Connected from the top of a tree

Connected from the top of a tree

Connected from the top a tree

I am up on a tree, 36 meters high, in the heart of the Amazon jungle. And I am online! To be up here feels amazing, but the fact that I can check my position on Google Earth, send pictures to Facebook and receive email feels even better! We climbed up to the tree with ropes-myself, two French tourists and two very young Colombians who work as guides when they are on vacation from their regular job which is...Paramilitares. "We kill guerrillas" they are telling me explaining that sometimes they kill - accidentally- some innocent people and in order to be paid they have to dress their victims with clothes of FARC or ELN.. "That way government accepts them"-they say- "and we get paid".. I am not really paying attention to their story, only a few years after I would realize that I had received a first-hand confession of an episode from the "Falsos Positivos" tragedy. But I wasn't interested to the death of others back then although I was terrified about something happening to me.. Climbing up on the tree felt so very dangerous and scary that I've been thinking all the time about myself crashing to the jungle's floor like a watermelon. But then, once I"ve reached the top my very first thought was: "Do I have any signal up here?". Finding that I had signal, I got so happy, that I forgot to even look at the landscape around me. Soon, the night catches me writing messages on this BlackBerry! I feel fine about it. After all, it's perfectly fine to be yourself and not an impostor, I never cared about "Mother Nature", "post-Internet-Nature" is our real Nature!

Miltos Manetas, 2009