Jannis & Martine

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.

Following up on Martine´s post on Argentinian history I will add some more of this dry stuff….

Argentinia´s moving history of civil war, military junta´s and revolutions is not only restricted to what happened in the 70´s and 80´s. It goes further back. We began to discover some more of that when we visited Cordoba, the second biggest city of the country.

Having just been in Bariloche, Santiago and Mendoza, Cordoba was a bit of a disappointment. It is one of the major industry centres in Argentina, and as such it lacks any tree, is stuffed with sky-high grey office buildings, but, luckily, it has a few places with some very impressive of the old stuff. In fact, the older buildings that are left, are far more impressive than anything we have seen around here before.

To begin with, there are a couple very beautifull 18th-century churches with mosaic covered domes. And then there is one very nice street covered with buildings from the 17th-century Jesuit university and the very impressive church next to it. Both are UNESCO-heritage. During the visit to this university we found out that it still the most important university of South-America and that they have a pretty rich collection. They showed us a big 20.000+-collection of printed books, originated from the era when the book printing was invented. The funny thing was that they showed us some 100 of the oldest books they have, and all of these books had been printed by a Mr. Elsevier in Leyden…

At the end of our tour around this magnificant university, our guide suddenly tried to convince us that Argentina is not as ´South-American´ as its neighbours, but is more like a ´European´ country. I had read some about the fact that Argentinians are considered to be arrogant, as they are convinced that they are a better than the other South-Americans and that Argentina is just ´a European country´ located in the wrong continent, but now I was hearing this for real, from a highly educated person. He even started giving us ´proof´, giving ´facts´ that Argentinia is building nuclear powerplants for other countries, the bypass-operation was invented here and that the laws of all South-American countries originate from Argentinan law. So, our guide said, in Argentina the people really are more developed than the neighbouring countries, it is just because of all those bad politicians that Argentinia is not rich and that it is not as efficient as its European counterparts…

So, by trying to convince us that Argentina is not a Third World country, our guide gave us a really good look in the mind of the Argentinian people. When you think about it, all of this it is not suprising, as Argentinia was one of the wealthiest countries in the world (but the wealth was only shared by a few people) untill the economy broke down in the 193o´s…

Following up on our visit to the Jesuit university we went to a couple of towns around the city, that each had an old Jesuit estancia to visit, with all of them (there are seven) also being UNESCO-heritage. These estancias are very big farms (up to 300 people working on each) that were created by the Jesuit order to earn money that went straight to their university in the city, and to their missions troughout the countryside to turn the native people to the Catholic belief. This worked out pretty well, as they also had some respect for the native people as they tried to learn their language (we saw some old dictonaries of this ancient language back in the university) and let them use their art skills to build the estancias, churches and university. They even used democratic principles as the Jesuit order didn´t see the Spanish king as their ruler, but only God and the people they served…

That democratic principle didn´t go very well with the Spanish king, so in the 18th century he expelled the Jesuits from the whole of continent. After that the university, the churches and all of the estancias supporting them were taken over by other Catholic orders, but, as they had less respect for the natives (they saw them more like ´dumb´ people who you had to integrate in Spanish society), that didn´t work out very well. Within five years the estancias were all but bankrupt, and as a result the Cordoba university also had become a shadow of its former self. The expellation of the Jesuits marked also the start of the period in which a high number of the native people got killed by the Spainish….

One of the towns around Cordoba did not only have a Jesuit estancia, but also another thing connected to Argentinia´s and Latin America´s moving history, but something more recent. This town, Alta Gracia, was the place were the famous revolutoniar Che Gueverra spent his childhood. Che was somebody who, after having travelled trough South-America & Central-America for a while, got heavily involved with the poor, and wanted to change the fact that all the the rich here rule the whole continent.

So he was a man concerned with the poor people and a man of principle. But, he also was heavily involved with the libaration of Cuba from dicatorship, which in the end resulted in helping another dictator, Fidel Castro, to power. Shortly after Cuba had been ´liberated´ he tried to liberate Bolivia from another dictator, but then the CIA killed him. All of this makes Che a pretty controversial person, but the museum we visted in Alto Gracia didn´t show anything of this and only showed us how nice, friendly and concerned with the poor people Che had been…

We found out that this is pretty typical of Argentian museums devoted to famous person, as the museum devoted to Evita is about the same. We visited this museum a couple of days ago in Buenos Aires and this was a bit of a disappointment. Apart from showing how nice, friendly and concerned with the poor & womens rights Evita had been, it did only show LOTS OF the dresses she had worn in her short life. Nothing about her controversial husband, who was a fan of Mussullini and facism, banned freedom of speech the and who still influences current Argentinian politics.

A strange, confusing and very interesting country…

Jannis.

Since we are now in a big city, we are publishing pictures on Flickr again, back from when we were in Patagonia and in the Lake District.

So check out our Flickr-webpage for the latest pictures. We just published our pictures from our visit to the Chiloe archipel, and more will follow the following days.

Jannis.

Since we arrived in South America almost 4 months ago, we spent most of the time in Argentina, so by now I understand much more of its moving history.

While travelling trough Argentina we came across all sorts of little monuments, signs and pictures of disappeared people. For instance in front of the hotel we´re staying in now is a little sign in the pavement saying:
Here used to live Maria such and such who disappeared on 23-12-1977.

A few years ago Argenina´s government has created a day off, as a memorial day for when the military took control of the country in 1976. Within a period of 5 years over 30.000 people disappeared without a trace. Some weeks ago an Argentinian student explained us about this day and he said he wasn´t too happy with it. He told us you should not look back at history….
But last week we were in Cordoba at this memorial day and there we saw this impressive huge demonstration, and lots of people were carrying pictures from their lost loved ones. Then we realised it is still very much alive with the people over here.

It showed again when a few days ago Raul Alfonso died. He was the first democratic president of Argentina following the departure of the military junta (after Argentina lost the Falklands war). On the day of his funeral it was very quiet in the streets, more quiet than when Argentina has to play soccer (they lost with 6-1 from Bolivia last week with Maradonna as coach). I guess in such a soccer-minded country that means something……

The military junta is the government of which Maxima´s father was part of. I was too young back then, but since Maxima came in the picture, everybody knows. So before I went to Argentina I knew about these disappeared people. But now for me it became more than just another story in the news: the story has names, the names have faces, the faces had a life and family, etcetera.

All of this has changed my opinion. I still think Maxima comes across as this charming and very nice woman, and she´s not responsible at all for her fathers acts. But I feel she definitely should distance herself from what her father did. As she never did before, I feel Holland is now respresented by somebody that might not disapprove of the murders her father was responsible for.

Is it that I am feeling to strongly about this, now I´m close to where it all happened, or did I just ignore it before?

Love, Martine.

Right now we´re back in Buenos Aires again, but we didn´t write any blogs about last weeks visits, to Santiago, Mendoza and Cordoba. So I shall first start there…..

When we flew down in January to Patagonia via Santiago de Chili we decided to not spent any time in Santiago itself. We heard Santiago, Chili´s capital, was a dirty, dull city and full of smog. During our trip we met lots of Santiago people, who were all escaping the city and looking for fresh air. So that confirmed everything. But travelling through Chili for a long while, we also got curious to it´s capital. So eventually we ended up going there, on our way to Valparasio, a ´must see´ port city not far from Santiago.

With our expectations very low, we liked Santiago much better than we had expected. In fact, we liked it so much that, after hearing very bad stories about criminal Valparasio, we decided not to go there, and spent some more time in Chili´s capital.

Probably one of the reasons why we liked Santiago, was the great location of out hostel. Our hostel was situated in a really nice, calm and beautifully colonial area. And as a bonus, right in front of our hostel there was this really picturesque and romantic little square. The square was a perfect place to find a nice spot in the shadow, and just chill down with a book.  There are always people around and it always has a nice atmosphere.

On Saturday nights people buy beer in the kiosk around the corner, and the square gets used as a very cozy outside-bar, even though the area with the hip bars is very close. One night we got caught up when a bunch of local people gathered to play traditional music and dance on it. Another day we got curious as there was a big film crew around. As we sat down, we were quickly removed, as we had just sat down right in the film set of a Spanish Fanta commercial. It was fun to see how a commercial is filmed and to see a professional film crew at work.

Another thing we liked in Santiago was that if there is a nice building or cute church, it is always surrounded by a nice plaza or park, so it looks  even better. Besides this, there are two big hills in the city with parks, botanical gardens, a zoo and a fairytale castle, where you can escape the city. This is why Santiago has a very friendly look.

Santiago was our last stop in Chili (though maybe later on we might cross the border from Bolivia to Chili one last time) and from there we travelled to Argentina again. This time to Mendoza, the centre of Argentina´s wine-district.

We were planning to take the night bus to Mendoza, but were advised to take the bus during daytime, as it´s one of the prettiest border crossing around. As we passed two amazing border crossings through the Andes mountains before, we decided we didn´t want to miss it. And it turned out to be very spectacular. The movie ´Seven years in Tibet´ has been taped here for a reason!!

As we already had gotten enough excitement hiking in Bariloche and travelling to Santiagio de Chiliwith the night bus, we decided to hav a bit of a break in Mendoza, a perfect city to do this. We even rented an appartment here, so it felt a little bit like home again. Mendza even has trolley-buses driving around, like in Arnhem.

Mendoza is a very nice city. About 100 years ago it has been demolished by an earthquake. When is was rebuilt again, it was built with very wide lanes and lots of big squares, so in case of another earthquake, people had a place to evacuate. Because they have covered the city with very tall trees, irrigated by water from the nearby Andes mountains, it all gave us a very good impression.

One day we rented a bike and visited several wineries in the area. It was very nice to cruise around between the wineyards mixed in with olive trees. Also we did some wine tasting which has improved our knowledge of wines. For me that is not necessarily a good thing: I always thought to only like cheap (and therefore sweet) wines. But now it turns out that the cheap wines are not sweet but asic, and I don´t really like these. I like the sweet wines that are not too old & oaky, but they seem to be a bit expensive too.

From Mendoza we made a 2-day side trip to the relatively close-by national parks Valley de la Luna (moonvalley) and Talampaya. As the name moonvalley already says, it has a moonlike landscape. Because of erodation it has very interesting rock formations. In this park they have found oldest dinosaurier bones in the world. They have lived here before the Andes mountains was formed.

Besides the Grand Canyon in the United States, the Talampaya canyon is the biggest in the world. As you can imagine, it is very impressive. It also contains lots of impressive aboriginal rock paintings and rock carvings.  I´ll leave it up to the pictures to show this. The pictures of the parks will follow soon as we are again uploading pictures on our Flickr-webpage.

The next stop was the city of Cordoba, Argentina´s second biggest city. It is a strange city: very ugly and grey, but with some very beautiful parts. Cordoba used to be the centre of the Jesuit society, who came here 300 years ago to spread the Christian ideas to the natives. That´s why there is a lot of Jesuit heritage in and around Cordoba. Jannis is more into this, so I leave it up to him to write something about it in a next post.

And this gets us to we are now, Buenos Aires. Love to be back!!

Love Martine.

We did not have good internet facilities for almost two weeks, so we have not been able to blog anything.

But now we are again in a hostel with proper internet facilities, so we will give plenty of updates in the next days. I will only write a quick update now, because we just have arrived in Cordoba, Argentinia, by a night bus, so we are a bit of tired.

About two weeks ago we arrived in Santiago de Chili crossing from San Martin de los Andes, Argentinia, as you can read in the previous blog entry. We stayed in Santiago for almost a week, and skipped nearby Valperasio, as Santiago was a much nicer city than we had expected.

We then crossed the border again going back to Argentinia via a beautifull and impressive trip through Andes mountains, seeing the area where the famous Brad Pitt movie ´7 years in Tibet´ has been filmed.

After crossing the Andes we arrived in Medoza, Argentina´s main wine area. As we also liked Medoza al lot, and as we stayed in our own cheap, but very nice private appartment, we stayed in Medoza for almost a week and then left to see two beautifull and impressive UNESCO world heritage natural parks, the Talampaya canyon (the second biggest canyon in the world) and Valle de Luna, moon valley, as it looks like you are on the moon. We left this area yesterday evening to arrive in Cordoba this morning.

Tomorrow we will give some more information about what we have done and experienced in the city Santiago de Chili, the Mendoza wine area and the Talampaya & Valle de la Luna parks.

See you later.

Jannis.

Five days ago we arrived in Santiago, so now we are in Chili again.

Before we moved back to Chili we first went from Argentine´s holiday place for the ordinary rich, Bariloche, to Argentine´s holiday´s place for the extreme rich, San Martin. Between these two places is the famous ´Seven Lakes´ route, so we booked an ordinary bus which did this route in under 5 hours, by driving like a madman along curving dry sand covered mountain roads.

A very beautifull, but also a little terrifying experience…

The village of San Martin is purpose built in a beautifull valley for Argentine´s rich and famous, so it really doesn´t look and feel as a South-American place at all, as all houses look like little Austrian/Swiss-designed holiday villa´s, the roads are without holes, and its is prefectly clean everywhere. Even our hostel was a bit out of the ordinary as we not only had a very beautifully designed & very clean private room with a view onto the mountains; we also had a very nice private bathroom. Something we had not seen since we left Buenos Aires, two months ago.

All in all, San Martin was a very good place to recover a bit from our little extreme horsebackriding, cycling, hiking and bus experiences. Having recovered some, we also did some more hiking during the last days of our stay. One day we did a very nice trip to, it is said, one of the most beautifull mountains in the world: the Lanin vulcan. As this vulcan is located nearby San Martin, we took the opportunity to visit this vulcano via a combined ´bus-ride/hike/bus-ride´-trip. As ´nearby´ out here means anything located less than 200 kilomers away, this resulted in an exhausting, but nice, 12-hour long daytrip.

After having rested a bit, we left San Martin to cross the Andes mountains again. The first part of this ride involved crossing the Andes mountains via a very beautifull route, which included leaving the Argentinian border very close to the backside of the…

…Lanin vulcano.

Seeing the (snowless) backside of the vulcano while waiting at the Argentinian/Chilean border, was certainly a somewhat different experience than doing a long 12-hour ´bus-ride/hike/bus-ride´-trip to visit its (somewhat more beautifull snow covered) frontside…

Another problem at this border crossing is that you are not allowed to take any vegetables and fruit into Chili territory. In normal circumsances this is not a problem, but as we had planned travel another 12 hours to arrive the same night in Santiago we had brought some advocados with us, to put on our bread…

Convinced that dry bread is just uneatable, and knowing that most Chilean custums are pretty sloppy crossing, we decided to hide the advocados behind our jackets that we left behind in the bus. So we entered the customs building with our backpacks, but without the advocados. In this building we found out that they were (as we had expected) scanning all backpacks for illigal stuff, so no stress there. Then suddenly these customs guys entered the bus itself (never before we had seen them doing that) and were going to search the bus for left luggage and other stuff. They did find some left luggage, but did not look into our left behind jackets, so we safely entered Chili with a nice, but illigal, bread topping.

After this somewhat tense border crossing we had a very nice ride into Chili, even seeing the famous Pucon vulcano. This all changed again when we had to change buses….

The plan was to do an 8-hour long bus ride across the Andes, arriving late in the evening in Temuco, which is a pretty dodgy Chilean city. This was no problem, as the guy selling us our bus ticket had told us, there were plenty of bus companies at Temuco´s bus terminal where you could hop onto one of the many night buses to Santiago, our final destination. Verry happy that our Spanish was getting pretty good (this guy talked only in Spanish, but we understood him very well), we planned to arrive at Temuco´s bus terminal during the evening and then to directly hop on to a night bus to Santiago.

All looked very well, until we arrived at Temuco´s bus terminal at 10 o´clock in the evening. The terminal we arrived at, looked pretty small and then we realised that this was not the main terminal, but only one of the many little bus terminals scatered around this very big city (our Spanish was probably not that good after all). Getting a little panicked now, I hurried to the bus driver and asked him if we somehow could catch a bus to Santiago,…. AHORA (now)!!! Realising that we wanted to go on a bus to Santiago the same night, he and his assistant quickly got our backpacks out from the bagage compartment and ran, carrying our backpacks with them, and us behind them, to their company´s office. There got us on the last night bus that was leaving this little bus terminal only 10 minutes later…

Happy everything was all right again, we discovered yet another problem. They said we could only pay in cash for the bus ride, there was no cash machine nearby and we didn´t have many Chilean pesos with us. After some frantic talking, searching and counting we found out that we  had just enough Chilean cash with us, left over from our previous visits, to pay for two cheap seats…

Only ten minutes later we left the dark and  dodgy ciy of Temuco again on our (not so comfortable, but no complains there) 8-hour night bus ride to Santiago, to arrive there safely in the morning.

Tomorrow we will leave Chili again for yet anoher crossing of borders and the Andes mountains, to arrive in Argentina again. We hope this bus ride will go smoother than the last one!

Jannis.

As Jannis wrote in his last post, I´m supposed to write a bit about our outdoor actvities around Bariloche.

Well, last week has been one with quite some exercise….

First of all we started off to go along with Fernando and Gulaya, an American couple, who went on a horsebackriding trip in the mountains. For me it was the first time, so I wasn´t very happy with the drill-instructor we had. We didn´t get any time to get used to riding on a horse and feel comfortable with it, as we almost immediately went into a steep hilly part (even Jannis had to get used to riding in the mountains). The instructor certainly didn´t help: all he did was shouting ´use the stick, use the stick, USE THE STICK´, to hit the horse.  But I didn´t want to use the stick, mostly because I didn´t want my horse to go any faster.

Luckily I had this really nice horse which seemed to feel that he had to be careful with me, and he took me gently to the top. Arriving there I even get to enjoy the great view a little bit. The way back down already went much better, as I had more confidence in horsebackriding. I don’t know if I’d ever go again, though….

On another day we decided to hire a bike, and Fernando, Gulaya and 3 other people from our hostel decide to come along to cycle ‘Circuito Chico’ (the small circuit) – a 25 km circuit along a hilly peninsula close by.

The last activity we did was trekking trough the national park. We planned to do a 3-day trekking, so stay 2 nights in refugios on the way.

We left the day after the bike ride, but because the first day was going to be an easy walk, we thought we wouldn´t need a day rest in between. We thought…….
But after arriving at night at our refugio at 1700 m high we knew it hadn´t been an easy walk!! The walk was going to take us 3 hours, but after we had walked for 2 hours, we suddenly came across a sign saying it was 3 hours more to our refugio. Having started late in the afternoon, we happely just made it before sunset.

After we started our walk the second day, we knew why the walk on the first day was called ´easy´. The second day the walk was even harder.
We had been informed that the second day we had to cross two mountain peaks. We started fresh and we looked with confidence at the first peak we had to cross, as we were already on 1700 meters high. So it couldn´t be too hard. But we were wrong. After climbing this peak, we realised we still weren´t at the peak itself, the other half was hidden. So we only had climbed just half of it…… We had a fare bit of the other half to go, while the track became more and more difficult.

You think of a track as an path you can walk over, so it´s obvious where to go. But this wasn´t such a track. The track was a marking of some red dots. You see a red dot on some rocks a bit away, so you know where to go, but you have absolutly no idea how to get there. At one stage we had lost the red dots at all and ended up in this really uncomfortable situation on a scary slippery part. But because it has been really difficult to get to the point you are at that time, you also do NOT want to have to go back the same way. It feels like a ´point of no return´.
After this heavy climb my left knee really started to play up.

In one of our hikes in El Chalten we met this guy who was stumbeling his way down to get back, which took him ages, but it was the only way out. Very painful. I didn´t want to end up like him, so with him as an example and knowing we still had another mountain peak to climb, we decided to go back to civilization when we found a way out.

Three Argentinian men had told us that after the first peak, there was another path leading to Cerro Cathedral, a big ski area. This path was staying on the same level, so we wouldn´t have to climb or decent anymore, and from this area you could go down with a skilift. We could even see this skilift in the far distance.
So we took the oppurtunity to go back.

It was one of the most beautiful tracks I have ever hiked, looking over this impressive valley. But for us it definitely was also the toughest and most scary one ever! The whole way we were climbing on slippery rocks looking down the valley.  What made it more scary was that during the 3 hours hike to the skilift we saw nobody. Then we found out that the skilift was being repaired, so it was totally abandoned. We were stuck on the mountain at 2000 meters high!

Just before we arrived at the skilift, luckily, 3 guys had showed up behind us. But these guys had no clue whatsoever, as they were stubbernly looking for a non-existing refugio.

So we looked further, but we only found more abandoned skilifts, and in the meanwhile it started to get pretty misty.

Then we found a fresh car track, and we thought following this track would take us down. When this car track ended at another abandoned skilift (and by this time the mist had really taken away any view at all) and it became later and later, we started to get panicking.

We rang the Argentine 112/911: no connection!! Calling with our Dutch mobile, we didn´t know the countrycode for Argentina…

Luckily just 5 minutes later the mist cleared up, and we saw a little village in the valley, which turned out to be the base of the Cerro Cathedral ski area. It was still a long walk going down, but at least we got somewhere to go.

We just made it before dark, so we stayed overnight in the ski village and we had never been happier to enjoy a nice meal and have a proper bed to stay in.

Love, Martine.

We are going to leave Bariloche tomorrow, so here are some general impressions…

First of all, we only had planned to stay here for a couple of days as this area is supposed to be something you should not miss, but is also THE place where all of Argentinia´s rich go on a holiday. So, as we thought it would be very expensive to stay here, the plan was to have a quick look around in Bariloche and then move up north.

This all changed when we arrived in Bariloche and noticed that the hostels over here are not too expensive (at least no El Calafate/Ushuaia-like prices) and are of very good quality, with a very nice staff, good big kitchens and even offer great views on the mountians.

One of the other things that makes Bariloche great, is the hiking in the mountains around here, but Martine will go more into this subject in the next post.

The other thing which makes Bariloche a great place to stay is the food. As across the border in Chili, lots of Germans have moved here, but the good thing here is that it there are not only Germans and Spanjards here. Lots of Italian people live here too. And this you immidiately notice after you arrive from Chili in the…

…food & drinks.

I have never had any better icecream than here, there are Swiss/German-chocolate shops everywhere and I again had some really good coffee here.

But the best food experience we had was when we went out for dinner, the night before we were going on our 2-day mountain hike. We first only wanted to eat a little bit in a tiny restaurant which serves only very small dishes, as it is a sort of a Tapas-restaurant but with non-Spanish dishes, such as curry and lasagna. After having a taste of a marvellous and very difficult to prepare risoto-lasagna, we ended up ordering more than six dishes. This really was the best place where we have eaten in the past 5 months.

To make things better, there are not only great hostels here, great food and great outdoor activities, but Bariloche also seems to be the place where all the nice and interesting travellers end up.

The first day we met Fernando and Gulaya, an American couple, who asked us to come along on a horse riding tour, which we did, but only after they had moved over to our new hostel with its Hilton-like views on the mountains. In return we invited them on a biking trip through the mountains and made them a typical Dutch dinner:

´hutspot´…

They returned that favour by preparing a delicious trout&salad-dish, so we offered them a free place to stay if they visit Holland during their 1-year round the world trip, as we still owed them after they had prepared us such a delicious meal…

As said, Martine will tell much more about our activities here in the next post, but in the meantime you can check Fernando´s and Gulaya´s blogsite for the things we have done with them, including lots of pictures. See the Page (see the upper right corner of this website) with the title Sites from people we know for a link to their blogsite.

Another interesting person we met was Jonathan Human who is travelling around for a couple of weeks.

Jonathan is not only a very good & creative cook (he made too much salad & desert yesterday, so we had some) and a gifted musician, but he also has some very original ideas. He, for example, changed his surname to ´Human´ after having gone trough an indian-ritual-thing a couple of years ago. Check out his websites for more on the Page (see the upper right corner of this website) with the title Sites from people we know.

After having seen & done great things here and met some great people, we will move up north to San Martin tomorrow and than cross the border to Chili,

to change country again.

Jannis.

The day before yesterday we have arrived back in Argentina after a very nice bus ride through the Chilean-Argentinean Lake District, seeing lots of mountains surrounded by lakes and beautifull forests.

We are staying in Bariloche, which is, for people we do not know this place, is the place where our ´Dutch´-Argentinian princess Maxima is going for ski-trip every year. We are not going to ski here, since it is summer here, but Bariloche is still surrounded by very, very beautifull lakes, mountains and some glaciers, so we will do some other stuff here. We are going on a horse ride in the mountains today, for starters and we will probably hike a couple of days in the national park here.

This is it for now, but no worries…

It is that beautifull here (and not as expensive as we had expected) that we are going to stay longer here than we had planned, so we will tell you more about Bariloche in the next post. We will also add some more pictures to our Flickr-site this week.

I only will notice that we have added links to some very nice blogposts from other people we have met the last month. Check them out on the Page (see the upper right corner of this website) with the title Sites from people we know.

Jannis.

After having stayed 10 days on Chileo island, we have moved out of Patagonia and moved on up north.

First we stayed one night in the touristy town of Puerto Varas and then moved on to Valdivia, a university city located near the Pacific coast.

When we travelled from Chiloe island to Puerto Varas everything suddenly changed from a very scenic isolated, hilly countryside dotted with wooden churches and little farms, with colourfull people and their traditions, to another very nice hilly forest and wheat covered area, which just looks like…

…Germany.

This is all not so strange since this is the area where lots of Germans emigrated to a century ago, to farm in this area.

You still notice that there has been a big German influence here as the local speciality here are küchen (very good cakes), one of the famous beers here (and by far the best) is the German-sounding Künstmann beer and the area is dotted with German-looking houses.

We saw some German influences in Puerto Varas where we had some very delicious küchen, but this was nothing compared to the area around Valdivia, as this city was the center of German immigration.

What they really have inherited from the Germans here, is the way they party.

Yesterday they had ¨The Night Of Valdivia¨ here, which is the main thing of the year visited by more than 100.000 people, with decorated boats floating down the river finished off by some pretty amazing fireworks. A lot of times it was pretty hard for us though, to discover that there was actually a party going on, as everyone was just standing with their hands in their pockets watching really good drum-bands playing ritmic Samba-music and quietly sitting on the ground watching the marvellous fireworks. Very down to earth…

We had more experience with this German-like party attitude here some days ago, when we stayed in the very nice village of Niebla, which is located in the beautifull hills nearby Valdivia with beaches on the Pacific coast. Because of this Niebla is full of Chilean tourists, and to entertain them they organise something of a bierfest-thing there every night. Just image that you are travelling in the middle of Spanish-speaking Chili and you enter a big tent where you see rows and rows of people drinking lots of beer and doing some folk-dancing on a band playing Schlagermusik-sounding music, with Spanish lyrics sung by Heidi-dressed singers…

…really strange.

The good thing is that it is not all like Germany here, though.

One of the things they certainly have not inherited from the Germans, is some feel for efficiency (a Danish guy who is working here confirmed this yesterday). The total lack for caring about doing something a bit efficient is a Chilean heritage where the Spanish have more rights to lay claim on…

But apart from all this, Valdivia is this a very good place to spend some time…

…we did, for more than a week.

Till next time when we have arrived in Bariloche.

Jannis.

Afgelopen anderhalve week zijn we in Chiloé geweest. Chiloé ligt net onder de havenstad Puerto Montt, waar we met de Navimag-boot vanuit zuidelijk Patagonië zijn aangekomen.

Chiloé bestaat eigenlijk uit een groot eiland met meer dan 40 kleine eilandjes eromheen, en valt ook nog net onder het gebied Patagonië. Het is een rustig eilandje met relatief weinig toeristen, alleen de Chilenen zelf lijken het eiland te hebben ontdekt. 

Juist omdat het een eilandengebied is, heeft het een hele eigen identiteit. Jannis vergelijkt het wel met Zeeland, dat natuurlijk ook uit eilanden bestaat. Hij denkt dat het lijkt op hoe Zeeland er tot de jaren ´50 uitzag, met allemaal hele mooie visserdorpjes aan de kust, kleine eilandjes met pondjes ernaartoe en overal kleine boerderijtjes met allemaal paar koeien, een hond, een lapje aardappelen (de aardappel komt hier vandaan – ze hebben hier meer dan 150 soorten) en wat groenten. Het eiland staat vooral bekend om zijn tradities (er zijn veel legendes waarin een groot gedeelte van de bevolking nog heilig in gelooft) en de houten kerkjes.

Er staan over het hele eiland honderden kleine kerkjes, helemaal gemaakt uit hout (sommigen zelfs met houten spijkers)omdat ze niks anders voorhanden hadden dan hout. Sommige kerken vallen onder het UNESCO erfgoed. In Castro, de hoofdstad van het eiland staat zelfs een kathedraal, helemaal gemaakt van hout. In Italië is er destijds een ontwerp gemaakt, maar bedoeld voor marmer en steen, en deze is helemaal ´vertaald´naar een houten exemplaar. Ik ben zelf nooit eerder in zo´n gezellige kerk geweest.

Om niet alleen de kathedraal maar ook andere kerkjes te kunnen zien, hebben we een paar dagen een auto gehuurd om over het eiland te kunnen touren. Vanuit Ancud in het noorden van het eiland, zijn we naar beneden gezakt, waar we uiteindelijk in de hoofdstad Castro zijn geëindigd. Onderweg hebben niet alleen verschillende kerkjes bezichtigd, maar ook langs heel veel fantastische kustlijn gereden, naar een vuurtoren geweest, verschillende forten gezien en een paar hele leuke visserdorpjes bezocht.

In een zo´n visserdorpje hebben we overnacht. Een heerlijk bed en ´s morgens een heerlijk ontbijt met zelfgebakken brood, eigen gemaakte bramenjam en ´küchen´ (tradiotioneel vruchtengebak, overgehouden uit de tijd van de Duitse kolonisten) en meer traditionele gerechten. En een schitterend uitzicht over de zee!

Vanuit Castro zijn we een dagje met de auto naar een kleiner eilandje geweest. Wederom een mooie trip. Aan het einde van de dag wilde we het pondje weer terug nemen, maar toen we bij de pond aankwamen, lag er een grote boot die met eb per ongeluk was drooggevallen op het strandje waar de pond normaal aanlegt. Er omheen lagen ook nog grote hopen grind, die er vanwege werkzaamheden lagen, dus er was geen enkele mogelijkheid om pond op te rijden. Een andere pond die met meer bezoekers van de overkant aankwam, kon ook niet goed aanleggen. En wij konden niet meer van het eiland af……..
Uiteindelijk hebben enkele mannen van de werkzaamheden, die bezig waren met het aanleggen van een grote, nieuwe aanlegstijger (wij snappen nu wel waarom  😉 ) even provisorisch een nieuwe ´aanlegstijger´ van zand aangelegd. Onze helden van de dag!

Door de mooie omgeving en de relaxte sfeer, zijn we veel langer in Chiloé geweest dan we aanvankelijk van plan waren. Maar alhoewel we geen echte planning hebben, krijgen we nu steeds meer het gevoel dat als we het tot Ecuador willen redden, we nu toch echt Patagonië moeten gaan verlaten en noordelijker moeten gaan. Vandaar dat we vanmiddag toch maar weer een busticket hebben gehaald om morgen dan eindelijk weer te vertrekken.

Weer een nieuwe bestemming: het Chileense en Argentijnse merengebied!!

Liefs Martine.

P.S. Kijk ook nog even naar onze Flickr-webpage voor de nieuwe foto´s van Torres del Paine.

Hi everyone, 

It has been a while, but since we have free internet in the (splendid) hostel over here, we are still busy finalizing the publication of our pictures on our Flickr-webpage from our trips of the past month in Patagonia:

Our journey from Punta Arenas, to Ushuaia, El Calafate, El Chalten, Puerto Natales and to Torres del Paine, untill we temporary moved out Patagonia a week ago when we arrived in Puerto Montt by the Navimag ferry.

Because of this (and since we are pretty busy here in Chiloe travelling by car, watching a sudden display of fireworks tonight and almost being left behind by the ferry on one of the islands here earlier this evening) it will at least be a couple of days before we have enough time to again write a proper piece here. We advice you to visit our Flickr-webpage instead and check out our pictures there, and the stories that go with them.

Enjoy!

Jannis en Martine.    

Hi everyone,

After leaving Patagonia with the 4-day trip by the Navimag ferry, we have stayed for two days in Puerto Montt, a very ugly port/salmon-production city. Apart from having a lovely hospedaje over there, this city only had one advantage for us: it has very good internet facilities.

This why we have used our time in Puerto Montt to sort out, edit & upload all of the pictures (a lot) we have taken in Patagonia last month.

Yesterday we have gone back to Patagonia again (yes, we really like this area), but now to the Chilean Chileo island, which is only a 3-hour bus-ferry ride from Puerto Montt city center. So now we have changed our world again, from being very ugly to fairytail-like surroundings.

We plan to be staying here for some time, so we now have plenty of time to use the internet. That is why we are going to publish a new set of Patagonia pictures each day on our Flickr-webpage, so check it out for lots of new pictures during the coming days. The first set we just have published are pictures from our visit to Punta Arenas and arround, during the first few days after we had arrived at Tierra del Fuego (Fireland/Vuurland) island.

I also have added some new blogsites to the Page (see the upper right corner of this website) with the title Sites from people we know, with blogsites from other travellers we have met during the last two months. So, check out these blogsites too.

Jannis.

Nou daar zijn we dan…

…weer in de bewoonde wereld!

Vorige week hebben we 6 dagen getrokken door Torres del Paine, een groot natuurpark in Chileens Patagonië.

Jannis en ik waren goed voorbereid.

Zo kwamen we er een week eerder na een dag regen bij de Perito Moreno Glacier al achter dat onze gortex-jassen uit Nederland het goed doen, maar dat ook een goede waterdichte broek hier toch wel erg handig is. Voordat we naar Torres del Paine vertrokken, hadden we dus eerst goede broeken gekocht.

Omdat Torres de Paine de grootste touristentrekpleister in Chilli is, hebben we vanuit Australie, via een tip van Let & Gijs, netjes alles op tijd geregeld. De refugios (berghutten) waren dus gereserveerd, zodat we niet in de kou hoefden te kamperen (achteraf gezien hebben we uitstekend weer gehad….. 😉 ). En als laatste hadden we uitgezocht welke bagage we mee zouden nemen op deze tocht. We besloten met zijn tweëen maar 1 tas mee te nemen, dan konden we het dragen van die ene tas mooi afwissellen. Mijn tas is het kleinst, dus dat was een goede tas om mee te nemen…

…dachten we. Jannis´ tas bleef met de overige spullen achter in ons hostel in Puerto Natales. Toen we net op weg waren, bleek mijn tas Jannis helemaal niet te passen, veeeeel te klein. De schouderstips stonden op zijn grootst, en nog zaten ze bij Jannis zowat op zijn rug. Ik heb daarom driekwart van de tijd onze tas gedragen, dus erg goed voor mijn zelfvertrouwen!! Ik moet we zeggen dat Jannis het wel precies op de moeilijkste momenten (en dat niet eens altijd bewust) gedragen heeft. En dan met een te kleine rugzak….

We hebben in die 6 dagen meer dan 80 km door de bergen gelopen. Heel pittig, maar het was heel mooi en hoe verder we van ons startpunt waren, hoe rustiger het werd.

De eerste dag was naar ons refugio aan de voet van een gletsjer. Daar zouden we op de tweede dag eigenlijk gaan ice-hiken (op de gletsjer lopen), maar dat is helaas niet doorgegegaan, dus hadden we de tweede dag al gelijk een relax-dagje. Dat hadden we nodig want de derde dag hebben we 10 uur gelopen (exclusief pauzes). Op de weg naar de volgende refugio was, precies in het midden, een hele mooie wandeling door een vallei die we niet wilde missen. Maar om die lange klim onderweg in te passen, bleek wel behoorlijk zwaar. Jannis heeft wat peptalks moeten geven (vooral nadat we een stuk verdwaald waren), maar uiteindelijk was het niet voor niks; hele mooie watervallen en een uitzicht op een schitterende bergketen.

Het hoogtepunt was de laatste dag. We zijn ´s nachts om 3 uur opgestaan om vanuit onze refugio naar hét uitzichtpunt van de Torres del Paine te lopen, zodat we de zonopgang op de Torres zelf (drie hoge bergpieken) zouden kunnen zien reflecteren. We gingen met een groep, waarvan enkele het personeel van een refugio verderop. Zij waren ervaren wandelaars, wat een veilig gevoel gaf, maar de keerzijde was dat zij als een speer de berg op klommen. We liepen niet naar boven, maar we vlogen. Dit terwijl dit van het hele traject juist de pittigste wandeling was. En helaas was er geen mooie zonsopgang, maar wolken……….

Achteraf toch goed dat we gegaan zijn, want terwijl wij weer terug in het refugio aan het ontbijten waren, begon het behoorlijk te regenen. Voor ons was het net tijd om het park te verlaten, zodat we terug konden kijken op 6 uitzondelijk mooie zonnige dagen.

Wat weer betreft hebben we echt geluk gehad. Maar goed ook, want Jannis is op de eerste dag zijn jas kwijt geraakt. Met behulp van medewandelaars is de jas weer gevonden, en heeft Jannis uiteindelijk zijn jas weer terug! Tijdens de zoektocht naar Jannis´ jas hoorden we een verhaal over iemand die zijn camera kwijt was geraakt. Ook de camera is weer teruggevonden, waarbij de vinder zelfs onderweg foto´s voor de eigenaar van het toestel heeft gemaakt, omdat de vinder het zonde vond van de mooie gemiste foto´s. Dat vind ik wel het toppunt van attent zijn!

Maar daarnaast waren we sowieso blij met het mooie weer omdat we vooraf vooral verhalen van reizigers hadden gehoord over ´net een glimp kunnen opvangen van de Torres in de wolken´, en een meisje die een week voor ons was geweest vertelde dat ze niet verder konden, omdat ze een rivier niet over konden steken. Het had er behoorlijk gestormd. Wij hadden dus wel mooi zonnig weer én daarbij ook mooie volle watervallen en stroompjes. Wel moesten we daardoor, tot mijn grote angst, regelmatig een voorheen klein stroompje, maar nu voor mijn gevoel een kolkende rivier oversteken. Ook hier waren er weer wat peptalks van Jannis nodig.

De laatste peptalk die Jannis heeft moeten geven, was in een van de refugios waar er een paar grote (!) spinnen zaten. Dat ik ze groot vond, zegt natuurlijk niks, maar Jannis vond ze dit keer ook groot, dat geeft al wat meer aan. De toiletten zijn hier vaak óf zonder wc-papier óf zonder slot (ik geloof dat de toiletregels hier zijn; deur dicht = bezet) óf zonder zeep, maar in dit geval ´s nachts zonder licht. Geen licht in de wc was zeker niet prettig nadat er de dag ervoor een grote spin tussen het wc-papier tevoorschijn kwam……..

Kortom, ik ben achteraf wel trots op onszelf.

Nadat we terug waren uit de Torres del Paine zijn we direct met een 4-daagse boottrip op de Navimag (een vrachtschip met ook wat plaatsen voor touristen) verder gegaan naar het noorden, waar je behalve eten en lekker genieten van de omgeving, niks kan doen. Het gehalte 60+ was dan ook wat aan de hoge kant, maar voor ons na een weekje trekken een hele goede balans 😉

Liefs Martine.

Yesterday we have arrived back in Puerto Natales from our 6-day hike in the Torres del Paine national park.

The hike was very nice, except for the fact that our ice hike we had planned for the second day got cancelled. Luckily this was compensated by very beautifull sunny weather during the whole period we stayed in the park (this is no joke, but we know other people who have been here too won´t believe us).

We are leaving the town of Puerto Natales again early tomorrow morning for our 4-day trip with the big Navimag boat, travelling up north through the Chilean islands, cliffs, glaciers and the ocean.

As we are now packing, sorting our washed clothes out and having some quick dinner, we will tell you more about our experience in Torres del Paine next time.

But we still had some time this morning to put some more pictures on our Flickr-webpage, so you can check these ot while we are at sea. The new pictures include some pictures we took while we overflew Patagonia 2 weeks ago so you can see some overview of where we have been.

Jannis en Martine.

We are just back from El Chalten where we have walked some great hiking trails, in preparation for our 6-day walk (including 1 day of ice climbing) in the Torres del Paine national park, starting one day from now.

In contrast with El Calafete which is a very touristy and uncharming village, the 600-people village of El Chalten is very nice, situated right in the national park and near a river, surrounded by the very impressive Fitz Roy en Cerro Torre mountains, part of the Andes mountain range.

The fact that El Chalten turned out to be such a very nice village was even more strange when we heard that El Chalten is only 28 years old, and had been errected solely for the purpose of hosting all the people that are walking in the mountains around it. The village is even that young and at such a location (in the middle of nowhere) that there are:

Very, very bad and slow internet connections, no connections for your mobile phone, almost no fresh vergetables available and you could not get any money from the bank, because there are no banks and cash machines there. The cash machine thing was solved two weeks ago, since they just had installed a cash machine two weeks before we arrived. A very big event they told us. We did not know all of this of course before we left, so we had brought lots of cash money with us, as all the travelguides said it is impossible to get money in El Chalten, so there we where: in El Chalten with plenty of cash money.

Our days in El Chalten really have been one the highlights untill now, as El Chalten is situated in very, very beautifull national park covered with sand dunes, yellow flower covered hills, wild rivers, waterfalls, short tree covered bush, predator birds flying around, snow topped mountains, the very impressive Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre mountains peaks and great walking trails overlooking this impressive scenery.

We noticed that there is lots of building activity going on now in El Chalten, so we wonder if the village will stay the same nice little village in the future. As the village grows, more and more people will visit El Chalten and its surroundings, and the fact is the national park is now suffering a lot from the hordes of people visiting it. We even got a special lecture from a ranger when we arrived, telling us to be very carefull with the environment, not to leave any garbage around and not to smoke anything anywhere (anyone smoking is evicted from the park, because a burning cigarette had started a bush fire a couple of years ago). He said that all the warning signs are now also being written in Hebrew so even Israeli people could understand that they were not allowed to smoke and to throw garbage away (there are lots of young Israeli people here, doing some travelling after they have done their 3-year service in the army)….

It will be a while before we publish another post as we will be hiking arround Torres del Paine the next 7 days, but I will try to publish some more pictures on our Flickr-webpage from our travels around Buenos Aires, flying into Chili over the Andes to Punta Arenas and seeing penguins.

Jannis.

We arrived yesterday in El Chalten.

Before we arrived in El Chalten we first have spent some more days in Ushuaia and then some in El Calafate, seeing Argentina´s major tourist attraction.

First about Ushuaia, the most southern town in the world. It´s one of the prettiest towns we have ever been, laying at a bay in the beautifull Beagle channel and located in gorgeous mountains with snow covered tops.

There we visited the huge prison (which is now a museum) over there. This prison is very important to the town, as Ushuaia has become a pretty big town since the hundreds of prisoners and their guards arrived.

The prison was very impressive with an exhibition in every prison cell, giving information about all sorts of criminals, and the political prisoners who stayed there. The most famous prisoner was Carlos Cardel, the man who made the Tango famous. The prison in Ushuaia was errected a century ago to house all major criminals because it is impossible to escape from there, as there are only the ocean and mountains surrounded by hundreds of kilometers of very cold and windy pampas to escape to. This is why nobody managed to escape from it in the 50 years it has been used.

On the last day we have rented bikes to see the beautifull surroundings. We cycled alongside the Beagle channel on a pretty tough (hilly) ride, followed by a couple of hours of hiking through the bush to an estancia. An estancia is basically a big sheep/horse/cattle farm at a distant location. This estancia was one of the first around but is now abandoned, besides some dogs and horses. It still is beautifully located near the water, surrounded by forests and mountains. All of this turned out to be one of the best trips we have done untill now.

After this great trip we left Ushuaia again, to go a little up north to El Calafate to see the famous Moreno glacier.

This was a very long trip, as the Argentinian part of Tierra del Fuego is separated from the rest of Argentina, as some time ago Chili has conquered a little part in between. We had to pass the border four times to go to from (Argentinian) Ushuaia to (Argentinian) El Calafate. Every passing took about an hour, so this resulted in 20-hour bus trip. A good thing was that we had to spend some time on a ferry, where we again saw dolpins swimming along.

We spend some days in El Calafate but the only thing you can do there without spending lots of money (it is very touristy) is visisting the nearby lagoon. This actually turned to be a very nice lagoon with water surrounded by camomilla, sand dunes, wild horses, geese and other birds.

The other thing you have to do in El Calafte when you are spening money, is going on a day trip to the glaciers, of which the Moreno glacier is the famous one. This huge glacier (which is as big as big as Buenos Aires and is 60 meters high) moves about a meter a day which results in big pieces of ice dropping in the water about every 15 minutes.

We visited the Moreno glacier with an ´alternative´ tour during which we first travelled through the mountains, seeing lots of big predator birds and even some condors high in the sky. After that we went on a boat trip cruising alongside the glacier during which we could see the almost fake blue coloured ice. We also saw some big pieces dropping in the water, generating big waves coming towards the boat.

After we had a Calafte ice cream (made from the Calafate berries which grow in the mountains over there) we took the bus to go to El Chalten, Argentina´s mountain hiking centre. It includes what they call here the ´top of the world´, the Fitzroy mountain range.

We will tell you more about this next time, but this might take a while as we are surrounded by mountains the next weeks, without proper internet facilities.

Jannis en Martine.

Here a quick post since we are on a pretty tight schedule right now…

We have left Buenos Aires last week, but not before we had visisted some nice museums, the Sunday market at San Telmo again and I had gotten an Argentinan haircut. As we now had a full day to explore the Sunday market we watched lots of performances, of which a very good tango music performance by music students was the highlight.

The last day we had some very late dinner (not a problem here, since you can easily go out for dinner at 12 o´clock at night) and slept some hours at the airport (to save an overnight stay in a hotel)  to checkin for our flight to Santiago de Chili at 5 o´clock.

After we had arrived in Santiago we changed planes for our flight to Punta Arenas in the south. This flight was really beautifull since it was very clear weather and the full 3 hour flight was over the Andes mountains, so we did see lots of mountains, rivers, lakes, snow and even a couple of glaciers.

Until yesterday we have stayed in Punta Arenas which is an Chilean outpost in the southern part of Patagonia, which used to be a pretty busy city. This was before the Panama canal existed, and all ships had to sail around Cape Horn.

Nowedays it is still a pretty big city for this area with a port, a large airfield (even with ex-Dutch F16´s on it), lots of tourists to see the penguins, trees that are bended by the strong winds and colourfull wind-battered houses which are all protected by steel plating on their walls. This all results in a Scottisch looking city with the same weather and with bright coulored Scandinavian looking houses.

We did not do much here, expet for making plans for the next couple of weeks. But, we did have some very nice Chilean/Brazilian stewish soups (in a very tiny sailor type of cafe run by some Brazilian looking women), visit a very impressive museum and we did do the famous Penguin trip.

This trip really was a highlight, as we went by boat to the remote Isla Magdelane island at which about 100.000 penguins are breeding. Since you could walk in between the penguins and they were not shy at all, this was really a great experience, seeing penguins wiggling around everywhere.

You can get an impression of this by checking out our Flickr-webpage as we now are uploading our pictures from our last two weeks of travelling around Uruquay, doing the nice ferry ride across the Rio de la Plate to Tigre near Buenos Aires, flying into Chili over the Andes to Punta Arenas and seeing the penguins.

We now are in Argentina again as we have left Punta Arenas two days ago for a 12-hour bus ride to Ushaia in the Argentinian part of Tierre del Feugo (land of fires / vuurland), so we really now are at the ´end of the world´….

Here a quick post (and in English to satisfy our Oz´ readers again), because we had a suprise yesterday…

The last two days we saw groups of people with racing team uniforms, so we were wondering if there was going to be a big racing event here.

Somewhat later we also saw lots of Spanish advertising with the word ´Dakar´ on it and even frontpages on the newspapers saying things about ´Dakar´. I then rembered that the famous rally Paris-Dakar has been transferred from Europe-Africa to somewhere in South-America because Africa has become too dangerous (click on this link for the full story), so we where wondering if this rally was starting somewhere close to us.

Yesterday evening when we were going for a walk in the city center we stumbled across lots of police, roadblocks and lots of people. It happened to be the Dakar rally which was starting from the city center to race to Chile….

So we, accidently had a very great night whaching the cars and trucks crossing through the streets with everyone cheering and apploading. A really great atmosphere, getting even better as even some garbage trucks joined the race as they where racing trough the public under load cheers and laugs.

We also saw lots of Dutch cars and trucks since we heard from a Dutch fan that The Netherlands has the second biggest team present.  

As we did not have our camera with us, we have no pictures, so I quickly searched for some websites with the some pictures:

This News site for an impression, some pictures and the story;

This Flickr page for lots of pictures of the participating motors, cars and trucks.

A last note:

The coming days we are going to add the first pictures f our stay here on our Flickr-webpage, so keep checking it out. 

Jannis. 

Wat meteen opvalt in Uruguay zijn de vriendelijke mensen.  Bij aankomst in Uruguay stonden we aan de bagageband te wachten op onze backpack, maar we kregen nauwelijks kans die te pakken. Iemand nam ze meteen over, hielp ons door de douane, en dropte ons in de juiste bus met de woorden ´welcome in Uruquay´. Zo gaat het continue, als je maar even lijkt te twijfelen, komt er meteen iemand vragen of diegene kan helpen.

Zo kwamen we op kerstavond, door vertragingen vanwege de kerstdrukte, veel later in ons hostel in Salto aan dan was afgesproken.  Daar stonden we voor een dichte deur….. De eigenaar van het hostel was al kerst aan het vieren, omdat dee eigenaar had begrepen dat we de volgende morgen zouden aankomen. Ons Spaans hapert blijkbaar toch nog wat af en toe  ;-).
Iemand die toevallig langs reed en ons zag staan, stopt, zorgde dat de eigenaar van het hostel gebeld werd en bleef wachten tot we binnen echt binnen gelaten konden worden. 
Gelukkig maar, want in Uruguay blijkt rond kerstmis echt alles dicht.  

Kerstmis wordt in Uruguay vooral gevierd op kerstavond en wordt hier vergelijkbaar gevierd als oud & nieuw, dus om 12 uur ´s nachts met vuurwerk. De dagen voor kerst staan er tientallen stalletjes waar je het vuurwerk kan kopen, maar zeker niet volgens Nederlandse standaarden. Er hoeft maar iemand een sigaret in te gooien, en je hebt een echte ramp.  Ook heeft het Jannis moeite gekost om geen ´illegaal´ vuurwerk zoals mortieren te halen.

Omdat op eerst kerstdag alles dicht was, behalve gelukkig enkele 24-uurswinkeltjes waar je wat snoep en drinken kan kopen, bestond ons kerstontbijt uit soepstengels, droog brood en water (en een chocoladereep om het op te vrolijken). Omdat het rond de 40 graden was, hebben we de rest van de dag – zoals het daar hoort- vooral alleen maar op apegapen gelegen.

Alles is wel versierd, maar dat komt bij deze temperaturen toch niet echt over, dus de kerstsfeer komt pas tegen  de avond. En dan komt ook de stad weer tot leven. Tegen de avond gingen er uiteindelijk ook nog een paar restaurantjes open, en konden we dus toch nog bij een pizzaria ´kerstdineren´.

Tweede kerstdag kennen ze hier niet, dus was alles gewoon weer open. Toen hebben we alsnog heel uitgebreid (want gesponderd door Jannis´ ouders) een lekkere kerstlunch genoten!

Net voor oud & nieuw zijn we terug gegaan naar Buenos Aires om daar oud & nieuw te vieren. Heel vrolijk is de ´confetti´ die voor oudjaarsdag overal gegooid wordt. Deze confetti bleek uiteindelijk uit verscheurde agendablaadjes en rekeningen te bestaan. Dit geeft wel nogal een rotzooi in een al behoorlijk rommelige stad, waar het vuilnis overal op straat ligt.

Het oud&nieuw zelf is niet zoals wij het in Nederland kennen met aftellen, waarna iedereen naar buiten loopt om vuurwerk te kijken.  Hier blijft iedereen in de kroeg zitten en gaat verder met waar ie mee bezig is. ´Het moment´ hebben we daarom zelfs helemaal gemist. Opeens hoorden we applaus, en bleek 2009 al een paar minuten te zijn aangebroken. Toen hebben wij op een gegeven moment de rekening maar betaald om zelf wel naar buiten te gaan. Daarbuiten bleek er toch ook wel een feeststemming, maar dat zit ´m meer in muziek en dansen en af en toe ook nog wat mooi vuurwerk.

Vandaag op 1 januari blijkt net als op kerst vrijwel alles gesloten, behalve enkele duurdere restaurants, de supermarkten, kiosken en de slipperwinkeltjes. Omdat de restaurantjes om de hoek niet open zijn, zijn we vandaag dus wat duurder uit dan geplant, dus de drankjes van oudjaarsnacht moeten we dan maar een dag later compenseren.

Vandaag kan het nog en willen daarom wij bij deze iedereen ´un buenos ano nueves´ wensen!!!!!!
Daarnaast Leo een hele fijne verjaardag en voor morgen alvast gefeliciteerd aan Nick en Janne!!!