Touching the sky....

La Paz, Bolivia: At an altitude of over 3600m (11,000ft), nestled in a valley in the shadow of the Cordillera Real (a part of the Andes) lies La Paz, the capital of Bolivia (overlooking for a moment that the judicial capital of Bolivia really is Sucre, but with the palace of the president, the congress, and the vast majority of the people and financial muscle of the country, La Paz is the de-facto capital).

Coming from the small, remote town of Uyuni, the difference could hardly be any more stark. Sure, people still speak Spanish (or Quechua for that matter)and women still wear traditional dresses and boulder hats - but just as common an occurence on the street at they are the businessmen in fine tailored suits and the teenagers in clothes that could put them smack into Buenos Aires, Berlin, or Seattle as well. La Paz is a bustling city with skyscrapers and fast food restaurants (yes, Burger King and McDonalds have made their way here, too), computer stores and movie theaters (I watched Mission Impossible III here).

"The shoestring", how I have heard my comprehensive Lonely Planet "South America" guide being referred to, usually offers a few sound suggestions for accomodation in any given city - but whenever I get the chance I actually follow the recommendations of other fellow travelers for a new city. A guide book is quickly outdated, and people who have just lodged somewhere a few days or weeks ago have usually a better grasp on the current state. So for my accomodation in La Paz I followed the advice given to me by an Argentinean couple during my Salar de Uyuni trip (and they were a nice elderly couple - if they liked the place, it couldn´t be that bad).

The place that I stayed in here was the "Hotel Torino" - smack in the middle of La Paz only half a block from the cathedral and the presidential palace, and right down in the middle of all the action. Renovated in the 50s it probably wasn´t anywhere near what I would have called "nice" in the states, but for here it was more than sufficient - and that for 50 Bolivianos for a single room with private bath (about USD $6), who can complain?

In order to get a better view of the city, I started hiking up one of the slopes of the valley - in the midday heat a very sweaty business, made a bigger challenge by the fact that the air at this altitude contains a lot less oxygen, so you are out of breath really quickly. After I made it about half way up, I wisened up and asked one of the locals which "micro" could get me up the rest of this slope. "Micros" are little mini-buses that have about 9-12 seats and constantly commute between popular places (in my case the cementary and the top of the hill, Ceja), and for 1 Boliviano (about 12 cents) you can hop on and ride along. I had worked my way up this slope for 1.5 hours, and now I learned that for less than a quarter I could have gotten a ride up AND down again! Needless to say that I didn{t waste much time and stopped the next micro going in my direction. The view from above was spectacular (see picture). La Paz appears antirely brown due to the fact that houses made of plain bricks are "finished" without any cover or paint (to me they always appeared as half-finished constructions, until I realized that they were considered done).

Another adventure to be done in La Paz is to visit the Mercado Negro, the black market. While apparently most of the business conducted here these days is legal, that wasn´t always the case. The market is essentially a maze of market stands and boothes that spreads over several blocks selling everything from shoelaces to fleece pullovers, from fish to office supplies. Many streets are completely blocked for traffic and only very narrow walkways allow you to meander through the labyrinth of merchants. Luckily it is really easy to get your bearing in La Paz (since whenever you head downhill you will hit the main throughfare), otherwise many a visitor might get lost in this part of town.

After only two days in La Paz I headed on to Lake Titicaca - excited to yet again move to another famous landmark of South America, yet sad to feel like not having given La Paz the time it deserved (more from the Lake and it´s highlights the next time). Among the cities that I have visited during this trip, La Paz was a definite highlight ranking almost up there with Buenos Aires (and you know how much I loved Buenos Aires).

(Images from La Paz in this gallery.)

There isn't enough soup to salt...

Uyuni, Bolivia: Yesterday I took a one day trip through the Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt lake in the world. It's bound to get smaller, as the Bolivians are scraping off the salt on the sides and process it into table salt, but with 12,000 km square and a thickness between 20cm and over a meter, we'd have to salt a whole lot of soup to make a dent into this salar.

The most common way to see the area around Uyuni (which includes some spectacular volcanoes, a few lagunas and more thermal hot springs) is to book a 3 or 4-day tour that takes you around all those sights in a 4x4 (on a side note, EVERY SINGLE CAR that runs these tours is a Toyota Landcruiser... if they weren't all stolen from Chile, this would made a great advertisement for Toyota), spending the nights in very simple refuges at temperatures below zero. Since I had my fix of "spending the night sub-zero" and have already taken a bath in some hot springs, I figured a one day tour would suffice for my needs.

The tour left around 10:30am and the driver picked up 7 passengers total that had to squeeze into the car. Luckily I was picked up first, so I got the passenger seat next to the driver with the best view and most space. After another short stopover to pick up some food for lunch, we took off.. of course not quite yet to the salt lake, but to the first "tourist stop" where we could by handicrafts, e.g. ashtrays and figurines made from salt, traditional hats and scarves, etc. I bought two traditional hats (I had been planning to get those for some time, so why not now) and will take one of them back for my sister in Germany. I suppose I need to start thinking about other gifts to bring home to friends and family...

After that we finally set off into the salt lake - and it's an amazing sight. I have never in my life seen anything that flat that stretches out over such a vast area. The driver didn't really have to do much other than steering the car in the general direction and let the car go.... no need to steer if there are no obstacles (other than a dead flamingo every now and then). After about an hour of driving, only interrupted by a short stop to witness the salt being shoveled into large trucks for processing in Oruro, we reached the Island of the Incas in the midst of the salt lake.

Now I am not sure why the heck Incas would see the need to have an outpost on an Island in a salt lake with absoultely nothing around for 80km in each direction, maybe they liked the cactuses there.... and the view certainly was swell too, but I imagine that getting water there without the help of a Landcruiser must have been quite the effort.

We spent a few hours in the area to take pictures, had lunch, and took more pictures. Every Landcruiser seemed to stop on this island - and pretty soon the more ludicrous among the travelers started playing soccer and dancing at 4000m altitude in the desert sun.

Later in the afternoon we started our treck back only to stop occasionally for some picture opportunities along the way. I could have spent countless hours taking pictures there (and in fact I did take about 200 fotos). The route back took us along the Hotel de Salar - which is a building constructed entirely of salt. The walls, chairs, tables - even the beds are made of salt. It's a functioning hotel and for some ridiculous amount of money you can spend the night there, instead we headed back to the rim of the salt lake to wait for the sunset. It wasn't as spectacular as I had imagined (further inside the salt lake the colors would probably have been more amazing), but the total flatness of the surface made for some great shadows.

After the sun had disappeared and only the faint glow of orange was left on the horizon, we packed up and made our way back to the town of Uyuni. The rising moon behind the Andes made for another quick stop for us photo enthusiasts, and around 7pm we were back at our hotels.

Today I will be leaving Uyuni again and heading to La Paz. Like always around here, the buses leave only in the evening, so I have to kill the day here catching up on email and news, and around 8pm get ready for another 14 hour ride. I got a tad smarter this time and booked myself on a bus with heating... and just to be sure I have packed my sleeping bag separately. You never know...

Venezuela had to go...

Uyuni, Bolivia: Another couple days have passed - I have gone yet farther up north and crossed borders into Bolivia for the very first time in my life.

I took another one of those fancy buses out of Santiago de Chile - and experienced the best that traveling through these means has to offer. I booked myself for the bargain price of 29.000 Pesos a so-called cama(==bed) seat - and it´s like flying first class on an airplane. You get a little pillow and a blanket, the steward comes through every now and then and brings some food and drinks, the seats recline almost all the way - and they are actually more comfortable than most hostel beds. A few movies are shown and in what feels like no time at all, you have another few hundred miles under your belt. I only had a ticket to Calama (CHI), but was lucky enough to spot a bus at the bus terminal that was heading the direction of San Pedro de Atacama, and for a meager 1000 Pesos they allowed me to hop on board and dropped me in San Pedro.

San Pedro de Atacama is - according to the Lonely Planet guide - THE backpacker´s gathering point of northern Chile. Notable sights here include the Salar de Atacama (the driest desert in the world and apparently the third largest salt lake after Uyuni and Salt Lake city), the Valley of the Moon and some Inca ruins. The town itself is kinda cute, with plenty of hostels and tour organizers - and even in this off-season it is packed with tourists - nestled in a small oasis of an otherwise dry and otherwordly desert. To see some of the surroundings I hopped on a Moon-valley sunset trip (the sunset wasn´t as spectacular as running down the dunes in Death Valley), and a Geysir trip for the next morning.

That geysir trip was quite amazing: A minibus picked us (me and about 10 other very sleepy people) up at our hotels at 4am in the morning, and the next 2 hours the little bus crawled on desert roads through potholes and dried out river beds from 2400m up to 4500m into the crater of a volcano. Surrounded by steaming geysirs we watched the sun slowly rise and create an eerie atmosphere (pictures to follow, as always) and the -8 degrees celsius quickly turned us into icicles. To warm up we headed over to the hot springs for a quick bath - another first for me, neither had I ever bathed at this altitude (more than 13,000ft), nor with outside temperatures like that.

Beign a slave to the bus schedules, I discovered that the only buses from San Pedro to Uyuni left either that very same night (Wednesday) or on the following Sunday, so I had to pack my things after only one night here, abandon my already paid room and jump on another 19 hour bus ride. This time I should experience the worst that bus travel has to offer.

Without any trouble I made the 20:30 bus from San Pedro back to Atacama, where the next bus should take me at 23:00 to Uyuni in Bolivia. That bus looked already a lot sketchier than the previous buses I had taken, and soon after departure I should discover that neither the toilet worked, nor the heating. Neither of these seem like a big deal when you are thinking of taking a bus from downtown Seattle to Redmond, which is only a 20min ride - but if you will be on the bus for 5 hour stretches without stop - on a route taking you from 2400m altitude to over 4000m altitude (that´s about the height of Mt. Rainier), both of those are becoming pretty big deals. What gets worse is that - unannounced to us foreigners, but apparently a normal custom in this area - the bus arrived at the Chilenean/Bolivian border at 3am, and would just sit there waiting until the border opens at 8am, no heating, no engine running, nothing. The local passengers were all informed and well-prepared, they had thick blankets and sleeping bags. Three other foreigners (french canadians on their way to an orphanage in which they volunteered) and I had no idea. Our sleeping bags and warm clothes were safely stored in the hold...

The minutes crept along. Luckily I was wearing both fleece jacket and shell, but was only wearing my hiking pants, which are one htin layer of cloth. It was cold. Very cold. Every time I looked on my watch only 6-8 minutes had passed, it turned 4am, then 4:30am. My legs were freezing. At 5am, wiht the sunrise and a little more warmth still 5 hours away, I had the idea to stuff some paper into my pants in order to insulate them a little better. What could i use? There were no used newspapers on the bus, and all I had was my diary, El Viejo y el mar, and the "South America on a shoestring" guide from lonely planet. That was the solution! There were still countries in this book that I wouldn´t visit on this trip - for example Venezuela! Quickly I ripped the Venezuela section out of the book, crumbled up the pages and stuffed them in my pants - finally there was a little more between the sub-zero temperature air and my legs than only one layer of cloth. That sealed the deal on me not visiting Venezuela on this trip, but it was worth it: It helped a lot.

Needless to say that the last 2 hours didn´t pass much faster, and I can only begin to describe the joy when suddenly a faint glow became visible on the horizon. Day was near! It would still take another huor until the first rays of sunshine would hit the bus, but one of the longest nights of my life was finally nearing an end. Like the 3 French Candians I hadn´t closed an eye throughout this night... not for more than 8 minutes at a time at least.

A few hours later I would arrive safely in Uyuni, Bolivia - home to the largest Salt Lake on earth. Tomorrow I will jump on a 4x4 jeep to see the highlights of this lake and hopefully take some more pictures...

A small celebration.

Santiago de Chile: It´s been 4 months now since I left my work in Seattle and began this journey. Time sure does fly.

I just treated myself to a nice dinner in an Italian restaurant in the fancy Bellavista district of Santiago to celebrate the occasion, alone. Quite fitting for my current state of mind. After four months on the road I am starting to get a little worn out. Every other night in a different city, in a different bed. Meeting new people but never spending enough time to actually getting to know them, constantly seeing new and exciting new things but always on the move to see the next one. It's like living life with the fast=forward button pressed. I am slowly getting ready for a break, ready to be around old friends and my own things again. I must be getting old.

The last few days have been very nice - after a great farewell dinner with my friends from the Navimag boat who then headed in their own respective directions - North, West, and East -, I did a day trip to see the section of the Andes west of Mendoza, the Puente del Inca (Inca bridge), and catch a glimpse of the highest summit of the Americas and the Western hemisphere - the Aconcagua (that part wasn't all that successful).

The following day I took another bus across the Andes (again) to Santiago de Chile, the capital of Chile. It's a huge city, very European in appearance, with a terrible smog problem. I spent two days here seeing the sights, walking the walk, and drinking the wine, and I have come to the conclusion that I like Buenos Aires better. Even though the location of Santiago appears nicer, with the Andes looming in the immediate backdrop of the city, the fact that you can only see them from top of one of the mountains in the city because the smog prohibits it otherwise makes this a whole lot less appealing. Sunset in Santiago begins an hour earlier than in the rest of Chile, simply because the smog reduces the sunlight that comes through so significantly.

In the center of the city on the Plaza de Armas is the cathedral, while touring the city I had the luck to walk into a ceremony - I believe where new pastors were ordained in the church service. The cathedral was brightly lit, a singing chorus demonstrated the great acoustics the cathedral had, and hundreds of people were watching. True to the Latin American way of life the Santiago-ans had no problems using their cameras and cellular phones in the church, so I figured they wouldn't have any objections to me taking pictures either. They didn't.

After the civil uprising in Mendoza, I had the chance of witnessing the Chilenean police in action today. On my way to the center I walked into street that was closed off by the police. A guy with a knife had apparently broken into one of the (closed) side cafes and decided to stay there until the cops arrived. And now he didn't want to come out. By the time I got to the scene, the SWAT team had just arrived and was preparing to end this thing (I was so hoping to shoot a police brutality video on my own). Unfortunately a negotiator that appeared at the same time got the first shot at it, and after 15 more minutes of yelling and throwing around furniture in the cafe, the guy decided to give up (just as the police tried to enlarge the restricted area to give the SWAT more room to move in...). Rubber bullets, mass arrests, stand-offs, and SWAT - you could think I am in the latin America of the late 70s and 80s.

Tomorrow I'll take another bus further north, taking me to the Atacama desert close to the Bolivian border. 22 hours... luckily I managed to get a so-called cama (=Bed) seat, which is pretty much like a first class airline seat. That should make this section a bit more bearable (it's about at 22.5 degrees, Nate - compare that to where we were in Punta Arenas..)

Shot through the heart...

Mendoza, Argentina: I got shot! Of course the title is exaggerating, I only got shot in my behind, and I wasn´t hurt either, except in pride.

The calm city of Mendoza isn´t all that calm after all! While touring the city a friend and I actually got caught in the middle of a civil uprising! While standing on the Plaza Italiana and taking some nice pictures of the fountain there, we suddenly heard gunfire and saw a large group (about 30-40) of 14-18 year old teenagers being chased by policemen on horses (and with shotguns!) right towards us. Realizing that running "with the herd" would only make us appear to be part of the fleeing crowd, we decided to stand right there behind the fountain and let them pass us. After all, having blond hair and being relatively tall makes you easily distinguishable as a foreigner down here.

The cops chasing the crowd shot another round of rubber pellets in the air to drive the crowd into a street they had sealed off - and one of those things hit me right in the butt as it came down!

As expected, the cops rode (or walked respectively) right past us and told us to get the heck out of this area. In the meantime they had locked in the crowd in a small, sealed off section of the street behind us, and we saw the 30 kids lying down on the road and grassy section of the park, face down, hands behind their heads.

Being good tourists of course we didn´t leave, but proceeded to sneak as close to the arrested juveniles and do some rubbernecking and picture taking. After another 20 minutes or so they were all loaded into an armada of Police cars that had arrived, and it was safe enough for us to return to the fountain and recover the rubber pellet - which I am now carrying around in my pocket.

The wine tasting yesterday was fine - we toured the Bodega Weinert and another smaller one. And even though we didn´t get a whole lot of wine to taste, you can´t go to Mendoza without doing a tour of some of the bodegas. To augment the lack of wine on the tour, we had another 6 bottles in our hostel afterwards.

Tomorrow I´ll finally do the tour around Aconcagua and the Puente del Inca - only to afterwards leave Argentina for good and turn up north through Chile into Bolivai and Peru. No more great steaks and fine wines - it´ll be mostly potatoes from here on (with the little exception of Santiago, where I hope to finally satisfy my craving for Sushi and Licorice - which are nowhere to be found here).

A little tip for the road: Don´t ever try to mail a sword from here to the UK.

Out of Patagonia...

Mendoza, Argentina: From Puerto Montt, Chile, I have crossed the Andes once again, thus heading back into Argentina and to the famous Argentinean party town of Bariloche. After having spent a few days there I have continued my journey northwards along the Andes to the town of Mendoza - the heart of Argentina´s wine and meat production. A good place to stay for a few days to update the blog, upload some pictures, and prepare the next leg of the trip. Oh yes, and to taste some wine. It´s been almost 4 months now since I left Seattle.

After having spent a day in Puerto Montt I came to the conclusion that I wouldn´t have missed an awful lot, had I followed some of the guys from the boat that imediately proceeded on their trip on to Bariloche. Puerto Montt is a little harbor town (about 150000 inha.) whose main connection with tourism is people getting on or off the boat to Puerto Natales, and those people passing through that want to visit the Isla de Chiloé, an island of wild and untamed nature and lush vegetation. The hostel (Rocco Backpackers) that the lads from Kawashkar and I stayed in was clean and not too expensive, run by the females of 3 generations of a family (truth be told, the little one, Kristina, is only 4 years old, so she doesn´t run much there, other than the TV). The town itself, however, is dodgy and even the locals tell you to not go out at night, especially alone. We followed that advice and had a few beers and watched "The Incredibles" for the 5th time.

The other lads that had stayed in the hostel were planning to continue on to Pucón, while I was heading for Bariloche. So before anyone else was up I left the hostel to catch my 8am bus across the Cordillera de los Andes back into Argentina.

Bariloche couldn´t be any more different from Puerto Montt. It´s on the dry side of the Andes, so there was no more of the misty and cloudy weather. And where Puerto Montt shone with run down buildings and a generally depressed mood to it, Bariloche lives up to the image of a party city that it is. Even during this "shoulder season" before the ski tourists start flocking to town, it was filled with tourists that came for rafting, horse riding, climbing, or 4x4 riding. Argentineans and foreigners alike. The heavy tourism in this city makes it more expensive than other parts of Argentina, so I decided to limit my visit to a few days and stay in a hostel again (Periko´s on Morales 555 - named after a dead dog, and it was a great, friendly place to stay).

After a day of hiking in the area and having met a few people from the boat in Bariloche again - and celebrating accordingly at the local Irish Pub "Wilkenny" that had Kilkenny on tab, I decided to go on a horse riding trip the next morning. Severly hung over, but a few hours on the back of a horse riding through the sparse patagonian steppe should be able to cure that. And it did indeed - after a few hours out there, guided by Pablo and his faithful - albeit overweight - yellow lab, we had a great time touring the estancia like real gauchos. I could have purchased my horse - Piñon - right there for only a few hundred peso! Why not? Spending a few weeks more and traveling by horse instead of Bus would be a fine idea. Hadn´t I tried to alternate means of transportation so far?

Of course, instead of taking Piñon on the next leg of my trip, I embarked on yet another epic-seming bus ride from Bariloche to Mendoza, 1276km further north - and for the first time in a few weeks a place outside Patagonia again. So far I had only scratched the surface of bus transportation in South America (7 hours is nothing!) - during this trip I got the full experience of the services offered by the bus companies. Just like Airlines they provide drinks and food, movies, pillows - the 19 hours were goen in a blink.

So here I am in Mendoza. It´s a beautiful little city, located just east of the Andes, on almost the same latitude as Santiago de Chile. The climate is mild, the weather always beautiful, and the people friendly. I could imagine picking up a job here and working here for a while. And let´s not forget it´s the heart of the wine producing region of Argentina, too! What better place to live?

After a first "wine tasting" experiment Susi and I performed (one of the travelers of the boat that seems to have the same route) where we downed 4 bottles of red wine over the course of an evening and got quite intoxicated, today 5 of us (all from the boat ride, reunited here again) are heading for a REAL wine tasting, touring two bodegas and having more wine and some nice food in a third one. As good tourists we won´t spit out the wine we are tasting. Take it all in!

The others are heading on to Santiago or Buenos Aires tomorrow again, while I have decided to stay for a day or two more to tour the Aconcagua mountain and the sights on the Chilenean border (The Aconcagua is the highest mountain in the Americas and the Western Hemisphere, over 6900m high. Can´t miss seeing that one). After that I´ll head over to Santiago as well and make my way further up north.