Alright, so perhaps Xmas was a few days ago but when you´re on holidays you don´t really know what day of the week it is or whether it´s a major holiday or not. Not having internet for a few days didn´t help either in getting our Xmas wishes out.
Anyway, I realise I´m a bit behind with my posts (now in El Chalten in the Los Glaciaros National Park in Argentina btw), which will be fixed soon enough, but as a bit of a preview: we basically spent Xmas day hiking near Bariloche and had dinner with all the others on the Dragoman truck at a microbrewery which also did some great steak and chocolate mousse. Oh, and did I mention that Bariloche is considered the chocolate capital of Argentina? Either way, let´s just say we´re coping with the whole setup at the moment, even if Xmas was a little strange this year…
Will be spending NYE in El Calafate (a small city wedged between a couple of national parks), again undoubtedly eating too much in between hikes. Just the way we (or I anyway) like it 
Finally, if I don´t get to internet before then, have a great New Years everyone! Looking forward to catching up with you all around the world over the coming year!
Well, today we went mountain biking from Pucon. Had to fit in at least a few activities (we did hiking and biking) as would have felt guilty skipping every adventure activity on offer here (which covers just about most in existence). So mountain biking it was today. Had forgotten (from Tuscany in 2005) that we don´t go cycling often and that hilly places are not a good place to start. Scenery was great (especially the Ojos de Calburgua, so blue lakes and waterfalls… very photogenic), but let´s just say I´ll sleep well tonight. And I´ll be walking funny for a few days.
Last thing I thought worth mentioning is the “vulcano traffic light” installed on the roof of the tourist information centre. As I mentioned before, Pucon is near the (still active) Villaricca vulcano (at the base pretty much actually), so I guess they figured some sort of vulcano information device would be a good idea. It´s currently on green which I´m guessing is a good thing. If it hits red I guess things are going to get interesting around here very quickly. Or it will anyway for those tourists stupid enough to need a traffic light to tell them that the vulcano is going off. Didn´t work out what the orange was for. Perhaps I should´ve read the explanatory text that went with the traffic light. Silly tourist.
Huerquehue is a national park not far from Pucon where we are now. Walk was about 17kms and only between 800 and 1400m high (woohoo, no worries about altitude any more… although we weren´t quite sprinting up the hills I have to admit… with the lower altitude the temperature also seems to have picked up a bit). Apart from the views of the local vulcano (Villaricca), the park has some very scenic lakes and a tree variety called the Araucaria. Kind of like a cross between a palm tree and a pine tree with dinosaur scales. They get pretty big and it made for a nice change in the forest scenery. So did the trees actually which I wasn´t used to any more after 4 weeks above 3000m including Altiplano´s and deserts (not a lot of trees there). Which reminds me that Pucon is funnily enough about the closest thing I´ve seen to Switzerland (except with snow capped vulcanoes rather than mountains), although apparently Bariloche (in Argentina where we´re off to next), is even more so. Strange.
I guess you could be stuck in worse places, but it´s simply a case of me being extremely spoilt these days.
La Serena is a beach town at the southern end of the Atacama desert which we got to after driving south for a couple of days from San Pedro (enjoyed the bush camping on the way down actually). If you´re into lying on a beach, great. Otherwise, the town centre was ok and very, very Western/modern (after Bolivia anyway), but overal getting some stamps here was the highlight.
Santiago is just a big city. The biggest we´ve been to since London actually (5m+ people). Its centre is great for shopping but otherwise it was great to just be out of the tent and into a nice hotel for a few days. Did enjoy the farewell dinner (it was the end of the Cusco to Santiago leg for some of our fellow Dragoman travellers… doesn´t time fly), great food.
Also got quite a few chores done but somehow managed to again run out of time for internetting. Interesting how that happens when you´re travelling. Oh well. Posting some photos will eventuate at some stage.
After having lived at above 3000m since Cusco and above 4000m (roughly) since the Altiplano, we thought we´d try and see how much higher we could go. Fortunately around San Pedro there are several vulcanoes that go up to 5500 or even 6000m. Easy fixed.
Finding a guide was just as easy, but he pretty much scoffed at our recent Inca Trail and Cordillera Blanca experience (latter only up to 4800m, defn not high enough), so an “easy one” (5480m going by my GPS) called Lascar was selected. The other cool thing was that each morning it still emits a little smoke and we could see into the crater from the top. The walk started at 4900m so we had a little bit of a head start, but still…
Well, we weren´t disappointed. Physically it was quite a challenge and at a height where I´d say hiking is not really great fun any more (think: one step, one or two breaths, one step, one or two breaths, etc… and add a few breaks and breathless gasps in between), but the views were hard to beat. Apart from being able to see the whole crater(admittedly very smelly, ie sulphuric, ie rotten egg gas), we could see all the way along the chain of vulcanoes that previously we´d only seen from San Pedro and in most other directions. Very, very cool. A few more photos might´ve been taken. Sleep was quite good that night too.
Next time we go up this high will be in Nepal (Annapurna Circuit), so I guess an interesting side effect was that we now know we´ll be able to actually complete it (highest point is at 5419m, ie a bit lower), which is always good to know before you fly half way around the world and hike for 10 days to get somewhere
First stop in Chile was San Pedro de Atacama. Interesting place after a little while in Bolivia; almost Western and WAY more expensive. Enjoyed the return of some mod-cons though. Landscape hadn´t changed though. It´s in the middle of the Atacama desert (driest place in earth, which helped with the camping of course… nobody enjoys camping when it rains, I don´t care what they say… yes, even if they´re from Scotland) and has all the associated goodies: salt flats, geysers, moon like scenery, etc.
We did a tour of the Moon Valley as it´s known which had some cool rock formations and some great views of the chain of vulcanoes that make up the Andes around there. Sunset was also nice (although a little sandy, got to love wind in the desert)…
Well, despite some earlier concerns as to travel plans through Bolivia (due to violent demonstrations days before we arrived), we´ve now left Bolivia and managed to do everything as planned.
First up was Potosi (altitude 4000m), an old mining town (which used to be the richest and largest city in the world a couple of hundred years ago). Didn´t do the mines; not interested in seeing poor people being exploited while submitting ourselves to some very dodgy mining OH&S standards. Did check out the place itself which was great. Very cruisy and some great views from the roof of the San Francisco convent (you actually get to walk on the roof!).
Next up was Salar de Uyuni, aka the Uyuni salt flats. These are massive salt plains (12,000 square km, ie larger than Holland) which you can drive around in jeeps (or be driven around in jeeps as in our case) and which in some spots stretch as far as you can see. Interesting place when you´re as tanned as I am. Cool also are these “islands” which you can drive up to; literally just hills I guess which happened to be higher than the surrounding layer of salt (up to 120m) and are now little oases with cacti, etc. The one we visited was Isla del Pescadores. Translated means something to do with fish. Interesting name, I´m thinking more to do with the shape than what you´re going to catch off the edge of it.
And then finally (on our way out to Chile), the Altiplano. These plains are at 4000m or more and let´s just say we managed to get away from most of the tourists. Our overland truck happily dragged us over the pass (5000m) and past a whole bunch of absolutely stunning sights that I´m guessing most people don´t get to see: lakes with red algae and mineral deposits with flamingoes (Laguna Colorado), similar lake but with different minerals making it bright blue (Laguna Azul) and not to be outdone a green version for good measure (Lago Verde), all surrounded by vulcanoes, landscapes created by these vulcanoes and other mountains. A few photos might have been taken.
As an aside, for the enjoyment (or not) for those who haven´t been to not-so civilised places like La Paz (or Rome or the Arc du Triomphe in Paris), I thought I´d throw in a few traffic rules we learned yesterday on our way through La Paz as passengers in one of the local taxi´s… (although I imagine these will be very familiar to anyone who´s been to South America, Africa, Asia or Bendigo)
- Adhering to red lights is optional
- If someone is tooting their horn at you, you´re ok: at that stage you know you´ve been seen (and will probably not be mowed down)
- Lines on roads to indicate lanes are a waste of paint. Besides, you can fit more lanes onto a slab of concrete if lanes are not marked.
- There is always an invisible third lane in the middle of the road. The direction of this lane varies depending on the speed and size of oncoming traffic
- A gap is a gap. A gap is always worth going for. Lives are expendable when a gap has been sighted
- Taxi drivers are actually part-time off-road rally drivers. This becomes apparent when not on sealed roads.
- There are no bonus points for hitting old ladies, dogs, people with boxes of stuff, etc. as these are all to easy to hit: for some reason they seem to throw themselves (or perhaps they are thrown?) in front of oncoming traffic every few metres
- You don´t need a power nap when tired: a near miss accident every few minutes is guaranteed to keep the adrenaline pumping all day…
More interestingly, everyone seems to go by the same rules and survives. I´d just be intrigued to find out how driving lessons are conducted…
Fortunately the second day was a little more productive than our first day in La Paz (although not particularly surprising). We did a walk from Tuni (about two hours outside of La Paz) to the Condoriri base camp at 4700m, through stunning scenery. You can see why people keep coming back for the many treks in the Bolivian mountains.
Condoriri is one of the mountains in the Cordillera Real and like most is a rather technical climb if you want to get to the top. The walk to base camp, although reasonably tough (17kms, between 4300m and 4700m), fortunately only involves very gentle slopes (so is very easy on the knees, unlike the Inca Trail!).
Again, we seemed to be very lucky with the weather. The sun was out all day and when we set out the area was covered in a thin layer of snow from the previous night. By the time we had lunch though, the snow was gone and had transformed the landscape into a green version of the one we walked through in the morning. Very cool.
Again, some pictures to follow when I get to a (much faster) computer with USB and some sort of image editing (resize) software (other than MS Paint in Spanish… que??).
And have been for a few days… Easy to forget when you´re on holidays
Go to the Our Wedding page on the left for the details as to how to check them out.