A selection of unpublished travel writing
God’s Glory
The boat cut through the water at full speed, more than 40 kilometers per hour, splitting the massive river in half. A monstrous thing, fuming and heaving itself down the Amazon, punching through the brown stream like a rusty fist. A show of brute human force, tellingly named “God’s Glory”. The boat carried roughly a hundred passengers from Tabatinga at Brazil’s border with Colombia to Manaus, the capital of the Amazon some 1.400 kilometers and 34 hours away. Outside, there was a sticky heat, but the air-condition cooled the interior down so much that people wrapped themselves tightly in blankets.
I had imagined it differently, expected it to be a humbling experience to see this burbling road. Carrier of water and people and pink dolphins that all but spans the width of the South American continent. Creator and nurturer of the entire region, flanked by dense eternal green on both sides, the world’s largest tropical rainforest. Venomous land and unexplored frontier.
Somewhere out there live hundreds of tribes, dozens of them uncontacted, enviably free of our modern worries. They roam beneath a thick canopy that strangles the sun. When it rains, the water takes minutes to reach the ground.
But while the plants might have different names and the birds foreign colors, it felt as if I had crossed this water many times before. At the river’s edge stood houses on unsteady stilts like invalid veterans of a forgotten war. They reminded me of people elsewhere, who cut down trees wanting more.
One trunk at first, an entire forest in the end, until the jungle was one of concrete and steel.
Beastly Nation of Water
I cursed the water while staring fiercely into the blue deep in an attempt to calm the waves, only to have a gust slap more salt spray into my face. I wanted to shake my fist. I couldn’t. My body exhausted. From the violence of the elements. Waves beating against the boat‘s hull, whooshing wind and gurgling liquid, a relentless up and down, sails flapping, metal crashing, wood bending, joints creaking.
A few hours after we had left Cartagena, the land faded from view and the world was water. The clouds were hovering above the horizon, as they often do around here, growing out of the water to rest upon the ocean like a crown. The plan had been to sail west from Colombia and slip into the Pacific Ocean through the Panama Canal. But instead we now headed east, away from the canal and towards Aruba, chasing more favorable winds.
I made a mental note, one of the few things still possible given the unsteady circumstances, that it was similar to what I had always perceived to be the essence of my existence: carried against the current, through high water and hell, always afloat and prepared to change direction at a moment‘s whim.
The hours went by, days and nights, weeks maybe. Who knows.
I thought about the ages before, about people who braved the seas. Magellan and Vespucci and Columbus, all the others whose names we forgot just the same. How did anyone dare cross these unknown seas in wooden ships? Not to speak of the adventurous forebears, thousands of years ago, who had the nerve to climb into carved-out trunks, which technically could be considered boats, but come on.
I then embarked on something bordering madness and began to count the waves, wondering how many were traveling the endless oceans. You see, I had a lot of time on my hands. The slightest movements would require me to recover like an astronaut after a space walk. I drank water in sips only. Every other hour. Even as the sun lit ablaze an inferno the second it shot into the sky.
I wanted adventure and I believed sailing ranked high on the list of the ones still to be had in this saturated world. So I joined my aunt and uncle for a month and a half on their journey around the globe. But night fell and in the moist darkness, the wind was picking up, tossing the dice. Waves tumbling over themselves, reaching fiercely. Then rain. And the current, Jesus, the hellish current. Carnage.
There were mornings, when we sat around, having realized the weather had carried us not closer, but further from our destination. Since there wasn’t much else to do, we continued to stare across the blue, hoping to spot a sliver of land, a faint contrast in the distance, only to find more water.
I now believe it might well be that looking out on the waves doesn’t calm a person, but makes one mad. There were no news, only updates about the wind. People died while I was on the boat and people were born, yet for all I knew, everything was water and the lands beyond it the same I left when we set the sails.
How numb one becomes. How muted the urgency of the world. Solely focused on when we will finally have overcome the beastly nation of water. Waves three and four meters high. You can’t capture the ferocity with a camera. Impossible.
Of course, this is only one part of the story. But the rest is for another time. Suffice it to say there were dolphins swimming alongside the boat. And at night the stars shone serenely against the dark expanse. Though their lives had been just as turbulent as the mean water below, they hung there, seemingly at ease. To think that this was the same sky that everyone who’s ever lived on earth had seen. Magellan and Vespucci and Columbus too. All of the over 100 billion people so far, save for the blind ones. Think about it.
La casa de Pablo
Pablo Escobar‘s former house is in a worse shape than the image of the man himself. Paint peeling off the walls, windows shattered, ceilings giving in to the weight of the thick, wet air. Not even water in the blue-tiled pool facing the sea. From behind, out of the island‘s jungle and the dense mangrove swamps, roots are creeping back onto the estate, pushing through the concrete in a fit of rage.
One has to call it estate, since house is to understate what the kingpin had constructed for himself on Isla Grande, not far from Cartagena, less than half an hour by helicopter, if you have one, which Escobar did. And helicopter-owning men surely aren’t ones to understate. The facade, now tainted by the unforgiving trade winds, was immaculate and of a blinding bright white.
And blind it did. The drug war wasn’t fought here, a place of lavish parties, elaborate banquets by the shore, with room for 300 guests, with golden shower heads. The blood was shed elsewhere. Exploring the crumbling building, I peered into holes and dark corners, looking for some dusty dollars. After all, El Patrón was once directing the vast majority of the world‘s cocaine.
15 tons of it entered the United States every single day. It was a money-printing exercise, which required the Medellín cartel to spend more than $50,000 per year for rubber bands alone to wrap the wads of cash coming in. You know the stories, you saw one of the many recent productions about his life, Narcos perhaps, have become fascinated like many have, which is why t-shirts with Escobar’s face are trending, a faux freedom fighter. You heard that he didn’t know where to put all the illicit dollars, therefore built himself a zoo with giraffes and elephants. And hippos, particularly hippos, to which he may or may not have fed his enemies and which have propagated, from a pair once to dozens today. ⠀
So, as I mentioned, Escobar‘s image is in better shape than his residence. Amid rotting palm leaves and plastic bags twitching in the breeze, clothes hang out to dry on a line taut across the pool.
„Amigo!“ A bare-chested man yells across the yard and gestures me over.
He has friendly eyes and a fierce scar on his lower torso. He introduces himself as Edwin. With two handful of others – men, children, women – all of whom owning little more than the mattresses tossed about the otherwise empty palace, he has made this scene of opulence his home.
„Amigo!“ He is waving wildly, now suddenly with a rusty machete in hand. Where did this madmen get the machete from?
As I’m still contemplating my fate, amigo my ass, he takes a coconut, splits it in two with a decided whack and hands it to me. I gulp it down, somewhat overwhelmed by the situation and with little idea what else to do. Edwin smiles and nods and commences a private tour of the area, pointing out tunnels and ladders once built as possible escape routes, taking me through archways into a cool room where a billiard table once stood to entertain the cartel men.
Edwin is a construction worker, but paid labor is hard to find on the island and necessities are expensive, as they need to be ferried over from the mainland. Where Escobar once reveled in his powdered glory, Edwin has dwelled for about a decade, he says, his father much longer.⠀
While the island is a favorite getaway for well-off Colombians, who ride in on growling speedboats with Reggaeton at deafening volumes to spend some sunny hours at a resort, most of the several hundred islanders farm and fish and have little to no access to running water and electricity. Edwin takes me up to the top floor. The place still reeks of its former grandeur, the vista of pale blue waters the same it has always been. We pass a chunk of marble, on which a bible and a dust mask lie, both for those suffocating from circumstance I suppose.
Edwin then directs me on. „Pablo’s bathroom,” he says. Of all the rooms, this one seems the most intimate. It‘s where El Patrón took a dump. Or rather multiple, many. With the toilet brush resting beside the porcelain, he might have just sat there a few minutes ago.
The adjoining balcony overlooks the yard. “From here, Pablo yelled down his commands,” Edwin says. “And he threw down money.” While he explains this, he stiffens his back and tosses down one imaginary bill after another towards a mob long gone. We both watch the money glide away, our eyes following its enchanting dance, see it turn and teeter and tumble, until it fades in the salty air.
Back to Botswana
I’m in Southern Africa again for work, only some weeks, which is too short really, but all the necessary permits came late, as important things always do and I need to be back home at the end of the month to take care of personal matters. I spent an evening researching flights, attempting to reduce my already out-of-hand carbon footprint by finding a connection that would require only one layover instead of two. I thought about taking train journeys across Germany and Europe, renting a car to drive the remaining distance from Johannesburg.
The thing is, I ended up doing neither, resolving a millennial dilemma in a millennial manner: by acknowledging the impact my life has on others and the environment – and not acting.
Much in the same way that people are snorting cocaine in every club now. „People died for this,“ they say. „But the world is fucked up and we’re all going to die and what can you do anyway?“ So we sit and snort cocaine and watch the world burn, playfully flicking matches into the blazing mess.
The radio was playing Michael Jackson‘s „Heal the World“ when the plane broke through the morning haze and touched down on the cracked tarmac of Gaborone‘s tiny international airport. An ambiguous song for ambiguous times. Yet, by some standards, the world does seem healed in Botswana. A country, where every evening the sun dissolves in a deep pink, a place with vast stretches void of people, where it’s more likely to be killed by an animal than by another human.
The latter is my own truth, not statistical fact, but at the exact moment I was writing this, a goat stepped onto the freeway and in front of our car, not minding the lethal speed of the four-wheeled projectile hurtling towards it, avoiding it by half a meter at best. So there you go.
Even elephants are reclaiming their territory, a third of all African elephants live in Botswana. A trophy for conservationists and something else for many locals, who tell stories of acquaintances and relatives, of fathers on their way to work, trampled to death.
Let me put you in my shoes: Imagine driving into the dense shrub that is the Okavango, the world‘s largest inland delta. The road is but some tire tracks leading over dirt and sand. The last stretch of tar ended ages ago, at some point a single car passed you. There’s no phone signal and it’s the rainy season, which means there’s always a good chance of getting stuck.
You are on your way to a supposed campground, which in this area simply means a patch of land with a fence around it to keep the wilderness out of your bed. You are racing against the fading light, given you almost ran over a baby hippo the other night and, well, just look up how many people fall victim to angry hippos every year.
Then you notice some rustling in the trees, large shadows heaving from tree to tree. A herd of several dozen elephants appear, grey and mighty. They cross the road and continue on, while the sky is turning its evening pink. The world doesn’t seem that fucked up then, does it?
On the road
We tell ourselves stories. One of them goes like this: that some day, we will get up in the morning, pack our clothes, nothing much, two pairs of pants and shirts, some underwear, a towel, a toothbrush and a good book, we‘ll stuff it in a bag and just leave. Well, we‘re also going to take sunglasses, because even though we‘re headed nowhere and everywhere, we‘re headed south.
We tell ourselves we don’t need much, least of all preparation. That‘s a convenient lie, of course. But we need it to survive, to keep on toiling away in stale offices, hoping to make it to retirement without too many scars.
The reality is only some few venture out. In these connected times, connections are the thing we struggle with. Even the most foreign places have become digitally accessible and in believing to know them, because we can see more than ever before, we are blind.
Adventures have become rare since we began to follow recommendations about the paths more travelled. My parents hitchhiked across Europe in their youth, always at a moment’s whim. They found what they didn’t know existed. They were part of a generation, which, baptized by Kerouac‘s writing, followed his words down roads and roads, looking for a magic country. For many today, it will forever be as it had long been for Kerouac, who wrote, “I’d often dreamed of going west to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off.”
My uncle surely thought often about buying a boat and sailing west, as long as the winds carried him, around the globe maybe. Until, one day, he eventually quit his job. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone”, he said and hoisted the sails.
And I guess that’s the world we live in, where one of the boldest things we can say is that one is leaving with neither a plan nor a return date. While I sometimes feel an urge to escape the trouble and be lost at sea, I admire the audacity of my uncle’s undertaking, facing high waves and the deep dark.
Whether or not to brave new waters, however, isn’t a question reserved for travelers. There’s a wilderness with alien creatures all around us, not below the surface, in plain sight. We needn’t be Jacques Cousteau to discover it, we needn’t be afraid of the pressure of the deep sea.
We only need to open our eyes.
About not worrying
I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever be as careless as a child again.
Looking back, even though time has warped my memory, there’s none of the existential dread that has crept into my life in the decades after. Sure, there were major setbacks. The time I forgot my teddy bear named “Teddy” on the train or when another one of my stuffed animals, a pink hippo, was sucked out of the open window of our family car dashing across the autobahn.
Still, when I think about life as a child, the first thing that comes to mind is a state of not worrying. During those years, we didn’t worry about the recession and student debt and groping presidents. We didn’t know yet what a nightmare this world could be. Every day was full of adventures, big and small.
Then, we would sit and marvel at the little things, snails and oddly shaped rocks. But things changed and somewhere in all that changing the sense of adventure faded and a sameness crept in. So we stopped exploring, we lost our youth. ⠀
The innocence was spoiled and we weren‘t able to retrieve it. Despite of this, the world for me was still one of opportunities. I had a passport of a wealthy country, light skin and parents who owned property. I learned about money and status, made plans for a future, which grew ever more grandiose over the coming years.
Once, when I didn’t need stuffed animals anymore, I scribbled on a piece of paper, as part of a class assignment, that my goals in life were to own a Lamborghini and a private jet. And while I’m certain to have believed in Batman as a proper career choice, I wrote down pilot.
It wasn’t long after that, when I learned that people cheat and steal and also began to do it, taking some coins here and there from my parents’ piggy bank. It stood on a cabinet in the living room, the top of which I could only reach using a chair. Of course I knew it was wrong, but I got away with it, so I kept doing it. ⠀
I finished school and studied and worked. I never became Batman and neither a pilot. I don’t own a Lamborghini, let alone any car. On the other hand, I spend a considerable amount of time worrying. About working too little and too much, about wasting time partying and wasting time not partying, about death and, even more, about life.
My point is, we should be more childish. Worry less, explore more, but don’t be naive about the fuckedupness of our existence. I believe while sincerity is fundamental, seriousness is anything but. Do what excites you, not what excites others. If you find joy in building a sandcastle, then get down on your knees and start digging. Or just take a moment to look at the clouds, odd shapes constantly shifting. Watch them drift along, effortlessly.
Happiness
Not long ago, the trees bore green already, but the night was still cold from winter months, a friend asked, “When were you happy for the last time?“ It’s a question elegant in its simplicity, though it might be the first domino to fall.
There are the obvious answers: I was happy when the sun in March finally broke warm through the clouds. I was happy when I moved my finger across a map planning the next escape. Even if I knew that ten countries removed, rivers crossed and worlds discovered, I still wouldn’t find the happiness I was yearning for. It’s my personal trait and likewise emblematic of our times, where happiness has become yet another commodity, hawked at every street corner. But it’s a diluted happiness, the pure stuff seems hard to come by these days.
There’s no news in stating that society has long told us what makes us happy – a steady job, a loving family and a piece of land with a house on it. A shift, however, has occurred in recent decades, which led to one being lauded for being oneself, for finding true happiness.
What actually happened though is conformism disguising as individualism. Happiness is now a billion-dollar industry with products ranging from dietary supplements to yoga retreats and happiness coaches. But we aren’t happier, we are depressed and anxious. The number of people on prescription meds is one the rise and the suicide rate too.
It might not be a straight line, but it seems fair to say that it’s what happens if we make bliss the religion of the moment and declare only a blissful life one worth living.
Thinking about all of this, I find it hard to point to the last time I was truly happy. That’s why I turned to my friend and answered, “Now. Now I’m happy.” It was true and it wasn’t. The sun was setting and the people around us were drunk on the expectation of a coming summer. My phone was in airplane mode, because even though happiness might be fifty percent genetics, one thing that certainly makes you happier is to disconnect.
For a moment, the existential dread within me paused, otherwise roaring and declaring me a failure. And then the sun sunk and darkness came.
Life in boxes
Plants are rather difficult things. At least if I look at my track record of attempting to keep them alive. Still, I surround myself with them. I suppose it’s a way of coming to terms with the fact that except for a month now and then, there wasn’t a time in my life I didn’t live in a city. One of many ants in a concrete formicary.
There were, not long ago, the ferns I got to turn my living room into an urban jungle. Likely after seeing an image on Pinterest. I specifically bought the ferns because they were low-maintenance. At least that’s what I typed into Google before buying this particular variety. But it turned out that even for the ones that didn’t need much, my care wasn’t enough, and the leaves turned a dark green first before losing almost all color.
Then there was the kumquat, which I bought as a symbol for a growing relationship. But the tree never grew and then it withered, making me wonder whether it’s a sign for other things to fail.
The botanic crime scene lies somewhere among the concrete trouble, my little scrap of the universe, a one-bedroom box that – emotionally measured – is so small, I only need to spread my arms to feel its boundaries. There are quiet lives and deaths behind every wall, beneath, above and beside. Quiet because they are inaudible.
With the exception of one sound, a yawn, usually on the dot at four in the afternoon. It sounds like the low roar of an animal from the depths oft the woods. I find it fitting that, though living amid millions of beings, the one sound I hear in my apartment should be that of exhaustion.
I thought about all of this during some weeks in Morocco earlier this year, where I found lives packed into much more minuscule boxes than mine. In Essaouira were two men, taking a break in the sun, seated in their parked carts, one of those painted a lucent blue.
I thought about how I would regularly marvel at other people’s apartments, wondering how much better their life must be with guest bedrooms, floor-to-ceiling-windows and heated toilet seats. I thought about how I left my box, that I so often consider a cage, to visit a place where many people will never be able to leave theirs.
And there‘s much more to say and there isn’t. But then, maybe, there’s this: if you can choose your box, follow the lead of the one man with the blue one. It’s the color of the sky and the sea, two of only a few pleasures in life that are actually free.
We exist
Spring is here, all saturated colors, clear skies and light feet. I’m leaning out of my living room window, breathing in the air that’s as polluted as last month, not any fresher really, but I like to think differently. The wind carries over faint bossa nova tunes from somewhere else.
Now, below me the facade drops three floors to the ground, which is the minimum height needed for the following sensation to occur: I shift my gaze downwards from the sky and my thoughts follow suit, suddenly thinking about letting go. More observer than participant, I see myself leaning out further, as I have done many times before, on high bridges and steep cliffs and dizzying rooftops. Even though I know, I still wonder what would happen to my body.
It’s a curious urge, wanting to experience death. On the other hand, quite human. We all die, that much is certain. It’s the when that people dread. Not having an expiration date is not knowing how much time you have left to pursue your dreams, hug your friends and kiss your lover once more.
So, there’s an appeal to having control over death. For Jean-Paul Sartre it was the existential human freedom to choose whether or not to leap, something he called the vertigo of possibility. There’s even an expression for this fatal desire in French: l’appel du vide – the call of the void.
Of course, the possibilities go both ways, it’s equally about choosing to live as it’s about choosing the opposite. And in that sense, my dark thoughts are a reminder how valuable life is. We tend to lose sight of it in the daily vortex of work deadlines to be met, birthdays to be remembered and parents’ expectations to be lived up to.
Cats, on the other hand, don’t worry about those things. Just as they surely don’t contemplate heights nearly as much as I do. After all, they have survived drops of several hundred meters. Cats are built to fall. I suppose, in some way, that’s true for us too, given life is a series of falling and failing and getting back up.
Still, I sometimes wonder when observing cats, absurd as it may sound: Would I live the same, if I had nine lives?
My thoughts and the bossa nova tunes are drowned out by loud rap music that a group of teenagers is playing on a portable speaker while spraying a graffiti tag on the wall below me. They are leaving a mark on this world. A scribble, which, although illegible, clearly reads: We exist.
No sleep till Brooklyn
When I slept in the city that never sleeps, it was usually in tight spaces that could just about fit a life. My first room in a shared apartment in West Harlem only had a twin-sized bed, enough for one person, always a struggle for two. But then again, New York isn’t about resting.
For years, I thought the nickname “the city that never sleeps” indicates a place of round-the-clock parties. I remember several times, usually after having stumbled out of a basement club or a birthday party or the customary Friday evening circus of us journalism students, drinking whiskey and complaining about class assignments. Inevitably, some of us and the occasional few strangers would roam the streets at four in the morning, trying to find an open bar for yet another last beer. We would fail.
“I’m from Berlin, the city that actually never sleeps,” I would say, possibly swallowing some words, due to part outrage and part intoxication.
But even then, even though we didn’t believe it, we sometimes still sang it like Sinatra did, “I want to wake up in a city that never sleeps.” As the months went by, I realized that it’s not the nightlife that keeps people in New York awake. It’s the work left undone, the voracious machine churning on and wanting more. And so people keep breaking their backs with a smile, because, as Sinatra sang in the same song, “If I can make it there, I'm gonna make it anywhere.”
That’s why it was hard for to accept that I didn’t. After some years, I left New York, tired of the hustle, fed up of living mostly paycheck to paycheck, only to be a citizen what’s the greatest city on earth, but quite frankly isn’t. Even though everything did seem smaller, of less significance, after having lived there.
I still come to New York at least once a year. And there’s this magical tingle, every time, somewhat alike to falling in love. After one warm summer night out with old friends, when we listened to the free Philharmonic Orchestra’s performance at Prospect Park, watched the fireworks, smoked weed and giggled on swings and slides of a nearby playground, after this night, I messaged a friend, “I tend to reminisce about nights like that one – they make me miss New York and all the good people there a lot. It was annoying to always worry about money, but I had the best company doing so."
So I didn’t make it there. I failed. But today I know that it’s ok.
As an afterthought, Wikipedia says the term “the city that never sleeps” has been applied to other cities as well, including Buenos Aires, Chicago, Las Vegas, Madrid, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, Tokyo.
Getting lost
I tend to hate traveling, but love it. There are all the disappointing moments, usually experienced at places deemed exceptional. Because, apparently, if we can agree on anything, especially in these divided times, it‘s that you need to kiss below the Eiffel Tower and take a selfie at Times Square, that one needs to ride a gondola in Venice and have a beer at Oktoberfest.
But think about how many came before you and how many will follow, how many will focus their cameras on the same buildings, perform the same posture for the lens. And, of course, that‘s the point. It’s one of the basic exercises of being human. We want to belong, we all do, and have the photos to prove it.
I remember seeing the Mona Lisa many years ago for the first time. It was the single reason for visiting the Louvre: to come face to face with the most valuable painting in the world, its significance inflated to such an extent that even a building as large as the one housing the museum seemed to small for it. It’s not that I found beauty in this particular work of art, I came because it‘s agreed upon that one must see it.
In my memory, I was walking increasingly faster, heartbeat speeding up just the same, the closer I got to the room where the Mona Lisa was on display. While I don‘t recall any of the other exhibits, I specifically remember the moment the disappointment set in. The room was incredibly crowded and looking around me, I couldn‘t spot the Mona Lisa. But then I did. The painting was small, almost tiny compared to the object I expected, hanging behind thick glass.
It appeared ordinary. So much so that I found it quite difficult to take an adequate picture of it. One that would capture its grandeur.
Quite a few similar situations followed before I started exploring instead of sightseeing, learned to get lost, so I could find. Depending on how you look at it, I became more human or less. Certainly, I became myself and found the things that make me happy instead of others.
This is, I guess, a long-winded way of explaining how I ended up in a cul-de-sac in Marrakech dotted with blue plant pots placed next to blue doors below a blue mural of a Tuareg and why I spent much more time there than in front of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting.
Crossings
The Mediterranean Sea holds almost four million cubic kilometers of water. And tens of thousands of bodies. From Spartans in ancient times, who came for war, dragged to the ground in their beaten battleships, to migrants today, who are the opposite, victims of wars both physical and ideological.
The latter come on rafts similar to those used on larger ships as, quite ironically, lifeboats. For the migrants, unlike the saying, the way isn’t the goal. But, surprisingly, this is never shared across the internet as an inspirational quote. Also, even apart from costing lives, there’s an actual price to pay. Smugglers demand up to several thousand euros for the crossing.
My ticket to Europe cost around four hundred Moroccan dirhams, less than forty euros. I arrived at the port of Tangier, located at the northern tip of Morocco, as always: at the very last minute. I put my credit card and passport on the ticketing counter, and moments later, have a nice journey, I walked onto the ferry. It was a catamaran painted in red and white, which could reach speeds of eighty kilometers an hour.
So, only a bit over sixty convenient minutes later, I was in Spain.
My biggest issue during the journey was having accidentally sat down in business class, located on the upper deck and with almost nobody in any of the one hundred seats. This was accidental only insofar as, naturally not having chosen the more expensive ticket, my attempt at pretending to be a member of that class failed and an employee asked me to leave.
And while I made my way to an equally comfortable economy class seat on the deck below, somewhere on the Libyan coast a raft was being inflated and shoved into the perilous waters.
