The streets of San Christobal are quite narrow and traffic typically flows in one direction. This doesn’t eliminate the problem of jams at intersections, but the traffic lights have been removed due to increased congestion. Instead, the rule of one has been implemented. This rule means that cars at the two inbound roads at any intersection take turns. One from the north, one from the west, then one from the north again. It worked so well that they’ve been able to convert some streets to pedestrian-only malls.

The Mexican rainy season is imminent and we got a taste on our first night in San Cristobal. Fiona and I both got dressed up to go out to dinner with our guide Patrick, only to have the skies open up as soon as we left our room. We thought we’d be fine under our umbrellas, but the real problem was underfoot. The cobbled streets were ankle deep in running water.

Apparently it was worse fifteen years ago. The two rivers that run through town disappear into a hole just after they join up on the far side of town. With the increase of plastic being discarded, the hole blocked quickly during rains and the downhill houses would be entirely submerged. The authorities resolved the problem by digging a 100m tunnel to lead the water away, but the streets still take time to drain properly.

Thankfully, our room has a gas fireplace and we were able to make great headway towards dry shoes and warm bodies in the couple of hours before we turned in.

The Chiapas region of Mexico is in the west, near Guatemala, and was once occupied by the Mayan people. The name, which comes from the Chia seed growing in the Sumidero valley was first taken on by the local warriors who even the Aztecs avoided for their fierceness. The Spanish eventually defeated the Chiapas through modern weaponry and allying with nearby enemies. More recently, the valley has been dammed for hydro-power and is 150m deep in places. One village was relocated in the process, which isn’t too bad in comparison to the displacement occurring in other places like India. Chiapas provides a third of Mexico’s power needs and is rich in other resources, but the people are among the poorest in the country.

We learnt all this within hours of landing in Mexico. Patrick, our guide, has degrees in both history and anthropology and my head has been swimming with stories since we arrived. Fiona and I chose this trip with CultureXplorers as a compromise between my preference for a few genuine intimate interaction with local people and Fiona’s preference for filling up every moment of the trip with relevant experiences and so far it’s been a success.

Patrick hired a boat and driver to take us out on the river where we saw an eagle searching for food, a kingfisher winging across the valley, cormorants peering into the water, vultures drying themselves on rocks, a black pelican turning its head from side to side, spider monkeys playing in trees and crocodiles sliding into the water to protect their tiny babies from humans. I was amazed to see a diving board near the boat house, but apparently the crocs have learnt to fear humans and it’s generally safe to swim as long as you don’t go too near the nests.

Debris has collected in one spot, where the current is affected by a waterfall 120m below. Vultures were picking through this and some had gathered around a bovine carcass that had found its way into the watercourse. Unfortunately, the debris was also the final resting place for plenty of plastic since, much like in Bhutan, the locals haven’t yet understood that it doesn’t degrade the way organic scraps do.

The rock formations are also interesting, with one peak towering 1000m above the current water level. It’s primarily limestone, but the white rock is black with moss and pink with minerals in many places. At the far end of the boat ride, moss grows under a waterfall when it stops after the rainy season and then dries in place during the following year. Minerals in the water then collect in the moss and harden to create a new bed for moss. Over thousands of years, the moss and minerals have piled up to create a Christmas tree effect. Unfortunately, only the tip of the tree is still visible above the waterline.

Drivers can be ticketed in San Francisco for not turning their wheels when they park. At first glimpse, it seems nonsensical – damaging tread by turning wheels when not moving means less grip when you really need it – but then you realise that the tyres are turned so that the car will roll into the kerb should the brakes fail. On streets as steep as San Francisco’s, a runaway car could do some serious damage.

For many years, I’ve looked at open source as the start of a new economy, a way of life, not just a model for software development. My Masters thesis looked at online communities who were volunteering their time to collaborate with like-minded people to create a better version of something that would otherwise be a commercial product.

Doubters among my colleagues and friends ask why it would happen now when it hasn’t worked in the past. To me, the answer is clearly that the foundations hadn’t been set. This is not simple philanthropy where one’s donation (usually money) benefits unknown people on the other side of the world – the donors benefit directly from others who add their complementary skills to their own. This is not communism, driven from the top down. It must be driven by the masses, and until now, the masses haven’t had the time or the tools. Nor were experts from around the world as able to easily connect and share ideas.

Despite the efforts of groups like OSCar, my vision still had limited application to physical products. It worked for software, and it could work for governance, but you still need specialised components to build a car.

Alastair Parvin, in his TED talk, Architecture for the people by the people, has shown me that we’re a step closer. The 3D printer now makes it possible for people to create the components they need even to build a house.

Where do you see this trend going next? Is an open source economy possible? What problems must be overcome? Some believe that the power-hungry few will sabotage such an economy. I worry that the raw materials used by the printer may still be inaccessible or detrimental to the environment, but I’m also confident that the right minds collaborating can find a solution to that problem.

John L. Murphy has completed a mammoth review of just about every book written on Bhutan. He understands the value of a book written by locals and residents.

There are many more books about this amazing country than I knew of, and I’m delighted to see he rated some of my favourites highly – see Beyond the Sky and the Earth and Treasures of the Thunder Dragon. I wondered how he missed Bold Bhutan Beckons, but then I realised that, like my publisher, CopyRight Publishing is an independent publisher. I’m even more honoured, then, that Murphy found and took the time to read Dragon Bones. While it’s not mentioned until about halfway through the article, it’s clear that he valued the depth of experience that went into writing it.

‘Like his compatriot Launsell Taudevin’s With a Dzong in My Heart memoir set in 1988, Murray Gunn finds that advising the locals about Western methods clashes with rank-pulling bureaucrats, a more lackadaisical work ethic than he expected, and a series of culture clashes mixed with awe at the kingdom’s beauty, Buddhist traditions, and courtly atmosphere. While Gunn repeats many of the trekking adventures others do in his account, unique to what I’ve read in other versions, he listens to his guide: “This is our life. We have to come up here no matter what the weather’s like and we do the same trails over and over until our feet are sore. And we can never go anywhere else. There’s no holiday for us.”’

I love the line he chose to quote and his reason for doing so. For me, the trek was fascinating because of the attitude and companionship of the locals who helped us on the journey.

Insight ran an excellent series of interviews with young Aborigines living in Alice Springs last night. The kids opened up and talked about their fights, their drinking, their family problems and their hopes for a better future.

If I have one regret about my book Dragon Bones, it’s that the stories of the Bhutanese people are told in my words, not theirs. It’s now my dream to collect the stories of Aborigines, immigrants and other minority groups in Australia and publish them (in some form) in their own words.

I’ve recently discovered the ‘Sydney Story Factory‘, which looks to be a great way to do that. Thousands of students attend courses and regular tuition on creative writing, with a focus on telling their own stories. All volunteers are screened for working with children so it’s a comfortable environment. Unfortunately, the screenings have always clashed with my other volunteering commitments, so I’m yet to join, but it will happen this year.

As soon as the introductions were done, our Maori hosts invited us into their home for lunch. Louise served us a delicious banquet including battered fish, roast chicken with cranberry sauce, potato bake, a green salad and fried bread. It was largely a Western-style meal, but the Maori influence was clear, particularly in the fried bread. These matchbox-sized pieces were still greasy with the oil they’d been cooked in and were tasty cold, though I imagined they would have been much better fresh out of the pan.

Later, when Bob was showing us around his yard, he pointed out the wire frames used to hold hot stones for a hangi — a communal roast cooked for large groups. First they make a fire stacked five logs high and pile on the stones to warm up. Then they dig a trench, choosing the length depending on the number of diners. When the stones are ready, they’re packed into the wire baskets and lowered into the trench. Food is then placed on top with meat closest to the stones and vegetables above that. These days, they use a canvas cover to keep the heat in, but it was probably made from flax in the past. The sheet is held down by dirt around the edges and balloons up with the heat. When the sheet collapses after about three hours, the meal is ready. It’s a lot of work and they don’t bother for less than twenty people (unfortunately for us), but Bob says that it’s not much more effort to cook for three hundred.

Bob picked some feijoa fruit from trees next to the house and some banana passionfruit during our tour, both of which were delicious. The Feijoa tasted like banana (to me) but had a texture more like a kiwi fruit. The seeds of the banana passionfruit were fleshier than their more common cousin, and packed in an elongated banana-like shape. Bob told us that only a lazy man could go hungry in this area. With a beach to fish from and a bountiful forest throughout the peninsula, it was easy to see why.

They said they liked to end the tour by cooking bread in the sand, giving the visitors a chance to take an active part in a Maori activity, but were thwarted during our visit by a total fire ban. No rain had fallen in the area for the previous three months and, unfortunately for us, this was one time they were clearly in agreement with the authorities.

The first song of greeting that Bob and Louise, our Maori hosts, chose to sing mentioned a god. I asked whether that was the Christian God or a / the Maori god. It turned out to be the Christian God, which, they told me, didn’t interfere with their Maori culture. Maori lore included creationism and there was no reason to believe that the Christian God couldn’t be their creator.

That begged the question of whether everyone in their tribes was Christian, and they started listing off the religions other family members subscribed to — Mormon, Seventh Day Adventists, Muslim. Everyone was different and that was acceptable. After all, it was all the same God. That made a lot more sense to me than the idea that unless you follow a particular flavour of Christianity, you’ll go to an eternal hell. Louise told us that each person chose a religion based on whatever gave them most comfort in their particular time of need.

For many of them, I guess that is when they lose a loved one, and although they look to different religions, the tribe still celebrates death in the traditional way. Family and friends gather around the body in the marai and tell each other stories of their memories. To hear Bob and Louise describe it, there is a lot of laughter and people can get quite cheeky, especially since it’s the last opportunity to get back the chain saw they lent the deceased (to which a son might respond that they thought it was the chain saw he himself had lent last year). Once the stories are all told, which may be days later, the body is rowed across the inlet and carried up to the cemetery.

We visited Bob’s family cemetery, which only began three or four generations ago. Prior to that, Maoris wrapped the bodies in mats, placed them from trees until the flesh had rotted away, then cleaned the bones and placed them in a cave. Like many cemeteries, theirs perched on a hill overlooking the ocean and was full of tombstones. The newer graves were decorated with flowers and toys or useful items. A few items made it further up the hill, as if blown, but Louise suggested that some were poached from other graves by visitors who’d forgotten to bring something themselves.

Like my own culture, graves faced east. People who’d been troublemakers in life were still buried here, but were placed facing the opposite way or even buried standing up so they’d never get any rest.

Bob and Louise, our Maori hosts, lived in one of three houses across from the beach at Rawhiti (pronounced Rarfity). They came from separate tribes that shared the Rawhiti peninsular at the east end of the Bay of Islands. Three houses seemed a little small for two whole tribes, but I soon found that more people lived in the area than I had imagined. Out of site in either direction, driveways peeled off from the coastal road, each leading to four or five family houses. Bob and Louise themselves had eight children, and while they joked that they had ‘only three’ still living at home, it seemed that large families were the norm. Bob himself came from a family of eight children and another relative had eleven children.

While Maori’s have a history of inter-tribal violence, the two tribes here have long had peaceful relations (Louise claims that her tribe is known for peace-making and mediation). They are even close enough to share a marae, the town-hall-like hut that forms the centre of the Maori community. These days, children often move to the city or overseas as soon as they finish school, but they always end up coming home between jobs and the tribe is still strong.

A small amount of the land on the peninsula has been lost to non-Maoris, but that seems to have worked out well. Bob works in the orchard of one and another owns ExploreNZ, a tour company taking people out to swim with the dolphins. The tour we’re on is his brain-child and seems to be a winner all round. Locals get paid and their culture lives on, the owner gets a profit, and I get to have the kind of experience that means the most to me as a traveller.