Juan was getting jittery, it was time to leave and make our way back to the path cascading down the side of the crag. It was dark, it was slippery, and we were tired. The sight of our (two) headlamps bobbing through the vegetation was probably driving the villagers wild. When we finally made it back to our extreme hammocking camp we were fully prepared to fall into them.

The rockface was only reachable by passing some tricky and dangerous terrain, we awoke to hear rockfall a few hundred metres along the crag, and the cloud had entered the hammocks with a vengeance. It was time to head down to the boulder field for a few first ascents, and then back to the finca for a giant barbeque, making up for all the days we had spent dreaming of hot food and coffee with sugar. We are a lot closer to scaling that route, but it will have to wait for another expedition.

For now, like all good things in life, this chapter has ended. It is time to let go, to remember to be amazed, and to watch beautiful memories spilling through my hands like gold dust.

You can’t catch them, they’re already swirling and dancing in the wind below the farallon.