No Weapons Expo, No Warships Waiheke Island

Five years of Fukushima Daiichi

This week I attended the Eye of the Storm climate change conference in Wellington and discussed the two biggest coverups of my lifetime.
1) The downplaying of the worst industrial disaster of all time Fukushima Daiichi and
2) The possibility of near term human extinction as a result of runaway,abrupt climate change.
As part of that discussion I omitted to mention the consequence that  after human extinction, which a number of other presenters mentioned in passing, the fact that we will see over 430 nuclear power plant melt downs and even worse 1200 spent fuel pool fires.

I have just toured the North Island of NZ with U.S. climate and methane researcher Jennifer Hynes author of “ The Arctic Methane Monster” https://jenniferhynes99.wordpress.com/the-arctic-methane-monsters-rapid-rise/  and “ The Demise of the Arctic” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L19JBY0kNmo  , raising the alarm about the methane discharges from the melting permafrost and sub-marine clathrates which threaten to completely destabilise the energy balance of our biosphere, that up until recently has been destabilised by our rampant discharge of millions of years stored carbon in just 150 odd years of atmospheric arson .

We spoke to an audience at the amazing Hart Family Farm of Rachel and Greg Hart near  Napier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtD-z2hcIco  and then travelled south to the capital and spoke in the Hutt Valley  at a public meeting organised by Jacinta McKenzie from “ Transition Towns” in Wellington before returning to Auckland for our presentation at Laila Harre’s seafood restaurant and venue  Ika Sea. Professor Guy McPherson, professor emeritus from the University of Arizona and Paul Beckwith from the University of Ottawa both spoke via Skype and we hope to have the video of that presentation very shortly which was Live Streamed to the net via the team at  Slipstream and The Daily Blog
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/?x=5&y=2&s=Arctic+methane+emergency
I was approached at the Hutt Valley meeting by Victoria University lecturer and activist Pala Molisa http://dailypost.vu/news/molisa-dedicates-doctorate-to-mum/article_7e7328d1-a721-5c3e-9d22-6ccf5d27ba93.html  and was  asked to speak at “ The Eye of the Storm” climate conference at Victoria University where I was on a panel with Rod Oram speaking about the corporate media and what I consider the two biggest cover-up’s since the shooting of JFK by the military industrial complex which has gone on to murder millions of people. The two core subjects of my presentation were the true repercussions of the triple melt down at Fukushima Daiichi and the possibility of Near Term Human Extinction from runaway abrupt climate change. For more on NTHE I suggest you go to Professor Guy McPherson’s blog Nature Bats Last at guymcpherson.com or listen to his and Mike Sliwa https://michaelsliwa.wordpress.com/tag/blog/  weekly radio show on prn.fm also called Nature Bats Last.
I am sometimes accused of being “ too emotional” when I speak publicly about our climate catastrophe but I find the imminent extinction of most if not all complex life on this planet a very emotional subject but interestingly,  I experienced an amazing response from the Indigenous representatives at the conference.
I was approached numerous times by participants from Kiribati, Nauru, Vanuatu and the Soloman Islands thanking me for displaying that  emotion and showing a sense of urgency about this unfolding catastrophe as they do when talking about the imminent loss of their historic homelands and the daunting prospect of becoming “ Climate Refugees”, a term that really doesn’t sit well with them.
The developed world have  behaved like arsonists and set fire to the biosphere and as usual the first people to suffer are the Indigenous people and most relevant to NZ are our Pacific neighbours who I believe deserve  a managed access plan to NZ to facilitate an orderly withdrawal for them from their disappearing and daily more  inhospitable Islands.
I believe there is a disproportionate emphasis on sea level rise in this discussion where I believe the first thing to drive people from their Islands will be what James E Hansen referred to as “ The Storms of our Grandchildren” which are bearing down on us already NOT in 2100 as the mantra goes.
I will be interviewed soon by Eric Draitser of STOPIMPERIALISM.org  where we will be discussing the role of imperialism in our catastrophe and the bankruptcy of leadership we see in the world from the Imperialist nations and their lackeys like NZ Prime Minister John Key and the converse inspirational  leadership being shown by Anote Tong president of  Kiribati https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KACXV-cW-4  who I had the pleasure of meeting and I kid you not, dancing with at the post conference celebration in Wellington.
Professor McPherson and I believe that NZ will be one of the last habitable places on earth which puts a huge ‘cross hairs’ target on our country, I firmly believe we should be pursuing an independent  foreign policy and not signing up to any military alliances as we have with the United States Empire of Chaos as correspondent Pepe Escobar calls it.
Like it or not we are facing a dystopian future, let’s talk about it now and not when the proverbial hits the fan because it already has and is flying towards us all as we speak and twerk in distracted oblivion.

Below is my interview on Libby HaLevy's website Nuclear Hotseat.

http://nuclearhotseat.com/2015/12/09/nuclear-hotseat-233-climate-changenuke-connection-rainbow-warrior-wnzs-kevin-hester/

Brushes with Death Chapter One

Malaria Episodes; Numbers 1,2,3,4, and 5

A distant cousin of mine from Ireland turned up in N.Z. with her Kiwi husband, on holiday from their jobs in Mozambique. Maureen was a mid-wife who had spent the previous 10yrs of her life teaching African women to be mid-wives. You couldn’t count the number of lives she would have saved, by imparting that knowledge, in some of the poorest countries on the planet.
Ian her husband was an engineer, who, whilst re-habilitating the water supply in Beira, Mozambique had come up with an amazing idea how to save thousands of lives in the Barrios surrounding the city. What used to happen when the rains came was the ground water would become polluted with fasces from the appalling sanitation conditions the people lived in. As a result everyone would soon come down with dysentery and a huge proportion of them would simply die, especially the new born and infants, predominantly from diarrhea and dehydration.
Ian went into the barrios with a dumpy level and shot levels to find where all the ‘High’ ground was and then appropriated (misappropriated!!!) the company digger and sunk deep latrine holes to act as long drop toilets. The idea was when the rains came the fasces weren’t washed into the water supplies and the level of contamination and therefore illness and death were heavily reduced.
This simple solution saved thousands of lives.
These two people quickly became my heroes.
Ian was now working on the re-construction of the main port on a European Community Development Project. When he heard I was an Electrician and that I had High Voltage experience from London he offered me a job building the port Sub-Stations and installing the container cranes used for loading and unloading the ships.
This sounded like an amazing opportunity. As a result of being hired to go to Mozambique to work on the re-habilitation of the Port in Beira, Ulli and I began to organize our departure from Germany, said good bye to our friends and set off first for Paris then to London.
My good friend, Lucy was due to have a baby and we decided to be with her for the birth and then to fly to Africa. All our friends in Germany, collected baby clothes for her and one friend said she had a Perambulator and did we want to take it for her. Now, I was expecting some kind of fold up pram but when she arrived, she genuinely had a perambulator.
It was a classic piece of German engineering and design. Beautiful ‘White Wall’ tires. ‘Leaf ‘suspension, for a typically smooth German driving experience. A gorgeous ‘wicker basket’ type bassinet, which could be removed and used as a separate crib for a newborn.
It was simply gorgeous BUT bloody enormous. How the freakin’ hell were we going to get this bloody thing ‘overland’ to London and the only answer was, push it.
We trained to Frankfurt from Aschaffenburg where we had been living. From the Train Station to the adjoining bus station we simply piled our backpacks into the pram and pushed. We got some seriously weird looks, with some people craning their necks to see if there was a baby underneath it all.
Eventually we made it to Lucy’s home in Brixton, London where we presented her with a mountain of Baby clothes and the single flashest perambulator in the whole of the U.K.
We hung out with Lucy for a week waiting for ‘Scarlet’ to arrive, but to no avail. She was going to come in her own good time and we were booked to fly to Africa the day before the war started.
George Bush (the Dad) had organized a war with Saddam Hussein for the 15 of January 1991. How bizarre was that.
‘Ring, Ring.------ Hullo, Saddam here, how can I help you?-------
‘Yeah, Hi Saddam, George Bush here, waddup?’
‘Feel like a bit of a ‘set to’, old ex mate?’
‘How are you placed for the 15th?’
‘ Yeah, why not’ says Saddam,’ we’ll give you the Mother of all Wars and seeing as though we’ve both got god on our sides, why don’t we call him the umpire?’
‘Righto, I.C.B.M.’s at dawn it is. Stay in touch, don’t be a stranger.
‘Hi to wee George!’
So, seeing as though the war had a fixed start date, ( I am not kidding, Google it) We decided we would fly over the Middle East the day before to avoid any misguided, guided missiles or the odd irate Islamic jihadist. We said our goodbyes to Lucy and the unborn Scarlett and headed for Heathrow. After wading through the interminable queues, taxis and the tube and just before we were about to board the plane, I spent the last of our local coins on a final call to Lucy, to hear that her waters had broken and she was waiting for a taxi to the hospital. Scarlett was arriving to bear witness to the war.
Our ticket was to Nairobi, Kenya. We flew in and booked into the crumbiest backpackers in Kenya and I high tailed it into town on the hunt for a T.V. with C.N.N. which, as a general rule, tends to have great war coverage!
I proceeded to sit captivated, in front of that T.V. for three solid days until Ulli dragged me kicking and screaming into Africa on the threat of her leaving without me if I didn’t come.
One of the first things we saw when we arrived at this derelict backpackers (everything in Nairobi was pretty derelict) was this amazing overland Truck, which looked like a huge loaf of bread on giant wheels. Sitting under it with room above her head, was this little blond German woman carrying out repairs. This view was to become a recurring theme on our trip.
We headed north through Kenya, risking our lives on a daily basis on the incredibly dangerous roads littered with the corpses of motor vehicles whose luck had run out. Mostly, we travelled in decrepit Japanese mini-vans or Peugeot 404 station wagons, poorly maintained, overloaded and at death defying speeds.
We stopped long enough in Arusha for me to go to the local police with a traumatized African Woman to get our bus driver arrested for the single most dangerous piece of driving I have ever witnessed, ( including what I have seen on Hollywood movies ). He was drunk and stoned on Kif, a mild narcotic leaf chewed in the rift Valley as an appetite suppressant.
He had been racing another bus, two abreast on the main highway, driving around blind bends on the wrong side of the road at 100km’s / hr.
Afterwards, whilst we were waiting at the Arusha bus station we heard a huge kafuffle and saw some young guy running thru the enormous crowd with everyone having a swing at him. Eventually he tripped and went down and the mob pounced on him and was in the process of kicking him to death before some army troops who just happened to be in the station, waded in to his rescue. They beat everyone off him and then dragged his bloodied mess of a body into the Station police office where THEY started beating ‘the living daylights ‘out of him. We couldn’t bear to watch and left while he was still alive and have no idea what happened to him.
I wouldn’t fancy his chances as it doesn’t pay to get caught if you’re a pick pocket in Kenya.
We bussed across the border into Uganda crossing the source of the Nile at the junction of Lake Victoria.
We became instant millionaires. We changed about $100U.S. and received a brick of Ugandan money which was seriously embarrassing and a little intimidating even though it had so little relative value.
We loved Uganda. The people were beautiful, traumatized and sad but mysteriously it was a wonderful place. Kampala was fantastic. Teeming with people with nothing to do and everywhere we went we saw these enormous crane birds, the size of an Albatross sitting on roof tops and the defunct street lights.
We looped around the Ruwenzori Mountains where the last mountain gorillas eke out a precarious existence, sandwiched between interminable civil wars. Skirted poor old Rwanda, just a few short years before the genocide that was to soon decimate their nation and slipped back into Kenya to try our luck again in the Kenyan traffic all the way down to Mombasa.
Now we had heard that you could take a dhow along the coast to Pemba and on to Zanzibar. Sounds exotic eh?
We found the port and located a dhow that was heading down the coast. We negotiated a deal with the captain and he then took us to the local port authority and Customs post, where we were made to sign a disclaimer that said pretty well “We acknowledge, we are both stupid and stark raving mad but are still going to take the aforesaid mentioned dhow down the coast.”
By the time we arrived back at the boat there were another 100 passengers on board and approximately 100 tonnes of grain in sacks. The dhow had about six inches of freeboard and not a square inch of free space for the fare paying mzungus ( Europeans). We climbed up onto the coach roof of the steering station with everyone asking me, the experienced sailor, if this was safe. Yeah, yeah I said it’s just a coastal trip.
We set off hours later than we had planned and it was soon getting both dark and windy. The longer we were at sea, the windier it became, until by midnight we were in a full on gale with mountainous seas and this overloaded tub rolling from gunnel to wave washed gunnel.
Now, we were on the coach roof where the hideous pitching of the vessel was accentuated and we were literally holding on for grim death. Many was the time, when I looked over the side and saw no boat only water. The mizungus repeatedly asked me, ’is this safe?’ I continued to reassure everyone that we were and the boat would not founder, but I was literally crapping myself. In the early part of the evening we could see lights on the coast but as the night wore on I realized we were out of site of land and only found out later that we were 80miles offshore. Some coastal trip.
Somehow we survived the night and late the next day we arrived in Pemba, exhausted both physically and emotionally. Back in Mombasa we had seen another dhow loading for the same trip and they had left around the same time.
She foundered with the loss of 81lives with only one survivor, a German woman who swam and swam and………..
We paid for what passed for a decent room in Pemba and slept the sleep of the traumatized and abandoned the thought of continuing in a dhow and waited for the arrival of an impending coastal trader. We secured tickets on her for the second leg to Zanzibar.
That trip was pretty uneventful until we approached the main Port in Zanzibar. We approached the wharf at an angle of about 25degrees which would be pretty standard for a yacht but for a 200ft, 500tonne, coastal trader would be pretty acute, as they don’t alter course quickly but my main concern was we were doing about 5knts.
5knts and 500tonnes, you do the math. This, roughly speaking, is the equivalent of about 100billion pounds of Newton force. When we were about 400m out I said to Ulli. ‘This guy is pretty confident’.
When we were about 50m out I said to Ulli, ‘Brace yourself’.
Man, we smacked that wharf with mind numbing force. It had obviously just been re-built with huge 500mmX 500mm ‘Whalers’. Massive, square, machined, whole tree trunks for precisely this purpose. To protect the concrete wharf from destruction.
It was appalling, everyone on the boat bar Ulli and myself were knocked down with the shock of the impact. When the bow made contact, these massive hardwood ‘Whalers’ splintered and fired spears straight thru the welcoming party and straight thru the corrugated iron walls of the adjoining packing shed. We bounced down the wharf destroying the new protective ‘whalers’ eventually, coming to a shuddering halt. Even the people on the concrete wharf had been knocked off their feet. Miracuously, no one had been impaled.
After a moment or two of chaos, everyone on land and ship picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and those on the ship casually prepared to disembark and face the next adventure in their lives. African people, man are they resilient.
After disembarking, I walked around to the front of the ship to inspect the damage and there was about a cubic metre of hardwood compressed onto the bow of the ship!
We were now in the exotic, former slave trading capital, Zanzibar.
It is a beautiful Island city with an immeasurably tragic history. The last place millions of African people saw of their wonderful, fearful home before beginning a voyage of death, humiliation and subjugation and the biggest slur on western culture to date. Zanzibar was a focal point of the Slave Trade.
We were pretty stuffed after this adventure and headed out to the coast to rest and recover. We camped at this amazing village adjacent to the lagoon where the local women farmed and harvested sea weed for export to Japan and the men fished for beautiful reef fish, lobster and octopus.
It was a pretty cool place and I learnt a local song that I would sing to the ‘girls’ working the sea weed farm as I waded out to the reef.
The chorus was Hakuna, Hakuna matata, hakuna matata. (Hakuna matata means No Problem; they are a bloody philosophical lot, Africans!). They seriously loved it and it got them laughing from the souls of their feet. It was nice for all of us.
We hung out in Zanzibar for a while and then headed for Dar Es Salam, the capital of Tanzania and the home and possibly the birth place of Pan Africanism. The University of Dar Es Salam is the seat of Pan Africanism. Many of Southern Africa’s independence leaders were educated and cut their teeth intellectually here and you didn’t have to look hard for a debate on Colonialism or apartheid. I was in my political element.
Whenever I was asked what I thought of the apartheid state and what should be done to the regimes leadership, my standard reply was that I’d put a tire around their necks, douse it in petrol and set it on fire ( a Soweto necklace ). It was a great ice breaker.
It was here that we saw the Germans and the bread loaf overland truck again. We decided to head for the Serengeti and Ngorongoro National Park. You’re not allowed to travel add hock through the park but we skipped off a bus at the first village, thinking that hitching would be more fun.
It would have been for all the animals that were lurking just outside the villages, had the sun gone down before we were picked up.
Coming from New Zealand, I had a potentially tragic lack of fear for wild animals as none of ours would do you any harm but we were now in Africa and I was particularly slow to wake up.
We arrived in Ngorongoro village on the edge of the crater hoping to check into the local camping ground (even though we didn’t have a tent). We were disappointed to find out that the camp had been recently closed because a troop of leopards living in a nearby copse of trees had developed a taste for tourists and had started plucking the odd one out of the camping ground and it was thought that it might be bad for the tourist industry feeding naive backpackers to the animals.
A local aid worker stopped to ask us if he could help us and suggested the cheapest place to stay was Rhino Lodge.
He gave us a ride down a long twisting gravel road, about five miles out of town to the Lodge.
He dropped us off at the door and waved us goodbye.
We went to check in and I went ballistic. This place was little more than a glorified backpackers but they wanted US$55/ night. You could have bought a farm in Tanzania for that. The secret to nuclear fusion is try to charge me ten times more than something is worth. You could have bolted a gas turbine on to me and generated electricity
I absolutely went thermal and refused to pay. Ulli operated the pressure relief valve on me ( she stood back and waited), then pointed out that we were in the middle of the jungle, miles from even the most primitive of villages and it was dinner time and she didn’t mean ours.
Her and I haggled for about 15 minutes with each other, and then she exercised her veto and said “you always get your way, but not this time.’ ‘We are not going to be some feline’s dinner’. On that note, I sulked my way into the most expensive hotel room I’d ever had and had a shower and went off hunting for a compensationary beer.
We were sitting on the deck of the lodge and a couple came out, getting ready to drive somewhere. I asked where they were going and they said to one of the other Lodges which had a magnificent view down into the crater and asked if we would like to come. We had successfully bludged a lift.
As we were backing out of the car park, the woman in the passenger seat turned to us in the back and said. ‘If we’re lucky, we might see a leopard on the way’. Ulli is now looking daggers at me and I’m pricked to the heart. We drive about 50 meters from the inner gate up the driveway and the husband stops and turns the Range Rover off.
Coming down the DRIVEWAY are a pack of hyenas, 6 or 7 of them and they are about twice the size I thought they were, with the biggest heads I have ever seen. They walked down the side of the Range Rover with their heads just outside the window. I have by now, shrunk to the size of a 3yr old and am trying to squeeze down the back of the seats. It turns out, that was the best argument I ever lost in my short pathetic life. Go Ulli.
We hitched a ride out of there on the back of a flat deck truck with our back packs at our feet. It was brilliant crossing the Serengeti like that and really gave us a taste for having our own transport which we were able to satiate later on in the adventure. At one stage we were driving down a long straight and in the distance was a copse of trees. As we approached half of the trees simply walked away. They were giraffes, it was magic.
We headed down to the border with Malawi.
Now Malawi was ruled by this crackpot called President Bandra. He had been installed by the Brits in 1970’s and had clung to power with ever declining sanity and increasing senility.
One of his inspired dictates, to lift his country out of abject poverty, corruption and nepotism was to ban women from wearing trousers or shorts. Radical shit eh? That was bound to work! Why hadn’t someone thought of that before?
So, we’re at the border crossing and Ulli has to wear a sarong over her trousers to gain entry into the country. I couldn’t take it seriously and drifted off on one of my surreal tangents and wrote on my immigration papers, under occupation, that I was a Brain Surgeon. I started walking around the customs post with my hands turned up like a doctor doing scrubs. It left a few people perplexed and Ulli mortified. She said ‘what if someone is sick and they want you to operate’.
That made me excited but alas no one jumped at the opportunity.
It took ages to clear through into Malawi, until we realized that ‘unofficial’ customs fees were due and the longer you haggled the longer you waited. One thing we had on our side was time and we waited for their shift to nearly finish when the cross rate plummeted; we handed over some shrapnel and crossed over.
Because the sun was setting we had to sleep in the local school class room. It was just as you would imagine. No windows, cute little wooden chairs connected to little desks, dirt floor. Homemade blackboard, stubs of chalk.
The next morning we headed for Nakata Bay on the edge of Lake Nyasa. We bussed into town and were dropped off in the main square which was surrounded by older woman selling vegetables under banyan trees. Quintessential Africa.
We were approached by a group of young men who offered us accommodation at a number of lodgings. We picked one, just out of town adjacent to a small stream.
Being a world class eater, I struck up a great friendship with the cook and knowing that his survival was intrinsically linked to my appetite, I endeavored to guarantee his employment by supporting the kitchen. It helped that he was a great cook.
We dumped our gear and headed down to the local beach and low and behold what is the first thing we see when we navigate our way down the precarious dirt track to the beach but our much admired Bread Loaf overland truck and Axel and Christa. We had said hullo to these two folks a couple of times previously and had had brief conversations about each of our travels and it was good to catch up again.
We hung out together, went swimming, lazed around under the trees and continued eating.
As we left later in the day, I asked if there was anything I could bring back the next day from the market. Fresh bread? And avocado?
So began a small ritual, each day we would arrive from the village with fresh goodies and have breakfast together. Ulli loves coffee and so did these folk. We were collectively making brunch one day and I went to empty out the espresso machine and dump the old coffee grains and Christa said ‘keep those ‘. They used to mix the coffee grains with washing powder as a hand cleaning agent for when they had been working on the truck. It was soapy and abrasive and cleaned like grease lightning.
One day I was strolling round the village and saw a couple of blokes working under a large Fiat van and we said ‘hi’ as I walked by. The next day they were still there and I asked them what they were doing. They said that the clutch had jammed and they couldn’t operate the van, they had limited tools and little idea of how to fix the problem. And money, forget it.
I suggested we borrow tools from the Bread loaf and we pull the gearbox out together and have a gecko.
Axel loaned us all the tools we needed and in a couple of hours, the three of us had the gearbox out, unjammed the clutch, re-adjusted it, chucked the gearbox back in and Max and Kazim were up and running again. They were ecstatic. That night we went to one of the bars for a beer. These guys were great people but were pretty uncertain about Axel, Christa, Ulli and myself.
The relationship between black and white people globally has been compromised by the events of history and in Africa, it can be toxic. They hadn’t had a relationship with white people before on this level. It started with the three of us climbing under the van together with little idea of what we were doing, working together and achieving a result collectively, equally.
I’m lucky enough to come from a multi cultural society where we treat each other with (a growing level) of respect but Africa is way different. It’s fair to say they were a little intrigued by us.
Not long after, the rains came and disaster struck. We woke up in the night and the heavens had opened and the building we were staying in was dissolving. I kid you not.
It looked like a sturdy building made of solid, plastered and painted walls but when that torrential rain got into it, it literally dissolved.
As we were lying in bed and we started to hear the leaks. Then with our torch, we saw water running down the walls, then next thing you know, there was a big plop on the bed beside me and I found a huge piece of plaster which had de-laminated from the wall and fallen off in one piece.
We stayed awake, the whole night, literally watching the place dissolve. We actually couldn’t stop laughing. It turns out the place was just a mud hut that had had a cosmetic makeover to make it look like a house.
Next morning I went outside to go to the long drop toilet and it was on a slight lean. Ulli watched me going in and said, ‘I wouldn’t go in there if I was you’, but I confidently laughed off her concerns.
Now I’m a firm believer that Number 2’s should not be rushed and I’m renowned for taking my time but as I’m sitting there, the bloody lean becomes more pronounced and I could literally feel the ground moving beneath my feet and outside Ulli’s protestations are becoming more and more strident.
I abruptly finished my deliberations and just got out by the skin of my teeth. I had barely exited the door, taken a few paces to where Ulli was standing with a look of horror on her face and turned around to witness the entire Khazi drop on a 45degree angle into the stinking cess pit that it straddled. Had I not left when I did, I’da bin up to my neck in Sh..!
This all appeared highly amusing at first, until the level of destruction that was unfolding around us became apparent.
Our guest house was near, but above the stream. We looked down and through the trees and couldn’t believe our eyes. That little stream that had been as small as 1m and as large as 5m wide was now a raging torrent in some places 200m wide. Large trees and debris was racing by in the dirty, muddy water. The scariest thing was where there had previously been flat land between the stream and the cliff, there was now only water and the edges of the cliffs had been scoured away.
Then, the dawning of the terrible tragedy that had unfolded, whilst we had been sitting up all night, laughing at the crumbling plaster. Hundreds of simple mud and straw huts had disappeared. Not only people’s homes, businesses and livelihoods but the people themselves.
That night, within hundreds of meters of where we had slept, officially, 17 people had been washed to their deaths. The real number was probably many, many more.
We gingerly made our way into town around the souls of people gone. Christ, the place was a disaster and people were walking around pretty shell shocked. Apparently the town of Nakata Bay was cut off. We walked past the end of the town, down the main incoming road to find a massive slip where thousands of tons of hill side had simply slipped away and there was a yawning chasm possibly 75m wide dropping down a ravine more than a 100m. They weren’t gonna fix that in a hurry.
The only other way out of town was now cut off by a raging, swollen river. We weren’t going anywhere.
We were simply boxed in with no chance of moving. Our friends in the Bread loaf were on the other side of that torrent, at the bottom of the cliff and we had no Idea what their predicament was. There was no way we could cross and we were seriously worried about them.
As the days went by, we helped with the clean up and waited for external assistance. At first it didn’t come but we did see the occasional Helicopter fly by with people in it surveying the damage. Probably 2 or 3 days after the arrival of the rain, people began to drop like flies. But the problem wasn’t flies, the problem was mosquitoes.
With rain come mosquitos. With mosquitoes comes Malaria.
There were a quite a few muzungus in the town staying at various places and we had seen each other around. When I heard one of the English girls had gone down with malaria, Ulli and I went up to the local hospital to check on her. It was about a one km walk. She seemed ok and I got talking to the lab’ tech who said that there was a shortage of blood in their blood bank and that African people didn’t as a rule donate blood except in an emergency and then only for their own families. We decided to canvas all the tourists to get them all to donate. A large number did.
The river slowly subsided and we were able, after a week or so to ford it and walk to where the Bread loaf was parked. The rough, winding track that they had driven down was gone. It was now simply a cliff. When we got to the bottom of it Axel and Christa were ok but their truck was now parked at the bottom of said cliff.
Naturally they were pretty disheartened and at a loss what to do. My suggestion was that we cut a new track and as no one could leave town anyway we weren’t really being held up.
I went to the local council building and borrowed picks and shovels and the three of us started digging. At the end of the day I struggled home exhausted and covered in mud and Max and Kasim spotted me. ‘Waddup?
I told them what had happened and ………………..now we were five. When I got back to our guest house there was a written message from Ulli. ‘Sick, probably Malaria, gone to the hospital’.
I walked up to the hospital and my girl is flat on her back, pale, feverish and yep, she’s got Malaria. I promptly went to the Lab’ technician to warn him that the blood he had from Ulli was probably infected with Malaria. He was unconcerned. He said that if the person was sick enough to need a transfusion he would give it to them and treat the malaria later!
Ulli progressively got better and after a day or two I got her home to the guest house and her temperature started to drop as the Chloro- Quinine started to kick in. When she was on the road to recovery, I went back to road building with Kasim, Christa, Max and Axel.
Meter by meter we carved out a track. After 4 or 5 days we had a passable track and decided to have a go at driving the truck out. Poor old Christa simply couldn’t bear to watch.
I instructed Axel to keep the driver’s door open just in case he needed to jump if the truck was to slip back down the cliff. Axel was pretty experienced and worked his way up the hill pretty well but at about the ¾ mark, the truck lost traction and with all four wheels driving forward, the truck came to a halt, held, and then began to slide, both back and off, our track. As it began to gain momentum, the left rear wheel hit a boulder and there was a loud smashing sound as the truck came to an abrupt bone jarring halt. The smashing sound wasn’t the impact of the truck hitting the boulder but of the rear axle exploding.
Now we were stuck, ¾ of the way up the cliff with a broken axel. We had a brief cry, then anchored the truck with strops to stop it going anywhere, had another cry and went home to rest and regroup. I hated leaving Christa and Axel alone that night as they were completely demoralized. Two freakin broken axels.
Ulli was regaining her strength bit by bit and was aghast at how the three of us looked each day when we came home. Kasim and Max insisted on checking on Ulli each night before they went back to their van to sleep. As a general rule we were filthy, sweaty, and exhausted.
The next day we rendezvoused at the bread loaf to decide our next move. I said, ‘we need to remove the axel to see if it can be fixed’.
Axel climbed up on the roof of the truck, opened a large wooden box and triumphantly held up a spare axel that he had wrapped in grease proof paper. Freakin Germans, how the hell they lost the war to the Brits, I do not know!
Sweet, easy, out with the old and in with the new!
Not!
We pulled the large, nobly, wheel off. Removed the outer hub and bolted on the ‘gear puller’ that the ‘bloody think of everything German’ had. We started cranking on the pressure and banging the end of the shaft with a hammer to ‘Break the hold’.
We got so much strain on the gear puller we couldn’t turn the bolt another millimeter. This bloody shaft had been in there since the day it was built in 1962 and after 30 yrs of hard work it had no intention of being extracted.
We left it overnight on load, came back the next day, tried again, borrowed a gas torch and heated it all up, bashed, swore, cried, added a pipe to the socket bar for leverage and preceded to break the gear puller.
Found another gear puller, broke that, and can’t be sure but probably cried again.
We hunted down a gas welding set and Axel welded a steel plate on the end of a nut screwed it back onto the shaft and the four of us lay on the ground alternating with two sledge hammers banging away at the plate and after an interminable number of crazed and obsessive strokes the freakin’ thing ‘popped’ and then came free.

It had taken three days to remove the broken axel and it took us one hour to install the new one.
Since the road had been washed out, very few provisions had been able to get into the town and the one that was running out the fastest was beer. There were about a dozen small bars in the town and one by one they had to close as they ran out of anything to sell. Each evening after working on first the track and after, the truck, we would adjourn to whichever establishment was still functioning to hear what were the latest developments in the repairs to the road and retell of our own progress with the truck which had become a cause célèbre in the village.
Prudence and time to gather our thoughts dictated that we found a tractor with a long strop and pulled and drove the truck, at the same time the final 50m or so to the top of the cliff. It had taken over a week from go to wo.
We were completely elated and physically and emotionally fucked. We had sweated, cursed , cried and cajoled both ourselves and each other for a week and all this with a daily growing audience intrigued by this mulit cultural team ‘slaving’( is that an appropriate term) away together, drinking from the same water bottle, eating the same food, debating solutions equally. We didn’t realize it at the time but apparently it was unique.
Once we had the truck safe and sound and had stopped jumping round, dancing as only Africans and mad myzungu’s can and kissing each other and all the bystanders, Axel and Christa pulled me aside and said ’We want to ask you one last favor? We want to swap our truck for your and Ulli’s backpacks. What do you think?’
But that I was so exhausted, I would have taken their temperatures, thinking that they too had come down with Malaria!
I said ’you can’t be serious. Chill, relax, you’ll feel better tomorrow.’
But they explained to me that they had had enough of such dramas over the last 17months they had been on the road and for the sake of their marriage they believed that they needed to get away from the truck.
I was completely stuffed, my girl was at home sick in bed and I couldn’t in any way get my head around this incredible offer and I said I’d go home and we’d talk about it the next day.
Like any marathon you may run, you ration your reserves until the finish and then you are spent.
I went back to the guest house, told a resurgent Ulli that we had recovered the truck and the amazing offer that Axel and Christa had made to me and then crashed and slept the sleep of the dead.
I woke up the next day with no real plan or obligations. We slowly got it together and with increasing reserves of energy, Ulli and I made our way up the road to see Christa and Axel.
Their position had not only, not changed, but solidified. They were adamant and they explained themselves to us in both English and German.
They had lived cheek to jowl in that small truck, experiencing adventures and challenges for one and a half years and they were completely over it.
The offer was one Overland truck, complete with every spare part you could imagine, stereo, tools, futon, Carnet du passage, the works, in exchange for two backpacks.
To a blind man with no arms it was a great deal.
Ulli and I deliberated, but also knew it was too good an offer to refuse but it was also too generous, so we came up with a counter offer.
We proposed we would give them, the two backpacks, a U.S. $1000 that we had on us and one day we would come to Berlin and take them out to dinner!
Deal? Deal.
After showing me all I needed to know about the truck, Axel and Christa jumped on a ferry that was doing relief supply runs down the lake whilst the road was out and literally sailed away.
We drove the truck down into the village and parked it under one of the banyan trees and considered our new found circumstances.
Not long after I fell ill. In my experience of contracting malaria, after you fall ill, you remember that in the hours preceding there was a very low level headache. Then it just hits like a brick.
We had anti –malarial medication and I immediately began taking a course of Chloro-Quinine. Malaria feels like a massive dose of flu. High temperature, sweats, fever, the shakes and the single most massive headache I have ever experienced.
Fortunately, Ulli had by now recovered and she was able to look after me. At first it appeared that I was getting better, then I had a terrible night of all of the above symptoms and then I started to struggle to breathe. I simply couldn’t get air into my lungs and I started to deteriorate. Fortunately, the local cop dropped in to see how we were and the moment he saw me, he piled us into the back of his Landover and raced us up to the hospital.
The hospital was run by a Finnish doctor and I was taken directly into his office, rather than the ward. He was pretty laid back! He lay me down on a bed in the office, took my temperature and listened to my lungs. By this time I was pretty unresponsive, couldn’t sit or stand and was finding it difficult to respond to questions and was progressively slipping from consciousness. The remarkable thing was, I could understand everything that was being said and could process the information but just couldn’t contact the other people in the room. I was literally drifting away.
He put me on a drip of saline and injected quinine into the solution
The doctor said very calmly to Ulli that I was very, very sick and needed to be admitted. He opened a draw in his desk and pulled out some medication and put it on the table.
He said ‘I keep this drug for people who are very sick’ ‘It is called Fansadar, it has been banned and removed from the market because of its possible side effects, but I think your boyfriend should take them’. Ulli asked what the side effects were. He replied ‘Heart failure, liver function failure, kidney failure’. I don’t remember him saying etc etc but the way his voice trailed off you couldn’t be sure he was finished but he had probably covered off the main points. As I said, by now, I was little more than a spectator and Ulli was left to make the decision on her own. It was a very lonely decision to have to make but she didn’t hesitate and said ‘If you think he should take them, then let’s do it’.
They wacked a Fansadar into me and then carted me off to the ward.
I am sure I won’t be able to paint the picture of what a ward in a hospital in a small village in Malawi looks like but I’ll give it a go. I was put in intensive care which was characterized in its difference from the other wards by a sign on the door saying “Intensive Care”. The windows were broken, the plaster was cracked and the paint flaking. The cistern didn’t work in the toilets and they were abominable. The beds were old metal spring bases dating from the 60’s. Some of the rooms, had doors.
Whilst I was in my catatonic stage I would watch, as a rats’ head would poke through the ceiling where the steam vent pipe from the sterilizer went through the roof. He would stick his head out, survey the scene, casually descend the pipe, and walk across the lid of the sterilizer (I kid you not) and climb down on to the floor. He then proceeded to wander around all the bodies of the people sleeping on the floor looking for grains of rice dropped by my roommates. For every person in a bed, there were probably two or three people sleeping on the floor.
Around this time, I hit a hospital all time record by recording a temperature of 41.4degrees. Technically impossible to come back from. They were wacking continuous drips into me, dosed with quinine and fansadar. I completely ballooned up with fluid retention.
I started to realize how sick I had become when Max and Kasim came up to the hospital to see me. I was at the catatonic phase and couldn’t respond to any one. The two of them came gingerly into the room, took one look at me and without saying a word, turned around and left with a look of horror on their faces. I took that as an extremely bad sign. In four or five days, I'd gone from a fit 30yr old to Michelin man, burning up with fever and looking down the barrel of death.
It was impossible for me to eat and if I had have been able to would have vomited it up immediately. Ulli was continuously pouring fluids into me and I just puked them up immediately. It is one of the problems people have with taking oral medication for malaria as, because of the nausea and vomiting a lot of the medication is thrown up before the body can absorb it thus under dosing the virus. One thing you don’t want to do with malaria is under dose yourself as you can knock it back but if you don’t knock it out it just re-gathers strength and comes again.
There were a number of reasons why I survived this bout of malaria. The great Finnish doctor and his banned drugs. W.H.O. saline and quinine, a reasonably robust constitution, but undoubtedly the love and care afforded me by Ulli, was the single most important contribution to my survival. She literally bathed me continually for four days. I’m sure this dropped my temperature that critical fraction between life and death. This was the second time in as many months that she had saved my life. Thanks Bella.
It must have been a seriously crap time for her knowing that I was probably going to die. The body language from the staff was pretty grim and their ability to influence events beyond what they were already doing was nil. They had seen a lot of death and I was just another person in a long line.
Whilst I lay there boiling, with a truly thumping headache and completely unable to communicate I remember thinking, ‘Shit, what a bastard, I’m gonna die here and Ulli is going to have to tell my mother and father, that is so not fair to her.’ I was completely ambivalent about dying. I wasn’t scared, fretful, none of the things you’d expect. From that time to this I have had not a skerrek of fear of dying. I wonder if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
Finally, we got on top of the virus and I pulled back from the brink. My temperature began to drop, I regained my faculties. I could speak, couldn’t really eat but could drink coke which had sugar in it and I began to get some strength back.
After a day or two more the Doctor said I could leave and stay at the guest house, where there was a functioning toilet and shower. He said to me and Ulli, ‘you did well; there is no one who has walked out of this hospital who had been as sick as you’. At first I could stand up but not walk, then slowly I would be able to take a few steps but I was so frail that my battery would die immediately and it was weeks before I fully recovered my strength.
I had gone 11 days without food and my weight had dropped from about 65kg’s to 51kg’s. I was ……..skinny!
I started to regain my strength with the help of the great food cooked for us at the guest house by ………… and I started putting on weight. Now there is a product that Malawi is famous for and that is Pot, It is sometimes described as a cob.
It is dried and compressed and wrapped in the husks of maize. We’d heard lots about the amazing Malawi cobs and we were keen to try one. I asked around a bit and were shown a few miserable looking things and bought one. The pot was truly good but the cob didn’t live up to the visual spectacle I’d been told about. We mentioned this to our cook and he said ‘I’ll fix that’.
Next day he came to our room with a sack and inside was half a dozen of the biggest ‘Corn Cobs’ I have ever seen. They were massive and the quality of the pot was diabolical. We’d stumbled on El Dorado. I can’t remember how much they cost but somewhere in the region of a few dollars each, it was ridiculous.
By the time all our health dramas were concluding the roads had reopened and we were able to plan to leave. We arranged to drive in tandem with Kasim and Max down to Lilongwe, the capital and major city in the south of Malawi. Kasim and Maxs’ boss wanted to meet and thank us for the help with the truck and frankly we weren’t sure if the clutch was truly repaired so a convoy seemed a good idea.
As we drove to Lilongwe we stopped frequently on the side of the road to buy vegetables. We would be cruising along and we’d see maybe five tomatoes piled up on the side of the road in a small pyramid, or a cucumber sitting alone on a mat, maybe a few spuds or a cabbage. We’d stop the truck, wait and soon some woman would come rushing from the bush after hearing the truck stop and sell us her excess produce for just a few cents.
A huge percentile of Africans, don’t live in the cash economy and selling anything to generate money is imperative if you want to buy sugar, cooking oil etc. I will never forget the taste of those tomatoes. One of my most entrenched memories was the amazing taste of those home grown African tomatoes.
We hit the big smoke of Lilongwe and were welcomed into the homes of Kasim, Max and there extended families. Everyone was interested to hear of our adventures. We made some great friends.
I can remember going to the bus station for fried potatoes. They had these 1 meter round, steel plates slightly conical with boiling cooking oil in the middle fired by a gas burner located underneath and large chunks of potatoes or pieces of meat being deep fried. When the spuds were cooked they would just drag them out of the oil higher up the plate and away from the heat to drain. Then they would serve them with salt, pepper and a Cajun type seasoning. It was beautiful, filling and cheap.
It was time to keep moving and we said our goodbyes to the boys, dumped our ‘cobs’ and headed for the border with Zambia.
We crossed over with a couple of young English girls and headed for Lusaka. As evening fell, we pulled into a clearing on the side of the road and proceeded to set up camp. We got our little stools out, tuned my little broadband radio to the BBC, set up the gas cooker and rustled us up some food.
African people would always be intrigued by the mizungus in the ‘Bread loaf’ and would shyly peek inside and marvel at the luxury. We often invited people for a cup of tea and this day was no exception. We were in the middle of nowhere but out of the trees came a mix of people. Young, old, shy and inquisitive. One guy came up to me carrying a sack and a bucket and asked if I wanted to buy some tobacco. I declined saying I didn’t smoke but offered him a cuppa. He sat down and we had a drink and a chat when it dawned on me I hadn’t see ‘raw’ tobacco before so asked to have a look in the sack.
He cracks it open and low and behold the bloody thing is full of Pot. I’d nearly missed it. I said ‘this tobacco, I smoke’. He had a 4ltr bucket and we agreed on a price for a bucket of pot. It was completely stupid of me as we were only planning to stay in Zambia for a week or two and a cup would have been tons. I paid a coupla bucks for the lot and had to give the bulk of it away not long after. Duh!
To be honest I think I just liked the idea of buying my pot by the bucket full!
Later an overland truck arrived in our clearing and swept into action like a whirlwind. Tables and trestles were set up, tents pitched, food cooked, sleeping partners decided on, beer drunk, consciouness lost and when the new day dawned the reverse and they were off. Man it was slick.
We didn’t hang around long in Zambia and soon crossed into Zimbabwe. In those days Zimbabwe was positively modern. Good roads, Robots, as traffic lights are beautifully named, lots of modern consumer goods and a modern efficient private sector. We found this great backpackers called Sable lodge, where we parked the truck in the drive way and headed into town for luxuries like Pizza, Mexican food, movies and bars. It was pretty refreshing.
I found an engineering shop to repair the broken axel and turned up with the two pieces. The Zim’ owner said yes he could weld it but a better idea was to make a new one. They had exactly the right steel and a brilliant engineering workshop. I came back 3 days later and there was an exact copy and a spare, beautifully made. I pulled out my vernier to measure the diameters etc to check that it would fit and it was exact and the price? $66U.S., a fraction of a new one or the cost to make one at home. Brilliant.
Shortly after we had a slow leak on one of the tires on the truck and I said to Ulli one morning after breakfast, ‘you do the dishes and I will remove the tire and repair the tube’. The wheels were a design called ‘split rims’, where the two sides of the wheel are bolted together, so to remove the tube or replace the tire you simply un- bolted the two halves. A simple and low effort project.
I started working and shortly after, Ulli came out and found me slumped over the tire.
Malaria #2.
It’s amazing it just hits me like a bolt of lightning.
We reacted pretty quickly and Ulli got me into a taxi and down to a local doctor. He asked me what was wrong and I stupidly said ‘I think I’ve got Malaria’ to which he hit the roof, saying ‘how would you know. I’m the doctor, I’ll decide’. Grumpy old bastard that he was.
Surprise, surprise, yep I’ve got malaria. Now I’m not purporting to be an expert but I’d had recent experience and I thought his reaction was a little over the top.
This bout was pretty straight forward. We were careful with the doses and I wasn’t particularly ill. Compared with the first dose it was a breeze.
We made friends with the guy running the lodge and located, in Zimbabwe, Malawi Cobs. Our van became a focal point of stoners hanging out, drinking a few beers and having a smoke. It was very salubrious.
The next leg of the journey was to our destination, Mozambique. We drove to Mutare which is a hill station town located on the range that separates Zimbabwe from Mozambique. We stood at a lookout gazing across the frontier with trepidation into Mozambique. We needed to get from Mutare to Beira. It was a straight forward trip except that there was a civil war raging on both sides of the road. We took a deep breath and set off.
The drive was surreal. The road was deserted except for the odd Military truck patrolling along it and occasional groups of refugees who looked completely traumatized.
One of the first things that were suggested to me, once we arrived in Beira, was to get armed. There was a thriving market for weapons and buying one was simply about deciding what you wanted. You could buy literally anything, Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher, no probs. A.K.47, standard issue, a Walther PPK as made famous by ‘Bond, James Bond’ all available. I wasn’t really into the idea but did see the need to have a weapon, so settled on an 11shot, 9mm semi-automatic Malkov, an East European pistol. It cost me U.S. $40 and fortunately we never had to fire it in anger.
I dropped with another bout of malaria whilst working in Beira but it too passed without much ado. Hard to believe you could become passé about malaria but none of the subsequent bouts ever amounted to anything like the debut episode.
About three months after we returned to N.Z. I was working as a contract electrician and was rushing one day to finish a job so I wouldn’t have to return for just a few hours the next day. The moment I was finished and began to relax in the packing up stage, it hit me again. I was walking to the van and wham and I lay down on the grass and waited.
Soon enough the owner of the house came looking for me and was disconcerted to fine his electrician lying on the ground like a stunned mullet. He wanted to call an ambulance but I stupidly said Na, just call my girlfriend and my boss. John sent one of the boys around to recover the van and Ulli turned up, shaking her head. She was a bit over malaria by this stage. We drove to a medical centre and sort help. I was a little reluctant to tell the quack what was wrong with me after getting a bollocking the last time from the arsehole doctor in Zimbabwe.
After he had examined me and was obviously perplexed, I ventured, that I had a suspicion it was malaria. When he heard that I’d been in Africa and had three previous bouts of the bloody thing he started beaming. He couldn’t believe his luck and started taking blood samples for testing. Vial after vial after vial. I said wow, Christ, leave me some. If I hadn’t stopped him he’d a drained me dry. He had called the Lab’ to get an urgent test and they had said get as much as you can and we’ll send it to the University so the students could have a look at the living virus.
Bloody vampires.
But having said that, the head of the tropical diseases unit at Auckland put me on a course of drugs that seems to have cured me and 17 yrs later I haven’t had a recurrence.
When we said our goodbyes to Kasim and Max we said that when we sold the truck we would send them some money as we believed they should be rewarded for their work at the cliff face. When we were in Zimbabwe we met two kiwis who wanted to buy the truck. I asked them what they thought it was worth and they said US$10k. I explained to them that I had been given the truck for free and if they paid me half of that figure then we would all benefit equally.

They jumped at the chance and paid us $5k. After arriving in N.Z we sent a letter to the Max and Kasim enclosing $250 each with instructions to confirm that they had received the dosh. When we received that, we sent them another $250 each. Both of them set up businesses with that money which was a considerable amount of seed capital relatively speaking where they lived.

Two years later we turned up in Berlin and settled the contract with Axel and Christa.

Full circle!

Slightly Less Bold New World

Slightly Less Bold New World

I struggle to identify when the tipping point occurred. There were so many factors that could be construed as when the definitive change happened. But really they were a sequence of interrelated events, that simply created a vortex, at the bottom of which I find myself now, on this boat, in this ocean, running from this slightly less than bold new world.
I’m grasping to find a starting point for this chronicle.
Was it the financial crisis of 2008 which began as a rumble of house hold debt and culminated in the collapse of the world financial system late in 2009 and the subsequent wars that followed?
Or was it the break-up of the European Union and the demise of the Euro.
I remember they coined this expression at the beginning of the debacle, Sub-Prime Debt.
Sub-Prime Debt; listen to that term, SUB PRIME DEBT. Who the fuck thought that there was a viable form of debt that could exist called Sub-Prime debt.
What the fuck were they smoking?
Later they renamed it Toxic debt! If they had have called it toxic debt in the first instance, no one would have fallen for it and the fuse wouldn’t have been lit. Bugger!
These cretins, these captains of commerce, these Harvard educated geniuses succeeded in creating the most explosive time bomb of all time. Then they lit the fuse and I kid you not, they stuck the freaking thing directly under their children’s beds.
Every night, when they tucked their cherished little ones into dream world, they ignored the hissing of the fuse beneath the bed and the ticking of their own instinctual clock and went back to their vapid, delusional lives. God love em!
Well, sure enough, the bloody thing blew and all hell broke loose. But it wasn’t like a typical bomb, which achieves its maxim destruction force by expending all its energy in the shortest possible time.
No, this one went off like slow motion nuclear fusion. Atom crashing into atom like dominoes, spiraling out from the centre of the capitalist universe, America, to eventually reach every corner of the planet.
The worst thing about this particular bomb was that it started to blow and destruct but it just kept on going.
None of that old BANG, followed by silence, then the plaintive wailing of the injured and the crackling of the flames. Na, none of that.
Nope, this one went BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG infinitum. I’m still hearing it. Just one loud, ongoing, single, monstrous bang.
This is the ‘cage rattler’ that I always suspected was coming but prayed that I was wrong.
So, anyway, first we all leant of the Sub Prime Debt and we looked over the fence at those stupid Americans and thought, ‘serves you freaking right, you idiots’. Little did we know that they had just lit the fuse that would end the existence that we all had grown up with!
The banks and their minions approached poor people who had successfully proven over decades that they could not save a dime (for whatever reason) and offered to sell them a brand new house. Now you can’t blame them for saying…….. OK, sweet and my daughter will have one too please!
Then the shylocks sweetened the deal and said that they only had to pay minimal interest on the loan (in the small print it said this would rise to market after 2yrs).
The time bomb was that the cost of repayments would triple overnight when the honeymoon period was over and that the value of the homes was overstated by 30% or 40%. These former trailer park residents were never going to be able to afford the new costs and the banks mail began to jingle with the sound of keys being returned
The next thing was the expansion of our vocabularies.
We leant new words like Ponzi and Trillions. Now strictly speaking we already knew there was a word Trillion, but instinctively we knew you could not use it in conjunction with the word dollars or pounds or euro. But they just started pretending that there were trillions of dollars around. Or trillions of euros or funnier still trillions of British pounds!
How did they get anyone to fall for that?
From that moment on we should have known that we were all freaking doomed. Intelligent people from all over the globe were discussing whether or not the ‘Bailout ’involving trillions of this or that would be successful.
No one actually said “duh, we don’t have trillions or for that matter Billions. In fact, just in case you hadn’t noticed we’re all freaking broke”.
Nope, those Harvard geniuses continued to shuffle the deck chairs and the band played manfully on.
Then we learned all these new acronyms; CD’s, CDO’s CDA’s MGL’s, ERM’s---- DO REH freaking ME’s. They created these financial instruments (otherwise known as weapons of mass destruction) upon which all the existing money was incinerated. Christ they were smart.
So, first the homeowners went bung. Then they lost their jobs and the factories and businesses went bung.
Then the governments decided that the solution was to take what remaining pittance of money was left and do a loaves and fishes routine with it and feed the thousands of ……………………………………………………………………bankers with it.
The very same people who had caused the debacle flew in, in their Armani suits and private planes, cap in hand and literally got away with what was left. It was truly brilliant.
If anyone could have suggested such a scenario had a whisker of a chance of success they would have been ridiculed, but pull it off they did.
It was like a race to shoot the last Rhino or catch the last whale. The fox dining on the last chicken in the hen house.
Then the Americans began bailing the large car companies, who said we only make stupid monstrosities that no one wants or can afford to run and those pesky Krauts and slippery Japs have stolen all our business by cunningly building what people want, so if you don’t give us all the money left in the piggy bank we’ll sack everyone and it will be all your fault.
Now all this sounded like a kiddy fight until the trade wars broke out. As you can imagine the efficient German and Japanese car makers and their non- subsidized, fully engaged workers didn’t take kindly to the handouts that there corporate competitors were receiving. The word protectionism kept popping up and slowly like a smoldering flame so did the heat and vitriol.
Around the same time the national banking systems of the world began to completely unravel.
Iceland was the first to fall, smothered under a mountain of debt racked up by their out of control banking sector. Then it was the turn of the Celtic tiger, Ireland. After living off handouts from the E.C for decades and promoting a massive housing bubble, the Celtic tiger’s teeth fell out and it quickly began to starve.
The Polish plumbers, that had been keeping the drains clear and the water flowing quickly went home.
Next it was the turn of the Greeks and the Portuguese banks to fail and as each one dropped the cry went out to Germany for help.
The Germans found themselves in an unenviable position. By this stage they were sick and tired of propping up every man and his dog. The previous 20yrs were dominated by the cost of German re-unification. The financial burden that this had entailed was only just beginning to abate when the crisis hit.
Now, its one thing to prop up fellow Germans and to be good European citizens but the German populace and the extreme right in particular were vehemently opposed to bailing out their lazy and spendthrift neighbours.
To a large extent the German banks had not got involved in the trading of the toxic assets that had brought the U.S and the U.K to their knees and they resented the damage those cavalier actions had done to their own economy and industries. Eventually their patience simply ran out and Europe began to unravel.
I think it’s fair to say the Germans were loath to let this happen but they were simply overwhelmed by the financial burden their taxpayers were expected to bear and old animosities re-appeared.
Thus the beginning of the end of the European Union experiment unfolded. Rather than suffer the consequences of maintaining membership by reducing deficits and raising interest rates the weaker member states withdrew from the union and devalued their currencies in an attempt to restore competitiveness.
The classic Argentine approach to defaulting on your debt. This made the former allies competitors and the gloves came off.
It began with relatively minor skirmishes. The first one was in South Osetia, where Russia and Georgia had hand bags at forty paces but like any physical confrontation, it quickly spiraled out of control. Simmering tensions between Russia and Ukraine blew up with the Ukrainians not paying for their gas and when their supply was shut off they replied by closing the transit pipeline between Germany and Russia.
Christ, can you imagine what the Germans thought? Our account is current and where is our gas? Being nicked by the Ukrainians actually!
The Ukrainians completely overplayed their hand and the government was overthrown by the opposition party aligned with Moscow and the beginning of the end of the democratic experiment in Eastern Europe was upon us
It was a classic contagion. Banks were failing all over the world. The former champions of the financial world were one by one exposed as the charlatans they so obviously were.
One of them put up 2 cubic meters of US$100 notes ($20m) for a cricket match! CAN’T ANYONE HEAR THE ALARM BELLS RINGING?
Nope, there goes another $8 billion.
And Madoff, $50billion. $50 billion……. Say it slowly.
Try saving $500 bucks and see how long it takes, now multiply that time by 10, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again, now do it again. Get the freakin’ picture?
Millions of days of hard work incinerated by shylocks and hardly a one of them behind bars.
A shadowy Robin Hood esk group emerged in the U.S. calling itself ‘The Final Court of Justice’, they started kidnapping former heads of financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers and CEO’s of large Banks and corporations and throwing them off the roofs of tall buildings because they didn’t have the honour to do it themselves. When it was too difficult to kidnap them they simply shot them in the car parks of country clubs and restaurants.
There was a groundswell of sympathy when a number of them were killed by bodyguards of Henry Paulson during an attack on him after he had been sacked from his job at the Federal Reserve.
Copy cat gangs emerged across Europe and Latin America killing numerous bankers and Industrialists in a fit of rage that generated little sympathy for the victims from the general public but howls of indignation from their contemporaries.
MORE TO COME…………………………………