Crossing the Equator

As we are only visiting one country in the North American Continent on this trip I originally intended to plonk the Mexican blog entries in the South American webpage. After all, Mexico is a ‘Latin American’ country, just like those in South America.

But Gary didn’t like this idea – he wanted to be pedantically accurate. So, I’ve made a new site (after much demanding / cajoling / bribery / blackmail) – www.catch-up-with-the-sun-northamerica.blogspot.com as you might guess! Similar to all the other continental sub-sites it’s accessible by the link on the right hand side of this page. And you’ll find some piccys of Mexico City and some impressive pyramids posted there already…

Leaving Peru

Peru is a curious country, incredibly varied. From the heights of the Andes, to jungle valleys, ancient Inca ruins and Spanish Colonial coastal deserts… you do get the impression of truly travelling as you move from place to place here. Each city or town (or village) we visited was very different from the last – keeping us interested even after being on the road for nearly 11 months.

Although Lake Titicaca was truly beautiful (and spectacularly cold) and the Ballestos Islands offered the chance to see the most amazing wildlife we’ve ever come across, I think the highlight of Peru for us was visiting Cusco and the Sacred Valley. The scenery is beautiful, the towns vibrant, and of course the area is crowned by a series of dramatic Inca sites – including Machu Picchu, the most impressive Inca Citadel of all. This is a great area to explore independently too – no need to get tours to sites as the public transport is very good (and very cheap).

Since we landed in Santiago back in December we’ve travelled solely by bus, car or train – so it’s a little strange to have to catch a plane to Mexico for our last month of travelling. This return to the northern hemisphere doesn’t actually move us much closer to the UK as Mexico City lies much further west than Lima. But from there we plan to travel overland eastward towards Cancun, passing a few Maya pyramids on the way.

Anyway, below you’ll find a good v scary contest for Peru…

Some things we’ve found great…

1. Inca Ruins. Predictably the highlights of Peru for us were the ancient sites of the Inca civilisation – not so much for the stone work or architecture, but for the locations! The Incas really couldn’t match the Cambodians of the Khmer Empire or the Ancient Chinese in the construction of their temples or forts, but they really did place them in the most breathtaking sites possible! Machu Picchu is particularly beautiful of course, but even the lesser known sites such as Pisac are stunning. The Incas must have been mad to build on the top of the Andes like that – and very, very fit!

2. Inca Terraces. The Incas were actually better a sculpting agricultural terraces than building temples… these fascinating terraces transformed the Andean mountain slopes in many places and are frequently still used by local farmers today. Perhaps the most impressive examples we saw were in Pisac, where numerous clusters of immaculate terraces stretched downs the steep mountain slopes in all directions. The ones at Machu Picchu weren’t bad either, come to think of it…

3. Ceviche. This is the closest Peru gets to Sashimi – raw fish marinated in citrus juice and spices instead of being cooked. We particularly liked the fish called chito, but we haven’t a clue if this goes by another name back home. Great texture and well worth trying if you get the chance.

4. Ballestos Islands. After seeing the hoards of birds and sealions on these fantastic but tiny lumps of rock I’d really love to visit the Galapagos Islands at some point. Unfortunately we don’t have time to visit Ecuador now - we’ll have to reserve that for the next around the world trip I think!

5. Orange Juice. The orange juice in Peru was universally excellent – concentrate doesn’t seem to exist, so they squeeze everything freshly. Lovely! The only other place we’ve found with juice like this is Egypt weirdly enough.

6. Rural Peruvians. In some ways Peru is a distinctly less pleasant place to travel than neighbouring Chile – in the main towns and sites you get the distinct impression that everyone wants to make money from you. The honest ones tout tours and hotels, or try to sell you everything from woolly hats to mini-guitars. The less honest ones tend to follow you, trying to look unobtrusive! Not that we had any trouble, but we’ve met plenty of people who’ve lost a few belongings in South America! But if you leave these areas and wander off into the countryside, as we did in search of a few Inca sites near Cusco, you get a completely different impression of the locals. We met nothing but kindness and helpfulness in our wanders off the beaten track, making us much more optimistic about Peruvians than we would have been from our highly irritating encounters with pestering souvenir vendors and shoe-shine boys in the Plaza De Armas in Cusco. It’s a shame our Spanish wasn’t a bit better – conversation may have been virtually impossible, but at least you don’t need to be fluent in a language to convey good will!

And some scary things…

1. Earthquakes. Erm, none struck during our visit thankfully, but from time to time Peru does seem to be knocked by some crackers. The destruction from the 2007 earthquake that virtually destroyed Pisco and the Paracas peninsular is still painfully evident – from the piles of rubble and ongoing construction work in Paracas’ port to the cracks stretching along the cliff edges in the peninsula. Throughout the country most of the historic buildings are relatively new simply because they have been decimated every hundred years or so! This is not the most stable part of the world.

2. Security Measures. While exploring Lima we saw no violent crime, but we were more than a little perturbed to see how many security measures were in place to stop it. Police and hired security constantly patrol the public areas on foot and by car – especially in Miraflores, the coastal suburb where we chose our hotel. All buildings have elaborate security systems and sturdy external gates with remote locks… in a way reassuring, but in another fashion highly disconcerting in their necessity! This country may be a lovely place to travel, but they clearly have unresolved issues regarding violent crime.

3. Touts. And tacky souvenir sellers. They get everywhere and they are really tiring. We haven’t seen this many since India, and the only place where they are more numerous and annoying is Luxor in Egypt!

4. Vultures in the Desert!

Oh well, back to the Northern Hemisphere to swap the Incas for Mayas and Aztecs for our last month of our trip. I don’t think a year is long enough for this kind of thing…

Entering Peru

Leaving Chile for Peru was an interesting experience. The most hassle free way to cross the border from Arica to Tacna (the most southerly Peruvian town) is apparently to travel by collectivo. This has a few advantages over buses – mainly that they actually wait for you if you get held up with border bureaucracy… rather than continuing on with all your luggage as you struggle with limited Spanish and a sullen border guard! These ‘taxis’ aren’t great though – ours was about 20 years old, had the reassuring ‘No Fear!’ logo plastered across the top of the windscreen, and like all the others, refused to leave Arica until full (i.e. crammed with 5 passengers and twice the car’s weight of luggage balanced precariously on the roof). Still, we made it to Tacna without too much trauma or border queuing, and even managed to locate the bus terminal from which we could move on to Arequipa, the city where we hoped to spend our first nights in Peru.

This is of course where we hit our first snag. We’d got up before dawn broke (about 6am Chilean time), but waiting to fill up the collectivo took time, driving and border crossing more time… so that when we reached Tacna it should have been about 10.30am. Which is when we discovered one of the odd things about this part of the world. Although Chile and Peru are on more or less the same longitudinal axis, Peru is 2 hours behind Chile. Weird! We think Chile has is wrong here – even Bolivia which is East of Chile – is 1 hour behind Chile. Meaning Chile is only 3 hours behind the UK, and that the sun rises remarkably late there. Anyway, as a result we found ourselves stranded in the manky bus terminal in Tacna at 8.30am in the morning, with the next bus to Arequipa leaving at 12.30pm. Over 4 hours to kill to a 6 hour bus journey after convoluted border crossings… oh joy.

We tried to have a look at Tacna’s town centre. This was OK I suppose, except that we set off in the wrong direction, fully laden with all our rucksacks in the heat of the midday sun! Argh. Our Spanish is improving, but it’s not great – a helpful bloke at the bus terminal assured us it was only a 10 minute walk away and gave us directions. Unfortunately the Spanish for ‘right’ is damn nigh identical to that for ‘straight ahead’… you get the drift! When we eventually found the main plaza it was very pretty and lively, but we were half dead and happy to collapse into a nearby internet café. After a while we staggered back to the bus terminal for a long wait made to seem even longer by the cat-calls of various ticket touts. One man and woman were particularly skilled at competing in this – they’d yell ‘Arequiparequiparequiparequipa!!!’ break-neck speed as loud as they could every 10 seconds or so. The man was louder, but he couldn’t match the woman for fitting-as-many-syllables-as-possible-into-each-second! To my ‘delight’ Gary thought he’d have a go at out-pacing them (fortunately at a low volume) – he couldn’t come close!

So we killed a few hours staring in fascination at the women in full and highly unflattering traditional dress: apron, HEAVEY skirts (serious amounts of fabric to make their bottoms look as large as possible), tights, twin pigtail plates, all topped off with a bowler hat! As seen in the photo. Eventually we did manage to catch the bus, but only after messing around with numerous luggage and ticket booths, and an irritating unannounced and unmarked departure tax (in a tiny unnoticeable booth on the far side of the terminal).

But this seemed to be a reasonably good work up to travelling around Peru. The bus journey itself was barmy! This wasn’t the company’s fault – they were fine – but the bus seemed to be stopped every 10 minutes for some vehicle check or another. Sometimes all the passengers were herded out, told to get their luggage, then told to leave their luggage, and finally made to walk through a random customs-like building while the bus was driven all of 10 m along side, before being allowed to get back on. Most often we just sat in the bus as the driver talked to the various Police officials for 10 minutes or so. Once however we all had to surrender our passports to a Policeman who came on board. Disconcertingly he vanished off the bus with them, but thankfully returned 10 minutes later and gave them all back. We haven’t a clue what these checks are meant to achieve – if they wish to monitor the movement of people here it’s pretty futile as most of the cars passed through these checkpoints completely unmonitored.

Anyway, we did finally reach Arequipa, and we were relieved to find it a very pleasant city. We are presently checked into a nice hotel on the beautiful Plaza de Armas – but I’ll talk about that in the ‘Arequipa’ post on the www.catch-up-with-the-sun-southamerica.blogspot.com page in a few days time!

Leaving Chile and Bolivia

We didn’t expect our time in Chile to be quite so scenic. I think it would be fair to say we’ve seen some remarkable things in many countries around the world during this last year, but some of the scenery we’ve been privileged to wander through in Chile and Bolivia has been breathtaking. Absolutely amazing.

We entered Chile in an interesting way, touching down in Easter Island as we hopped through the Pacific. The most remote lump of rock on the globe is impressive enough in its own right – sweeping hills, dramatic cliffs, mysterious lava tubes, eerie volcanic craters – but add in the presence of the staggeringly huge and sombre Maoi statues and you have a truly unique island. Our stay there was possibly one of the most memorable of the trip.

And of course this was shortly followed by our visits to the Altiplano. This high altitude plateau in the middle of the north Chilean and Bolivian Andes completely astounded us – it really wasn’t what we’d imagined at all. We thought that travelling through the barren, dry Atacama desert might be fun, especially as it would be completely different from previous our explorations this year. What we didn’t expect is that as you ascend from sea level into the Andean mountain range you would be surrounded by so many beautiful colours. The deep pure blue of the sky, crisp white salt flats, mountains with rock of every hue from black through to yellow, vibrantly alive geothermal areas, vivid multi-coloured lagoons complete with vivid-pink flamingos wandering tranquilly through the water… we’ve just never seen anything like this before. I really hope the photos we’ve posted on the South America page over the last few weeks give some sort of an impression of this place. It is truly beautiful.

It is not the most easily explored part of the world however! Chile has a reasonably good infrastructure by South American standards: the roads between major cities are good, the buses run to time – getting from place to place independently is easy. But as you go to the more remote regions (which of course are the most beautiful), the beautifully tarmacked roads are replaced by rocky dirt tracks with no real maps or signs to show you where to go! This is when you need your nice 4x4 truck and helpful driver so that you don’t get stranded at high altitude in the middle of nowhere at night, when the temperatures rapidly drop to -15 degrees C! And if this is the case in Chile, what about Bolivia? A much poorer country – we honestly didn’t see any roads that weren’t dirt tracks when we were there! Yet the scenery made our short visit there one of the highlights of this year. Especially our time watching the sun rise over the spectacular Salar De Uyuni, the largest salt flat in the world. As you stand in the centre of the crisp white salt it honestly seems to stretch into infinity, leaving you feeling alone, isolated and very small!

Anyway, at this point it seems only appropriate to list some of the great versus scary features of Chile, Bolivia and Easter Island…

Some things we’ve found great…

1. Lagoons.

2. Volcanoes.

3. Salt flats. I think we’ve raved about how wonderful the high altitude scenery is here a few times now! If you haven’t already seen the photos on the South America sub-blog for Bolivia, Copiaipo and San Pedro De Atacama go and have a look!

4. Maoi. The weird ancient culture of Easter Island that obsessively created these huge stylised stone monsters of course caused its own destruction in the process. Was it worth it? To them probably not! But there is no doubt that the lasting monuments of their downfall are immensely impressive and well worth the trip to the most isolated island on Earth.

5. Pisco Sours. You know I really struggled to find alcoholic drinks I enjoyed in Asia – except in India where a good gin and tonic is widely available. So it was particularly good to find the national drink of Chile is really tasty! A mix of lemon juice with a zingy brandy to make a short lime-green sour drink. Very nice!

6. Telepizza. It’s really good to find a quick, cheap and commonly available food in a country who’s cuisine isn’t really to your taste (see below). For us, Telepizza was a lifesaver! The pizzas made by this country-wide chain really aren’t bad – nice thin bases, reasonable toppings… Best of all they always seem to be open, particularly important when most restaurants and Cafés seem to be closed every Sunday and Monday, let alone over public holidays like Christmas and New Year! Yep, Telepizza may not produce the finest pizzas in the world, but they are a heck of a lot better than Pizza Hut, and they stopped us from starving on a number of occasions!

7. The Sky. In most places in northern Chile it rains once a year at most. So for the other 364 days the sky is free of clouds, and as you ascend to the Altiplano it takes on the deepest, purest shades of blue imaginable. It really sets off the stunning volcanoes, lagoons and salars. And at night… beautiful. Northern Chile is home to some of the most powerful telescopes in the world – the major European and USA telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere are all based here due to the exceptional clarity of the sky. But you don’t need a telescope to appreciate the brilliance of the stars as they appear in their millions, or the beauty of the largest, brightest moon I’ve ever seen.

And some scary things…

1. Food. Vegetarians must have a hard time in this part of the world. The standard Chilean diet seems to consist of meat – lots of meat – and perhaps a few potatoes. Not so dissimilar from ‘Classic’ British food in many ways! Er, we weren’t fans. I mean, cooked-till-well-and-truly-dead meat and mash? Yuck! They like horse-meat too. Gary did venture as far as trying ‘Pollo a la Pobre’ a traditional combination of fried chicken and chips with two fried eggs balanced on top. Very healthy! But even he shied away from most of the other combinations of meat on offer. Its made a lot worse by a tendency to fry everything – and as a result of these fattening staples most of the population seem to be plump at the very least.

2. Coffee. Erm, well, you can have instant! You know most people here use the word ‘Nescafe’ interchangeably with Coffee! That kind of sums it up. Not fair – we like a good black coffee in the morning.

3. Music. We have swiftly learnt to dread some types of South American Music. Actually we learnt to despise a certain type of particularly evil ‘pop’ within seconds, but unfortunately had to suffer it for hours and hours… During our trip to the wonders of the Bolivian Altiplano and Salar De Uyuni we were driven around by a nice bloke called Valerio. He occasionally played a tape in his 4x4 jeep, but it would always be a pretty benign mix of Bolivian traditional music with a few western songs thrown in for god measure. Nothing great, but not to objectionable either – and at a reasonable volume. But then again Valerio was a nice guy. Unfortunately our return transfer from Uyuni to San Pedro was in the jeep of a much less pleasant bloke called Edgar. He practically shunned Gary and myself the entire way, speaking only to our fellow traveller Nachos in rapid Spanish. I know there were linguistic difficulties, but it’s easy to be polite and pleasant. He didn’t even try. On top of rudeness he inconsiderately let us all freeze at night in the car (lying that the heating didn’t work – it did – we tried it when he was out of the car). I mean freeze – prolonged exposure to temperatures well below zero. And perhaps his infliction of his ‘taste in music’ upon us was even worse. He had two CDs, each with around 18 tracks on them, but we couldn’t tell one song from another. All had the same evil, rapid but monotonous synthesised drum beat, each song exactly the same pace as the last! And every track had an identically pathetic synthesised accordion-like drone playing practically indistinguishable repetitive, simplistic, forgettable tunes, while somebody ‘sang’ in Spanish every now and then. To make it more interesting (I assume) from time to time when the singer wasn’t singing he’d chant over the accordions’ drone. ‘Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru!’ or perhaps ‘Arrrreeeeeba!!!’, or something similar. It would have driven us insane under the best of circumstances, but at top volume for hours on end because the obnoxious Edgar claimed he’d fall asleep otherwise (he only said this to Nachos of course, not us – we were ignored). Grrr. By the time we reached the Chilean border we were delighted to see the back of him – no one could have made a greater contrast to the lovely Valerio who we thankfully spent most of our time with exploring one of the most wonderful parts of the world we’ve seen. Despite Edgar the trip was well worth it – he pales into insignificance.

Anyway, onwards and upwards (well, northwards anyway), back towards the northern hemisphere and home – on to Peru… And that journey probably deserves its own entry come to think of it!

Espanol y Comida (Spanish & Food!)

Chile is an easy place to travel around. Really simple. Ok, as long as you can brave some linguistic complications… Put it like this – if you’ve read the blog for a while then you’ll remember the trouble we had making ourselves understood in China. Hardly anyone there understood English – and to make matters worse ‘Chinese’ is actually a collection of hundreds of mutually unintelligible tonal languages with a horribly complex pictorial written counterpart. To put it mildly we struggled – you’d have laughed your head off it you’d seen our first attempts to buy train tickets! Lets just say it was only possible because we looked up a few Chinese character place names in advance, and we were lucky enough to be served by a lovely bloke who was more than willing to make himself understood by a very graphic sign-language! But by the end of our stay in China we were proud to have mastered a few phrases in Mandarin, perfected the art of miming, and become scarily adept at drawing of beautiful little pictures to make ourselves understood!

And now we’re in South America, where approximately the same number of people speak English as in China (i.e. about 0.0000001% of the population). But luckily it’s not so bad! Latin American Spanish is a slightly softer version of its European counterpart – but most importantly as far as we’re concerned it’s a nice, Latin-based non-tonal language! Yay! No more worries about whether your voice goes up or down at the end of a word. OK, the pronunciation takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s not so bad. Especially as they use the same alphabet as we do! Gary is even finding bits of the French and Latin he learned at School useful (he’s much better at these language things than me). Today he managed to make a hotel reservation by phone with someone who spoke no English. Although perhaps I shouldn’t hype his linguistic ability too much before we attempt to check-in to the place…

Anyway, apart from our struggles with booking everything in Spanish, Chile has proved very easy and relaxing to travel around. The buses are fantastically comfortable and inexpensive compared to Europe, with huge amounts of leg room and reclining chairs resembling those you’d get in Business Class flights. The skies here seem to be permanently blue and cloudless – we haven’t felt a drop of rain since leaving Tahiti. And genuinely dramatic, stunning scenery seems to be routine. Chile is a very pleasant place to travel.

No, my only quibble with the country is the food. I always thought the UK was the birthplace of a particularly malignant form of cuisine – combining boring, bland non-flavours with soggy-cum-iron-hard-chewy textures. Especially nasty cook-until-well-and-truly-dead meat and veg. if you know what I mean. But at least eating in the UK has been saved by the abundance of culinary imports. It’s very easy to get your hands on a delicious Italian, Indian or Chinese meal, and in many places you can choose between Japanese, Thai, Mexican and many others too. But here in Chile the food is a bit like traditional British fare, and there’s a distinct lack of imported flavours. Apart from Santiago (where we had some lovely fresh Sushi) it’s a struggle to find anything but fried meat and potatoes. Great. So far our only saving grace has been a chain of fast-food restaurants called ‘Telepizza’, which (believe it or not) actually produce pretty good thin crust pizzas in a few minutes for about £3 a shot. Not bad. But at this point we’re getting a bit tired of pizza, and (even worse) as we travel north to more and more remote places we’re a bit scared that there may not be any outlets of this wonderful chain. Argh! Fried chicken and potatoes! Help!!!