John's Pan-American Odyssey

Around The World in 269 Days...

Well, I'm back 'home'. A couple of days shy of 9 months after I flew out from Auckland Airport, I passed through again on my way to my parents place, completing World Tour 02/03. And what a tour it's been...

The first 3 months in Chile (Easter Island, Patagonia, Torres del Paine, Atacama Desert), Bolivia (Uyani Salt Flats, La Paz, Taihuanaco, Lake Titicacca and Isla del Sol), and Peru (Inca Trail, Machu Picchu, Cuzco) have all been covered before, so here's a quick summery of the other 6 months.

The rest of Peru included condors at the Colca Canyon and flying over the fantastic Nazca Lines, before finishing in the capital Lima. From Lima I flew to Mexico City by way of a stop-over in awful Miami. Mexico was just fantastic. From the bustle of the worlds largest city to the tiniest Mayan villages, the Spanish colonial towns, the remote and overgrown temples and enormous pyramids, and most of all the wonderful people, it's a country I fell in love with (well, except for the American tack of Cancun, and the Disneyfication of some of the ruins). The best bit was Oaxaca, where I was strongly tempted to see out my days sitting in the plaza, eating chocolate, drinking mezcal and listening to the marimba bands play all night long. Paradise. I'll be back.

After Mexico came a brief detour through tiny Belize (3 hours drive, end-to-end) with more beaches and ruins, before arriving in Guatamala for the ruins at Tikal (as seen in Star Wars part VI), the New Years fireworks at Flores, and the crumbling colonial capital of Antigua. Then it was back over the border into Mexico to catch a flight back through horrendous Miami to Puerto Rico to meet up my with my friends Linda and Judy. We spent a few days exploring the old city before flying out to a week lying in the 30 degree sun on the beaches of Barbados, mon.

Next stop with the girls was party town New Orleans, USA, home of great blues and jazz and the, umm, 'bead economy' :-) I then caught the train north to Washington DC to visit the Smithsonian museums and to try talk sense into 'W' (no luck there), before moving on to Philidelphia (Freedom Bell, Ben Franklin, etc), and Princeton to visit a friend, Nyrie, studying at the university there (as seen in the Russell Crowe movie 'A Beautiful Mind'). With the temperatures plunging and the snow falling, going drunken sledging at 3am in the morning in front of the college seemed appropriate :-)

The real snow came in New York (Statue of Liberty, Times Square, Ground Zero), where the temperatures dropped to as low as -20 degrees! I wasn't so impressed with the Big Apple (wrong time of the year I guess), but there were 300,000 people I did get along with on the anti-war march (and got a close-up view of the New York Polices crowd control techniques) The day I choose to move on to Boston was dubbed by the media 'The Great Blizzard of 03', with 26 inches of snow falling in 12 hours, turning my 3 hour train ride into a 10 hour epic. I think I would have really liked Boston, but for the fact it was completely buried and everything was closed.

To escape the cold, I headed for (comparatively) tropical London to visit some old friends before touring the English countryside around Stratford and Oxford and visiting Linda and Judy in Cheltenham, where they are currently working.

One of the real highlights came next with a visit to Belgium to catch up with the friends I made while in Bolivia/Peru: Elke, Ellen and Simon. Now, I know Belgium doesn't exactly have the most exciting reputation as a travel destination ('Flat and Boring'), but you couldn't be more wrong... Well, OK, maybe the flat part is true :-) From cosmopolitan cities (Brussels, Antwerp) to medieval cloth towns (Brugge, Gent), Roman ruins (Tongeren) to World War 1 battlefields (Ieper and a great great uncles grave), channel beaches (Heist) to canals and windmills (Knokke, Damme), I pretty much covered the whole of Flanders, some parts of it by bike. There's some great history and culture there, not to mention the chocolate, waffles and beer :-). Best of all though were the people, who took me in and treated me as one of the family. I look forward to returning the favour.

The other great thing about Belgium is it's just next door to a bunch of other countries. One weekend saw us piled into a car for a quick trip through the Netherlands and Germany. The following week, I headed to Amsterdam (great art, nice canals, shame about the tourists). Then it was time to move on, with a quick wiz south to Spain to see Madrid (great art) and Barcelona (over-rated, except the Sagrada Familia) before flying on to Turkey. Istanbul (mosques, palaces, carpet salesmen) was great, but the real highlight for me was the battlefields at Gallipoli, where another great-great uncle was killed. It was something special to retrace his footsteps across the battlefields.

I then returned to Belgium to help Elke paint her apartment, probably the least likely thing I pictured myself doing on this trip, and take a day-trip to Paris (just because you can). Finally, with the money all gone, it was time for a brief return to England to visit the girls in Cheltenham again and a quick side-trip to Wales before jumping the long flight home by way of a very short stopover in Hong Kong (SARS masks & rampant paranoia). At 42 hours door-to-door, it wasn't much fun, but it could have been worse (SARS = empty planes = space to stretch out).

So now I'm trapped in small town New Zealand, staying with my parents, watching the snow pile up outside while I try to beg a job somewhere. Europe would be nice, it's summer there at the moment...

P.S. Don't forget the photo's at http://john.layt.net/world02_photos.html

Day 101 - Merida, Yucatan, Mexico

I couldn't stand Miami, so I popped along to the airline office, had my flight changed to the next day, and the next morning bright and early caught the bus to the airport and presented myself at the check-in counter for the inevitable security checks. Except they couldn't find my booking, I had disappeared from their system completely. Luckily I had my paper ticket, and after a while I was back on the system and being directed to the luggage search area with a cryptic "You're lucky you chose to fly today". As per usual, the secuirty guy couldn't work out how to open my pack, and then couldn't get everything back in again, I had to stand behind the red line on the floor and watch as he mangled my stuff (it would be a security breach for me to help him). I then headed for my gate, discovering on the way that there were no customs or immigration to clear, and, worse still, that there would be no meals served on the flight!

A quick detour to Pizza Hut took care of the hunger pangs, then it was the Full Monty search before they would let me on the plane. All non-US or Mexican citizens had their carry-ons fully searched, had to remove their shoes for x-raying, and were given a full pat-down and metal detection. Phew! I was last person on the plane, and found the cause of the US airline industry's troubles: a 300 seater plane with only 50 people on board. Good thing about that is that you get not just 1, but 2 rows to yourself, plenty of room to stretch out and relax. As it turned out, we would need it. The plane had barely pushed back from the terminal and started it engines, before they wound down again and the Captain announced that one engine had a low oil pressure warning. So back to the terminal we went, and an embarressed looking engineer topped the engine up. Then we pushed off again, started the engines, then wound them down again. This time the pilot announced that one of the fuel pumps was not working, and that regulations now required special safety clearance before we could leave. Back to the gate, and an hours wait before clearance finally came on the condition we added more fuel to the other fuel tanks. Finally all was ready again, and the Captain announced that if a 3rd problem cropped up, the flight would be cancelled (3 strikes, you're out!). So we all crossed our fingers, and mumbled a few prayers, and eventually we rumbled down the runway and into the sky over 2 hours late.

Describe hostel, Zoalco, Cathedral with Jackhammers.

6 hours in museum. Missed Metro stop, huge crowd.


Now, if there's anything I love more than mingling in a concert crowd, it's the feel of that kick drum, amplified a billion times over, rearranging my internal organs for me. Well, OK, there's one thing I love more: when the concert's free. In this case, the band turned out not to be a Mariachi band as your cliched imagination might expect, but in fact a popular Mexican Ska band, playing a mixture of Madness and their own, very popular, stuff. Bizare as the combination might sound, they were actually quite good, the rythym section was tight, and the horn section was just plain smokin' (as you would expect in Mexico: kinda makes me wish I hadn't given up playing. Not that I was any good. Maybe that's a project for when I settle again, wherever/whenever that may be?). I recognised a couple of their songs from the radio, and the kids knew all the words. It was certainly amusing to see Mexican teenagers pogo-ing along to "One Step Beyond", a song I was "getting down" to long before they were even born... And before you ask, yes, even rythmically impaired me was bouncing up and down just a little bit (which, as those who know me well will know, is something, like my legendry pool playing ability, that normally only occurs for a short time between consuming drinks number 4 and 5) :-)

Walking back to the hostel past the front of the Cathedral, I noticed a super-stretched limo waiting outside, a quick peek in the door confirming a white wedding in full flow, the priest doing his best to compete with the noise from the concert (as if the jackhammers weren't enough to contend with). Poor things.

A little further on I came across a group of traditional dancers, not your "dress up in flashy costumes and play 5 times a day for the tourists" type traditional dancers, but a genuine come-as-you-are, enjoy it for the fun of it traditional dancing. In the centre were a couple of drummers pounding what at first seemed a monmotonous beat, and a couple of people feeding some incense burners and performing some rituals. They were surrounded by about 50 to 60 people, initially in 3 concentric circles,

Sunday free galleries.

Monday Teotehuacan.

Wednesday bus to Oaxaca. Bs security

Oaxaca = Heaven, by way of stomach.

O/night bus to San Cristobal

Palenque

Campeche

Merida

Cancun / Playa

Merry Christmas to one and all!

I hope that whereever it is in the world you may be, whether at home with loved ones, working away in a foreign land, or just wandering the globe like me, that you have a happy and peaceful Christmas. And don't eat too much turkey, OK?

My Christmas this year will be spent on the beaches of the Mayan Riviera, basking in the sunshine and swimming in the Carribean. While the travel experience is a rewarding one, it doesn't compete with a Christmas at home, especially as this is my 3rd in a row away from home. Sorry Mum!

Take care one and all,

John.

P.S. I promise to make some time to update my web travel diary, and add my latest photo's. Think of it as a late Christmas present :-)

Day 100 - Campeche, Mexico - Altitude 0m

Well, sorry the the lack of updates, 23 days now, but net access in the States, like most other things, cost a shocking amount more than South America, so I had to restrict my time online. Hence, no updates from there. Then in Mexico I've been having too much fun to have the time, and I've also been busy scanning my latest photo's and building a page for them. I have been keeping notes, and had planned to do one mega-post, but it's just taking too long to organise, so we'll start with the USA portion, then follow with Mexico later, OK?

Yes, I'm now in Mexico, having a great old time, and as you'll notice from the day counter I have not only passed the magic 3 month mark, but have now clocked up a whole 100 days!!!.

In our last instalment, I was waiting to fly to Miami. Knowing the level of security around US flights, I was a bit annoyed when my taxi to the airport was half an hour late. My annoyance increased when we got stuck in a massive traffic jam as we neared the airport. After about 15 minutes wait, however, the traffic slowly cleared, as did my annoyance, as the cause of the delays became apparent: squads of riot police hanging around, mopping up small blazes of rubbish and car tyres, riot trucks with water cannons at the ready, the street still slick from their recent use, and in the distance retreating groups of disgruntled campesinos. Half an hour earlier, and we would probably have been caught in the middle of it all. The taxi drivers explanation a succient "Probleme".

Arrival at the airport brought back memories of passing through Israel, one glance at the Middle Eastern stamps in my passport and a couple of stupid questions later (e.g. "Do you have receipts for all the hotels you stayed at? Why did you change the date of your flight?", etc) and the airline's security person had me identified as a potential terrorist and I was taken aside for further questioning and through baggage inspection. After another half hours delay, I was finally allowed to check in, but unlike Israel where you get the VIP treatment of a personal escort to the plane, it was to the back of the queue for me and another half hours wait to get to the front again. Finally after checking in, I had to make a mad dash for the gate as the plane was already boarding. I cleared customs, and local security, only to be stopped again at the gate for another full search of my carry-on by the airlines security. Seems they didn't trust the airport's security checks. Finally they let me on board and soon we were winging our way north. Now, the flight left at midnight, and had a flight time of 5.5 hours, so do you think they let us get straight down to sleep? Nope, first there was dinner, then the movie, and after 3 hours they finally dimmed the lights. Then 1.5 hours later the lights came up again and breakfast was being served. So up I turfed in Miami International Airport at 5:30am, sleep deprived and grouchy, and having to wait, sipping expensive, awful airport filter coffee, until it was late enough to arrive at the hostel in Miami Beach and crawl into bed for a fews hours catch-up.

Emerging around lunch time, I decided to start fulfilling my wish list: first stop the mini-market and a lovely fresh pint of milk gone in 60 seconds, along with US$1.25. That's one expensive cow :-). The newspaper and coffee, albeit filter, soon followed, but do you think I could track down a bookshop in all of Miami Beach? Don't Americans read??? Anyhow, by this time I was getting rather hot and sweaty, it being 30 degrees and all, so I decided to augment my mobile wardrobe with a much needed pair or two of shorts. So I caught the bus to the nearest mall. It's at this stage I discovered just how spread out Miami is, and just how car-oriented the Yanks are, to the point of running down the public transport system. It took over an hour to travel the distance a car would take 15 minutes, thanks to the overcrowding and constant stopping (that was nothing, the following day it took over 2 hours!). The Aventura Mall is supposedly the largest in Miami, but believe me, we have bigger and better with more choice back home. I was in luck as Macy's were having a Pre-Thanksgiving Sale with up to 50% off, and as it was the final day, they were taking the discount off again. Thus I was able to buy a couple of pairs of Calvin Klein and Nautica shorts for only 25% of retail! It took a huge amount of discipline not to whip the credit card out and clean out the entire CK, Boss and Armani sections and post them home... Even better was the fact that when I brought pants just before I left 3 months ago, I was size 34, I'm now down to size 30!!! Woo hoo!

Across the road from the mall, I eventually found a bookstore, but unbelievably, there was no footpath leading there. It was expected you would drive your car the 50 meters from the mall parking lot to the bookstore parking lot! Needless to say, it was overpriced and overflowing with lame self-help books and none of the travel guides I wanted. Then it was an hour on the bus back to the hotel (I've travelled between countries in less time!), before setting out in search of my longed for Thai dinner. Wrong again :-( Nothing was even remotely in my price range, so I ended up with Subway instead.

Over the next few days I just dawdled around, enjoying some time on the beach. Even though I acted as something of a cloud magnet, it was still 25-30 degrees, so the chance to get my gear off was most welcome (by me, not by the other sun-bathers blinded by the glare). The beach was beautiful, long gently sloping white sands (imported by truck!), but the surf was non-existant and the water very shallow, so no-one much bothered with swimming. Basically, I was just filling in time while I took care of admin stuff like developing photo's, changing flight dates, and trying to convince NZ Customs that I really am a Kiwi and I plan to return home (sooner or later), so not to charge me $2500 tax on my stuff I shipped home from Oz. That was, until I realised just how much money was draining away just by my being there.

Now, while the cheapest accomodation in Miami is in Miami Beach, Miami Beach does not have the cheapest of anything else, whether it be food, transport, internet or especially entertainment. There were people at the hostel who thought paying a US$20 cover charge for a club and then paying US$10 a drink was worth it, but the sane ones such as myself visited the bottle shop and sat around the hostel or the beach talking all night. There was not much else to do, really. Bruce Springstein was playing a concert, and I would kill to see The Boss live, but the US$75 ticket price was just too outrageous. And going to watch some American football just didn't appeal. Then there's the serious shortage of cutural activiities like museums and galleries. And the people were either fake looking rich kids in their huge cars, or homeless bums, begging for a quater for coffee (read beer), there seemed to be no middle ground. It's not a place I could live, in fact, it's not really I place I want to visit. What the hell was I doing here???

It was the sticker shock of everything that mostly led me to change my plan to head north to a small resort called San Augustine for Thanksgiving, it would have cost $100 for the return bus trip alone! Even a trip to the Everglades (2 hours away) would cost $60 for the bus. Instead, I decided to head for Mexico ASAP, where at least I could breathe again without being bankrupted in the process. Of course, my Starbucks addiction, at $3.76 for a Grande Mocha Frappachino from their beach-front cafe, didn't help any...

Day 77 - Lima, Peru - Altitude 0m!

Wow, I can breathe again! Yes, 0m altitude, back to sea level (and how good is it to see, smell and hear the sea again, even if it is a murky polluted brown colour) and my sinuses have miraculously cleared up. I�Lm now in grey, grey Lima. Not grey from pollution, but from the constant cloud cover caused by the local micro-climate. A good day here is when the cloud cover thins enough to let more diffused light through, but you never get to see the sun. I miss the sun already, but that�Ls OK, because tonight I fly out to Miami! Ah, Western luxuries, here I come! First on my list is a long glass of chilled fresh milk, followed by a real latte (or at a pinch Starbucks) while sitting in a cafe reading an inch-thick newspaper. Then I�Lm going to find the largest bookstore in town and spend a couple of hours aimlessly browsing. And for dinner, something Asian. Don�Lt even get me started on the desserts....

Between Arequipa and Lima, of course, was Nazca, famous for it�Ls lines in the desert. It was a real early start for that bus, which departed at 5:45am, again without my desperately desired wake-up shower. The bus was a standard local bus, but with a toilet, which was a good thing as it meant the bus didn�Lt have to stop every half hour or so. You wouldn�Lt actually want to use it, but the locals were happy with it, and I was sat far enough away not to mind the smell. I was crammed in next to a rather plump local, who spilled over onto my seat, making for a fairly cramped but otherwise OK journey. Thanks to the afore-mentioned toilet, the journey only took 8 hours, instead of the 10 I had been told, so I arrived at the bus staion long before my guide was supposed to pick me up. Yes, I had caved in again. Someone in Arequipa had told about a deal this guide did for pick-up, accomodation, flight and tour for only $50. I could have organised it all myself for about $5 less, but hey, why fight it? Being the independent sort, I couldn�Lt be bothered calling the guide, and so walked the 1km to the hotel. Except Nazca is rather warmer than I was used to, a dry 30 degrees, so I arrived rather sweaty and hit my private shower straight away (private batchroom again, how decadent!). Soon I was out exploring the town, which took about an hour and I was done. It�Ls not a very big place, and while the tourist industry pumps large numbers through here, it�Ls obvious not a lot of the money hangs around. It was probably the most run-down and dirtiest town I had been to in the whole of Peru. Still, it had a nice plaza (what is it with me and plazas?), and the people were cheerful, if a little too vigourous in their election campaiging.

The next morning, my guide picked my up at 8am and drove me out to the small airport, where I sat around for about an hour waiting for my turn to fly. I ended up being allocated as the right weight to balance a couple of Italian guys in a tiny, 45 year old, 4 seater Cessana 170. If it wasn�Lt for the experienced look of our pilot, and the well maintained appearance of the plane in spite of it�Ls age, I would have walked away there and then. Squeezed into the tiny back seat, we taxied and took off, the engine with a rough edge to it�Ls sound that made me very uneasy. We had barely cleared left the runway, when we banked sharply, barely skimming over some power lines and settled at the disturbingly low altitude of only 300m above the ground ata speed of 180kph. After a 5 minute bouncy ride on the updrafts, we arrived over the desert area where the Nazca people made their lines by clearing the dark rocks littering the serface, exposing the light sand below. The majority of the lines are narrow, perfectly straight pathways thought to have been built by the earliest Nazcas for navigational and religious purposes, but the truely spectacular lines are a later series of zoomorphic and geomorphic shapes such as the monkey, the spider, the hummingbird, and the trapezoids, which can only really be seen from the air. We flew over each of these in turn, the pilot first banking to allow one side of the plane to snap away, before executing radical, wing-tip turns to allow the opposite side an equal view. I don�Lt know what was the more exhilerating, the incredible shapes, or the wild plane ride! After 20 minutes of line-spotting, we returned to the airport for a perfect landing. The only disappointment was not getting a photo of the spider when my auto-focus got totally confused. It�Ls made my "Top 5 South American Experiences" list.

After my nerves had calmed in the afternoon, my guide took me out to the ancient Nazca cemetary, 35km south of the town. This was a stretch of desert strewn with bones, clothing, and the occasional mummy, discarded by the local grave robbers during their search for golden hoardes. There are now a set of restored pit tombs that have been re-populated with some of the mummies and some pottery to give some idea of what they originally looked like. While the Nazca didn�Lt practise advanced mummification techniques, the state of preservation is remarkable, thanks to the arid conditions: Nazca receives about 2 hours of rain a year, hence many houses don�Lt even bother with roofs. The cemetary was followed by the obligatory visit to the pottery and gold workshops, where they tried to talk me into paying twice the price for some cheap trinkets. Really, they should have learnt by now, Kiwis and Aussies are the toughest people to sell to...

That night, I was booked on the bus to Lima, leaving at the very inconvenient time of 1am. I had checked out of my hotel earlier in the day, so after exhausting all the possibilities such as internet cafe, restaurant dinner, and a very long coffee at a cafe, I ended up sat in the bus terminal from 9pm onwards. I grabbed some sleep on the bus, but not much, as it reached Lima at 6am. After sitting at the terminal until 8am, I could finally make my way to my hostel, where I crashed and slept until lunchtime, before showering and setting out to explore the city. The last couple of days have been spent mooching around, souvenir shopping and doing the usual plaza�Ls, museums, churches, monastories and catacombs filled with 70,000 bodies. Hmmm, I really should see someone about this fixation with dead bodies, it can�Lt be healthy...

So in 3 hours time I�Lm off to the airport for my 757 out of here. It�Ls been a fantastic 11 weeks, and I�Lll look back on it in my next installment. Who knows, I may even fill in some missing details from Cuzco.

Ciao amigo�Ls!

Day 70 - Arequipa, Peru - Altitude 2335m

I´m baaack! Yes, I´ve been to the Colca Canyon, and I have to say I was not impressed. The Grand Canyon in the USA had better be a million times bigger than that to impress me when I get there. And as for the condors...

Well, lets start at the beginning shall we? It was up early on Sunday morning to be ready for the pick-up at 7:30am. While waiting, I swapped travel tips with a couple of America girls who were happily eating their breakfast in the hostel cafe. I suffered in silence, my tummy growling, as I thought I didn´t have the time to eat, but the van didn´t arrive until 8:30am, so I could have. Bad start. Another hour was spent chasing around other hotels to pick up the other tour participants, most of whom had got sick of waiting and went to find breakfast. Lucky $%&@$%. Finally we got going, and after a couple of hours driving out from Arequipa, we hit the dirt roads and started steadily climbing through the desolate (there´s that word again, I really must learn some new adjectives) landscape. After a brief coca tea break, with a quick pet of a tame llama (which spat on one person, how very Tintin), we finally reached the top of the pass at 4800m. It made a nice change to watch other people suffering from the altitude :-) After a brief look around, we dropped down the other side to the town of Chivay at about 3800m, which was to be our stop for the night.

After an overly expensive lunch (guess who got a kickback from the owner?), we checked into our hotel. Well, hotels, actually. I was odd man out and was in a different hotel to the rest of the group, but I did have the luxury of a Private Bathroom! After an hours rest, we were picked up again and shuttled off to the Hot Springs just outside town. Here we spent a couple of hours relaxing in the 40 degree waters, enjoying the canyon scenary. While there was no bottle of wine this time, there were a couple of stunning Danish girls who had been in Peru for 2 months and had some great stories to tell :-) After the Hot Springs came dinner at another local restaurant, with a Pena show thrown in for good measure. This entailed more pan pipe music (no Guantanamera this time, so no musicians were harmed in the process), and some local dancing, at the conclusion of which was the compulsory "Lets drag the Gringos up and laugh at them making fools of themselves" segment. Fortunately, I could claim cameraman duties, so managed to keep my arse firmly in the chair where it belongs.

We were up at 5am the next morning (the private bathroom proving useless, as the hot water wasn´t on!), and on the road at 6am for a 2 hour drive along the canyons edge. The canyon starts as a small valley, the sides slowly growing taller as they move closer together. Should I at this time mention that our driver must have had a kamikaze streak in him, and that I expected him to send us over the edge at any time? I´m only glad I had the backwards facing seat so I didn´t have to watch his overtaking manouvers: the looks on the other passengers faces were enough (Strangely, no-one tipped him at the end of the tour...). Anyway, we made it alive to our destination, the Cruz del Condor, an outlook at one of the deepest parts of the canyon, a 1200m drop to the floor. Here the hoardes of tourists descend to catch sight of the condors as they use the early morning conditions to glide by looking for their breakfast. That´s the theory, anyway. In reality it´s pot luck. You might see 20, you might see none. We saw one. A single, solitary, lonely condor. We had barely gotten out from the van and found a possie on the canyons edge when it went swooping past. I barely had time to fire off a quick, probably out-of-focus, wrongly exposed, snapshot and he was gone. We waited another hour, but nada mas. At 9am it was time to start the long drive back to Arequipa, stopping at a small village whose church had been destoyed a year befor ein an earthquake and was slowly being rebuilt, and again for lunch in Chivay. We stopped for another cup of coca, and this time the llama spied my packet of chips in teh back of the van, decided he wanted them, so poked his head in the door, grabbed them and tried to take off with them. No-one, man or beast, comes between me and my food, so after a brief tug-of-war, the llama was soon dispatched and I had my chips back. Funnily enough, no-one else was too keen on sharing the packet with me :-) Finally we reached Arequipa at about 4:30pm. So, 16 hours cramped in a minibus for a 15 second condor sighting, and a large-ish crack in the ground. I´m not overly sure it was worth it, but then you takes your chances.

After a tiring 2 days, I felt totally disinclined to book a 10 hour bus ride to Nazca for the following day, choosing instead to rest up for an extra day. So here I´ve been, surfing the web, lounging around and stuffing myself on kebab and chocolate cake. Tomorrow morning, I catch the 5:45am bus through to Nazca to see the famous lines. See you there!

P.S. In case you´re wondering why everything seems to be some great drama, replete with near-misses and disappointments, well, that´s real life folks. Nothing´s perfect, and part of life is learning to appreciate the imperfections for the human qualities they embody. Besides, this would be very boring reading otherwise!

Wow, I just had what has to be the best lunch I have had for ages: a kebab!!! Yes, here in the land of Peru, where the cuisine is normally limited to guinea pig, llama, or anything Italian, I have finally found something that isn´t. Now, amittedly, it was missing a few key ingredients, such as pita bread, hummus, tahinni, chili sauce and yoghurt, and so wasn´t a patch on the Sahara Cafe back home in Wellington, but it was a very nice change from pasta, pasta, pasta.

Now, there´s rumoured to be a Burger King in this town somewhere...

Day 67 - Arequipa, Peru - Altitude 2335m

Hmmm, what did I do today? Umm, walked around town a bit, poked my nose in a couple of churches and museums, sat in the plaza watching the world go by. So what´s so different? It´s Arequipa, not Cuzco!!! Yes, I finally got off my well padded little behind and toddled down to the bus terminal. Shock, Horror! And boy does it feel good to be on the move again. It wasn´t until I paid the hotel bill that I realised quite how long I had stalled for: 11 days!!!! Where did they all go??? Well, OK, there was 7 days sat reading "Lord of the Rings" in the plaza, but there were 4 days spent gawking at the sights aroiund Cuzco, so it wasn´t a total waste of time. I´ll fill you in on my Cuzco impressions in my next entry. But first, Arequipa.

In a moment of weakness (forgive me, oh Travel Gods of the Planet Lonely), I decided to book the luxury bus, Royal Class, figuring that even my generously padded behind would stuggle with the 12 hours of sitting required to make it to Arequipa. It´s not that it´s a long way, it´s just that the roads here are not the best. So for 12 hours, I lounged in the fully reclining, air-conditioned, TV equipped comfort of my top floor window seat, watching the world roll by as I listened to Ben Harper turned up VERY loud on my MP3 player. Very loud, because the selection of videos being played at full volume was abysmal: Julia Roberts, Keanu Reeves and Jean Claude van Damme. Yay, my favorite actors. Actors??? Ha! And the Air Con wasn´t working, so the fake vinyl seats soon had my back soaked in sweat. At least the lunch was hot, even if half it ended up all over me thanks to the very bumpy road at the time. So why did I bother???

Arequipa. Big city in the south of Peru. Busy, noisy, not a shade on Cuzco. Two main attractions for me down here. Tomorrow, I head off for a 2 day tour to the Colca Canyon, reputedly the deepest canyon in the world, and home to lots of condors. Today, however, was visiting two very special chica´s, Juanita and Sarita. These two young girls are to be found in the local university museum, where they are kept at a permanent -20 degrees. Juanita is the famous Ice Maiden of Arequipa, a 13 year old Incan girl, sacrificed at the top of a local montain, to please the unhappy mountain gods. Almost perfectly preserved by 500 years in the ice, she´s a remarkable time capsule of Incan clothing, culture and DNA. Her clothing looks like it was made just yesterday, vivid and soft, and her body is remarkably intact, right down to her eyelashes. Sarita, found on another mountain, is older and not as well preserved. You don´t get long with the girls, but their faces are ones I won´t forget in a hurry.

One of the things I love about South America is one moment you´re sitting in an internet cafe, minding your own e-business, next moment a fiesta erupts around you :-) The samba/rumba/whatever beat being completely impossible to ignore, I stopped mid blg entry to run out and have a good old gawk at what was going down. In this case, it was the local university´s end-of-year parade, kind of a cross between the Rio Carnivale and a US High School Homecoming. For over an hour, each of the faculties danced on past, arrayed in a wide variety of traditional and very un-traditional costumes, lead by their Senorita and a band pounding out the beat. Best float had to go to the Transport Faculty, with their giant sized Yoda built on an old VW Beetle! And I´ll say this for the South American senioritas, they have legs and hips, and they sure know how to use them!!!

Day 63 - Cuzco, Yada, Yada, Yada...

Well, this was going to be written yesterday, but I wasn´t feeling too good yesterday afternoon (something I ate, I think), so crawled into bed for a wee nap at 4pm. Problem is, I didn´t wake up again until 7am this morning...

Yesterday was Day 62, the 4th of November, and for those of you who failed maths at school, that means 2 whole months since I first arrived in South America. And with tomorrow being Day 64, thats 9 whole weeks since I arrived. Of course, if you want to be pedantic, you can then add on the 3 and a half weeks between quitting work and arriving in SAm, but that only makes it sound an even more impressive 3 months come this Friday. Little wonder I´ve needed a bit of a breather here in Cuzco. Anyway, in light of this auspicious occasion, I thought I´ve give a "State of the Nation" update...

So just how is old John-boy coping with the physical and mental demands of such a stressful life style? Well, physically, I am very pleased to report that I have lost over 5kgs so far, and will soon be back down to my old pre-Sydney, only slightly un-healthy weight. That is, if the scales are to be believed, they under-read my height by 5 cm´s, so who knows? But my pants are looser, and my belt needs a new notch cut, so it looks real enough. Of course, my abs still look like a huge bowl of jelly (wobble-time: 18 seconds), and the love handles have room for a family of 12 to cling to, but that´s nothing a few billion sit-ups won´t fix. Do you think I can fit them in before I hit Miami Beach? I´m certainly fitter than I was, now faster than a speeding La Paz taxi, able to climb steep tourist streets in a single gasp. There´s been a persistant cold, and dodgy kness, but that´s all cleared up now, so, all in all, physically it´s been a good move.

Mentally, now there´s a good question. Pipe down those who reckon I should have been committed a long time ago, this is adults talk... Overall, it´s pretty good, but subject to swings. Most days, I wake up, realise I don´t have to go to work, and feel very, very good :-) Other days I wake up, and feel very, very far from family and friends (I miss youse all...) and it takes a real effort to get motivated to explore an alien world. It helps immensly when I have travelling companions, or there´s something major to be explored, and best when there´s both. However, overall, the space and freedom to think and do what I want, when I want, to come or go as I please, is one of the key reasons for my travelling (so everyone who thought travel was just an excuse for me being a lazy bum were right all along...). The other, slightly more obvious reason, to see new stuff, to store up experiences, sights and sounds and my reactions to them for later use, to grow through pushing myself where I don´t want to go rather than taking the easy path, to look inside the machine and learn what makes it tick and just how hard I can push it when needed. Am I starting to ramble, is there a point to this, will this ever reach a conclusion???

Oh, here comes the nice man in the white coat with all those pretty coloured lollies...

NEWSFLASH: Cuzco, Peru

Police report that a tourist has gone on a murderous rampage, killing dozens of local musicians from bands busking in Cuzco restaurants, using only a dinner knife and fork. Eyewitnesses have reported the tourist as yelling "You´ll never play Juantana-bloody-mera ever again!!!" as he rushed from the restaurant where he had been enjoying his dinner...

Day 60 - Cuzco, Peru

So nothing has happened in 48 hours, except me spending entire 8 hour days on the internet. How´s that for killing 2 more of those 5 extra days I need to fill in? The up side is, it´s still cheaper than doing most anything else in this town :-) I could be happy with this, US$15 a day for a room, 3 restauant meals and net access, what more could a geek want? Oh, wait, human interaction perhaps???

Which has gotten me thinking about how the internet has changed the entire travel experience. When I did Africa 5 years ago, just as the Internet Age dawned, my only contact with the outside world was my monthly phone call home, and the occasional bulleten of BBC World Service news. Now, I can read all 344 pages of the Microsoft anti-trust settlement within minutes of it being issued, from the comfort of my chair here in Cuzco. I start stressing out if I only receive 2 e-mails a day form the outside world. Not to mention the effect of not logging in at least once a day: what might I have missed? Is this right??? What ever happened to immersing yourself in the travel experience, cutting yourself off from your own world and fully embracing the culture around you? Exploring the limits of yourself, the challenge of the isolation, the differentness of it all? Excuse me while I contemplate these thoughts while sitting in the local MacDonalds, drinking my cup of Nescafe and reading the latest copy of Time magazine....

Anyway, here´s the long awaited, much anticipated, Pulitzer Prize winning, War and Peace length log entry from Bolivia! Excuse the all-too-knowing, I-knew-that-would-happen tone of some of it, it´s very hard to ignore the known future when writing about the past (hmm, there´s something very Prime Directive-ish about that statement...).

Day ?, La Paz, Bolivia, Altitude Xm

Leaving San Pedro (not in a box). Not a hard thing to decide to do after the bad bad bad day I had had. So I paid my money for the Salar tour to Bolivia, by chance the last space available, and got an early night in the hope of better days ahead. The new day dawned and things immediately looked up. In a now familiar happening, while waiting to leave for the tour in what passed for the hotels guest lounge (a couple of picnic tables under an awning), another guest turned up and asked if I was also on the Colque Tours Salar tour. This was Elke, from Belgium, on holiday for a month through Chile, Bolivia and Peru, so we set off for the tour office together (changing hotels, best $200 I ever lost?). At the office, we met up with a Dutch couple, Simon and Ellen, whom I had met 2 days before on the Valley of the Moon tour, and whom Elke had also met previously in Santiago. And we would be sharing a 4x4 for the next 3 days. Small world, huh? So was born the "Four Amigos". Or something like that, at any rate.

We piled into a bus with the 8 other people on our 3 day tour, and set off for the Bolivian border. After a long climb from some 2300m at San Pedro up to the Bolivian border post at 4400m (I read somewhere the highest point of the border pass was 4800m, but I have no confirmation of this), in the shadow of the 5960m Volcan Lincancabur, we collected our new stamp, and discovered the joys of altitude. I walked a mere 20m to take a photo of the border sign, and was breathless by the time I got back to the bus. A short 5 minute drive brought us to Laguna Blanca, a small white lake with an almost perfect reflection or the surrounding mountains, thanks to the salt. It was here that we swapped over into the 6 seater 4x4´s we would be using for the rest of the tour. Obviously, the Four Amigos decided to stick together, and with the addition of Toby and (I´m sorry, I´ve forgotten your name!!! I blame the altitude...), a couple from England, had what turned out to be the good fortune of choosing Ambrosio as our Tour Guide, Driver and Cook, all rolled into one. Ambrosio didn´t speak a word of English, but Elke speaks excellent Spanish, English, Dutch, French and German, so we had a ready made translator for his copious explanations. The driver in the other 4x4, by contrast, was very new to the job and barely spoke a word to his group, we had to end up filling them in on what they had seen each day :-)

After a basic breakfast of stale bread and much welcomed coca leaf tea (yes, THAT coca leaf, just in a legal, beneficial form...), we were off to explore the surreal and desolate scenery of the high Altiplano. First stop was the aquamarine Laguna Verde at 4350m, followed by an area know as the Desirto Dali and the Roces Dali, a desolate area littered with rocks straight out of a Salvador Dali painting (which lead to much speculation as to whether he had been here or not). From there it was on to Lagunas Polques at 4350m for lunch, where the guides jumped into the 30 degree sulpher pool for a quick swim. With an air temperature down around 10 degrees, no Gringos followed...

After lunch, I claimed my turn in the front seat for the ride onwards to El Sol de Manana, a geothermal area of geysers and mud pools at the absurdly high 4950m. Looking and smelling just like Rotorua in good old NZ, it was here that I first started to feel the effects of the dreaded Soroche, aka Acute Mountain Sickness. Impressive name, but common as anything, most travellers get it when first reaching altitude, and it´s just a matter of time to allow your body to adjust to the lack of oxygen. Symptoms are mainly lethergy, shortness of breath, and headaches, but more serious symptoms like vomiting and coughing up blood indicate a turn for the worse. The next few hours passed in a dozy haze, including the Laguna Colarada, a usually bright red lake filled with flamingos. I´m not sure, but I think it was, but then I could barely be bothered to get out of the 4x4, let alone appreciate the scenery :-) It was a relief to finally reach our hotel for the night in a small village called Villamar, a mere 3900m high. I say a hotel, but it barely qualifies for the term. "Four Mud Walls with Roof" would be a better description, and my first introduction to the local "flush-it-with-a-bucket" style plumbing. Still, we had a decent dinner, with coca tea, and headache tablets, and who cared what the place looked like when I felt like never waking up again.

But wake I did (big surprise that), slightly better, but still pretty zonked, my sinuses clearly not liking the altitude. A short drive from the village, we stopped to explore the small Valle de Rocas Villamo, containing some pre-Incan Quecha ruins, thought to be at least 1000 years old. These tiny slate huts (about a meter tall and half a meter in diameter) would not fit your average Gringo, even the modern locals are too tall, with the original inhabitants having crawled in through a 20x20cm window, and slept in a squatting position: there was room for northing else. There was also a large communal area surrounded by a defensive wall, and hundreds of fist sized stones left over from when the defensives had last been overrun by the unfriendly neighbours. From there it was on to the Cuidad Italia Fantastico, another valley with fantastic rock formations, and said by Ambrosio to be haunted at night. The rocks proved to be too alluring for one Israeli from the other 4x4, he climbed one rock only to decide he couldn´t get down again. The half hour delay in talking him down caused our program for the day to be shortened. Our lunch stop was at the Laguna Vinta, the last lake and flamingos we would see, and indeed this time I do remember seeing them, after venturing out too far and starting to sink into the mud. After lunch, we skipped another set of ruins in favour of the Canon de Rocas de Villa, a small but impressive canyon, and one of the better sights so far. By this time, my body was starting to play ball and I actually had the energy to notice the hordes of llamas at the Quebrada Desorza before we arrived at our next night stop, the town of San Augustin at 3700m.

In a fit of energy, we decided to use the last hour of light to walk around the town and try to connect with the locals. Initial efforts were in vain with bowler-hatted mothers hustling their children inside at the sight of the Gringos and their cameras. After a bit of wandering, however, we stumbled across the sports field, where the high school´s girls team was practising soccer and basketball. After watching for a little while, and chatting to the girls, Elke decided it would be fun if the 3 Gringos Boys took on the Local Girls in a quick game of basketball. Hey, sure, why not, we´re taller than them, have longer reach, we´re guys, no worries. Altitude? No problem. So with 2 local girls as ring-ins, the game began. With stringbean Simon taking the first rebound under the hoop, the ball came to me, and in my best Michael Jordan impersonation, I ran the lanes inside one, outside another, switching ball from hand to hand, stopped, double pumped, spun around the wall, a thing of beauty and grace (amazing, I actually kept control of the ball!), then went for the lay-up, only to discover that my legs wouldn´t comply, my arms were lead, and my lungs were lying about 10 meters back on the court. In the time it took me, Simon and Toby to recover from the single run down court and get back on D, the locals had already scored twice. So the game progressed for 10 minutes, us dazzelling with our flashy skills, the girls sitting back and waiting for our lungs to run out and hitting back before we got to even catch our breaths. It was a massacre. Their coach mercifully put us out of our misery and we crawled to the bench, the taste of blood in my lungs, probably the hardest physical effort I have ever felt. Now I know why athletes train at altitude. After what felt like an hour of heavy breathing to recover, we retired to our hotel for dinner.

After dinner, Ambrosio told us of a variety concert being put on for the locals, so we wandered down for a look at the traditional dancing and singing. This time, the locals were friendly and waving, wanting to say hello to these Gringos who had been beaten so badly by their girls. Contact made. The concert itself was, well, insightful, if not exactly entertaining. It apparently doubled as auditions for the local Teachers College, so we got the full run of unharmonious singing, incomprehensible comedy skits, and some of the portliest dancing girls ever seen on a world stage. Of more interest was watching the locals in the audience, their traditional dress, behaviour and reaction to the concert and the Gringos in their midst.

The final day of the tour was the jewel in the crown: The Salar Uyani, 12,000 km2 of blindingly white salt flat at an altitude of 3653m. The salar is the worlds largest reserve of lithium, only problem is it´s buried under some 30 meters of salt, so no-one can be bothered digging it up. We drove for a couple of hours into the centre of the flat, the hallucinatory effect shimmering away and robbing us of all sense of distance or perspective. Eventually, we reached an "island" called Incahuasi, a lump of land pushing up through the salt, and populated with thousands of cactii, where we had our lunch. Another hour or so on from the island, we came across the Hotel del Sal and the Palacio del Sal, 2 hotels built almost entirely of salt, even the beds! Another hour saw us at the salt mining villages along the edge of the salar, then all too soon the tour was over at 4pm in the frontier town of Uyani. First stop was a hotel and a hot shower, then a chance to explore the town, and work out a mutual escape plan north, as there was no reason for staying in Uyani 1 minute longer than forced to. After one look at the buses that were on offer, we voted for the train. Now, there´s 2 types of train out of Uyani, the luxury Gringo express train, and the not-so-luxurious local all-stops train, each running twice a week. The Gringo train was due to leave the following night, but, you guessed it, was already booked out. Leaving us with the local 2nd class train, the Warri Warri del Sur. In 2nd class. Leaving at 1:30am the next morning. But at least it wasn´t 3rd class, right???

So, a hurried dinner, and back to the hotel for a couple of hours sleep before arriving at the station at the required midnight check-in time. From here, the fun really began. In amongst the locals in the waiting room were also a fair number of Gringos, curled up in their sleeping bags as protection from the 0 degree night. We found a corner and waited. And waited. By 1am, news came that the train might be an hour late. By 1:30, it was looking like 2 hours late. At about this stage the Bolivian police decided to drop by. Seeing all the Gringos lying around the waiting room, they decided it was a health risk, and opened all the doors to let some fresh air in, exposing us to the freezing night air, and refusing to let us close them. Neither would they let us onto our carriage which was sat on the side railing awaiting the coming train. The only warm spot left was the cafeteria which had been empty up to then, and to which we all reluctantly adjorned to buy coffees and play cards. Coincidence? We didn´t think so. Finally at 3:30am, the train rumbled into the station, we tossed our bags into the guards carriage, and jumped our carriage at the very end of the train. While the seats were reasonably comfortable, and actually reclined, the heating didn´t work, so the next few hours were fitful sleep as the train lurched from one stop to the next. Once the sun was up, all hope of sleep was gone and we watched the barren, flat landscape roll by (except Elke who has that remarkable talent of sleeping anywhere, anytime), stopping every half hour at barely-existant stations without a town to be seen.

Finally, at about 11am, we reached the end of the line at Oruru, a small city where the Bolivian flag was first raised in the revolution against the Spanish. There´s not much to report on Oruru, it´s not a tourist destination, and most Gringos jump the first bus to La Paz. We chose to stay the night, to get a feel for what a real Bolivian town was like. Busy, noisy, smelly, and caring not a jot for us Gringos. Not bad, really. Then it was onto a bus to La Paz, capital of Bolivia. Arriving at La Paz is one of those jaw-dropping, Oh-My-Gawd moments: after several kilometers of shanty towns spread across a wide plain, suddenly a chasm appears, as if God had swung as axe and split the plain into two, and the city had tumbled down the steep valley sides to cover every available inch of ground. The descent into the valley is spectacular, the city chaotic, the experience exhilerating. This is a real Soth American city, populated with real South Americans, so very, very different to the European population and sensibilities I had found in Chile.

We spent a lot of time just wandering around the city, soaking up the atmosphere, visiting the markets, watching the locals, getting a real feel for the place. We spent a day visiting the ruins at Tiwanaku, a huge complex of pre-Incan temples. Rather than take an expensive organised tour, we choose to use local minibus transport. This almost backfired on the return journey to La Paz when we were almost caught in the middle of a full-blown minibus war. Our minibus was fairly peppy, so overtook another minibus along the road, then promptly stopped to pick up another fare from the roadside. The driver we overtook objected to this, thinking the fare was his, so cut our minibus off, preventing us from moving back onto the road. No problem, our driver tried to go around him by inching down the side of the raised causeway. The other driver moved to block our escape, and within seconds we were on the verge of toppling over the 5m drop. About this time, the Bolivian ladies riding at the front started to wail and yell that we were about to die and to let us all out, and the drivers were yelling at each other and things looked real bad from our seats trapped right at the back. Eventually, common sense prevailed, the other guy drove off and we thought it was all over. Nope. We eventually caught up with the other minibus, and in overtaking it, our driver thought it would be a good idea to make a side-swipe at the other guy and try force him off the road instead. Luckily he missed, and we eventually pulled away, with me nervously glancing over my shoulder the whole way back to La Paz in case he returned, Freddy Kruger style, to take his revenge.

The following day, Elke and I visited the Valle del Luna, an area of Badlands just outside of the city, with bizarre formations erroded out of the canyon walls, before visiting some local museums. The most interesting, if not very spectacular, was the museum commemerating Bolivias loss to Chile of it´s Pacific coastline and ports in the War of the Littoral. This is still a very real grievance to the Bolivians, 125 years on, and Chileans find it very hard to do business in Bolivia as a result. The central feature of the museum was the Map Room, where they had collected virtually every map ever published showing the Littoral as part of Bolivia. We also found it slightly incomprehensible that that could commemerate as "heroes" the generals that lost the war so badly!

La Paz was a city we had really come to like, so it was really disappointing to have to leave it, but our next destination was Copacabana, Lake Titicaca, and the Isla del Sol.

Day 58 - Cuzco, Peru - Altitude 3400m

Here I am, back in Cuzco, chilling for a few days after having completed the Inca Trail and seen Machu Picchu, an absolutely fabulous experience. After that, everything else can only feel like an anti-climax. I´m now countling down the days to leaving South America, officially 16 days to go, but I can only seem to find enough to do to fill in 10 of them :-) Then it´s on to Miami Beach for a week on the beach (as well as some real coffee, real newspapers and real toilets!), before hitting Mexico and Central America for 60 days.

So, Cuzco, tourist mecca, and gateway to the Incan world. Elke and I spent 2 days having a look around and preparing for the Inca Trail after arriving from Puno. A chunk of that time was spent looking for the right agency to do the trail with. We eventually choose one of the more expensive agencies, which promised a small group of 6 or less people, instead of 16-20, and a better standard of treatment for the porters who carry almost everything for you. After that, we walked around the various sights, climbed a few hills for the view, sat around in the main square people-watching, and ate rather too well (stiff competition has lead to tourist menus of about US$3 for a 3 course meal, even if some do push you through in less than 15 minutes!). I really do like Cuzco, in spite of the touts. Once you´re away from the main square and Gringo Alley, the hassles die down and you can enjoy the atmosphere of the place. Everywhere you go, you see Colonial buildings built on top of the old Incan walls, the Incan walls being carefully fitted stone with no morter, the Spanish Colonial being rough stonework with morter. Whenever there´s an earthquake, it´s the Colonial masonry that fails, the Incan remains as strong as the day it was built.

Finally Inca Trail day dawned, but not until a nights frantic packing had passed. We had decided to hire a porter to carry our personal gear, and the new regulations set a limit of 18kg that we could give to him. We initially choose what we needed and put them in our packs, but weighing them on the hotels laundrey scales showed we were way over weight, even after throwing out absolutely everything we didn´t need (clean underwear, who needs it?). In a stroke of genius (even if i must say so myself), I realised our packs weighed 3-4kg each, almost half our allowance, so we chucked those, and put our gear into those plastic type carry bags all the local woman use, that we had originally brought to store the stuff we were not taking with us. Result: weight limit reached after 3 hours of stressing out (as it turned out, we could have taken more, the hotel scales must have been rigged!). This left us to only carry our daypacks with essentials like water, chocolate and toilet paper!

We were up at 4am the next morning to be picked up at 5am to start the trail, but without a shower, the promised 24 hours hot water apparently meant some other 24 hours. After a 2.5 hour minibus ride, we reached Piskakúchu, the tiny village literally at the end of the road: from here, it was a 38km walk over 4 days reach Macchu Picchu. That might not sound like far, but an important chunk of that is steep uphill, as you will hear. (You will have to excuse the vaugeness of some of the distances and times I give, my map is none too accurate, and my memory was rather fatigued at the time. I´m sure Elke, having been smart enough to write it all down as we went, will correct me where I´m wrong :-).

Our companions on the journey turned out to be only 2 other Gringo´s, Annie and Beth from San Francisco, our guide Jorge, our 7 porters, and most importantly, the cook. So, 4 tourists with 9 people to support them for 4 days. This is not your usual Kiwi style DIY trekking. Each morning, we would be woken at 6am with Coca tea, breakfast was served at 6:30am, and we would aim to leave by 7am. The porters would then pack everything up, race ahead of us, set up for morning tea at about 10:30, race ahead again for lunch around 12:30pm, before finally racing ahead to the campsite to set up our tents ready for our arrival. Afternoon tea followed at 5pm, with dinner at 7pm, and bed sometime around 8:30pm. The food the cook could whip up on just two gas rings (pity the poor porter who carried the gas bottle) was just incredible, it easily beat some of the restaurants we ate at in Cuzco. Treats included popcorn, won-tons, french toast and yummy salads. Along the way, industrious locals set up stalls selling water and chocolate to the desperate Gringos, and beer to the exhausted porters, all of it carried in along the trail. The porters have to be some of the hardest workers on the planet, flying along the trails at break-neck speed in spite of their heavy loads, and still with enough energy to serve us along the way, well deserving the healthy wages and tips that make them better paid than some professionals in Cuzco.

Anyway, onto the walk itself. The first day was to be the easiest, a 12km, 4.5 hour relative stroll along a gradually rising trail to a height of 2750m at the first campsite at Wayllabamba. Unfortuatey, Annie had had a bad experience the night before with a Cuzco restaurant, and had a tough day of it fighting off food poisoning. Along the way, we passed the Incan ruins at Llactapapa, a guardpost village defending the entrance to the two valleys that lead to Macchu Picchu, viewing it from above on the trail. We reached our campsite only half an hour after our lunch, thanks to the early start, and spent an afternoon of relaxing, before an early night in anticipation of the dreaded Day 2.

Day 2. The infamous Day 2. The killer uphill. Dead Womans Pass. A 1200m climb over only a few kilometers to 4200m, reputed to take some people a whole day to complete. After a few fairly easy km´s gently climbing an additional 250m, the hard stuff begins. Elke and I set ourselves an easy pace, figuring on a tortise strategy as oppossed to the hare option taken by some other groups. As the climb progressed, we slowly overhauled the hares, some of whom had to resort to the oxygen bottles, and after only about 3 hours climbling (broken by a tea break), made the summit among the first climbers, with it´s stunning view back down the valley. Shortly after, the weather closed in and the view was all but gone. We were mightily impressed with ourselves, but knew that it was the 2 weeks conditioning at altitude and not carrying full packs that were the reasons, not our personal levels of fitness or ability, which were, let´s face it, not exactly steller. After a million photo´s of other people struggling up the trail and of the view back down the valley, it was an equally steep 900m downhill drop for an hour on rock steps (ouch, my knees!) leading to our campsite at Paqaymayu and a well deserved late lunch. The less fortunate groups had been allocated another campsite over the 2nd pass, a further 3 hours walking, which we fortunatey could leave for the following day after a heavy nights sleep.

Day 3 was to be our longest day, taking until 4:30pm to complete, and covering some 18km´s over the second and third passes, but including some of the best scenery and ruins along the way. First there was the second pass to conquor, a 700m steep climb to 4000m. The climb was not as long as the previous day, but it was steeper, and along an original Inca Trail of rock steps. Halfway up was the Incan ruin of Runkurakay, a guardpost to keep out the commoners from the sacred trail we were now following. Its view back down the valley to our campsite was also stunning. After a 2 hour climb, we made the summit, and quickly set off down-stairs again, pausing at the Incan ruins of Sayqmarka, a suspected ceramonial site due to its ritual baths and fine stonework. By this stage, we were hating the downhills more than the up, with our knees taking the jarring impact on every step. Soon the path levelled for a while, before slowly climbing to the third pass at 3700m. The scenery along here was truely stunning, the trail passing among the cloud forest with its varied plants and birdlife, with precipitous drop-offs to the river valley far below, and the occasional Inca tunnel to be passed through. Finally we reached our late lunch just after the third pass at Phuyupatamarka, another ceremonial Incan ruin with a view down the valley to Macchu Picchu mountain. While the Machu Picchu ruins were on the other side of the mountain, we could feel the excitement now of almost being there. With the weather starting to close in again, we cut lunch short and took off ahead of the crowd to the final campsite, detouring off the main route to take in the Incan terraces at Winaywayna, before being amongst the first to arrive at Intipata, the final campsite, the first where all 20 groups allowed on the trail each day camp together. As a result it´s a big, noisy place, but had the first hot showers we´d seen for 3 days, and a welcoming bar.

Finally, it was day 4, with a short 1.5 hour sprint to be the first to Machu Picchu. Being the smallest group, we were out on the trail first at 5am, but were soon overtaken by some very rude Flying Dutchmen, determined to be the first there. After pushing their way past, they were indeed first to the Gate of the Sun, high above the ruins, but we were only 5 minutes behind, and there well before the sunrise, the main purpose for getting there so early. That first view of the ruins, serenely nestled below you on the ridge between Machu Picchu and Huayna Picchu, waiting for the sunrise, is breathtaking, but you´re intitially surprised by how small it looks. We were incrediably lucky, at this time of year you only have a 10% chance of a clear morning, and we had struck a near perfect one. The Dutch soon got bored and left, leaving us the best seats in the house to comtemplate the view, but not for long. By the time the first rays of the sun were hitting the ruins, a noisy, pushy crowd of up to a hundred other trekkers had joined us, spoiling the serenity we had initially enjoyed.

We were soon on our way down the mountain to the ruins themselves. How can I describe the feeling? Certainly, it´s second only to the Pyramids for the awe at finally being there after so many years of dreaming about it. An incredible sense of achievment to have survived the trail so well, and massive respect for the Incas at such a remarkable feat of building in such a precarious position. Machu Picchu may not be the most impressive set of ruins per se, but the location is unbeatable and without equal in my experience. To look down the two steep sides into the river valleys far below, and up the other two sides to the massive peaks, you cannot fail to be impressed.

We spent 2 hours being guided around the ruins in splendid sunshine with Jorge providing excellent commentry, before the first of the day tourists started arriving to overrun the site. We then had the choice of more exploring of the crowded ruins, or climbing the incrediably steep Huayna Picchu mountain with its renowned views. After some arm-twisting by Elke, and over my tired body´s protests, the two of us set off on the hours climb. Believe me, this made day 2 look like the Uyanai salt flats, some of the Incan steps being a mere 5 centimeters wide with a 20 centimeter rise, other rocky parts being a case of "grab the rope and hope". Eventually we reached the top with it´s truely fabulous view, and scarily steep falloff, but had to soon turn back to make it down in time for our lunch and return to Cuzo. Nearing the bottom, the weather closed in, yet again with near perfect timing after we had seen what we wanted.

We lunched in Aguas Calientes, the small and very expensive tourist town servicing the ruins, before catching the "Backpacker Special" train for the 5 hour ride back to Cuzco. For US$25, you´d think the seats might at least have been comfortable, but any ideas of catching up on that mornings lost sleep was entirely in vain. We arrived back in Cuzco, had a quick shower and a very late celebratory dinner before a well deserved sleep. Unfortunately for Elke, it was short lived sleep, as she was up at 5am the next morning to catch her flight to Lima, then home to Belgium, poor thing. Which leaves me all alone again, with no-one to talk to and, worse yet, without a very competant Spanish translator. Now it´s back to lots of sign language and "No entiendo!" :-) Miss you already, Elke! Sure you won´t change your mind and carry on travelling??? Anyway, see you in Belgium next year.

So, was it worth blowing the budget for? You betcha! It´s the memory of a lifetime, and pretty damn close to the best thing I´ve ever done. Yep, it´s that good. I would have liked to stay on for another day to really get to grips with the ruins, but it leaves me with a reason to return some day, and I´d happily walk the whole damn trail again to see it. Simply unmissable.

Day 50 - Cuzco, Peru - Altitude 3400m

Wow, it's Day 50 today, hard to think I've been on the road that long already (altough some days it feels like forever). Then again, when I have another 200 or so days planned to go, it's not really that many now is it? Tonight there will a suitibly muted celebration, given that I start the Inca Trail the day after tomorrow.

So, it's now Cuzco, Peru, an beautiful colonial city built on the Inca ruins, but over-run with tourists and the resulting touts. You couldn't get a greater contrast to Bolivia, where the people usually ignored you, and certainly didn't bother learning to speak English, French and German so they could hassle you in 4 or more languages:

"Postcards, Senor?"

"No, Gracias"

"Cigarettes, Senor?"

"No, Gracias"

"Breakfast, Senor?"

"No, Gracias"

"Inca Trail, Senor?"

"NO, GRACIAS!!!"

If you ever come here, have a sign made up first, you'll save your vocal cords from irreperable harm :-)

But first, a return to Copacabana. Elke and I caught the slow chug-chug tourist boat out to the Isla del Sol at 8:30am, into a stiff breeze and slight chop, arriving almost 2 hours later at the southern end of the island where we got off to find ourselves a hotel. After climbing the ancient Inca Steps from the boat landing, we made a wrong turn somewhere, but some friendly locals soon re-directed us to the small village where we choose a hotel on the top of the ridge, in the hope of a great view of the sunset. After dumping our gear, we set off to walk the circuit of the island in brilliant sunshine. The circuit heads north from the village along the ridgeline of the island, giving wonderful views down and off to each side and over Lake Titicaca. After about 3 hours walking, we reached the north end of the island, where we looked around the Inca ruins where the first Inca was said to have risen from the waters of Lake Titicaca.

About a half hours walk back along the east coast of the island we found a small restaurant (well, someones back yard, really, with a few tables set up) for a quick lunch, before setting off for the return trip down the coastline. Well, it was supposed to be the coastline, but after about an hour, we became very aware that we were nowhere near where we should be, instead being halfway between the coast and he ridgeline, climbing an ever steepening trail. Now, we weren't lost, far from it on an island that size, just not where we wanted to be. If anyone from the Bolivian Tourist Board happens to be reading: Signposts Please!!!! Eventually, we re-joined the ridgeline trail and reached our hotel after a couple of hours, just as the dark clouds rolled in overhead, putting to rest any hopes of a great sunset. Instead, we had to settle for the full moon rise over the Isla del Luna (Island of the Moon), not a bad end result. The Isla is a wonderfully serene and beautiful place, I would loved to have stayed longer, and I highly recommend it. Just go in low season to avoid the swarms of tourists it usually suffers from.

The following morning we were up early to get back to the harbour to try catch the first boat back to Copa, so we could make our bus to Peru. After a protracted series of negotiations consisting of the boat skipper walking over to us, quoting an inflated price, and our turning him down, he finally offered the normal price literally as he was casting off. The trip back was very serene in the sun with no wind. Elke took the opportunity to give some quick Dutch lessons to a local tour guide who had a Flemish group he was guiding and wanted to impress. Then it was onto the bus, and across the border into Peru, another stamp, and 3 hours later an overnight stop in Puno. Here the well-oiled Peruvian tourist industry snapped into action, with the bus steward making himself commission by herding us gringos onto a free transfer to a local hotel, selling us tickets for our bus trip the next day, and arranging to pick us up from our hotel the next morning to take us to the bus. We didn't have to do a thing, other than hand over the money and worry that we were getting ripped off. We weren't. Watch out for this guy, he can really hussle, but he delivers the goods, and one day will probably run the entire industry :-)

The bus from Puno to Cuzco started out well enough, a half dozen gringos on a flash double decker, but a few towns later the locals started piling on, complete with masses of bags, children, and various hard to describe but almost unbearable smells. After about 8 hours we finally reached Cuzco, where we had another close call with the Tourism Industry, but managed to escape the clutches of the waiting touts and find our own hotel, located only one block back from the central plaza. Cuzco really is a remarkable city, with much to been seen from walking around or just sitting in the Plaza and watching the world go by. It's a real collision of Ancient Inca, Colonial Spanish, and Modern Tourism. Take away the touts, and it's a place I can really like. I'll tell you more once I get back from the Inca Trail and Macchu Picchu. Now, where's that party???

Day 46 - Copacabana, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia - Altitude 3820m

"Here at the Co-pa, Co-pa-ca-baaa-naaa...."

Come on, everyone, all together now!

"There´ll be music and dancing and fun and...."

What´s that Mr Manilow, wrong Copacabana? But what about that beach I lay on in the sun for a couple hours today, working on my high-altitude tan, surely that was THE famous Copacabana Beach? No? OK, so it was made up of pebbles, the lapping waves were from the less than tropical Lake Titicaca, and there were no Brazilian Babes in Bikinis (just Bolivians in Bowlers), but the sun was shining and I did get to roll up my pants and go for a paddle, surely that counts for something?

Copacabana is a small town on the shore of Lake Titicaca, which has been the center of pilgramges for centuries. First the early Amayra Indians came here to where they believed the world was created, later the Incas came to worship at the Isla del Sol, where they believed the first Inca arose. Later, good Catholics came to venerate the statue of the Virgin (and still do), and now the Gringos come in their hordes to enjoy the beauty and serenity of the Isla del Sol and Lake Titicaca. At the centre of the town is the cathedral with its famous statue of the Virgin, patron of Bolivia.

When we arrived here this morning, we were greeted with the sight of dozens of cars, buses, taxis and trucks lined up in front of the cathedral for the traditional cha´lla (blessing), in which the owner of a car dresses it up with flowers and feathers and has it blessed on the hood, engine and tires with beer (for the less well off) or cheap champagne. They ask for the protection of the Virgin for their coming journeys, a wise course of action given the driving habits of most Bolivianos. Bus companies have been know to send entire fleets of new buses to Copa just for this. Afterwards, they all parade down to the beach for family picnics and a paddle.

Overlooking the town is the Cerro Calvario (Calvery Hill), a very steep half hour climb up past the stations of the cross to the large cross and altar at the top with a magnificent view over Copa, Titicaca, and out to the Isla. Pilgrams climb the hill to make offerings to the Virgin and consult traditional fortune tellers. We Gringos come to appreciate the view as the sun goes down, and it is worth the effort. It´s also good training for the Inca Trail :-)

At lunch today, we said goodbye to Ellen and Simon, who went off to the Isla del Sol this afternoon, and are then returning to Chile before heading home. I´m going to miss them, having been a constant source of excellent entertainment, conversation and company. See you guys in Belgium next year! (Yes, plan variation no. 327, Belgium has now been added to the itinerary). Elke and I plan to catch the boat to the Isla tomorrow morning, walk around it for about 5 -6 hours, stay the night, then return to Copa and catch a bus on to Peru. Wow, those countries are starting to just fly past!

For the hard-core travellers out there, try to beat this one. Bed in a secure twin share room for one night with shared hot showers: US$1.25. OK, so the toilets lacked seats and you had to bail the water into the loo yourself, and the beds were made of some compound harder than iron, but just imagine, US$1.25 for a hotel for the night! I used to spend more than that on my morning coffee!!! Man, is this one cheap country to travel in, I´m well under the US$25 I budgeted, more like US$20, and that´s with eating out 3 meals a day at restaurants and taking the "luxury" buses. I think I´m eatng better here than I did at home for the last few years!

(Yes, yes, the missing San Pedro to La Paz section is coming, soon, I promise...)

Day ??? - La Paz, Bolivia

Apologies for the lack of an update, I`m just having way too much fun, and have had no time at all to write anything up. I`ll start drafting something now, and post it in a couple more days....

Day 38 - San Pedro de Atacama, Chile

(Written on Day 38, posted 3 days later due to technical difficulties! Now in Uyani, >Bolivia, details to come tomorrow.)

These last few days have reminded me of that corny old
song lyric that "Life Is A Rollercoaster", because
I´ve well and truely been riding it the last few days.
So there I was in Santiago, waiting for my flight
north to Calama, just chillin´ at the hostel and
enjoying the company, when someone mentions that the
Red Hot Chili Peppers are playing that night. Cue
mass exodus to the ticket office for the bargain of a
lifetime, and later that night 14 of us Gringos were
off to see the Chilis in Chile. Kinda cool, huh?
Anyway, great concert, nothing beats singing along to
"Under The Bridge" with 50,000 others in a football
stadium, but after that peak, the rollercoaster took
it´s first downward plunge. In the crush for the
buses afterwards, I suddenly realised that the old guy
trying to push in ahead of me was definately not in
the demographic, and glancing down saw my velcro
trouser pocket was open. Sure enough, he had lifted
10,000 pesos (US$13) from my pocket (the only cash I
had dared bring with me), and worse yet, my ticket
stub! Now I can´t even prove I was there! While no
great loss, it was a bit of a wake-up call, especially
with the harder countries coming up.

With that lesson under my belt, and only 4 hours
sleep, it was up at 5am the next day to catch my
flight north to Calama. Calama is the main town serving the
Atacama region, and it´s main claim to fame is that it
has never rained there in recorded history. Calama
though was just a passing through point on my way to
San Pedro de Atacama, a backpackers paradise in the
middle of the Atacama desert, the driest in the world,
and gateway to the Atacama salt pans, the worlds
largest source of lithium (God, I sound like a guide
book!). With fresh warnings ringing in my ears from a
girl who had had her pack stolen while trying to catch
the bus to San Pedro, I caught the interminably slow
service that decended, no, crawled down the long straight
road into the salt pan. The driver was well advised
to take it careful, the abundant wrecks, crosses and
shrines were testament to those whose brakes had
failed the steep downhill.

The population here is only about 2800, boosted by the
hundreds of backpackers who flock here for the surreal
landscapes and laid-back atmosphere. The town is
almost entirely constructed of adobe mud brick, the
electricity is prone to dropping out, and water is a
scarcity. A large proportion of the population is
indigenous Indian, a change from the majority Spanish
Chileans I´ve become accustomed to, and not all of
them appreciate all these gringos invading their town.
The weather is another attraction, it´s 25-30 degrees
at the moment, with less than 20% humidity, a huge
contrast to the 5 degrees I had to cope with less than
a week ago! I have even been able to dig out my
sandles for the first time.

On arrival, I picked the first hostal I could find,
and tried to catch up on my sleep. Later in the
afternoon, I caught a tour to the Valles de Martes and
Lunes. As the names suggest, these valleys look just
like Mars and the Moon, with fractured red pancake
rocks and white salt mixed in various proportions with
sand dunes and volcanic cones. The tour ended with
sunset watched from atop a giant sand dune, giving a
fabulous view of the last rays of the sun setting fire
to the red landscapes. Another peak for the
rollercoaster, but the biggest dip yet lay ahead.

This morning, I checked out of the hostel and moved to
a better one, mostly because I wanted a decent shower.
As I was checking into the new hostel, I realised I
must have left my ticket wallet, containing my plane
tickets, one of my passports, and some of my US
dollars and travellers cheques at the old hostel, and
with a sinking stomach quickly ran back to hopefully
fetch it. The hostel manager was waiting for me when
I got there, and had found the wallet under the bed
where it must have fallen while I was packing. I
quickly flicked through it, and everything seemed
intact, so I left, thanking her profusely. It was
only when I got back to the other hostel that I did a
careful count of everything in the wallet, and found
US$200, secreted in-between 25 US$1 notes, was
missing. I wouldn´t have minded a $10 or $20 finders
fee, but $200 is a real blow, that´s a whole weeks
travelling funds. And there´s no comeback, it´s a
staright case of some gringo says one thing, a local
says another, the police can´t do anything and forget
about claiming it on insurance. Obviously, it was my
own stupidity that caused it, but it´s still a blow to
the confidence and the enjoyment. Added to a bad
nights sleep due to my sinuses playing up and a
bleeding nose, it completely ruined today for me, all
I´ve done is try to sleep, send e-mails, and curse
myself.

Well, hopefully tomorrow starts off better. I´m
catching a 3 day tour over the border into Bolivia,
and up through the Uyani salt flats to Uyani itself.
It´s a desolate region, no net access for sure, so
I´ll see you all on the other side (intact, I hope),
with my impressions and a summary of what I thought of
Chile (once today stops clouding my judegement).

Stay safe.

Day 35 - Santiago, Chile

You will notice from the header that I´m not in Ushuaia, the southern-most city in the world, but back in Santiago. As it turned out, the earliest I could get a seat to Ushuaia would have been today, and that would have been going the long way with a change of bus and an overnight stay on the way. The shorter, quicker route wasn´t available until Wednesday. No way was I hanging around in Punta Arenas that long, and it would have cut too much into my travelling time up north, so I legged it to the airport at 6am on the Sunday morning on the off-chance there was a spare seat on the plane. There was, and now here I am. The good part is that I´ve now had two days to organise stuff, like changing my flights, posting unwanted junk home, buying new trousers to replace the pair I wrecked in Torres, and developing my photo´s, and I´m still on schedule.

My flight out from Santiago is still on the 10th, but now going to Calama instead of Arica, from where I head into the Atacama desert and on to Bolivia. My flight out from South America now goes from Lima in Peru, and is booked for about the 20th of November, 2 weeks earlier than originally planned. The 2 weeks saved from not going to Ecuador now gets allocated to seeing Mexico in more depth, with a couple of days stop-over in Miami in-between. I can amost taste that real coffee now....

First time I was here in Santiago, I hated the place, but this time it doesn´t seem so bad. It probably has something to do with the weather being fine, sunny and 20 to 25 degrees, a welcome change from the 5 degrees and rain of the deep south, but I guess it also has something to do with being used to South America now. I´ve spent a bit of time actually sight-seeing the last couple of days, and there are some nice old buildings gently crumbling into the ground, leafy open squares, and interesting little markets to poke around. I´ve also been introduced to stike action, Chilean style. Some of the bank and health workers are on strike at the moment, and they´ve set up pickets outside their companies headquarters, where they spend the whole day blowing whistles, banging drums, sounding sirens, blasti ngtrumpets, and throwing confetti into the air all to a Samba beat, and generally stopping anyone inside from being able to work! A lot of fun to watch, but hard on the old ears :-)

Well, I mentioned I´d developed my photo´s, and I scanned some of them in, so if you´re at all interested, go have a look at my South American page to see what I´ve been up to.

Oh, I must tell you about Punta Arenas. It´s a plesant enough town, standard Chilean place really, nice square, trees, old houses, friendly people, etc. I was there with an Aussie called Ben, and we picked a hostel at random from the Lonely Planet, and ended up in a total dive. If the walls were any more crooked, they´d be sent to jail. The beds sloped downhill, and I didn´t dare use the bathroom. But for only US$4, we couldn´t complain, and decided to blow what we´d saved on normal accomodation on a decent dinner. We turned up at the LP´s recommended restaurant for some local cuisine, and found Guaynaco steak (a cousin of the llama) and Roast Beaver on the menu. It would have been an interesting treat, but it was way beyond my budget (sorry, Ben!). Instead we ended up at a diner frequented by the locals, where the waitress had to explain the menu to us Gringos using sign language and animal noises: I´ll never forget her pig impersonation!!!

Day 32 - Puerto Natales, Chile

Here I am in Punte Arenas, supposedly just passing through on my way to Ushuaia, but the bus that I was told would be going tomorrow morning appears not to exist :-) So it looks like I´m trapped here for a day or two, trapped being the right word as it´s after 1pm on Saturday, and virtually everything here closes until Monday 8am. Bugger. If I can´t get Mondays bus, then I´ll have to skip Ushuaia, and return to Santiago a few days early.

Last entry I said I was planning to do a day trip to the Moreno Glacier over in Argentina. Well, I asked the hostel owner to book me on the trip, but she misheard me and booked me on the Sorreno Glacier trip instead. So what´s the difference? One of the world´s biggest and most spectacular glaciers versus a day spent on a converted fishing boat putting to and from a tiny creek of ice, surrounded by retirees waiting to die. Well, OK, it wasn´t THAT bad, but you get the picture, it was a little dissapointing after what I was expecting. I did meet some nice American and German ladies with Phd´s on their way to a conference (who made for great dinner conversation), and some very entertaining Indian couples from Bombay enjoying their post-retirement freedom, but I did feel very outside my demographic... Guess I´ll have to leave the Moreno until next time.

Day 30 - Puerto Natales, Chile (Again)

I am pleased to report that both Elvis Presley and Che Guervera are alive and well and working in Torres del Paine National Park, Elvis in a Refugio (along with his twin brother), and Che as a gaucho. At least, they looked like them...

What can I say to convey just how fantastic TdP was? Words or photos just can´t ever do it justice, but I´m going to try :-)

Day 1, we left the hostal in Puerto Natales at 7am after a very yummy homemade breakfast (but no shower or shave as the water was off) and caught the bus into the park, where we finally reached the starting point of the trek about 10:30am. Within minutes of hoisting my pack and setting off, I knew I was in for trouble: overpackers disease strikes again! I must have had about 20kg´s, including 5 days food, and a few changes of clothes (so I like clean underwear and t-shitrs that don´t smell of 3 day old sweat, so sue me!). By then it was too late, I had carried it in, I´d have to carry it out again, or eat it along the way. And wouldn´t you know it, the longest climb of the whole trek was for the first 2 hours. With much encouragement from my companions, I made the first refugio after only 1.5 hours and was happy to dump my pack before heading further up the hill to the Torres lookout, 2 more hours away. After a final mad scramble for an hour over a boulder and snow strewn 60 to 70 degree slope, we made the lookout for a perfect clear view of the Torres del Paine, 3 massive fingers of rock towering some 2800m high, with an ice lake lying at their base, and a small ice flow off to the side. It was truely amazing to finally be standing there, at my number 2 reason for coming to South America. Just awesome. After half an hour, I had to head back to reach the refugio again before dark. Total trekking time: 5 hours. Dinner was... you guessed it, pasta!

Day 2 also dawned clear, and I set off alone from the refugio, down the mountain and onto the track leading around the base of the mountains to the next refugio at Los Cuernos, the Devils Horns. Along the undulating course, I met up with a young Dutch couple who were to become my companions for the next 3 days. This was probably the longest, hardest slog of the trip, as it was a full 5 hours trekking with a near full pack, and I arrived at the refugio totally exhausted. Yet another pasta dinner didn´t help either, but the view from the dining room was magnificent, watching the light slowly fade from Los Cuernos, another set of massive points.

Day 3 was supposed to be a day trip from Los Cuernos to the top of the Valle de Frances, but the weather was wet and overcast, so I opted instead to walk on to the next refugio at Pehoe, with a brief side-trip up the valley. The Valley is a fairly steep climb (especially when carrying a full pack), with massive mountains on either side and a small hanging glacier half way up. On a clear day, it is said to be magnificent. That day, the cloud hid most everything except the glacier and the odd peak of the mountains, but at least the rain stopped shortly after we started walking. A total of 5 and half hours later we reaced the Pehoe refugio, nowhere near as tired as day 2, but starting to feel very sore in parts of my body I had long forgotten about.

Day 4 was a day walk up to the Grey Glacier, a good 3.5 hours there over undulating terrain, but into the teeth of a fierce Patagonian wind, the first we had encountered. The glacier itself is on the smaller side, but still interesting as it splits around an island in the middle. The small bergs that calve off the glacier collect at the bottom of the lake, blown there by the winds, making for an impressively jumbled landscape. The walk back, wind-assisted, was a mere 2 hours and 45 minutes, it would have been quicker, but by now by body was really starting to complain, especially my right knee which screamed at me every time I took a step downhill. Guess that race down the hill on the 2nd morning wasn´t such a good idea after all....

Day 5 was walk out day, a casual 4-5 hours over almost perfectly flat pampas to meet the bus. By this stage, though, my knee was completely gone, and would only support weight when locked straight, any attempt to bend hurting like hell. Add to that not having shaven for 10 days, and having lost my hairbrush a few days before, I must have looked a sight, a scruff-beared, hair to all points of the compass, side-to-side hobbling Frankenstein of a hiker, emerging from the primordial wilderness in persistent rain 5 hours later. The sense of acheivement of completeing the famous ´W´ trek more than made up for the pain, though, and the memory of the Torres is one to be treasured.

I´ve now been back in P Natales for 2 days, just resting up, waiting for my knee to recover and fighting off a looming cold from the last days rain and cold. In the next couple of days I plan to hit the Moreno glacier and the worlds most southern city, Ushuaia, both over in Argentina, before heading north in warmer climes.

Day 22 - Puerto Natales, Chilean Patagonia

(Excuse the typing, this is one crappy keyboard with a very temperamental i key)

Woo Hoo! Made it this far, now the futherest south I have ever been, well past the bottom of the South Island. Puerto Natales is a small port town, but with one big attraction, the Torres del Paine park, with it´s massive towers and amazing glaciers and lakes. I hopefully leave for the park tomorrow for a 4 to 5 day hike, but the Amercan/Aussie couple I´ve teamed up with are a bit under the weather, so it may be a day later.

The ferry trip here was an interesting experence. There is some amazing scenery along the way, with narrow twisting channels, as narrow as 80 meters (the boat being 20m wide) and towering cliffs and mountans as we threaded our way through the islands along the coast. Sadly the weather was very variable, with great sunny patches where you could see everything, followed by long wet, cloudy patches where you couldn´t see a thing. Those patches were spent playing cards or talkng in the ships bar. When the weather was good, or there was some particularly narrow part, everyone crowded out onto the decks, rugged up aganst the cold and wet, with eyes barely peepng out through the scarfs, beanies and jackets.

For the most part, the sailing was very smooth, the islands sheltering the channels from any waves. There was a 12 hour period, however, when we were in the open sea, fully exposed to a roaring gale from the west, pumping a 5 meter swell that set the boat, designed for the calmer shallows and without any stabilisers, wallowing, corkscrewng, yawing and pitching in an entirely unpredictable and increasingly violent series of movements. At the start, myself and another lunitic Kiwi called Gavin stood at the front of the top deck, watching the boat plow through the increasingly bigger waves, making huge walls of spray that set the whole ship shuddering, then ducking behind the spray screen to avoid a soaking, laughing maniacally all the time. The crew found us most amusing, but were a bit annoyed, because they had to stay on deck to watch us. Eventually we went below, but negotiating the stairwells threw my balance off entirely and I was quickly revisting that days lunch. I ended up having to retire to my berth at 4pm to lie still with my eyes closed, feeling the boat try to rip itself apart, and listening to the sounds of the tables in the dining room being thrown across the room, and other people not making it to the toilets in time. What a mess! I´m told the crew attempted to serve dinner to the dozen or so passengers who could stomach it, and that it rated up there with Charlie Chaplins best efforts :-) Eventually at 2am, we sailed back into the islands and all was at peace, well except my stomach, which took a few more hours to recover.

If you come this way, you have to do the trip, but do it in Summer, OK?

Day 19 - Puerto Montt, Chile

Puerto Montt is about the same latitude as Wellington, and is the port from which I catch the ferry down to Patagonia, a trip lasting 3 nights. I´ve really been looking forward to this trip, as the scenary is said to be fantastic, if the weather is good. I´ll let you know when I get there, but it´s not looking too hot at the moment, so I may be needing that puke bucket :-) Even more so, I´m just dying to get to Patagionia, with all those mountains and glaciers.

I spent the last two days in Puerto Varas, 20km north of here. It´s another tourist town, set on an enourmous lake, against a backdrop of volcanoes. In my inevitable comparison to a place back home, it´s a lot like Taupo :-) I did a day trip out to a small village (if a bus stop, a shop, a tour agency and a small hotel, all closed at the time, can be considered a village) called Petrohue, which sits at the foot of the Osorno volcano (a near perfect cone shape) on another lakes edge. From here you can catch a ferry service across to Argentina. I almost had to end up taking that trip, as the return bus never arrived, and I ended up having to hitch a ride back.

Last night, in a desperate need for a change from eating pasta with sauce, I treated myself to eating out, justifing it due to the fact I´m spending less than expected, less than US$30 a day including special activities, instead of US$35 plus special activities I had planned on for Chile. So far, so good! Most of the savings so far have come from the off-season accomodation rates, I´m getting single rooms for the price of a shared dorm as the places are half empty, US$8 instead of US$15, by buying lunch at the markets where it´s real cheap (if a bit basic and boring), and cooking my infamous pasta dinners (I try to stay places with a kitchen, but it´s not always possible).