I must stop doing this. We arrive in a new city after a ten hour night-bus ride, feeling hungry and anxious because even though we've never been so comfortable, we can't sleep on those buses. Invariably we arrive at 6am on a Sunday, and in a bus station which is situated in one of the less salubrious areas of town. If I had any sense I would know that a bus station at 6am on a sunday doesn't figure highly in most city's promotional literature. But I have no sense. So I get fractious and ball my fists and flounce a bit 'I hate it here!' And then I fire an email off to one of my parents, barking 'this town is a dump!'. And then later I put down the rucksack and wash my face and look around and realise I've done it again. I've maligned a perfectly pleasant place and now I have to backpedal.
So, pedalling at the ready. We went to Cordoba and I got in a huff because we had to walk for- oh, about a year- to get to the youth hostel. And then they put us in separate dormitories for the night! Goodness, I was so angry I ate all the biscuits. Over the next few days I gradually noted that Cordoba- the Cultural Capital of the Americas 2006 (how I had scoffed!) - had many pleasing aspects. It has millions of bookshops, for one thing. It is in fact the oldest university town in Argentina- a sort of Argentine Oxford, if you will, only with fewer bicycles and pillocks. It also has a lot of nice old buildings, including a church called 'the Jesuit Apple'. Why, I know not. It also has several well appointed small museums including a really thought-provoking and scary one on the Disappeared, thousands of people who went missing or were murdered by the military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s. There was a room with scrapbooks made of some of the victims by the relatives, showing their childhood photos and old school diplomas. It was a terrifying place, and really well done. I would definitely recommend it. For once we can't blame the guidebook for not knowing about this one, it only opened a few years ago. Well worth a visit.
The only thing to do, once you've been somewhere sobering and thought provoking, is to counteract the sombreness with a trip to a giant cuckoo clock, so this is what we did the nextday. The guidebook had promised us 'Vegas-like' levels of tat and tackiness so obviously I couldn't wait. Unfortunately I misread the book, so I was expecting a ten storey high cuckoo clock. It actually read two storeys. And this I feel was stretching it a bit. We had travelled for an hour to get there and there were TOUR BUSES parked by it so I really was expecting something massive and overwhelming. It wasn't. Don't go. If you are ever invited to see the Giant Cu-Cu in Villa Carlos Paz, politely decline.
If, however, you are invited to go to Che Guevara's childhood home in Alta Gracia, go at once (preferably on a Wednesday because all the museums are free). Alta Gracia is a delightful place, with a lovely Jesuit mansion to visit and then a really good Che museum detailing his childhood and showing pictures of him as a kid, and with his bedroom and toys and the bathtub the young revolutionary took his baths in. The gift shop was on the whole disappointingly tasteful, and the Che themed Cuban-Argentinian fusion snack bar was closed, but this minor setbacks aside, it was a grand day out.
We are now in Mendoza, the Argentine wine capital, and tomorrow morning we shall be embarking on the long expected bicycle wineries tour. Quite how the combination of a hot sun, cycling and wine tasting will affect us is not precisely known- I had a bottle of beer two days ago that made me distinctly wobbly- but since I cannot cycle very well perhaps an inebriated wobbling will act as a corrective. We shall see. I may have plenty of time to practise, as the Argentine-Chilean bordercrossing is currently shut due to snow. This is causing a bit of a headache in the scheduling and planning department. Fortunately Lovely Chris is on hand with map and spreadsheet and will doubtless save the day while I am guzzling the wine we buy on the tour. Que sera sera. I have finally noticed that's Spanish.
First, select your llama...
Sunday 28 August 2011
Thursday 18 August 2011
Screwing the System
Goodbye Bolivia. Good Morning Argentina. More accurately, Good evening Bolivia, Good evening three hour wait at the border while they riffled through my knickers and feminine hygiene products in search of cocaine, and then good evening Argentina. It was too dark by the time they'd decided there weren't any narcobarons in the queue to see if there was an appreciable difference in scenery although Chris was adopted by a dog as soon as we set food in the land of Steak and Wine so it didn't seem to be so very different.
The first sign we had that we really weren't in Bolivia anymore Toto was that they had a free coffee maker on the bus and invited the passengers to partake of it -quite why you would want coffee on an overnight bus is anyones guess but the gesture was appreciated- and a real life working toilet that wasn't hermetically sealed off. Such is the contrary natureof my bladder that I didn't actually use it but by all reports it was marvellous.
Upon arrival in Salta we discovered how Argentina pays for these neat contrivances and that is with the sort of inflated bus prices that makes Chris emit frightened squeaks like a bat trapped under a saucepan. Suffice to say the Diminutive Red Guidebook is totally and hopelesly out of date on this matter. A thorough examination of finances concluded that if would be all but impossible to eat, sleep and travel comfortably. Something had to give; the question was what.
Fortunately Chris and I have become masters of a principle called Screwing the System (It's actually called ****ing the system but there may be children present). Screwing (ahem) the System involves making financial savings where none should be possible. For example, by walking round town for an hour to find the crummiest, scuzziest hostel not mentioned in the guidebook and then haggling the price down, by filling water bottles up from water jugs in restaurant, and by never leaving a dining establishment without an assortment of sachets in one pocket and the toilet roll in the other. It had been a sort of guilty game in the Andean nations, where everything is so cheap anyway that it takes a special sort of financial pedant (yes fiance, I'm talking about you) to thieve mayonnaise and napkins, but in Argentina we are grateful for the practice for we are now in deadly earnest.
The latest STS wizard wheeze is to stay in hostels with kitchens. Anyone who went to university with me, I know what you're thinking, but the trick here isn't to steal asparagus risotto from the communal fridges (Honorable Mention here to Mr Stephen Molloy wherever he may be, who was the creator of said risotto which at one point was feeding at least 8 undergraduates on the sly). The trick is to go to the supermarket, buya load of potatoes, and then feast on them. I went a bit crazy in the supermarket, having not seen a proper one for months, and cooked a feast which promptly poisoned Chris (future wife FAIL)- this turned out to be an even more cunning plan as he ate nothing at all the next day which saved a FORTUNE.
This set me to thinking about how you could create a conglomerate of all the South american countries and theoretically live for free if you incorporated certain national characteristics across the board. For example, you could save tens of pounds a week if you didn't go to the bathroom anywhere except for Argentina (no toilet tax and as much toilet paper as you can stuff into your jumper), if you only drank wine in Bolivia (one quid a bottle- there's no pound sign on these keyboard by the way) but only drank beer in the cloud forest of ecuador (60p a litre); if you only went clubbing in Cusco (entrance free, rum and cokes free), if you stayed in the hotel in Puno (six dollars between us) or preferably were adopted by a Quitenan family - and bought all llama based souvenirs and pan pipes in La Paz- if you did all these things, it is theoretically possible to live in south america for nothing. And this being the case, I am increasingly tempted to try another year.
Wednesday 10 August 2011
Hidden Gem
Next stop: Tarija. For a lot of this trip we've been on the established gringo trail and for some reason Traija doesn't seem to have made it onto the list. This is fantastic news for us because it means we don't have to compete for hotel rooms like jackals around a carcass, and furthermore they have to charge realistic prices without adding on a 30% tourist tax.
After the ice encrusted trip to the south west in only took the brief guidebook promise of an 'idyllic springlike climate' for us to book the tickets. This and the fact that for som reason there are no cash machines in southern bolivia except in this one place. So Tarija it was by default.
As with everywhere we have been to without expectations, Tarija has turned out to be brilliant in lots of small ways. The ability to sleep in less than ten layers of clothes has been a definite plus, although in the contrary nature of english travellers we were immediately complaining of being too hot. The town is the capital of Bolivia's winegrowing area, and is full of cafes, parks and wine shops. The wine tastes fine to me, being red, warm and wet, although Chris thinks it tastes of dribble, and they do delightful little saltenas for lunch. They even have some magic ingredient in the pizza sauce that makes it taste better than all the other pizzas in Bolivia. And a real shower, with real hot water. And since we are about to go to Argentina with a budget that may necessitate us eating bin scraps for three months, we decided what the hell, got a room with cable and have spent a week eating steak and biscuits and watching the baseball. I have also been researching theme parks. This is the thing about Bolivia. It's sucha wonderful place to do nothing in.
Oh, and Chris proposed. Like I said, this is a bloody great place.
After the ice encrusted trip to the south west in only took the brief guidebook promise of an 'idyllic springlike climate' for us to book the tickets. This and the fact that for som reason there are no cash machines in southern bolivia except in this one place. So Tarija it was by default.
As with everywhere we have been to without expectations, Tarija has turned out to be brilliant in lots of small ways. The ability to sleep in less than ten layers of clothes has been a definite plus, although in the contrary nature of english travellers we were immediately complaining of being too hot. The town is the capital of Bolivia's winegrowing area, and is full of cafes, parks and wine shops. The wine tastes fine to me, being red, warm and wet, although Chris thinks it tastes of dribble, and they do delightful little saltenas for lunch. They even have some magic ingredient in the pizza sauce that makes it taste better than all the other pizzas in Bolivia. And a real shower, with real hot water. And since we are about to go to Argentina with a budget that may necessitate us eating bin scraps for three months, we decided what the hell, got a room with cable and have spent a week eating steak and biscuits and watching the baseball. I have also been researching theme parks. This is the thing about Bolivia. It's sucha wonderful place to do nothing in.
Oh, and Chris proposed. Like I said, this is a bloody great place.
Thursday 4 August 2011
Salty Goodness
And so to the Salar de Uyuni. This is billed by the guidebook as THE must-see sight of Bolivia. After the Cretassic Park fiasco we were less inclined to trust said book 100% but as there is really remarkably little else to do in this part of the world and everyone we had met had raved about it we decided what the hell and booked a three day trip.
It should be apparent to anyone who has been further than Dover on an organised tour that the agency will tell whatever lies they deem fit in order to get you to hand over money. These lies range from the mildly inconvenient - telling you the bus will take five hours when it will take seven; the severely inconvenient- telling you there is a toilet on the bus but neglecting to tell you that it will remain locked for the duration and you will have to pay five bolivianos to a toothless crone so you can pee in her vegetable patch; and the downright criminally negligent lies- in this case, telling you that the temperature in Uyuni is the same as in Potosi (5 degrees at night) when in actual fact it is TWENTY FIVE WHOLE DEGREES LOWER.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First we must get to the Salar. If you've ever seen pictures, you 'll know that this great white expanse of saltiness is the place where you can do trick photography that makes you look the same size as your stuffed toys, or enables you to sit on the palm of someone elses hand. It is interestingly the remnants of a dried up ocean, but no one really cares about that when there are trick shots involving coca cola bottles to be done. So, it's a big white salt desert. It's very cool, but i'm not sure what else I can tell you about it really. It looks like the sort of place you would expect to see mammoths, if there were any left. It should have penguins. I think if it hadn't felt cold enough to be the Arctic, the fact that it looked like the arctic but was warm would have been notable. But it looked and felt like the north pole.
We went to an island in the middle of the salar and had a bracing picnic in a hurricane at a table made of salt. The island, a former coral reef back when this was an ocean, is covered in huge enormous cacti, about twenty metres tall. The tallest one was over 1200 years old. Impressive eh? The wonder of it all is what would possess a cactus to settle on a coral island in a salt desert in a hurricane and then stay there for a millenium, but then I know remarkably little about the psychology of cacti.
We stayed the night in a hotel made of salt bricks. The beds were salt, and the floor was salt, so it felt like it had snowed in the house. There was an agreeable santa's grotto type feel to the place, and exceptionally good biscuits. We drove into town through a dust storm and 60mph winds to buy beer, and passed the night listening to a gale force wind trying to scrape the roof off. Fortunately we hit upon the idea of wearing all the clothes we had brought with us all at once and so a hat, scarf, gloves, three pairs of socks, two pairs of trousers, five t-shirts, two jumpers, a fleece, six blankets and a sleeping bag later we were ready for bed, although unable to bend any of our limbs.
Somewhat to our surprise we actually survived the night although our toothpaste had frozen in its tube. Our next stop was Laguna Colorada. It is a lake which is red, because of the microorganisms in it, and these same little critters turn the flamingos that live in the lake pink. Frankly I am surprised that the flamingos were not blue as I have never ever been in such a frigid and hostile environment, not even the time I got drunk and booked a holiday in Poland in January. Unbelievably there are people who live full time on the altiplano, growing quinua and running salt hotels. If NASA ever need to find people to colonise Mars, this is the place. The landscape was distinctly Martian too, with reddish soil and weird rock formations and some of the weirdest light I have ever encountered. All in all it was a good introduction to interplanetary travel and I'm not sure someone didn't put LSD in my breakfast, but it was beautiful. Beautiful, and of course, unbelievably fricking cold.
The second night's accomodation made the first night's look like the Hilton. Having driven for an age across an enormous wide windy space we pulled up at what could charitably be described as a shack. We were in a dormitory with the other four people in our jeep, who by this stage we were bonding with nicely. As the temperature plummeted after sunset I tried to have a can of beer but it was frozen (of course I surmounted this obstacle eventually). They lit a woodfire which gave out all the heat and light of a candle. We went outside to look at the stars: more stars than I would ever have thought possible, in the widest sky I have ever seen. We stayed outside for as long as possible without risk of an icy death, about four minutes. Some germans arrived, we played cards. It was as convivial a way as we could think of to pass the last night of our lives, as we were all convinced we would be found dead in our sleeping bags in the morning, six gringo icicles who should not have listened to their tour agencies. At one point it was suggested (by me) that we should draw lots to see which one of the group we should burn as firewood. In the end we burnt the bread from dinner, said our farewells, climbed into our bunks and waited for death's sweet kiss.
We were stunned to wake up the next morning suffering from nothing more than mild nasal frostbite although all agreed it was the most uncomfortable night we had ever spent. The itinerary for the day involved us driving to a hotspring, where we could, for no additional charge, take our clothes off and jump into hot water. The hot water part sounded great, but the part where we had to strip down to our swimming costumes sounded impossible. However, when we arrived the lure of the steamy water was too great after three days without a shower. And it was glorious. By general consensus we agreed that the best thing to do would be just to never get out of the water. We stayed in as long as we could, watching absently as our socks were blown away by the wind, until finally we were coaxed out with pancakes. We were then told that due to adverse weather conditions (ha! what the hell had this been?) the laguna verde was closed (frozen solid) as was the chilean border. Our guide tried to frighten us with tales of jeeps being blown away in the desert. needlessly, because by this point we were all ready to go home, if only to have another crack at the one hot shower in Bolivia, located in the hotel/prison in Uyuni where we had shacked up before the tour started. They had pizza there too, and heaters.
So the verdict is as follows: go to Uyuni, and do this trip, because the scenery is unforgettably beautiful. But for God's sake, pack thermal knickers.
It should be apparent to anyone who has been further than Dover on an organised tour that the agency will tell whatever lies they deem fit in order to get you to hand over money. These lies range from the mildly inconvenient - telling you the bus will take five hours when it will take seven; the severely inconvenient- telling you there is a toilet on the bus but neglecting to tell you that it will remain locked for the duration and you will have to pay five bolivianos to a toothless crone so you can pee in her vegetable patch; and the downright criminally negligent lies- in this case, telling you that the temperature in Uyuni is the same as in Potosi (5 degrees at night) when in actual fact it is TWENTY FIVE WHOLE DEGREES LOWER.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. First we must get to the Salar. If you've ever seen pictures, you 'll know that this great white expanse of saltiness is the place where you can do trick photography that makes you look the same size as your stuffed toys, or enables you to sit on the palm of someone elses hand. It is interestingly the remnants of a dried up ocean, but no one really cares about that when there are trick shots involving coca cola bottles to be done. So, it's a big white salt desert. It's very cool, but i'm not sure what else I can tell you about it really. It looks like the sort of place you would expect to see mammoths, if there were any left. It should have penguins. I think if it hadn't felt cold enough to be the Arctic, the fact that it looked like the arctic but was warm would have been notable. But it looked and felt like the north pole.
We went to an island in the middle of the salar and had a bracing picnic in a hurricane at a table made of salt. The island, a former coral reef back when this was an ocean, is covered in huge enormous cacti, about twenty metres tall. The tallest one was over 1200 years old. Impressive eh? The wonder of it all is what would possess a cactus to settle on a coral island in a salt desert in a hurricane and then stay there for a millenium, but then I know remarkably little about the psychology of cacti.
We stayed the night in a hotel made of salt bricks. The beds were salt, and the floor was salt, so it felt like it had snowed in the house. There was an agreeable santa's grotto type feel to the place, and exceptionally good biscuits. We drove into town through a dust storm and 60mph winds to buy beer, and passed the night listening to a gale force wind trying to scrape the roof off. Fortunately we hit upon the idea of wearing all the clothes we had brought with us all at once and so a hat, scarf, gloves, three pairs of socks, two pairs of trousers, five t-shirts, two jumpers, a fleece, six blankets and a sleeping bag later we were ready for bed, although unable to bend any of our limbs.
Somewhat to our surprise we actually survived the night although our toothpaste had frozen in its tube. Our next stop was Laguna Colorada. It is a lake which is red, because of the microorganisms in it, and these same little critters turn the flamingos that live in the lake pink. Frankly I am surprised that the flamingos were not blue as I have never ever been in such a frigid and hostile environment, not even the time I got drunk and booked a holiday in Poland in January. Unbelievably there are people who live full time on the altiplano, growing quinua and running salt hotels. If NASA ever need to find people to colonise Mars, this is the place. The landscape was distinctly Martian too, with reddish soil and weird rock formations and some of the weirdest light I have ever encountered. All in all it was a good introduction to interplanetary travel and I'm not sure someone didn't put LSD in my breakfast, but it was beautiful. Beautiful, and of course, unbelievably fricking cold.
The second night's accomodation made the first night's look like the Hilton. Having driven for an age across an enormous wide windy space we pulled up at what could charitably be described as a shack. We were in a dormitory with the other four people in our jeep, who by this stage we were bonding with nicely. As the temperature plummeted after sunset I tried to have a can of beer but it was frozen (of course I surmounted this obstacle eventually). They lit a woodfire which gave out all the heat and light of a candle. We went outside to look at the stars: more stars than I would ever have thought possible, in the widest sky I have ever seen. We stayed outside for as long as possible without risk of an icy death, about four minutes. Some germans arrived, we played cards. It was as convivial a way as we could think of to pass the last night of our lives, as we were all convinced we would be found dead in our sleeping bags in the morning, six gringo icicles who should not have listened to their tour agencies. At one point it was suggested (by me) that we should draw lots to see which one of the group we should burn as firewood. In the end we burnt the bread from dinner, said our farewells, climbed into our bunks and waited for death's sweet kiss.
We were stunned to wake up the next morning suffering from nothing more than mild nasal frostbite although all agreed it was the most uncomfortable night we had ever spent. The itinerary for the day involved us driving to a hotspring, where we could, for no additional charge, take our clothes off and jump into hot water. The hot water part sounded great, but the part where we had to strip down to our swimming costumes sounded impossible. However, when we arrived the lure of the steamy water was too great after three days without a shower. And it was glorious. By general consensus we agreed that the best thing to do would be just to never get out of the water. We stayed in as long as we could, watching absently as our socks were blown away by the wind, until finally we were coaxed out with pancakes. We were then told that due to adverse weather conditions (ha! what the hell had this been?) the laguna verde was closed (frozen solid) as was the chilean border. Our guide tried to frighten us with tales of jeeps being blown away in the desert. needlessly, because by this point we were all ready to go home, if only to have another crack at the one hot shower in Bolivia, located in the hotel/prison in Uyuni where we had shacked up before the tour started. They had pizza there too, and heaters.
So the verdict is as follows: go to Uyuni, and do this trip, because the scenery is unforgettably beautiful. But for God's sake, pack thermal knickers.
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