New Zealand North Island and coping with the rain

 I arrived in Auckland on Christmas day, after a long and delayed flight from Santiago. At least I wasn’t in a rush to get home for Christmas dinner, like most of the very upset folk on the plane whose families were awaiting their arrivals.

I checked into a bland but comfortable hotel in Auckland. The highlight of which was a beautiful bathroom with a deep bath and plenty of gushing hot water. Bliss! After six months of hostal showers in south America, this was real luxury.  The remainder of my Christmas day was spent wandering down to the harbour front and trying to stave off sleep in order for my body clock to adjust to this new time zone.

Starbucks was open, 2 of them in fact. Really??? Is there such a need for bad coffee on Chrismas day? Many of shops were Chinese or Japanese take aways and newsagents or superettes as they are known locally.  Apart from  these there was just me, a few nut cases and one or two tourists wandering about.  The harbour was pretty unimpressive. A mismatch of ugly buildings and dock cranes. I went back to the hotel.

 It rained for the first two weeks I was in New Zealand. Not just normal rain, that stops and starts and gets you a bit wet. This was big rain, the sort that would soak you through in a matter of seconds, that came from all angles, gusting horizontally at you as if a bucket of water had been thrown.

Barney had arrived from the UK on boxing day, and after a day to recover from jet lag we picked up the camper van.  

We set off from Auckland, south on state high way 1. New Zealand is bigger than the UK and has a lot less people. This major road that links the North of the north Island to the South only has two lanes and not a lot of traffic.

 I had met a really nice couple from NZ in a bus station in Argentina, and after having sharing a couple of bottles of red wine, (it was a long wait for the connecting bus), they had given me load of NZ travel tips (expertly drawn into a map on a napkin) and also their emails. Subsequently, they had emailed me to invite me to their beach house,  about an hour and a half from Auckland. An invitation like that should just never be turned down.  Looking up the route we found that Google maps hadn’t mapped it yet (a good thing in my books) and there was one very minor road according to our atlas. It was looking good. We had to make a quick pit stop back to the camper van rental company as we had discovered that the fridge did not work but finally we arrived at the most spectacular little bay on a peninsular of land that faced Auckland city. In a speed boat you could probably get across the water in an hour. There were waves lapping on the shores of a beach of black sand that led up to steep slopes of silver and green tree ferns and all sorts of flowering trees and lush foliage. Along the waters edge were peoples houses, ranging from the 6 million dollar super pad to the original wooden “batch” or fishermans cottage. Grant and Traceys place was one of the latter, passed down through Tracey’s family for several generations and now shared three ways. Most of the other plots had sadly now been yuppified and normal folk would never be able to afford a little piece of this paradise any more. 

Grant and Tracy met us with open arms in the nearest car park and we walked up the beach to their house. We spent the rest of the day, picking mussels, exploring the beach and tucking into a fabulous steak dinner. 

This was when the rain started. 

It started in the night and didn’t stop for about 2 weeks. We had left Grant and Traceys after just one night. Partly because we wanted to get the NZ odyssey  started and partly because it wouldn’t have been much fun couped up in the house all day. We were heading for a place called Rotoroua, which is kind of in the centre of the North Island and in the middle of a landscape of steaming hot geysers, thermal springs, bubbling mud pools and clouds of sulphurous gas. It has quite a unique eggy smell! En route, we decided to stop at the Waitomo, an area famous for its spectacular limestone caves and also glow worms. I treated us (as it was Barneys birthday) to a full day epic caving experience, which included a 100m absail  and then about 6 hours of caving and canyoning. It was pretty exhausting but really good fun. It was still pissing down when we eventually resurfaced. 

The next day were headed off ( IN THE RAIN) to Rotoroua. Our plan was to stay there over New Year. The rain didn’t stop. We were camped up about a 25 min walk from the town centre. We had to buy a big umbrella. New year’s celebrations were cancelled as an outdoor concert with fireworks by the lake had been planned. I was asleep before 12!

We managed a rather waterlogged walk into a huge forest of rather impressive red wood trees. A circular hike of about 2.5 hours to various view points, sadly lost to us due to poor visibility. The next day we did get a break in the weather for about 4 hours, when a scalding sun burned through the cloud as we visited a geo thermal “wonderland”, to watch a man put soap down a very questionable “natural” geyser to make it erupt! It didn’t mention that on the brochure.

The tourist industry here is an extremely slick, costly and well organised operation. With many companies competing to take your money.  Most of the small and large towns have “I sites” (tourist information centres) generally very well informed and very ready to book all sorts of things if you hand over the cash. It was beginning to become clear that we really needed to pick and choose our tourist experiences carefully if we wanted to escape a Disneyesque experience of NZ and also if we wanted to stay within budget! We were finding things quite expensive and having the camper van to sleep and cook in was helping to keep costs down. As soon as you ventured into a bar, coffee shop or restaurant the money would start to haemorrhage from your wallet.

 New Zealand is a young country, so I am told. This is certainly the feeling I get passing through the larger communities, dotted around the country side. They have a feeling of temporariness. The buildings are wood or metal and new looking. Even the shop signs don’t look permanent, like they might go out of business any moment.  There are lots of retail parks, considering  there are so few people. Often there are 2 of the same mega supermarkets in the same community.  One thing I was finding though was how friendly the people were. In general it seems that people here have more time, are willing to chat, give you tips and directions or even invite you into their homes.  The young people are much more polite and confident and often passing on a trail or on a beach will say “hello, How are you?” look you in the eye and smile. Its nice.

After the New years wash out we headed down to The Tongariro national park, in the centre of the North Island. I wanted to do the Tongariro crossing, a 19km volcano hike.  We had been watching the weather forcasts and things were looking up. We arrived in the village of Whakapapa where there is a pub, a café and an information center,  a camp site  a whopping great big ugly beast of a building called “the chateau”. A real blot on the landscape, but apparently built in the 1930s as the area grew in popularity as a ski resort, a past time still hugely popular in winter.  The campsite offered transport to drop us off and then pick us up at the other end of the crossing, which we booked for 7am the following day. 

After an early night we got up at the crack of dawn, only to find that there were now severe weather warnings in place and we were advised to wait for a day!

After another early night, we got up at the crack of dawn and it was clear in the lightening sky. We boarded the bus along with about 20 others for the half hour ride to the start of the hike.  Arriving at the start I was horrified to see about 5 other coaches dropping off hundreds of other people. No joke, it was like Christmas shopping on Oxford street!  We set off, with the masses. The first part was very flat, but then came the devils ladder, which is as you imagine. A fairly steep, long, uphill.  Luckily this thinned out the crowds a little. I have to say, that despite all the people, once we got up into the volcano craters, the walk was pretty special. There were beautiful layers of ochre and black earth, sulphuric lagoons of exceptional shades of blue. Puffs of steam came out of the ground at various places and the views over the volcanic rock strewn plains, superb. This was where bits of Lord of the rings was filmed.  The weather couldnt have been more perfect.

It was raining again the next day. Cats and dogs.  We decided to head east to the coast and an art deco town called Napier.  We figured that if the rain kept up, at least we could go to the cinema!

Napier is actually really pretty. It was very badly damaged in an earth quake in the 1920s and completely rebuilt in Art deco style. Many of the buildings remain today and have been lovingly maintained. It is a beach resort on Hawkes bay, and there are loads of vineyards around it. We had left the rain and arrived in the afternoon sunshine.  I t was great to finally sit on a beach and feel warm!

The next day we hired bikes and did a bit of a wine tour around the vineyards and then along the coast. Our plan was to start heading south the following morning to some remote beaches and a marine reserve, spend the day and night there before driving to Wellington.  When we woke, you guessed it…..it was raining. Even harder than anything we had seen before. And blowing a proper gale.  So we decided to head straight to wellington. It was that cinema option again.  It was quite a drive and the wind was blowing so hard against the van, it would almost whip the steering wheel out of your hand when a cross wind hit. By the time we arrived it was still sheeting down. We found a campervan park, right in the center of Wellington, a whopping $50 a night to park in a carpark, but there was a cinema up the road, so that’s where we went.

When we woke, we woke to a whole different city. The sun was shining and the wind had blown its self out. We spent the morning exploring the city. Wellington is on the South coast and the rolling suburbs fan out on many peninsulars of green hill sides overlooking the Tasman sea. I would say that the majority of homes have sea views. The city its self is a nice mixture of old and new, with some great modern arts centres and cultural bits as well as really nice sea front restaurants and bars. We were off to meet a man called Peter that afternoon. He'd offered me his driveway to park the van and is on old friend of one of my Austrailian relatives. He is also a great hiker and climber and had already sent me 2 detailed emails full of information on things to do and good hikes etc.  We arrived, in a cloud of smoke, having nearly burnt the clutch out on the van trying to get up his very steep driveway.  Peter has this amazing house, right on top of a hill with huge glass windows overlooking the rolling green hills and suburbs, right down to the coast. At 74 years old he is really fit and still "tramping" regularly up to 25km. He volunteers at all sorts of places, from the local nature reserve to the animal rescue centre and when he's not doing that he fixes the loom at a University that has a weaving dept. We spent 2 nights camped outside his house and he generously gave us plenty of his time, driving us round Wellington and hiking with us up to an amazing view point in the hills behind his home before we headed off to catch out ferry to the South Island.

Patagonia and the Torres del Paine

The houses are mostly made of tin sheeting in Patagonia. Its stapeled together and then either left plain, painted a bright colour or tongue and grooved in plastic wood effect panels. It seems to me to be a weird material to choose for building in a place that is really hot in summer and really cold in winter. Most of the houses and shops have piles of logs outside, fuel for the multiple wood burners inside. Some more modern homes have large gas bottles instead.

From Puerto Williams we caught a ferry to take us through the magellan straights and Chilean fjordlands to Punta Arenas, from there we caught a bus to Puerto Natales, the gate way town for the famous Torres del Paine national park.
Julie and I had said goodbye to Kimberley in Punto Arenas and had a couple of days to organise the logistics for our next trek known as the W.  It is called this because the route is in the shape of the letter W.

Going to Patagonia and trekking in the Torres del Paine had been a dream of mine for a long time, but on arriving in Puerto Natales and seeing the hoards of gortex clad tourists, I had a feeling I might be disappointed.  We had been given lots of route advice from the 2 guys who ran the hostel we were in and after hireing a tent and stove and shopping for food we set off. First we had a 2 hour bus ride into the park which cost $30. Then there was the park entrance fee which was another $30, then there was the cost of the catermeran ferry to take us across to the Western side of the trek, another $24 dollars! The route is so popular there are now "luxury" refugios along the route and paying campsites, complete with insitue tents for hire. This enables those with a big budget or the lack of strength or will to carry their own gear the change to walk the route with a small day pack. To stay in a dorm in one of the refugios with full board costs about $180 a night. To hire a tent $8 p.p plus $6p.p campsite fees. We were far too cheap for any of that and were opting to carry all our gear and stay where possible on the free campsites along the route.  The free campsites are in pretty out of the way and inconvienient places and it meant alot of walking with very heavy packs.

Once we disembarked from the catamaran we had a good 5 hour hike up hill to reach our camp. Although we were struggling a bit under the weight of all our food, the spectacular vista of a deep blue lagoon next to us, in which were floating pale blue icebergs was a great distraction. The park was full of shoulder high shrubs, laden with all sorts of colourful flowers. It was very pretty. Soon we were hiking up through woodland and across streams and waterfalls. Considering the amount of people that visit the park every day, the trail were really prestine and rubbish free. The woodland eventually cleared we could now see one of the highlights of the walk, the great glacier Grey.

The glacier is the most amazing shade of powder blue and every so often a chunk breaks off and slowly floats off down the lagoon. Near the glacier there are not one but two luxury lodges, complete with sun terraces and wooden lounge beds. This was not for us and we hiked on up into another forest. Eventually after a long steep hike we arrived at a little camp ground on not very even ground in the woods. There was a waterfall next to it and a few tents dotted aroung in the trees. There didnt seem to be many people around though. We soon realised why.....

As soon as we started putting our tents up we were attacked by a swarm of bugs and mosquitos. We had to put long sleeve hooded tops on to stop them from getting all over our arms and in our hair. We realised that everyone else on the camp site were hiding in their tents from this flying invasion! 
Things werent any better the next morning and we were glad to get going. We had to hike back then same route we had come the day before and although we were going downhill, all the nice views were behind us and it was a little boring. Back at the Catameran camp we headed east to our next camping spot. This place was called Campamento Italianos. It was larger and nicer with less bugs than the previous nights camp, and after 8 hours walking we were glad to be there. The following day we left our tent erected and hiked up the Valley Francaise to a mirador at its top. The views of the mountains around us were really amazing, almost cathederal like.

Returning to the tent, we packed it up and hiked another 2 hours to the next camp. Campament Chileano. This is the thing about the W, theres alot of back tracking. Campamento Chileano was the only fee pay camp we were going to stay at, and that meant a hot shower, which was nice as the two past days had been pretty hot. We were now walking along side a large blue lagoon with pretty black and white pebble beaches. It was pleasant but a bit boring. The view was the same all the time and our feet hurt.  We were on our way to campamento Torres, the last camp before the famous rock towers. We had a little plan in our minds that instead of camping with the masses, we might sneak our tent up to the viewpoint for the towers and sleep up there. The point being to see the sunrise. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the camp, there was a guard checking everyone in and as he had launched into some south african football anthem as soon as Julie had told him her nationality, and he had given us a tent pitch right in front of his hut, we might be noticed, if our tent suddenly disappeared mid evening. So we got up at dawn with the masses of noisy Israelis and hiked up to the towers in the rain, for a very damp sunrise.

I have only seen a tiny bit of Patagonia on this trip, but my general opinion is that its overly expensive, over rated and very busy.  I would go back if I had plenty of money and could go off season, but I think there are plenty of other places to go first.
So, after a sad farewell to Julie, I spent my final couple of days in America in Santiago. Trying to avoid the teargas being thrown at students outside my hostel. I have had an amazing time, met some incredible people and made some good friends. I think I have learned a little about my self and a bit of another language. I have pushed my self physically, thats for sure and realised that we are all so much more capable than sometime we think we are. Its just a question of taking the leap. I don't have any regrets about leaving my job, although I miss my team, and I look forward to starting a new adventure when I finally return to the UK, but first.....
New year and New Zealand.

Ushuaia, Isla Navarino and the best trek in the world!

Ushuaia is in the very south of Argentina. The Tierra del Fuego or land of fire. Its 1000km from Antarctica! Flying into Ushuaia was incredible. The views of the beagle channel lined with forest and snow-capped mountains and then the pretty little port town of brightly painted wooden houses, looking very Scandinavian.

The Tierra del Fuego is the largest of south Americas southern Islands (73,753 sq. km) and split between Chile and Argentina. It’s so far south that in summer the sun sets very late, about 11pm, that you can do plenty of stuff outdoors in day light hours.

The Argentinian Fuegan Andes form an arc of wilderness around Ushuaia and resemble a scaled down version of the far higher mountain massifs.

I’d met up with Julie and Kim in a very nice modern hostel with great views and heated floors. The plan was to have a couple of days relaxing and also to explore the nearby Tierra del Fuego national park. Chile and Argentina are much more expensive than other parts of South America and we were really trying to keep costs down by cooking for ourselves and sleeping in dorms. The entrance to the national park was a quarter of my daily budget and the dorm was a third!

The national park was lovely and well worth the visit. Easy trails to follow and at sea level for a change, along a beautiful coast line. We spent the day there, unfortunately the one day it rained! The weather is very changeable and very unpredictable in this part of the world, a bit like the UK!

Our plan was to do the Dientes trek on the Isla Navarino. Navarino is the most southern island in Chile, and the circuit is the most Southerly trek anywhere in the world, before Antarctica. The only way to get to it was in a small and expensive inflatable speed boat, across the Beagle channel. We booked our tickets for the Monday morning with a plan to be able to do the trek easily over 5 days and then catch a once weekly, 30 hour ferry from Puerto Williams, the only settlement on Navarino, north through the Chilean fiord lands  to Punta Arenas.  We were going  to carry all our food and equipment ourselves and do the trek on our own.

Monday morning came and we marched down to the port fully laden will all our gear, most of which we would leave in Puerto Williams. We boarded the little vessel, thankfully covered, in the pouring rain, got about 40 minutes out to sea before the skipper pronounced that we would have to return to port. We were in line with the last of some small rocky islands and just about to hit the channel, but the boat was too small and the waves too big. It was too dangerous. We turned back.

We found another hostel in Ushuaia for the night and prepared to give the crossing another shot in the morning. This meant we only had 4 days including the voyage day to do the trek.

The next day we were back at the port, earlier, and with more passengers.   After going through immigration and having our passports stamped for the second time, we crammed into the little craft and set off once again. This time we made it past the little Islands and we were out into the choppy waters of the channel. Within the hour we had made it across to a small landing platform and the Chilean boarder post and customs control. From there a mini bus picked us up to take us to Puerto Williams on the other side of the island. It is the only settlement and it mainly a navy base and port for ships going to Antarctica. This was definitely the town at the end of the world, where the wild horses and dogs roam.

The island has the windswept, bent over tree look about it. It is very green around the edges with densely wooded foothills leading up to the spikey brown rock peaks of the Dientes Navarino. Although it is summer time here and even though the highest point of our trek was only going to be 829m there are still patches of snow on the ground.

As soon as we got into town and cleared yet more passport stamping officials, we hired a tent and camping stove, went food shopping, notified the police of our trekking intentions and return date, found a hostel for our return day and where we could dump our excess baggage, went to book our ferry tickets and finally set off…….at 5pm! Luckily the first day hiking was only going to be about 4.5 hours and we managed to get a lift to the trail head, knocking off about an hour of road walking.

The Dientes circuit leads around the jagged pinnacle known as Los Dientes de Navarino, the highest summits on the Island.  We started off next to a river and followed a trail steeply uphill through really thick forest. Although this part of the circuit is a popular day hike, the trail is still vague. Every so often we would see a red mark painted on a tree or rock, pointing us in the right direction. We had 2 different route guides which we were cross referencing to make sure we stayed on track. The hill got increasingly steep and there were tree trunks to climb over and under before we reached the clear ground leading us to the summit. It took us about an hour of hard climbing. A real baptism by fire, with our heavy packs!

 It was worth the effort, because as we emerged onto the higher ground out of the woods we had amazing views right across the channel back to Ushuaia on the other side of the water to P Williams on the other side of the Island. From the summit we skirted round the peak, traversing steep scree slopes, before finally descending over large boulders to a beautiful lagoon which was where we planned to set up camp for the night. It was about 8.30pm. After tea and dinner of rehydrated pasta in sauce we squeezed into our 3 woman tent and went to sleep at about 11pm, just as it was getting dark!

The following day we woke early had breakfast and broke camp. The first couple of hours took us steeply up the side of a waterfall and then over a pass between two peaks. We had magnificent views of the Dientes now. There were lots of patches of soft snow, and the wind was ferocious! It was so strong that there were times we just had to hang on to the rock, or fall to our knees to stop ourselves from being blown over. Julie at one point was actually picked up by the wind and dumped on a rock a couple of feet in front. Things quietened down a bit once we got over the other side of the pass. An Italian couple we had met the day before had decided to turn back; it was all a bit too much for them.

 We had to put in 2 long days to make up for missing the first day due to the failed boat crossing and for having such a late start on the second day. The walking was incredible. The scenery changed constantly. The island was colonised by beavers about 200 years ago and they have bred prolifically and built amazingly ingenious damns and caused an incredible amount of destruction to the Islands forests, but this just added to the magical spectacle of the views around us.



Beaver dams

 Some parts were dry and rocky and some were deep snow or deep mud. Julie managed to be knee deep in mud at some points and for some reason by the end of the day I could feel the heat from a blister building up on my left heel. Weird considering I’ve been hiking in the same boots constantly for 6 months and never had a problem.

Julies muddy feet

 We managed to go a good distance by about 6pm and found a nice campsite near to a lagoon with a fast running stream next to it. We had been told we were allowed to have camp fires and as the beavers have left so much dead wood everywhere we set about building one. Dehydrated pasta again for dinner plus tea and biscuits. My feet were in tatters and had swollen up from all the ankle twistingly hard walking we had done carrying a heavy pack.

 A couple of neurophen and some compeed were hopefully going to help! We managed to cook on the camp fire, saving our gas. Julie had a complex sock and shoe drying operation going, but mainly just managed to burn holes in her socks!

We woke to beautiful sunshine the next day and headed off feeling pleased with ourselves that we had covered such a good distance the day before. Again the scenery was just brilliant. It was thrilling to be somewhere so remote and to be wild camping and guiding ourdelves. Some of the path finging was really tricky and the markers were pretty much non existant or very faded, but we were still on track. By lunch time we knew we just had one pass to go, so after our sandwiches we had a little sleep on the hill before heading up the last  pass.

The pass wasn’t so big,  but what we hadn’t accounted for was a seemingly endless rocky plateau at the top. Ankle twistingly hard on the feet, especially mine!

 But again the views were worth every bit of effort and pain. We had all gone knee deep in stinking bog mud at some point or other during the day! When we finally reached the edge of the pass to start our down hill decent we could see views below us of big lagoons and the channel once more, which would be the end of the circuit. First we had to tackle an almost vertical decent down an incredibly long scree slope. Thank god it wasn’t windy!

We made our final camp at the end of a large lagoon with views back up to the pass and over to the sea. It was a beautifully sunny evening and we knew we only had a few hours to walk the next day to get to the road, where hopefully we hitch hike a lift the 7 to 8km back to Puerto Williams. We sat up late round the campfire drying our muddy, now rinsed, boots and socks. Julie managed to burn another pair!

We didn’t get up until 8.30 the next morning and it was only that the sun had made the tent so hot we were baking. After breaking camp we set off down hill, past beaver dams and lagoons along a river and into thick forest. The trail soon disappeared and we found ourselves doing an assault course of climbing over, under and through tree trunks, our only real direction was that we should be heading down hill, and where ever the wood was thin enough to let us through. It took us about 2 hours to get through the tangle of trees which cleared to allow us views of the water, a beautiful bay and the road running along the coast.

 We ended up walking the 8km back to Puerto Williams. A couple of vehicles passed us but one was full and one going the other way. It was a nice feeling to get back to the hostel, have a shower and put on my flip flops! We cooked up a storm of a meal, ribs, mash potatoes, greens, tomato and avoacado salad and cake, sorted all our stuff out and got our bags ready for catching our 7am ferry the next morming.

Wine and desert!

After finishing the Salar de Uyuni tour I was dropped off at a little outpost in the desert, which was the Bolivian border, to wait for a mini bus to take me across and into Chile. For some reason you can’t take fresh food or flowers across the border so there was a growing pile of produce outside the little office that travellers had left behind.

The bus took us down from the high altitude desert in Bolivia to the low altitude desert of San Pedro de Atacama in Chile.

Arriving at the immigration office and customs control in Chile, San Pedro just looked like a shabby little muddle of low rise dwellings built out of just about anything, from mud, straw, glass, wood, corrugated iron etc. We had to queue for a long time in the baking sun for our turn to get our passport stamped by the one official on duty. A coach load of people from Paraguay were ahead of us. A weirdly mixed bunch with quite a few Mormons, all identically dressed in pristine black dungarees, pastel short sleeve shirts and baseball caps. The people in the Southern parts of South America are much more western looking. Often fair haired and fair skinned, I was no longer the only blonde on the bus and aside from my back pack could blend in quite easily. After a couple of hours we made it through immigration and completed the short drive to the centre of San Pedro. On the way I started to notice signs for increasingly boutique and swanky hotels nestled behind adobe walls. The centre of san Pedro was really smart red and white clay buildings that gave way onto shaded courtyards and restaurants full of people drinking chilled wine and eating gourmet food. I was surprised to say the least.

I found a nice little hostel tucked away for 20,000 pesos. That’s about $40. Not cheap, luckily I was only staying one night. I had met a couple of 18 year old on the bus, Ross and Joanna, so we had decided to go for lunch and hang out. Being at a much lower altitude it was noticeably hotter.  About the only thing I wanted to do in San Pedro was a night time tour to an observatory in the desert, where I had heard that due to there being no light pollution, you could see the stars brilliantly and that they had about 15 telescopes you could look through, whilst a professional astronomer explained all about the planets and the solar system. Unfortunately the English tour that night was booked out. There were spaces on the French tour and against my better judgment, Joanna persuaded me to part with $25 to go…..It was turning out to be an expensive day. We spent the evening first of all watching a local cultural performance in San Pedro’s main square, eating take away grilled chicken and chips and drinking red wine, before joining the tour at 11pm to go out to the observatory. The sky was a blanket of stars, it was really impressive. The astronomer guide had a laser light that he could point to individual stars of constellations as he was explaining about them. Sadly most of it was lost in translation as neither Joanna nor I speak much French!

Early the next morning Joanna and I boarded a bus to take us to Salta in northern Argentina. About 16 hours through the desert and another border crossing. Thankfully this one was a lot quicker than the last. I spent one night in Salta and then got a bus four hours south to the wine region of Cafayate. The journey was stunning. I had a seat right in the front to of the bus, next to a young lady who was from the region, but studying in Europe, and just returning home for her best friend’s wedding. She was a great source of information and interesting conversation about Argentina, its history and politics. The scenery was amazing. We were driving through a red rock desert. Sandstone carved over time by water and wind into the most unusual shapes and textures. After 4 hours we emerged out of the hills and down onto the hot, dry valley floor that made up the majority of the vine yards. I spend 4 days in Cafayate, cycling around the vineyards, hiking up to waterfalls and generally just relaxing. It was boiling hot in the day time and it was necessary to go inside to escape the heat. It was definitely siesta country. The little town had wide tree lined avenues, South American colonial architecture and horses and donkeys just roamed around, with the odd Groucho trotting up the road too.

After Cafayate I bussed down to Tucumán and then connected straight through to Cordoba. Argentina’s second city. It was still uncomfortably hot. I spent 2 nights in Cordoba, where thankfully I met a nice English guy to go out for meals with.  When I had arrived at the hostel the Argentinian B team for American football were also staying there. It was a bit over whelming. The whole place was full of these gigantic men all shouting at each other in Spanish. They had a game the day I arrived, which they won, so sprits were high to say the least!

Finally I arrived In Buenos Aires! Wow what a city! I was only there for 24hours but had a whirl wind guided tour and was really impressed. It was much cooler and windy. The city reminded me a bit of Barcelona and east village in New York. There were wide avenues lined with plain trees and lots of quirky little shops and restaurants. The area I stayed in was called Palermo and if I had known how nice it was I would have skipped Cordoba and headed straight there.

The next morning I was on my way to the domestic airport to get my flight to Ushuaia to meet Julie and Kimberly. I felt quite excited. Since finishing the tour in Bolivia, I felt like I had just been wasting time in the cities and I was really looking forward to getting out in the hills again.

I left La paz on a local bus full of gringo tourists like me except for the rather large Bolivian lady in the seat next to me. The seats were small, she was large and her multi layered skirts and shawls took up even more room, not to mention her bulging shopping bags! I squeezed in next to her. We had a little chat, she was very sweet, and then she promptly fell asleep, on my shoulder. It was a night bus and the road became increasingly bad. We stopped in the desert at about 2 am for people to use the loo and stretch their legs and then continued down the bumpy road slowly into the breaking dawn. Through bleary eyes the next day broke spectacularly on the desert revealing blue sky and endless stretches of sand. Eventually we pulled up at a collection of concrete buildings, which turned out to be our final destination. My heart sank. It was a dump.
I hurried off the bus, to try to find a hostel. After checking into a rather run down motel I bumped into Greg, the motorcycling Canadian who had arrived the night before. We went for breakfast and he told me his adventures and mishaps during his ride down from La Paz. The Bolivians dont like selling petrol to foreigners and charge, legally, about three times as much as to locals.  So Greg, being on a budget brought as little as he thought he could get away with, and then run out in the desert. Next he had been driving through an area where there is quite alot of civil unrest and had been caught up in a road block and then struck by people with baseball bats as he tried to pass through it. I was glad that our bus journey had been trouble free.

 

Next I went in search of an agency to book my Salar de Uyuni tour. Its a 3 day tour in 4x4 vehicles of the salt desert and then the surrounding mountains and lagoons. I had heard from everyone who I had met who had done it that it was absolutley spectacular and not to be missed, but I was a little sceptacle that 3 days driving over 1000km was going to be my cup of tea. Still the tour would drop me off at the Bolivian and Chilean border and that was where I was headed. There are about 70 tour agencies in Uyuni, so it wasnt hard to find one and I was mostly concerned that the other 5 people in the car would be a good mix. I ended up in a group with 2 French, 2 Colombians and a young English girl.

The following morning we set off early and our first stop was a rusty old collection of trains. In the setting of the desert and the blue sky they looked like some sort of art installation you would see at Tate modern rather than just a grave yard for trains!

The Salar de Uyuni is the worlds largest salt flat, sittling at a high altitude of 3653m and blanketing an amazing 12,106 sq km. It was part of a prehistoric salt lake, Lago Minchin, which covered most of SW Bolivia. When it dried up it left this enourmous salt desert, the Salar de Uyuni. There are several islands that pepper this white desert. The isla del pescado at the heart of the salar is a hilly out post covered in Trichoreus cactus surrounded by a sea of hexaganol salt tiles.

The flat, white expanse of the salt desert is just broken up by the odd tracks left by the 4x4 vehicles zooming accross them and the odd conical piles of salt ready for harvest. The islands seem to float when viewed from a distance and the perspective in all this whiteness is very perculiar.

We stayed the night in a little hotel constructed from blocks of salt with mud and straw roofs and salt shingle on the floors. Our second day was spent driving through a surreal, treeless landscape punctuated by red and orange hills and snow capped volcanoes and heards of llamas and vicunas, near the Chilean border.  There were sparkling aquamarine lagoons with 3 varieties of flamingoes, caked white at the edges with all the minerals in the water.

In parts of the desert the wind had carved the rock into Daliesque sculputres.

One of the most beautiful lagoons was the Laguna colorada, a bright adobe red lake with black  and white shores.

Our second night was spent at a very basic and not very clean hostel, sleeping bag came out, as the sheets didnt look like they had been washed for quite a while. I awoke in the night to find a small cat had nestled on my chest and was contentedly purring while gently scratching at my neck. It refused to budge and I just hoped it didnt have fleas! Our final day was spent visiting geysers at dawn that blew powerful jets of smoke from the bubbeling muddy earth, then driving through still more spectacular landscape, where we were dropped at a small outpost which was the Bolivian and Chilean boarder.