We are sorry to say that for the time being, New York meetings are suspended as Laurie really needs a helper. If you have some time to spare and are based in our near NYC, please contact Laurie on the e-mail address below.

For details of forthcoming meetings email newyork@globetrotters.co.uk or register for email updates, click here at our website.

New York meetings are held at The Wings Theatre, 154 Christopher Street (btw Greenwich St and Washington St ), to the right of Crunch Fitness, in the Archive on the first Saturday of each month at 4 pm .

Answers to Flag Quiz

Algeria	Botswana	Cayman Islands	Dominican Republic	Guam

For information on Ontario meetings, please contact Svatka Hermanek: shermanek@schulich.yorku.ca or Bruce Weber: tel. 416-203-0911 or Paul Webb: tel. 416-694-8259.

Meetings are held on the third Friday of January, March, May, September and November. Usually at the Woodsworth Co-op, Penthouse, 133, Wilton Street in downtown Toronto at 8.00 p.m.

Back in September last year, you may recall us reporting that Ryanair were proposing to make in-flight entertainment available on its flights. Passengers were to be charged £5 ($9.48) to access films, cartoons and tv shows on portable lap top type units. Ryanair Chief Executive Michael O'Leary who said in September the units would become “as common as the in-flight magazine”. These have been on trial since November and are about to be abandoned. “It was lack of demand. They decided not to follow it any further,” a Ryanair spokeswoman said. Ryanair said it had not lost any money on the system, which was on trial in only five planes before making a significant investment. The latest money making wheeze is to have in-flight gambling. Watch this space!

News comes of Ryanair selling a brand of water called Blue Rock water, which costs £1.85 for a 500 ml. Reports state that this special Ryanair water isn't from a pure mountain stream or highland spring – it is just carbonated tap water. To purchase the same water from Thames Water i.e. turn on the tap costs 0.06p per litre. The only difference between turning on the tap in any London home and Ryanair's Blue Rock is that the sparkling version has been carbonated at a water treatment works in Beckton, East London, before being bottled and labelled. While the label does not claim to be genuine spring water, neither does it make it clear that it is tap water. Britvic, which 'makes' Blue Rock, made exclusively for Ryanair, claimed the brand was about to be replaced by a new product called Pennine Spring, sourced from a natural spring in Huddersfield.

Due to bereavement in Christina's family, we regret to say that Texas meetings have stopped pending further notice. If you have time to spare and would like to take over Texas meetings, please contact the Beetle on: beetle@globetrotters.co.uk

Every September the annual Open House London event takes place and this year the dates are 17th & 18th September 2005. Over 500 buildings are opening their doors to everyone and turning the capital into a living architectural exhibition. And it's absolutely free! Last year, the Beetle and Padmassana braved the cold autumn air and set off to see if we could get to go inside the famous Gherkin – the tall, glass clad bullet shaped building. It could have been the early hour, or the lack of copious amounts of coffee, but coffee, we could see the gherkin but could we find it? It took an age to get there! By the time we got there, around 9.45am, the queues were breathtakingly long, as Padmassana's photos show.

So, instead, we went to the Bank of England and we joined a guided tour there. It was excellent! Believe it or not, the site of the Bank of England, which has been located in Threadneedle Street since 1734, covers a massive 3 ½ acres – who would have thought it! We moved down a very majestic staircase to some beautiful state rooms downstairs and through the gardens and up again to the rooms that are used to hold meetings with visiting officials to discuss monetary policy. The tour ended in the Bank's museum which is fascinating and includes a gold bullion bar, encased in bullet proof glass, of course, which Padmassana had a go at lifting through the specially designed hole for people to touch the bar. You can visit the museum any time and it is free of charge. The museum is open Monday to Friday, 10.00 – 17.00, Christmas Eve, 10.00 – 13.00 but is closed at weekends and on Public and Bank Holidays.

After the Bank of England tour, we visited one of the livery companies near Smithfield market and after a fry up at the Beetle's favourite 24/7 greasy spoon café, we headed up to St Pancras and joined a tour run by Arups, the consulting engineers responsible for building the new ST Pancras train staton which is to be the new home of the Eurostar as well as a new and upgraded train station for regional trains.

All photos are by Padmassana. We are looking forward to this year's Open House and maybe this time we'll be better organised to go and visit the Gherkin!

If you'd like more information about this years' event, then take a look at the official website, which also runs other architectural tours during the year: https://www.openhouselondon.org.uk/

Trade Aid is a UK based charity aimed at poverty alleviation in Southern Tanzania by creating educational and employment opportunities for the local community and assisting in the development of a sustainable tourist industry in Mikindani. As part of this, Trade Aid take on volunteers to work with the local community. Tim Crouch is one of these volunteers and her he writes about his experiences in the beautiful coastal town of Mikindani. For more information on the work that Trade carries out, see: http://www.tradeaiduk.org/

As the sun sets over Mikindani, the smoke sits in the valley and the sounds rise; after another day in paradise I can't help thinking about the overload heaped upon my senses whilst in Tanzania. The sights can always be captured by camera and many of the most delicious smells can be recreated in the kitchen buts it's the sounds that make Mikindani so special and it's the noises that will stick most in the mind. Words can only scratch the surface of the overload Mikindani places upon the sense of hearing.

The day always starts early in Mikindani and with it so do the sounds. At first light you hear the scraping, scratching noise of women sweeping, invariably just out side your door, a sound that rarely stops before it has accomplished its two aims of cleaning the street and waking Mikindani's inhabitants. Only after this sweeping has woken them up, do the cockerels start to crow. Being in Mikindani, you are never far away from some livestock, be it cows, goats or chicken and so you never feel far away from the farmyard. There is a theory circulating Trade Aid in Tanzania that animals in Tanzania are bred not for their meat (there can be none more gristly on earth) but for their capacity to break eardrums.

The first real human voices come following the early morning school bell, a rock hit against the redundant rim of an old car wheel signifies the children's long and noisy walk up the hill to school. During the day office work is accompanied by the dulcet tones of the women next door calling their various kids for various reasons from various corners of Mikindani. When the children finish school in the afternoon, again accompanied by a ring of the school “bell”, the noise starts off as a distant cheer and culminates in a crescendo of young voices shouting their delight at returning home after a hard day in the classroom. This shouting just puts them in the mood for some more shouting when the games start during the afternoon, a din that doesn't stop until early evening when again the various mamas call their various offspring this time purely for the reason of feeding time.

As you walk out to the road you are hit by the same diesel fumes encountered the world over but the amount of noise produced by such a tiny volume of traffic is a phenomenon unique to East Africa. The combination of decrepit engines and wildly elaborate horns produces a sound that will eclipse anything produced in a New York traffic jam.

As we sit down to dinner the call to prayer from the mosque chimes in for the fourth and therefore penultimate time that day. After dinner we walk down the hill with the food for the dog, the fourth resident of the Trade Aid house to the sound of his whimpering at the smell of the leftovers we are carrying. Just as we lay in bed trying to get to sleep the women of Mikindani have one last blast this time to round up the men of the town before allowing all of us to slip off until the next day when the sensory overload will start all over again. I for one will miss it like crazy.

Which countries are represented by these flags? For the answers, see at the end of the eNews.

1	2	3	4	5

Mistake, mistake, mistake – How could I have made such a stupid mistake. At our late lunch stop I had changed from boots to sandals, strong sandals, the problem was not with the footwear but with my brain which seemed to have gone into non thinking mode as the day started to turn to twilight. We had been walking fast, through thick rain forest and crossing and re-crossing rivers or maybe even the same river. The last few Kilometres of the twenty seven from our jump into the jungle to the 'Yawanawa' village, our guides had decided to make what was a two day trek into one. Why? I have no idea, unless it was too see how we would make out. My legs felt like lead pillars as I walked in the river my sandals acting like buckets holding my down feet, like walking in treacle, my heart pounded loudly with each stride as I tried to keep up with 'Yawanawa' Indian ahead, who was starting to disappear in the dusk. The tribe had warned us that the rain forest was very dangerous at night and they would always be back in the village by nightfall! Just as I thought I could go no further and dusk started to turn to darkness, I saw a figure on the shore about a hundred metres away waving me on. I staggered up to Adam Baines, for that's who it was, as he said “Well done Tony we have made it” and we shook hands. Months of politicking in the urban jungle, then many adventures on the way to our final destination, the 'Yawanawa' village of Novo Esperanca – At last we had arrived or nearly, the last hurdle or just about the last straw, was about seventy steps cut in to the steep river bank leading up to the village.

The 'Yawanawa' were early risers, the queue for the bathroom or in this case the river started at 0415 hours for the women and then the men from about 0445 hours. Breakfast consisted of something from the day before, usually highly salted and difficult to keep down as the sun started to kiss the village roofs of the 'Yawanawa'.

Adam and I stayed in the village main hut, a sort of Pub with no beer or village hall, were the tribe met either to eat with the chief or discus tribal policies or problems. This hut had one large interior room with a double bed and a hammock, I had the hammock after a discussion that I'm not sure if I won or lost!? There was also a kitchen, or should I say a small room that contained a medium size gas bottled refrigerator, used if any medicine had been air dropped to the tribe and needed to be kept cold and a large jug of water with a tin bowl. We had a special treat one night, when the chief switched the fridge on for a couple of hours and we had a mug of cold water that tasted as good as any cold beer I have ever tasted.

These Indigenous people had five different ways of sustaining themselves,' in the depth of this green paradise.

The hunters split the area around the village into seven parts and one part was never hunted on for seven years. They hunted and ate, monkeys, deer, wild pig, various birds and some things I did not want to know the name of. Fruit and fish were also part of their main diet. These people were just about to experiment with having one field for various vegetables.

The two ways they made some money was with 'Aveda', a Canadian firm that bought Uruku off the 'Yawanawa' for the making of their expensive and famous make up, sold in top shops like 'Harvey Nichols' both here, France and in North America. The second way was with tapping the rubber and making it into a sort of vegetable leather used in bags of all types and also sold in quality shops in the worlds fashionable capitols.

The children had half a day of school and half a day of learning how to work like their parents, in whatever was their speciality. The best hunters or fisherman got the best and most desirable woman as wives. I asked why no one seemed to wear glasses or have bad hearing? – The answer was simple nobody would marry anyone with those problems and therefore they were bred out – Survival of the fittest! Adam's words echoed round my brain, “Lucky you were born in London Tony”.

The money the village made enabled them to have huts made out of planks but in the same traditional design but better fitting than the log version.

The tribe lived by some simple rules of the live and let live sort. Laziness was a major sin because it let down a people that had to pull together to survive. Daime was taken once every six weeks, the drug that keeps your head in order, or tidies the files of your mind. The last execution had been fifty years ago and everyone in the tribe had to watch over the age of twelve. The idea being, that when the 'Yawanawa' voted the death sentence, the tribe would know the horror of execution and think carefully before voting for death.

These people gathered on the large veranda of the main house in the evening to eat with the chief, play cards on the only table in the village, with a solitary candle lighting the game. Saturday night would be dance night and they would dance until dawn of the next day. A ghetto blaster run by a car battery, (that had been charged by a solar panel), in one of the huts again lit by one candle, would explode sound into the night frightening off any sort of animal, reptile or even insect far away from the village.

Antonio looked after the canoes and water transport; the tribe would have its own specialists just as we do in our world. The Chief himself would deal with the outside world business. The Marriage with outsiders was not encouraged, The 'Yawanawa' did not want Aids to in filter the village and also when a non Indian married one of their girls, they tended to take the bride out of the tribal area to live.

As the time came to leave this green paradise, I thought had it been worth all the problems in the urban jungle, difficulties of permissions, of hopes being raised and dashed and then raised again. The answer of course was a big yes. Staying with 'Yawanawa' even though for a short time taught me so much not just about the tribe but about myself as well. Everything is possible, with determination, tenacity, time and a belief in yourself, even when others say that your idea is impossibility.