Feliz Ano Nuevo!
Since we last wrote we have come through Bolivia, a short and horrendously expensive stint into Chile and across into Argentina. I think the last photo album had a couple of pics coming into Bolivia (Lake Titicaca and La Paz) and Matt is putting up all of our Bolivia pictures right now :)
La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, is a pretty intense sort of city (to cross the road you just have to run out in the traffic, for example!) - at least the bit we were staying in! We made it there for New Year's Eve hoping to catch up with some friends we met for an hour or so in Medellin, Colombia. Unfortunately as we arrived, they were leaving and our search for New Year's friends remained fruitless. We still had a couple of bottles of Christmas wine left over from Peru(we were too sick to drink them at Christmas! Plus they tasted like shit… Peruvians like their wine sweet and nasty!) so we tucked into these and sat in the kitchen waiting for random people to make friends with us. Anyone who’s travelled in hostels will know that this is a pretty failsafe method. After a couple of hours, we’d made friends with a French couple who were nice enough to go out of their way to speak English with us even though every other person in the room was French. This trait always impresses me about Europeans and I’m always grateful. There were a big group of Japanese backpackers using the kitchen to make a complicated meal and after a while one of the girls came out with a heaping platter of spicy vegetables and Japanese salad which she sat down in front of us and told us we could tuck in. This took care of dinner and we headed out for not exactly a wild and crazy New Year’s but definitely a fun night. The Frenchies introduced us to an English couple down the pub and we hung out with them until about 1am, when we returned to the hostel and Matt spent the first few hours of 2010 lying on the floor throwing up into a rubbish bin and moaning pitifully.
The next day La Paz looked like a nuclear bomb had hit it. We saw people falling into piles of rancid food scraps, a man in a suit pissing on the footpath at midday with his willy flinging about, and a taxi drive directly into a gaping hole in the middle of the street that wasn’t there 24 hours earlier. We took it easy, ate at a Dutch restaurant to ease our tummies into Bolivia and generally wandered about seeing the sights. The most interesting part of La Paz is also the most touristed – the Witches’ Markets. Local women in tiny bowler hats and full skirts sell all sorts of weird shit here from New Years’ lucky potions, herbs and decorations to dried llama foetuses, as well as the usual touristy faff. We also visited the Coca Museum which detailed the history of the coca leaf and the subsequent cocaine boom in the Western world.
The following day Matt set off to climb Huayna Potosí, a mountain outside La Paz rising to 6088m. Check out the pictures he’s posted as he looks like a proper hardcore mountaineer with his ice axe etc! I’m very impressed with his efforts as it was a three-day trip, the summit attempt on the last day leaving at 1am in the morning (his head torch fell down a crevasse at 3am!), 6 hours up and 4 hours back down. The base camp on the first day is at about the same altitude as Mt Blanc, just to give you an idea how high this is! His group got to play around on a glacier testing out their axes and crampons and I think Matt was really having fun until the last day – I don’t think it’s an experience he’s willing to repeat any time soon. Out of the 6 guys on his trip, only Matt and another English guy plus the guide they were roped to made it to the summit and out of about 30 people trying that same day, around 10 made it in total so he did really well. When he reached the bottom he found out one of the other guys in his group had stumbled and fallen through a hole in the path, wedging himself by his backpack at about chest deep – when the guide and the other guys pulled him out of the hole, they looked down to see it was about 100m deep!
The other cool thing we did in La Paz was the ‘Death Road’! A few years ago there used to be a lot of traffic on this narrow, windy, muddy road and bikers and drivers would plunge off the side to their deaths fairly regularly. Nowadays, probably due to the amount of money coming in from the tourist industry, the authorities have built a schmick new road for traffic, leaving the Death Road as a friggin awesome day trip on a mountain bike from La Paz. I really didn’t think I’d have fun but once I had all the gear on (full motorcross stuff!) and went over a few rocks with the amazing suspension on the bikes I was feeling more confident and although I was the slowest in the group I still had a great time. Matt of course is a bit of a psycho and kept up with the guide the whole way with glee, while I trundled along with the safety van right behind me the whole way! It was awesome though, 65km and downhill the entire way, amazing scenery and a brilliant experience. Bolivia is such good value, we paid $48 each and got the trip, all food, gear etc, buffet lunch and a swim and shower at a hotel at the end then back to La Paz.
Right so we FINALLY got our arses out of La Paz and headed south to Uyuni for a three day 4WD trip through Salar de Uyuni and the desert beyond, through to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. The huge, bright white expanse of the salt flats was really awe-inspiring and trippy and we took lots of silly pictures and had a great time. We were on the trip with four people I can best describe as internationally roving bohemians…two of them lived in Barcelona and made enough money busking on the street (up to 100 Euros in one night!) to not only live comfortably but to save up for a huge South American trip. The rest of the trip we spent driving around the desert looking at cool windblown rock formations and visiting some amazing lagoons filled with hundreds of bright pink and white flamingos. The most impressive was Laguna Coloradas, an important wetland system, that had a brilliant red tinge in stripes across the water. The best experience of the trip was on the last day – after setting off at 3:30am and driving through a spooky geyser field filled with steam, we arrived at dawn at the most beautiful hot springs you can imagine, steam rising up and flamingos wandering around with the rising sun in the background. Awesome. The hippies loved it and so did I.
Arriving in San Pedro we were instantly shocked by the price of everything. Comparing Chile to Bolivia is like comparing Norway to India or something. We broke out our brand spanking new camping stuff for the first time, hoping for a bargain, and paid the rock-bottom price of TWENTY AMERICAN DOLLARS FOR AN UNPOWERED CAMP SITE IN A BACKYARD. Holy shit. In La Paz we were paying $8 for a private double room, and that's not even cheap there! Needless to say were were out of there like a shot. It was a shame because the town is really cool, all earthy colours and packed-mud streets and set on the northern tip of the driest desert in the world. We’d done all the ‘desert’ stuff in Bolivia, so opted instead to take a really interesting astronomy tour with an entertaining old French astronomer at 1:30am in the morning. The stars are stunning in the desert and it made me homesick for Kingaroy, you don’t realise how much you don’t see when you live in a city.
Next day a 24 hour bus ride to Santiago, capital of Chile, and diverted across to the coast to the coolest city ever, Valparaíso. Everything is art here – neighbourhoods of coloured houses sprawl up hills around a naval port, steep staircases and furniculars connecting the streets, tiny cafes and art galleries stuck in random corners and everywhere, on every wall, graffiti artwork and murals. We had a brilliant afternoon just walking around, taking photos and eating Española empanadas (tomato and hotdog slices in pastry – suprisingly delicious). The next day we retardedly missed our bus to Mendoza, Argentina and had to fork out $48 for another one :(. Got here eventually though, after a long but stunning bus ride over the border, and have spent the last couple of days camping outside of Mendoza in an awesome shady campground with an outdoor movie screen, cooking steak and eggs over a fire and generally chilling out. Mendoza is a very Western city with hundreds of pavement restaurants and wide shady streets. Tomorrow we are renting bikes to do a big day cycling around the wineries in the area, which I’ve been looking forward to for a while now (the wine here is delicious and very, very cheap). Next we’re shooting down to Bariloche in the Lakes District and then on to Patagonia.
Sorry guys that was another long one, but it’s very hard to fit three countries into one blog :) I hope everyone is well. I’ve only got a few weeks left before returning to the real world, but Matt has changed his flights to the 28th of March and will get to see lots of Brazil lucky bastard!!!
Cheers,
Ash and Matt
