Sunday, August 14, 2011

Time to say goodbye...

Alas, the dream, while sweet, has come to an end!  I have only got 1 sleep left!

I must apologise for the general slackness in updating the blog since getting to Buenos Aires, but it seems we haven´t really stopped moving long enough (and when we weren´t moving, there was a lot of sleep to be caught up on...) to post any updates!  But I will do my best to give a detailed account of the past 12 or say days that I have been roaming around Argentina.

Welcome to Buenos Aires

We arrived in Buenos Aires around 4 or 5 in the afternoon.  Landing in Argentina is quite relieving.  Road signs and painted lines are not just for decoration, dogs are on leashes instead of on roofs, nobody is needlessly beeping their horn, the streets are wide, and everything appears to be pretty clean and organised. 

Alice has foolishly booked us in to a dorm with 6 other people.  I am not sure who she thought she was travelling with when she booked that, but I reluctantly agree to try it for one night (it didn´t last... we booked a private room the next day).  When we arrive at our hostel, almost everyone else in our dorm is still asleep.  See, in Buenos Aires they have chosen to shift EVERYTHING they do back a few hours in the day.  So dinner is at 10pm.  Then you have a few drinks at midnight, before the clubs open at 2 to 3am, and you stay out until 7am or so.

So we head out to dinner at a very classy establishment...


This delightful statue was right next to our table, Alice is sitting at her chair to take it.  I commence my steak challenge straight away, aiming to get at least 1 steak per day while in Argentina.  Alice makes the mistake of ordering pasta, putting her behind on the steak challenge from day one, can she catch up?  Only time will tell.

After dinner, we decide that when in Rome... so we head out to a bar.  Sticking to our theme of going to authentic local establishments while in South America we head to an Irish Bar for a few drinks.  And then to several other bars, where we meet various locals.  Usually at least 1 person in a group can speak English and acts as a translator for everyone else.

At some ungodly hour we head back to our dorm.  The beds are uncomfortable, and creak loudly everytime someone rolls over, and there is only one bathroom for the 8 guests of that room.  Surprisingly, the next morning Alice actually brings up moving to a private room before me!  I agree without hesitation.

The steak challenge continues
Alice and I have booked ourselves onto an overnight bus to Mendoza the next day.  Realising that this means we will be eating dinner on the bus that night, and it is unlikely they will be serving us a steak, it is important to get todays steak in at lunch time.  We walk to the suburb of San Telmo where we check out some markets (basically peddling the same crap that markets pedal all across South America, and Australia), and then consume.




Delicious.  Of course you cannot eat steak without red wine, and the local variety Malbec is in plentiful supply.  Alice isn´t a huge fan, her delicate Melbourne taste buds describing it as ¨a slightly off Shiraz¨.  In the right quantitues, though, it still has the desired effect.

We also head over to the cemetary.  Here you can see just how much money Argentina has had throughout its history.  The graves are small... or actually quite large shrines to the person or family.  If you were wealthy, you get buried in a beautifully decorated large tomb like this - 

 

If you are less wealthy, you are basically stored in the drawer of a filing cabinet, where the drawer may or may not fit, like this -



To Mendoza
So we board our first overnight bus.  Busses in Argentina are so comfortable!  Leather seats, and free wine.  Occasionally even an additional glass of free champagne.  It all tastes like it cost about $1 per bottle, but if its free its free, and if its free its bloody good!





Breakfast on the busses, however, leaves a lot to be desired.  Especially if considered from a nutritional point of view.  It consists usually of a muffin, filled with caramel, crackers with a caramel spread, a sweet croissant called a factura, and a museli bar (not the healthy ones, but the ones with chocolate chips and a thick sugary glaze).  Alice, our resident dietician, is horrified... BUT SHE ATE THE WHOLE LOT!!!! (Someone inform the Austrlaian Dietician Society, she should have her membership revoked!)

When we arrive in Mendoza, we take a wander around the city.  It is Sunday and everything is closed.


We decide to go and get a slightly healthier breakfast... yeah right!  Time for more sweet breads, a ham and cheese toasted sandwich, more facturas, a coffee, a jucie, and a fruit salad (the healthy part)... all in a delightful package called the ¨Americano¨ breakfast.



Surely we can´t consume that after only just consuming our bus breakfast?

The Australians have triumphed over their second breakfast.  No wonder Australia has taken over the USA as the world´s fattest country.

For dinner we head to the Hyatt, which apparently has Mendoza´s best steak according to a local magazine (probably funded by the Hyatt...).  It doesn´t disappoint.  More Malbec consumed also.  (You will notice that most of my time in Argentina is spent eating and drinking... this is the perfect way to spend a holiday).

The next day in Mendoza we head out on some wine tours.  They drive us a little outside the city to the vineyards.  Unfortunately due to it being winter, the vineyards aren´t much to look at.  Just a whole lot of dead looking vines in dry soil.
I struggle to believe that these have ever produced a grape in their lives!  We are on a bilingual tour, which means everything gets said first in Spanish, and then in English.  The English Speakers can´t help feeling that something gets left out in our translation.  Generally the explanations go like this:

GUIDE:  Oggada boogada, oogaa booga, bibida bobada bibada. Lo siento mucho gusto ribido robodo chibido bladbidi blah blah memento spirento a la de colcame... (don´t try to translate that, in case its not obvious, I am just typing gibberish, but they speak for several minutes)

SPANISH SPEAKERS:  Ha ha ha ha ha (hearty laugh by all at an apparently classic joke by the guide)

GUIDE:  A blabidi bla bla cien shen mosomo.... (more Spanish explanation)

SPANISH SPEAKERS:  (All nod intently with great interest)

GUIDE:  (At last addressing the English speakers)  These are the grape vines.  END EXPLANATION



Hmmmm... definitely something gets lost in translation.  Our explanations are always about one fifth of the length of the Spanish ones.

Eventually they finish the explaining and get to the tasting.  Our first wine of the day at about 10am:
Its important to swirl you wine while looking and smelling it before drinking.  Mainly to ensure you look like a pretentious dickhead and to show people around you that you know what you are doing...

At one winery, they spend a long time explaining to us how they are an organic winery which uses no chemicals in production, everything is completely natural.  So you can understand my horror, when I see this right next to the grape vines!!!

Those, my friends, are gigantic oil wells!  I can´t help but think they are releasing some sort of toxic waste into the same organic soil that this lovely fresh natural wine is coming from...

We are treated to a fairly significant buffet lunch, all looks very delicious.  Alice and I are both excited to see what we believe is calamari rings served as part of the entre.
We both tuck in, but it doesn´t taste quite right. In fact it tastes down right awful.  We enquire as to what this is and are informed that it is cow stomach... or tripe.  I can add that to my list of things I don´t want to eat again, along with frogs and guinea pig.

Spanish still not improving
That night, on our way to dinner, Alice and I decide to stop in first at a little bar and have a bottle of red wine as its still early.  Its important to keep hydrated, so Alice attempts to order a soda water, or ´Agua con gas´.  Waiter looks confused.  Alice repeats her request several times, and eventually the waiter appears to understand and leaves the table.  He returns with this:


Hmmm.. note quite a soda water.  I guess potentially at some point this water did have gas in it, and it is now frozen.

High Andes tour
So I may have consumed a little too much Malbec the previous day and night.  Once again, I find myself slightly hungover and about to undertake an altitude tour.  We board a bus of entirely spanish speaking people as the only two English speaking people.  This means the guide has to translate everything for just 2 people out of about 12.  I think she is annoyed.  I would be happier if she didn´t translate because then I wouldn´t feel like I had to open my eyes every time she spoke English.

She seems to be crapping on a lot about a bridge.  Apparently its very important and famous.  Nobody is quite sure who built it, maybe the Spanish, maybe the Inka´s, maybe San Martin.  But after all this talk I am expecting something pretty impressive that is for sure.  What I am not expecting is this:

This bridge is barely 3m long, and 2 m high.  And what is worse, is that the water doesn´t even go under the bridge, it goes to the right of it.  So basically if you walked over the bridge, it will lead you straight into the stream... I think the reason nobody knows who built it, is that nobody wants to claim responsibility for it.

We continue up the Andes and the dry surroundings gradually become covered in snow.  This is my first time in snow.  Some children have built a pretty good snowman.  Realising I will have neither the patience nor skill to construct this, I go and acquaint myself with theirs.

Whoops

(Crying heard in the background...) Hmm. head wasn´t attached quite as firmly as expected.  Never mind, some children have constructed another even more impressive one!


Shit... not again.

(More crying...)

Better get back on the bus.  We head up to see the highest point in the Americas.  We ask the tour guide to take a photo of us.  She keeps telling me to move forwards, backwards, bend back because I am blocking the view of it.  Until, in the end, I have adopted a stance which makes me look camper than the love child of Peter Allen and Liberace.

Glad that is the only photo we have to remember of this important moment of the trip...

Back to Mendoza, then back on another overnight bus to Buenos Aires.  We have about 6 hours to spend there before boarding yet another overnight bus to Iguazu Falls.

Luxury at last
16 or so hours later we are in Port Iguazu, where we are transferred to the Sheraton to check in at about 2pm.  I guess some time ago, the Sheraton put a lot of money into a brown paper bag and handed it to a president or some dodgy politician to be given the right to construct their resort (which, compared to the surroundings, is kind of an eyesore) right in the middle of a national park, only a few hundred metres from the falls (one of the natural wonders of the world).  Yay!  Here is the view from our balcony:


Yay!

And another shot from the hotel as I enjoy my first beer:

Yay!

We go for a wander to check out the falls.  Our full day tour is tomorrow, but its only a few hundred metres so definitely worth the stroll to get a sneak preview.

Breathtaking!

Anyway, enough of that, plenty of time to see the falls tomorrow.  Alice and I head back to the hotel and take up our rightful positions beside the swimming pool, cocktails in hand.  After a few cocktails, we decide to go and see about our compelementary ´whirlpool´ experience.  We aren´t really sure what this is, but apparently we have to wait about half an hour before we can do it, so they offer us to spend half an hour in the sauna while we wait.  Sounds good.

Male and female saunas are separate, so we head to our respective rooms for half an hour.  I come back to the meeting spot, fully clothed.  Alice is sitting in the waiting area wearing the complementary bath robe.  Without giving it a great deal of thought I head back to the changing room and change into my bathrobe, head back to the waiting area and very carefully sit down.

Awkwardly I enquire of Alice ´Are you naked under that?´.  Horrified at this suggestion, she replies ´No, of course not, we are about to get in a public pool, I am wearing my togs.´ 

Right... I head back to the change room once more and apply appropriate swimming clothes.  Glad that happened before we got to the whirlpool experience.  The whirlpool experience turns out to basically be a series of water massages jets for your back, head, shoulders, feet.  Sooo relaxing.

We return to our room and drink the bottle of wine we smuggled in to avoid paying the outrageous prices charged by the Sheraton.  Unfortunately this significantly increases our tolerance to later outrages prices to be charged by the Sheraton while we enjoy our three course meal, with a massive steak, and a bottle of wine, and some champagne... and a slightly overpriced glass of cognac to top it all off.  When we check out we are kind of shocked to realise we have just spent US$800 between 2pm yesterday, and 8am today... and most of it between 2pm and midnight.  Luxury comes at a price, and it was definitely worth it... I never want to leave.



We go on our falls tour, it is spectacular.  See photos for proof.




It takes two to tango
Back to Buenos Aires on ANOTHER overnight bus.  I think we have now spent more time on busses than on land over the last 4 days.  We book to see a tango show.  Unfortunately, said tango show also comes with a compulsory tango class!

While we got off to a shaky start, with Alice in her grandpa slippers and me in my hiking boots, we manage to graduate with flying colours!  Certificate to prove it!

 The show is far more impressive than our 1 hour dance lesson had resulted in.  And came with a great steak, and all you can drink wine.

That brings us to today, where Alice has dragged me to another boring street to get photos in front of colourful walls...
 

And we also checked out more gardens, containing even more statues of topless women (the city is littered with statues of topless women... yay!).

Today we managed to get our obligatory steak in at lunch time.  However, given it is our last night in BA we are about to head to a very highly recommended restaurant, where I will more than likely consume my second steak of the day.  This is indeed a fitting end to an amazing 6 week journey!





So that is about it!  My plane leaves tomorrow at 2pm Argentina time, and arrives in Brisbane on Tuesday night sometime.  Its all over!

I hope you have enjoyed blog and it will serve as a guide to any of you considering travel to South America in the near, or distant, future!

Adios!

Thursday, August 4, 2011

On to Argentina

So Alice and I have now managed to survive on our own for six entire days!  Well done us!

Our first task, was to get ourselves to Uyuni to go on a tour of the salt flats.  As with everything in South America, travelling a few hundred kilometres takes far longer than it should.  Our journey starts reasonably early in the morning (9am) where we must make our way from our hostel to the bus terminal in La Paz.

Don´t try and rip me off because I´m a tourist!
So we hail a taxi near our hostel and ask him to take us to the bus station.  Trying our best to say ¨Estacion de autobuses¨, we eventually give up and just get out our map and point to it.  In South America, it is normal at this point to negotiate the cost of the taxi, but this detail slipped our attention at the time.

So we arrive at the bus station, and the taxi driver says ´Quince Bolivianos´.  Being the experts at Spanish that we are, we mistakenly assume he has said ´50 Bolivianos´.  Which is outrageous.  So we hand him a 10B note.  He repeatedly says ´Quince´, but not wanting to be ripped off, Alice and I stand our ground.  We even fail to pick up with he starts saying ´Cinco mas´ or ´Five more´, that he has in fact asked us for 15 Bolivianos, not 50.  Eventually he tires of arguing and drives off.  It wasn´t until about 15 (Quince) minutes later that we realise he was asking for 15B, and we had just argued over 5 Boliviaos.  That is about 80 cents...

Once in the bus terminal, we purchase a ticket for the bus (I will be honest, we cheated a bit here as we had our Intrepid Tour guide write us a pretty detailed list of instructions on how to get to Uyuni) and pay the departure tax.  This bus takes a few hours and gets us to a pretty dirty little town called Oruro, where we have a two hour or so wait before catching this train:



To Uyuni.

The train initially looks very comfortable, it has a TV, heating, and reasonably comfortable seats.  However, it turns our that our seats are the two right next to the door at the back of the cabin.  The only way to close said door is to absolutely slam it shut, otherwise it will just swing back open.  Further, our carriage is one carriage away from the dining cart, and there are probably another 3 or 4 carriages in front of us.  Each cabin has about 30 people sitting in it.  So, throughout the 7 hour train journey, there are 90 to 120 people who need to walk through our cabin to go the dining cart.  All of whom will take three goes to shut the door, until they learn they will need to slam it.  All of this is going on in my left ear.

To make it worse, the train has windows that open and close in small segments, locking into place every 10 centimetres or so.  Alice has the window seat, and insists on keeping the window closed, except for all of the times when she has to reopen it to take photos out the window.  Each opening and closing generates about 4 loud bangs.  This is in my right ear.

Fortunately, to distract me from it all I have the soothing sounds of Culture Club (Boy George) singing Karma Chameleon and other hits from about that era, which is what the train company thinks is suitable entertainment.

At the end of the ride we are greeted with this scene of complete havoc.


That is the several hundred customers, trying to push their way to the baggage cart to get their baggage off.  Eventually they move all the bags to a room, which is just as bad.

The next day we are transported around 9am to the office of our salt flat tour company.  I can´t wait to meet our ´Professional Speaking English Guide´.



Turns out our guide is not English at all, he is in fact Bolivian.  However his English is pretty good.  Alice spends most of the trip distracted by his small hands, which she thinks were disproportionately small even for his short stature.

We head out to the Salt Flats.  On the way we check out a train graveyard (sorry, no photos, they are on Alice´s camera).  Once you get to the Salt Flats, it is basically 100´s of tourists taking stupid photos.  It is actually quite difficult to do as there is so much glare that you can´t really see through the view finder of your camera what you´re taking a photo of.  Here are some of our best efforts (Alice and I, plus our tour mates Jenny, Sarah from Sweden, and Chiraag and Nick from England).











After having our fill of photographs we drive onto Fish Island, which is a truly bizarre place.  It is an island, as the name would suggest, in the middle of all this salt, completely covered in cacti.  It is REALLY windy here, and the wind is ice cold.




After exploring the island for a while we jump back in our 1980s Toyota Hilux and head to our accommodation for the night.  A building entirely made of salt.  That includes walls, beds, floors, pillars to hold the roof. The roof is a thatch roof, the only thing not made of salt.  As suspected, salt is not terribly good at keeping in warmth and it is pretty bloody cold.  A few bottles of red wine do the trick to provide warmth (or at least ignorance of the cold).

More Mummies

We awake in the morning and have a quick breakfast before heading out on the second day of our tour.  This takes us to another (groan) 1000 or so year old grave site where we see another 15 - 20 skeletons of mummies in the dirt.  This cost us 10 Bolivianos ($1.40ish), and it wasn´t worth any of them.  It was cold and windy.  Here is me next to an ´Apacheta´, or translated ´Pile of rocks´.


Is the pile of rocks old?  No, apparently not.  There is nothing particularly interesting about it at all, it is just there.  Probably nobody could be bothered moving it, and it was just easier to put a sign next to it like it was supposed to be there.

Change of itinerary
So, apparently it is so cold and windy that our tour guide has to call off the rest of our planned journey.  It has been snowing in the regions we were to visit, which means all of the pink flamingos are apparently dead.  While I think a photo with me and a few thousand pink flamingo carcasses would be great for the album, it is agreed within our group that we just head back to Uyuni.

The tour guide offers to take us instead to some hot springs.  But neither Alice nor I have a towel with us, so we opt out of that option, and opt in to the ´Extreme Fun Pub´ in Uyuni.  This place is hilarious.  When you order the cocktails, they come in mystery glasses.  Hilarious!




Somewhere in here, Alice and I also managed to do something completely on our own.  Because our trip gets cut short by a day, we need to move our bus tickets earlier by one day.  We go to our bus company and establish, with some difficulty, that the bus is full. This is all done in ou limited, broken, Spanish.  We then take our limited broken Spanish to another bus company, and manage to purcahse two tickets.  Slightly concerned that they are half the price of our other tickets we decide it is better to be uncomfortable and out of Uyuni, than wait another day here for a comfortable bus.  We head back to our other bus company, and manage to cancel our tickets and obtain a full refund!  Yay us!

Our bus leaves at 8pm and arrives at 6am.  This was a TERRIBLE bus journey.  It is dark, but I think most of the time the bus is not even driving on a road, as we are moving at about 1km per hour and I can hear the wheels spinning in dirt/mud.  The only thing to lighten the mood is the group of 6 or so Brazilian guys, probably aged in their early 20s, who had clearly been drinking all day, and insist on meeting us and dancing around us like Kangaroos once they find out we are from Australia.

Death Road
Once we are back in La Paz, we check into two hostels.  The first one is cheap, only US$10.  But I will point out that it was Alice, not me, who suggested after we take a nap in it that perhaps we search for more comfortable lodging.  I do not hesitate to agree. (I was probably about 1 second from making the same suggestion).  We also book our places for a pleasant ´bike ride´ the next day on the WORLD´S MOST DANGEROUS ROAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I originally wasn´t going to do this ride, but because Alice got food poisoning when she was supposed to go with our tour group, I end up agreeing to be her companion.  At the very worst I can just sit in the safety bus and have a pleasant drive down the mountain.  We start the day high, at 4700m above sea level where it is BLOODY  FREEZING and there is snow not too far from us on the mountain top.

Here we are in our sexy high-vis wind proof riding gear.






We then ride 60km or so down the mountain, which will also take us to about 1000m above sea level where it is actually warm!  I haven´t ridden a bicycle since probably the year 2000, or maybe earlier.  I am a little apprehensive, but because it is all down hill at least I don´t have to put a great deal of effort into it.  There are some flat bits which, to my disgust, require me to pedal, but these are fairly short.

The first third is on bitumen, but after that we get onto the old road, which is made of dirt, and has drops to the side of the road of several hundred metres most of the way.



This road is called death road for a reason.  The last death on this road was in June this year!  People get distracted by butterflies and follow them off the cliff, forget they are still turning a corner (some of them are 180 degrees) and ride off the cliff, lose their brakes and ride off the cliff, adjust their goggles and ride off the cliff, try to take self portraits on their camera while riding and ride off the cliff.  However, it becomes quite plain that the road is safe unless, as our tour guide puts it ´You ride like a f**king idiot´.





I am not sure why Alice has chosen to put such ´active´ activities in the 6 weeks of the journey that I am with her, considering that I am VERY unfit.  Especially when, once I go back to Australia, she is heading to Colombia to sit on a beach and drink cocktails out of coconuts for four weeks... I signed up for the wrong end of the holiday!

At the bottom of the mountain we are given a buffet lunch at a nature reserve.  Here there are several species of monkeys, birds, turtles, a boa, and of course some dogs for good measure, that have run of the place.





 They jump onto people, and you are not allowed to touch them.  They will hop off you when they are done.  We are told to empty our pockets of all valuables, because the monkeys will pick pocket us.



The monkey in the photo above (and I assure there is a monkey there somewhere...) has epilepsy and so is kept in a cage.  Normally, in the wild, its family/friends would kill it.  However here it is kept and given epilepsy drugs, which are apparently very expensive.  Further, because it has been on them so long it has to keep getting a higher and higher dose, at ever increasing cost.  Meanwhile, 30% of the Bolivian population lives below the poverty line on less than $2/day...



This large parrot, only minutes after this photo was taken, gets attacked by a Spider Monkey.  Very amusing... turns out the animals might not be as happy living together as the owners make out!  I guess the Spider Monkey thought this bird, with its colourful feathers, was getting far more attention than it deserved.

For the 3 hour drive back up the mountain we treat ourselves to a well deserved beverage.




So that is about it.

We are currently sitting at the airport in Santa Cruz after catching an early morning flight from La Paz.  Our airline from Santa Cruz to Buenos Aires is Aerolineas, and we arrived to find a completely empty desk.  By the look of the vacant desk and the rusting gold plated sign behind it, Aerolineas may have gone bankrupt since we booked our tickets (or perhaps even before...), but this is still early days, we will give them another hour or so before getting too concerned.
Ciao.