Bolivia

Bit of a break since the last entry. It's hard to get time on the laptop to write. After San Pedro we spent a few days in Salta walking around the city and doing a mountain bike trip and then one night in Tilcara on the way to Tupiza in Bolivia. This entry will be about Bolivia and everything we've done here in the last two weeks.

In Tupiza we went for a walk into the local countryside (very dry) following the map given to us by our hotel which had some trails roughly marked. We aimed to walk to the Puerto del Diablo but managed to miss a turning and ended up at the El Duende Canyon instead. According to the map this was actually much further than we thought we had walked and it was well worth it. We walked up the dry riverbed for a way as the canyon was very pretty before going back to the road we came along and turning back toward Tupiza. On the way back we saw a horse track to the side of the road and decided to follow it as it was more interesting. It led us to the Puerto del Diablo which we'd been trying to find earlier. From there it was only a few km back to town. It was a good 4 hour walk at altitude and in dry dusty conditions but was worth it.

The next 4 days we spent on a tour of the altiplano and salt flats finishing in Uyuni. This is a standard 4 day jeep tour with a driver and cook one of which is also a guide. There were 4 in our jeep, us and a Dutch couple who spoke enough Spanish to translate most of what the guide said for us. The tour involves long hours in the jeep, cold nights in very basic hostels and fantastic food and views. There are lakes of every colour, thermal ponds, strange rock formations caused by ancient volcanism and geysers. We also saw lots of vicunas and llamas and flamingoes.

The Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt lake in the world, was partially flooded so we couldn't see all of the interesting features. We did see one of the salt hotels and had lots of time on the salt lake to compose pictures using the strange lack of perspective. We did the tour with La Torre tours in Tupiza and would recommend them.

From Uyuni we took a bus to Potosi, about 4 1/2 hours to see this old colonial city. In the 17th century Potosi was the richest city in the world and bigger than London, New York and Paris were at that time. This was because of the large mountain that stands over the city and has been mined for silver, tin, zinc and other minerals for nearly 500 years. Potosi was the centre of the silver industry until the 19th century. The mines still exist but now produce a lot less than they used to and are very dangerous places to work. We did a mine tour and spent about 1 1/2 hours in the dusty cramped and poisonous conditions. Miners can expect to work there for only 10-15 years before getting silicosis so bad they can't mine anymore. The tour was very interesting and guided by an ex-miner who spoke very good English. We did the tour with Koala Tours. We also visited the Casa de la Moneda (The Mint) which was also very interesting. It houses a unique example of 3 huge mule powered silver rolling mills which are very impressive.

From Potosi we caught the overnight bus to La Paz where we stayed in the Estrella Andina hotel which has beautiful murals all over the walls and serves a very good breakfast in its rooftop bar. From La Paz we did the World's Most Dangerous Road bike ride, a downhill mountain bike ride on the old road to the jungle. It is downhill from 4700 m to about 1000m and about 63km. We did it with Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking who were very well organised and worth paying extra for. At the end we had lunch in La Sende Verde, an animal rescue centre, which has lots of animals and is very relaxing. You can also spend the night there or volunteer with them. I also did the zipline after the bike ride which was excellent. It was in three sections across the valleys and an amazing thrill with great views.

We also did a 3 day/ 2 night Pampas tour with Bala Tours. This involved flying from La Paz to Rurrenabaque and a 3 hour jeep ride to the Yacuma river. Both our flights were delayed which is common. The flight there took off on time but when we arrived the pilot couldn't see the runway through the fog so turned around and went back to La Paz. The flight took off again 1 1/2 hours later. The return flight was delayed 2 hours because the previous days flights hadn't been able to make it. The lodge we stayed in was lovely and relaxing and it would've been nice to spend more time there. We had two boat trips down the river, a walk, swam with pink river dolphins and fished for piranha. We saw capybara, squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys and capuchin monkeys, caiman amd lots of birds of many species. Swimming with the dolphins was a highlight. They were amazing and came up really close and brushed against you and we stroked them gently. They were amazing! I also caught six small piranha and threw them back which was quite fun. Another highlight was getting really close to very curious squirrel monkeys at the end of a long (and chilly) boat ride. We had to spend one night in Rurre after the tour as the flights do not go late enough to avoid this.

Back in La Paz we discovered that the roadblocks at the Peruvian border were still in place and probably will be until after the Peruvian elections on June 7th. The protests have turned quite violent with buses and ferries being stoned and customs and immigrations being burnt down. Also Puno now has riots in the streets. Astonishly tour operators in La Paz still seem to be selling through tickets to Peru! The reputable tour agnecies we spoke to said there's no way through and the only way to Peru is to fly to Cusco or Lima so we've paid $340 US each for tickets to fly to Cusco tomorrow (Sunday). This means we won't see Lake Titicaca but we don't really fancy getting stones thrown at us.

On our last day in La Paz we walked up to the Killi-Killi viewpoint to look out over the city and to Calle Jean which has lots of colonial buildings and museums. The precious metal museum was most interesting. I also did an open top bus tour of the South area of La Paz and the Valle de la Luna. This was well worth it and allowed for a 1/2 hour guided stop of the Valle de la Luna. We have also eaten well in La Paz, I would recommend the Star of India, a British run curry house that was fantastic, Sol y Luna (Dutch owned), La Cueva (Mexican) and Olivers Travels, a friendly 'fake' Bristish pub!

Overall Bolivia has been much easier to travel in than I expected. It is still cheap and there is lots of interesting things to see. We could've have spent much more time here.

Northern Chile - Art, Pisco and Desert

We finished the Dragoman section of our South American travel at the beginning of May in Santiago so are now travelling on our 'tod'. Slightly more stressfulk in some ways and less in other ways and generally a little more comfortable than travelling on 'Cindy' and camping. The route we took through Chile was from Santiago to the coastal town of Valparaiso, then north to the seaside resort of La Serena at the eend of the Elqui Valley, then further north and inland to San Pedro de Atacama in the Atacama desert and finally we left Chile (for the last time) by bus over the Jama Pass to Salta in Argentina.

In Santiago, we spent our day there mostly on the Cerro San Cristobal with many Santiagan runners, walkers and cyclists. It was Sunday and a bank holiday weekend so the city itself was completely dead - even the museums were closed - and everybody seemed to be making the most of the unseasonable weather. More details here.

We got the bus to Valparaiso on the coast on Monday morning and stayed in the beautiful old Cerro Allegre area. The city is made up of the flat business district by the ocean and surrounded by many steep hills that contain the residential areas. It is small enough to walk around most of the city but some roads are very steep. We visited the open air art gallery which is a few streets of murals on the walls of buildings in Cerro Conception, the house of Pablo Neruda - a famous poet and walked around a self guided tour of Cerro Conception and Cerro Allegre. The houses are all very colourfully painted and on a sunny day the city is very pretty.

After a few days in Valparaiso we took a bus up the coast to La Serena. This is a seaside resort and town at the mouth of the Elqui Valley. This part of Chile is semi desert and the Elqui Valley is one of several fertile corridors used for agriculture. We did an Elqui Valley day trip bus tour that took us to a papaya farm, the Poclaro dam, a pisco distillery, a couple of nice villages and lunch in a solar oven restaurant. In the lower parts of the valley many fruits and vegetables are grown while at higher altitudes the crops are mostly grapes (wine, table or pisco) and some avocado. This is the only place in the world that can produce Pisco and call it Pisco. This is because even though the Peruvians first made the spirit, the Chileans patented it!

We did the tour with Elqui Valley Tours booked through the El Punto hostel. We wanted to do this tour joint with the evening Mamalluca observatory tour and were expecting to be dropped off in Vicuna village with time to get dinner and then be picked up and taken to the observatory later. However, at about 5pm our guide told us that there was noone else who wanted to do the observatory tour so he had to take us all the way back to La Serena. This was quite annoying as if we had known this we would have stayed the night in Vicuna instead of La Serena so we could organise the transport to the nearly observatory ourselves. Luckily we did make it back to La Serena with enough time to find and book private transport up to the observatory. We did end up spending oover 2 hours extra on the same road though. The observatory is specifically for tourists and has a 14 inch Meade telescope in a dome and a smaller telescope outside. It is a good introduction to the Southern night sky and we saw Saturn, the Orion nebula and the tarantula nebula amongst other things. The group size was only 9 when we went which was nice and small. The night sky is this part of Chile is the clearest in the world because of the climate, low population density and altitude. Many of the world's largest telescopes are located here.

From La Serena we took a 16 hour overnight TurBus to San Pedro de Atacama in the middle of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth. This is a dusty tourist focussed village dominated by hostels and tour companies. It is hot and sunny in the daytime and freezing at night. We did three tours in the day and half we spent here, the Valle de la Luna, El Tatio geysers and the SPACE (San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Expeditions) tour. The first two are the dominant tours. The Valle de la Luna goes to several places with interesting rock formations formed by the wind and ancient water flow and salt formations and then you climb up a giant sand dune (on a rocky path to the side) to watch the sunset. We chose Desert Adventures as our tour company. The tour was good but the group size was rather large at 27 people. The views and rock formations are stunning and the salt canyons very interesting.

The El Tatio tour starts at 4 am (however we weren't picked up until after 4:30) for a drive up to over 4200m to see the geysers and thermal pools on the sides of the volcanoes. The geysers are at their best just before sunrise hence the early start. Breakfast is included in the tour and we had warm chocolate milk and hard boiled eggs which we think were heated in the geysers! On the way down the tour makes several stops to look at wildlife (vicunas, viscachas and waterbirds on a surprising wetland area) and see an indigenous village, Machuca.

In the evening we did the SPACE tour. This is run by a French astronomer who has a great setup of 10 telescopes all focussed on different night sky items for use on the tour and also has a few domed telescopes we didn't see. He is very enthusiatic and funny and again this was a good introduction to the night sky. We also we able to see the moon and he helped everyone who wanted to get a photo through the telscope. Unfortunately the group size was rather large for this type of tour, about 30 people, which made it hard to use the telescopes as much as I would've liked.

We left San Pedro the next morning on the Pullman bus to Salta. Pullman don't have an office in San Pedro and you can't buy a online ticket for this route so we just waited by the side of the road and hoped the the bus would actually turn up and have enough seats for us and the other couple waiting! It did and we headed out of Chile for the last time. This bus journey is amazing. It goes up to nearly 5000m through the Jama Pass into Argentina. It crosses salt flats goes close to 6000m volcanoes and though gorges and past brightly coloured rocks and cliffs. It takes nearly 11 hours including the time spent at the border crossings but is well worth doing.

Villarrica Volcano

We spent a few days in Pucon at the end of the Dragoman tour and had the opportunity to trek up the Villarrica Volcano. Again we were lucky with the weather, the day before we arrived had been wet and foggy and it was not possible to do the volcano. But our day was warm and sunny with little wind so was perfect.

The trek itself is guided and you are given lots of specialist gear. It starts with a chairlift up the first 400m to get over the loose volcanic gravel section and then there is about 1 hour walking up rockier paths. After this it's crampons on and a slow slog up the ice and snow to the top. At the top you can feel the sulphur in your throat which makes it hard to get a good look at the crater the the smoke that continuously flows out of it.

Next is the fun bit! Sliding down :-) You have a strange nappy type pad to strap to your bottom and also a small plastic sledge for the slower sections and basically you just sit and slide down the snow and ice. This was done in short sections of maybe a few hundred metres down each. The top two were very steep and it was incredibly difficult to maintain control using the ice pick dug in to the slope along your side. A couple of members of our group failed entirely causing one of them to be dubbbed "the human cannonball" after he rolled down the mountain for the second time taking out 2 other people and requiring the guide flinging himself on top of him to stop! It was awesome fun and wish I could do it again.

For more details of the walk up see Nick's running blog.

Diving in Bariloche

We have spent 2 1/2 days in Bariloche in the Argentine Lake District. In winter it is one of South America's largest ski resorts but in summer also has plenty to offer. We are here in late autumn so activities are slightly restricted but there is still plenty to do. Again we have been lucky with the weather with bright sunshine and very little wind. A couple we met while walking informed us that 5 days previously the whole town had been under 3 inches of snow and trekking had been impossible. We spent 1 1/2 days walking in the area's national parks, I'll let Nick tell you about that (link to be added). I was surprised to find a couple of dive centres on the lake shore so thought I would give altitude diving a go for the first time - Lake Nahuel Huapi which the town sits beside is about 750m above sea level.

The Aquanautica dive centre was less than a mile from our hostel and the only local centre producing results on Google. It is another SSI centre, I could not find a PADI centre in the area. It is well equipped and friendly but very little English is spoken. Therefore I would only recommend it to experienced divers who don't speak a lot of Spanish. I had sent an enquiring email at very short notice and so did not have a confirmed booking when I showed up but Juan Carlos was ready for me and took me on a dive immediately. It was a shore dive which I was quite happy with given the short notice. The dive site in front of the dive centre is called Neptune Park and I was shown a short video of it before diving. One dive cost £42 including all equipment hire.

The water temperature is 11 degrees Celsius at the moment, a temperature I have never dived in a wetsuit before. However, Aquanautica uses wetsuits from November to May and drysuits only for the rest of the year so wetsuit it was! I was given a Seacsub full length 7mm suit and 5mm hooded shorty to wear on top. I also had 5mm boots and gloves. The equipment looked well maintained and the wetsuits and BCD seemed almost new and a very good fit. I did not have to try on more than one suit.

The dive started with a shallow shore entry and buoyancy check and then the first 5-10 minutes were spent at 5-7m which gave me chance to become familiar with the hired equipment. Almost immediately we descended we saw shoals of trout. They were too shy to get close enough for photos but I could see them clearly. Visibility was excellent, 10-15m and the bottom is sandy so there wasn't much to interrupt the view.

We dived for 45 minutes and I was not at all cold which surprised me. There was plenty of other wildlife to see including crayfish, mussels, crabs, snails and lots of small fish. The crayfish were everywhere, under every piece of wreckage and driftwood on the lake bottom. I used my camera on the automatic underwater mode and got some great shots down to about 20m. After the initial shallow portion of the dive we descended down the steeper slope to around 23m and then came gradually up again. We paused at a 3m wooden statue of the god Neptune at 20m. There were many other objects to explore in the shallower areas from 5m to 10m, from road signs to a wreck to a stove with kettle and 'mate' gourd! I also stroked a wooden trout and played a wooden cello. We finished the dive inside a diving bell at about 5 metres deep. It has an airspace inside where you can take out your regulators for a chat.

While obviously only a training site I enjoyed the dive immensely. Apart from the clarity of the water and depth it reminded me of Wraysbury where I have done most of my freshwater diving. Juan Carlos has an excellent set up for instructing here and it is a shame I am not staying longer in order to dive some of the other sites in the lake. I would highly recommend diving in Bariloche and with Aquanautica.

Torres Del Paine

Last week we did the 4 day "W" trek in the Torres Del Paine National Park. Nick has written about it in his running blog:

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4

Ushuaia - Diving at the end of the world

We have spent 3 nights in "Ushuaia - el Fin del Mundo". It lies 54.5 degrees South on the island of Tierra del Fuego in Argentina. It lays claim to the southernmost city in the world  - but many other places (particularly in Chile!) also do. Whatever the actual status it is in a beautiful setting with mountains on 3 sides and the Beagle Channel on the other. The Beagle Channel, named after Charles Darwin's boat, has many islands with colonies of sealions and king cormorants, and lots of giant kelp.

Monday the weather was superb, cold but bright sunshine and no wind. Perfect for a boat trip on the Beagle Channel to see the islands and wildlife. We had a tour on a large catamoran for a couple of hours with the opportunity to disembark on one of the Bridges Islands and walk around. We also stopped to look at two sealion colonies and two king cormorant colonies.

In the afternoon, we went to the end of the world museum which is expensive at £5 entrance but informative and interesting. It has displays on the history of the town from the indigineous peoples to missionaries to the first European settlers and the use of the town as a prison. It also details a few of the many shipwrecks. And there are 95 stuffed birds - at least one example of every bird native to the area. Quite creepy but also stunning to look at birds like a condor up close.

Tuesday I went scuba diving. It's 5 weeks since we left Tobago so I was very much looking forward to getting in the water again. There is only one dive shop in town - Ushuaia Divers - run by Carlos. It's a small SSI dive centre but supplies reasonable equipment inlcuding 5mm neoprene drysuits. The cost is £100 for two dives off a RIB in the Beagle Channel. On our trip there was one other diver who was inexperienced in using a drysuit but things went fairly smoothly underwater. I was hoping for sealions or king crabs but wasn't that lucky. We saw many starfish, a few crayfish, nudibranchs, a interesting squid/jelly like thing that had flashing neon lights down its sides and many shell fish. However, the highlight is swimming amongst the giant kelp and enjoying the light and atmosphere it creates.

The water was 7 degrees today - the coldest I've ever dived in! However, the air temperature is probably colder. Unfortunately, when renting a drysuit you always have the risk that it will leak and flood. The neck and wrist seals on my drysuit were not perfect for me and I had a small trickle from one wrist and the neck and the dump valve as well. I was wearing my own Fourth Element Thermocline top underneath which insulates when wet so it was 30 minutes before I started to feel cold. I lasted 45 minutes and surfacing shivering and unable to take anny of my own gear off :-( brrrrr... I would recommend Waterproof 5mm 3 finger mitts though - it was the first time I'd used mitts and my hands didn't get that cold. Obviously, we couldn't do the second dive as I had a wet undersuit and we needed to get back to the shore so I could warm up. Disappointing but I am still pleased to have dived here - I just wish I had my own drysuit and Arctic thermals!

Carlos was lovely and kept making sure I was OK and not going to get too cold but I would've liked to have had a small discount for missing the second dive. He offered that I could go back tomorrow but as we are leaving I can't. He did waive the £5 port use fee but that is small compared to £100 for one dive! He also gave me a lift back to the hostel and came back later to stamp my log book and deliver a CD with some photos of the dive and a film of the area. This is nice but most of the photos are quite green as he uses a compact camera set on the standard underwater mode rather than setting the white balance manually.

But in summary, I would recommend diving at the end of the world and Ushuaia Divers is safe and friendly.

Walking in Torres Del Paine National Park

See here for details of our walk in Torres Del Paine National Park.