Kate Hennessy : Freelance Writer

Kate Hennessy dons her blacks and joins 20,000 Goths in Germany at the world’s most un-colourful festival.

(See photo gallery here)

He stalks by the tram stop in head-to-toe black PVC, thighs squeaking like rodents. Sunlight glints from studs around his neck long enough to skewer a steak and his face scowls out from behind a fragile scaffolding of chains and piercings. Yes, I think. We’ve arrived.

Each year in May or June, the German city of Leipzig hosts the biggest Gothic and dark culture event in the world – the four-day Wave-Gotik-Treffen (WGT). More than 20,000 of the Gothic diaspora heed the call to come and swamp Leipzig in black.

Photo: Kate Hennessy. Leipzig Opera House for Diamanda Galas. Outfit care of the amazing Imaginarium Apparel: http://www.theimaginariumapparel.com/

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Most tourists who visit Peru’s Sacred Valley will whip around its famed capital, Cusco, then beeline it for iconic Incan ruin, Machu Picchu. Both are wondrous sights and tourists looking for photographs and souvenirs will return home satisfied. But for seekers rather than sightseers, the Sacred Valley also offers ayahuasca: a potent, hallucinogenic, shamanic healing medicine.

My experience begins a month before Peru while visiting a friend in California. At a dinner party I mention I’m interested in shamanic healing. A guest says he’s just returned from an ayahuasca retreat in Iquitos in Peru’s Amazon jungle. Humid and buggy, Iquitos is the centre of Peru’s ‘psychedelic tourism’ boom but he warns me Iquitos is intense for first-timers.

“Go to the Sacred Valley. It’s gentler there.”

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Words by Kate Hennessy/Images by James Brunker

[See PDF for published version with James' wonderful photographs. Mine below are just snapshots.]

We’ve radically changed travel plans to come to the Virgen de la Candelaria festival in Puno, Peru, but on arrival I’m felled by altitude sickness. Puno doesn’t look or feel very high but at 3,830 metres above sea level it’s higher than both La Paz, Bolivia (at 3,640 metres) and Machu Picchu (2,430 metres).

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Ancient jungles host rare animals, headhunting remnants and grassroots conservation programs on tropical Tetepare Island, a true lost world of the South Pacific.

‘Fortune Forest’ reads the side of a logging ship hulking just off the coast of Rendova Island. Heavy machinery sprouts from its hull and dwarfs the diminutive boat that passes by carrying visitors – soaked in warm sea spray – to neighbouring Tetepare Island. Both islands are in the Western Province of the Solomon Islands, a Melanesian archipelago five degrees south of the equator.