Day 250 - Saturday 27th May 2006

Waking up with enforced freshness (due to no alcohol sales) I made my way to the beach. That took me all of ten seconds as I walked out of my hotel, down 5 steps and there I was. Then it was straight into the water to cool off.

For breakfast I made my way along the small row of shops that passed as the village centre, stopping only when I reached my preferred juice lady. There I ordered a litre of fresh fruit juice (passion fruit) and watched as she cut up the fruit, blended it with ice and served it to me. For only 1,500 (£1 = 4,500 Pesos) I had a beautiful fresh fruit juice breakfast.

I had to keep my t-shirt on during the day as I could feel that I had overexposed the previous few days and didn’t want to fry up in the strong rays of the sun. I therefore tried to stay out of it as much as possible, a task made a lot easier by the bar that lay on the sand, in the shade of the trees.

For some reason the police weren’t enforcing the ban on the sale of the local beer during the day so I sat and had a few whilst reading, now and again taking the time to cool off in the calm waters.

At some point during the afternoon we took the short taxi ride back into Santa Marta to see if anything was open, and we found the local mall doing a small trade. We noticed that the cinema was open and noted the times of Inside Man for the next evening’s entertainment.

The rest of the day wasn’t that eventful, however one thing of note was a great fish lunch for 15,000 Pesos. The owner brought out a platter containing about ten Red Snapper, and asked us to select our desired fish. He then went away, fried it up and served it with a generous portion of coconut-flavoured rice and a normal salad.

In the evening I managed to finish Atlas Shrugged, which was a monumental effort if I do say so myself. To finish took me the best part of two months (although I did read some other, less challenging books in between), and I would say it was up there with Dostoyevsky as one of the most in depth works I have read. The story follows the fortunes (and misfortunes) of a group of corporate and social high fliers, and their struggles against a society and government that punishes excellence and rewards mediocrity.

Considered Ayn Rand’s crowning piece, Atlas Shrugged is a book that takes a lot of perseverance, however it is certainly worth the effort. To anyone who is considering trying to read something other than the usual Dan Brown or Stephen King (I had read about 30 of these kinds of books since starting the trip) and wants a little bit of a challenge, Atlas Shrugged will start you thinking about such ‘interesting’ things as governmental interference in society and its impact, and whether the effects of the interference are actually beneficial to the society it is trying to aid.

Overall, the message portrayed is resoundingly against any kind of governmental interference in society. Ayn Rand argues that forward thinkers and entrepreneurs will create a better system purely through their new ideas and innovations. Inventing some method of production or a new machine will make a task that much easier to accomplish. If a task is that much easier to accomplish, less time needs to be spent on producing the same amount. Therefore the overall saving is time. The time saved can then be spent trying to find ways of improving other things.

Throughout Atlas Shrugged the government are continually trying to create a society where every person in the world is equal. By imposing ludicrous Regulations that are designed to limit the effectiveness of the leading entrepreneurs of individual markets (steel, copper, transport) they set out to achieve their goals. This in effect hinders the hardworking and helps the lazy.

As the story progresses it becomes apparent that as more rules and regulations are imposed, the less efficient all production and the free-markets become, meaning that the policies introduced by government have totally the opposite effect to their intention.

English lesson over, that was my quick synopsis and review of one of the main issues in the book, however it covers a whole spectrum of social, political, financial and personal issues which revolve around the disintegration of a social system.