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 Suffice to say the Diminutive Red Guidebook is totally and hopelesly out of date on this matter.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.

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.

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.

Cretassic Park

I believe it was Saint Francis of Assisi, (later covered by The Byrds) who said 'To everything there is a season', and quite right he was too. A time for war, a time for peace, (turn turn turn) a time for menu del dia, a time for McDonalds; a time to blend in, and a time to put on a global hypercolour T-shirt and a bumbag and get on a truck with a papier mache dinosaur head on the front and go to Cretassic Park.

It's not called Cretassic Park, of course. It is called something similar though, and promised, in addition to the largest collection of dinosaur 'printfoots' (sic) in the world, 'a collection of lifesize dinosaur models created with the greatest cientific (sic) rigour'. Naturally I would have paid any price in the world to see this and had been clamouring for a ride on the dinotruck since our arrival in Sucre.

Sucre had been slightly disappointing up to that point. I am suspicious of towns in general which have more lawyers than restaurants. It is all very pretty, but it also all designed to part the tourist from his money and even at rock bottom Bolivian prices this attitude does not endear a place to me. But Cretassic Park promised to be so mind boggling underwhelming and rubbish, after the hype in the guidebooks, that i couldn't wait to get there.

I wasn't disappointed. The DinoTruck (TM) bounced and jounced its way out to a quarry out of down and deposited us at the gates under the large plastic head of a T-rex. We were given an hour, or four. Not wanting to miss a precious moment I grabbed a ticket and scrambled through the turnstile.

The dinosaur footprints were not on the floor. They were on the quarry wall at a distance of three hundred metres away, which gave the impression of beetle tracks. I wasnt even sure I could see them until we went to the gift shop and looked at a poster which had them coloured in. Chris took a picture and we went back aagin. There, on the ridge. That indistinct splat was definitely either a sauropod footprint preserved in cement, or a tuft of grass. Who cares? The expression on Chris's face when he realised we had paid real life money for this was beyond priceless. I spent a few minutes wondering why the footprints were on a vertical surface (suction cups seemed the most entertaining answer), reluctant to find out the truth from the worlds tiniest and dullest on site museum. So I turned my attention instead to the real life cientifically rigorous dinosaur models. They were awful- huge, but awful. There was also a cretassic rat and a cretassic platypus lurking in a pond, for no reaosn. The whole site must have covered 200 square metres. The 'mirador' was the roof of the restaurant. It was so stunningly bad that it was brilliant. When they turned the sound effects on while I was passing under the belly of the (female) titanosaur I nearly cried with joy.

There came a point ten minutes later where there was nothign left to do except watch the BBC walking with dinosaurs DVD that someone had thoughtfully purchased and put on in a cool room. Then we realised that if we didn't hurry, the return dinotruck would leave and strand us there for another three hours. So we ran for it.

Waste of money? Certainly. But to everything there is a season- including plastic dinosaurs.

Bathing and Bolivia

Here's something you can all try at home. Go out into your garden shed early in the morning and remove all of your clothes. Then use a hairdryer to heat up an eggcup full of water and throw it over your head. Repeat. Once you are very wet and very cold, have someone open up a nearby sulphurous drain. Now here's the most important part: as soon as you have put the shampoo on your hair and committed yourself, allow the hairdryer that is providing the heat to the water to explode, filling your shed with smoke, your eyes with shampoo and covering you in water that has been piped directly from the Arctic.
Fun, eh? You've now experienced a Bolivian shower. If we've never shared a shower before, dear reader, I think you'll agree that this was an experience.
Notwithstanding the grievous state of the nation's plumbing, Bolivia has so far exceeded all expectations. Partly this is due to our expectations being no higher than being kidnapped at the border and then again in the capital. Low expectations are a very good thing when travelling, as almost everywhere turns out to be nicer than the guidebooks indicate. Copacabana, the border town on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca, was an enjoyable pitstop while we sampled the delights of the Isla del Sol. And whereas in Peru the street vendors and purveyors of tat will attach themselves round your ankles and let you drag them several yards down the street, in Bolivia you have to actually express an interest in the merchandise. Now that is progress.

We have spent the last week in La Paz throughly enjoying ourselves. La Paz itself is an extraordinary city and a full on sensory assault after the gilded cage that is Cusco. La Paz is noisy, dirty, smelly, chaotic, vibrant, schizophrenic, sprawling, vibrant, thrilling, colourful and above all MAD. It is geographically steep and ridiculously cheap. A three course meal costs 90p. For the first few hours we mainly kept moving to avoid being run over by people, cars, buses, dogs, carts, policeman and everything else living. Cusco was a beautiful, elegant and contrived city. La Paz has none of its beauty but beats the crap out of it for character. And so in spite of all our expectations we fell in love with the place and stayed for a week when we meant to stay for a day.
There aren't a great many tourist sights (the Valley of the Moon, which is in the books, was a bit of a let-down, but the zoo down the road let us in for 35p and we saw jaguars, which quite made up for it) so we've sort of been roaming the streets. Our hostal is located in the witches market, which involves a lot of bunches of herbs, amulets, incense and dried llama foetuses. I'm tempted to bring some of the latter home but am unclear how I would explain them to Customs so I am having to limit my spending sprees to buying up tacky religious objects, which Bolivian seems to specialise in. I am particularly pleased with my glow in the dark Holy Family figurine, although Chris is less enamoured.

We were also fortunate enough to run into the lovely frenchies (vive!) that we met at Machu Picchu so spent a very nice evening quaffing the local beer and eating satay. In fact we are able to live like kings here on our meagre budget and are somewhat reluctant to move on. I assume this must be a common feeling as the streets of La Paz have a good sprinkling of dreadlocked gringos selling bracelets who clearly have never left either, and for the first time I am more than a little bit envious.

Inca Trial

No, of course that isn't a typo but instead a rather witty play on words. Oh forget it. I have just arrived back from an amazing four days biking and hiking my good self around Machu Picchu. Brilliant and thoroughly recommended, but let's not pretend I found it all easy. Given that I am more prone to bitching than rhapsodising, let us begin.

As I hurtled down a mountainside on a bicycle that looked like it had been made with bits of scrap from the Ark, I realised absent mindedly that I was paying rather too much attention to the gorgeous Andean scenery and giving too little thought to how to avoid becoming a Wiley Coyote style puff of smoke in a ravine below. Some brilliant person had told me a great story about how a girl on Death Road in Bolivia had breaked sharply at a switchback and been rather disconcerted when her brake sheared off and plunged her headfirst to an exhilirating but messy death below, so I was a bit twitchy to say the least at the first corner. Fortunately the brakes worked and I employed them to great effect for the next three hours, reaching a maximum velocity on corners of 2mph. I narrowly avoided a head-on collision with a boulder when I went through a stream across the road at approximately three zillion miles an hour and was blinded by waterspray. For the last hour or so we were biking on a spine jolting stretch of unpaved dustbowl which, combined with the spray from the rivers, gave me an excitingly literal brown patch on the back of my trousers reminiscent of the figurative brick I had been endeavouring not to excrete for the entire ride. I didn't come last though, which was pleasing, and moreover I was very, very brave.

Back on two legs for the next day and eight hours of hiking, during which I had an epiphany. This is it: the reason I am scared of so many things is because I watch too much TV. The Wiley Coyote thing the day before was but the tip of the iceberg (Titanic). During the course of the day I freaked myself out on a badly repaired wobbly bridge (Indiana Jones), convincing myself I was about to plunge into a waterfall below and be dashed upon the rocks (Emperor's new Groove). I similarly (metaphorically) wet myself on a perilously slender mountain ledge (Last of the Mohicans) and later, as we picked our way across a boulder field in a dried up river bed I decided that I was in grave peril of slipping between two rocks and having to hack an appendage off with a penknife (127 hours). In short, I spent quite a lot of the second day scared out of my wits. Fortunately I took about a thousand photographs as the day is all one long blur in my recollection, except for a part where I stopped for a glass of juice and met an engaging animal called a picaru. This is a sort of jungle guinea pig, cute with a wuffly nose and long whiskers. The woman in the house was fattening it to eat it. I've seen that film too. Over the course of the day I reached two conclusions: firstly, that the Inca Trail really is quite an impressive undertaking and secondly, that I'm not getting a Sky movies package when I get home. In the evening we were given Inka Tequila at dinner (urgh) and then coralled into a very small nightclub with the other 9 members of our tour group, who were mainly French and brilliant fun.

Day three was marvellous: a nice flat walk with wide paths and very few movie connotations. We walked around the bases of Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu mountains through the a cool, shady forest and tried to outrun a group of noisy Israelis who were bent upon ruining the experience for the rest of us. They later turned up in our hostel, alas. The walk itself also including a pitstop with hammocks which was an unexpected bonus. We got some sneak peaks at the ruins of Machu Picchu from the foot of the mountains and spent a while goggling at the height of the mountain we would be climbing at 4am the next day. Over lunch we realised that we would be scaling Machu Picchu on 14 July, which excited the Frenchies very much. Our plan was to storm the ruins a la Bastille, sing the Marsellaise loudly on the summit, and then for good measure have a battle between the French and English members of the group. 'Avec plaisir', one of them riposted. Aux armes, citoyens!

Day 4 began rudely at 3.30am as we all set off downhill from Aguas Calientes to queue up at the bridge before beginning our hour long climb (1700 steps, people!). the reason being that they only let the first 400 people up Huayna Picchu mountain, which is the one you can see in the picture. I had already decided that I didn't give a tiny mouse's fart about climbing that mountain so was in no particular hurry, but at any rate was carried along by a tide of head-torched zombies shuffling their way up. I lost Chris early on as he raced with the serious climbers, but plodded on regardless and note for the record that climbing a mountain in the dark with a torch is far superior to doing it in daylight because you can't see how much further you need to go. Somewhat to my surprise the steps ended and we joined a huge sweating throng of people waiting to go in.

I'm not sure I can properly describe the experience of being in the ruins. Firstly, they are huge, much bigger than I had thought. Consequently the place seemed to gobble up all the people who had arrived so that you had the sense of being almost entirely alone on a big, misty, brooding mountainside. Because you've seen so many pictures of it- on TV, in books, and on llama wall hangings in every hostel in the land, it seems oddly familiar. Also, it's not really that old. It is contemporaneous with the Tudors. But it feels really old. And it was only occupied for about 70 years. It was a summer house for the ninth Inca, Pachacutec, when Cusco got too cold. Nice location for a second home but a bit of a bitch to get to, I feel. Anyway, we had a tour and then Chris went to climb the other mountain and I had a nap on a wall. A flock of green parrots flew past my head. 'Ooh look', said an american tourist, 'hummingbirds! 'Don't be silly,' her companion remarked, ´the tour guide said that hummingbirds were like twelve foot long in Peru'. Someone tip that tour guide.

Later in the day the sun came out and burnt all the mist away, and more day trippers arrived, but they tended to congregate in two or three spots, so we really didn't have to try hard to find quiet places to just sit and stare at the place. It was strange really, because Machu Picchu was really the reason we decided to come to Peru in the first place, and now we'd reached it. And then with a last look from the look out point at the Guardian's House, which is where you get that picture that everyone has seen, we climbed back down and began the really long walk home again.

Puddles

There is nothing like watching Wimbledon to make you feel British. So we were very pleased to discover that the tournament is broadcast across the continent. Of course, what makes you feel particularly British is watching Wimbledon put the covers on with rain lashing your windowpane. Given that I got sunburnt while climbing El Peru mountain on Wednesday- our way of celebrating an undeserved day off for a mysterious holiday called 'Pope Day'- the chances of rain didn't seem high. The average rainfall for Cusco in July is about sixteen drops, or so I have been told. So it came as a bit of a surprise to wake up on Friday to a steadily intensifying drizzle. Having spent the last five months basking in mid20s temperatures and golden light we didn't even know where our waterproofs were. Except for Chris's waterproof trousers. We knew exactly where those were because I had forbidden him to pack them when I did the Great Rucksack Cull in January. I felt a bit bad about that for a moment.
Cusco is not a city you should visit wearing white trousers, ever. Outside the historic tourist centre the roads are still unpaved, which means dust. Great clouds of it had been drifting over us while it was sunny, and now with the addition of the unexpected rain the dust and water have combined to leave huge puddles of thin hot chocolate all over everything. Where there is no hot chocolate there are great rucks and gouges out of the roads for cars to drive through, so that crossing every road results in a thorough soaking.

Apparently all of this is caused by either by the El Niño weather phenomenon or his less known sister La Niña, which bestirs itself every few years and makes rain where it should not. I wouldn't mind really- it made my pictures of the Incan ruins in the Sacred Valley look quite brooding and cloud capped. It is summer in England after all, and you can't expect to miss out on greyness and puddles just because you happen to have flown to the other side of the world. But I do mind. I mind quite a bit because last week we booked a trip to Machu Picchu and for a day of it we're going to be on bicycles.

I recall once riding my red bike across a tiny bump on a shallow downwards incline in Richmond Park and hitting a stone. I recall distinctly the sensation of flying over the handlebars and of lkanding on my knees and face simultaneously, grazing my chin on the concrete path. It hurt forever, it seemed. Then there's my friend Carl, who arrives at work by bike, often with a terrifying story of some perilously close near miss or with a bit of actual bike or leg missing. My own personally favoured arrival at Machu Picchu would involve being carried in a sedan chair by strapping men in loincloths. Bicycles would come somewhere near the bottom of the list. But cycling down a mountain in the rain? Forget it. Unfortunately it's paid for now and they don't do refunds so keep a weather eye out next week and do a little rain dance back home on my behalf. And if someone could also send Chris's trousers c/o the British embassy I would be much obliged.