Claire takes on the world….

Laptop hasn’t been working for the last two weeks. It came back to life so I will get up to date soon….

After bidding farewell to South America I flew to Australia to see what was happening down under. When I first landed I stayed with my friend Sue. Her buddies were saying how a few of them flew home to see their folks during their year away. Luckily I had mine come to me. Mummy and Daddy Canning made the 24 hour trip to the land down under to see how their little bundle of joy was doing. Main priority in Australia for any true Neighbours fanatic is to get to Melbourne and try and see some of the actors. So off to Melbourne we went.

We didn’t get to go on the Neighbours tour because while lots of people told me how good or bad it was, no one mentioned booking ahead. We did however manage to get to the ‘Neighbours Night’, where the stars come out to play with the regular folk and we all go crazy taking photos. That night we got to meet Alan Fletcher (Dr. Karl), Stuart (Blair McDonagh) and new people who play Declan and Steve. There was a table quiz to keep us busy, while they went around meeting people. We seemed to be the only gang taking the thing seriously, and managed a respectable 2nd place. Although there was $500 for first place, and nothing for second.
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Photos on this entry don’t seem to be coming up. I’ll fix them when I get a moment…

After 262 days, 12 flights, 15 nights spent on buses, 11 countries, and 1 baptism it was finally time to say goodbye to South America. Jenny and I saw a mini tornado from our bus on the ride down the coast of Chile to the capital Santiago. We almost fell over each other trying to get some photos out the window of our last sunset. In keeping with how the trip has been going we couldn’t get a direct bus to Santiago but luckily our 12 hour stop over was in a town called La Serena, where the beaches are clean and the hot chocolates are extremely chocolatey.
Before departing I have a few awards to dish out;
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Long story, but it was a long day.

Most days I have on the road are fun. I get up, figure out where I am and what time it is, and then it’s 12 hours of thinking of things to do, places to see and finding food to eat. Us travellers have our own worries and stresses though, but no matter how bad things get, we can’t complain. If we attempt a complaint, we get hit with a “I’m working 40 hours a week, you’re travelling the world” kind of line.

So in the absence of a sympathetic ear, I am going to tell my blog all about the trouble myself and Jenny had getting from Bolivia to Chile. In case you haven’t been paying attention, Jenny is the 18 year old whipper snapper I first met in Peru when she moved into the apartment Michael and I had been sharing. We worked together for a month then she returned to the mean streets of Belfast. Six months later she followed her boyfriend to Brazil where I found her and we took off across Bolivia.
Now our time in Bolivia was up, I had to get to Santiago, the capital of Chile, to catch a flight to Australia and she had a flight back to Brazil, en route to the Emerald Isle. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some of the photos from the tour. A few were taken by Flo, the French guy. If you think any photo is cool – it was more than likely taken by him.

Remember when you were young, and you didn’t know if a cactus would hurt…….

The ‘hotel’ we stayed in our first night.

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Ok so not exactly the Moon itself, but the photos look like we could have been there! I’ve wanted to go to the south-west of Bolivia ever since seeing this web-site. In fact, their blog is so well written you might as well check out their site to see what I’m on about. You can catch up with mine some other time…..

Before heading of to Uyuni, the land of the salt, we first went to Tupiza. This is supposed to be the nearest thing to the wild west in South America and the place where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid were killed (thank you Jenny for that nugget of information). On the way there we took part in a bit of a protest, a trip highlight for Jenny (she likes that kind of thing). The bus driver had let on four Argentinians who stopped him on the road. The bus was as full as could be, as always, so they made a home for themselves on the floor. A few hours into the trip we were stopped by the police and the four were ejected. Sitting on the floor is the usual in most places around here but highly illegal apparently when in the middle of nowhere. After watching the four being given out to by the coppers, our fellow passengers revolted at the driver’s decision to leave them behind. We all got up, and demanded they stop and let them back in. We were shouting and banging on the door to the driver’s cabin but he was unfazed. Eventually the crowd gave in and Jenny returned to her seat, deflated.

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All the fancy pants tourists had amazing cameras down there, and took amazing photos. I unfortunately did not. And I didn’t get to know any of them well enough to steal their photos. Although that’s usually Jenny’s job, so it”s her fault.

These are what I managed;

First, the €1.70 dynamite!

The mine from the outside…

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In Potosi we set off to do what Jenny described as the hardest thing she’s ever done, and it wasn’t far down my list either. Potosi was (supposedly) the richest city in the world at one stage. They have mines and I believe it made them rich, but then the Spanish overworked them. I’m not too sharp on the details but I can tell you that for €1.70 you can buy a stick of dynamite there and blow up whatever you want. It’s not like you’re allowed blow up whatever you want, but it’s about as hard to come by as bread is in Ireland. Some English guys blew up a hostel in southern Bolivia with the dynamite they bought in Potosi. They found out fairly lively that that’s against the law and ended up behind bars until daddy bailed them out.

So with all this talk of dynamite we had to check this out. We met a Bolivian who greeting us with a few words of Irish, the quickest way to charm an Irish person, so we immediately decided he was our man. Both myself and Jenny hope to study International Development so we felt we had to experience what these guys do every day, and we were only looking at the work, they were they guys pushing and pulling tons of stones in the heat, with a severe lack of oxygen. Even outside the mine it was hard to breathe. Potosi is the highest city in the world, if the guide book is to be belived, at 4300 metres (around 13,000 feet).

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After a few days taking in one of Bolivia’s capitals (I’m still confused about that), we left Sucre to head to a place up in the mountains called Potosi. Because I had Jenny with me, our exit from Sucre had to be dramatic. We arrived at the bus terminal, about an hour after all the buses had gone, expecting to get on a bus straight away. When the masses were finished giving us ‘you’re crazy’ looks I went in search of a bus while Jenny held the fort (minded the bags).
I eventually found a guy who said he could get us on a bus that evening, in fact the bus was leaving in about 30 seconds. I flew up the hall skipping in between people, shouting at Jenny to get the bags we were leaving. The guy had followed me and brought us outside to the taxi rank. I was yet again confused and asked what a taxi had to do with getting us on a bus to Potosi. The man answered
“The bus, it’s gone, and ladies can’t run after buses”.
So we jumped in, had the taxi bring us maybe 20 metres to where the bus had just pulled out. The guy jumped in front of it, melodramatically of course, and got them to let us on.
Just as I was throwing in the luggage I remembered we hadn’t done our usual bathroom/sweet shop run before a long haul run. I asked the guy about the facilities on board.
He gave me anice hearty laugh and said
“No toilet. The trip is terrible, terrible!”

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The promising start; Jenny sets off with her backpack ready to take on the wild.

Jenny before getting acquainted with the mosquitoes:

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Warning: long entry. You’ll get the idea of what I was up to from the photos I’ll put up if you want the lazy option. 

Top of my ‘to do’ list in South America has always been to visit the Amazon. And 8 months in I still hadn’t managed to find my way there. So after quickly hightailing through Paraguay I was determined that we visit the ‘lungs of the earth’ once we got into Bolivia.
First stop in Bolivia was Santa Cruz, a cool little city in the south east of the country. After doing the mandatory look around to check out souvenirs get some baked potatoes we went to a travel agency and were soon signed up to three days and two nights in the Amazon.

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