toogreytogrind

Feliz Navidad to all, even the noisy Israelies in the next dorm.

We've got our tickets booked for Pucon and the hostel booked there. I'm still struggling with the rapid speed of the Spanish.

Navidad en Santiago.
We are stopping at the Casa Roja Hostel as we wanted a bit more of a party time for Christmas. So far it's been good and we've met a good bunch of people. Our dorm is not that noisy so that's probably one factor.

One North London guy we met said he had problems telling people that he was English and that they didn't believe him, and that he had to say he was Indian. I guess they don't know that the UK is very multi-cultural here in chile.

We tried to buy some ciproflaxina from one farmacia and we were told that we would need a percription from a doctor. I was shocked and pissed off! But thinking back I thought it was iresponsible to sell it over the counter in all the other countries we've visited. I'm not sure which is right now bacteria can cross borders.

After surviving on Bolivian food for a month a trip to the sea sounded fantastic. I would be able to eat ceviche again and would have to choose what type of fish I wanted to eat. Here we are La Serena a sea side town and sea food is, is, well not really abundent, and not that good, the rest of the food is not that good either. They have the food, for example you go to the supermarket and there`s loads of sea food and cheap as well. It´s just that it doesn´t get to the streets and if it does then it´s over cooked.

You´re not even safe eating a pizza. We had a walk down to the sea front and went to La Mia Pizza, which is listed in Lonely Planet. Both our pizzas were substandard and had English prices. I now have another type of food I´m off eating.

There´s also Pikies here as well. "My friend, give me money."

Antofagasta was surprisingly nice, Lonely Planet paints a bad picture of the place but it has a nice Plaza to hang out in. Albeit if you don`t mind a bit of hassel from Pikies. These gypsy women were begging for money for their babies and WOW how many babies did they have. Birth control was obviously a foreign concept for them. Well for all of Antofagasta, you can`t walk down any street without there being at least one pregnant woman knocking about. Also, these gypsy women far from looked like they were Hank Marvin.

The night we were leaving, well the morning about 5 in the morning. Lisa jumped into bed with me and was holding me and shaking me. Well I thought that she was shaking me, then she said "There´s an earthquake."

Me: "oh yeh, there`s an earthquake." The whole room was shaking for another 10 seconds or so and then stopped and I went back to sleep.

The quake knocked out the electricity for our block, it was talked about on the local radio station. In the morning when the receptionist commented about it and said it was a five.

Thinking back it was all a bit sureal and I was so tired, it was like a dream. I was still tired in the morning when we left for our 12 hour journey to La Serena which turned into a 13 hour trip.

San Pedro was a shock I was used to my 50p lunches over in Bolivia but in San Pedro it would be more like 5 pounds or 5000 pesos. We moved hostels to Eden the cheapest place we could find and are making good use of the kitchen.

Valle de la luna: Maybe it´s because I´ve seen so much of this type of scenary and it´s become the norm, that I wasn´t blown away with this place.

Quebrada del Diablo: A nice bit of single track mountain biking. Very sandy and slippy, which kept the speed down but some nice but not fantastic riding.

Next stop: Antofagasta is a coastal town so ceviche should be back on the menu.

It was time to say goodbye to Salta, so instead of cooking we headed out for a meal at the Irish Bar. I went for steak again, and it arrived pulsing with life, or jugoso how they call it here. We washed down our meals with a few Salta Negras, Guiness substitute. Then we crashed out early due to our early rise the next day.

Sunday morning, we were walking to the bus station at about 6am and the crowds were leaving the clubs. We arrived ready as we possibly could be for our 9 hour journey to San Pedro. The trip was smooth and quite relaxed.


Arriving at San Pedro I had no dollers to change, Argentinian pesos which I want to keep, and Bolivianos which I changed. 110 Bolivianos, enough for a room a nice meal and a piss up. In San Pedro you money dosen`t quite as far, when my 110 was changed up it came out as 5500 pasos. Most places are advertising a meal as 7000-8000, ie 7-8 quid. Considering San Pedro has a reputation as a Hippy Hangout, ........ What do I want to say? Well I always though The Hippy Way was to get away from the money rat race.

This is something I`ve read on travel advise pages and blogsites. All the Latin American countries I´ve vistied up to Argentina the answer would be that you can`t. Well not if you look like me. On the whole in countries like Bolivia, the people ever don`t care about you being there or will comment maybe on your size, or you will hear gringo, but it`s never nasty. I guess, I didn`t really mind being different, and being looked at as something different.

Arriving in Argentina, you can blend in. yes there are still some indigenous looking people, I guess because we are still quite north. But It´s nice to be able to walk down the street and not stand out.

Jump, jump, everybody jump, jump......

We left the Belgrano, the name of our hostel. I never thought about the guerra de las malvinas up until now, how do the Argentinians feel about the British?

The trip down to Salta was strange, well it was normal, that`s why it was strange. There was trarmac on the roads, white and yellow lines, railings to stop the bus from leaving the road. We have grown too used to the roads in Bolivia, which have dust and rocks, ruts, and crosses with flowers.

Also we had a nice little break for about 1 and half hours, while the police checked the bus and baggage for that product that Bolivia is so famous or infamous for. We all had to get in lines with our bags and get our passports out. Another thing that we have got used to is the security guards in bolivia are like little boys with guns. This Argentinian guard had a easten european surname and was about 6´6´´ but he took one look at my British passport and must have thought "not worth it."

Arriving at Salta was like, well arriving at some European City, we´ve not had this kind of standard since New York. The prices are more as well, more or less the same prices as in Bolivia only there are 6 pesos to the pound and 16 Bolivianos to the pound.

Food, the food is also different the steak I had last night, even Lisa a vegy said that looks like the best steak you´ve had this trip, including America. I said "No, it`s the best steak I´ve had, ever." Not just that perfectly cooked as well. About 2.60 pounds so relativily expensive, but not for the quality.

Crossing the border of other countries, like Perú to Bolivia there´s not much difference apart from the cost of things in Bolivia. Bolivia is cheap, maybe one reason why we spent so much time here. Well that is a small reason the main reason was it`s gorgeous.

Hight: At the border crossing I saw something that I haven`t seen for a while tall people on the Argentinian side. Maybe I can blend in a bit more here!

Spanish: Up until now I`ve been getting the gist of 99-100% of the spanish, even if I didn`t know all the vocab. Things started changing in the South of Bolivia where the R at the begining of a word and RR in a word are pronounced like Z, not a spanish "th" but like an English Z. So a Fox instead of being a Zorro is pronounced ZoZo. Over the border is different altogether I`ve heard all the peculiarities of spanish in one sentence and understood nowt. I was trying to chill with the different vocab in each country but Argentina is mad. I reminds me of a Nigerian work collegue in London who went for a job and he passed everything apart from they didn`t understand him, he lost the job. Also Lisa notices that they are talking faster more like the speed of the Spanish, so far the Latin American has been slow. But maybe this is just because it`s a border town and Argentinian Spanish is easier!

Cost: We went for the cheapest hostel listed in LP and it was too expensive $85 A. We got somewhere for $50, we would need to adapt.

We were only planning a short stop here and we stayed 4 days, I`m not sure why this town is sleepy. The plan was to leave for the border, where there is an imagration office. I did notice that our 30 day pass for Bolivia was almost out and they just love to extract more money out of you for extra days.

I`d been in contact with Gravity Bolivia regarding working with them as a Mountain Bike Guide, but thinks were still not clear. It may be that we need to go back to La Paz, but we still needed to get a new stamp.

One good thing about doing the trip to the border from here is that you can take the train. With so many bad bus journeys it`s nice to have a change, even if it is a bad train journey. As it turned out it was a good train journey, when we finally left. The time changed from 9 am to 1pm.

La fontera: El rio villazón
Villazón - Bolivia
La Quiaca - Argentina
The original plan was to get a stamp for 90 days and stay in Bolivia but this crossing is free and Lonely Planet says that there is more facilities on the Argentina side. Don`t believe it! Yes, we crossed over to La Quiaca and there`s no ATM nor a bank that will change traveler cheques. I can`t get in touch with Gravity so we`re leaving for Salta tomorrow. There`s no sense in staying in a dead end frontera town. No offence La Quiaca but you leave Villazón with it`s colours and shops to La Quiaca which looks like it was something a few years ago but now it`s dead.

Tupiza has fantastic landscapes, this is cowboy country. Butch Casidy and the Sundance Kid setted down here to retire form all that bank robbing. Apparently one was named after the prison where he spent some time, the Sundance Prison, and the other was a Butcher. Not sure which was which, but there you go. There was a robbery at the local mine 99 years ago where all the miners wages were taken, but they never found who did it. Not Rocket Science me thinks!!! There is a Butch and Sundance tour but with little interest in it, it is very expensive I think just the tow of us would be 75pounds each for two days.

There is a Triathalon (Bike, 4x4 and horse) trip where you can see the sites, so we went for that.

Bike: an easy enough section of riding apart from the dogs and buses. There was one bus that was going so fast that I swear that it was sliding around the corner and went into a single track tunnel, sounding its horn just as it went in. We tried to get through the tunnel as quick as possible.

4x4 part 1: This was just a easy drive back to town to saddle up.

Horse: Now for the first hour I was enjoying it, I was trying to move with the horse. We were going up quebrada de inca. I just wasn`t taking in the views due to the pain, no matter how I tried to move with the horse I was getting bumped about. On the way back there seemed to be hundreds of dogs all having a go at our horses. I was glad to get of.

4x4 part 2: This was a drive up a quebrada and beyond, the drive was fantastic with iron coloured rocks and lead coloured rocks. The track was erroded with rain and very norrow in sections.

We had our bus ticket booked with OGLOBO for Tupiza for 8:00am. On arriving at the station and asking several times where the bus leaves from, and were told platform 8 or 11. At 8 en punto, i started to worry and went to the OGLOBO office I was given tickets for Trans Norte (an other company) and was taken to their office. I went to get Lisa and we waited. We finally borded the bus from the Imperial company and left for tupiza at 10am. Already I had enought but never mined only 6 hours to go.

The journey is along the pan-american highway. I know some of you will be picturing a highway as tarmack, railings and such like, but re-picture it as dust, rocks, mud and ruts.