Mexico, oh I love Mexico. The stunning landscape, the spicy food, the cheap beer. Most of all, though, the people: despite the tourist invasion in many parts of the country, Mexicans are the most hospitable, most friendly and most gracious bunch I have ever met. After three and a half years it was high time to go back, if only to see my friends.

Coming back, though, was a weird experience. It was a little bit like seeing a nephew that you last saw as a cute ten year old boy and finding him a troubled teenager: broke, juvenile delincuent, a drug addiction and a serious disease on top. Mexicans acutely feel the impact of their triple crisis: the worldwide economic crisis, the swine flu scare and the raging drug wars.

As a country whose economy depends hugely on tourism and manufacturing for export, the current economic crisis has hit Mexico particularly hard. People loose their jobs en masse and they do not have much of a social safety net to fall back on. And after a close friend and traveling companion came down with flu symptoms, it became impossible to simply write off that scare like most Mexicans do. In any case, even if the disease were not real, its economic effects on the tourism industry definitely are.

What most shocked me, though, was the incredible level of violence that has swamped the entire country within the last couple of years. When I left, Mexico had a few hotspots of trouble along the border and in Mexico City but was otherwise a safe and civil country. Today, it is ravaged by what at time seems like full-out war: soldiers and federal police, armed to their teeth, in every city; shoot-outs in the middle of the city, even in tourist areas, for example in Veracruz just a few days before we passed through — a cabby told us about his colleague who was riddled by bullets despite being an innocent bystander; the friends who tell stories of a shooting in the very house next door; reading in the newspaper about clans actively killing off any witnesses who dare speak up against commonplace extortion of small and medium-sized businesses; the people who put off the purchase of a new car for fear of appearing a worthwhile kidnapping target. And this is not isolated to any particular area: with few exceptions and varying degrees of intensity, this affects the entire country.

Now, I do not want to discourage anyone from visiting this amazing country. Mexico is very well worth your time and money! As a tourist, you are very unlikely to be affected directly by any of these problems. But as soon as you start speaking to the locals, it’s impossible not to notice this extremely troubling development. I don’t have any easy solutions and, as it seems, neither does anyone else. But I do know that Mexico finds itself on a slippery slope. I hope they can stop their slide.

I sure am lucky living in Europe. This is not to say we don’t have our fair share of ridiculous air safety regulations. But at the very least we are spared the nonsense of taking our shoes off each and every time we pass through security. Not so for North Americans, or gringos as they are so affectionately called here: they have obviously become so used to this burden that they are threatening to hold up the flow here in Cancún. Gotta remind them that while Mexico adapts most of their rules, they don’t adopt them all.

Of all the places I have visited, the most impressive is the salar de uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, and its surroundings. This area is so unique and amazing that it is hard to find the right words to describe it. I will try anyhow.

As we visited at the end of the rainy season, part of the salt lake was still covered in water. While I imagine this to be disastrous for the vehicles (they are driving them through salt water!), it added still another dimension to our visit. Driving across an endless expanse of shallow water over the salt was an almost disorienting experience. It was difficult to discern the horizon and everything seemed to be melting into each other. It truly felt like another world.

We then continued to the dry part of the Salar and were immediately blinded by the pure white that extended to all sides. At some points, we saw only white salt all the way to the horizon. We also saw an old bus again and again — though I was never quite sure if it was just a fata morgana — as it was crossing the salt lake. I couldn’t quite understand why anybody would drive a bus across a salt lake, until I understood (and felt in my buttocks) that driving on the salt lake is more comfortable than on any actual Bolivian road. Completely smooth riding.

We continued our three-day trip after a cold night’s sleep and crossed the international railway line to Chile on the second day. The crossing is unmarked, naturally, which really isn’t a problem as there was only a thrice-weekly service during our visit. What a great chance for a photo! The tracks just extend straight towards the horizon with no distraction or even usage in sight. I would not dare just standing on train tracks over here in Europe but this is just one of many Bolivian delights.

Wherever we went, we continued to see weird, intensely green patches of shrub in the midst of what is otherwise mostly a desert. It looks a little like moss from the distance but quite different with a closer view. It is dry and hard to the touch. With the help of Google and Wikipedia, I can even provide a name: yareta, a slow-growing high-altitude plant. It grows at a rate of just one millimeter per year which means that many yaretas are over 3,000 years old. When I saw it during our trip, however, I was more mesmerized by its intense green color than by its ruggedness and survival skill. What a contrast with the sky!

We also came across a multitude of unique lakes. Laguna colorada looks fairly normal in the morning but during the day the sunlight combined with certain algae turns it a deep, bloody red. The contrast between the white borax and the red of the lake could not have been more striking. We spent the evening wandering around the lake admiring the colors and long shadows. The light at this altitude is really special, drawing sharp contrasts and stark lines. We also saw laguna verde, a lake that turns green during the day. In this instance we actually saw the transformation with our own eyes. Within minutes, the lake went from translucent to bright green. Unfortunately, I am color-blind and couldn’t really see the green very well. I am told it was a very impressive sight, though. See the photo and judge for yourself.

And these are just parts of the amazing scenery we saw! We saw a geyser field, visited volcanic hot springs, saw an active volcano spew smoke, danced with the locals for carnival, saw lots of flamingos and stroked a vicuña. We also got lost in the dark because our driver was new and didn’t know the way. (The cook, who knew the way, was sulking and refused to answer our questions.) And we spent three days with a great bunch of Chileans and Argentinians who warmed to us markedly when they realized we spoke Spanish.

If you ever get the chance to visit the salar de uyuni, do not hesitate but take it immediately. This is one of the most amazing sights you will ever see. See all photos of the trip.

They went to villages in trouble and got the villagers to help them identify who among them had the best-nourished children—who among them had demonstrated what Jerry Sternin termed a “positive deviance” from the norm. The villagers then visited those mothers at home to see exactly what they were doing.

Just that was revolutionary. The villagers discovered that there were well-nourished children among them, despite the poverty, and that those children’s mothers were breaking with the locally accepted wisdom in all sorts of ways—feeding their children even when they had diarrhea; giving them several small feedings each day rather than one or two big ones; adding sweet-potato greens to the children’s rice despite its being considered a low-class food. The ideas spread and took hold. The program measured the results and posted them in the villages for all to see. In two years, malnutrition dropped sixty-five to eighty-five per cent in every village the Sternins had been to. Their program proved in fact more effective than outside experts were.

Ideas like this fascinate me: they are so simple, yet so effective. However, they are also very difficult to arrive at — life doesn’t hand them to you, as they are unusual and new. It is always easier to follow common wisdom and do what everybody else is doing. But that approach will also lead to a more complicated and less effective solution.

via Atul Gawande: University of Chicago Medical School Commencement Address

I was a user of ma.gnolia. In February, ma.gnolia lost all user data irrecoverably. This meant for me that all my online bookmarks — pointers to interesting sites and articles that I wanted to remember — were gone. Luckily, I could recover most of my boomarks from my blog archives and the Google cache. However, that has taken quite some time. During that time, no Links posts were possible. Now I am back to normal (and back to using delicious) and Links posts should resume as before.

This was quite a lesson for me. Little did I know that ma.gnolia was run by just one guy off a couple of Mac Mini servers in some basement. He didn’t even keep a backup. These days, when more and more services move into “the cloud”, we must be careful who to trust with our data. On the one hand, they must keep our data secure and not give it away to others. On the other hand, they must also ensure some sort of adequate backup. And if the services you use don’t provide a secure and stable backup, then you have to do it yourself.

Lesson learned.