Nothing’s Familiar

Well after my last post I haven´t done a great deal worth mentioning, unless you all want to know the in depths to my new and much appreciated diet, which I will tell you about anyway as it will pad this out a little bit more…

I arrived in Salta (Argentina) and immediately fell in love with the place. Admitably the reason for my positive outlook was the fact I could purchase something other than indigenous clothes, llama meat or 3 stones stuck together to resemble a monkeys face, but – there were also nice women to look at too. So, enjoying the new style of life I stayed in Salta for a while and ate nothing but steak (occasionally with chocolate sauce) ice cream and played ping-pong all day, I also managed to watch England Vs. Argentina in my hostel surrounded by Argentineans.

After 4 days of losing ping-pong to my Scottish buddy I decided it was definatly time to move on, so in the true spirit of budget travelling I jumped on a 28 hour bus trip all the way to Iguazo Falls to avoid him – it was just a shame he sat next to me on the bus, stayed at the same hostel and then continued to beat me at ping-pong for the following 2 days.

In between getting beaten at the-only-sport-Scottish-people-seem-to-be-good-at we visited the mighty Iguazu Falls. The hostel where we stayed was on the Argentinian side of the Falls and if you walk for 10 minutes towards the river you stand at a point where you can see Paraguay and Brasil (and obviously Argentina, if you look at the ground). The waterfalls are shared between Argentina and Brasil so for the first day we ventured into Brasil. We received a few more passport stamps (upside down) in the process of crossing the border and jumped on a few more buses to get to the National Park. Inside the park we walked around for about 4 hours being truely impressed by the waterfalls, the park itself was pretty tacky with hundreds of tourists (bloody tourists!!), adventure trips, and various other things which resembled an amusement park, but the waterfalls made it all the worth while. I also had the pleasure of meeting some Chinese tourists and impressed them with my ability to speak Chinese. I pretended to understand everything they were saying, then just to clarify my fluency I threw in occasional sentences here and there. Impressed, they then grabbed my Scottish mate (he´s called Alasdair) and said something like “You have red t-shirt, me white t-shirt, photo together my English friend”…To which Alasdair replied….”SCOTTISH”. I laughed so hard I nearly dropped the Chinese dudes camera.
I suppose I should mention that I abseiled down a cliff with the waterfalls behind me, but to be honest it was pretty rubbish. It cost over my days budget and I spent most of the time trying to spin myself around to look at the waterfalls behind me.

The next day we walked around the Argentinian side which wasn´t as good (more tourists), but it took us further into the waterfalls. We payed a few pesos to ride a power boat into the waterfall and to ultimately to get drenched. I have hundreds of photos which I am sure will bore the living socks off you, but I will post a few of them on there just to give you an idea of why the waterfalls were so spectacular.

I am now in Buenos Aires after a further 18 hours on a bus, I have carefully selected a Hostel without a ping-pong table and tonight, no doubt, I will get a sample of the Argentinean´s capitals nightlife.

Buenos noches chicos

Rob.

Hello people, how the devil are we?

I´ll try and be quick, but don´t shout at me if your cups of tea go cold.

I paid $60 to fly from Rurrenbaque to avoid the 18 hour busy journey across the worlds-most-dangerous road and mainly to avoid another 18 hours of bouncing up and down on my bottom. I also managed to smuggle my huge machette aboard which, hopefully, should have arrived in England by now labelled on the custom sheet as “crafts”.

I arrived in La Paz after the 1 hour flight, checked into a hostel which was next to plenty of hairdressers, declined every request to cut my crazy hair and then spoke to a crazy American who had just been released from San Pedro prison after 8 years inside. He wanted to sell me 3 stones. 3 stones superglued together which, according to him, resembled a monkeys head. However unlucky for him I had just spent 20 days in the jungle and had seen what monkeys really look like, so I declined his offer but gave him 8 Bolivanos so he could get himself a milkshake – and so he would get the hell away from me. I didnt tell him that, of course.

Me and my adequatly-goatied-Australian friend then boarded a 10 hour bus to Potosi, which only cost 30bolvianos (2pounds).

We arrived in Potosi at 6.00am tired, ate breakfast at 7.00am then managed to get on a tour to the mines at 8.00am. At 8.30am we were dressed in baggy trousers, big wellington boots, a leather type jacket and a bright yellow hard hat. “It’s fun to stay at the y-m-c-a”…. at 9.00am we purchased dynamite and lots of it. This has to be one of the only places in the world where a 9 year old boy can walk into a shop, purchase sticks of dynamite, fertizlizer and fuses. We were briefly told that out of the 3 choices of Dynamite; the Bolivian stuff was the best, the Argentinian stuff was good, but the Përuvian stuff was only used to throw at other workers/policemen during riots or fights.

I settled on the hardcore Bolivian stuff and gave them one pound for the privalage.

Potosi is officially the highest city in the world (4060m above sea level) and its main and pretty much only ´attraction´ is the mine. The safety record for this mine is outstanding, in 300 years the mine has claimed only 8 — million lives; after spending 2 hours of crawling on my hands and knees, climbing down crazy wobbley ladders, jumping out the way of manually pushed carts and breathing a life times worth of dust I can see why.

40m down in the mine I decided I needed a cigarrette and at high altitudes cigarrettes burn really slowly, so the upshot of this is they last a lot longer! ….. but when you are down a mine where the oxygen is even more limited they last even longer. Six minutes of puffing away only accomplished half a cigarrette, so I got bored and threw it away.

When we finally came to the surface we had the fun of blowing up the dynamite, but to make the dynamite even more powerful we removed the paper, repacked the explosives into a bag full of fertilizer and sealed it into another bag after attatching the fuse. The guides lit the fuse whilst we were all sat around and procedeed to do STUPID things like putting the dynamite into their mouths and posed for photos. I took a photo of them, then put the dynamite in my mouth. They then ran down a stoney hill and placed the dynamite on the floor before sprinting back to safety (after doing a few push-ups on top of them for comical effect). The explosion the TNT made was crazy, the inital explosion deafend me, then the shockwaves shifted through the mountain ranges and echoed for an eternity, well, 1 minute at least.

Hindsight tells me not to put dynamite in my mouth again.

…..Tea gone cold yet?

The next stop was Uyuni to see the spectacular ´Salt Lakes´, I paid another $65 dollars, then a further $50 on drinking lots of beer, bacardi and rum (so much so that we decided we´d snort the remaining 1/4 of a bottle through our nose)….. My headache and un-keeness to see anything but my pillow on the first day of the tour may have been related to the above.

I can´t really provided a detailed explaination of what the salt lake looked like, so I´ll save you the strained explaination and just tell you to imagine a lake, replace the water with salt and voila!

The rest of the 3 day tour took us around some amazing scenery and put us into a hostel made entirely from salt and the coldest ´hostel´ on this side of the earth. We also saw gyzers (not the cockney type), lakes of various colours and paddled in hot springs.

Make sure you look at these photos as the above explaination was pretty pathetic.

http://www.buzznet.com/burb

I am writing this e-mail in Chile, I arrived here 2 hours ago. It´s far too expensive to travel here (with a $30 a day budget) so I am going to Argentina tomorrow. I probably havent done Chile much justice only seeing an internet cafe, hostal and a bar…………but I fly out of Santiago/Chile in 1 month so I will see their airport as well.