Our account for Flickr had expired, so I found last week that you couldn’t check out all of our travell pictures anymore.
But yesterday we have reactivated our account again, so you can see all of our prictures again on our Flickr-webpage.
This week we will try to upload the remaining pictures from the last days of our 8.5-month trip: some more pictures from La Paz and some pictures from our short stay in Madrid and our flight back home.
Jannis.
I am temporary working as a mailman to deliver the Christmas mail, and it seems to that in this job I am using my hiking clothes more than for what I had bought them originally: to hike in the Patagonian mountains.
Last week it has been snowing heavily in the Netherlands and especially in the erea where we live, the hilly surroundings of the city of Arnhem and I am delivering the mail in the most hilly part. So last week has been pretty cold & windy while delivering the mail, so I’ve started wearing my backpack/hiking clothes again, since they protect muich better againts this extreme weather than my original Dutch winter clothes….
Jannis.
And, here´s another short post just to say that the 1st album/CD of my brother´s band ´Donder´ is selling very well, and as a result has gone up in the Dutch Top 100 album charts.
From number 48 to number 39!!!!
See the band´s page on MySpace and the Donder-website to listen to a couple of their songs, in Dutch (dialect) language.
Jannis.
Here´s a short post just to say that, as of this week the 1st album/CD of my brother´s band ´Donder´ is now in the Dutch album charts on number…
48!!
See the band´s page on MySpace and the Donder-website to listen to a couple of their songs, in Dutch (dialect) language.
Jannis.
Nu we al een tijd terug zijn, wordt het weer tijd om een ‘normaal’ leven op te bouwen.
Dat lukt al aardig, want Martine is al kort na onze terugkomst in deeltijd aan het werk als diëtist (dus zij is nu de kostwinner hier) en werkt sinds enkele weken al weer voltijd.
Ook ik heb sinds kort een nieuwe job in een adviesfunctie en begint daar vanaf begin volgend jaar mee. Tot die tijd nog eventjes klussen en misschien nog eventjes postbode spelen rond de kerst om de tijd door te komen. Ik heb alvast mijn auto maar te koop gezet want mijn Audi 80 heb ik nu niet meer nodig, al ben ik nog steeds een fan van deze auto:
Verder gaan we binnenkort naar de CD-release van de band van mijn broer (die heeft een platencontract binnen; zie hun pagina’s op Hyves en MySpace voor meer informatie) dus ook aan leuke dingen doen we nog genoeg.
Jannis.
Since a couple of weeks we have internet access again, so I have started to post our last collection of pictures on our Flickr-webpage.
I have just posted a fresh set of pictures showing our visit to the ruïns of the ancient capital of the Tiwanaku kingdom, this really was one of our highlights of our Bolivian visit.
The plan is to post our remaining South-American pictures in he next couple of weeks. After that I will post the pictures from our first month travelling in Australia, since we didn’t publish those properly.
So keep checking our Flickr-webpage!
Jannis.
Voor de grap bekeek ik net onze site nog eens een keer, en tot mijn verbazing zag ik dat de site, weleenswaar minder maar toch nog steeds behoorlijk goed bezocht wordt…..
Vandaar dat ik nog maar een (mogelijk dit keer echt de laatste) blog schrijf. Nu we bijna 3 maanden (jeetje zeg, dat gaat bijna net zo hard als de tijd die voorbij vloog onderweg) terug zijn, is het leuk om nog een keer terug te blikken.
Wat er aan vooraf ging:
Bij elkaar zijn we iets meer dan 8 maanden weg geweest, dat is heel erg snel voorbij gevlogen. En ondertussen zijn we ook al meer dan 3 maanden terug en is het dus alweer bijna een jaar geleden dat we weg gingen.
Zelfs het ‘terug zijn’ gaat dus zo voorbij…
Liefs, Martine.
We have got our keys back, so we’re back again in our own appartment again. After having stayed at our parents’ places for the last two weeks.
So the last couple of days we have been unpacking everything and inspecting our place for damage, as our first renter seems to have been a little careless with our carpet and some other things, and our broker, didn’t inspect our place properly when the renter handed the keys back to them 3 months ago (they will get a nice bill from us next week). Happily enough the second renter was very clean and very carefull with our stuff so we got the appartment back in pretty good and clean condition, apart from some 3-month old damage.
Today was the first working day for Martine so that was another big change.
Jannis is still not feeling too well (again some Bolivian stomach problems today) but in spite of this has finished his CV today, so if everything goes all right he will also have a job in a couple of weeks.
It seems that everything is slowly getting back to ‘normal’ life….
Jannis and Martine.
P.S.
It will take a while before we have a internet back in our appartment, but we still keep posting the remaining pictures on our Flickr-webpage when we are at Martines’ or Jannis’ parents places.
We are back in Holland again, staying with our parents untill we are able to go back again into our appartment.
This gives us some time to do things like read our mail, do the laundry, unpack, etc. And of course looking back on our trip. Strange to think the trip is over and now just a memory…
In the meanwhile while we were enjoying our travel, things were happening back at home: some of our friends got pregnant, a couple of baby’s were born, some friends moved to a new place, some friends moved in together and even some ‘die hard single’ friends found a partner. Unfortunately also some bad news reached us.
Besides that we couldn’t believe all the things happening back home. First of all, after being away for just a few weeks, I found out the department I used to work for was being sacked. So the (pretty hard) decision to give up my beloved job to go travelling, turned out to be the right one!
And while being away the recession also hit Holland fully, so the job situation changed around completely from since we had left (a good reason to stay away a bit longer). Another worry while travelling was that our real estate agent, through who we had rented our flat, was going bankrupt.
But after 8 months of travelling all of this doesn’t seem to have mattered: all my colleges have new fun jobs, our broker was part of a bigger company so it has been rescued by its mother company, and even the resession doesn’t seem to be a worry as there are still plenty of vacancies to apply for.
We feel happy to be back home especially since we were being welcomed on arrival at Schiphol by our family and some good friends (including one of the ‘new’ baby’s). We are also enjoying things like clean clothes (in South-America the washing machines are not that good) and of course stroopwafels, drop, a glass of cassis, bolussen, etc.
Or actually, just the fact that you can eat and drink anything. Or take every bus (without having to worry if the busdriver has driven to many hours) and take any taxi without the fear of being hijacked and robbed. So we appreciate the things you take in Holland for granted again.
After more than 8 months of travelling, having exciting new experiences and changing everything constantly, we now still have things to explore, being back at home: we are looking forward to see the new houses of our friends, meet their new partners, their ‘new’ baby’s or see how other babys meanwhile have grown into little kids.
And after our amazing trip, travelling to Tokyo, Australia, Argentinia, Chili, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Lima and Madrid, we now have come to the most scary part;
going back to ‘the real world’…….
Love, Martine
P.S.
This blog and our foto’s on Flickr were our way to stay in touch and let you know how and what we were doing. Besides if there was an exceptional reason, we have not sent any mail. So don’t take it personal if you didn’t get a postcard……… 
P.P.S.
The coming days we will be posting loads of new pictures on our our Flickr-webpage since we are still 3 weeks behind, so keep checking! We even are posting more pictures from Salar de Uyuni so now there are almost 100 (Hundred!) Salar de Uyuni pictures to see.
This is just a short post as we arrived in Madrid yesterday, and we have only have two days untill we fly to Amsterdam this Sunday-afternoon.
So we have to hurry a bit to see some things and we are a little tired from yesterday´s flight. We flew directly out of Lima, Peru, on a a very tiring 11-hour flight, and, as we flew with the worst airline I have ever flown with, Iberia (where they give you only 2 (TWO !!) drinks in 11 hours) we are now recovering a little in the sun…
Jannis.
P.S.
The last days we also have managed to publish some very nice Bolivian pictures on our Flickr-webpage, so check them out.
We are now in Lima, Peru, staying a couple of days here with Martine’s Peruvian relatives, Ricardo and his family.
Ricardo is a cousin of Martine’s Australian cousin Michelle. She’s the one who got married eight months ago, and since our eight-month trip started in Australia with Michelle’s wedding, it’s very special to end our trip with a visit to her Peruvian family.
As we had been sick a week ago, we’ve not done very much in the city here. But we still have gotten a pretty good impression of Lima as Ricardo has guided us around the nice boulevards and neighbourhoods along the Pacific ocean, and Flor, Ricardo’s mother, has made us some fabulous Perivan food, including delicious ‘arroz con leche’ dessert (rice with milk) and ‘chita morrada’ (made from black corn) drink.
In about an hour we are going to have our goodbye-lunch as we fly out of Lima tonight. For lunch Flor is making another famous Peruvian dish: ‘ceviche’. I have been told that it is raw fish marinated with lemon and onion, and since I grew up along the Dutch coast and like fish very much, I am very curious about this ‘ceviche’ dish.
This will also be our last South-American meal…
Jannis.
Because we have been sort of stuck in La Paz last week, as we have been pretty sick, but not as sick as our jungle-travel-buddies Brad and Caren who even took antibiotics to get better (see the link at the top right ´Sites from people we know´ for a link to their blogsite).
So we had the ´pleasure´ of enjoying La Paz a little longer. Not really the best city to be stuck for more than a week, but luckily we had CNN in our room. So we are completely up to date with everything that has happened the past 8 months, including Holland beating England with cricket…
Since we have run out of time now, we had to change our plans for the last weeks. Instead of making our way through Peru to fly out of Lima, we now will fly directly to Lima this evening. In Lima we will stay a couple of days with Martine´s Peruvian relatives.
From there we will fly directly to Madrid to spend our last couple of days in Spanish-speaking territory.
Jannis en Martine.
During our stay in the jungle we must have eaten something wrong, as not only we, but also Caren and Bradley (the couple we travelled through the rainforest with), are having some problems.
As a dietician I of course feel more like just eating well and let your body fight the problem. But as we had a 20-hours busride ahead of us, in a bus without toilet, I put myself on a diet of eating nothing and taking Loperamide tablets. Luckily Jannis wasn´t too bad and could manage the busride with just being careful. This is how we managed to arrive back here in La Paz without any ´accidents’.
Unfortunatly by this time also Jannis seems to get worse as well, so we will stay here a couple of more days to recover. This has given us somr time to arrange our flight back home (Sunday June 14) and publishing our pictures of Paraguay on our Flickr-webpage). So by now we’re ‘only’ still a month behind with publishing our pictures ;-) That’s the positive site of having stomach problems.
It seems that having problems is, even though we’ve been very careful, something every traveller going to Bolivia has to go through….
Love Martine.
We have just come back from a very ECO-friendly tour to´the jungle´, booked at an agency (Maldidi Travels) run by a very inpiring woman. Let me explain:
A few days ago we flew into the Bolivian Amazonas, into Rurrenabaque with the idea to go on a pampas tour. This is a tour into the wetlands around here, were you can spot loads of wildlife.
But we heard some very animal-unfriendly stories: drugging a tarantula spider with cigarette smoke, so you can put it on your face for a picture, grabbing baby kayman´s & anaconda´s to show them to you (which apparently caused that there are 50% less around these days) and feeding wild animals. So we weren´t that keen on going to the pampas anymore.
But then we ran into Rosa Marie, a very interesting Bolivian woman who managed to achieve that a part of the rainforest here is now a national park (which means now it is all protected area) in a time when Bolivia was still a dictatorship. Something that required a lot of persistance and guts, because she had (and still has) a lot of enemies. Such as local politicians who want to built a huge dam in the area or to cut down big pieces of forest to make a lot of money, but of course would destroy the nature there.
Despite this (often criminal and violent) resistance she still succeeded in making part of the rainforest here, a national park. This is why, a couple of years ago, she has been decorated as the worlds most effective nature conservator.
Now she has bought a big piece of another part of the rainforest herself to also turn it into a protected area; the Serena reserve. To attract tourists to this reserve she has built some nice lodges over there, reached by a 3-hour boattrip from here. The profit that is made from the tourist visits, is invested back into the reserve, for further protection against illegal hunting etc.
So this is how we ended up going on this more expensive, but definitely more ECO-friendly ´jungle-tour´. It was certainly worth the extra money!
The lodge was very romantic. It had no walls, it´s only surrounded by mosquito nets. Not even the bathroom, but because you´re only surrounded by rainforest nobody can see you anyway. And because there is no electricity, at night everything is lit by candles.
After blowing out the last candle it is pitch-dark, which makes you experience the noices and smells of the rainforest even more.
But we were also a bit worried after our neighbours found a scorpion in their lodge. The guide told us not to worry though, because he had a cure for scorpion poison. He came up with an old fishook, we never realised before that fishooks should be part of the first aid kit……
We woke up the next morning by the sound of rain. Very cosy. Even though it´s dry season here and we arrived in a humid and very hot environment, the weather has changed very quickly during our stay. So it has mainly been raining here for the past few days.
During our stay in the Serena reserve we still got to see a lot of animals. In between the rains, we still walked a lot, spotting heaps of monkeys, and have canoed along a couple of lakes, spotting heaps of birds and a some kaymans.
We also enjoyed the food in the lodge very much, because even though they don´t have electricity here, the cook still prepares amazing meals. He was for instance able to prepare a very creative but very tasty ´cholcolate-pancake´ cake for Jannis´ birthday.
Even since we have arrived back in Rurrenabaque the rain has not stopped yet. So we can´t fly out of here, as there is only a grassy airstrip here (we heard that the mayor here doesn´t allow the building of a concrete airstrip here since he still is trying to build the dam, and too many tourists going to the Madidi park would prevent this forever). So instead of an easy 1-hour flight we are going a 20-hour bus-ride back to La Paz tomorrow….
Love, Martine.
P.S.
We have published loads of pictures on our Flickr-webpage again.
We just ended staying in La Paz for a couple of days.
Except for the fact that this 2-million people city is strangly built on the slopes of the mountains (it is very tiring to walk in the streets here) and that there are very nice museums and traditional markets here, not much positive can be said about it. It is basically a city unlike any other Bolivian city we have been: it is very dirty and chaotic here, there are no trees and flowers here and the old colonial buildings all seem to be sort of collapsing….
But yesterday evertything was different. We went on a day excursion 65 km from here, to the ruïns of the Tiwanaku city. It used to be the capital of a very important ancient culture.
The ruïns of Tiwanaku are located near the famous lake Titicaca which is the highest lake in the world. Tiwanaku is near lake Titicaca because the lake once functioned as the river Nile of this continent, regulating the climate of the nearby ´altiplato´ flat lands located high in between the Andes mountains. As the Tiwanaku people were also very inventive in the way how they farmed those lands (using ricefield-like configurations) it was possible to produce lots of the food, so much that Tiwanaku could become a very big city.
In the end this resulted in Tiwanaku becoming one of the most important South-American empires, compairable to the more famous Inka´s. Tiwanaku built big cities like the Inca´s: using unknwown ways to move, cut and combine large stones into big buildings and they also knew as much about astronomy as the later Inka´s did. In contrast with the Inka´s however (who lasted less than 300 years), the Tiwanaku empire existed for more than 3000 years. But around 144o it suddenly dissapeared (they don´t know why), more than 500 years before the Inca-empire appeared.
At the site of the Tiwanaku capital only 40 % of the stones are left, since a lot of them were stolen by the Spanish to build churches. But what remains of this ancient city is still fascinating: some very large and impressive Inca-like statues, a very large piramide (they are now reconstructing it), a big religious temple and an underground cellar in which they have put more than 200 stone faces in its walls. There also is a big harbour, built when lake Titica used to be a much bigger lake. This harbour is constructed by strangely shaped massive 150.000 kg stones, nobody knows how these stones have been moved to that place.
What interested us the most was a very large stone gate in which the Tiwanaku´s had inscripted a very accurate calendar. The calender has 12 months, with each month having 30 days, so they really understood the monthly & yearly cycles of the earth. But they were 5 days short, so they gave the month September 35 days, because it was the most important month of the year (spring starts in September over here).
Tiwanaku is probably not so well-known in Europe as the Tiwanaku culture has no written history, and it was already gone before the Spanish arrived here. But these ruïns are not to be missed when you are around here.
This morning we took a 50-minutes flight, landing on a little grass airfield in the jungle in Rurrenabaque, in the Bolivian amazone. So we are now out of La Paz and in a very different setting. It´s very warm, there are lots of trees, plants and animals, and it´s very humid.
A very nice change of environment…
Jannis.
In a couple of hours we are going to leave Sucre to La Paz, with the nightbus.
So we say goodbye to ´the white city’ - all the buildings in the city centre here are painted in colonial c.q. Spanish white. Because of the white city centre, Sucre is now UNESCO-protected.
When we arrived here we thought that Bolivia just had received a huge amount of money, because they are renovating and painting a lot of the buildings here. Later we found out that UNESCO will visit the city centre during the main independence day on May 25th, so that´s why the city council mandates that everything has to be perfect for that day. It doen´t matter if you have or don´t have money, every owner of a building in the city centre has to assure that his building is in perfect shape. Otherwise you will get a fine.
It´s a shame that Sucre is not as rich as we had thought before.
Jannis and Martine.
P.S.
We still are reguraly publishing new pictures on our Flickr-webpage), so keep checking it out.
A couple of days ago we still were in Potosi where we were introduced to a bit of the history of this area.
The little streets of Potosi are full with lovely Spanish balcony covered & brightly coloured buildings, so you can still see that back in the 17th century Potisi was a very wealthy city. In fact, back then it was the largest city in the world.
Potosi became so wealthy because back then there was a huge amount of silver in the mountains around the city. The nasty thing was that the Spanish got this silver out of the mountains by forcing the native people and African slaves to work in the very unhealthy mines, killing a couple of MILLION of them in the process. It seems like the Spanish didn’t mind to much, because they used the African slaves and natives for about 250 years, until there was no more silver left. The church didn’t seem to mind to much too, because a big amount of this silver was used to ‘decorate’ the local churches…
The silver was also used to make the money for the Spanish kingdom, so a big mint was operating in Potosi. This mint is still around, it has now been restured and is very impressive. It is a very big, but also a very beautifully designed, building with about hundred rooms inside. Each room is now a small museum, and the old Austrian horse driven minting machines (to make coins from the crude silver) are still around.
Potosi is one of the nicest cities we have ever seen, but its main disadvantage is that it is the highest city in the world. Its main plaza is situated at about 4000 meters high. So, walking around, uphill, in the winding streets is a bit of a struggle as constantly it feels like you’ve just run a maraton. At night it also gets very cold, and they don{t put the heating in the hotels, because they think it’s still pretty warm now. As the Salar the Uyuni had also been very cold, we needed a change of climate.
So, after having stayed a couple of days in Potosi we moved to Sucre which, for Bolivian standards, is ’pretty’ low (about 3000 meters) in the mountains. We arrived in Sucre by a short but very beautiful ride through the mountains, in sort of a taxi which we shared with 2 other people. When we got out of this taxi it was already feeling a lot warmer, and we could breath normal again.
Apart from this Sucre is also a very nice city. Not so sweet and cosy as Potosi is, but a bit more elegant (all the buildings in the centre are white here) and with a much better nightlife (we even have found three Dutch bars here, so we ate ‘bitterballen’ yesterday). Sucre also used to be Bolivia’s only capital, but now it has to share this status with La Paz as the government moved to that city a while ago. But, as the supreme court still resides in Sucre and as the independence from Spain was declared here, Sucre remains one of Bolivia’s TWO capitals.
When we arrived here last Thursday we heard that this weekend Bolivia was going to celebrate its 200 years of indepence. So, by incidence, we were staying in exactly the right city this weekend.
They have made lots of work of the indepence celebratings, so we got see some nice things of a very varied program. From groups of all over South-America dressed in traditional dresses, local rock and folk bands, a very good Jazz-band which brilliantly mixed standard Jazz instruments with local ones, such as wooden fluits, to some fireworks (the organisation has hired some guys who fire ‘mortars’ and other big stuff from behind each band and from the the middle of the busy plaza, with people curiously watching from very close-by if everything is going all right).
We will see if they have organised something for tonight too…
Jannis.
We arrived in Potosi yesterday evening, after having visited Tupiza´s beautiful eroded rock formations, very pretty lagunes and the famous Uyuni salt lakes.
This we did with a 4-day tour, sleeping in very cold places and driving through deserted landscapes, so we are a little behind with our internet stuff. So in some days there we will update our blogsite properly, but for now I want to say this:
This tour was one of the most impressive things we have done untill now. It was at least as impressive as our visit to the eroded rock formations of Valle de Luna & Talampaya parks (we just have published the pictures of these on our Flickr-webpage).
Jannis.
Even though I wasn´t to sure if I would do it again, yesterday we went horseriding, here in Tupiza.
After our experience in Bariloche, where we had a real ´drill-intructor-guide´, I wasn´t too sure if I was going to like it. The more in the past our horseride-experience in Bariloche became, the more I forgot about the nice bits and just remembered the scary part.
Jannis convinced me that if I wouldn´t go horseriding again soon, I would probably never go horseriding anymore in the future. As this spot seemed to be a good place for it, as the surroundings here are very beautiful and it gives you a real ´wild west cowboy feeling´, we booked for a short 3-hours horseride. But only after a lot of talking to the tour operator…
And it turned out to be really lovely!! The guide was nice and relaxed, the horse was very kind, a dog came along for support, the weather was beautiful and the homemade local cornballs we got for lunch were very nice. And most important, it wasn´t scary!! But I must admit the whole trip we only went on a really slow ride.
We even extended the 3 hours into 5 hours and I enjoyed the whole trip. Today I don´t even have pains, as this time I didn´t cramp.
Next time I go for the multiple day horseride option
Love Martine.
A couple of days ago we arrived in Bolivia from Paraguay in a little city called Villamonte, near the border in the southeast of the country.
As said before, few people travel through Paraguay and as everybody in Villamonte was staring at us with our large backpacks, it was pretty clear that even fewer people travel to the dry eastern part of Paraguay to cross the Bolivian border there. So we were the only tourists in town.
A new experience for us as even in dry east of Paraguay there were a couple of tourists around (three Australians and one Italian to be exact).
Together with this ´new´ experience we were very suprised by the fact that Villamonte looks like a pretty rich city, with beautiful buildings, green looking plaza´s and very well maintained roads.
The next day we moved on to the much bigger city Tarija (because there were no cash machines in Villamonte and the next bus would go three days later) and here we again saw a very well maintained and very nice looking city, dotted with trendy restaurants and nice plaza´s. Yesterday we moved on again, to Tupiza, a little town 3000 meters high in the mountains, and again the plaza looks marvellous.
All very different from Paraguay where you find every once nice plaza to be occupied by drunks, homeless and turned into a slump…
At first we didn´t get why these Bolivian cities were looking so good, as Bolivia is the poorest country of the continent, but then it became clear.
When we had a good look around Tarija we began to see grafitti everywhere proclaming independence for the eastern part of the country. So it is probably not only the northeastern part of Bolivia that is the rich part of the country and where they want to become an independent republic. The same seems to be true for the southeast.
I just have read that they have huge amounts of gas here and a couple of years ago president Morales (the first indigenous Bolivian president, from the poor west part of the country) nationalised the gas industry, and he now has plans to invest a big part of the gas earnings to the poor parts of the country.
Not a terrible bad idea it seems, it looks much like the way the Dutch government is spending the earnings of the Dutch gas reserves. But the rich in the east don´t want to give up their luxery lifes it seems…
Happily enough the most of the demonstrating (and sometimes even the fighting) to become an independent republic is only taking place in the northeast. That is why we won´t go there. But we still see a lot of soldiers here too, to prevent further problems with the independence movement…
Jannis.
Right now we are in Tarija, a fairly big city in the south of Bolivia just across the Paraguayan border.
We arrived from Paraguay a few days ago. It took me these few days to overthink and realise how I really feel about Paraguay. Jannis already told about the struggle to get through this country, so I´ll write a bit about some of the other impressions I have of Paraguay.
Besides that it´s soccer team is the Number 1 in the South America poule for the worldcup 2010 at the moment, we didn´t knew anything about Paraguay before going on this trip. We hadn´t met any other travellers or knew anybody who had been there before. I can say that Paraguay is really off the beaten track. So before we arrived we did some reading about this country.
The main thing which becomes very clear when you read about Paraguay, is that it is a very corrupt country. Luckily we mainly had good expeciences and thought the people (and even the very corrupt police) were very friendly indeed. We didn´t experience the corruption too much ourselves, but you can tell if you know. We even came across the building of the minister for anticorruption.
There is a joke here about the fact that Paraguay has been Number 1 on the list of the world´s most corrupt countries year by year. There was an exception a couple of years ago, when Paraguay was suddenly Number 2 on the list. The saying is that this is because they had sold their Number 1 position….
One of the impressions I have of Paraguay is that of a country with huge contrasts.
Here in Paraguay is the first time we saw slums (sloppenwijken). In other parts of South-America we know there must be some as well, but it was not something we ever actually have noticed anywhere. But in Paraguay it is something you can not mis. In the backyard of the very expensive, very new and well mantained congress-building is a slum. It is not something they try to hide…….
In the capital, Asuncion, we also passed Hollywood-like neighbourhoods. You can´t imagine a bigger contrast.
Even in the isolated orthodix christan mennonite villages in the far east, you could still see a big gap between the rich mennonites and the poor indigenous indians. I assume they were poor, because many of them were hanging around drunk, looking for work.
Another impression I have is that Paraguay is tropical. Luckily we were here in fall, but in the far east it was still unpleasantly hot, besides very dry and dusty.
One thing I am very possitive about is the Paraguayan food. After having travelled through a mainly meat-eating country, it was a relief to get loads of vegetables. Also rice, sweet patatoes, cassaves, beans, corn and lots of fruits is part of each meal.
What I liked too is that they are really soccer-mad here. When we say that we are from Holland, people often say they know Holland because it is the land of the famous ´Naranja Mecanica´, the Orange machine.
But the thing that striked me the most was the fact that we had breakfast with a German who was carrying a gun around. He put the gun on the table and acted like it was very normal. He is the director of a farming-thing (if I understood correct, because I was stunned for a while) that bought a piece of land somewhere. And this piece, is the land that a big and rich landowner wants to buy, so for this landowner it would be very convient when the German would die. So from now on this German is watching out, especially every time he gets out of his car…
As you can see it was again a very different country to all the other countries we´ve been before, with lots of new experiences. Only the flag is like the Dutch flag, so that made us feel a bit at home. But now we are very happy to be in the (so far) very cheerful Bolivia!!
Love, Martine.
Yesterday we finally finished a rather complex and tiring week of travelling across this country called Paraguay…
After we had found out that there was a Dengue fever epedemic in the Pantenal area located in the south of Brasil, we decided to go to Paraguay instead. As the north of Paraguay also is affected by the same Dengue fever epedemic, we limited our visit to the south part of the country.
The idea was to travel in a straight line from the east to the west, by entering the country via Puerto Iquazu in the far north of Argentina and leaving Paraguay again at the border with Bolivia, in the southeast. This way we could get a good look at the country, in not too much time. It seemed a good plan, until we had a couple of reading sessions in our travel guides, which resulted in this very long story:
A first thing that was a little unexpected, was that Paraguay has almost no ATM´s outside its capital. Even most of the smaller cities don´t have them. So we couldn´t pin money everywhere. A little tricky, as we had to bring a lot of cash into the country, especially since Paraguay is the most corrupt country in world…
So we decided to skip the eastern part of the country and go to the capital first to get some cash. From there we would move to the western part of the country, onto the Bolivian border. So, one problem solved, and we still had a good plan.
But, then we found out that crossing the border from Argentina was not so easy, as there were no direct buses going from Puerto Iguazu to Asuncion, the Paraguayan capital.
We had to take a bus that first crosses the Argentinian/Brazilian-border, this bus then travels for 30 minutes through the Brazilian city Foz de Iquazu and it then crossed the river to Ciudad del Este, a Paraguayan city just across the border. There we had to go to the bus terminal to try to catch a bus to Asuncion as we didn´t want to stay in Ciudad del Este, as it is not known as one of the safest cities in the world…
After some more reading and asking around we found out that we didn´t need to get any passport stamps to travel through Brazil for 30 minutes. So we could stay in the bus after we got our exit stamp at Argentinian customs and go directly to the Paraguayan border. That was easy and good.
What was not so good, that we had to get off the bus at Paraguayan customs to get our passports stamped, and that the bus wouldn´t wait for us. We had to wait for the next bus. What was even worse, was that Ciudad del Este´s border crossing is pretty hectic as all sorts of people are trading stuff in the tax free zone over there, and there are lots of (maybe corrupt) police hanging around there too.
Luckily enough the Paraguayan people in the bus were very friendly and they helped to get us off the bus at the right spot (we had missed the tiny customs building). Even the police were very friendly: after we had gotten our stamps the policy told a bus driver to drive us to the bus terminal. At the bus terminal we quickly got on one of the many buses the Asuncion, the capital. So far, so good.
When we arrived in Asuncion at the bus terminal it was already getting a little darkish, so we quickly asked around if a bus was going to the city centre. Asuncion is also not known as one of the safest cities in the world and the bus terminal is a 45 minutes drive from the city centre….
We quickly found a bus for the city centre, so, as we normally do, we asked the bus driver to give us a signal when we would be near the main plaza. He said yes, so we waited for almost an hour, and just before we were going to ask if we had arrived yet, he realised we were still in the bus, quickly stopped next to another bus and told us to quickly change busses (all of this in very difficult to understand Spanish, as they speak a mix of Spanish and Guarani here, the old indian language).
We changed buses, and after some more talking and more language-difficulties the bus driver got us to the city centre, we got out and found a nice hotel just before dark. A good ending to a hectic day after all.
After having stayed a couple of days in Asuncion we decided to go to the deserted eastern part of the country. Here you can only find a couple of thousand Guarani people, and more than 30.000 ex-Dutch/German Mennonites (conservative christans), living in 3 big farming colonies/villages. We wanted to vist 1 or 2 of these villages, and then move on cross the border. A difficult task, we found out…
After some more reading and talking at the bus terminal, we found out we could take a night bus to one of the villages, Lomo Plata, so that was pretty easy.
But to go to the border from that village, you first had to take a bus in the morning to one of the other villages, Filadelfia, and then wait for another bus that leaves in the evening and takes you to the customs building at the border. After that you had to wait the whole night to catch another bus at 5 o´clock that would be coming through from Asuncion to take us across the border.
To make things more difficult we had to purchase the bus tickets at the bus terminal in advance, as the people of the bus company told us that you we couldn´t buy these tickets at the border crossing. So, we bought the tickets for the border crossing in advance, but with no departure date on them as it would be no problem to enter the bus without a reservation, they told us. So, it all seemed to be arranged, and we still had a solid, if not a little complex plan.
The night trip to Lomo Plate went very well, and after we had found out there was no reliable bus service on Sunday we waited till Monday to cross the border. After hurrying a little (the bus left half an hour earlier than they had told us the day before) we catched the morning bus to Fildalfia and waited there until the evening for the bus to the border crossing. Everybody we asked told us the bus would pick us up across the main hotel in the village, but the problem was that nobody knew when this bus was leaving. Something between 6 and 8 o´clock most people said…
While waiting for this next bus we spoke to an Australian family who told us they had met an Italian guy in the hotel who was going on the same trip with us. So, while waiting for the bus which still hadn´t arrived at 7 o´clock, we crossed the street to the hotel and met the Italian guy.
He said the bus terminal was close by (we didn´t know as nobody had told us, and since there also are no maps available of these Mennonite villages), so we walked to the bus terminal to see if there really was a bus going to the border in the evening. There was, but it only left a little later, at 9 o´clock. A cvouple of hours later we arrived at the border crossing, and the friendly customs people told us that the bus to Bolivia wouldn´t arrive at 5 o´clock, but would arrive earlier, at 2 o´clock. So that was good as we wouldn´t have to wait as long as we had expected.
After having waited 4 hours in the cold night, the bus arrived. It then became clear that the Italian guy, Enrico, was travelling with another bus company that would arrive an hour later at 3 o´clock. And we couldn´t go either with ´our´ bus, as the bus driver said we should have reserved for this night as the bus was completely full. He really wouldn´t take us with him, even though we had valid tickets. He even wouldn´t let us stand (this is normally no problem over here, but this time it was), but (strangly) he had exactly one place left for Martine if she wanted to come….
So, there we were, waiting again in the cold night, feeling a bit screwed by a sort of corrupt bus company.
We decided to wait, to try to get on the bus of the other company. When the other bus arrived Enrico explained to the bus driver that we had missed the previous bus, and that we wanted to come with them. That was no problem, but we had to purchase new bus tickets, as this bus was from a different company.
We did, as we didn´t want to spent anymore time waiting, travelling, and waiting again in another empty, dusty, boring Paraguayan village.
Shortly therefater we entered Bolivia and travelling again seems to go pretty smooth now, except for the first 1000 meters…
Just after crossing the border the (very old) bus we were driving in, broke down. The bus driver spent more than an hour fixing the drive shaft (some broken bolts or something), but after that it was only another hour before we had arrived on our destination, in a country which is probably more used to foreign travellers.
Jannis.
As promised, here is an impression of the famous Iguazu waterfalls, we visited a couple of days ago.
First we went a day to the Brasilian side of the Iquazu Falls. It was a bit of a hussle to get through customs (the bus doesn´t wait at the Brasilian border for you to get an entry stamp in your passport), but the views were certainly worth it:
We thought it couldn´t get any better. But when we visited the Argentinian side the next day, this side turned out to be even more spectacular. You get more of an overview of everything at the Brasilian side, but at the Argentinian side you get to walk the whole day along all sorts of big and smaller waterfalls. All the time you are accompanied by all sorts of animals, such as all sorts of colourfull butterflies, tropical birds, salamanders and some cute other animals we don´t know the name of.
After a day of strolling along the various waterfalls and animals, we REALLY thought it couldn´t get any better. But the final, main attraction, had yet to come, the Devil´s Throat waterfall (within a couple of weeks we will publish pictures of it on our Flickr-webpage).
We had already seen it from the Brazilian side, (as you can see above; it´s the big waterfall in the left of the picture), but from the Argentinian side you can get really close, so there it´s much more spectacular. It is huge and very impressive. You can´t even see the bottom of this fall as there is water moisture from the falling water everywhere, like it´s raining.
After seeing its main highlight we finally said goodbye to Argentina, after having travelled through it for 4 months. The last day we spent arranging our crossing to Paraguay. Not an easy task, as Paraguay is not much visited by travellers. But we worked things out, so here we are in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.
Love, Martine.
About a week ago we finally left Buenos Aires for the north of the country. It took us 12 hours by bus to get to the far north of Argentina, just below the Paraguayan border.
When we arrived early in the morning it immediatly felt tropical, very hot and very humid, so we really felt we had gone to a completely different area of South-America again.
The first couple of days we stayed in Posadas, the biggest city here, with about 300.000 people. It was a good place to spent the Easter days there, as in all of the smaller towns and villages all shops and restaurants are closed, when there is a Christian celabration. We had experienced this before when we spent Chrismas in a smaller city in Uruguay and couldn´t find anything to eat, as all of the restaurants and supermarkets were closed.
Posadas is a very lively city, with very good cheaper and more very chique restaurants (where we had dinner) a good and cheap hotel (where we stayed in) and a very new, fancy, long, trendy boulevard. This boulevard is very lively at night (but not at Easter night of course) and from there you have good view at Paraguay, just across the river. Since also the icecreams are much cheaper here in the north (as everything else), we had a very good time here.
Shortly after Easter we decided to go an hour further east and to spent a night in the little town San Ignacio which is famous for its Jesuit ruïns - one of the 30 villages the Jesuits had created in this area which they lived together with the local aboriginals, the Guaruani people.
This town seemed not only to be very famous for its (very impressive) ruïns, but it also is a very cosy place to stay, as it is located in the middle of the subtropical jungle. In fact, we liked this town and its subtropical envronment so much, that we ended up staying there three days and nights. In those three days we visisted the ruïns by day, by night (they are very nicely lit in the night), and we did a very nice kayaking tour.
This tour was just the two of us with a young guide (who had been everywhere around in the country) and it did not only include a couple of hours of kayaking along the Paraguayan border. This guy also took us tio an hour of safari-driving by jeep trough the jungle and another hour of hiking. A thing we learned from him was that the border between Argentina and Paraguay is marked by the deepest point in the river between these countries. The same principle is applied to the border with Chili, but there it is the highest point in the mountains that marks the border (we just published some of these border-pictures on our Flickr-webpage).
After the hiking-safari-kayaking we left San Ignacio the next day for a 5-hour bus ride to one of the major highlights of our trip, which, as are a lot of the things we have seen and done untill now, is something with water again; The Iquazu Falls.
These are the biggest waterfalls in the world, and according to many, also the most impressive. We agree.
Martine will tell some more about the Iquazu Falls, as she is the waterfall specialist between us…
Jannis.
Yesterday we tried to change the date of our post about Buenos Aires from the 13rd to the 14th to prevent bad luck, but then it sort of crashed. So now we are writing this for the second time…
Right now, we are in San Ignacio, a little town in the north of Argentina near the Parquayan border. It is getting very tropical here. That is a bit different from a few days ago, when we still were in Buenos Aires, where it´s autumn now. This means the weather was perfect! Nice and sunny, but not too hot.
For a change we stayed in Palermo, a trendy and posh neighbourhood on the other side of the city. Palermo is famous its beautiful green parks, nice fusion restaurants and its clubbing scene. You can also find the Evita musuem there, so of course we also had a look.
Especially Martine was very impressed by the fact that Evita comes across as a very strong women who achieved a lot in her short life (she died at 33 years), such as introducing women voting rights in this macho country. As Jannis said before, the weird thing about the Evita museum is that nothing mentioned at all about the fact that her husband Colonel Peron, was a dictator.
Next to Palermo is Recoletta, the wealthiest neigbourhood in the city. Recoletta is populated with a lot of big elegant buildings, embassies, impressive government buildings, massive statues and wide lanes with big trees. The wealth of this neighbourhood is best shown in its cemetery. The dead are not only just buried there, but each one has gotten his own little palace. No wonder a lot of famous people end up here. The latest addition is the ex-president Martine wrote about before. At the moment his grave is even beating Evita´s in popularity!
It was very nice to stay in trendy Palermo this time. But after we had seen the things we came for, we moved back to San Telmo, the nice and cosy neighbourhood where we had stayed before.
Back in San Telmo we visited the Sunday market again, and there we got free tickets for this Tango performance. This turned out to be really nice. It all started with an hour of Tango lessons, where, suprisingly enough, we didn´t do too bad. After this Tango class it got really busy with Argentinian people who all had come to dance on the Tango mucic. They all were really good, and since we only had started to learn, we quietly moved aside. An hour after that an orchestra of young musicians started playing fantastic modern Tango music, on which only the best were able to dance on. The live music gave us the goosebumps, but what even impressed us more was the final performance by a professional Tango couple. Since we had tried to dance the Tango ourselves, we realised the complexity of their dancing.
The day before we left Buenos Aires we had one last thing to do: visit the Boca neighbourhood. Boca is one of the main tourist attractions in the city, but as it is a rough harbour area, you can only visit it safely by going there by bus, even though it´s only an hour walk away from where we stayed.
Boca is expecially famous for its bright coloured houses, each part of which has been painted in a different colour, as their owners painted them with leftovers from the shipyards.
Boca is also well known for its soccer team which has a very special stadium. It is open in the front, so you can look into it from the outside. As the stadium is only a few streets away from the touristy area, we of course wanted to have a look at it. But having walked only a street or two towards the stadium, we already saw some strange acting boys watching us. So we decided to turn around. Not a bad decision, as we heard these boys yelling at us while we slowly walked away.
Boca was a very strange experience as it´s very nice and safe in the couple of touristy streets, but as soon as you start to wander around, you immediately enter a dangerous area.
After having been three times in Buenos Aires, it starts to feel like ´home away from home´. So leaving it behind at last, it feels like we are starting with a new holiday…
Martine & Jannis.
P.S.
Keep checking our Flickr-webpage as we are still publishing pictures on it frequently.
