Round the World with Ann and Katie

I got the overnight bus from Salta to the Bolivian border where I had no problems crossing over.  Immediatle there was a lot of obvious differences between the 2 countires.  Bolivia is noticeably a lot poorer, less westernised and less developed than Argentina.  But it was easy enough to find a bus to Tupiza, my first stop in Bolivia.  I had heard a lot of stories about the poor transport in Bolivia, so was expecting the worst but so far it hasn´t been too bad, not the same luxury you get in Argentina nad Chile though.

I arrived in Tupiza early afternoon and found a nice hostel to stay in.  Again after what I had heard from other people I was suprised by how nice the hostel was, it actually had one of the most comfortable beds that I have had for a long time.  The claim of having hot showers  was a bit of an exaggeration though.  I spent the rest of the day looking round the town and getting organised for the next few days.

The next day I did a horse trek through the gorges and canyons in the surrounding countryside.  This was really good, just like being in the wild west, riding through the dessert past cacti.  The horse riding I have done before has only been walking so doing a lot of trotting and cantering was good fun, but the next day I was feeling a bit sore when I started a 4 day Jeep trip to Uyuni.  In the morning I met the guide and the other people I would be going with.  It was a bit of a strange mix of people, the guide who didn´t speak a word of English, a guy from Russia, a guy from Australia, and a Japenese girl who didn´t speak that much English and no Spanish, but somehow it actually worked quite well.  The first day was a lot of driving up to the altiplano, some good views but there wasn´t really much of anything there.  We passed a few small villages which were basically a few mud huts and llamas.  The people living there made the people I saw in Mongolia look very wealthy.  Its amazing that they can live in these places, at high altitude with land and temperatures that are too poor to enable any kind of agriculture except a few llamas.  Our first nights accomodation was basic but again better than I had expected, we even had flushing toilets and lights so i don´t know what everyone else was complaining about.  And I finally got to use all the cold weather clothes that I have been carrying around in +30’C for months.

The next day we had to be up at 4.30am to leave by 5.00am.  But there was a really nice sunrise as we drove up to one of the highest points of the trip at about 5000m.  Most of the day was spent driving through a national park on the border of Chile, where we passed through so amazing landscapes, different coloured lakes with flamingoes, and volcanoes.  We had to stop for n early lunch at a miners village for some repairs to our Jeep, are driver blammed the damage on the bad roads, but I think it was more to do with how fast he was driving on the bad roads.  In the afternoon we went to a really nice hot springs for a swim, a perfect temperature, not too hot or to cold and in a really nice place.  Then we drove up to around 5000m again to see some geysers before dropping down again to Laguna Colorada where we spent the the next night.  The Laguna was one of the highlights of the trip, as we got to see a lot more flamingos close up and all the different colours in the water at sunset was incredible.

The third day wasn´t such a long drive and we had a few interesting stops.  We went through the dessert, past interesting rock formations and more lagunas before reaching the Salar de Uyuni, the highlight of the trip.  We stayed the night in a hostel by the side of the salt flat that was made entirely of salt, including all the beds and furniture.  So had a good night there before another early start to see sunrise on the salt flat.  it was worth getting up early for as it was one of the best parts of the trip.  Only when the sun was up could you really appreciate the scale of the place.  As far as you could see there was just salt.  We stopped for breakfast at an island made of coral and covered in cacti before carrying on across the salt flat.  We stopped a few more times, including one stop at a museum where there were salt sculptures and an area where people are allowed to mine the salt.  Then we arrived at Uyuni in the early afternoon.

Theres not really much to do in Uyuni but I stayed one night before getting the bus to Potosi the next day.  The only tourist attraction there was a very strange museum with a collection of mummies and deformed skulls, without really any information about them at all.

From La Serena it was a long overnight bus ride to San Pedro de Atacama where I spent the next few days. The town is really small with only about 2000 people living here, and a lot of tourists. The main street in the town is full of tour agecies offereing trips to the local sites and restaurants. I found a really nice hostel to stay in, with traditional style buildings made of mud bricks and a thatched roof around a central courtyard. I spent a while walking round the town trying to decide which of the main tours I would do the next day, but in the end gave up and went on got a bottle of wine with a couple of girls I had travelled up from La Serena with. After a good nights sleep I decided not to do any of the tours and instead hired a bike for the day. So I set off into the desert by myself with a sketch map of the area, a lot of water and suntan cream. I decided not to be put off by the name and went to see the valley of the dead. Here I cycled along a track in an enclosed rock valley until I reached an area of sand dunes where the local sport of sand boarding is popular. I decided against trying it and headed back to the main road and on to the moon valley. This was a difficult ride in the hot weather and up a lot of steep hills, but the effort was worth it. The place was amazing. It is one of the most popular tourist sites in the area but all the tours go there for sunset, so I had the entire place to myself. Cycling through salt flats, sand dunes, past strange rock formations, it as like nothing else I had seen before. After climbing up a sand dune to get better views over the whole area, I managed to find a bit of shade to have lunch before cycling back into the town. Luckily the way back was mostly down hill so it was relativly easy going. Later in the afternoon I cycled out the other side of town to an oasis for a swim to cool off. Then in the eveneing I went out for dinner with a group of people I had met the day before. We went to a really nice restaurant in a courtyard with the tables arranged around a fire in the middle. It does get really cold here at night, so the fire was greta. THe next day I had a very early start, 4am. I went on a trip to the Geysers del Tatio, the highest geysers in the world. Apparently the best time of the day to go is at sunrise, as when the temperature difference is greatest the geysers look most impressive. Very strange to see the boiling water right next to frozen ice. Spent a while looking at the geysers then had breakfast. Thankfully the sun started to reach us then as it was absolutly freezing. To warm up we went for a swim in a hot pool, this was really nice until we had to get out back into the freezing cold air. Then it was a really nice drive back in to town where we saw llamas, guanacos, flamingos and nandus. The following day I got the bus back to Salta, Argentina. This was one of the best bus journeys I have been on as it went up over the Andes, past salt flats, volcanoes, oasis. At one point I think the road is up at nearly 5000m, so there is snow by the side of the road. Arrived back in Salta late in the evening and just spent a few days there getting ready to go to Bolivia.

The overnight bus to Chile was OK, but didn´t have much chance to sleep because of the border crossing, passport checks, baggage checks and customs etc. I arrived in Valparaiso at about 6am. Well at least I thought I did. I got off the bus at what I though was Valparaiso, but I soon realised it was actually the next town along the coast, Vina del Mar. I thought it was about 30 minutes bus ride to Valparaiso so I decided to wait at the bus station until it got light at about 7am and then try and find a bus. As it was Sunday morning I didn´t think buses would be running that early and I ddidn´t think turning up at a hostel that early without a reservation was a good idea either. But after waiting at the bus station a while I realised that actually Chile was an hour behind Argentina so it was only 5am so I had a long time to wait. Later I was chatting to a guy who told me it was actually only about 5 minutes to Valparaiso, so at about 7am I gave up waiting and went and got a taxi instead. This also didn´t go quite according to plan as it turned out the taxi driver had no idea where he was going once we got to Valparaiso, so after driving around for a while, stopping 3 times to ask other taxis for directions I eventually made it to the hostel, only to find that they had no spare beds. Luckily the guy there wa really nice and phoned round several other hostels to find somewhere for me to stay. Turns out Valparaiso is a very popular place for a weekend break, so took him a while to find me somewhere and there were no spaces left in dorms so I had to go for a more expensive single room, but by that point I didn´t care. It was only a few minutes walk down the road though and when I arrived the room was worth the extra cost. For only 3 pounds more I actually had a family room with 2 beds, a sofa and private bathroom in a very nice hostel. It was also really good as I was able to check in straight away and get a few hours sleep before breakfast. I ended up having a really nice day in Valparaiso. Its a world heritage listed site and is a great place to spend the day just wandering round the streets. It is built on a big hill rising up form the coast. It has been destroyed several times by earthquakes so there is a strange mix of architecture from a lot of different ages. There are loads of cobbled streets and alley ways between the different styles of houses all painted different colours and with a lot of street murals. So I spent most of the day just wandering round the streets. My hiking in the Andes over tha last few days proved to be good training for the very steep streets. I also went to Pablo Nerudas house and that was really interesting. After visiting the one in Santiago a few months ago it was interesting to compare the 2 and find out more about the man. So I had a busy day there seeing most of the sights and then left the next day on the bus to La Serena, a town on the coast further north. I just stayed in La Serena a couple of days before getting the bus further north to San Pedro de Atacama. Its a small town without a lot to do, except a couple of interesting museums and a beach. The highlight of my stay here was a trip to the observatory. The area is famous for astronomy and has all the biggest telescopes in the world because of the surrounding hills in clear skies with very little light pollution. The first part of the evening we spent outside looking at different types of stars through a telescope and identifying some constallations. Then we went inside to use a bigger telescope to see Mars and Saturn. The view of Saturn was amazing as you could see the rings and one of its moons. They also showed us some really intersting photos of other galaxies taken from the huge telescopes in the area.

I decided to spend a few days in Mendoza before heading back to Chile.  The main attraction of the area is all the vinyards that surround the town and are famous producing most Argentinian wine.  The day I arrived I spent the day looking round the city, which I thought was a nice place, not too big and a lot of nice parks and squares.  I also went to an intersting museum about the history of the city, from its foundation, to an earthquake in 1860 and how they designed and rebuilt it.  In the evening I met a few people in the hostel and went out for a drink with them, to sample some of the local wine before doing the vineyard tour the next day.  The vinyard tour was really interesting as we went to one large industrial place and a much smaller one so we could compare the different production methods and taste the different wines.  We also went to a distillary where they make a lot of different liquours, all of which I thought weren´t very nice.  After that we went to another vinyard for an amazing lunch and more wine tasting.  When we arrived there were loads of cold meats, cheeses, bread and salads spread out on the table and we thought that looked like a good lunch but then the waiter said that was just going to be the starter and there were actually 4 more hot dishes and ice cream to come.   So it was a very big and tasty lunch, certainly didn´t need any dinner in the evening.
We went back to Mendoza and everything was shut as it was another national holiday so I spent the rest of the day in the huge park by the city, which also seemed to be where everone else from the city had spent the day.
The next day I set off on a 3 day hiking trip in the Andes.  After a couple of hours drive we arrived at thye refugio where I would be staying for the next couple of nights, it seemed a a really nice place but very quiet.  I soon realised that actually I was the only person staying there that night and that I was also the only person doing the hike that day, so I had my own private guide.  He spoke about as much English as I speak Spanish so we got by in a combination of the 2 languages and ended up having a really nice day.  The weather was perfect, clear sunny skies but not too hot so we had a good walk up to a peak at about 3600m.  In the evening it was just me and 2 people who worked in the refugio, who spoke absolutly no English, so it was another good opportunity for me to practise my Spanish.  Had a very nice dinner with them and a very relaxing evening.  It made a nice change from staying in busy city hostels with people coming and going throughout the night.
The next day I was joined on the walk by 4 other people and a guide who spoke English.  We had another really good day climbing a peak called Mt. Arenales to about 3400m.  On the way we were really lucky to see a group of guanacos which came really close to us and when we were sat at the top having lunch there were a few condors flying very close overhead.  Seeing them this close up made me realise how huge they really are.  In the refugio that night I was joined by 2 other people so we had a nice evening together.
The final day was the most difficult walk, a climb up to 4200m.  But we were really lucky with the conditions again and it was a perfect day so we had no problems getting to the top despite the very steep climb.  There were really nice views from the top, you could see a very long way down the valley in front of us and behind you could see further in to the Andes with 6000mhigh snow covered peaks – I´ll have to come back another time to climb some of them.  As unfortunatly that was my last day in the Andes and I had to return to Mendoza to get the overnight bus to Chile.

From Cordoba I got an overnight bus to San Juan so I arrived early on Sunday morning. After walking 45 minutes across the town to the hostel, I found that the address I had was wrong and the hostel had moved to another location only 5 minutes from the bus station, so I walked all the way back again. Walking through the town I thought it was strangely quiet and then I arrived at the hostel to find there wasn´t many more people there either, so it was a big contrast to busy Cordoba. I met a nice Dutch girl in the hostel and we started trying to find something to do for the day, but soon realised that there really wasn´t anything. After spending the rest of the morning walking round the town we realised that only 3 things were open, a tour agency where we booked a trip for the next day, the church and the supermarket. Every other building seemed to be either a medical specialist or a lawyer so we were starting to wonder what the people that lived there were like. The only few people we had seen had been cleaning the pavements with kerosene, which seems to be what everyone does there at the weekend. Well, that and go to the supermarket, where we must have queued for at least an hour just to buy a few things. So we ended up spending the rest of the day at the hostel where other than a lot of staff there didn´t seem to be anyone else there. But we passed the time Ok and in the evening an American guy turned up as well. We had an intersting meal together in the evening, because of the farmers´ strikes choice of food was a bit limited, no meat and very few edible vegetables, but we invented a new dish and found that peaches, red cabbage and pasta sauce with rice actually made quite a nice combination. The next day we had to be up at 5am for a very long day trip to the Valle de la Luna, a national park a couple of hours drive from the town. The park is full of geological features, strange rock formations and a lot of important sites where they have discovered some of the oldest dinosaur fossils in the world. On the way back to San Juan we also stopped off at a town called Vallecito which is basically just a huge shrine. It was one of the strangest places I´ve been because the size of it was unbeliveable. Apparently everyone that drives past is suppossed to stop and leave something or they get bad luck. The main thing to leave was car number plates, there were thousands of them from all over the world. Then there were groups of buildings with various different collections of things people had left, ranging from photos, wedding dresses, guns, knives, tropheys and even a collection of cars. Apparently one guy had even donated enough money to build 12 houses in the town. What made the place even stranger is that the legend the shrine is based around isn´t recognised as a mirracle by the church and they want nothing to do with the place. It was all just very strange. We arrived back at the hostel late in the evening and were unsuprised to find it as quiet as ever. For the first time in 9 months I even had a room to myself so I got a good nights sleep before leaving for Mendoza the next day.