Category: South America

To Iguazu And Beyond

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 18/11/2008

We spent two full days at Iguazu Falls in the end. One on the Argentine side, where you can get close up and very, very wet by taking a boat right underneath the waterfall itself (aftermath pictured below), and one on the Brazilian side, where you get the full panoramic view of the falls in all their glory.

We did our best to avoid the crowds, by catching a ridiculously early bus to the Argentine side on the first day and then rolling up casually late to the Brazilian side on our second day, but even when we found ourselves dawdling behind a tour group of pensioners walking single file along the trails we still couldn’t help but be wowed by the thundering watery glory of it all.

At over a thousand kilometres from Buenos Aires to the falls, our final overnight bus journey of the trip had also been one of the longest, but as we’d once again paid to travel in style on plush and very spacious reclining seats, we weren’t too tired when we were deposited in tiny, tropical Puerto Iguazu the next morning. As well as visiting both sides of the falls, we also took the opportunity to walk to the edge of town, where the Tres Fronteras lookout lets you see three countries from one spot.

Sadly, despite being one of the highlights of the trip, our stay in Iguazu was also tinged with sadness for us, as it marked the end of our affair with Argentina. On our last evening in town, I somehow found room for one more bife de lomo, and then that was that. The next morning we caught a cab to Brazil: at the midway point on the bridge that forms the border, the Argentine blue and white painted on the sides gives way to Brazil’s green and yellow. I turned to Sal and wondered aloud if we’d ever eat steak as fine as that again…

The final two weeks of our trip passed in a blur, starting with a few days in Rio, where we stayed just a coconut’s throw from Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. Sadly, for the first time in our trip, the weather didn’t quite cooperate, but it still didn’t stop us from ticking off the standard tourist attractions: including Pão de Açúcar and Christo Redentor. When we rolled up to buy tickets for the train up to see Christo, the weather was so bad that the guy at the ticket window even told us we wouldn’t see anything. “It’s cloudy” he said, as if we hadn’t noticed. Given that we had no other days left, weren’t going to be coming back to Rio any time soon, and had already trekked all over town to get to the bottom of the mountain, we decided to take a punt anyway, and we were glad we did. When we got off the train at the top, it was so cloudy that we could barely even see the top of the statue from the bottom of it. It actually seemed rather appropriate to be up in the heavens with Christo, but then all of a sudden the clouds parted to reveal the glorious city below, before closing again almost as quickly as they had opened, with the pattern repeating at regular intervals. (And every time the train deposited a new set of arrivals at the top of the mountain, we would watch amused as they saw the clouds part for the first time, as we had done, and rushed to the edge to grab their photos of the city, before slowly realising that exactly the same thing would be happening again when the clouds parted again just a few minutes later).

From Rio, we caught the bus to the lovely little idyllic colonial town of Paraty. After hiring bikes again and getting ourselves caught in the torrential rain, then riding up the world’s steepest hill (2 hours up; 10 minutes down), we waited for the sun to come out before indulging in Paraty’s other main attraction. When the sun finally chose to cooperate, though, we didn’t hesitate to jump on a boat and sail off to some of the nearby beaches, serenaded by a chap on board with an acoustic guitar playing “Brazilian pop music”.

On our last night in Paraty, with only a long bus journey to Sao Paulo separating us from the end of our trip, we grabbed a quiet dinner at gimmicky but nice flambé restaurant (they stopped short of flambéing the menu, but that was about it…) and got an early night. Many hours later, we were woken by some very rude people who came in at about 3AM and suddenly started making all sorts of noise. We eventually got back to sleep, but, Sal tells me, I inadvertently got my revenge. Apparently, many hours later when the noisy people had come back and gone to bed, I’d been snoring so loudly that they’d been banging on our wall to try to get me to shut up.

I felt very proud of myself.

The trip to Sao Paulo was long, but largely uneventful. Apart from the fact that as we pulled out of town we paused at a fire station, where a big burly chap in uniform got on. I assumed that he was going to check our documents, like the police who’d sometimes got on our buses in Peru, but that turned out not to be the case. Apparently his job was just to put on the in-bus DVD, Rugrats in Paris. Once he’d carefully selected the Portuguese soundtrack, his job was done, and he hopped off the bus a short while later.

For the final two days of our epic four month journey, we checked in to one of the most expensive hotels in town (our final two nights’ accommodation cost almost as much as our entire month’s stay in the apartment in BA…) and basically didn’t leave.

And then that was that: many hours on the supremely uncomfortable Swiss Air flight back home later, we were on the ground in Manchester wondering what to do with our lives now that it was all over and the real world beckoned…

Buenos Aires: Slight Return

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 03/11/2008

So what do you do if you unexpectedly find yourself back for one last weekend in your favourite place on the entire continent?

We couldn’t quite believe we were back. As the taxi took us across town to Palermo I started to think about all the bonus stuff we were going to be able to do. The lovely little hotel we’d booked into at the last minute was on the corner of Carranza and Gorriti, which wouldn’t have been an ideal location for a first time visitor to the city, but was perfect for us–stumbling distance from all our favourite bars and restaurants, around the corner from Olsen and the No Brand shop, and a short walk across the tracks to Palermo Soho.

Of course we couldn’t leave BA again without revisiting La Cabrera, home of the finest steak in town, so one of our first tasks was to book in for dinner. We also booked in for Sunday brunch at Olsen, and I went back to the No Brand shop (where the girl behind the counter recognised us) to buy their El Che T-Shirt. It was like our own personal BA Greatest Hits compilation.

We didn’t feel under any obligation to do any more tourist stuff, but did tick one final item off the list by visiting the Carlos Gardel museum over in Abasto. It was very interesting and, I thought at the time, very reasonably priced at just a peso. It was only much later that I looked at the tickets and spotted that we’d been charged the Entrada Residente, the price for locals, which made me very happy…

But all good things have to come to an end. And there is, after all, only so much steak you can eat and only so much Mendoza Malbec you can drink. And so our weekend came to an end and we left Buenos Aires for good on the night bus. We were heading 1200 kilometers north, where Iguazu falls, Brazil, and the last three weeks of our journey were waiting for us.

Argentina Buenos Aires South America Uruguay

So Where Was I? Oh Yeah…

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 02/11/2008

And so August, as it has a way of doing, came to an end and we were forced to leave lovely Buenos Aires to continue our travels. On our last day in the apartment we got up early to clean the place, popped out for a last lunch just down the street, and went back to wait for our landlady to come over so that we could swap the keys for our deposit.

Luckily, we’d anticipated that she’d be late, so even though I had to give her a call 30 minutes after she was supposed to be there–to find out that she was “just leaving now”–we still had plenty of time to get our money back and then get ourselves over to the shiny Buquebus boat terminal for our afternoon trip across the Rio de la Plata. And a couple of hours later we were in pleasant, laid-back Montevideo. After a small drama getting hold of Uruguayan Pesos (“why are we the only people in this situation?” we’d wondered, as we stared at the “out of service” message on the only ATM in the terminal in Montevideo–it was only later that we realised that it was Sunday night, and so everyone else on the boat had been Uruguayan and returning home after spending the weekend in BA…) we found our hotel and settled in to a few days in the capital.

Having failed to get into the still-closed-for-renovation Teatro Colon in BA, we did our best to make up for it after stumbling upon an free performance at Monetvideo’s equally impressive equivalent, the stunning Teatro Solis. It was great, even despite the fact that the bulk of the audience for the free afternoon recital by a visiting German orchestra was made up of clearly disinterested local schoolkids who were more into talking to each other than the music, and also despite the fact that the guy sitting just along from us had failed to understand the concept of “no photography”. It may have been perfectly timed to hit the break in the music, but I’m pretty sure Wagner’s original vision hadn’t included the the accompaniment of a mobile phone camera shutter…

With 20 or so kilometres of coastline, mostly bordered with a nice wide jogging/biking track, Montevideo also provided us with another chance to get on our bikes and go for a ride. We rode for miles, past empty sandy beaches and through quiet seaside resort suburbs that would be packed in summer. We ate some amazing seafood at the Uruguay Yacht club looking out over the bay before turning around and letting our weary legs cycle us back to the hotel.

After a couple of days in Montevideo we caught a bus along the edge of Uruguay to pretty little Colonia, and almost instantly realised that we’d badly miscalculated in our planning. We thought we’d stay there for a couple of days, but as nice as Colonia was, it was immediately obvious that you could see the entire town in about 30 minutes. And it didn’t help that our hotel room was small, shabby, and nothing like the pictures on the hotel website.

“Why don’t we go back to BA?” I suggested.

And so that’s what we did. 5 minutes later we were at the boat terminal changing our ticket so that we could jump on the first boat the following morning, shortly after that we were on the internets booking ourselves into a posh looking hotel in Palermo Hollywood for the weekend, and shortly after that we were running around town taking our photos of Colonia before the sun set.

We were both excited, though: we had a bonus weekend in the best city in South America to look forward to.

Argentina Buenos Aires South America

Buenos Aires

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 01/09/2008

From San Antonio it was just an hour on the bus to Buenos Aires, where the apartment in which we were planning to spend the whole of August was waiting for us. I had a wallet full of US$ to pay for it, and we were ready to stop lugging the backpacks around for a bit.

Actually, getting the cash to pay our rent had proved to be something of a challenge, as Argentine ATMs impose ridiculous limits on foreign cards. Some of them won’t let you take out more than 320 pesos in one go (which is about fifty quid, and doesn’t go very far when you need to get a month’s rent plus deposit). I got some of the cash while we were in Chile, where the limits are a bit more sensible, although that in itself nearly caused us some problems. At one machine in Santiago, I withdrew about £250, or 250,000 Chilean pesos. The machine chose to dispense this as 50 CH$5,000 notes, an amount so big that it could barely fit through the cash dispensing slot, resulting in Sal and I frantically grabbing at the jammed notes to try and pull them out before the machine closed up again. When we had got them out, I could barely shut my wallet, so I took the centimetre thick wad of notes straight to the casa de cambio and swapped them for 5 US$100 bills…

When we’d tell people that we were planning to stay in BA for a whole month, we tended to get one of two reactions. There are the people who understand why, and then there are those, like the Irish guys we horserode with in San Antonio, who would just look at us aghast and say “A month? Really? What are you going to do?”

Just the other day, we were chatting to some fellow gringos at the Boca Juniors match who’d opted for the latter response. “What have you been doing?” they asked.

“Um. Well. Loads of stuff…”

Perhaps our minds have been warped by all the amazing steak and wine we’ve had. Of course we really have done loads of things in BA, and being in our little place in Palermo, away from all the tourist crowds, has just meant that we’ve had the freedom to take our time. We gradually ticked off the tourist stuff, though, like Recoletta cemetry (eventual home to Eva Peron), the colourful streets of La Boca, the Casa Rosada (presidential palace), the Plaza de Mayo (where the mothers of the “disappeared” gather every Thursday to protest about the murder of their children during the military dictatorship in the late 70s and early 80s), Puerto Madero (the renovated dock area), the Costanera Sur ecological reserve (where we hired bikes and rode along the Rio de la Plata), the races at Palermo Hippodrome (where Sal successfully picked the second placed horse in every race, which would have been great if she hadn’t put all her bets on for the win…), MALBA (the modern art galley), the fine and decorative art galleries, the ballet, tango and that Boca game…

But actually, no, we really spent the month eating.

With so many fine restaurants to choose from, especially in Palermo, we never needed to go to the same one twice. And I can’t stress enough just how good Argentine steak is. Even when it’s not amazing, it’s still head and shoulders above anything I’ve ever had anywhere else in the world. There are many cuts to choose from, but for us it was all about bife de lomo (tenderloin), ideally served jugoso. And as our time in Argentina came to its end, I started to think about my own personal top five…

Top Five Steaks

(5) Don Julio, Guatemala 4691, Palermo

This place has been around for years, and you can see evidence of this in the reviews written on the labels of the wine bottles that line the walls. When I asked how big the cuts were (as we’d made the mistake of not sharing one elsewhere) I was invited over to meet the chef and view a tray packed with raw steak in all its different forms. Mine was excellent, but Sal’s was just a little too done, so this place only makes it to number 5 on the list.

(4) El Solar del Convento, Caseros 444, Salta

This was where we had our first real Argentine steaks, and they were among the best.

(3) Zarza, San Antonio de Areco

After a couple of disappointing meals in Rosario, it was great to get back to some quality cow. The little place we picked for dinner on our first night in San Antonio didn’t look like anything special, but turned out some truly wonderful steak.

(2) El Desnivel, Defensa 855, San Telmo, Buenos Aires

The steaks were so big in El Desnivel in San Telmo that we really should have shared one between us, but we made it through the whole juicy lot of it somehow.

(1) La Cabrera, Cabrera 5099, Palermo Soho, Buenos Aires

We had to wait maybe 90 minutes for a table at La Cabrera but it was worth it. Definitely the best we’ve had. In fact, I’m getting hungry just thinking about it…

Una Problemita

Life in BA wasn’t all a bed of thick juicy steak, though. We did have a couple of dramas along the way. I’ve lost count of the number of museums and other tourist sights that were closed for renovations, we didn’t get to see the inside of the famous Teatro Colon (which is closed for renovations that are taking two years longer than they were supposed to) and we were turned away from more than one restaurant that couldn’t fit us in (including one that was completely empty but apparently fully booked).

Oh, and we managed to get ourselves locked out of the apartment, which was fun.

We were heading out for Sunday lunch at a posh Scandinavian restaurant called Olsen, that’s over in Palermo Hollywood and famous for its Sunday brunch. We’d been turned away from there the previous Sunday but this time we had–gasp–a reservation. As we stepped out of our apartment, I turned to put my key into the door that had just slammed shut behind me, but the key wouldn’t fit in.

We had two sets of keys, and when we were in, we tended to leave one of them in the lock on the inside. One set were in my hands. Had I left the others in the lock on the other side of the door, thus preventing me from putting the ones I had into this side? It was the only possible explanation I could think of, making this very definitely my fault. Oops.

After bothering our very nice neighbour, and arranging to meet Eduardo, the building’s doorman, a few hours later, we went off to what turned out not to be the pleasant Sunday brunch we’d been hoping for.

“Is there a key on the other side?” asked Eduardo, when we met him later. “Then I think the only way in will be to poof!” he said, making the sound and action of a door being broken open. We went up to see what he could do anyway, and after a bit of poking about with a screwdriver he had a brainwave.

Our balcony door was open, so he could simply climb through our neighbour’s window, jump onto the balcony and open the door from the inside. Simple.

Oh, except for the fact that our apartment was on the eighth floor, there were at least 2 metres between our neighbour’s window and our balcony, and it was a sheer drop down to the cold, hard street below. Eduardo decided that this was no problem and went off to get what turned out to be the world’s flimsiest bit of rope with which to tie himself on.

Luckily, after some discussion, we managed to persuade Eduardo that this was not such a sensible idea (at one point I gave the rope he’d tied to the neighbour’s window ledge the slightest of tugs and the “knot” he’d tied came instantly free in my hands), and suggested that he might phone us a locksmith…

And so, several hours later, we finally got back into the flat. We weren’t actually there to see how the locksmith–described by Eduardo as “the best in the area”–had managed to get the door open. His default technique had been to take the key that we had, line it up with the lock, and bash it with a screwdriver in an attempt to force it in. After twenty minutes of this, our landlady and her husband had turned up–just back from their holidays and clearly exhausted, poor things. She took us over the road for a coffee while the locksmith and his son, who was subsequently drafted in to assist, battled with the door.

But we got back in eventually. And it wasn’t even my fault. There was no key in the other side. The lock had just decided to die, and we were the ones unfortunate enough to be stuck on the wrong side of it when this had happened. Just as well, I guess, that Eduardo hadn’t risked his life to get inside, as even if he’d survived the drop, he’d probably have just ended up stuck in there for the rest of the day…

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Horse Riding

We spent a few days in Rosario before heading on to a little town called San Antonio de Areco, just an hour out of BA. Sal wanted to go horse riding, and so it seemed foolish not to stop in gaucho country to give it a go. As we had an apartment booked for BA, we decided to blow out on a nice hotel and jumped on the bus.

Unfortunately, when we arrived in tiny San Antonio, it seemed like it wasn’t going to be as easy as we’d thought to get up on a horse of some kind.

“Oh no, you’re too late,” said the man at our hotel, looking at his watch, when we asked about the possibility of horse riding in the morning. “The farm will be closed now. Maybe we can call them tomorrow. But I don’t think so.”

Oh. So off we went to the tourist information office in town.

As my Spanish vocabulary doesn’t quite cover horses and horse riding, and as we were in a tourist information office, my opening gambit to the lady behind the desk was “¿habla usted ingles?” but her reply was just a curt “no”.

So I stumbled through in Spanish trying to explain what we wanted to do. But no, she said, there was no horse riding to be had here. Maybe we could call these ranches out of town. By this point she had switched into the English she didn’t speak, and she went on to tell us that you couldn’t really go horse riding because it’s too dangerous. And the insurance costs too much.

Oh. So off we went away from the world’s least helpful tourist information office. We knew from our hotel search that there was at least one ranch in town (curiously not one of the ones she’d told us to call) so we walked over there.

And there we met a friendly chap called Juan Manual, who laughed at our story and told us that horse riding would be no problem at all, that there’s no such thing as needing insurance in Argentina, and that the reason that the lady at the tourist office hadn’t told us about them was probably because he’d recently interviewed her for a job at the ranch that she’d not been given…

And so off we went the next day.

It turned out to be surprisingly good fun, although after four hours in the saddle, I realised when I got down that there’s a reason why John Wayne walks like that…

Argentina South America

Thoughts on Argentina…

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 29/08/2008

* Gosh. They don’t half like a protest here. You can barely move without coming across a group of people airing their grievances. For the first part of our stay in the country there was a big ongoing protest by the country’s farmers against new export duties that president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was trying to push through. Every time we turned on the telly there’d be the same footage on each of the five local channels, which would either by CFK giving a passionate speech or the senate in the middle of a heated debated about the new taxes. (The farmers got what they wanted in the end, but only after the vice president used his casting vote to break a tie and vote against the bill–clearly someone had an eye on his political future there…)

We’ve come across many protests when we’ve been out and about too. At one point we were in a taxi to the bus station and had to take a detour around a group of hospital workers who were burning tyres in the middle of the road in a bid for better terms and conditions. Then when we got to the bus station the TV in the waiting room was showing a full scale riot taking place in the centre of Córdoba, a town we’d been to a week or so earlier. Of course all the locals around us were just going about their business without paying any attention to the devastation being wrought on their second city. To us this stuff is incredible. To the locals, it’s just what people do here.

* They say that the British like a bit of a queue, but they’ve got nothing on the Argentines. As tourists we have been largely immune to it, but for the locals there is seemingly no part of going about your everyday business that doesn’t involve joining the back of a rather lengthy line.

The closest we came to getting involved in this was when we made the mistake of buying a local SIM card for our phone. In the UK this would have been a straightforward procedure:

(1) Buy SIM card
(2) Place in phone
(3) Make calls

But nothing in Argentina is that simple. It was more like:

(1) Buy SIM card
(2) Realise SIM card doesn’t work
(3) Buy second SIM card
(4) Realise that although second SIM card does work, international calls are barred by default on pre-paid lines
(5) Spend the next few weeks with a local mobile phone that doesn’t do the only thing you wanted it to do
(6) Phone customer service and try to talk to bloke in Spanish until he hangs up you
(7) Finally decide to brave the customer service centre
(8) Join queue stretching almost out of the door just to get a number to wait in line to be seen by one of the customer service representatives
(9) Stumble through a conversation in Spanish with helpful but ultimately clueless person who tells you it is probably the phone but who eventually agrees to raise a help ticket anyway and says that it might be sorted in two days
(10) Finally manage to dial an overseas number on the phone
(11) Realise that credit was loaded onto the phone so long ago that you now only have 2 days to use it before it expires…

* Argentine Spanish is weird. I’m getting better now, but when I first got to Argentina I suddenly found I couldn’t understand anyone (and they couldn’t understand me). It’s bad enough that the Spanish I learnt at school was European Spanish, but speaking Argentine Spanish isn’t just a matter of remembering to “s” every time I was taught to “th”. They have different words for stuff, and (in the area around Buenos Aires) even an entirely different verb form, vos, which replaces tu as the informal “you”. Oh, and the Argentines also pronounce the double l, which is usually a “y” sound, as a “j”. I’m still getting used to saying “pojo”, “boteja” and the like when my instincts tell me it’s wrong…

Ironically, they call Spanish “castellano” here, even though Castilian Spanish is precisely what they don’t speak. The other day someone asked me if I spoke Spanish by saying ¿Caste-j-ano? I think by failing to answer and only pulling a confused expression, I sort of answered the question…

[One thing I do love about Argentine Spanish, though, is their habit of using -ita. You can add this to a Spanish noun to make it a smaller version of the thing (hence senorita is a small senora), and the Argentines have really taken this verbal tick to heart: from preguntitas (little questions) to problemitas, it still makes me smile every time I hear it…]

Argentina Chile South America

Chile and Argentina…

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 28/08/2008

As nice as it was to be back in civilization, in a land with paved roads and road signs and everything, we didn’t exactly hang around in Chile. In fact, less than 24 hours after we’d entered the country we were back at the same border post being stamped out by the same guy who stamped us in the day before. He didn’t even bat an eyelid as he removed the tourist card on which I’d written that we’d be staying in the country for a month and passed my passport back to me.

It’s not that we didn’t like San Pedro de Atacama. On the contrary, it’s a pleasant little town–if a little touristy–of whitewashed houses and traffic-free streets. And after spending so long at chilly altitude it was lovely to be somewhere warm again (even if it had been cold, there would have been no danger of us shivering through the night, as the bed in our hostel had sheets made of polo fleece–it was as if we’d slept in a big comfy jumper).

But Chile is expensive. With no functioning ATM in town (seriously, what is it with border towns?) and only a limited supply of US dollars to exchange at punitive exchange rates, we were forced to keep moving. And as the bus across the Andes to Salta in Argentina only runs on certain days of the week, the first thing we did after checking into a hotel was to go and buy our tickets out for the next day.

We were joined in Salta by Chris and Kyria, who we’d first met on the chilly salar de uyuni, and who happened to be heading the same way as us. After we’d helped them celebrate American Independence day in Salta they went back to Bolivia and we started to work our way south through Argentina: a day in Tucumán (the cradle of Argentine independence) here, a few in uni town Córdoba there, and several more in Mendoza enjoying the delights of the country’s wine region.

From Mendoza, we poped back into Chile for a little while. The road over there takes you right up to the top of the snowcappped Andes, and back down through the ski resorts on the other side (at one point the road even goes under the ski run–and I hope no one ever strays too far from the middle, as that looks like a rather large drop on either side…)

But once again we didn’t hang around in Chile. We spent a few days in Valparaíso, a pretty town on the side of a hill by the ocean where we saw the first rain of our trip so far, and then a few in Santiago, before heading back across the mountains once again to Mendoza.

Bolivia Chile South America

Salt

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 18/08/2008

There was no electricidad again.

This time we were in the tiny dusty nothing town of Uyuni, ready to set off on our 4WD tour of the amazing Bolivian salt flats. We’d left La Paz the day before on the bus, travelling to a forgettable town called Oruro up on the top deck at the front. Our seats were panoramico, apparently, according to the woman who sold me the tickets. And we certainly had a full and unobstructed view of just how crazy the drivers are in these parts, including our own driver of course–if I’ve got a full panoramico view of the road ahead and I can’t see around that blind corner up ahead, then I’m pretty sure he shouldn’t be overtaking. That was enough Bolivian buses for us, so in Oruro we jumped on one of the few remaining passenger trains in these parts, the Expresso del Sur, which wound its way down the country through some impressive scenery to deposit us later that night in a chilly Uyuni.

This time a lack of electricidad didn’t mean that we had no water, just that the water was exclusively cold. Our shower, like most Bolivian showers we encountered, heated the water through an electric element in the shower head. But Uyuni was cold. So having no hot water was effectively the same as having no water at all.

As an indication of just how cold it was in Uyuni, we’d been woken from our sleep by the pleasant morning call of the lesser spotter backpacker, as one of our fellow hotel guests was being violently sick into one of the communal sinks in the courtyard just outside our room (these would be the sinks described by the Lonely Planet in its review of the hotel as being “great for laundry”). I wouldn’t have been volunteering to do any of my laundry in them that day, though, as when we left the hotel to find some breakfast we could see that his sick had frozen solid in the bottom of the sink into a sort of piece of abstract art. (And when we came back later to pick up our bags, the poor ladies from the hotel were pouring boiling water over it from a kettle and poking it with a stick to try to dislodge it. Rather them than me…)

The salt flats are every bit as stunning as we expected them to be, and there’s not much I can add that the photos don’t already show.

With such stunning scenery, it’s almost impossible to take a bad photo there. And it also seems to bring out the urge in everyone to mess around with trick photography–we went flying, as we’d seen someone else’s version of that shot back in Cusco, but other groups were taking it to another level. There were people there with props, playing with perspective to shoot themselves climbing into giant Pringles packets, pushing over giant footballs, standing on each others hands, and doing stuff like this.

After we’d spent the day hanging around on the salt, and visiting the spectacular cactus-filled island, Isla Incahuasi, we left the salar to spend the night in a hotel made of salt, in a small town called San Juan.

[I should point out that the salt hotel we stayed in wasn’t the salt hotel. There used to be at least two of these on the salar itself, but they’ve been closed down for environmental reasons. As the Lonely Planet colourfully puts it, they didn’t properly manage the waste, “essentially channelling it back into the same salty crust that you’ve come to admire…” We stopped at one of these hotels while we were on salar and saw that it has been renamed “a museum” (albeit a museum that sells drinks and has beds you can sleep in…)]

The second day of the tour took us to some more spectacular landscapes, but we were lucky to have got out to see it at all, as our morning had begun with the not so reassuring sound of a cold jeep refusing to start. It was eventually talked into cooperating (after a small nudge from the tour group), and apart from us subsequently pulling up in the middle of nowhere to let it cool down (“un pocito problema” according to the driver, who then jumped out and started throwing bottled water at the tyres) we made it through the rest of the trip, visiting funny shaped rocks, flamingos, and lagoons along the way.

The final night of our salt tour was not only the coldest of our trip so far, but also a timely reminder of why we haven’t been staying in dorms. As we slept in our sleeping bags, under the covers, and wearing all our clothes, listening to the cacophony of snores, grunts and moans coming at us in stereo from the other people on our tour in the dorm beds around us, we vowed to stick to the private rooms again from now on.

We also vowed that perhaps we should head for somewhere at a slightly lower altitude that might be a bit warmer, but as luck would have it, the start of the third day of the tour passed within spitting distance of the Chilean border, and so rather than head all the way back to Uyuni (which only offered more Bolivian buses, more freezing altitude, and no doubt more electricity-free hotels), we opted to jump off the trip and cross over to San Pedro de Atacama, a tiny tourist town just over the other side of the border down in Chile.

In fact, we’d technically left Bolivia two days earlier, when we’d got our exit stamps in our passports in Uyuni before the tour, although we wouldn’t enter Chile until we’d not only left the tour at the Bolivian border but also travelled a further 40 or so kilometres down to San Pedro. This confuses the hell out of me, by the way: where were we between stamping out of Bolivia and entering Chile, for starters. But then as someone who spent his formative years living on an island, I always find land borders a bit weird…

Bolivia South America

The 1980s

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 16/08/2008

In our room at the hostel in La Paz was an ancient tourist information book, called Discover Bolivia, or something like that. It claimed to have been published in 1991, but it also included helpful information about the country such as “the currency of Bolivia is the peso…” which hadn’t been true since 1986.

In amongst the adverts for VCRs and other state of the art gizmos, I found this gem selling British Airways to the tourists of Bolivia. It’s not quite like that these days.

At the back of the book there was a page that said something like: “this copy of Discover Bolivia magazine is here for you to enjoy because other tourists have left it behind. Please do the same and leave this in your hotel room. If you would like to order a copy of your own, please fill in one of the attached tear off cards…” and, on the adjacent page, there was space for 6 detachable cards for tourists to fill in and send to the publishers with a cheque for $19.95. And even though the book had (presumably) been in the hotel room for almost 20 years, only 3 of the cards had gone.

Bolivia South America

How I Failed To Get Into Prison. And Other Stories…

Post author By Matt Armstrong
Post date 15/08/2008
2 Comments on How I Failed To Get Into Prison. And Other Stories…

After the peace and quiet of the island we returned to Copacabana to catch the bus to La Paz. All our other buses up to that point on the trip had been public buses mostly containing locals, but this time we’d somehow ended up on a bus entirely filled with fellow gringos. And even after being away in our own little world for just a short time, I’d almost forgotten that this continent is full of all these other identikit backpackers all doing the same stuff and going to the same places.

Our fellow travellers on this bus journey included an Irish guy who appeared to have stolen Billy Connolly’s hair. Within seconds of sitting down in the seat in front of me he’d reclined as far back as he could go, for maximum knee-crushing potential, and revealed to everyone within earshot that he was not happy. As I tried to regain the feeling in my lower legs I realised that this was because he’d come from Cusco, labouring under the misapprehension that he would be travelling on a directo bus to La Paz (if he’d really been going the fast route–via the Desaguadero border crossing–then he shouldn’t have even been in Copacabana at all, let alone having to change buses there). Unfortunately for him–and me–he’d ended up going the long way round, and when he realised that this route crosses the lake at Tiquina, and that we would all be chucked off the bus to jump on a ferry, while the bus travelled across on a floating platform of its own, he almost exploded.

Just before leaving Copacabana, we’d bumped into Lottie and James, who we’d previously met in Huacachina and Arequipa. They, too, were heading for La Paz, albeit on a different bus (presumably free of moaning gringos), along with their friend Nick, and so we had friends to catch up with when we got there. And when we did catch up with them, the first thing they told us was that they’d just signed up for a trip their hostel was organising to Willkakuti (“El Retorno del Sol”), the celebration of Aymaran New Year that was taking place that night (the winter solstice) at Tiwanaku, an archaeological site 70 odd kilometres out of town.

Did we want to come? They asked.
Well. Why not? Who needs to use that hostel bed you’ve paid for anyway…

And so we found ourselves forgoing sleep to join a 1AM bus full of gringos heading out to the festival. We might have been half freezing (in spite of all the extra layers we’d brought and the dubious local rum we’d drunk while we waited for things to get going) but it was one of the best things of our trip so far. Joining the crowds on the site felt a bit like being at a weird South American version of Glastonbury, except with no music and where the only entertainment is the arrival of the sun…

I’ve no idea what happened to everyone else who had been on our bus, but we seemed once again to be mostly surrounded by locals (who explained what was going on, and told us that the thing to do was to put your hands in the air to soak up the sun’s energy). Oh, and then Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, turned up in a helicopter to officiate at the ceremony. We couldn’t quite see what it was he was doing, but I did get to tick off the first item on my South American Presidential Bingo Spotting card (although having said that, it’s taken me so long to get round to writing this up, that he almost wasn’t president of Bolivia any more–he survived a referendum earlier this week–I don’t know whether that says more about how far behind I am in writing up this trip, or how quickly things can change in South America…)

When the ceremony ended we had to rush back to get to our bus, and so we joined a minor crush as everyone else tried to get out of the site down the same tiny flight of stairs that were woefully incapable of dealing with the volume of people who were there. While we waited to get out the locals around us laughed at me for being so tall and told me that I looked like that Doctor House off the TV show. Which is a new one for me…

Our journey back featured yet more moaning from the gringos on the bus. One of our fellow passengers described the two hour trip back to La Paz–in a comfortable half empty bus on mostly empty paved roads–as “the worst bus journey ever”.

Clearly the words of a man who hadn’t spent much time in Bolivia.

Oh yeah. The story of how I failed to get into prison isn’t actually as interesting as it sounds. We’d heard and read about La Paz’s famous San Pedro prison, where the guards turn a blind eye–if you slip them enough cash–to visitors coming in to meet a prisoner and see the city within a city inside, but we turned up without doing any proper research, expecting someone would just approach us like they do everywhere else, and it was only after this didn’t happen, and after I eventually plucked up the courage to ask the guards–in Spanish–if they’d let us in, that we realised that it wasn’t quite that easy.

I could come in, said the guard, if I knew who I wanted to visit. Oh. Right.

I opted not to try picking a name out of the air, and we left disappointed.

And that was mostly that for La Paz for us. We spent the rest of our time there hanging around with our friends, at least until I got my first bout of sickness of the trip so far, and had to spend two days in bed while an increasingly bored Sal went out to look at art galleries. And then it was time to head on to Oruro a little way down the country, where we were catching the train to the salt flats…