Got to keep my readers on their toes somehow.
Enjoy a few highlight snaps from sunny Santiago and colourful Valparaiso...
Tuesday, 29 March 2011
Santiago & Valparaiso highlights
Back home now, in the good old London town. So here I am, uploading some photos finally. And backwards!
Got to keep my readers on their toes somehow.
Enjoy a few highlight snaps from sunny Santiago and colourful Valparaiso...
Got to keep my readers on their toes somehow.
Enjoy a few highlight snaps from sunny Santiago and colourful Valparaiso...
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Long Delayed Update or The Internet in Bolivia Sucked and I Got Lazy
Errrr.
Where was I?
Riiiiight. Hurtling down some crazy road above La Paz, Bolivia. That was fun!
Since then I´ve left La Paz for lower ground, headed to Santa Cruz on the overnight bus, experienced the total madness of carnaval in Santa Cruz (there´s no parade, but the chuck permanent ink and paint over everything and everyone until it looks like there was one), rattled about inside a taxi on unpaved roads for 3 hours to get to beutiful Samaipata, witnessed a butterfly migration, took a tour in the jungle (and helped my tour guide hunt out interesting mushrooms for his photography collection of fungi), flown to Buenos Aires and eaten amazing steak, visited the cemetary where lies Evita, overnight bus to Puerto Iguazu and went to see the incredible waterfalls that make Niagra look weak.
That´s up to date... I would gush about how incredible the waterfalls are, but gotta go get my bag ready to head to brazil tomorrow morning to check out the Brazilian side of the falls, there named Iguassu falls.
Few words of summary then instead:
Troops of monkeys, coatis (random raccon like thingys with long noses and stripy tails, billions of butterflies, waterfalls so powerful that there´s fine mist in the air hundreds of metres from the water, seeing a toucan (a proper one, all black and white and colourful bill), rainbows all over the place, some of them nearly complete circles, getting completely drenched in a boat underneath the falls. Beautiful beautiful place that even herds of tourists wearing jungle explorer hats and sporting ´fanny packs´could not ruin even a little bit. That´s gotta be saying something?
Where was I?
Riiiiight. Hurtling down some crazy road above La Paz, Bolivia. That was fun!
Since then I´ve left La Paz for lower ground, headed to Santa Cruz on the overnight bus, experienced the total madness of carnaval in Santa Cruz (there´s no parade, but the chuck permanent ink and paint over everything and everyone until it looks like there was one), rattled about inside a taxi on unpaved roads for 3 hours to get to beutiful Samaipata, witnessed a butterfly migration, took a tour in the jungle (and helped my tour guide hunt out interesting mushrooms for his photography collection of fungi), flown to Buenos Aires and eaten amazing steak, visited the cemetary where lies Evita, overnight bus to Puerto Iguazu and went to see the incredible waterfalls that make Niagra look weak.
That´s up to date... I would gush about how incredible the waterfalls are, but gotta go get my bag ready to head to brazil tomorrow morning to check out the Brazilian side of the falls, there named Iguassu falls.
Few words of summary then instead:
Troops of monkeys, coatis (random raccon like thingys with long noses and stripy tails, billions of butterflies, waterfalls so powerful that there´s fine mist in the air hundreds of metres from the water, seeing a toucan (a proper one, all black and white and colourful bill), rainbows all over the place, some of them nearly complete circles, getting completely drenched in a boat underneath the falls. Beautiful beautiful place that even herds of tourists wearing jungle explorer hats and sporting ´fanny packs´could not ruin even a little bit. That´s gotta be saying something?
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
Surviving Death Road
A quick catch up.
I survived Death Road!
So called for the numerous folk who have sadly lost their lives on this crazy perilous piece of gravel cut into some cliffs, high up and around 2 hours outside of La Paz, Death Road was until relatively recently the main road up towards Coroico and is still around 6km shorter than the new road, prompting locals to occasionally take some interesting risks with their lives.
The road itself was cut out of the rock by prisoners over the course of some 20 years. A not unremarkable feat given its location. The route begins at around 4650 metres and descends to 1200, taking in 69km or hairpin bends around crazy cliffs, hundreds of metres vertical drops to one side and sections barely 3m wide and of course, there are no rails lining this incredible creation. If a person is reckless enough to go too near the edge, well, game over.
This previously being the only route, locals would take huge trucks, vans, even coaches up, often driving for over 18 hours with no sleep to reach their destination, resulting obviously quite often in calamaties, one of the more tragic of these being the plummet to the bottom of the ravine of a coach containing around 100 people. Yikes!
Luckily, because there is a new (and much safer)road now in place, trucks and vehicles in general are a much rarer sight on the Death Road, though there is the occasional loco local who will attempt it! Mostly the only people who now use this road are tourists on mountain bikes. And that´s just what I did.
Setting off early doors, we arrived at the track head at around 8:30am in the shivering cold of 4650 high amid snow-capped peaks and wrapped in layers of fleeces, scarves and gloves. There were 2 others in my party; an English girl Lizzie, who I´d arranged to do the tour with, and a Chilean named Pablo as well as our guide.
We tried out our bikes, and tentatively tested the brakes, the most important part of the bike for this excersise! A few minutes later we were up on the first part of the road - a luxury section with only slightly pot-holed tarmac, nice and wide and with occasional barriers between us and the short way down. It did involve the careful overtaking of huge lorries driven in the usual (read ´insane´) Bolivian style, but was generally alright. The views, when I dared look up from scouting pot holes and broken bits of tarmac, was amazing. Snowy mountains rising up above the clouds and morning mistiness and the treeline poking through far below.
I tried to keep up as best as possible with our guide as it was really cold and I was longing to get the feeling back into my fingers.
I didn´t have long to endure, because the descent is incredibly rapid and by the beginning of the Death Road proper we were stripping off sweaty fleeces ready to enter the sub-tropical region only a few hundred metres lower.
To be continued....
I survived Death Road!
So called for the numerous folk who have sadly lost their lives on this crazy perilous piece of gravel cut into some cliffs, high up and around 2 hours outside of La Paz, Death Road was until relatively recently the main road up towards Coroico and is still around 6km shorter than the new road, prompting locals to occasionally take some interesting risks with their lives.
The road itself was cut out of the rock by prisoners over the course of some 20 years. A not unremarkable feat given its location. The route begins at around 4650 metres and descends to 1200, taking in 69km or hairpin bends around crazy cliffs, hundreds of metres vertical drops to one side and sections barely 3m wide and of course, there are no rails lining this incredible creation. If a person is reckless enough to go too near the edge, well, game over.
This previously being the only route, locals would take huge trucks, vans, even coaches up, often driving for over 18 hours with no sleep to reach their destination, resulting obviously quite often in calamaties, one of the more tragic of these being the plummet to the bottom of the ravine of a coach containing around 100 people. Yikes!
Luckily, because there is a new (and much safer)road now in place, trucks and vehicles in general are a much rarer sight on the Death Road, though there is the occasional loco local who will attempt it! Mostly the only people who now use this road are tourists on mountain bikes. And that´s just what I did.
Setting off early doors, we arrived at the track head at around 8:30am in the shivering cold of 4650 high amid snow-capped peaks and wrapped in layers of fleeces, scarves and gloves. There were 2 others in my party; an English girl Lizzie, who I´d arranged to do the tour with, and a Chilean named Pablo as well as our guide.
We tried out our bikes, and tentatively tested the brakes, the most important part of the bike for this excersise! A few minutes later we were up on the first part of the road - a luxury section with only slightly pot-holed tarmac, nice and wide and with occasional barriers between us and the short way down. It did involve the careful overtaking of huge lorries driven in the usual (read ´insane´) Bolivian style, but was generally alright. The views, when I dared look up from scouting pot holes and broken bits of tarmac, was amazing. Snowy mountains rising up above the clouds and morning mistiness and the treeline poking through far below.
I tried to keep up as best as possible with our guide as it was really cold and I was longing to get the feeling back into my fingers.
I didn´t have long to endure, because the descent is incredibly rapid and by the beginning of the Death Road proper we were stripping off sweaty fleeces ready to enter the sub-tropical region only a few hundred metres lower.
To be continued....
Crazy La Paz
So, an update is pretty well due, and I have rather skipped quite a lot between MacchuPichu, Lake Titicaca and so on. Suffice to say there were hailstorms up on the lake, so I skipped through pretty fast.
Spent the last week and a bit in huge crazy La Paz. The city is basically built into a valley, with the lowest point still being at very high altitude (maybe 3600? the sources all vary in their estimations). At any rate, it´s high. Climbing stairs is difficult. Walking around is difficult. Everything is on a hill and so going anywhere leaves you a bit breathless. The wealthiest and commercial parts of the city are located at the lowest points, lining the base of the valley. From there an unbelievable number of buildings are built up, way up the valley walls until a few perch on the top.
From a disance La Paz resembles a huge bowl that somebody might have poured a gigantic amount of uneven multicoloured shreddies into. A mad jumble of windows, doors, balconies, buildings piled one on another until it´s very hard to distinguish one from another.
Unfortunately, with typical Bolivian (and indeed South American) disregard for any sort of health and safety, people have been allowed to continue building their homes way up into the cliffs despite their instability, especially during wet season. TYhe ground here is pretty much made of sand, and thousands of streams run underneath the cliffs into the valley below.
Recently, there have been huge landslides around the outskirts of La Paz. In one particular case an entire two thirds of a mountain has fallen away, causing hundreds of homes and infrastructure to be completely destroyed. People are now building camps among the rubble and attempting to return to normal life.
The hostel I was staying at (Loki) was very actively involved in raising money to help put these communities back on their feet. One afternoon the staff set out to scout the camps and assess what they could most productively provide, so I went with them.
The scale of destruction is really incredible, described by the BBC as "looking more like an earthquake zone." Thousands of people are homeless. Some living in tents they have been provided with, but others making do underneath homemade structures created using salvaged materials and tarpaulin. In one site, 32 families were camped within 3 shacks. Bolivian families are large and the hostel staff I was with estimated that maybe 150 people were living there. They´re people that raise their own livestock and live off the land, so they had refused to be moved to a safer area as it would have meant leaving behind their animals, and the ground is still unstable and further landslides are very likely at some point.
It was astonishing how resourceful the community had been. Within only a few days of losing their homes, the community had set up a pretty functional camp site and were providing themselves with food and water, though they desperately needed matresses to keep them off the freezing ground at night. Needless to say, sanitation is also going to be important in the next few weeks.
Hopefully donations from the hostel and other groups around La Paz will help to relieve the situation until the government sorts out new land for these communities to set up again.
Volunteers are also needed to keep the children from the community occupied while the adults try to organise things so the few of us that went up to the site ended up staying a few hours and playing football with a group of the children. They did seem genuinely happy to have some random foreigners join them, and hopefully it was a welcome distraction from what must be hard nights in the makeshift camps.
Images from the BBC here
An article about the situation here
Spent the last week and a bit in huge crazy La Paz. The city is basically built into a valley, with the lowest point still being at very high altitude (maybe 3600? the sources all vary in their estimations). At any rate, it´s high. Climbing stairs is difficult. Walking around is difficult. Everything is on a hill and so going anywhere leaves you a bit breathless. The wealthiest and commercial parts of the city are located at the lowest points, lining the base of the valley. From there an unbelievable number of buildings are built up, way up the valley walls until a few perch on the top.
From a disance La Paz resembles a huge bowl that somebody might have poured a gigantic amount of uneven multicoloured shreddies into. A mad jumble of windows, doors, balconies, buildings piled one on another until it´s very hard to distinguish one from another.
Unfortunately, with typical Bolivian (and indeed South American) disregard for any sort of health and safety, people have been allowed to continue building their homes way up into the cliffs despite their instability, especially during wet season. TYhe ground here is pretty much made of sand, and thousands of streams run underneath the cliffs into the valley below.
Recently, there have been huge landslides around the outskirts of La Paz. In one particular case an entire two thirds of a mountain has fallen away, causing hundreds of homes and infrastructure to be completely destroyed. People are now building camps among the rubble and attempting to return to normal life.
The hostel I was staying at (Loki) was very actively involved in raising money to help put these communities back on their feet. One afternoon the staff set out to scout the camps and assess what they could most productively provide, so I went with them.
The scale of destruction is really incredible, described by the BBC as "looking more like an earthquake zone." Thousands of people are homeless. Some living in tents they have been provided with, but others making do underneath homemade structures created using salvaged materials and tarpaulin. In one site, 32 families were camped within 3 shacks. Bolivian families are large and the hostel staff I was with estimated that maybe 150 people were living there. They´re people that raise their own livestock and live off the land, so they had refused to be moved to a safer area as it would have meant leaving behind their animals, and the ground is still unstable and further landslides are very likely at some point.
It was astonishing how resourceful the community had been. Within only a few days of losing their homes, the community had set up a pretty functional camp site and were providing themselves with food and water, though they desperately needed matresses to keep them off the freezing ground at night. Needless to say, sanitation is also going to be important in the next few weeks.
Hopefully donations from the hostel and other groups around La Paz will help to relieve the situation until the government sorts out new land for these communities to set up again.
Volunteers are also needed to keep the children from the community occupied while the adults try to organise things so the few of us that went up to the site ended up staying a few hours and playing football with a group of the children. They did seem genuinely happy to have some random foreigners join them, and hopefully it was a welcome distraction from what must be hard nights in the makeshift camps.
Images from the BBC here
An article about the situation here
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
Catching up
I've not always been able to keep this thing updated as I should.
Hopefully I can post a few photos from Cusco and Puno soon. I have now crossed the border from Peru into Bolivia, via Copacabana. Tried to go to Uyuni and the famous salt flats 12 hours south of La Paz, but the wet season here has been harsh, flooding roads and making them impassable and sadly causing many many people to lose their homes.
This being the case, I will now not be travelling down to Uyuni. Instead I'm going to be in La Paz for a few days, which is fine by me in fact because La Paz doesn't deserve any adjective less than incredible.
It's noisy, unbelievably busy, chaotic, the air is thin on oxygen, because of the altitude, and thick with pollution and it's also incredibly beautiful. In an unexpected way.
Hopefully I can post a few photos from Cusco and Puno soon. I have now crossed the border from Peru into Bolivia, via Copacabana. Tried to go to Uyuni and the famous salt flats 12 hours south of La Paz, but the wet season here has been harsh, flooding roads and making them impassable and sadly causing many many people to lose their homes.
This being the case, I will now not be travelling down to Uyuni. Instead I'm going to be in La Paz for a few days, which is fine by me in fact because La Paz doesn't deserve any adjective less than incredible.
It's noisy, unbelievably busy, chaotic, the air is thin on oxygen, because of the altitude, and thick with pollution and it's also incredibly beautiful. In an unexpected way.
At the top of Huaynupicchu mountain
And thanks so so much to the lovely person who took this and emailed it to me when I had failed to load my own camera with it's battery!
Monday, 28 February 2011
MachuPicchu - Part 2
Safely arrived at the entrance to MP, valid ticket for 10am entry to Huaynupicchu mountain in hand, I was left with an hour to spare before my guide turned up for my tour. I wasn´t sure how I was to find him, but had been told somewhat cryptically that "His name is Miguel and his jacket will match his flag." Further clarity was not possible due to the mutual lack of common language between me and my contact at 4 in the morning.
It was ineveitably raining hard, so I waited under cover close to the entrance.
At 45 minutes past when my guide was supposed to show up, I decided that South-American scheduling or no, I had to go hunt for him. After establishing that he had in fact somehow already started the tour and was somewhere within MP complex, another guide raced me round almost the whole mountain in an attempt to find my tour, which, breathlessly, we eventually did. He was wearing an orange poncho and carrying a rainbow coloured flag. Hmmm.
Anyway, the tour was all pretty informative, the usual stuff about rocks that look, sometimes quite dubiously, like either a condor, a snake or a puma - each of these representing a different aspect of the Inka world view. Lots of stuff to do with shadows in various shapes of llamas and such that only appear during summer or winter solstice. Windows that align with the sun during solstice. And so on....
All very interesting, but having seen a fair number of Inka sights by now I could probably reel off this stuff by heart. And sometimes,just sometimes, I think a person could be forgiven for saying that, on occasion, a rock doesn´t have to look like anything except, perhaps, a rock.
Tour done, I made my way to the entrance to Huanupicchu (I´ll call it HP now). I should explain; HP is a mountain that rises monument-like to 300m above MP, at the opposite end from the entrance. Intrepid people that have slung themselves out of bed at 4am and beat their way to the front of the bus queue are permitted the privilage of climbing up for an extraordinary view down into the MP complex.
At 10am I began my hike up. The climb was extremely steep, essentially 300 vertical metres of crazy, uneven, rain-slick, gigantic-stepped stairs. Standard sheer drops to one side or another. A clamber through a couple of caves. A last few steps up a perilous little ladder. And then I emerged at the glorious summit.
Into a cloud.
Everything around was solid white. An infinity of whiteness, as opaque as the blackest night but filled with blinding light. There was nothing else to do but sit around and wait. And at least the rain had stopped.
Gradually the light broke through the clouds, and they shifted, to reveal what has to be one of the most stunning views I´ll ever get to lay eyes on. Hundreds of metres below the whole complex of MachuPicchu is laid out like a miniature city shining golden in the morning sunlight, white clouds drifting over and constantly concealing and revealing different aspects of the scene. You can see all the way to the river far below, and all the neat horizontal lines of the Inka terraces cut into the hillsides. A few metres away from where I was sitting, little whirring birds chased through the shrubbery and astonishingly bright and metallic green hummingbirds were feeding from the fushia pink flowers. Incredibly beautiful. It wa svery easy to see why the Inkas considered the mountains to be holy and built their temples high up in the clouds.
Waiting in the rain at 4am for an hour and a half after an hours sleep in order to get my ticket for HP, it did cross my mind on not a few occasions that perhaps nothing was really going to be worth this much effort. Well, it really was.
Sadly, no sleep and chaotic planning don´t really do anything for my organisation. I forgot to but my fully charged battery in my camera. There are no photos to come of any of this. So, you´ll all just have to believe me when I say I´ve been to these incredible places. I don´t think I could forget them, so photos seem a little beside the point anyway. If you want to see what it was like, you´ll all just have to go!
xoxo
It was ineveitably raining hard, so I waited under cover close to the entrance.
At 45 minutes past when my guide was supposed to show up, I decided that South-American scheduling or no, I had to go hunt for him. After establishing that he had in fact somehow already started the tour and was somewhere within MP complex, another guide raced me round almost the whole mountain in an attempt to find my tour, which, breathlessly, we eventually did. He was wearing an orange poncho and carrying a rainbow coloured flag. Hmmm.
Anyway, the tour was all pretty informative, the usual stuff about rocks that look, sometimes quite dubiously, like either a condor, a snake or a puma - each of these representing a different aspect of the Inka world view. Lots of stuff to do with shadows in various shapes of llamas and such that only appear during summer or winter solstice. Windows that align with the sun during solstice. And so on....
All very interesting, but having seen a fair number of Inka sights by now I could probably reel off this stuff by heart. And sometimes,just sometimes, I think a person could be forgiven for saying that, on occasion, a rock doesn´t have to look like anything except, perhaps, a rock.
Tour done, I made my way to the entrance to Huanupicchu (I´ll call it HP now). I should explain; HP is a mountain that rises monument-like to 300m above MP, at the opposite end from the entrance. Intrepid people that have slung themselves out of bed at 4am and beat their way to the front of the bus queue are permitted the privilage of climbing up for an extraordinary view down into the MP complex.
At 10am I began my hike up. The climb was extremely steep, essentially 300 vertical metres of crazy, uneven, rain-slick, gigantic-stepped stairs. Standard sheer drops to one side or another. A clamber through a couple of caves. A last few steps up a perilous little ladder. And then I emerged at the glorious summit.
Into a cloud.
Everything around was solid white. An infinity of whiteness, as opaque as the blackest night but filled with blinding light. There was nothing else to do but sit around and wait. And at least the rain had stopped.
Gradually the light broke through the clouds, and they shifted, to reveal what has to be one of the most stunning views I´ll ever get to lay eyes on. Hundreds of metres below the whole complex of MachuPicchu is laid out like a miniature city shining golden in the morning sunlight, white clouds drifting over and constantly concealing and revealing different aspects of the scene. You can see all the way to the river far below, and all the neat horizontal lines of the Inka terraces cut into the hillsides. A few metres away from where I was sitting, little whirring birds chased through the shrubbery and astonishingly bright and metallic green hummingbirds were feeding from the fushia pink flowers. Incredibly beautiful. It wa svery easy to see why the Inkas considered the mountains to be holy and built their temples high up in the clouds.
Waiting in the rain at 4am for an hour and a half after an hours sleep in order to get my ticket for HP, it did cross my mind on not a few occasions that perhaps nothing was really going to be worth this much effort. Well, it really was.
Sadly, no sleep and chaotic planning don´t really do anything for my organisation. I forgot to but my fully charged battery in my camera. There are no photos to come of any of this. So, you´ll all just have to believe me when I say I´ve been to these incredible places. I don´t think I could forget them, so photos seem a little beside the point anyway. If you want to see what it was like, you´ll all just have to go!
xoxo
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