Justine and Dylan’s Travel Blog

Alright, have been promising this for a little while, but they’re now all up (as always on www.dylanav.com). And by “all”, I mean approx. 1900 highlights (out of approx 7000 photos so far). Hmmm. Sorry about that. I haven’t brought the number down any further because we’ve just seen a lot of stuff lately.

Note: I haven’t done ANY editing of the photos (so yes, I know there is room for improvement with quite a few of them), but I plan to at some stage pick a couple of dozen really good ones, do the usual postprocessing (levels, cropping, etc) and put them up somewhere separate. Maybe in June

Some of the (scenic) highlights of the trip so far:

→ Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail, Peru: Day 1, Day 2 (incl. Dead Woman’s Pass), Day 3 (incl. Second Pass), Day4 (incl. Sun Gate, Machu Picchu and Wayna Picchu)

→ Walking through the snow to Condoriri base camp, Cordillera Real, Bolivia

→ Looking out over the Salar de Uyuni (Uyuni salt flats) from Isla de Pescatores, Bolivia

→ Flamengoes at Laguna Colorada, Altiplano, Bolivia

→ Climbing Vulcan Lascar to 5480m, Chile

→ Refugio Frey circuit walk (incl Refugio Lynch and Cordon Catedral), Nahuel Huapi NP, Argentina

→ Laguna de los Tres, Los Glaciares NP, Patagonia, Argentina: Take #1 (incl. hail coming in horizontally and Piedras Blancas) and Take #2 (incl. almost perfect weather and Laguna Sucia)

→ Watching the sun rise over Cerro Fitz Roy on a perfectly clear day, Los Glaciares NP, Patagonia, Argentina

→ Glacier walking on Glaciar Grande at the base of Cerro Torre, Los Glaciares NP, Patagonia, Argentina

→ Valle des Frances, Torres del Paine NP, Patagonia, Chile: Take #1 (incl. hanging bridge near Campamento Italiano) and Take #2 (incl. perfect weather around the amphitheatre near Campamento Britannico)

→ Los Cuernos and Las Torres, Torres del Paine NP, Patagonia, Chile

→ Watching the sun set over Manhattan from the Rockefeller Center, New York, U.S.

Off to Japan, Nepal, China and Thailand next week. Should be good for a few more highlights

These two places are in Holland by the way, just in case not everyone’s familiar with them.

The first is the place where our friends who we have been staying with live. Not far from where I was born and lived for 18 years, it’s always interesting coming back here (especially after a previous post where I just mentioned how I now feel like I’m coming home – but not quite – when visiting London or Melbourne… seem to have collected a few “homes” around this planet…). Again it’s been great catching up with friends and a good chance to catch up with some homework (didn’t quite get around to organising that whole second leg of our journey around Japan, Nepal, China and Thailand before we left). I imagine it won’t be too long before we’ll be sorely missing knowing some good friends and being in countries where we speak the langugage and know where everything is. Oh well, plenty of that in Melbourne coming up.

The second place is a place not far from where we’re staying: to add a little touristy flavour to our otherwise social agenda, we went to a reconstructed fortress village called Bourtange. Not sure how to describe it really, it’s not exactly a fortress, but far more protected (with moats, drawbridges, etc) than your average village (was in 1742 anyway). Not a bad day out, but I’ve decided it’s definitely more interesting from the sky than it is at ground level: check out the google map from the Vesting Bourtange homepage.

Oh, and did I mention all the food? Gotta love stamppot met rookworst, snert, stroopwafels, pannekoeken (at Het Pannekoekschip of course), koek, Jonge Goudse, Fries suikerbrood, etc. Me thinks it’s time to go for another hike… soon.

Visiting London (for a weekend) was a little odd. Arriving at Heathrow, catching public transport into Camden (where we were staying with friends) and going out in London was all so familiar. Yet in the back of my mind I knew that it was only for three days and that I was sleeping on a fold-out sofa at a friend’s place. Very odd and I guess similar to the feelings (sort of) that I get these days in Melbourne: you know the place back to front and it kind of feels like home, but you know you don’t live there. I guess the only difference now (between London and Melbourne) is that for Melbourne this won’t be the case for much longer…

Either way, it was great to catch up with a few of our friends who were in town at the same time. Hope to see them again some time, but it might be a little while now we don’t live down the street any more…

Next stop was New York. Time for some shopping, walking around and as turned out, some even chillier weather.

First day it was -5 degrees Celcius and snowing pretty hard. Pretty cool for those of us who still get excited about walking through snow (read: Justine).

Second day it was much warmer (ie just above zero degrees)… but that just meant that the snow turned to rain. Doh. From Battery Park we could hardly see the Statue of Liberty and most of the tops of skyscrapers were hidden in clouds. Shows indoors (Spamalot musical and a comedy show at Carolines on Broadway) during these two days made up for the weather and come highly recommended (although if you know Monty Python’s Quest for the Holy Grail a lot of the jokes in Spamalot are going to sound familiar). Ice cream from the Cold Stone Creamery… well, let’s just say we ate it inside.

And then there was the third day… Perfectly clear day, sun, etc. Couldn’t have asked for a better (Valentine’s!) Day. Walked around Central Park and finished it off looking at the sun set over Manhattan from the Rockefeller Center (aka Top of the Rock). This is incidentally the building during the construction of which the famous picture was taken of the construction workers eating lunch on a steel beam tens of stories above the ground (just do a Google image search for “construction workers rockefeller” and you’ll see what I’m talking about).

Highlight of the last day before we flew out was definitely a shop called Crumbs which makes cupcakes. Apparently they started the “cupcake rage” a few years ago. Whatever, but I have to admit that it’s the best cupcake I’ve ever had so they’re probably right.

We managed to time our visit to Vancouver so that it coincided with a parade held to celebrate the Chinese New Year (completely coincidentally… we all know all our trips are organised around hiking seasons). Great little bonus as it was quite a spectacular affair with the various types of dragon costumes, colourful flags and other types of costumes on display.

Of course it did rain, but that was apparently supposed to be that way in order to give it that Canadian touch.