Voyage to Sudamerica

The summing up

2009-07-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in an internet cafe in Lima, the leaden sky pressing down on the busy streets of jostling cars. I have had a cold for the last five days after being infected by Seb and my stay in the mountainous town of Huaraz, famous for being framed by the Cordillera Blanca where "Touching the Void" is set, was therefore curtailed. Im my boredom, Ive worked out how far I´ve travelled in South America.

As you remember, I started my trip in Buenos Aires and headed south across the arid, flat pampas, unsure of what the future would hold. Puerto Madryn and fishing escapades later, I found myself in the "land of mist and snow", Patagonia, gawping at glaciers and climbing mountain crags. The cold, bleak immmensity of the landscape got to me in the end and I yearned to head back to civilisation. It came in the form of the street vendors and sooth-sayers of Santiago, in the "cafe con piernas" and deep seats of Starbucks. My love for Argentina meant that I would cross back into the country of the gauchos twice on my way up Chile, visiting Santiago and the beautiful Salta. Mystery lay in the "magnetic" valley of Cochiguaz, near the Elqui valley and exquisite beauty in the star strewn mantle thrown above me. San Pedro was the tourist nexus of the north, drawing me in and spitting me out again within two days, my jeans a little more ripped from sand boarding and the valle de la luna. Trains have been a continual disappointment in South America, and Calama was no exception. It wasn´t a lurching steam engine that awaited me, but prostitutes on street corners and an Italian with a beard who went by the name of Alberto.

"Dawn in russet mantle clad" walked not "oer dawn of yon high eastern hill", but over the rosy, rotund faces of the Bolivian women in their top hats, my most enduring memory of Bolivia. The mountains of salt led on to Tupiza and Tarija, nearly falling off a horse and sampling some foul Bolivian wine. Refreshed, I travelled on to Potosi and the bowels of hell, only to emerge suffocated and humbled. The white walls of Sucre provided the perfect setting for independence celebrations and prepared me for the din of La Paz`s streets, "the shanghai of the Americas". The cross into Peru was imperceptible, both of the Andean peoples of Lake Titicaca descending from the Tiahuanaco tribe. Enjoying David´s company, I gained an interesting insight of how people live on the islands of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, so different from Puno where people entice you into their hostels in the hope of foisting a sub-standard tour upon you.

Arequipa was a pleasure, Cusco a chore. The first was as elegant and relaxing as the second was vulgar and stressful. It was made up for though, by the first sight of Machu Picchu as the sun rose over the surrounding mountains that had lain inviolate for so many centuries before the arrival of Bingham. Much of the area did not even appear on the map of the famous Italian cartographer, Raimondi. I have travelled progressively more slowly as time has passed, and by the end I was content to just keep on keeping on.

Argentina was my favourite country, but does not compare to Bolivia in terms of difference and "culture shock". The people of Madagascar seemed more akin to Europeans than the Quechuan speaking locals of Uyuni or La Paz. In all, I have travelled 13,000KM across dry pampa, silken grass land, barren mountains and icy precipices. The sand dunes of the Chilean and Peruvian coast would seem to stretch on forever and then suddenly give way to snow-capped peaks and green foliage. The pampas north of La Paz was an even greater contrast, home to flitting kingfishers, parrots, dolphins and caimans.

I´ll certainly miss the four sol dinners (though Ive eaten too few and am surely running low on funds), the staggeringly high, six thousand metre mountains, meeting new people at every destination and the feeling of freedom you experience when you pack up you meagre belongings and get back on the road. In terms of culinary highlights, the steak of Argentina stands out, as does the ice-cream of Bariloche, the humitas of Bolivia, Israeli food in La Paz and above all, Cappricio cafe in Arequipa where oozing slabs of artery blocking chocolate cake would be served up with nonchalance.A place to be remembered and its not even in the Lonely Planet.

The smelly socks will not be missed, though, nor the swiss-cheese trainers and jeans that haven´t bear the scars of chimichurri sauce and ceviche juice. I believe some bugs may have found a willing home there. The bread here in South America is nothing short of crap; a sort of sweet, crumbly dough that doesn´t bear up well to the rigours of jam spreading. God knows why they have a word for homemeal bread, pan integral, because nobody eats any. To be added to this growing list are holes in the ground where you are expected to urinate, toilets without seats, carrying toilet paper around in your bag wherever you go, supermarkets that don´t cater to the individual, pharmacies that refuse to sell plasters, illegal driving, continual strikes, contempt for the Gringo, poor water pressure in the showers, hair in the plugholes, marauding Israelis, laundries that shrink your clothes and people who have no sense of civic pride. It made me yearn at times for some sort of benign dictatorship that would make the buses run on time. There are no trains left to run on time.
As Orwell said, everything feels heavier in England and people with knobbled faces apologise for being pushed or jostled (apart from London, of course, the least English part of England. Will people be protesting in the streets about Britain´s complicity in the torture of terrorist suspects. I doubt it...the Ashes are a far bigger concern. It may rain, but its still home. TAKE ME BACK TO DEAR OLD BLIGHTY....

Machu Picchu or Picchu? Cusco or Qosco?

2009-07-01T17:10:00.000-07:00

Peru would be alright if it weren’t for the people, the women on every street corner with leering smiles who entice you into their “massage parlour” with calls of “mister, mister, massache”, the taxi drivers and tour operators who brazenly lie to you, the bus drivers who let their country go to the shit in order to protect their own narrow interest. The people who jeer at you and call you “gringo” with a contempt that you would reserve for the lowliest of beings, while relying on your money to survive, the greasy haired libertines who grab at you as you walk down the street and whisper “You want weed man, coke?”. Of course, these people comprise only a small proportion of the population, but they do enough to take the shine off a city that should overwhelm a tourist with its culture, elegance and heritage.

“Cusco”, a perversion of the Quechuan word “Qosco” was literally the heart or navel of the Tihuantinsuyo (Popularly known as the Inca empire), the four districts of which stretched to the north into modern day Columbia, to the south into Chile and Argentina, to the East into the Amazon and to the West to the coast. The word “Inca” only refers to the head of the tribe, a descendant of the sun God Inti. Under the reign of the Inca, Pachacutec, Incan lands were transformed from a tiny collection of small villages and hamlets into a vast, sweeping empire containing tens of thousands of people who owed homage to the Inca and worshipped the sun God in the ceremony, Inti Raymi. The creative force of this empire was concentrated on Qosco. Pachacutec remodeled the city, building upon the stonework of earlier inhabitants and turning the modest Temple of the Sun into Koricancha, or temple of gold. Much of this spectacular work can still be seen today in walls and fortifications that have borne the winds and rain of half a millennium and today support a modern city. I stayed in the artsy district of San Blas and every day, when walking to the Plaza de Armas, I would pass an exquisite Inca wall built in the expansionist style; hulking, irregular shaped masses of rock fit together seamlessly without the help of mortar and polished to create a shiny finish. This contrasts with an earlier style of rough hewn rock glued together with mortar and a later style of shiny, regular blocks fitted together seamlessly in uniform lines. The expansionist style seems to me to be the most ingenious and intricate. Without the help of the wheel, the Incas fitted strange shaped stones together so perfectly that not a blade of grass can fit between the seams, built the walls to withstand earthquakes and would lay the foundations for a modern city that pays little attention to its own roots.

Koricancha is a fantastic example of Inca masonry. When the Spanish arrived, much of the Sun Temple was dismantled, but the foundations and fortifications were retained in order to built a Franciscan monastery above it. The smooth, curving outer wall looks like a breaking wave and contrasts favourably with the clumsy Spanish structure it supports. Inside, two perfect chambers that are mirror images of each other hold niches where the Inca would have sat during the winter solstice, the sun shining on him alone. All the walls lean inwards and the two hunks of rock that form the door run horizontally from a trapezoidal lintel in order to spread the weight in a world that had no conception of the arch. Because weight could not be distributed more efficiently, all the Inca buildings I have seen are squat and made of monoliths of rock, suggesting that the city itself was made of low-rise buildings. Despite all the Inca remains that litter the city, it is difficult to visualise exactly how the city would have been, like seeing a stumps of wood where once a forest stood. The old centre of the city is reputed to be shaped like a puma, the head being the ceremonial site of Sacsayhuaman where the Festival of the Sun, Inti Raymi, would be held. Outside the city walls, fields and terraces would have stretched off into the distance, feeding Qosco and the rest of the empire. Probably because they lived in temporary dwellings, the ordinary farmers and citizens of Qosco have left few visible signs of how they lived.

Yet within Qosco, it is easy to forget that you are living in one of the most historically important cities in the world. Locals prostitute their centuries-old culture by posing for photos with as many goats and llamas as they can muster, young children of nine and ten are forced to make a living by making up information about the Incas and feeding it to gullible tourists and one man dresses up as the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, complete with all his regalia: colourful tunic, gold headdress, sandals and golden axe topped off with a husk of corn. There is a street branching off from the Plaza de Armas where you are sure to be offered drugs and at the end of the street lies homogeneously Israeli area, complete with Israeli signs and budget restaurants. Party hostels like The Point and Loki cater to the needs of the gap year English who want to get slashed and humiliate themselves without even leaving the comfort of their hostel and the staff refuse to speak to you in Spanish. In the centre of the city, you see nearly as many tourists as locals. There is little living in Qosco that is authentic, not even the name. Only some old walls supporting modern decadence. This is such a shame in a city as beautiful as Qosco, where two beautiful Mestizo churches grace the central square against an azure sky invariably spotted with billowing cumulous clouds.

Are modern Peruvians any more developed than the Incans? They may talk on mobile phones and use computers, drive cars and look into space, but their running water is polluted and many children don’t go to school or are forced to work at an early age in order to earn a living. Some are abandoned by their parents and stuck in orphanages where they are helped by willing tourists. On my Machu Picchu trek, I met a girl called Lydia who had volunteered in an orphanage in one of the riches cities in Peru, Arequipa. One day, someone proposed raising money to give the children new clothes to wear at school. The money was raised, the clothes were bought and given, but the next day they had disappeared. They had been sold for drinking money. The people are fired on by their own government and so demand their rights in transport strikes that paralyse and impoverish the country. Yet despite all their ostentatious catholic piety, many Peruvians have yet to learn to treat each other with respect. This became glaringly obvious when we went to watch Inti Raymi in the head of the puma, Sacsayhuaman. We arrived at 9 in the morning in order to secure seats for a ceremony that would begin at 2 in the afternoon and were soon heckled by a woman behind us who whined throughout the day about us being too tall and obscuring her view (Nobody can whine like a Peruvian). For the first hour of the ceremony, we were given an uninterrupted view of the parade ground where the Inca was being carried on a litter to a central platform where he would perform a libation with chicha (a fermented drink made from corn) and make a symbolic sacrifice of a llama. As the hill overlooking Sacsayhuaman became more crowded, you could feel the tension in the air and some people stood up to get a better view to a chorus of “Bajate, Bajanse”. When they refused, the people above threw bags of rubbish and stones at them, despite the fact that there were tens of young children in the crowd. Plastic bags rained down, one of them hitting me on the back. The people below retaliated and in the tumult, hundreds of innocent onlookers decided to leave, standing up and angering those above yet more. From then on, we saw nothing. An old man struggled up a slope and then collapsed onto his knees before fainting. He was quickly helped up by a woman who hauled at his limp body, pressing his face into the folds of her blouse and restricting her airway. He was laid on his back and people jumped down from the terraces above with their own home brewed remedy. One woman proposed putting alcohol in the man’s nostrils, while a young adolescent offered to perform CPR. Luckily, a young American medical student was on hand to save the day. Meanwhile, wave upon wave of Peruvians tried to push their way through the throng while an old man lay on the floor, perhaps about to die. Crazy.

My four day jungle tour to Machu Picchu was fantastic, despite a conceited, unfit guide who would lag behind the group and abandoned us the day before we went up to The Lost City of the Incas. Our tour included Rachel and Scott, sun brazed Californians who live in San Francisco and work as an artist and teacher respectively, the two Johns, funny, gay Canadians on a short tour to Peru and Lydia, a bubbly English girl who has been surviving on five soles a day since her credit card was stolen. The tour started with mountain biking on a road bordering the Urubamaba valley, the Sacred valley of the Incas. We sped round tight corners as we descended from a high mountain pass to humid jungle, at times leaving the road for a dirt track whose bumps unseated both of the two johns who tumbled over the handlebars. Yohan consoled us by boasting that he could jump 10 metres on a bike. The second day included a steep hike through jungle to an Inca trail, past a group of ailing Irish who often stopped to catch their breath and later collapsed into hammocks or vomited into toilets. The Inca trail was one of the most spectacular sections of the treck, with perilously narrow steps and nothing separating you from a two hundred metre precipice. Yohan performed an Andean ceremony to the surrounding Apus, or mountain Gods, which involved addressing each mountain in turn and stripping three coca leaves to the stalks. With this, we were granted safe passage all the way to Machu Picchu. Salcantay loomed ahead of us, laden with snow, but it didn’t compare to our first view of Machu Picchu the following day as we stood on a rickety metal bridge riddled with holes. A vertical cliff face rose up hundreds of metres to an Inca trail that somehow traversed the impossible gradient. On top of the mountain, the three windows of the sun temple were silhouetted against the sky. The boring slog along the railway tracks finished in Aguas Calientes, a bizarrely modern tourist town crouching below towering mountains covered with trees and tropical vegetation. That same day we braved the vertiginous climb up Putucusi mountain to the side of Machu Picchu. We clambered up a series of almost vertical ladders, struggled up the rocky slopes with quads burning and gained the summit for our first view of Machu Picchu. We saw it from ninety degrees, as if in cross-section, the mountain of Machu Picchu descending into a hollow where the ruins stand. A ridge takes up on the right where the ruins end and bumble along to the foot of Huayna Picchu where some ruins still cling. To climb this mountain, you have to be one of the first four hundred people to enter Machu Picchu, and so the following morning, we crawled out of bed at 3:30 and began to walk at 4.

The torch beams swung around crazily in the darkness as we walked towards the bridge in the pitch black. For the first ten minutes we met nobody, but soon picked up the trail at the start of the steps. Despite the hour, the air was hot and humid and we were all bathed in sweat after the first flight of steps. Unusually for Seb, he hung behind, nursing his blisters and a brewing cold. In the darkness, the steps seemed to go on forever and I had to grope around to find the next step. After an hour of hard climbing, we began to smell bacon wafting from the 900 dollar-a-night hotel next to the entrance to Machu Picchu. We were among the first people to sit down on the steps and easily gained admission to Huaynu Picchu. The city looked spectacular as the sun rose slowly over the surrounding mountains. Llamas munched lazily at the grass covering the terraces and we were surrounded on all sides by tumbling terraces, constructions that looked like rustic cottages and the smooth stonework of sacred buildings. Next to the steep steps, irrigation channels carry water down the hillside. The water is supposed to come from an underground lake and the flow is constant throughout the year. We were given a tour by a man called Percy that was less than illuminating. All we were left with was uncertainty; uncertainty about what Machu Picchu was, how it was constructed and who was truly the first person to discover it. Some archaeologists have claimed that the site served as a haven for the Virgins of the Sun because only female skeletons were found in the cemetery. Others claimed that it was a prison, but the consensus today is that it was a get-away for the Inca Pachacutec and was one of the last safe havens for Incas fleeing the Spanish invasion. The trails leading to Machu Picchu were blocked and the lost city was not officially found until 1911 (of the 1880s depending on whom you believe), although the local people had known of its existence for centuries. The problem lies with the Spanish who seeked to destroy rather than to understand. Contrary to popular belief, Machu Picchu does not mean Old Mountain, but is a meaningless name coined by the Spanish. Furthermore, no Spaniard ever deciphered the complex Incan cords where the key to understanding the Tihuantinsuyo may lie. They are multi-coloured strands of fibre with knots of various types and colours. The size of the knots, their colours, the space between them and the direction of twist may all carry meaning. That said, they may merely have acted like the rosary in the Catholic Church, reminding the Incas of important facts and dates in a primarily oral culture. Quien sabe?

The late afternoon was magical as the slanting rays of Inti picked out the strict contours of the terraces and the rising hulk of Huayna Picchu. Exhausted, we took the tourist bus back down to Aguas Calientes, a rip off of Starbucks and some extortionate Mexican food. Quite a day!

2009-06-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

Odyssey

After ten days in Arequipa, gorging ourselves on chocolate cake and visiting the occasional site, David, Seb and I decided to take a bus as close as possible to the colonial city of Cusco to the north. In Arequipa, no-one had been able to tell us definitively if it was possible to reach Cusco; they would often furrow their brows, grumble about the “paro regional” and advise us that we should just stay in Arequipa for the next few days. We were like Odysseus’s men, lured into Circe’s abode and fated to gorge on food forever as pigs.

Nobody in Arequipa could tell us exactly why the inhabitants of the Cusco region had left their jobs and erected blockades around the city. Some speculated that it was in response to government atrocities in the north of Peru, where indigenous people were fired on by police, their bodies later dumped into the rainforest. Others thought that this merely provided a convenient pretext for some disorder. We later found out that the strike had more to do with the local water supply that the government is attempting to privatise.

Six hours after catching the bus, we found ourselves in the dusty, desolate town of Espinar. Despite the protestations of a local taxi driver, nothing was open and we ended up sheltering from the bitter cold in a hostel where we grabbed two hours of sleep before continuing on to Sicuani. At six in the morning, the bus jolted up to a roadblock, a line of huge stones traversing the road, surrounded by locals huddled round a campfire. Unusually for South America, we found all our bags waiting outside when we got off the bus, and the driver was in such a rush to leave that David got trapped inside.

We still had no idea of the walk that awaited us. A motorbike driver agreed to take us as far as he could, which I took to mean the town from which the bus would leave. We were soon to be disillusioned. Squashed into a truck, I experienced a feeling of adventure and exhilaration that I have never felt reclined in a comfortable seat on a large bus. I had just finished Che, La Vida por un Mundo Mejor by Paddy O´Donnell, and had his Bolivian “heroics” in mind. Without maps or communications with Cuba or La Paz, Che and his men hacked their way through the selva surrounded by soldiers trained by the American military. They had little to eat and Che was paralysed with asma attacks that left him incapacitated, laid out in a hammock carried by his men, smelling his own filth. He was captured with an orange in his pocket, weighing less than sixty kilograms. I am not idealistic enough to think that such a fate holds any charm.

The trailer shook with the vibrations of the motor and after fifteen minutes, several figures on bikes started to come towards us. The driver slowed down and pulled in to the side of the road. We were soon surrounded by gesticulating Peruvians, one of whom pulled out a nail from his pocket and punctured the wheels of the motorbike. They shouted at the driver for taking tourists and breaking the “paro”. We paid him what we could under the watchful gaze of the strikers, and left.

The road was perfectly straight and stretched off down the valley past fields of maize and lowing cows. We shouldered our bags that must have weighed thirty kilos and trudged off into a mirage of melting tarmac. Others walked in the same direction, many of them locals who were simply trying to get home. Three Cusquenas (inhabitants of Cusco) had been caught out by the strike while another woman was carrying a muti-coloured sack. A baby cooed inside. There were far more roadblocks than I had anticipated, many of them simply low lines of rock, perhaps topped off by a gnarled tree root. The bigger blockades consisted of trucks parked across the road. Locals congregated in wide circles and discussed the strike, ordinary people able to take the floor and express their views. We stopped once to listen and heard a small man speak in monotonous tone and ending each sentence with a resounding “Companeros”, comrades. I wonder if this strike has a socialist, anti-Western tinge. Later on in the day, we sat down at the side of the road and were mocked by the passing cyclists who laughed, called us gringos and told David that he was slow. In the last town before we caught the bus, the locals glared at me and an old woman had the temerity to hit me over the bottom with a wooden switch, much to the pleasure of the surrounding villagers who guffawed, revealing their discoloured, rotten teeth.

We knew that we would never make it to Cusco walking alone, so we paid the extortionate prices demanded by motorcyclists, tuc-tuc drivers and small children with trailers to take us the few kilometres between the roadblocks. On one occasion, we hopped into a trailer pulled by a small child on a bike and crawled along the rock-strewn road. Shortly after getting off to help the child push the trailer up a hill, we saw some bicycles racing towards us. Baja, baja (get off, get off) the child cried. In an ecstasy of fumbling, we ripped our bags from the trailer and pressed some coins into the child´s hand as he turned round and fled from the oncoming strikers. He got away, but a tuc-tuc driver wasn’t so lucky. A cyclist hung on to the window, grabbed a huge rock and threw it at the driver through the opening. I assume he missed because the tuc-tuc sped off into the distance.

Five hours after beginning our walk, the sun was at its zenith and was beginning to take its toll, despite the wide-brimmed leather hat that shaded my face from the sun. At one village, Tinta, the locals told us there was no lunch on offer because of the strike, and it was a similar story at the next village where an old man disappointed us with relish. Luckily, one comedor had stayed open and we forced down a revolting pasta dish that wouldn´t have been out of place in the Twits. Thereon in, we didn´t manage to catch any more transport and so had to brave the sun and the burning tarmac for some fifteen or twenty kilometres. Groups of locals on bikes patrolled the road, sometimes sending scouts further to ensure that no locals agreed to carry tourists (the irony is that locals themselves were let through). The most zealous of the strikers were young men of 18 or 19 years who took malicious pleasure in halting a motorbike and puncturing the wheels. They smiled at us mockingly as we passed. Huge blisters appeared on Seb´s feet and walking became toil. David himself began to suffer and lagged behind, rising over the brow of the hill with a vacant expression, his jumper wrapped around his head.

We passed over a hundred lorries held up before a bridge, passed locals playing football in the fields and had begun to despair of reaching Cusco that day when we reached the village of Checacube. Some motorcyclists refused to take us because they said their tyres would be punctured (pinchados). Luckily, a huge red truck pulled up on the square and the driver agreed to let us board, for a price of course. As we approached the barricades, we pulled our mochilas above our heads to deflect any flying rocks. But, the rocks never came. Instead, some of the strikers who were tired of their work decided to board the truck and go home. Che wouldn´t have been impressed. This is what saved us, because from then on, we passed through the blocks without any trouble and reached the bus shivering because of the icy wind. An odyssey indeed!

I sympathise with the strikers, but erecting roadblocks and paralysing a huge city is no way to protest or effect change. Surfing on the internet, I have found that this is no isolated event. The same thing happened at the end of 2008. Such actions can only harm the people of Peru in the long run by reducing GNP and discouraging foreign investment in the country. The government is perhaps reluctant about breaking up the strike because of what happened in the north of the country, but actions like this should not go unchallenged. We need peaceful protest, not disorder and violence.

Stuck in Arequipa

2009-06-17T13:19:00.000-07:00

I walked out of our hostel into the blinding sunlight that beat down upon the cobbled streets and bounced off the white sillar walls that stretched down the road towards the Plaza de Armas. Small, yellow taxis that might once have been Fiat Puntos, screech round corners and beep their pathetic, plaintive horns in the hope that someone will make way. Walking down the street you pass street vendors selling a non-descript meat scewered on a wooden pole and left to sizzle for hours on a charcoal burner, looking sad next to some dessicated, shrivelled potatoes. Toothless men in rags shelter in doorways and hold their caps out to you as you pass. Women pass in suits, shopkeepers throw water onto the pavement and scrub and you gain tantalysing glimpses of quiet, damp courtyards where people laze around and relax to the sound of gurgling water, surrounded by geraniums and the blue or ochre walls of yet another colonial building.

This is Arequipa, the City of the Eternal Blue Sky, a large, prosperous city in the South West of Peru that is renowned for being conservative and resenting the domination of Lima. The historic centre of the city has been declared a World Heritage Sight because of the uniformity of the architecture; almost all the colonial buildings are made of an off-white volcanic rock, Sillar and the city is dotted with mestizo architecture, featuring intricate stonework, leaves and grapes. In front of every church stands a green cross with a ladder that represents the fusion of the Catholic church with Incan and Pre-Incan religion. Despite the attacks of Dawkins and the onslaught of evolution, religion is still going strong here in South America (though perhaps it is on the decline) and signs of religious devotion can be found at every turn. It is, after all, called the Rome of the Americas. Near our favourtie nightclub, Deja Vu, the outstretched arm of a stern looking priest beckons the traveller onwards and in the adjacent street lies the huge monastery of Santa Catalina. It was opened to the public in 1970 after over three hundred years of seclusion and is a city within a city, its narrow streets and passageways winding their way past cloisters, potted plants, fountains and the cell of one Sor Anna who was made saint by Pope John Paul II for the miracles that she was said to have performed.

There was something exciting about losing yourself in this haven of tranquility, calm and peaceful despite the hundreds of tourists who pay to enter every day. Wherever you wander through the thick walls, you are confronted with the imposing outline of Misti volcano which hangs over the town, only a few kilometres from the city centre. It is still active and the overwhelming power of Arequipa´s tectonic forces have been can be seen in the ruins of one part of the monastery. Earthquakes devastate Arequipa on a regular basis and in 1868, the city was almost razed to the ground, only to be rebuilt by its industrious citizens. People are still drawn to the volcano, though, because of the fertile volcanic ash that is spewed over the surrounding fields and on a tour of the city, we saw hundreds of small, tin-roofed shacks and homesteads creeping their way up the steep slopes.

Where today´s citizens of Arequipa look to science to predict an earthquake, their ancestors looked to the Gods. The Andes mountain chain that runs up the Western coast of South America bristels with volcanos and no city more so than Arequipa which is surrounded by the Misti, Chachani and Pichu Pichu volcanos. The Inca empire expanded rapidly in the fifteenth century under the Emperor, Mayta Capac. Walking through the desert with his soldiers, they stumbled across the beautiful oasis of Arequipa, then inhabited by primitive, semi-sedentary tribes. The legend goes that tired by the long journey and in seek of rest, or enticed to live in the area by the beautiful, fertile land, Capac´s soldiers asked him if they could stop there. He replied in Quechua, "Ari Qhipay" (si quedaos), which means "Yes, stop here". Hence the name Arequipa. When natural (and perhaps political?) disasters occured anywhere in the Inca empire, a human sacrifice would be offered to the Gods to appease them. The Incas viewed volcanos as living beings who could be beneficient or wrathful, taking revenge on humans with ash and smoke. Many daughters of noble families grew up in the knowledge that they would be sacrificed to the Gods and their umbilical cord was kept so that it could be buried with them, a bridge to the beyond. Whenever an eruption occured, a ceremony would be performed in Cusco and a party would set out with the sacrificial offering, sometimes travelling thousands of kilometres to reach volcanoes of 6000 metres or higher. They scaled the mountains in replacable straw boots, cut steps into the hillside, survived artic temperatures before finally killing the intoxicated charge with a swift blow to the head. In the 1990s a thirteen year old girl, Juanita, was found on the volcano, Ampato (following the eruption of a nearby volcano that melted the thick layers of ice) and was moved to Arequipa for preservation. She is startling well preserved, hunched up in a chamber of ice, her skin and nails perfectly intact, except for drops of fat purged from her skin. Her eye sockets are black holes. The irony is that we are just as impotent as the Incas in preventing earthquakes and eruptions. At least they had peace of mind.

The Arequipenas are said to be rather haughty and consider themselves superior to the rest of Peru. In a nightclub I got chatting to a girl who asked me what I thought of Bolivia. When I replied that it was my favourite country so far, she furrowed her brow and retorted that all Bolivians were ugly and uneducated and that their cities were nothing compared to Peru. She obviously hasn´t been to Potosi or Tarija. In one breath she cast scorn not only upon Bolivia, but upon her compatriots in the Peruvian jungle and countryside who look not towards Europe and America but towards Pachamama (mother earth) and Pachatata. This kind of attitude may explain the muted reaction to government atrocities in the province of Bagua, northern Peru, where police opened fire upon indigenous protestors. The government has passed a law that is inimical to the indigenous citizens because it allows the government to exploit their natural habitat in order to extract oil and gas. They set up roadblocks and the government responded with violence. Around twenty policemen were killed along with an undetermined number of indigenous, whose bodies may have been collected by the police and dropped into the thick of the jungle from planes. Here in Arequipa, people put up posters denouncing the government and a small procession filed through the square, but there was no great public outrage. The air didn´t buzz with the news of murder. People continued to drink their coffee and eat oozing slabs of chocolate cake with blissful apathy. This is surely what happens when people see murder as an every day occurrence.

There was no chocolate cake in the Colca Canyon, a deep scar on the land that is reputed to be the deepest canyon in the world. Some even claim that it is twice as deep as the Grand Canyon, but David and I have been lied to so many times in Peru that we now assume a healthy scepticism. We took an overnight bus to the canyon, tried to sleep on an overcrowded bus that jumped around on the rough road and I almost lost my walking boots in the bustle. Our first view of the canyon was spectacular. Unlike the Grand Canyon that drops vertically down from the desert, Colca Canyon looks like a valley whose narrow bed curves between interlocking spurs and outcrops of rock that look like the butress roots of some great redwood. In some places, the hillside descends in sheer drops of lineated rock, but they are few and far between, allowing the hiker to walk down into the canyon on a steep path. We passed walkers who couldn´t speak for shouldering their packs and small, wizened locals who skipped past us on shortcuts worn into the rock. We reached the base of the canyon within three hours which is surprisingly green given that the river Colca is almost dry and that the deep gullies that descend from the snow-capped mountains are full of rocks show no hint of moisture. We climbed again, drank an Inka Kola (which tastes identical to Irn Bru, but contains yellow colouring instead of orange) in front of a stuffed fox and skidded our way down once more towards the Oasis where I collapsed into a hammock, surrounded by brutal, orange rock.

The narrow path zigzagged its way crazily up a hillside in a steep ascent that would have befitted the Incas. It was five in the morning and the sun had not yet come up as we began the climb, bananas in hand. The path was lit by a full moon and the sky glittered with stars. The first half of the walk passed without incident, apart from a rabid dog that gave me a nip on the knee. We scared it away with stones. The second half of the treck showed me how unfit I have become. As the sun began to rise, casting its horizontal rays over the canyon, David began to forge ahead and I lagged behind, breathing hard and looking at my feet. The path stretching on ahead was just too depressing. By the time I reached the top, I was my back was bathed in sweat. Orios have never tasted so good. The canyon is also famous for Condors and we went in search of them, attempting to reach a viewpoint by climbing over a wall. As I raised my weight onto a stone, it gave way and my outstretched hands fell forwards onto a cactus bristling with spines. Five long spines had pierced my left hand through my alpaca gloves, one of them driven a few centimetres into the skin. I tried to pull them out myself, but couldn´t handle the pain. A tour guide led me to a hospital draped with a poster warning against hepatitis. The nurse inside reassured me that I would live by recounting the story of a tour guide who had fallen backwards onto a cactus. One of the spines had pierced his lung.

I am writing such a long and convoluted blog because I can. A transport strike around Cusco has meant that no buses have left Arequipa for Cusco in the last four days. Today a normal service was resumed and we hope to travel to Cusco tonight, hopefully avoiding the marauding mob armed with stones. I have not yet mentioned the food here in Arequipa. The city is known as the gastronomic capital of Peru and much of the traditional food is served in Picanterias which serve spicy food and meat in an intimate setting. Cebicherias (this may be a spelling mistake since the dish is called Ceviche) serve raw fish marinated in lime juice and served with chilli and sweet potato. Chicha is a strong alcoholic drink made from maize and Rocoto relleno is another famous local dish. Rocoto is a spicy vegetable similar to Chili and about the size of an apple which is rellenado (filled) with meat and fish. And of course, you can´t forget the cuy (guinea pig) which arrives on you plate with head intact and leering teeth.

On a more frivolous note, nobody here in Peru seems to understand the difference between Scotland and England. Walking around a supermarket, I caught sight of some sweets called English toffees. On the packet is a picture of a rabidly scottish scotsman with flaming hair, kilt and bagpipes. A local newspaper referred to Andy Murray as English, an unpardonable offence, and the official drink of Arequipa is Kola Escocesa, a sickly purple drink which has no discernible link to Scotland. Do you think Scotland receives a share of the profits? I am also wondering whether the harsh wind of Patagonia has marred my virgin looks. When I got into a taxi to take me to the bus station on Saturday, the driver started questioning me about how I could afford such an expensive trip. I answered and then looked out of the window again. A minute later, he suddenly blurted out And how does it feel to leave you wife back in England?

The islas and goodbye to an old friend

2009-06-09T17:12:00.000-07:00

It has been a tumultuous five days, not just for me, but for the world; I have torn myself away from Bolivia, crossed the border into Peru, visited four islands and read of a massacre of farmers in the north of the country. Gordon Brown looked as if he was going to be forced from office, he was accused of using women as "stagprops" and Roger won his first French Open against the surprise finalist, Robin Soderling, making him only the sixth man to have won all four grand slam titles and equalling Pete Sampras´s astounding tally of fourteen majors.

After spending a day in La Paz and being treated like scum at an Israeli restaurant, I boarded a bus in the frenetic, dirty city of El Alto towards Lake Titicaca. As we left La Paz, the landscape quickly changed, the tall buildings and suffocating fumes of the capital giving way to flat, light brown countryside stretching off to my right towards rippling, snow-capped mountains. Wheat and barley is grown in this area, just as it was under the Tiwanaku culture which began as early as 1500BC. The shores of the lake, and the islands that dot it, ripple with hundreds of uniform terraces that are either Inca or Pre Inca and are used to prevent soil erosion and to allow farming on steep hillsides. My first view of the lake was spectacular. As we rounded a bend, a vast expanse of water lurched into view, made all the more picturesque by the countryside that surrounded it. A light wind rustled the surface of the water, but in the lee of the islands, the water looked like a mirror, creating sweeping bands of dark blue and blinding cristal. The name, Lake Titicaca is believed to come from the Aymara language. "Titi" means Puma (a sacred beast) and Kaka, grey (important to distinguish from the Spanish which means "shit"). I also read on Wikipedia that the lake is supposed to resemble a darting Puma.

Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) was my first destination, a mass of rock resembling an octopus that is reputed to be the birthplace of the Inca sungod and the first Inca emperor, Manco Capac. He is said to have emerged from an outcrop of rock that is now called "titikala", or "roca sagrada". Next to this rock lies a sacrificial table where offerings were made to the gods and a little further from Inca ruins that resemble the dry stone walls of Yorkshire. I visited this "laberinto" (laberyinth) on my second day on the island and had to crouch down to fit through the succession of four foot doors that led from one small room to another and eventually ended in a dead end.

Once you pass the steet sellers and women forcing you to buy a pass of entry to the island, you discover a land of strange contrasts that has changed little in some areas since the time of Manco Capac. From the dock, I laboured up some moss-grown Inca steps that climb up the hillside and ate the local speciality, trout, in a low, rustic restaurant that overlooked the wide, sparkling bay. A string of snow capped mountains could be seen distinctly through the thin, limpid air. Once I had gained the height of hillside, fending off the approaches of street sellers, I walked south down the spine of the island amidst some of the most beautiful countryside that I have seen in South America. Because so little rain falls each year, the villagers plow their meagre terraces by hand and plant it with wheat, barley and other cereal crops that shined in the sun and created a patchwork of contrasting coloured plots that cascaded down the hillside towards the water below. As I walked, breathing hard in the mountain air, I saw women with billowing, voluminous dresses and dark shawls ushering sheep this way and that on barren slopes. They carried wooden switches that they would use when the sheep dared to disobey. Large spits of land descend into the water, tapering to join Inca ruins that now lie below the surface of the water (the water level was once much lower than it is now). As I ascended a small hillock, I passed a huge, fat American woman who was being followed by her "guide", a tiny, emaciated boy who could have been no older than seven or eight. He bent under the weight of her heavy bag, but seemed to be faring better than his charge who seemed to be at the point of capitulating to the thin air. Her swinging posterior was eventually lost in the distance.

I stayed that night in the village of Challapampa which sits in a cradle of land between the mainland and a spit in the north-east of the island. I had rushed to reach the village before dark fell and was rewarded with a view of pigs grazing in the fading light and children playing a variant of marbles with plastic bottle tops. As I sat on rock, overlooking the bay, a young girl tried to make me pay for taking a picture of her cow. Luckily, there was electricity that night, but when I ventured out for dinner, the dusty streets were deserted and the signs outside dwellings, reading "restaurante" and "comedor" seemed to mock me, for there was no light inside. In a narrow sidestreet off the main drag, a feeble light glowed in the blackness, beckoning me into a low room, which I first saw through a chink in the two doors. Sitting at a table were Hector and Paddy, the two lads from Leeds who used to play for Horsforth Dynamoes and whom I had previously bumped into in Puerto Natales (Patagonia) and Salta (northern Argentina). I sat down for a beer and a fat trout. Maybe there is a God.

On the way back from Isla del Sol to the mainland, I met David, and Englishman from Telford who attended Cambridge as a post-graduate. He let slip that he was glad that he hadn´t studied at Cambridge as an undergraduate and had to backtrack swiftly when I told him of my situation. We decided to visit the three island of Uros, Amantani and Taquile, but that first meant crossing the border to Puno and saying goodbye to my beloved Bolivia.

The country has treated me very well. It is a land of great natural beauty and the people are as friendly as any I have encountered in South America. Yet they labour under the injustices commited to them in the past; a naval sign on the wall in Copacabana proclaimed that Bolivia has a right to a sea port and that it should be a priority of the government to reclaim it from Chile (It was lost in the War of the Pacific). The day I left, the people of Uyuni began a six day strike to protest against the government´s decision not to pave the roads to and from Uyuni. Transport in and out of the town was blockaded and when some tourist tried to escape with a bribed taxi driver, a crowd surrounded his car and slashed the tires.

We had been told that Puno was a "shithole" and so we were pleasantly surprised when we found some great bakeries and some pool halls, despite the stinking green water around the dock. After playing some pool amidst drunk locals who sporadically broke into violence, we departed for the "Uros" islands, over thirty floating islands constructed of totora reeds, which sit a few kilometres from Puno. They are hidden in the reeds like a secret community. Some people believe that the Uros people were descendent of Polynesians, and they once spoke their own distinct language, Uro, before it was gradually replaced by the Aymara language. (the last Uro speaker died in the 50s). The Uro people fled to these islands in order to escape Incan contamination of their culture. As we approached the island, we were mobbed by women who greeted us in their local language, and we replied by saying "Wakili", hello. The reed islands rest on a base of roots that release a gas as they decompose, helping to keep them afloat. The reeds, however, have to be continually replaced, an arduous chore that falls to the women as the men go off fishing. All the buildings are also made of reeds and the women wear huge, colourful dresses and sell souvenirs from low stalls. The islands are a self-contained community, containing a school and a basic medical centre. A low women with a stoop told me that the people here prefer to cure their ailments with the plants that they grow in rectangular, upraised plots, not surprising in a country of curanderos (shamans or healers). The small girls wear a bell shaped hat coloured white, green and pink that is said to resemble the national flower of Peru, the Kantuta. All the small children stared at us inquisitively from uinder their broad-brimmed hats, hiding the terrible sunburn that blotched their smooth skin.

After an hour or two there, we travelled on to Amantani, a small, barren island where we would stay in the adobe house of a local, single mother called Maria. Her son was a tiny, smiling cutie called Roy and he had a sister called Luz. Maria was outwardly friendly, laughing at almost anything we said, but it was a laughter borne of loneliness and insecurity. She never told us what had happened to her husband. We were served eggs and quinoa soup in a low kitchen whose walls had grown black from the smoke of an open fire which was used for cooking. Maria would bustle round us and also attend to her three children and her mother, who spoke only Quechua. That night, we were draped in a poncho and Andean hat and led through the moonlight to the town hall where we participated in Andean dancing. It involved little more than locking hands with our respective hosts, rocking the shoulders back and forth and then being led in a long, winding snake. The women wore white blouses and black shawls and tucked their bulging stomachs under tight corsets which led down to pink dresses that twirled around as they danced. It was a relatively tame affair and by half past ten, we brushing our teeth in the light of a lone, guttering candle.

Our last stop was the island of Taquile which lies to the south of Amantani. As on the other islands, draught power is not used on Taquile because there is not enough pasture to support horeses and cows. The island is famed for its tight-knit textiles and the men a sombre outfit of black trousers and white shirt with black waistcoat. They also wear bright hats though, whose colour varies depending on whether they are married. A red hat means that a man is married, red mixed with white denotes that the man is single. Single men are expected to knit their own hats and their suitability as marriage partners depends on their skill at knitting and fishing. Traditionally, fathers judged their daughters´marriage partners by holding one of their hats above the sea and filling it with water. If the water seeped through the wool or alpaca, the man was considered unfit to marry the daughter. Once a man has decided to marry a woman, he must live with her for a trial period of one year because their is no divorce on the island. It is called the "watching" time. If the couple subsequently split, they must travel to the mainland to find another partner because they are considered "sullied". Jane Austen could have lived on Taquile. And so, our heads buzzing with all this information, we sat down on a rooftop terrace that overlooked the sea to enjoy a lunch of steamed fish mixed with onions and cumin seeds. Quite the life...

Days of rain and some crocs

2009-06-03T14:15:00.000-07:00

The whole week before I rode the most dangerous road in the world, people had been spreading rumours about an English guy who had fallen over the edge to his death. I didn`t take any notice, went with the same company and ended up shivering on a mountain 5000m above sea level, the surroundings wrapped in a mantle of fog. The first hour of the descent was not dangerous, though I did worry about catching hypothermia as the wind whistled through my clothes. The hail and rain was so intense at points that you had to squint into the grey beyond, occasionally closing your eyes. This first stretch was on paved tarmac, but it soon deteriorated into a steep, downhill dirt track, effectively a ledge cut into a vertical hillside, giving you incredibly views down into the valley below, but causing me to apply the brakes sharply at every turn as we approached the edge. I had expected to be so scared by the road that I would ride like a timorous beasty, and kick myself later, or feel bootganged into riding as fast as everyone else. The surprise was that I have never felt more secure on a bike, and for much of the time, it felt as if we were cycling on any other steep downhill road, maybe because the thick cloud hid the vertiginous drops from view. The vegetation here is a lush, semi-tropical green. Everything was saturated in water, and cascades of water dropped hundreds of metres from cliffs above. We stopped for lunch on a wide outcrop of rock at the head of which stood an Israeli monument. It commemorates the Israeli who died close to this spot. Him and his mate decided to make a video while riding the bikes (Sound a bit like tig on bikes, Alex?) and he strayed over the edge.

I spent that night in the small, mountainous town of Coroico before taking a bus to Rurrenebaque for the Pampas tour. The rain never let up, flooding the towns narrow streets and turning the alleys into a mud bath that I traversed in flip-flops, only to find that I had left my flip flop behind. All the people in my group for the Pampas tour were great, two bubbling, quirky Canadians complementing a funny Englishman and his uninformed Chinese girlfriend. Two Israeli girls made up the group. The other group that stayed in the same accomodation as us contained an interesting German family. The father loved to harrass animals with large sticks, wore socks with his sandals and had a squint. At dinner time, his wife would launch forth in her harsh, grating German accent, demanding that we give her the leftovers from our table and later complaining that the weed nowadays isn´t as good as in her day (presumably in the heavanly sixties). It is difficult to pinpoint what was exactly wrong with the daughter, but she had a vacant look, like an immolated cow.

Getting to the Pampas was an adventure in itself. The 4x4 lurched around in the thick mud, bringing out Schumacher-like driving from our chofer, and at one point several lorries had to be pulled out of the mud by a caterpillar. The Pampas here are a wide connection of waterways, divided by reeds and wetlands, which eventually drain into the mighty amazon. The three hour boat ride to our lodge on the first day gave us ample opportunity to marvel at the wildlife. Cranes and herons stood motionless on branches with their long beaks upturned, while the sound of the boat´s engine would disturb a resting stork which would swoop up into the air and beat its wings in undulating flight, its legs straight out behind it. We rounded bends to find caimans and capbybaras, a kind of overgrown hamster that is entirely vegetarian, while we were treated to the flight of the kingfisher, that would fall from a branch and flit its way along the surface of the water. The tiny, yellow squirrel monkeys provided some entertainment, but it was astounding to find two caimans waiting for us when we pulled up at the ranch (sitting at the front of the boat, it was always my job to tie up the boat). At first sight, it looked fiersome, long thick body rippling with prehistoric scales, its whole body motionless, ready for the strike...except that it was about as tame as a dog. Our guide, Reinaldo, went as far as to stroke its snout, and the following day we found it lolling around under the veranda, its mouth full of unfinished rice and pasta. When I suggested to the other guide that this animal was no longer wild, he looked riled and gave me the evil eye, which I returned. How is a caiman supposed to scrape rice from its mouth if it doesnt have a tongue. On the first night, we went looking for caimans in the dark. We found what we thought was a frog, but the silent peace of the night made up for any disappointment. There was no electricity in the cabins and I struggled to find my way with the dim light from my dying phone. Eventually, though, I settled down to the sound of cicadas and beguiled my soul with sleep.

On the second morning, we failed to find an anaconda in the cold, wet conditions (as cold blooded animals, snakes like to bathe in the sun) but the highlight of the day was fishing for pirahnas.We primed our hooks with small pieces of meat and launched them into the water where they were attacked by swarms of pirahnas that pushed the meat this way and that as they hit it like missiles. The problem was that they only ever nibbled the meat, making it nigh impossible to hook them; the best that I could do was a tiny, pubescent pirahna that was no bigger than a salmon par. We were all upstaged by one of the Israeli girls who looked like she had been pirahna fishing before. On the last day, we went swimming with dolphins, or rather, in the vecinity of dolphins, because the animals just wouldn´t play ball. I was the first to strip off and plunge into the warm water after a dolphin that had curved above the water´s surface just moments before. I kept swimming through the water that kept changing in temperature from pleasantly warm to freezingly cold, but the dolphin never resurfaced. I ended up being hauled back into the boat like a beached fish, only to see a whole family of the long nosed pink dolphins rise out of the water again. This time four of us jumped in, banged our palms against the boat to attract them and generally made a racket. We never saw another dolphin. Swimming in crocodile and pirahna infested waters just for that...a sacrifice too far.

Sucre and the Shanghai of the Americas, La Paz

2009-05-27T15:15:00.000-07:00

Today I saw the first cloud that I have seen in Bolivia, a cauliflower cumuluous cloud, scudding across the sky. That was before I went to a local bar to see Man United humiliated by a Barcelona side who make an art out of keeping the ball.

Two days ago, though, I was in Sucre, a pretty city of gleaming white colonial buildings that was named Bolivia´s capital in the new constitution. It is the most European city that I have visited, with wide sweeping streets and simple, yet elegant neoclassical facades. When I arrived, the city was in the grip of celebrations marking the bicentenary of the revolution of Charcas, or as the press in Sucre tried to claim, the first spark of Latin American independence. For the two days that I was there, a neverending parade of dignitaries, soldiers, musicians and citizens piled down the central street, Avenida Arce to the booming of a brass band. Sitting in cafes bordering the street, the windows and light fittings would literally shake with the reverberations of the drums outside. The church of San Francisco stood immediatly outside my hostel, and it is reputed that it was here that the bell first struck to call the people of South America to freedom. A dignitary gave a speech calling on the people of Bolivia to unite together to create a strong nation (The Bolivian moto is Union y Fuerza). Yet these celebrations showed what a divided, disunited country Bolivia is, despite the goodwill of the thousands of people who lined the streets to see the local chess and football club pass by. Morales decided to hold the bicentenary in a small village over a hundred kilometres from Sucre in a deliberate affront to the capital. Last year on the 25 May, a group of campesinos affiliated to MAS (Morales´s party, Movimiento al Socialismo) marched into the central square of Sucre and were promptly attacked by some Sucre residents who beat them, stripped them of their clothes and gave Sucre the reputation of being a racist city. Morales has also undermined the basic legal right to presumption of innocence by issuing a decree stating that the goods and property of people implicated in terrorism would be immediatly confiscated. He is not popular in Sucre, where a taxi driver told me that he was a mentiroso, a liar.

Tiring of the incessant street parades, I moved on to La Paz on a freezing bus, wearing only a tee-shirt and jumper. At first, La Paz seemed to be just like any other big city; busy, polluted and noisy. But the city revered by Ernesto Guevara de la Serna as the Shanghai of the Americas soon began to work its charm. Many of the old colonial buildings have been knocked down and rebuilt, but behind the church of San Francisco, narrow, cobbled alleyways still wend their way up the hillside towards El Alto, the fastest growing city in Bolivia, whose houses twinkle round the rim of the canyon at night. Poverty is as evident here as elsewhere in Bolivia. After drinking a coffee at the bourgeois Cafe Berlin on my first morning in La Paz, I passed a small indigenous women who had crouched down in a busy street to pee into a drain. She seemed to feel no shame or embarrasment at suffering this indignity. In the central square, pigeons flocked around a man holding seed in his hands and an old hunchbacked man stared plaintively into a shop window at a watch that he would never be able to afford. A plaque on the wall commemorated the people who were shot dead in this square by the government of Sanchez Lozada before it fled on mass to the USA.

The central artery for traffic in La Paz is El Paseo, more like a motorway than a central street. Colectivos stop every few yards so that a ticket seller can lean out of the window and holler the destinations in a piercing, machine gun spanish that I, at least, cannot understand. The mercado de hechinceria (witches market) consists of a long line of stalls on a shaded, cobbled street where old indigenous women sell dried llama foetuses (for good luck), animal amulets and plates of offerings to pachamama, which contain piles of coca leaves and fake money. Aphrodisiacs crowd the shelves. The owners of these stalls sit on the pavements in their black and grey protruding hats, so drowned in petticoats and shawls that they look like squat mushrooms, their legs and arms nowhere to be seen. High above was the central produce market selling everything, from beds and electronics to dried, stinking fish and cows innards. These markets are always fascinating because of the density of the stalls and due to the incredible sense of activity and vitality that they exude. On every corner sits a women selling freshly squeezed fruit juice and popcorn. The comedores, or eating halls are built of corrugated iron. Inside, small, dark men bend over their steaming soup, ladled out from huge vats by rotund women. There was even a pet section, assuming of course that the white rabbits and budgies were not being fattened up for tomorrow´s lunch.

La Paz has a big drug scene and while eating lunch in a cuban restaurant below a looming portrait of Che, two greasy Bolivians who I hadn´t spoken to up to that point slipped me a post-it note with a telephone number on and explained that I could ring it at any time to buy weed or coke. My brush with drugs continued as I visited the fascinating coca museum and later when I was led to the notorious route 36 by two of the guys in my hostel. Our taxi driver knocked on an iron gate that seemed to lead to an ordinary house and it was opened by a guard who scanned the street sheepishly before ushering us in and patting us down. Inside, the air was thick with smoke and people were ordering lines of coke from the bar, which came on top of CD cases. As the other guys snorted away, I sank into a chair, feeling somewhat out of place.

Tupiza, Tarija and the mouth of hell"

2009-05-23T14:37:00.000-07:00

From Uyuni, I travelled on to Tupiza and then to Tarija with an ex-English teacher, Stewart, with whom I spent a happy week. Tupiza is a small dusty village that sits in a narrow valley, surrounded by interesting rock formations and canyons. I visited these on a large, black mare flecked with grey that knew the path so well that it wouldn´t obey my futile tugs to right and left, only obeying its master, a taciturn fifteen year old boy, who could send it into a gallop with a smacking of his lips. The problem was that the horse only knew two speeds, a stupefying plod that made you feel like a corpse lolling back and forth, and a gallop that forced me to grip the saddle with both hands and had a deleterious effect on my posterior. After the first hair-raising sprint, I resolved to just plod along, but the boredom overcame me again and again, with the result that I was never truly in control.

"Control" was an important theme for Stewart who was interested in Eastern spirituality and was reading a book called the "Bhagavad Gita". Wheras western philosophy treats the body and the mind as separate entities, eastern philosophy establishes no distinction between the mind and the universe. Drinking wine, cracking open peanut shells and playing backgammon, we discussed his philosophy. He believes that humans can achieve enlightenment, that an immutable core lies at the core of every individual (and therefore "the bourne from which no traveller returns" does not mark the end) and that you can choose to influence your environment in any instance. He contests that you can choose to roll a double four in backgammon; he himself admitted that this implies that he rejects reason and the enlightenment. What confused me was why he chose to reject reason in this case, and accept it in every other. During the time I spent with him, he never once walked towards oncoming traffic or threw himself off a building.

The city of Tarija is prim and wealthy. Tree lined flowerbeds line the streets and palm trees dot the central square. People there are whiter than they are in the rest of Bolivia, perhaps because many Andalucians emigrated to this area. As we ate empanadas and chicken in Plaza Sucre, we would watch the local bad boy set making circles of the plaza, boys hanging on to tailfins and music ripping through the soft night air. Despite the hulking hummers, though, child beggars wander the streets with a plaintive air, calling you "tio malo" if you don´t give them some money. On our second day in Tarija we visited a bodega in nearby, Valle de la Concepcion where we were taught to swill the wine, smell it and savour it by a camp Bolivian teenager. All his advice fell on dead ears. Even the most expensive wine was acid and astringent
, leaving your mouth and throat burning. This was made up for though, by another nearby bodega where a solid, self-styled campesino, called Jesus sold us a fantastic bottle of wine and showed us around his wine cellar.

From Tarija, Stewart and I went our separate ways, he to Bermejo and I to Potosi, the highest city of its size in the world. On the bus, I was squeezed against the window next to a huge indigenous woman whose layer upon layer of clothing must have hidden obesity (I have yet to discover how these women become fat on a diet of vegetable stew and the odd slice of llama). Potosi is a city of contradictions. The intricate stonework of the colonial mansions and the sumptuous churches belie the poverty of the tens of thousands of workers who made that wealth possible and continue to toil in terrible conditions, extracting silver, iron, lead and zinc. The cathedral´s adobe wals were washed away by heavy rains to be replaced by huge concrete slabs and the biggest bell in Bolivia, the core of which is made of gold. All this work was performed by slaves. Cerro Rico, where the metals are extracted, can be seen from all over town, an orange monolith cut into terraces so that lorries can beetle their way up the steep slopes. I was persuaded to take a tour of the mines on my first day in Potosi. We first visited the miners shop, where we were entreated to buy coca, drinks and explosives for the miners. The history of mining in Potosi explains why these humble gifts are so important.

The mine was originally owned by two powerful Spanish families who forced the miners to work as serfs. With the 1952 revolution, the mines of Potosi were nationalised, the workers were granted life and health insurance and education was provided for their children. In the years leading up to 1985, the price of tin fell and the cooperatives were formed; ten or more miners would approach the state and buy a concesion, giving them exclusive rights over a particular section of the mine. Despite the word "cooperative", the mining of today is a very individualistic business. The miners are not told where to work, they return only 30% of their profits to the cooperative and they have to buy all their own equipment. Ironically, the Iraq war increased the price of basic metals, enticing the young men of Potosi back down the mines where they worked up to 24 hours a day, conscious that their good luck could turn at any moment. The guide also let us try a liquour called quitasuenos (literally, take away you dreams) that the miners drink to dull the torment of a life spent underground in terrible conditions. It is 95% alcohol. They also make offerings of quitasuenos to the two spirits that preside over the mine, Tio and Cochamama (mother earth); inside the mine we saw a sculpture of the Tio, a red, devilish creature with a gaping mouth ready to receive the sacrificial offerings of the miners in return for their life and health (as the guide told us, Cerro Rico is a swiss cheese of winding tunnels and an article published today in the local newspaper suggested that the upper section of the hill has become structurally unstable). God does not exist in what a sixteenth century chronicler described as "the mouth of hell".

We then went to a processing plant where the silver is separated from the waste rock, before descending into the mine itself. The guide confided to us that much of the metal that is extracted nowadays is plena basura (complete rubbish). When the spanish first began digging holes into Cerro Rico, they found veins of silver that ascended up the rock like the trunk of a tree, splitting off into smaller veins. As Niall Ferguson recently explained in his "Ascent of money", the Spanish mined so much pure quality silver that they reduced the price of the metal on the international market. With the passage of time, the quality of the silver has been gradually decreasing and the miners have diversified into tin and other metals. A kilo of poor quality silver can sell for as little as 10bs. When you reflect that a safety helmet costs around 40bs, the mining seems barely profitable.

We entered the narrow entrance to the mine standing up, but were soon crouching down and shuffling through low, dark passages past carts and sweating miners stripped to the waist. In the light of our headlamps, we could distinctly see particles of dust, like snow round a streetlamp. On the walls hung thin, delicate strands of crystals that the guide explained to us were aspestos. The life expectancy of a miner in Cerro Rico is 45-50 years (even Glasgow doesn´t compare). As we delved down further into the mountain, passing from level to level, the passages became ever lower and narrower, forcing us to crawl, breathing in dust and touching walls smeared with stinking sulphurous deposits. The water bottle in my belt dug into my stomach and the fetid air meant that my breathing was laboured despite the red bandana that covered my face. At one point, we stopped in a low cavern to watch a miner at work. He was rythmically knocking a hole into the rock with a hammer ready for a stick of dynamite. In the gloom, we could make out his naked, muscular torsoe. He answered our questions with difficulty, in a hoarse, rasping voice that seemed barely human.

Like many miners, he left Cerro Rico in the 90s, couldn´t accomodate to life in the open air and crawled back down the narrow shafts. He was in his thirties, but seemed far older, with cheeks inflated with coca and sunken eyes. He was in the process of mining a sliver of a vein of silver, barely 2mm wide. Despite the fact that he had been working continuously for a month, he hadn´t yet blown out enough silver to sell. Miners who belong to the cooperatives may work up to 24 hours a day. They can´t urinate onto the rock because it releases methane, so they pee into their trousers instead. By thirty, a miner is considered done. Conditions have not improved yet under "Evo". To the sound of hammer beating against spike, we crawled back up again towards the light.

Bolivia, an Italian and some serious salt

2009-05-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

I am now in Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in South America which has been subject to more revolutionary upheavals than any other. For the last week I have been travelling with an Italian from Milan, Alberto, a bearded, hook-nosed clone of Adam Sandler. Like all Italians, he is in the habit of "hablarse a codos" (to rabbit away) and ends every sentence with a rising "eh", raising his shoulders and putting his hands together like a beggar. The biggest difference between Bolivia and Chile has been the buses. In the border town of Ollague, we left our comfortable Chilean bus and boarded a tall, rusting hulk filled to the brim with Bolivians and their bags, boxes and other belongings. To reach our seats we had to climb over legs and arms, and when the bus finally stuttered into motion, potatos started to rain down from the overhead departments. Pictures on the outside of the bus taunted us, showing air conditioning, drinks, food and comfortable seats. Needless to say, I didn´t get much sleep. I had a similar experience travelling South-East from Uyuni to Tupiza. After crawling for two hours along a rocky excuse for a road, we stopped in a small town with a damn for a "pequeno descanso" (small break). Two hours later, I was still sitting on the side of the road playing backgammon and waiting for the driver to fill up the bus. I had a far better experience on the bus to Tupiza. The comfy seats just about made up for the danger of the journey; in some places, the bus was crawling along the ledge of a mountain, barely wide enough to accomodate both wheels. As we rounded the hairpin bends, the front edge of the bus hung tantalizingly over the edge, and the people in the front seats with it. I read in the newspaper today that a trucker had died on the "Paso de Jama", the road that I will take from Tarija to Potosi. It is locally known as "Paso de la muerte)

I haven´t yet bored of oggling the old women here in Bolivia. There are small, stunted and surprisingly rotund, clad in the traditional blouse and petticoat in whose deep recesses they pocket their change. Tall, protruding bowler hats perch on top of their heads, attached around their knecks with an elastic cord and they sport thick, alpaca stockings which keep out the freezing wind of the Antiplano. They often carry striped sacks on their backs, filled either with food or with tiny infants whose tiny hands poke out from the folds of cloth. Some look like witches about to catch a spell, while the taller women look like the nobility of some alien race.
In Uyuni, we saw ample evidence of superstition. Before embarking on our Uyuni trip, Alberto and I made a tour of the market, passing tables loaded with brightly coloured fruit and a meat hook from which a flayed cow was hanging. The thick crowds outside hid the most interesting thing, though. A small, fat man stood next to a steaming vat of putrid liquid, stirring it with a spoon and shouting repeatedly "que mas contiene" (what else does it contain). The vat was thick with seaweed, medicinal wood and the head of a small crocodile. He claimed that this concoction could cure dolor de huesos and an infinite number of other ailments. Another man extolled the virtues of a saint who could be contacted, for a small fee of course.

Uyuni is a small, dusty and ugly town, lost in the immensity of the desert plain. On the first night we ate at a local comedor for ten bolivianos (around one pound), enjoying a soup of quinoa and vegetables, meat and rice. The great attraction of Uyuni is that it is the starting point for the Salar de Uyuni tour which encompasses the biggest salt flats in the world, numerous lakes spotted with pink flamingoes, hard volcanic rock twisted into improbable shapes (such as a tree) and steaming geysers. The salt flats were undoubtedly the highlight for me. My legs tucked up beneath me in a Toyota 4x4, I looked out of the window over miles of glistening white salt, piled up in places into mountains of hard crystals and twelve metres deep in the centre. Our guide told us that a sea had once covered this area. It receded and left a lake, which then dried to leave huge salt deposits. The salar was magical in the evening as the sun began to dip below the surrounding mountains, casting pink rays over the perfect, geometrical panes of salt. On the second day of the tour, we saw a mountain of seven colours, the different shades of red and green bleeding down the rock, and on the third day, after surviving a night where the temperature dropped to -7C, we bathed in a steaming pool fed by geysers and wandered round the Valle de las rocas. Wind and rain have sculpted the rock into birds, cowboy hats and holes, while huge boulders balance on tiny ledges, ready to be pushed on to a passing foe.

On the way back towards Uyuni, we passed a small village, hidden under the shadow of the rocas and barely perceptible just a few miles away. Around the village, llamas drank in the brooks and field upon field gleamed with golden sheaves of quinoa. Quinoa is supposedly a supergrain, similar in texture to cous-cous, and it commands such a high price that many farmers have stopped rearing llamas and have begun cultivating the crop. I mention it because the husk of the quinoa plant is used to make a powder that is added to coca leaves, which releases the alkaloids contained in the coca (among them, tiny amounts of cocaine). Coca leaves have been chewed since time immemorial in the Andean countries to combat altitude sickness and to alleviate hunger and fatigue. The spanish conquistadores first banned coca before they realised that it made their workers more productive during their forty hour shifts. Therafter, it became compulsory. Alberto and I bought a big bag of coca and put it to good use once we climbed over 4000m and my head began to throb with the increased pressure. You take around ten coca leaves, roll them into a ball and slowly chew them until they are moist. The green gunge is then placed between the top lip and the gum and sucked. The quinoa powder is applied using a wooden utensil to avoid direct contact with the skin.

Evo Morales began life as a llama herder and came to power largely because he vowed to protect coca producers in Bolivia against the pressure of the United States, which considers coca production in Bolivia to be fuelling the global trade in cocaine. Many steps are needed to turn coca leaves into cocaine, and I certainly never felt a high when sucking the coca leaves, only a slight numbness in my tongue (Coca was formerly used as a commercial anaesthetic).

Everywhere you go in Bolivia, you see the "Evo" daubed on the walls, along with "Vote si por la nueva constitucion" (vote for the new constitution) which, among other things, establishes Sucre as the official capital of Bolivia and allows Morales to rule for a further two terms. He is a man who polarises opinion. I asked the owner of the hostel in Tupiza whether he likes Morales. He pulled a face and declared brusquely, "Me gustaria quitarle la cabeza" ("I would like to take his head off) Like the famous Peruvian novelist, Maria Vargas Llosa, he believes that by emphasising his Amerindian heritage, he increases tension in a largely mestizo (mixed blood) South America. Today I have been reading articles about Morales in a Tarijan daily which are surprisingly explicit in their criticism of the President given that he is pursuing a case against anther paper for defamation. One article begins;

"In these times, it is worth asking oneself where resides the spirit of the Bolivian people to vigorously oppose a regime based on deception, demagogy and lies. For the current government to cling to power, it only needed to loan our sovereignty to the Venezuelan petrol-empire and make us believe that it was liberating the people after five hundred years of exploitation".

Yesterday, I read an article claiming that the previous government of Lozada had fleed to the united states to escape punishment for their involvement in the "Black October" of 2003 in which over seventy protestors were killed in a riot that would lead to the overthrow of his government. Today, the matter doesn´t seem so clear, though. Some influential figures have stated that if Lozada is to be tried, so should Morales who armed the crowd with Molotov cocktails. The judiciary is not independent in Bolivia. Under political pressure, the President of the Supreme Court of Justice has been removed. The government has no qualms about resorting to summary justice. Several weeks ago, three alleged terrorists were killed in their beds in the city of Santa Cruz because they had allegedly been planning to assasinate the President. The security cameras were cut by the police and the "terrorists" were shot in the back. (Reichstag fire, anyone). Lastly, a prominent indigenous leader recently had his back reduced to bleeding shreds because he opposed the changes that Morales is introducing. Those who persecuted this act of barbarism have not been caught. I am sure that little of this news is published in Britain. Morales is championed on the left as part of a broad movement in South America to liberate the indigenous, but at what cost?

You can see the hash coming from the volcano

2009-05-12T17:54:00.001-07:00

The last week has been a hectic blur of bus journeys, screaming kids, glimmering salt lakes and pink flamingoes, towering rocks and cavernous hollows. I began in San Pedro de Atacama, and believing that I only had a week before my train left Calama (Chile) to Uyuni (Bolivia), I rushed around Salta, only to return today to the news that the last train left in 2007. I´m not having much luck with my travel arrangements.

The week started in San Pedro de Atacam, a natural oasis town of green trees sitting in a huge bowl between towering mountains to the west and the high, antiplano to the east, a small spot of green in one of the driest regions on earth. The town has a feeling of it with narrow, atmospheric streets with low adobe houses and walls topped off with sticks. They were so low that in the fading light of my first night, I felt that I could look over like a giant to the dry, shimmering plain beyond. Like Chalten, though, San Pedro has become a huge tourist destination and its native charm is somewhat eclipsed by the tour agencies on every corner and the artesania shops that occupy some of the oldest houses.

My stay here began badly as I got stuck in a small hole of a hostel, lorded over by a huge fat chilean with dumpling eyes swimming in fat. There was a guy staying in my room with thick, black curly hair and an impish smile who claimed that he had slept with a girl from every South American country except Bolivia and Paraguay, but vowed to battle on to complete the circuit. Anyway, when checking out, he was told that he couldn´t leave his mochila in the hostel and he couldn´t speak to his German friend in the hostel. This sent him into a spasm of rage, his German friend lost his typical Aryan restraint and called the owner a fat bastard and the greasy haired proprietor raised himself from his chair for the first time that day to tower over the Israeli, his paunch a good metre from his spinal cord.

Thankfully, the excursions went better. The second day I was there, I dragged myself out of bed to see the shooting geysers at 4AM, my head aching and banging against a rattling window. Some of the fumaroles gave off just steam, other geysers spat boiling water like oil from a pan, and others had been covered with beautiful, intricate patterns of mineral deposits, shining silver, green and ochre in the slanting rays of the early morning. When we arrived, the temperature was a chilly 12 below, a good incentive to get as close to the geysers as possible. At four that afternoon, I hit sandsurfing with two Japanese girls from my hostel who carried an electronic dictionary and estimated my age at twenty-five, much to my chagrin. Our guide was a slim chilian, a skater by profession who had been forced to guide because he had damaged his foot. His eyes were very blood-shot and he hid them behind big, red, plastic glasses. The sandunes were located in an incredible valley, Valle de la Muerte, a barren inlet surrounded by triangular mountains, piled one behind the other like sharks´teeth. I showed little aptitude for the sandsurfing, could not go five metres without falling over and got thoroughly impregnated with sand, but loved it nevertheless, even more so because we were left to it rather than being given lengthy explanations like other groups. Hurrying as the sun began to set, we toured the Valle de la Luna, visiting chiselled mountains of rock contracting with creaks as the sun descended, others that bristled with thousands of tiny creases running down the rock from sharp points and still another that looked like a surging waves of steps in the dying light. We were also hurried to the Tres Marias (three pillars of rock eroded into lunar shapes) the Amphiteatro (a mass of rock that looked like an accordion) and a huge sand dune, but the real highlight was seeing the sun set from a ridge, surrounded by active and extinct volcanos, the dying day slowly splitting the uniform blue of the sky into dark purple, blood red, orange, yellow, green and infinite shades of blue. After smoking a joint, the guide tried to explain to us the formation of the volcanos; "You see the hash from the volcano". Ten goes later and he was still staying "hash". "Hobbies" might have provoked similar problems".

I then travelled across a salt lake spotted with pink flamingoes and had my bag searched by masked officials before reaching Salta, a city that I would recommend to anyone thinking of coming to Argentina. It is the most visually beautiful city that I have visited, is cheaper than the rest of the country, is a lively university city and is surrounded on all sides by incredible scenery. Cachi and Cafayate are separated to the south by a dramatic gorge, while to the north, the multi-coloured, rippling Quebrada de Humahuaca winds its way through Purmamarca and Tilcara to the remote Iruya. I visited Pumamarca and Iruya, the former a tiny, dusty village surrounded by vivid, multi-coloured rock and mountains that descend from a ridge before fracturing again and again into hundred of ever thinner pieces of rock, exactly like the wide root system of a tree.The colour of the rock nearest to the town is a deep red, like Ibizan earth. Different strata of soft rock run through it, coloured chalk, a dark sickly green and a deep purple. In some places, it looks as if funeral monuments have been carved into the rock, while in others, bulging, bulbous bubbles of rock have solidified to form smooth, modernist sculptures that seem to twist and writhe.

The road north to the cheap Iruya (you can get a dormitory bed in Iruya for 10 pesos, less than two pounds) zigzags crazily across the mountain, forcing the bus driver to perform switchbacks that leave the front bumper hanging over the edge. But it is worth it. The landscape here defies all superlatives. From a viewing point, we could see a huge mountain sweeping down from above us, before suddenly crumbling into a gorge. The cut was not exact, however, because huge spurs penetrated into the valley, themselves eroded into thin, tapering spikes descending from a common centre. Fertile fields above are separated by a drop of some hundreds of feet from a dry river bed where a few donkeys plodded langorously along. It was a landscape fit for the dinosaur.

Everyone is smoking weed here, except me of course, and a bubbling Frenchman in Salta said he would bring us some Coke if we wanted. He has also been using prostitutes all over South America because they are so chep and because he doesn´t believe it is possible to meet a good women out on the open road. The Belgians who I shared a room with in Iruya were also into their grass, including other things, notably tennis. They declared that Tipsarevic was a presumptuous yuppy from new Belgrade, rejected my suggestion that Djokovic was arrogant and criticised Federer and Nadal as boring machines.

People in Northern Argentina are racially different from their counterparts in Buenos Aires or Patagonia, far similar in appearance to Bolivians, (the same may be the case for the people in the far north of Chile that was wrested from Peru during the War of the Pacific). In general, they are shorter and thicker set, their skin and hair is darker and their cheekbones are higher, accentuating their large noses and full lips. Their faces seem to be rounder. Furthermore, despite all the tourism in Salta, people in some of the outlying regions are poor. Jujuy bus station was dirty and slightly menacing, peopled by hawkers selling fruit jelly and barefoot children with mud-smeared faces and rags of clothes, throwing themselves on the pity of passers-by. People also seem to be ruder that in other areas of Argentina. Few people know how the queue, when I got up on a bus to give my seat to a pregnant woman, she did not thank me, and one of the bus porters was a monster. His voice was so high that he couldn´t speak properly, just like the German man in the famous Boomeran YouTube clip, but he made up for his defect by being an insolent bastard. When I approached him, he demanded money for dragging my bag two metres and when I told him that I didn´t have any, he threw it back into the hold.

Yet in the tiny village of San Isidro, some old people live as their anscestors must have hudreds of years ago. They grow their own crops, wash their clothes in the river and rear cattle for the slaughter. As I approached San Isidro during a hike, I small a tiny, wrinkled stick of a woman bent over and hacking away at a dry plant with an axe. When I returned down the path some twenty minutes later, she had hauled the bundle of sticks onto her fragile back and was walking across some stepping stones, struggling to protect her feet from the surging water.

A journey to spiritual enlightenment

2009-05-05T15:58:00.000-07:00

From Mendoza, I crossed the border back into Chile, armed with Kafka´s "The Trial", a book that left me a little cold, and not in a good, chilling sense. Because of the crazy road system, I had to retrace my steps back to Santiago, passing through Puente del Inca for the third time, and eating salted, greasy chips in the huge bus terminal in the Chilean capital.

I have realised that I haven´t yet mentioned the food and drink on offer here in South America. There is a huge array of things on offer, many of which revolve around char-grilled meat. You have the tradtional, lomo, which is just a beaf steak, or can branch out and try the lomo a lo pobre, or poor man´s steak. A poor man would die for this steak, a huge slab of meat with a sloppy egg on top. This has been a favourite for the last few weeks. Down in Patagonia, restauranteurs specialise in lamb burgers, while in Bolson and Bariloche, I had the best ice-cream that I had ever tasted, dark, bitter chocolate interspersed with pieces of real orange and tart, refreshing grapefruit that tasted as if you were eating the real thing. Around Valpo, they go for their fish dishes, sopa de mariscos and reineta a la salsa margarita, being just a couple of the wonders on offer, the latter a delicate white fish bathed in an intolerably rich, creamy sauce. On every street corner in Santiago, streetvendors cry out in front of temporary stands piled high with caramel nuts and offer a strange peach drink, with sweetcorn at the bottom, too sweet to be recommended, while in the restaurants you are always given an appetiser of bread and a tangy tomato sauce, full of coriander. Wholemeal bread has yet to come to South America. They subsist instead on crumbly white bread filled with small holes, served on its own, or filled with hard pieces of fat. And then there are the empanadas, cornish pasty type confections filled with meat or cheese and ham. They are far bigger in Chile than in Argentina. The South Americans also maintain a fatuous distinction between the medialuna and the croissant, the former a very small, sweet pastry and the latter, a normal croissant as a European would understand it. Cakes they have inherited from the Germans and call them kuchen. When they try to create a native variety, it inevitably ends in an ugly mountain of whipped cream. Under the stars of the Andes and served by a local of indigenous blood, I ate a fantastic sandwich filled with steak, tomato salsa, lettuce, cheese and ham. On this trip up the Elqui valley, I tried Cazuela con ave for the first time, a steaming, refreshing soup served in a small, deep bowl, packed full of chicken, vegetables and coriander.

Pisco sour is a drink served in Chile and Peru and consists of the spirit, Pisco, lemon juice and sugar. Often it is topped off with frothed eggwhite and a sprinkling of sugar around the rim of the glass. One of the reasons for going to the Elqui valley was to see one of the Pisco factories that harvest the grapes hanging languidly from the vines and turn them into this strange concoction. The valley is spectacular for its contrasts; between the lush valley floor and the barren mountain sides, the bright green vines and the thousands of towering cactic, the sweltering hot days and the cold, clear nights. Such a climate is perfect for growing grapes, and also for viewing the stars. Many international organisations have taken advantage of this fact and have built huge observatories in the area. I took a tour to the Mamalluco observatory from Vicuna, a charming small village hidden between the folds of the hills, with low adobe houses and gardens where orange and lemon trees spring forth, the fruit almost indecently ripe. The tour to the observatory was spectacular, if a little marred by two screaming children (memory of your own childhood fades fast). The guide taught us how to locate the Cruz del Sur (cross of the south), an imperfect figure formed of five stars. If you measure four and a half metres following the line that connects the head and foot of the cross and then trace this virtual line vertically downwards, you will have reached due south. You must not confuse the cruz del sur with the Cruz falso, though, which will lead the unsuspecting traveller astray.

Yesterday, I ventured up the Valle Cochiguaz after poking my head into Pisco Elqui, a tiny village that seemed to have been lulled to sleep by the peaceful atmosphere of the valley. Almost no-one was around and I had to resort to asking directions to a cafe in a cerveceria where two fat men were repairing a toilet on the floor. The cerveceria alone was open for business. The settlements in the Valle Cochiguaz were established by hippies in the 1960s who believed that the age of Aquarius had shifted the centre of the world´s energy away from the Himalayas and towards this small tributary of the Rio Elqui. Significantly, the river in the Cochiguaz valley is not called the Rio Cochiguaz, but the Rio Magico. The valley looked strangely bleak in the grey light, but became more interesting further up as the rock changed colour from grey to a dark purple and the ubiquitous alamo trees reared up next to the river. Weeping willows, trumpet like flowers and thick undergrowth followed the line of the river and stopped abruptly at the valley sides, where tawny srcub and bulging cacti took over, clinging to the steep valley sides. I passed hundreds of bushes on the side of the road which must have evolved to conserve their leaves in this harshe, arid environment. Long, sharp thorns as big as my index finger (and I have a big index finger) spiralled out between the leaves, to deter the hardy, speculative goats that swarmed around (they make another local dish, by the way). Never trust the Rough Guide. The place where I had intended to stay didn´t exist, so I continued on up the dusty track, passing my first new-age hotel (surely it should be called dark age) which offered to unlock your bodies physical and mental energy through massage, reflexology, connection with the earth (I feel like writing galvanism) and magnetic therapy. Maybe a little like shock-therapy, or api-therapy, a treatment where you are repeatadly stung by bees in order to cure numerous ailments. You can fork out over a hundred dollars for this therapy in Alcohuaz at the upper end of the Elqui valley.

In the dirk back yard, concentric circles had been daubed in white paint, suggesting some rite. After hitching a ride on the back of a capricious horse with some gauchos, I finally reached my destination, a small hamlet whose doors shook in the howling wind. Cotton like buds had been blown off near-by bushes and were swirling through the air. After settling in, I set off in search of the Piedra del guanaco. It stands alone in an isolated field, guarded by Alsation dogs which threatened to make it an expensive trip. There are three different symbols scraped into the granite rock of the piedra, all of them stick-like. One is a strange symbol which looks like an upturned table with circular knobs, the second is the guanaco and the third is an impressionistic drawing of a snake (Inca). If I hadn´t known that the animals represented on the rock were supposed to be guanaco, I would have said they looked like deer (cue Karl Pilkington comment from podcast with Ricky Gervais). A sign to the left of the Piedra announced that that this was a Centro Magnetico, or Magnetic centre. The 60s have a lot to answer for. Incidentally, I see that Hazel Blears is being touted as the Labour Party´s Margaret Thatcher. If so, God help the Labour party.

Bikes and wines

2009-05-01T14:00:00.001-07:00

The last three days have been spent in Mendoza, a city in the West of Argentina which is famed for its red wine, Malbec in particular. The city was built on a fault line and was completely razed to the ground in the early twentieth century. Because of that, the roads are wide and lined with trees to prevent debris from falling buildings from damaging other buildings. On my first night in Mendoza, I was sitting near the central square drinking coffee when my chair started to rock back and foreward, as if someone had grabbed the back legs and had started to shake them. I looked down at the ground, bemused, and then at two old men sitting beside me who explained that it had been a small terremoto, or earthquake.

I had been told that Mendoza was a beautiful city, large and chilled out. I didn´t like it nearly as much as some of the other places I have visited. The wide roads seem to serve only to carry thousands of cars, making the city noisy and polluted. Plus, on the side of every road runs a deep ditch filled with stinking, fetid water. It also has the worst supermarket in the world, but more of that later.

The climatic conditions around Mendoza are perfect for the production of red wine. Almost no rain falls, preventing the grapes from being afflicted by the diseases that are associated with humidity. The long, hot days make the grapes big and juicy, with a high sugar content. This translates into very strong, bold red wines with an alcohol content of twelve to fourteen percent. Like every other gringo, I hired a bike on my second day and toured some of the vineyards in Maipu. I soon realised why the bikes had only cost 40 pesos for the whole day. The handlebars creaked, my right brake didn´t work and my rock-hard saddle kept slipping down, making it ever hard to peddle. Combine that with lorries and copious amounts of wine, and you might have had an explosive mix. Luckily, I am still here to write this blog. Despite all the hype, the wine was underwhelming, and I have since found out from a man in the hostel that the wine is superior in the region of Lujan de Cuyo. Despite being aged for two years in oak casks, the wine was acid and astringent, leaving tannins burning in your throat for several minutes after the tasting. Far better was the lunch that I had with two Frenchman from Paris and the liquour and chocolate store. In a tiny kitchen, on a road a few miles from civilisation, two cute, bashful women make a crazy array of flavoured liquours, from chocolate and dulce to leche to grapefruit. All the fruit liquours are made using the fruit that grows in the beautiful garden adjacent to the kitchen.

I took a bus back to Mendoza and saw an amazing advert on the side of a bus, featuring David Nalbandian and pain relief tablets. He was shown in battle garb, a metal helmet, a chainmail vest and a leather skirt hiding his podge. In his left hand, he clutched a spear and he was staring out from the bus intently, taking himself far too seriously.

The most interesting experience I had in Mendoza was in a supermarket, a huge Carrefour just a few blocks from the hostel. I had finished my wine tour and was lusting after a green Thai curry, with sweet coconut milk and handfuls of coriander. I hobbled over to the vegetable section in my new flip-flops and picked out two shrivelled, dessicated green peppers (red peppers were nowhere to be seen), a courgette, two chillies, a clove of garlic and two onions. I couldn´t find any ginger, so I went over to the women at the scales. She barked back at me that they only had powdered ginger, and that I would have to place each separate item I had picked out in a separate plastic bag. My vegetables now covered in metres of plastic, and some tasteless ginger and paprika shoved into a bag, I went back to the scales. The woman took one look at my things and declared that I couldn´t have the chillies, the courgette, the ginger or the paprika because they didn´t come to fifty grams. Those are the rules, she said, despite my protestations and those of an old local man to my right. Not once did she look at me, but continued to serve other customers with flashing arms, barking out replies through her slit of a mouth. Apparently you can´t eat if you are alone in Mendoza. I looked for some chicken, but they didn´t have any. Local argentines battled for asado beef, while bored looking cleaners swung their mops from side to side. So bored were they that the mop heads never actually touched the floor. I dropped the basket off in the wine section and beat a speedy retreat. If a country can´t organise a supermarket, how can it organise an economy. That said, the company is French, so maybe blame can be apportioned elsewhere...

Tomorrow, I go to La Serena in Chile and the Elqui Valley, complete with Pisco and hippies. My trip has suddenly started to revolve around alcohol.

Valpo, that`s just jokes!

2009-04-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

I have spent the last week in Valparaiso, a large port to the west of Santiago, and in re-tracing Darwin`s hallowed footsteps from Santiago, over the Andes to Mendoza. While in Valparaiso, I stayed in a hostel with three English girls from London, two of whom are going to Oxford next year, and the other to Bristol to read Medecine. Londoners are different, and London girls even more so. Whenever they found something funny, they would break into peals of laughter and cry, "Oh, that`s jokes, real jokes", or "Gosh, do you really think so". They were also incredibly organised, lugging around a thermos flask and a cool bag, (which, incidentally, they lost). They spent long evenings planning exactly where they were going to go, and in writing voluminous notes in their journals (they refused to call them diaries, for some reason) from seven until ten at night. One evening, one of the English girls, Jessie, accidentally missed out two pages in her penguin diary and spent the next twenty minutes agonising about how she could overcome this apparently insuperable problem. Tippex wouldn`t work because the paper was cream, she just couldn`t bear to tear the pages out...etc. On the first night we got there, I was delegated the job of chopping up the mushrooms for the stir-fry, but was reprimanded for my technique...,apparently I wasn´t qualified to chop the onions and the girls debated among themselves the order in which the vegetables should be cooked. I left them to it and fled to the dorm. Another night, a Canadian girl in the hostel started explaining how she was organising a world-wide revolution to spread love and peace, while an American girl was contemplating getting a tattoo; the tattoo would depict the first three sounds that the universe made when it came into existence, sounds that she makes in yoga to find internal peace. Did someone record the sounds? The Canadian topped it all off by suddenly declaring that the American had exacted justice in a past life. It was obvious to any perspicacious adult that the scars on her fingers meant that she had chopped people`s hands off in ancient Rome. It goes without saying, then, that she thought that disabled people had committed sins in a past life, like a certain English football manager.

Maybe there is little difference then, between a girl educated in one of the world`s richest countries, and the inhabitants of Chiloe, (a peninsula in Chile) who make a brief appearance in Bruce Chatwin`s enlightening, hodge-podgey book, "In Patagonia". According to folklore, Chiloe boast a council of witches, the "Council of the Cave", which has its own boat which attracts sailors and then marroons them on an isolated rock. They also have a guardian of the cave, an Invunche. To create this demon, a baby is kidnapped from his parents, his arms and legs are broken, and his head is twisted 180 degrees (exorcist?). It is forced to feed on human flesh and its left arms is twisted behind its back and sown into its right shoulder blade. Since it cannot move, it is carried around by members of the sect.

There were no witches and demons in Valparaiso, only the ghost of an old poet, a politician and a dictator (Pablo Neruda owned a house here, while Allende and Pinochet were born here). The money from international trade and the warehouses has long gone, but it has left an indellible imprint in the huge, imposing banks which line the streets and in the lofty cranes which swing there heads across the bay. Old, battered furniculars creak up the steep hillsides and give tourists access to the maze of streets lined with multicoloured houses painted in every colour from bright yellow and chocolate brown, to electric violet and lime green. There are more telegraph poles in Valparaiso than in any other city that I have ever seen, tangled masses of cables radiating from them like the spokes of a wheel, giving the city a strange, almost Eastern-European air, reminding me of the Alexanderplatz in old East Berlin. And as you wend your way higher and higher into the hills, the wide, semi-circular bay shines below you, new monstruous high rise buildings hugging the shore in Vina where beautiful, old buildings would have stood before the earthquake hit at the start of the 20th century.

The most interesting thing that I saw in Valparaiso, far outstripping my visit to Neruda´s house or the many markets, was a demonstration held outside the Municipalidad, or town hall. A huge crowd of, mostly, women had congregated outside and were being led in a series of ear-splitting chants by an old man with two loudspeakers taped together. I eventually realised that it was a protest of teachers demanding better pay and conditions. There were lots of children dotted amongst the crowd, many of whom thought the noise was a good excuse to prance around, ala Archie at Sarah and Colom´s wedding. The women cut an incongrous spectacle. Instead of banging on drums or shaking tamborines, they clutched pots and pans and were hitting them vociferously with spatulas and other cooking utensils, all the time with honest, earnest faces. One of the women at the back of the crowd, who looked like she was just out for a nice Sunday afternoon, was holding a cheese grater, while another, in the heart of the crowd, beat a biscuit tin with a cake slice. Aftering shouting a lot and marching into the nearby square, they announced a teachers´ strike for the following Monday and dispersed.

That is the sort of protests that I approve of, tied to modest, concrete goals. Che Guevara was nowhere in sight. He stills lives on, however, in Argentinian slang. According to a guardaparque who I was speaking to yesterday, "che" is used in the same way as "amigo" or "tio", as in "Eh, Che, vamos al parque a beber mate". "Che Boludo" is the most commonly used slang (jerga) phrase and combines "che", with "boludo", which means "big ball or testicle". (Pelotudo means the same thing). Like the word, huevon, which means the same thing, it used to be used as an insult (a synonym for estupido), but can now be used affectionately.

After three days in Valparaiso, I was retracing Darwin´s steps from Santiago, across the Andes to Mendoza, a journey that was apparently very useful to him in developing his ideas on volcanology, the uplift of the Andes and how the ocean subsided. First stop, Puente del Inca, a natural bridge that I imagined traversing a deep canyon. We passed small hillocks rising up in sweeping curves, covered in stubbly grass, the only thing that the earth can support when it is so dry (The El Nino effect has meant that rainfall in Chile this year has been unnaturally low). I watched a dire Nicholas Cage movie as we climbed ever higher into the Andes, nostrils invaded with the pungent whiff of fresh manure, the crests of the hills indistinct through the mist. The town, Puente del Inca, is incredible. It is a small dusty excuse of a settlement with corrugated iron roofs and wooden shacks, but it is surrounded on all sides by towering mountains shining dark brown, Cryptonite green and every shade of purple. I would marvel at the rocks again and again as I walked up the valley to Aconcagua the following day, the highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayas. However, my reaction to the bridge was similar to that of Darwin;

"When one hears of a natural bridge, one pictures to oneself some deep and narrow ravine across which a bold mass of rocks has fallen, or a great archway excavated. Instead of all this, the Incas bridge is a miserable object"

I wouldn´t go quite so far in my strictures, but the bridge itself pales in comparison to the mountains that surround it and the spectacular drive between Puente del Inca and Uspallata to the West. I am now in Mendoza and am planning to get suitably groggy with fine wine when I do the wine tour tomorrow. Until next time...

Coffee, markets and machismo

2009-04-24T08:48:00.000-07:00

Before coming to Santiago, I had thought that Argentina was a more interesting country than Chile. After spending more time on The end of the world (the translation of Chile in a native American tongue), and after reading Mi Pais Inventado by Isabelle Allende, I have come to the conlusion that Chile is itself a fascinating mix of reserve and brutality, passion and machismo, superstition and piety.

In Santiago, I stayed in Bellavista, an arty district in the north-east of the city that is full of cafes, bars, artists´ workshops and baroque buildings painted in psychedelic colours. The hostel was called the Bellavista Hostel, and before I discovered the patio upstairs where everyone congregated for drinks, I reverted to watching British TV like Lewis (It was strange how good Lewis seemed after being subjected to nothing but Telenovelas) and the amazing football match between Liverpool and Arsenal. It is worth watching, or rather listening, to a football match in a Spanish speaking country just for the commentators. Whenever the ball hits the back of the net, the commentator gulps in some air, expands his lungs and releases a cry of "gooooool" that lasts for a good ten seconds. They also scorn impartiality. When Torres scored his second goal, the chorus of Fernando by Abba suddenly blared out of the television, the word Fernando being replaced by El Nino. Could you imagine Mottie doing something similar?

That itself is strange given the close link between Chileans and Englishmen...according to Allende anyway. They share numerous virtues and vices. One is a certain reserve, solemnity and lack of exuberance;life is not to be enjoyed, but to be endured. She finds an explanation for this in the huge efforts that the conquisadores made to reach The end of the world, crossing the Andes, fighting hordes of Indians and battling against cold and hunger, before they could root themselves in the unfertile soil of Chile. But while the Chileans may not be the most demonstrative of Latin Americans, Santiago is still an interesting, bustling city.

Santiago is cleaner than almost any city I have ever seen, even Leeds or London. There is no chewing gum on the pavements, armies of state employees can be seen in the parks sweeping up leaves and even shopkeepers clean the pavement adjacent to their shops. Like the British, Chileans are very proud of their country. The huge market, La Vega, was one of the most interesting places that I went in Santiago. It lies across the river from the central market which is orientated towards tourists, the Mercado Central, where I enjoyed a typical Chilean dish, Reineta con salsa de Mariscos. La Vega is for the ordinary people of Santiago. As I crossed the bridge, clasping my camera ever tighter, I saw little old women hauling huge trolleys laden with fresh fruit and vegetables and paper pasted to lamposts advertising Viagra. La Vega is a market of dark, labyerinthine alleyways, harbouring thousands of stalls selling everything from Shitaki mushrooms and pigs trotters to Casio calculators and chicken feet (What are these used for. Soup?). Never have I seen so much fruit accumulated in one place. Tomatoes and potatoes are piled like bricks, seven foot high, and the air is laden with the tangy odour of coriander and spices that are kept in huge, bulging sacks. It is like a giant´s storecupboard. And everything is dirt cheap. The first time I went there, I bought a kg of plums for 350 pesos, around 40 pence.

As you move back towards the centre, everything becomes notably more expensive. As I approached the plaza de Armas, I was confronted with rows of tarrot stalls where Santiguenos sit with grave faces as their fate is revealed to them. This betrays another facet of the Chilean character. Though Chile may be the most developed country in Latin America, people are mystical and deeply superstitious, distrustful of doctors. Every home brewed remedy will be tried before dragging oneself along to a doctor, that most dubious of professions. Allende claims that one of her relations was a saint. Small wings began to grow from her shoulderblades, incorrectly diagnosed as a bone deformity by the doctors, and in the correct light, Allende could see a halo around her head. She also states that her grandmother could move objects with her mind and that she once saw the devil on the bus in Santiago, a green being with goatish hooves . Allende incorporated elements of Buddhism into her beliefs, and knows who she was in a previous life. This reminds me of the instruments that I saw in the Museo de Arte Precolumbiano, which were use to ingest hallucinatory substances. A wooden spatula would be forced down the throat in order to cleanse the stomach, and a special type of dust would be taken through the nose.

All this sits comfortably with devotion to the Catholic church, but despite religion, Chileans are as unfaithful as any other nation. Fifty eight percent of spouses cheat on their other half. Allende tells the story of a male friend who, in a sudden spur of lucid thought, tried to escape his tyrannical lover one morning. As he was walking down the road, he felt someone push him to the ground and start pummeling him in the back; it was the lover who had found the bed empty, run out of the house and down the street stark naked to take revenge.

Machismo is also deeply ingrained in Chilean culture, as demonstrated by the national hero, Pablo Neruda, who had numerous lovers. In the centre of Santiago, there is a chain of cafes labelled as cafe con piernas (coffee with legs). Young women in red uniforms, complete with mini-skirt, high heels and slap serve coffee and alcohol from an upraised bar to middle-aged, vegetating businessmen in sunglasses and crumpled suits. Presumably the bar is upraised so that the legs can be appreciated in all their glory. I was going to try the coffee there in the name of research, but managed to contain myself.

Many of these men wear blazers, which leads me on to another national trait. Chileans seem to assume that foreign goods are superior to their own. Heineken is a case in point. An average, insipid European beer, Heineken is drunk in greater quantaties than far better Chilean and Argentinian beer. The Chilean upper class have a fetish for upper-class Enlish dress, perhaps to cement their noble status in a country where everyone is a mestizo, and a descendent of humble, hard working conquistadores. Walking around the centre of Santiago, I saw a picture of an English aristocrat standing in a field, lank, blonde hair swept across his forehead, riding whip clutched in his hand, finely cut blazer and trousers complementing dark brown leather riding boots, pulled up to the knees. What a calumny. I could barely repress my chuckle...

2009-04-20T09:03:00.000-07:00

Pucon was exactly what I expected it to be, a tourist town, but I loved it nonetheless. The number of residents in Pucon stands at 10,000, but in the high season the population swells to 60,000 as tourists from Chile, as well as Europe and America, swarm the streets and taking advantage of the many cafes, internet shops, tour businesses and bars. This is one of the most volcanically active areas in South Americas. The deep rift in the ocean bed of the Chilean coast causes huge upsurges of lava which reach the surface at the hundreds of volcanoes in this area. Volcan Villarrica is Pucon´s raison d´etre and its imposing cone can be seen from different parts of town as you come out of a coffee shop or laze around in a park.

Two days ago, I climbed the volcanoe. I woke up at 6AM, met my group and was driven to the foot of the volcanoe, equipped with protective clothing, helmet, crampons, ice axe and gloves. I would have felt like an intrepid explorer heading out into the wilds of Patagonia had it not been for the fifty of sixty people who surrounded me, many of them hangers-on from the previous day when poor conditions had forced them to give up. At the beginning of the ascent, we were asked whether we would like to take a chairlift two kilometres up the slope or to walk. They stressed that anyone who was not in peak physical condition should take the chairlife because it was important to conserve your energy. Presented with a challenge like that, I could not refuse, but I was joined by only two other, an American from Orange County, California and a French girl. While the sluggards swung along above us, we trudged up through fine volcanic ash, taking two steps up only to slide back one step. Soon, this gave way to big, light, capricious balsitic rock that lay on a layer of ash and would often give way when you stood on it, creating a small landslide that would cascade down the hillside. The guides would suddenly cry rocas and everyone would stop and look up. After a climb of around two hours, we donned our crampons and stepped out onto the sticky ice, walking as if we were wearing flippers so as not to drag our feet and fall over. We slowly zigzagged across the shiny white surface, digging our ice-axes into the snow above us to give us leverage. Meanwhile, James, the Californian, was explaining what it is like to be a fireman in California. In a house full of smoke, the fireman can see nothing, and on several occasions, while trying to find the inhabitants, he has found that he is stepping all over them. On another occasion, a teenager was doing drugs with a propane torch, set light to his bed, left his bedroom to assure his family that the smoke was coming from outside, went back into the bedroom to recover his stash and died of smoke inhalation.

We passed a steep, rugged escarpment of rock which the ice had approached ina huge, sweeping curve, split into segments by narrow, deep crevasses. The views were already incredible, albeit a little hazy because of the morning mist and the hundreds of garden fires spluttering away. Lago Villarrica and the National Park was spread out before us, the arms of the lake stretching out to the feet of the surrounding mountains, dark green wooded projections that looked almost tropical. Volcanoes could be seen on all sides. There was one which had obviously blown its top, but the most impressive was Volcan Lanin which straddles the border between Chile and Argentina and is taller than Volcan Villarrica, itself around 2,800m. A week ago, the volcanologists recorded unusual activity near this volcanoe and it is expcted to erupt within the next week. Everyone in the surrounding towns and villages has been evacuated and the national park has been closed.

We reached the summit at the same time as several other groups which crowded around the crater, munching down their sandwiches and breathing in the sulphurous fumes. A couple of times I caught a full mouthfull of the noxious gas which burned the back of my throat and provoked a coughing fit. Clouds of the gas billowed from the volcanoe´s chimney and the rocks surrounding the crater´s edge curled with smoke or steam. We couldn´t see the bubbling lava beneath, and the volcanoe seemed strangely artificial to me, little different from the one that splits in two in that Bond film. On the way down, we slid down through the snow as the 22 year old guide hit on the French girl, to no avail. A whining seventeen year old Australian impeded us as he kept sitting down and refusing to go on, until he was all but dragged down by the guide.

The hot baths were the perfect accompaniement to the hard walk. Natural springs well up all over the region and have been dammed in Pozones to created deep pools which vary in temperature from tepid to boiling hot. I spent four hours lounging around in the steaming water, sipping beer and admiring the valley, before catching a bus to Santiago for a beggarly 8,000 pesos (around nine pounds). The city seems smarter than Buenos Aires, but I am yet to see whether it has as much charm. For lunch, I am planning to walk to the market where fish of every conceivable size and shape compete with wriggling shellfish and hunks of meat. At least I won´t go hungry...

San Carlos de Bariloche

2009-04-17T10:04:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, I decided to leave hippy town and travel to Bariloche to the north. Unlike El Bolson, Bariloche definitely is a tourist town, but it is charming at the same time. It has a large, paved central square that opens out onto Lago Nahuel Huapi, a huge lake that stretches out into the mountains and the mist and has huge arms (or brazos) that make for great boat trips and walking. Just as in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, the names of desaparecidos have been daubed in white onto the paving of the square, along with the year that they were taken (most seemed to be in the mid seventies). In the middle of the day, the square swarms with huge St Bernad dogs, the mascots of Bariloche, little wooden barrels around their necks, waiting to have their picture taken with tourists. Men with saws and chisels attack huge slabs of wood, crafting them into sculptures of lizards, gnomes, naked women and indians, the best being displayed in front of the town hall. As the sun begins to sink low, the square is filled with golden light and the skater crowd turn up, their baggy jeans hanging around their thighs just like in England. They turn up in Vauxhall Corsas and other pieces of crap, neons lights flashing and music booming out. They would often leave the engines running with the music blasting out through the open windows.

Bariloche is also famous for its chocolate, whic I sampled at Mamushka after almost drowning in a huge crowd of people. It was Easter when I was there and eggs of every different shape and size were displayed in the windows. One mechanical chocolate egg opened and closed to reveal a big, yellow chick. After staying the first night in a hostel out of town, I transferred to 1004, a fantastic hostel on the tenth floor of the biggest apartment building in Bariloche. There are no signs, neither at the entrance to the building or on the floor itself. My dorm room, the kitchen and the lounge all have huge windows which look out west over the lake to the mountains, Cerro Campanario and Cerro Catedral, behind which the sun sets every day. Going out in Bariloche, I was astounded by the number of Irish bars, Wilkennys, Pilgrim and others. Some just call themselves Irish bars as a marketing manoeuver; we found a bar in Bolson that was called "Boulevard", had a mock alpine interior and called itself an Irish bar. The Argentinians have also inherited the Spanish contempt for good time management. Even in a sleepy town like Bolson, the bars only started to get busy when we were leaving at around 1, and the clubs don´t kick off until about three. I met a guy working in a pub in Buenos Aires who shuts up shop at around seven in the morning, goes home to sleep until about two and then returns to clean up, waiting for the clients to turn up at around one in the morning.

After taking a chairlift up to a local hill, Cerro Otto, on the first day (and being bought a coffee by a Uruguayan couple because I didnt have any money), I met up with an Irishman from Cork, Tadhg, and did the Circuito Chico, a bike ride on the second. Tadhg is a twenty eight urban planner but he looks like anything but; with long shaggy hair, skinny jeans and a Bob Dylan neck-scarf, he looked exactly as a traveller should look. He started travelling in Vancouver, and has travelled through the states, staying in the National Parks for free with his tent. He loved Montana, and wished he had time to camp in Bariloche too. To camp in Patagonia is the best way of experiencing the dramatic landscape. On the circuito chico, we passed glassy lakes bordered by sandy bays and steep hills of pine trees. The tourist who stays in hostels or hotels only sees a tiny fraction of the Patagonian countryside, just as a normal fisherman could only physically fish 10 percent of the rivers and lakes. I was told that Tiger Woods and other American stars charter helicoptres to take them to remote fjords and rivers in Patagonia, far from any settlements and even more abundant in fish than the lakes that I have seen.

The day before leaving, I decided to go rafting on the Rio Manso which starts in Argentina, cuts its way through the mountains into Chile and ends in the Pacific ocean. After a two hour drive in a cramped minibus, we arrived at a campsite next to the sparkling, green water of the Rio Manso to a breakfast of Medialunas and coffee. I struggled into a wetsuit and a life jacket and then was off down the river with a great guide who took sadistic pleasure in waiting until we approached a rapid and then describing in graphic detail all the disasters that could befall us; "if you don´t paddle hard enough, we´ll get sucked down towards that rock, raised up and tipped over". The water is almost totally transparent, allowing you to see the river bed and in its upper stretches, the river is relatively wide, bordered by tall, golden alamo trees (which I had previously mistaken for Alamo trees) and ancient Alerces. Floating down the river, we could see ahead into Chile, hillsides covered with red and brown nire trees. In the early morning sun, hatches or mayflies skipped off the surface of the water and rose in small clouds as we passed, no doubt providing rich food for the seething life below the surface of the water. Because the season is drawing to a close, the water level has dropped, revealing over a metre of rocks covered in moss. As a result, the rapids were not as exciting as they could have been, but it was still exhilerating to see the rapids approach as the river narrowed and deepened, passing through steep gorges of rounded rock which loomed above us and extinguished the light. You´d stop paddling, hear the roar of the swirling water, and then begin paddling like madmen, even when the waves reared up and crashed over the boat and spray soaked your face. Two hours later, we were in Chile and rounded the trip off with a parrilla of char-grilled meat and beer.

I am now in Pucon, Chile. Tomorrow, I´m going to climb the active volcano, Villarrica, and after that, relax in one of the hot springs that surround the town. I almost feel that I have the opposite problem to Oblomov. Instead of lazing around listlessly or falling into reveries, I always feel that I have to be doing something when I am travelling, given that there is so much to feel and see. This afternoon, though, I think I´m going to buy a beer, sit on the beach and finish my book. Just a shame that I don´t to dress me and feed me like Oblomov. Oh well, life´s hard.

2009-04-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

El Bolson was my next destination, "the big bag" which sits below Cerro Piltquitron, a long jagged cliff which rises steeply from the fertile valley floor. Its something of a hippy town; thousands of hippies flooded into El Bolson in the 1960s and they can still be seen in the market that is held numerous times every week. On my first day in El Bolson, I wandered around the market and soon saw an old barefoot man dressed entirely in white linen, sporting half moon glasses and a goatee beard. There are hundreds of stores selling knitwear, wooden clocks, "essential oils", alfaflores ( a type of Argentinian sweet) and anything else that you can think of. You also see a lot of people wearing the traditional clothing of the "gaucho"; check shirt, leather boots, kneckerchief and beret swept to one side. Apart from the tourists for whom they are an affectation, they are worn by genuine country folk who are often seen herding their horses outside town. They also seem to be worn by ordinary people who want to show that they are working class by differentiating themselves from the pomp of Buenos Aires. One good thing though is that El Bolson is inhabited by real people with real lives and real lives, unlike El Calafate and Chalten which were created entirely for tourists and look like theme parks.

When I arrived though, all the hostels in the centre were abandoned. I eventually picked one which was recommended in my Footprint guide as being "nice" and on opening the door, I was greeted by a surly man who showed me to a dirty room and seemed affronted that I coujldn´t pay upfront. It seems that everyone is travelling north with the weather. Or it may be that people skip El Bolson and travel straight to San Carlos de Bariloche to the north.

To my mind, this area, from Esquel northwards, through Trevellin to El Bolson, is one of the most beautiful in Argentina. It doesn´t have the raw, awe-inspiring monoliths of Torres del Paine, or the towering peaks of Chalten, but it makes up for these deficiencies with a fantastic climate. Cool mornings are followed by hot sun in the middle of the day and the four days that I have spent here have been cloudless. The whole area is more fertile than the far south, green fields and towering golden cypress trees providing a welcome contrast to the high peaks and jagged rocks of Cerro Piltquitron. It has something of the "modesty" talked about in The remains of the day.

Yesterday I climbed Pitquitron and ate a lunch of pizza and homemade beer surrounded by mountains on every side. Its truly amazing how lazy most people are. All the way up I was being passed 4x4s. Once kilometre from the summit, they get out of their cars and labour uphill with their walking polls, stopping for regular breaks to catch their breath and curse the steepness of the hill.

Today I went fishing on Lago Puelo to the south of El Bolson. My spanish was obviously insufficient because I ended up trawling from the side of a boat with a huge artificial lure rather than flyfishing. It was great fun and I caught three huge rainbow trout (arco iris), but it lacks the excitement or subtlety of flyfishing. You might as well chuck a grenade into the water, so little skill does it require. Instead of casting, you sit there with the rod motionless or slowly moving back and forth. While a fly is a small target with only one or two hooks, the artificial lure that I was using measured around two inches and was rippling with six hooks. Hooking a fish with the rod I was using this morning is nowhere near as exciting as with a lighter flyfishing rod; the tip of the rod barely bends and you are given no real idea of the fish´s weight. Because the fish is so well hooked and because the breaking strain of the line is so great, you can practically haul the fish in. However frustrating flyfishing may be, the knowledge that the fish could escape at any moment if the tension of the line is not maintained, makes catching it all the more enjoyable. Flyfishing is a much more even fight between man and fish, an art like bullfighting. Trawling is like walking up to the bull and firing a bolt through its brain.

Tomorrow I´m catching a bus to Bariloche, known for its chocolate, outdoor sports and nightlife. I see that the price of oil has risen, so I can now help myself to another ice-cream with a clear conscience. I´m reading "Oblomov" at the moment, a Russian novel by Goncharov following the fate of a man who is confronted with the earth-shaking question; whether to get out of bed! The day after tomorrow, I think I may answer, no.

Venture into the wilderness?

2009-04-05T14:53:00.000-07:00

I´ve spent the last four days in the Chilean national Park, Torres del Paine, and am now sitting here with aching legs and tired brain.

Before setting off for the bus I had to decide whether to camp or to stay in the "refugios" which range from relatively plush cabins to simple huts. After much serious cogitation, I decided that I was incapable of messing around with pegs and camp stoves and so opted to stay in the refugios. Little did I know how expensive they were to be. The average refugio costs around 20,000 chilean pesos, the equivalent of four nights stay in a basic hostel. That meant that the 70,000 pesos that I had taken out of the bank accound would only last me three nights. And that meant that I had to complete the "W" trek in a record-breaking three days; hence the sore legs.

After hunting around in search of a tin opener (I was later to learn the delights of opening a tin of tuna using the little piece of metal on your swiss army knife) I was off into the wilderness. In fact, Torres del Paine is nowhere near as wild as the Scottish highlands. You are given a rudimentary map at the entry point and hike along well-worn trails that constitute the "w" or the "circuit". The first day´s trek up to the Torres was steep and arduous, but well worth the effort. Like Mount Fitzroy, the torres rise up vertically from the surrounding rock and are framed by a deep turquoise blue lake. My pocket-full of almonds sufficed as sustenance. That was where the fun really began. The man at the hostel in Natales had told me that all the refugios had cooking stoves available and that I didnt need to take a camp stove. He was wrong. I was reduced to hacking away at a tin of tuna with a swiss army knife and suffered the ignomony of being the object of pity of a German couple who let me use their camp stove. I least I got a mountain of rice out of it. In comparison to the other refugios, this one was plain luxury with a chill out area in front of a wood burner. I uncorked the bottle of wine that I had lugged up there, kicked off my boots and chilled.

As I continued on my way, I kept bumping into people that I had met at different stages of my journey from Peninsula Valdes onwards. The second day´s hike to the Cuernos wasn´t the best because of the cloud, but was to be made up for on the third day. That night I found out why opening those cans had been such a struggle; the tin opener was upside down.

The third day was my longest, and involved a hike to Glacier Grey with a bald Polish lady who is living in London. She claims that English people aren´t open to foreigners and that Americans are more friendly. The pack now lighter given that the wine had been drunk, I hurried on over an undulating path before ascending up a steep valley towards Glacier Gery. It was even more impressive than Perito Moreno because you could see its full extent, curving down from the icefield like a vast motorway and carving its path down to the lake where it split in two around an island of slate. That night I cooked an inordinate amount of lentils and am now suffering the inevitable consequences. I was now thoroughly exhausted and slept for a good four hours on the bus the following day.

My plans have now been scuppered by poor Chilean engineering. The Navimag ferry that I was going to take from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt has broken down and won´t be departing for another week. The only alternative may be to cross the border into Argentina and endure another gruelling bus journey to Bariloche. Got to go because two angry women are waiting to use the computer. Until next time.

2009-03-31T15:02:00.000-07:00

For the last four days I´ve been whiling away my time in El Calafate on the shores of Lago Argentino, staying at Hostal America del Sur which occupies a prime spot overlooking the town and the lake. Like Chalten, El Calafate is a tourist town set up to extort money from helpless foreigners who want to go and see the Perito Moreno glacier nearby. Despite the mock alpine chalets and habitual outdoor sport shops, it has a great feeling of openess and acts as a springboard for National Park Los Glaciares and other spectacular countryside.

On the first night in the hostel, I met a Danish guy who said that he was bored of his home country and couldn`t wait to escape. While the rest of the Scandinavian countries were blessed with mountain ranges and lakes, Denmark had nothing. The only mitigating factor is the Danish women, and even then, he compared them unfavourably with the Brazilian girls he had seen in Rio during "carnival". Apparently girls in Denmark "dont know how to flaunt their femininity".

America del Sur is one of the nicest hostels I have stayed in to date with a large chill out area and huge picture windows looking out to the lake. Nevertheless, one morning I woke up to find that I had been bitten at least a hundred times all over my arms and my back. The hostel denied that the beds were infested with bed bugs and implied my clothes might need a wash. The cheek! Gonna go to a lavaderia soon.

One disadvantage of Patagonia, though, is that it is frequented by the more mature traveller. Since leaving Buenos Aires, I havn`t met anyone below the age of twenty and doddery old guys aren`t an uncommon sight. This probably reflects the price of goods in Patagonia; in most of Patagonia, a litre bottle of Quilmes (the local beer) costs upwards of 10 pesos or two pounds. In Cordoba (and, incidentally, the home of David Nalbandian), it costs 5 pesos.

Israelis are everywhere in Patagonia. Most of them have been firing rifles and other firearms for three years and need a break. Military service must be a great way of imbuing people with certain sentiments, for good or ill. What would most British youths turn out like if they spent three years being told that the world was in the hands of a Jewish conspiracy. On my penultimate night in El Calafate, I was dragged to the casino by my three Israeli roomates and watched as they staked my fifty pesos on roulette. The seemed to think that they had come up with an infallible formula for making money by putting nine chips on the diagonals of the thirty six squares. Maybe they were right because two hours later I left one hundred pesos richer.

The real highlight of my stay was the trip to the Perito Moreno Glacier, a 50km tongue of ice that descends from the Campo de Hielo Sur, before breaking up in Lago Argentino. I was woken up one morning at 5am to the sound of my Israeli roomates forraging around, intent on getting to the park before 830 when you have to pay for an entry permit. I left in bright sunshine, but the rainclouds became ever thicker, spattering the bus with light rain and snow. Even in these conditions the glacier was spectacular. You look down at the snout of glacier, a vertical wall of ice 40 metres high which extends back for tens of kilometres. Deep fissures divide it into great daggers of ice which advance around a metre a day in the centre, letting off creaks and groans. Photos can never capture the intense, pulsating blue of the glacier. Every now and again, a huge chunk of ice, the size of a car, breaks off the face of the glacier and plunges into the water below with a boom that reverberates for tens of seconds. Some said it sounded like thunder. In my opinion, it sounded like a condensed, compressed explosion, ripping the air apart. From the top of the walkways you can appreciate the glacier`s extent, from the bottom, its height. The volumes of ice are almost inconceivable. Its all the more amazing when you reflect that you can only see a small portion of this glacier, which is itself but a small finger of ice descending from a huge icefield, which itself pales in comparison to the ice field which once covered Patagonia, extending from near the Pacific to the Falkland Islands.

The following day I cycled around Lago Argentino, repeatedly pursued by dogs of every size and type. I discoverd yesterday that I can´t ride faster than a dog can run. Even when two small dogs are chasing you, their barks and bared teeth make it a pretty scary experience.

At the moment, I am in Puerto Natales, Chile, preparing to depart for Parque Nacional Torres del Paine, on a walk (the "w" which should last about four days. I thought for a long time about hiring a tent, but I just know that I would end up wet and miserable. Gonna stay in the refugios, despite their inflated price. Just went to the supermarket to buy provisions and came out with rather more food than I had intended. Huge portions of rice and lentels it is then, washed down with some nutritious canned tuna and anchovies. As a side note, I would like to say how much I miss my mums cooking. Only when I started to buy food myself and to cook it did I realise what I was missing at home. Fantasising about food has been a staple of this trip. There just arent any grazing opportunities when youre travelling. And no, they dont have any Jacobs cream crackers. The apostrophe has just stopped working. I think thats a sign I should sign off. Until later.....

El chalten and the mighty fitzroy

2009-03-28T05:45:00.000-07:00

After a bus trip of around 28 hours, four of which were spent on a dusty floor in the middle of nowhere (Perito Moreno to be exact), I was rudely awakened by biting rain and wind at 6:00 on Wednesday, 25 March. The only thing you could make out through the gloom was a huge, vertical escarpment that looms over the east side of town. That´s pretty much all I would see on the first day because the all enveloping rain hid the mountains from sight and forced me to seek entertainment in the town itself. Chalten was the last settlement to be built in Argentina in the 1980s. When seen from further down the valley it looks like a random cluster of houses huddling together against the cold. None of the roads are paved and the place is littered with stray dogs and productos artesanales. Everything is orientated towards the tourist from mock log cabins and adventure sports shops to the hostel that sits on almost every street corner. As a French girl said to me, "Nobody is born in El Chalten". In such adverse conditions there was nothing for it but to walk down the street to a microbrewery to try some locally brewed beer and cake. It wasn´t exactly what I came for what the hell!

That night while repeatedly burning myself on the cheap, handless pots scattered around the kitchen, I met an Enlish guy from Cheltenham, Chris, and an American. We agreed to get up at seven the following morning and brave veritable tempests to reach Laguna de los Tres, a small lake that sits at the foot of Mount Fitzroy. Fitzroy´s alternative name is Cerro Chalten, which means "smoking mountain" in Telhueche. At sunrise, Fitzroy is sometimes lit up a vivid red which led them to believe that it was a volcano.

After a breakfast of scrambled eggs and a huge basket of toast, we headed out under an overcast sky. None of us were very hopeful of seeing the mountains unobscured by clouds. Uphill through a cool forest we climbed before reaching a lake. This was where we got our first sight of the mountains ahead. At first, I mistook Cerro Poincenot for Fitroy because the higher peak was circled by cloud. The American was shooting off hundreds of pictures as we went. As we emerged into the valley below, Fitzroy was ahead, grotesquely stunted dead trees to the left and to the right a long flat valley culminated in further snow covered mountains enveloped by brooding, grey clouds. Just needed Vigo Mortensen flying across the plain on a fiery steed to complete the picture.

After reaching Camping Poincenot complete with huge tents and hebrew signs, we climbed steeply for what must have been eight hundred metres . Fitzroy gradually disappeared as we entered the lee (?) of the hill. The ascent became progressively steeper; we had been warned that this last portion of the trek could be dangerous in icy or windy conditions. I was surprised that at this high altitude the air was so warm (it was soon to cool down when we were blasted by the ferocious winds of the ice field). A snowball fight followed before the final slog up to the ridge in front of Lago de los Tres and Fitzroy. Everything had worked in our favour. As we had walked, the remaining clouds had cleared giving us an uninterrupted view of the mountains, the two glaciers slipping down the mountainside on either side of the ridge and the vivid blue Lago de los Tres, filled with glacial meltwater. Against an azure blue sky, Fitzroy rose up like a dagger, its sides too steep for any snow to stick. Instead, tens of metres of snow had accumulated in a huge bowl below the peaks and was being blown off the hillside and into the hillside. Small ledges ,of perhaps half a foot, on the left hand side of the peak were the only things that looked as if they would give any purchase.

Sheltered from the wind behind a huge boulder and saw numerous rocks that had been split sheer in half by freeze thaw weathering. Salami sandwiches never tasted better. After a couple of hours gaping in awe, we walked back down the path between deep thickets of nire bushes shimmering red and brown in the afternoon sun.

Sausages, egg and potato salad, peas and sweetcorn for dinner in front of Clint´s chiselled face in Gran Terino. Good film by the way. Am now in Calafate, in a great hostel that costs $40 a night, including breakfast and free internet. Pictures will be along soon. Hasta luego chicos!

2009-03-23T07:57:00.000-07:00

It has been a great experience fishing in National Park Los Alerces after an inauspicious start. Esquel is an offshoot of the welsh settlments at Puerto Madryn and Esquel, and is a sprawling town overlooked by mountains in every direction, mountains that look as if they could be in the highlands except that they are higher and less rounded. Pine trees give it an alpine feel, and the temperature is perfect with cool, crisp mornings succeeded by warm, sunny days when there is not a cloud in the sky. Immediatly after arriving, I realised that the bus to Lago Verde had already left and so I tried to hitchike, but to no avail. Perhaps I didn´t look dirty enough. In the space of an hour, only one man stopped and he couldn´t take me far enough.

After dining on local trout, I set off on the bus the following day for Lago Verde passing towering hills, huge lakes teeming with fish and a receding glacier that looked impressive nonetheless. The accomodation I secured through Pablo was basic (my fishing contact), but the location was stunning. Perched on the edge of the brilliant turquoise blue waters of Lago Verde, the cabanas looked up the valley to huge soaring mountains and down it to Rio Rivadavia and beyond. Outside, children practised with the lazo and huge, perfectly groomed horses trotted around listlessly. After lazing around on the side of the lake reading my book, Pablo called off the fishing excursion because of "terrible toothache", and I was left alone with a rod a huge monster of a fly, called a "tarantula". Thus armed, I ventured to cast into the brilliant waters looking for unsuspecting prey. The brilliant thing about this lake is that (weather conditions permitting), you can see the fish rise to take your fly. The first time this happened, I was so startled that I raised my rod tip and pulled the fly out of the fish´s mouth. Frustrated, I headed down the lake to the next bay where I took off my trainers, rolled my trousers up to my thighs and began to wade into a weedy mudbed. Bad idea; the mud suddenly sucked my leg down . I clambered out and waded into sandy shallows this time. After about twenty minutes of casting, a huge silver fish suddenly leapt at the fly, missed it and foul hooked itself on the way down. Caught by the dorsal fin, the fish struggled for a good half hour, repeatedly pulling line of the reel, before I could lay my hands on its silver sides. It must have been at least five times bigger than the biggest fish I have ever caught in Scotland, probably weighing ten pounds. (No scales were at hand, so you can forgive a little exageration). A smaller rainbow trout that I caught an hour later provoked the scorn of a native who called it a "chicitito", or tiddler. It was around six pounds. There are obviously monsters out there to be caught.

Inspired by the previous day´s efforts I set out on Sunday to the sound of a cock crowing next to my cabana. But where the previous day had been exhilerating, Sunday was frustrating, with only one rise to my fly. This did give me the opportunity, though, to explore the River Rivadavia that flows into Lago Verde. With more water, this could be a good bet for hooking some large fish.

Today, I´m preparing to travel to El Calafate where you can see the Perito Moreno glacier and many other attractions. A twenty hour bus journey awaits, so you´ll forgive me if I sign off and go and get a cold beer.

Puerto Madryn

2009-03-19T08:38:00.001-07:00

Sitting in a "locutorio", wasting time until my bus to Esquel at 9:00 this evening. Esquel is just east of the Parque Nacional los Alerces, one of the most untouched areas of Argentina with fantastic fishing and hiking. In Puerto Madryn, I´ve visited a penguin colony, swum with sealions, had my "bautismo" in scubadiving and visited Peninsula Valdes (penguins, elephant seals and killer whales). Not bad in four days eh?

It has eaten away at the funds though. After aluminium production and fishing, tourism is the third biggest earner in Puerto Madryn and you can see why. Doing the dive and snorkelling with sealions cost me 550 argentine dollars (110 quid), which is pretty extortionate for Argentina.

The journey from Buenos Aires to Puerto Madryn was long. I had read about it in books but no-one can fail to be stunned by the vast, seemingly infinite emptiness of the Pampa humeda, echoing with the lowing of cattle. The landscape made it almost impossible to tell one place from another and I was worried that I would miss my stop and end up hundreds of kilometres away. I also forgot how cold buses can be. With the AC pumping out cold air, I spent most of the journey shivering in my "semi-cama" seat and got only two hours sleep. Just before reaching Puerto Madryn, I started talking to an old man with a grave, bespectacled face and bushy grey eyebrows. He tried to convince me that only one fifth of the normal employees turned up for work on 11 September and hinted at a Jewish conspiracy. He also said that the Argentinian government had scrapped the majority of the nation´s railways and privatised the rest to force people to take the roads, paying at toll booths along the way. He obviously thought he was enlightening a naive English child.

Puerto Madryn is a great place to watch wales from about September to February, but at other times of the year you have to make do with penguins, seals, sealions, elephant seals and orcas. I stayed at a hostel, HI Patagonia, that felt much more like an ordinary house than the place in Buenos Aires. The owner, Gaston, has been great and almost indecently helpful (he´s helped me to set up the fishing trip with his friend on Lago Verde), admirably dealing with my faltering Spanish.

Geology of the area is fascinating. The area was once the sea bed, but once volcanic activity began in the ocean rift in the Pacific, the whole land was pushed up. That explained the incredibly flat scrubland that surrounds Puerto Madryn and the huge hills of shells at Puerto Piramide. Apparently before the Andes rose to such a height that they blocked cool, wet winds from the Pacific, the whole of Chubut Province was a lush rainforest. Today, lack of rain (only around 200mm a year) means that the area is arid and dry.

After visiting a Penguin colony on Monday at Punta Tombo and dropping in on the old Welsh colonies of Trelew and Caiman (founded 1874), swam with sealions and dived on Tuesday. Walked down the wide, sunny boulevard bordering the sea to Terra del Mar where I was kitted out with a wetsuit fit for the Antartic; two layers, rubber shoes and rubber face mask. I realised why, though, when I jumped into the water and my knuckles slowly started to turn a deep purple. The first stop on the boatride was a shipwreck where two experienced divers took the plunge. Further towards land, I had my "bautismo". Although breathing was no problem, I took a while to master adjusting to the pressure by blowing out through my nose. We shimmied down a rope into the murky deep. Visibility wasn´t particulary good because of the high winds which had churned up the sea bed and I was virtually pulled along by the instructor since this was my first dive. Nevertheless, saw some pretty intersting fish, anemones and starfish. Continued on to Punta Lomos where we could see hundreds of sealions basking in the sun on a rocky ledge. You could hear them roaring across the water. Their lumbering movement on land was contrasted with their grace in the water. They twisted and turned at unlikely angles, and the moment I thought I might be able to touch one, it curved away and below me. The poor visibility made it all the more impressive to see them suddenly emerge from the gloom with wide eyes bulging, and their flipper-like feet propelling them along. That night I was treated to the traditional Argentine music of Julio Garcia (as important a national figure as Maradonna it seems)

On the excursion to Peninsula Valdes yesterday, we saw fluffy, bedraggled looking penguins shedding their feathers before continuing on to Punta Delgada in the SE of the peninsula. Sediment from the erosion of the NE of the peninsula is being deposited here in a long, slender spit that snaked along the coast. At first sight, the elephant seals looked like huge, smooth rocks and seemed almost impossibly large given the distance we were viewing them from. Adult males can weigh up to 4000kg. After a rest of four or five months and after the breeding season is over, each elephant seal goes his own way to hunt continuously for around seven months, not touching land until they return to breed again in the same spot exactly a year later. Scuttled off after hearing that killer whales had been sighted at Punta Norte. Only seconds after piling out of the bus, we saw a huge black fin slice its way out of the water and disappear again. As we watched them, it became clear that they were circling into deeper water, turning round and shooting towards the baby seals playing on the beach. They voluntarily beach themselves to have to maximise their chances of catching their prey.The two orcas had killed at least five cachorros that day.

Ten past one at the moment and scorching outside. Have got slightly burnt on arms and legs. Probably need to get as many rays as possible before travelling to Esquel near the Andes where it will be pretty cold. Not sure what food to take on the bus. Crackers perhaps...but which crackers. Not sure if they sell Jacob´s here. Gonna go and find out...

2009-03-13T09:48:00.000-07:00

Its a couple of days since my last posting, and a lot has happened since then. At the moment, I´m getting ready to brave my mammoth bus journey to Puerto Madryn. Over the past couple of days, I´ve visited the famous cemetery of Recoleta, hit a local nightclub, toured the stadium of Boca Juniors, inspected some rival youth hostels and eaten heartily in between.

I´ve really started to enjoy life at the youth hostel. You meet loads of people from all around the world (particularly English people, Australians, Brasilians and Germans) and its definitely forced me to be more outgoing and sociable than I would have been otherwise. By contrast, we met some girls from New York in a bar a couple of nights ago, and they just reminded me why a certain type of Americans are internationally loathed. After listening to them for a couple of minutes, my head ached from the reverberations of their screeches and they had absoutely no sense of British modesty and self restraint; they were on spring break and "fluent in spanish". Two guys from London, John and Richard, have become quite good mates although Richard is in to his head banging music and says "man" and "right on" quite a lot.

Nearly every night, we end up drinking beer and playing pool for free on the table in the bar. Its a challenge, especially when the balls start to curve to one side because of the tilt of the floor. I´ve been amazed at how much you get for your money in a hostel like "Tango City Inn"; free pool, free internet, laundry, activities etc. Yesterday, we visited another famous hostel in Buenos Aires, Milhouse. Its amazingly new and plush. People were drinking, playing pool and table tennis and pissing in urinals that looked as if they had been stolen from the set of star trek. The only weak point of the hostel is the bunk beds that creak at the slightest movement and threaten to collapse under my weight. It seems that the days of cold dorms, no hot water and cooking for yourself are largely over, in these urban areas anyway. It will be interesting to find out if that rule holds further south. I secretly hope it doesn´t.

On Wednesday, I went to bed at about three and awoke to the sound of a South American man snoring in the bed opposite me. Then strolled down to San Telmo after first groping around in the half light of the room to find my towel (By the way, Alice, the towel has been a godsend. Its amazingly absorbant, even if it does feel as if you´re drying yourself with Dave´s suede coat). The light is incredible early in the morning, before it starts to press down on you with waves of heat. I thought this quote from Jose Maria Gironella was apposite: "Arboles altos, prados fondosos, cielo de luz pura y diafana, suficientemente matizada para no matar el color". The Mercado Municipal in San Telmo is dark and cool. Old women bustled about displaying trinkets and postcards of Che and Carlos Gardel. A breakfast of huevos revueltos, cafe con leche y jugo de naranja set me back only eighteen pesos (just over three pounds). It was great, fresh food prepared in a kitchen that would definitely not pass health and safety rules in GB. So different from the quiet, stayed, wood pannelled cafe where I ate breakfast today. In Spain, it would be full of the tiny, coiffeured Franco supporters who can still be seen in Madrid, but here most of the women that you see are much younger. Its the sort of place a member of the nobility would eat. Rows of starched collared, prissy women sat nibbling at their sandwiches and the waiters were no better. When I asked him the meaning of a word on the menu, he sighed as if it inconvenienced him. The place was called Richmond and reminded me of a snooty golf club in England. While I sat there in t-shirt and flip-flops, a man next to me had donned a full suit and horned rimmed glasses, eating a cheese sandwich whose crusts had been diligently removed by the camareros. Outside, a woman and her child were begging for change. You can see why the anarchist movement is so present in Buenos Aires.

Yesterday, I took a tour around Boca Juniors´ stadium, in the working class and reputedly dangerous neighbourhood of the same name. Against the advice of the book, I walked there and didn´t see anyone who looked even vaguely dodgy. Maradonna, Batistuta, Tevez and Riquelme have all played for Boca in the Bombonera stadium (the chocolate box) whose steeply rising teers give it a unique atmosphere. The guide was slightly boring; he focused more on the minutiae of the stadium´s architecture and the state of the washing facilities than on the football and the club´s history.

Tonight, I´ve booked to see a tango show close to the hostel and am getting a lesson as well. Probably be the last thing I do in BA before leaving tomorrow.

2009-03-10T06:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I visited the districts of Retiro to the north and San Telmo to the South. One of the reasons I went to Retiro was to buy my bus ticket to Puerto Madryn, an eighteen hour slog south on the shores of the Atlantic. I´ll probably stay there for a couple of days before continuing on to Rio Grande in Tierra del Fuego (so called because of the watchfires lit by native indians according to Darwin), which is great for its fishing.

One of the interesting things about Buenos Aires are the gradations of wealth that can be seen throughout the city. The city was originally founded to the south of its current centre, in San Telmo. But alas, the huge mansions adorned with cupolas were allowed to languish after the nineteenth century when a yellow fever epidemic forced people to flee north into what was then the open country of Retiro and Recoleta. In fact, only two centuries ago, the area immediatly surrounding the grimy internet cafe where I am now writing was open countryside teeming with fig trees. The lack of inhabitants led the Franciscan monks to open a monastery here to ponder and recollect (hence the name Recolet).

I would advise anyone coming to Buenos Aires to stay in San Telmo, whose little cobbled streets are line by grand old houses that are slowly falling into ruin. Its one of the last places where traditional markets still exist, and I found it particularly enchanting in the evening when the golden light hid the marks on the walls and the broken glass in the windows. This is where the city waas originally founded (see photos later). Its an area of dark antique shops, faded arcades and great little cafes.

I´ve also been surprised since I´ve been here at how politically aware the people are. References to Eva Peron can be found on walls around the city, and on my first day in Buenos Aires, I passed two men with megaphones who vowed that the spilt in the Malvinas could never be atoned for. A "lema" just outside my hostel " Gane quien gane, las elecciones no ayudan al pueblo. No votes!". (Whoever wins, the elections don´t help the people. Don´t vote)

In the more salubrious area of Retiro, an eternal flame burns next to a monument honouring the Argentine of the Malvinas war. Strangely though, its overshadowed by the "Torre ingles", which was donated to the city by the British government in the 19th century. There was talk of knocking it down in the 80s but its still standing, as is the statue to George Canning in Recoleta (a British foreign secretary who helped Argentina win its independence) which looks worse for wear after having been chucked into Rio de la Plata.

Just like in British cities, people are moving further and further away from the traditional central, into quiet, leafy districts like Palermo. As in any big city, though, you have stay on your guard. After buying my bus ticket to Puerto Maryn, two guys tried to steal my I-pod from my backpack.

Staying in the hostel was a good move because I´ve met some guys from England, some Ozies from Tazmania and your customary bellicose Israelis. Better go-got the cemetery of Recoleta to explore.

Long journey

2009-03-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

After two ten hour flights, I´m finally hear, tapping away on a weird spanish keyboard in the hostel tango, Monserrat, Buenos Aires.

Both flights were pretty fun, confounding expectations. They´ve got an amazing safety video on Delta airlines featuring a hostess who looks like she´s just been cut out of plastic: make sure you put your luggage in the overhead "bins", and fasten your seatbelts in case of rough air" etc. Atlanta was swarming with US marines who seemed to be heading to Amsterdam, and we were treated to a good two hours of a CNN presenter speculating about whether Rihanna would testify against her husband/boyfriend-whatever.

Finally got into Buenos Aires at seven this morning. It looks like it´s rained loads: the countryside was green as far as I could see. I also met an Argentine on the plane who warned me about which areas of Buenos Aires not to visit and which verbs to avoid: coger for one. I´ve also yet to master the art of Argentine slang which seems to be quiet similar to Argot in French: Cafe becomes feca and so forth.

I wandered round Buenos Aires this afternoon, or rather the central area near my hostel, Monserrat. To get there, I first traversed the financial area of the city, called "La City" in homage to the renowned acumen of British bankers. Its actually suprisingly impressive: small skysrapers of glass and metal. The bits of Buenos Aires that I´ve seen so far, down Avenida de Mayo, seem like an older and more tawdry version of Barcelona, a city of the early twentieth century struggling into the twenty-first. I did see loads of interesting buildings though(see pictures on facebook).

The only problem is that they´re surrouded by parks inhabited by homeless people and their dogs. Peronism, and Evita Peron in particular, still exert a hypnotising effect over the people. I only had to walk ten or twenty yards from the hostel to see graffiti featuring the famous "descamisados". Anyway, that´s all for now.

Two weeks to go

2009-02-21T03:44:00.000-08:00

I'm sure you all know that I've only got two weeks left before I board a flight to Buenos Aires. The idea is that as I travel around, I'll collect my experiences, thoughts and encounters, and share them on this blog for anyone to see. Or...that's the idea anyway. Who knows what will happen when I get to Tierra del Fuego and find that the nearest internet café is two hundred miles north! I've been reading "Voyage of the Beagele" recently, and have been amazed and sometimes shocked by what Darwin found in the wilds of South America. No, I won't be fearing the attacks of Fuegian Indians or recounting stories of natives who wrap sliced dogs around broken limbs. No, my trip should be far more exciting than that.