it’s friday the 15th of february 2008, and i have a flight to go home. the problem is, i don’t have a plane to make that flight. great.
some problem in Buenos Aires with Aerolineas Argentina means there’s no connection to NZ, so i’m stuck in the Holiday Inn at Santiago International Airport. if everything’s sorted by sunday, i should be home on tuesday. i honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up later than that even, but here’s hoping not…
…that´s just another way of saying ‘beginning’ right? i hope so.
so here goes the last entry for this trip. i get to Bogota (Colombia) tomorrow, and the next day i’m on a flight back to Santiago (Chile). a few days from now i’ll leave Chile, head over the rainbow, and go back to the Land of Oz…
i just spent my last few days on the road chilling in Tayrona National Park (someone else’s photos), sleeping in a hammock in one of the most idillic beach settings you can imagine. i went swimming at sunrise and sunset. i never needed a towel. not everything has gone according to plan on this trip (party because i didn’t have that much of a plan), but i really can’t think of a better way to end this thing.
over the last year of travelling, i’ve been able to do exactly what i wanted. travelling for me isn’t about going and seeing all the toursity crap (which i saw anyway), but more about the doing and seeing the things i’d never heard about.
some of the things i never knew i’d do were stay on an estancia, chill in a desert oasis, see all the stars in the sky from the andes, find a giant hand in the middle of the desert (and then another in patagonia, and another on a beach), discover waterfalls at the end of the world, see dolphins from the island of Chiloe, drink absinth at 3,800m, and sleep in a hammock next to the beach. there’s a hundred other things that i’ve managed to forget already, and won’t remember again until sometime down the track when a sight, sound, or taste reminds me of what happened while i was here.
i’ve travelled the width and breadth of the continent, been from top to tail. i touched the pacific and the atlantic, i crossed the Beagle Channel and jumped in the Caribbean. i travelled from Buenos Aires to Bogota in bus (and i don’t even want to know how many hours it was all together). while i still can’t say i know south america, i at least know what i want to see more of. there’s always more to see if you look.
i’ve got uni a week after i get back (only this year to go!), and i’ll be working from about then too… adjusting to the Real World (that is, having to work, pay more than $2 a drink, and pass classes) should be interesting (and by ‘interesting’ i mean ‘incredibly painful’), but that too is part of the fun of travelling.
i am looking forward to going home (’HOME’ home) though.
i finally made it. after two months of travelling i’m on the coast of colombia. i’ve seen the carribbean, but haven’t been in it yet. YET.
in the end i had to skip over Cali and Medellin, but i know that one day i’ll be back to give the south/highlands of colombia the attention it deserves. colombia gets a pretty bad rap internationally, but in reality i feel much safer here than i have in Ecuador for example. everyone else who i’ve met who has been here as well has loved it. i’ve only been here 3 days (and one and a half of those were spent on buses), but i’m loving it so far.
looks like i might be off to the last day of Barranquilla’s carnival today. for the first time in 12 months, i met a guy who picked me as an aussie before i’d even spoken. every person i’ve sat next to on buses in colombia (ie. colombians) have thought i was colombian too. tomorrow i’m going to head east to find a nice beach to spend my last few days on…
hello from the northern hemisphere!
i crossed over in to Colombia from Ecuador yesterday. the funny thing is, it’s only gotten warmer the futher in to winter i’ve gone (on account of coming down from the moutains). considering where i started, and where i’ve been, i’m now so close to the caribbean i can almost feel the water. i should be there in two days or so.
i FINALLY finished the 5,000 word essay i had to do for uni in australia. i could sit here and complain how hard it was, but really it was the only thing approaching work that i’ve had to do in the last 6 months, and i kind of left it until the last 2 months (while travelling).
now in Lima, Peru. it´s nice to be back at sea-level. the other day i flew over the famous Nazca Lines, and stopped off at a desert oasis (arabian-nights style, palm trees and all surrounded by 200m high sand dunes) to do some dune buggy riding and sandboarding.
one thing i like about Peru is the utter superabundance of the word “inca”, who seem to have had their fingers in all the pies. so far today i´ve seen “inca sale” “inca laundry” “inca farmacy” and of course “inca kola” (which, for some strange reason is coloured pee-yellow, and tastes like bubble gum).
i’m on a bus to the border with Ecuador this arvo, and will arrive there tomorrow morning. my plan is then to jump on a bus and hit Quito by the evening. just a few days there, then across to Colombia, and the BEACH!
my trip is fast running out of time. three weeks from now, i´ll be back in the land of Oz.
currently in an oasis just south of Lima, Peru (about to go do a bit of dune buggy/sandboarding). have left Bolivia long behind, and flew through Cusco the other day. i should be in Quito, Ecuador in the next few days, then Colombia and the Carribean!
should have a more substantial update in the next few days, because i have to stop and finish off my assignment asap.
in my last post i listed the distances i’ve covered so far in my trip. it was then pointed out by a Canadian travel buddy of mine that the numbers (while large) don’t do the trip justice. nothing brought that home like my last bus trip…
i left Uyuni (where the largest salt flat in the world is found) yesterday night, to come to Potosi (the old financial centre of the new world, altitude 4,000m). the trip is about 300kms or so, and should usually take about 6 hours (there’s a lot of moutains to cross here). our trip didn’t take that long. it too 17 hours.
we left Uyuni at 7pm, and drove for about an hour. when we arrived at the first stream we had to cross, the light rain that had started a couple of hours before (which, it turns out, had been falling in the moutains all day) had turned in to several streams, or perhaps a ’small river’ would be a more accurate description. not only that, but stranded in the middle of the river was a family (of eight) and their small sedan (which was rapidly sinking). who knows what they were thinking when they tried to cross it (alone, in the dark, in the middle of almost nowhere), but this is Bolivia. one of my mates (who can sometimes be described as medio loco) jumped in to get them accross to the side where we and a few other buses were waiting, so it all ended well (once they finally reaslied that the car wasn’t going to make it).
we then had to wait 4 hours until the rain eased off, and we could finally cross the small stream. unfortunately, then next stream was known as ‘the big one’ and was about 3 times as wide as the last. luckily this one didn’t have a family stranded in it, and we crossed it in one go (aquaplaning all the way, which is not as fun as it sounds when you’re in a bus of 50 people).
soon after that we arrived at the last stream where we had to wait another 4 hours and so before finally crossing, as most of the far bank had been worn away. this one was probably the most iffy, but there were a lot of other people around on both sides and the sun was up so we tried it anyway. we arrived in Potosi at 12pm the next day, and the only thing i could think of after the first 5 hours o the trip was that the average bolivian is much smaller than i am. so much so that i couldn’t sit down in the seat without touching the seat in front of me with my knees (and i’ve got great knees), and the footrest wasn’t so much a ‘foot rest’ as a ’shin banger’.
while some of the bus rides here have been a bit scary, in one month from now i’ll be back in Sydney… now THAT’S scaring me.
i’m now travelling around with a bunch off cool argentinians, and am off to La Paz to meet some uni friends who are from there. i should be in Peru in about a week.
i´m now almost two months in to my Big Trip (currently in Salta, AR), and here are the figures so far:
Distance travelled
for a grand total of (approximately) 10,906kms!
i´d say i´m about half way so far, so my goal is to make it to 20kkms.
…and right now, i love Salta. it´s a really nice place. relaxed, safe, and hot (but not too hot - BA just hit 42). the only negative is i think it´s the worst place i´ve been to for change (ie. for money) so far. i couldn´t enter a museum today because i wanted to pay a 2 peso entry fee with a 10 peso note.
my travelling luck really knows no bounds. while i complained about eating too much steak in Buenos Aires, i missed Red Meat while i was in Paraguay. as i was crossing the border back in to Argentina (which i had to do twice, as the Paraguayos didn´t get around to stamping my passport on the way out) i met an estancia (an Argentinian cattle farm) owner, who invited me out to the farm for a couple of days. it was a great experience, as i got to oversee damns being built (while getting covered in mud and eaten alive by mozzies - my hands were covered in blood from killing them all), see gauchos at work, sell cattle, and eat meat at every meal. they used a lot of Australian techniques on the farm, but the feel was very different from back home.
will chill here in Salta for a little while, and then off to Bolivia. i´ve got until the start of feb to get to Colombia, so going pretty good for time.
in the capital of Paraguay, Asunción. unlike other countries which require a visa to enter them (like Brasil), Paraguay isn´t really known for… anything, really.
but every so often when you go somewhere off the Lonely Planet highway, you find something speicial, a diamond in the rough, to quote a classic.
Asunción is not one of those places.
i know some people who´ve enjoyed it, but they all knew people who lived here. the roads and footpaths are falling apart. there´s strange smells everywhere (even for south america), and there´s rubbish on all the street corners. now that i put it like that it reminds me of San Telmo (which i love) in Buenos Aires, but this town lacks all of San Telmo´s 19th century european charm.
technically the city is by the water (of the river Paraguay), but the area in between the centre and the bay is a shanty-town of people from the country who have come to find work. the area is bascially a no-go zone and on the maps of the city they just leave it all blank, which is kind of sad.
the highlight so far was a local music concert that was on in the main plaza, wich included the imaginatively titled ´bottle dance´. this involved a woman dancing with 8 wine bottles stacked on top of each other on her head. just when i thought it couldn´t get more wild, they pulled out the harp (yes, a harp) and the crowed really got going. i didn´t know Paraguaian folk music included harps, so i guess i´m lucky i came.
tomorrow i´ll head back in the Argentina to the northern town of Salta, before heading to Bolivia.