Who ate all the Timotei
September 1, 2006
We`re in Venezuela, on the Caribbean. No pics today because the
camera`s being moody. From Manaus – dreadful town – we went north to a place called Presidente Figuerdo, a small town surrounded by natural
waterfalls. We were economising, so couldn`t afford the full tour of
the local falls, so we decided to walk out to the best one. This town
was buried right in the middle of the jungle, on the one road that
Brazil has going north through the Amazon. Steamy sweaty heat. We
walked for an hour before we realised we`d been going the wrong way.
Fed up with walking, we decided to hitch back. The first person to
pick us up was a bare chested guy in a battered pickup. Smiley, really
nice, but he had a pair of handcuffs around his gear stick and a gun
on his lap. Luckily, he was a policeman.
Since then we`ve been hitching around quite a lot. The bus north out
of Presidente Figuerdo broke down and we hitched to the border with
Venezuela. Then we hitched into the nearest town.
The south of Venezuela is covered in flat-topped mountains called
Tepuis. They were formed, apparently, when the world was one big
continental mass, and South America fitted into the west side of
Africa. Since then, they`ve been isolated from all the wildlife around
them. We spent six days climbing one, camping in a cave on the top, in
the day we bathed in rock pools amid carnivorous plants. We have lots
of photos, without them it´s a bit pointless trying to describe the
odd moonlike surface of these Tepuis. We`ll try to put some shots up
later. One morning we woke up and there was a scorpion under the tent.
A few hours later we found a tarantula. It was all a bit `Land That
Time Forgot´.
Since then, we`ve been living cheap. Spent a week in a tiny hippy
village on the cusp of the Amazon, sleeping in hammocks, cooking rice
in empty tin cans, sleeping on the top of other little Tepuis.
Two days ago we got a bus to the coast and we`re back on a beach
surrounded by palm trees. Today we`re heading off to another little
hippy place we`ve been told about. Until soon, hope everyone is well.
We certainly are, tanned and relaxed, though missing friends and
family.
You´re never fully dressed without a moustache
August 14, 2006
More pics from Brazil. We´ve just spent 10 days in a little village called Alto Do Chao. We took a boat there from Belem, which was a big noisy port town with great docks and a totally ghetto hostel full of crusty euros.
The boat was three nights, four days, chugging up the Amazon at walking pace. About 100 other people on the boat. Everyone sleeping in hammocks on top of each other.
At quarter to six every morning, someone went round blowing a whistle to get everyone up for a bread roll and a cup of the sweetest coffee you´ve ever tasted. We had to pack up our hammocks so that they could put the table up. Then everyone ate in shifts.
First morning that happened we were very hung over and it was death. During the day we sat around on the top deck. The Amazon is so wide at some parts it was like we were at sea. Other parts were narrower so we could see the rain forest on the banks, or the little houses and churches of the people who live there.
Boiling hot, scalding sun. Nothing to do but read and play cards and look for monkeys in the trees. Met lots of really nice people on the boat though. Nice kids. A couple of lovely English people. Many very drunk Brazilians. They started drinking cashasa – the horrid cheap sugar alcohol – at 7 in the morning. Forty per cent; about a quid for a can of it.
In the evenings the top deck played blaring Brazilian pop music – a genre in which the accordion is the principal instrument and the moustache the crucial attire. After three days the sun and the music, and the close encounters with too many sozzled men, were sending us doo-lally.
But when we docked in Santarem we didn´t really want to leave the people we´d met (most others were carrying on in the same boat for another three days). Santarem we got a bus out to this tiny place, Alto Du Chao.
There are no roads to this part of the world – you have to fly in or use the river – so there are no tourists and it´s untouched. Alto Do Chao was on an inlet of the Amazon.
We stayed in a cheap possada and every morning we could dive into the river and swim to this sandbar. It was the friendliest place we´ve found in Brazil. No TVs, no news of the outside world. Every night we ate at the same little cafe. Indescribably beautiful.
When we were there, there was some kind of butterfly migration taking place, and there were thousands of them everywhere, floating around like blossom.
Anyone ever wants to escape – and thinks they can handle the boat ride to get there – this is the place.
We liked it so much we stayed ages, just doing nothing, reading, swimming, living on loose change. One day we took a small rowing boat through the forest canopy. When the water level´s high, there´s loads of forest that´s underwater. The waters were still high enough but give it a few more weeks and it will have dropped loads. We were taken by Ronaldinio, a kid who looked like the footballer. He was expert with a boat. As we drifted through the submerged canopy of trees it felt like we were on an India Jones set. It was really tranquil. I think we were supposed to see some animal life but there was nothing much going on.
Another day we headed off on some kayaks to find the Green Lagoon but we soon found it was pretty hard going along these rivers and we only had a vague idea of where it was but we kept going with picnic and water supplies balanced on our knees. Instead of the lake we found another sandbar that stretched for miles without another sole in sight. We stayed for lunch and watched the river traffic for a while before heading back to watch the sunset over a cold beer.
We also met this guy called Indios, who invited us to a ritual where we drank ayawaska, a shamanic tea that´s meant to make you speak to the dead. People told us we´d see a movie of our lives played out in front of our eyes, and when we got to the bad bits we´d throw up and be cleansed. Jenny spent half the night with her head in a bush. I don´t know how cleansed she is. She still looks pretty grubby.
We left Alto Du Chao and got on another long boat further up the amazon. Now we´re in a place called Manaus, which is a nasty big city.
Stupidly hot and humid. We´re getting out of here today and should be in Venezuela in about a week. We´ve been in Brazil so long, it´s just such a big place, but looking forward to getting back to somewhere Spanish-speaking. We´re both really well, missing you people and sending out masses of love.
(what nick and jenny now look like)
On our way to Lençios
August 10, 2006
First stop out of Salvador was Sao Felix, two towns that sat side by side straddling a river. This one bridge was their only connection and you could see cargo trains, buses, bikes and people on foot crossing at all hours. Lovely little town that has religious chantings in the hillside huts and virgins rolling fine cigars across their thighs at the museum down the road from our Pousada – rolled on the thighs of virgins – it´s not just a sales scam.
Lençois was beautiful and green and with nothing much going on. But it was the gateway to a national park. We spent a few days weighing up our options of which trek to go on; they had scrambling through canyons and visiting amazin waterfalls, sleeping in caves and trekking across platauex and staying in local houses on a mat on the floor. Well, it rained a bit so we decided not to do any of those – it was all going to take up about 4-5 days so instead we did some climbing. Found a local girl who was excited to have a girl to take out for a change. We climbed by waterfalls and rolling hills – amazing scenery which made up for me being a little out of practice.
The weather was nice again. We´d heard of a natural water slide about 4-5km walk away, so we found our way. Much better to be heading off on our own and not on an organised excursion, we thought. We had a picnic and books and found a brilliant vantage rock where we holed up.
Nick tried out the water slide first and was nearly too scared to try again with me, but I managed to persuade him it would be OK. Had a really fun day.
We then planned our next trip to get us up to the mouth of the amazon.
First stop though was Teresina, way in the north. Here we decided we needed a bit of luxury and asked the taxi man to take us to the best hotel in town. The Metropolitan. I liked the pool on the top floor where I spent the next two days – lazin and topping up my fruit caphirinas – they were really good.
A two-day trip from here took us to Piripiri – and a national park called Siete Citades, which has rock formations that some people think are ancient cities built by extra terrestrials. Our really friendly guide took us both out on bikes for the day to look at caves and stone formations and stone scripts from ancient times. Some of the cave paintings are hand prints by people with six fingers – hence the UFO speculation.
It was seriously boiling hot out there. The guide book said watch out for yellow spotted rattlesnakes – poisonous – and tarantulas. We didn´t see any, unfortunately. But we checked out these mental rock formations and spend a couple of days overheating in a little hostel in the middle of the national park, before continuing the endless bus ride north, towards Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon river.
Natural waterfall, Piripiri
August 10, 2006
Hi everyone. Nick and Jenny are still in Brazil. Here´s a bit of news.
We spent a couple of weeks in Rio. Nice to be a huge city after all those weeks on the road. Nice to be where the toilets have their own paper and you don´t have to carry your own. But I think we got a bit sick of it in the end. Rio is a bit faded, a bit Costa Del 1978, all crap plastic surgery and leathery skin. Copacabana is full of middle aged women learning to long board and OAPs in pink Lycra. On Ipanema, pedigree dogs wearing little sneakers are marched along the sand by their manicured owners, and ripped volleyball players airkiss and preen.
Meanwhile the kids from the favela come down to try to sell you anything and everything you don´t want or need with an oi or a tst tst to get your attention. Oi means hello in Portuguese. It took us a while to figure out that people weren´t being rude when they shouted it at us.
Every woman in this city, regardless of age or dress size, wears a skimpy kini. You see 80 year olds wearing nothing but dental floss.
Copacabana pulses with an energy unknown elsewhere – according to the guide books. We were (re)pulsed by gut wrench prawn kebabs, henna tattoos that turned skin putrid green, hammocks and fake sunnies and leering men. We snoozed, read loads and drank out of coconuts. If I closed my eyes, I was all alone…
There was one lovely area in Rio called Santa Teriza, which felt very Parisian – lots of rickety old colonial architecture and winding streets. We liked it so much that we thought about renting a place there and spending a few months mooching around, not doing very much. We found a place on Craig´s List – cheap, huge, would have been amazing – we could have invited everyone out to visit. But the owners didn´t get back to us in time.
Rio is surrounded by favelas – shanty towns, home to those who have nowhere to live. Some of them are huge – the largest one in Brazil is here, and over 100,000 people live in it.
We visited two (not the City of God – that´s outside Sao Paulo, but if you´ve seen that film you will get the idea). Space was tight, and all the buildings fought for it. Everything was built around little walkways between breeze block homes, teetering on top of each other. Apart from size though, these places looked pretty good. Built well, clean, and all the people we met were really friendly and smiley – more so than in the city. We liked the vibe here – it was more what we were used to from the other parts of South America we´ve seen. They weren´t like slums. They had banks, supermarkets, restaurants – for a while, even McDonald´s had a kiosk in the big one we went to, though it just sold McFlurries.
Police don´t go into favelas, we were told, unless on some major raid. Instead, the areas are ruled and enforced by drug gangs. Different gangs run different favelas. We saw men on the streets – the soldiers of the gangs – carrying machine guns. But it was very safe for us. In Rio proper, it´s impossible for gringos to go anywhere without being hassled for money, but in the favelas everyone minds their own business.
Rival gangs from other favelas sometimes come in and try to take over – that´s when these places are not safe to be in. But in your own hood if you respect the drug barons, they respect you, and most of the time life´s harmonious.
We went to a club in one of the favelas on our last night in Rio. It was what is known here as a funk ball. Brazilian funk is like bootie electro, but with heavier basslines and vocals. It was held in a massive warehouse about 40mins from the centre of Rio. This is how good it was:
The DJ was called DJ VIP
Cans of Skol cost 25p – this is the country where beer brands come when they die
Men in the crowd did formation dancing
All the women wore hotpants, kini tops and six inch heels
The hottest tracks were by a guy called DJ Marlboro
Some guy tried to teach Nick a dance routine. We also got into the VIP area – which was like a cowshed.
Rio was hectic, bit hassley big and expensive. At carnival time prices double and the crowds are vast with not enough space on the beach – I don´t think I´d come back for it…
Day after the funk party our last sight before departing the big city was sugar loaf at sunset.
If we can figure out how to make it work, there might be a picture below.
Next stop Saquerema, a very chilled beach place about an hour out of Rio. It´s where the surfing world championships are held. This place was really quiet, nothing much going on but lazing in the sun. After a couple of days we made our way further north towards Salvador.
Salvador used to be the capital way back when this was Portugal as far as the eye could see. Its got an amazing old town that´s practically falling down. All the architecture is super-old. When the Portuguese founded the town, the Caeté Indians killed and ate both the first governor and the first bishop before succumbing.
It is home to Capoeira, that dance martial art thing. They´re all at it. Salvador is full of tourists, and therefore absolutely teaming with people trying to rip you off or sell you something you don´t want. We found a really nice Pousada in the old town and loafed about doing nothing, going out lots and finding lots of parties. We found some great markets too, where you could buy live goats out of wheelbarrows. The poverty is much more evident than in Rio. You can buy trainers on the never never, ten monthly payments for new Nikes.
Jen eats corn in shady Salvador
After about a week, the crime and the poverty and the firecrackers and hangovers got too much and we moved on to a place called Lencois. More about that when we get the pictures off the camera. Sorry not many pics here, but the technology´s all wonky.
Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil
July 11, 2006
Hey chums,
Jen and Nick are in Brazil. Where were we when we last did this? Argentina, I think, heading into the Pantanal, listening to the Doobie Brothers.
Brazil turned out to be a lot more developed than we expected. There´s big poverty, but lots of wealth too. The land is flatter and there are lots of little pastel-coloured shacks that spew dirty, barefooted children by the dozen. But then there are lots of big glass buildings, snotty posh people and plastic surgery, too. Old men ride rust-coloured tractors; kids push wonky bicycles. Shiny 4×4s and vast petrol tankers honk as they thunder past them.
The sky is as blue as a Mediterranean ocean. The forest is so wet and green it looks like its oozing onto the road. We passed the Tropic of Capricorn. We don´t know what it is, but Nick had pee behind it.
On the border of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay we visited the Iguzi waterfalls. We saw them at night, during a full moon, and then the following day, too. They were so much more impressive than you would think. It looked like the end of the world – where ships used to fall off before they discovered the world was round. The pictures are on the laptop which is being repaired – this is the only one we´ve got for now, which is lame because words aren´t really going to cut it. But we liked them so much that we decided to go head slowly in the direction of Venezuela to see Angel Falls, so we´re now going to be in this part of the world for at least a couple of months longer than planned.
On the way into Brazil we popped into Paraguay for the day. We´d read that its position at the crossroads of South America had made it a haven for smugglers. In fact, it´s meant to be one of the most wretched hives of scum and villainy this side of Mos Eisley. To set the tone, there were no border controls to speak of, and no one checked our passports as we strolled in, crossing a putrid stretch of water called the Piranha River.
The whole border town is geared up for selling fake goods. Everything that could possible be faked is on sale: electronic goods, sports socks, pharmaceuticals, computer games, perfume, generic Viagra, trainers, DVD players, CDs, laptops – all of it bogus or nicked. One billion US bucks of dodgy fags are smuggled from here into Brazil each year.
We took these photos late in the afternoon when no one was around, so they don´t really do the place justice. It was all a bit too sketchy to be snapping tourist shots on street corners.
The ´Red´ party, a loose-knit band of crypto-fascists, run the country by tooth and claw. The economy is no longer in the toilet. It has rounded the U-bend and now lurks in a slimy corner of the nation´s sewer. We wandered round for a day, loving it, and then had a Chinese meal, which, we´re pretty sure, was made of fake food.
From there we went into the Brazilian Pantanal, a vast wetland that spends most of the year underwater. Here we got to fish for piranhas, which Jenny managed better than Nick.
We hunted like kings, and then fed our catch to the caymans. There are 30 million caymans in the Pantanal, and they are the best thing since poptarts. They spend most of their days sitting just below the water looking menacing but basically just chilling. They don´t have eyelids, which means at night you can shine a torch at them and their eyes glow red. We went out that night and did just that, and the rivers and water channels lit up with little red dots. Thousands of them.
The Pantanal is the largest wetland in the world, but during the dry season it´s used as grazing land for beef cattle. It´s full of huge cows like this:
We also saw this thing, which is the largest rodent in the world. It´s like a huge hamster. It doesn´t look it here, but it´s the size of an Alsatian. Caymans eat them.
Brazil messed up at the football, which was a shame because every time they won the country exploded with euphoria, and the streets filled with scantily clad women convulsing around sound systems.
But while the country may no longer be the best at that game, they still lead the way in packaging design and draftsmanship.
We´re on the coast, now. Spending some days doing nothing. Next we´re going to head north and back into the jungle on a boat. The plan now is to keep going, and visit Venezuela before coming back south to Argentina for a long stay in Buenos Ayres. Missing friends and pints. Running low on books. But basically we´re laying low and chilling, like the caymans. Hope you´re all having an excellent summer.
.
Southern Bolivia, into Argentina
June 7, 2006
A very long, dead straight road takes us out of La Pas and into southern Bolivia.
La Pas was probably our favourite city yet. It had that total third-world grubbiness that we never really found in Peru. It was a place where everyone was hustling. Everyone was jostling and trying to grab your sleeve. Everyone we saw on the street seemed to be sizing each other up or looking for angles. Look in the background of this shot and you can see the mountain that overhangs the city.
We spent a day wandering around the city cemetery. Down here people aren´t buried underground or cremated. Everyone goes into crypts, of sorts. Most people are walled up, feet first in long rows, stacked five or ten spaces high.
At the head of each little tomb, there was a space behind some glass for a photograph and some mementos – plastic flowers, a few cigarettes or coca leaves – however people remembered their loved ones. Many people had left birthday or anniversary cards when they came to visit the graves. The funny thing was, most of the cards were musical – those crappy things that play a tune when you open them. So when you walked through the cemetery, all you could hear were monophonic, atonal renditions of Chop Sticks, all played at different volumes and speeds as the batteries in each card slowly ran down. From all sides came this seasick clash of sounds, like 1,000 of the most primitive mobile phones going off at the same time. Somehow the Bolivian mourners didn´t seem to find it a disturbance. We found it hysterical.
We head south to Potosi, the highest city in the world. In the early 16th century, the Spanish found vast seems of silver in the mountains here and within months Potosi had become the most thriving place in the Americas.
During the next 200 years, millions of tons of ore was extracted from the site. Potosi grew to be one of the largest towns in the world – larger at the time than London or Shanghai. It was also the richest place in the South America. The silver excavated here bankrolled the Spanish crown for two centuries.
This wealth had a human cost. Eight million workers – mostly indigenous Indians and slaves brought from Africa – died here. Which probably makes it, after the battlefields of northern France, the most blood-soaked place in the world. To give you some idea of how many people died, the total number of black slaves brought to the USA in its entire history is not much more than 500,000. Probably three times that number were brought to Potosi alone, and died in the hills mining silver, while five million more Quechua people – indigenous Indians – went down into the pits and were carried out feet first.
Now the mountains have been picked dry. The town is poor, empty and shell shocked. Because of all the digging that´s occurred here, it is, quite literally, a hole in the ground.
“I am rich Potosi,
The Treasure of the world
And the Envy of Kings.”
This was the legend on the city´s first coat of arms. Now, like Shelley´s Ozymandias, Potosi is little more than a heap of sun-bleached bones.
Perhaps most startling of all is that poor Bolivians still arrive and work in the mines – now looking for tin, rather than silver. They live in tents by the side of the highway, or little shacks at the mouths of the mountain´s network of tunnels. We went into a shaft and descended 600 feet to where they work.
The shafts are run as cooperatives. No one works for any large mining company. Everyone down there is there for themselves. Men go down, pick up what they can find, sell it and then back they go. No steady wages. No health care. No insurance; though if you die in the pit your wife and kids receive a small pension. Life expectancy is around 40 years in the tunnels we visited, but can be as low as 10 years in the really deep ones.
But, as is often the case with such situations, with the diminishing returns of the mines, plus labour disputes and the country´s endemic corruption, the cost of implementing humane mining conditions would render the pits unprofitable and put the 1,000s of men who still work here out of a job.
Jen´s adventure down t´pit.
We headed off into the mine kitted out with coca leaves, crackers, cigarettes and dynamite – all for the workers. They chew coca leaves all day so they don´t get hungry or tired. The miners work 12-36 hour shifts, 6 days a week. Mining tools used are mainly dynamite because the rock is too hard for a pick axe. They have to buy the dynamite out of their wages so we helped them out by getting some more on the promise that they would blow some stuff up. This is the woman who sold us the TNT.
These are some of the men we saw down there. You can see their cheeks bulging from the coca leaves.
The youngest workers, officially, are 17, but we were told boys as young as 12 work down here (I´m sure it was the same down pit up north a few years back). The youngest boy we met said he was 15. Here he is:
The mine looked ancient. Rusty tin shacks with no mechanical machinery. The metals being mined were brought out by wheelbarrow. The youngest boys had this job, usually running around the corridors of the mine distributing waste and bagging up the minerals.
We descended quite quickly and along the way distributed the goods to the miners – they all wanted the coca leaves and seemed a bit unimpressed to get the crackers. There was no real security and we were able to wonder around wherever we liked – we had our guide with us and she kind of smoothed it over with the workers as we went along. “You´re really lucky,” the guide said at one point. “Just last week the area where we´re standing caved in.” We thought she was pulling our gringo legs, but she was serious. Sweet. The conditions seemed really basic and if you suffered even mild claustrophobia, you would have been panicking. When we were crawling through some areas we were wary not to knock the precarious-looking wooden struts bracing the ceiling. We ate dust. We struggled for air.
The best bit was when we asked a couple of the miners to explode some TNT. We could hear them knocking it into a section which seemed not too far away then one of the younger miners who was a fast runner lit the fuse and ran back to our group. No real warming and then a deep, bellowing thud and we felt waves of air shoving through our bodies. You could see the rock ripple. I felt my lungs squeezed by the force of the boom. It was amazing, looking around, everyone was wide-eyed and I caught the shock and glee on Nick´s face. The whole place seemed to have shifted but nothing came down and our exit was clear.
On the way out we passed the miners´ shrine to the devil. Every shaft has one. The miners, like everyone else in this country, hold a mixture of Catholic and indigenous polytheistic beliefs. They believe that the area below ground is ruled by a benevolent god - roughly like the Christian devil, but not a source of evil. Therefore they build shrines to this guy – they call him Uni, “uncle”. Every Friday they give him cigarettes and coca leaves so that he´ll help them find good minerals the following week. They also splash alcohol on his penis and touch it for good luck. This picture is without a flash, but you can just about see Nick along side Old Nick.
A note on their booze – the miners drink this stuff that is 96%. Basically it´s raw alcohol. We also bought some of this stuff and brought it down for them as a gift. Needless to say, we had a quick snifter before we gave it up. Meths. Petrol. Even for booze hounds like Nick and me it was too much.
It was a long crawl out from the 600m below ground we´d traveled and required some expert climbing on the rock to where we could see daylight. My own expert bridging skills came in particularly handy, I thought. This is what the sky looked like when we got out.
Leaving the mine we were covered in dust and hacking up crud for hours. At one point I was slightly worried that the dust and gases might have a lasting effect but then I thought about the miners who were down there for 12-36 hours at a time and they managed OK. Though I did wonder, if we did get trapped, how long it would take for someone to realise we were there and if there were any emergency services on standby if an emergency arose – it didn´t look as if any of it was that organised.
Saying this, the men and boys who worked down there were paid comparatively well – blv 2,000 a month (about $250). In town salaries were around blv 700 a month. They felt it was a family tradition to work in the mine and seemed resigned to their way of life. Maybe the coca and 96% alcohol helped.
Further Adventures…
We continue south, heading for Argentina. Southern Bolivia sits on high flat land. Gone are the spectacular green slopes of the Peruvian Andes. The landscape here is of red and pink rock. The mountains are made of dust. The only greenery that we can see are those tall, three fingered cacti you see in Roadrunner cartoons.
It feels like the setting of a wild west movie. In fact, this is the route Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid took when fleeing the Bolivian army after their last great heist – a silver mining payroll, in fact. They shot each other in a hotel room not far from here and are buried in an unmarked grave.
It is illegal to move in this country when the national anthem is being played. If you hear it, you have to stand still, looking serious, until the tune reaches its farty conclusion. Everywhere we go there are soldiers hoomphing it out on battered brass instruments.
This martial pride is confusing because Bolivia must be the most militarily unsuccessful nation on the earth. In the first 100 years of its existence, every one of its neighbours helped themselves liberally to its territory. Chile nicked its only stretch of coastline in 1879, landlocking Bolivia and rendering its nascent navy obsolete. In the years that followed, Peru, Argentina and Brazil all hacked away its best land. Even Paraguay, not exactly one of the world´s mightiest nations, sawed off a chunk of its oil-rich south-east in 1932. At the time of its independence in 1825, Bolivia had two million sq km of land. Now it has barely half that amount.
We stayed for two nights in a hostel next to a military base that trumped out a jumbled rendition of the anthem with tranquilizing frequency. Whenever I heard it, I was tempted to charge out and turn somersaults in the street, just to see what they do to me. Sorely tempted, but I never did. I fear the Bolivians lack not only the martial prowess of the British, but also our sense of humour.
All around Potosi sit the rusting hulks of locomotives from the time when steam trains were used to haul the tin from Potosi´s mines. Now you can crawl all over their huge skeletons.
This part of Bolivia has some of the largest salt flats in the world. Essentially, the whole Alto Plano used to by a massive sea. The water´s long gone but the salt remains. Thousands of sq km´s of white.
We drove out into the middle of it. It´s an impossibly strange and disorientating place. There is nothing, nothing, so really literally nothing, for miles. It´s impossible to judge distance. Your eyes try to adjust but everything seemed distorted.
This is how much Jen enjoyed it:
My first urge when we got out of the jeep in vast white expanse of nothing, was to do a sick. I was so hungover my head was dragging against the floor. Your eyes have nothing to focus on, so bouncing around in the back of the jeep on the drive out there makes you seasick. I looked around for a bush or something to crouch behind, but of course there´s nothing, just the sun beating down on me. There was no cover. If I´d have thrown up there everyone for miles around would have seen it. I realised there really was nowhere to save my dignity so i managed to pull myself together and to take in landscape.
We started walking towards an island of rock in the distance – the only feature in the landscape of salt. It could have been a mirage. The sun beaming off the salt flats created a blurred effect similar to that in the desert. If I had been alone and lost, I think I would have gone crazy. It was such an alien landscape, another world, like nothing I´d ever seen before.
We were told on the way out that people had actaully been lost out here. A few years ago, a group of 7 french people came out here and their jeep broke down. There are no features to navigate with. It´s impossible to tell which way you´ve come from. One by one they each left the group in search of help, none returned and after nine days they were all dead. Looking around you, you can see how possible that would be. With little electricity in these parts, there´s not even the glow of distant cities at night to help get your barings.
We walked for half an hour and finally reached the rock island, where we had lunch. It was made of coral reef - the whole place of course used to be under water. The only vegitation on the island were cacti, towering things that made the place look like some pre-historic world. I almost expected to see a velociraptor come crawling over the brow. These cacti grew 1cm a year and some of them were 1200m high.
After lunch we headed back across the salt flats, where Nick met his dream tall girl.
Out in the middle of nowhere sits a hotel entirely made of salt. With the flags and the white landscape we almost felt like we´d reach the North Pole. Everything in the hotel was made out of salt, beds and all. It looked like it had been abandoned it was so basic.
Some people were staying the night but this place had no heating and we were told that during the night it would reach at least -20. We waited here to watch the sunset, I´ve never seen one so amazing. With nothing to obstruct the view, it looked like a tropical ocean against the clouds, like someone had torn a rainbow to pieces and smeared its colours across the sky.
We passed through a hectic border town into Argentina. It´s immediately more sorted than its northern neighbours. The roads gain Tarmac. The dust inside the bus settles and then blows away. We´re in a first world country again.
We´re camping now in a town called Salta. But camping here feels more luxurious than staying in a hotel in Bolivia or Ecuador. It´s a big, confident town, and the first place we´ve been for ages where it feels like there´s enough to go around. Oddly, because of the financial crash that happened here a few years ago, everything´s dirt cheap.
Before the crash, the Peso traded at around 1:1 with the US dollar. Now it´s pegged at three to a buck. So, for outsiders such as us, everything costs a third of what it should. Of course for Argentinians everything costs more than they have, and so prices continue to fall.
The landscape is nuts again. Mountains rise up so randomly, so unexpectedly purple and high, that you have to look twice to make sure they´re not optical illusions, or clouds lying across the landscape.
We´re here for a few more nights. Then we bus it again, heading further east towards Brazil.
La Pas, Boliviar
May 29, 2006
Sorry we´ve been bad at updating this. Jenny and I are now in La Pas, Bolivia. Since the last post we went hiking in the Andes along what wasn´t actually the Inca trail, but was a very high route through some extremely cold but sublime scenery.
We bussed it from Cusco to a tiny village called Quisharani, where we stayed for a night. Then we began walking up into the high mountains. Blazing sunshine, vast blue skies. When the odd cloud floated by it was usually lower than us, so we could look down on it.
We camped the next night at another tiny, secluded village called Cuncani. The nights were clear, which meant the burned with stars, but it was ferociously cold. We slept under piles of clothes, with ice forming on the top of the tent.
The following day´s climb took us up to an altitude of over 4700m, before we came down into valley of orange lagoons and wild horses.
The trek ended at a town called Ollantaytambo, from where we got the train to Machu Picchu, what many people call the lost city of the Incas. While most Inka sites were destroyed by the Spanish when they invaded in 1533, they never found Machu Picchu because it sits at the top of a mountain, surrounded by vast peaks.
In fact, the city went undiscovered by westerners until 1911. Now it´s the best example of Inca architecture.
The complex is built in the shape of a lizard – Incas always built their towns in the shapes of sacred animals. It´s a magically peaceful place surrounded on all sides by sheer drops.
How a civilisation that had not even developed the wheel managed to build something of this scale at the top of a mountain remains a mystery. Loads of fruity Americans say they had help from aliens.
We climbed to the top of the peak that overhangs the site, from where you get the best views of the whole place. From up here the site is meant to look like a bird taking off – the condor was one of the most sacred animals for the Incas.
Heading into southern Peru, we hit a series of roadblocks set up by local leftists. They´d blocked the road with branches and boulders. The first few weren´t manned so we just got out of the bus and dragged everything out of the way. But a few hundred metres down the road we ran up against a roadblock manned by some angry Peruvian dudes protesting about trade with the US. Luckily, we had these excellent mechanics on board who managed to secure our passage with a bottle of Inca Cola and a few bucks.
However, there were more roadblocks further on. Riot police arrived with teargas and body armour, to disperse the crowd. But according to the strict traditions of South American law enforcement they just stood around scratching themselves and did nothing to clear the road. Our mechanics found more Inca cola and got the bus through, though we were pelted with rocks at one point and had a window smashed.
To get into Bolivia, we had to cross Lake Titicaca. It´s one of the highest lakes in the world and it´s huge. It´s like a sea sitting in the vast valleys between two mountain ranges. This is the place where the pre-Ink an civilisations started and some of the really ancient indigenous groups can still be found here.
The Amaru were used to live around Titicaca, but were pushed off their land about 2,000 years ago by increasingly bellicose tribes that came up from the south. In the end, the took to the lake itself, building small floating islands out of the reeds that grow there.
Hundreds of them still live on these islands on the lake, and we went out to visit a few. Everything they have is made of reeds – houses, furniture, boats.
Each large family has its own island. When people get married they go off and build a new island for themselves. If two members of a family row or fall out, they cut their island in two and float off in different directions.
Of all the communities we´ve seen out here, this was one of the most peaceful. On the lake it´s silent. The only traffic is the occasional reed boat bobbing by.
There´s nothing really for these people to do except sit around and weave things out of reeds and keep building their islands, but they get on with it as they have for the past two thousand years and seem unfazed when the 21st century arrives in all its garish colours and hi-tech fabrics to gawp at them as we did.
South America is sliding to the left, politically, primarily on the coat tails of Hugo Chaves, Venezuela´s red-shirted leader (who we saw the other day mooching around some pre-Inca ruins at Tihuanaco).
On May 1, international workers´day, the president of Bolivia marched an army into the country´s gas fields, which are run by private foreign countries, and forcibly nationalised them.
Bolivia is that kind of place. In the 170 years since it became a nation, it has had 194 governments, all of them rubbish. Worst perhaps was the bizarre, cruel General Mariano Melgarejo, who ruled between 1865 and 1871. This is a man who squandered his nation´s resources on booze and mistresses, ceded territory to Brazil in exchange for a horse, and once tied the British ambassador naked to a mule and banished him from the country for failing to drink enough beer.
More recently, in 1979, the presidency was seized by a general who was backed by a cocaine trafficking cartel and resident celebrity Nazi, Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons. And in the 1980s, inflation touched 35,000%. As anyone who knows me knows, I love all this stuff.
La Pas is a stinking, dirty, poor place where families can be seen rummaging through mountains of trash by the sides of roads (they take it to sell at the trash market on Sundays). It´s a much wilder place then Peru. The city is unimaginably chaotic and noisy. Posh restaurants crank up dire pop tunes. Brass bands honk past outside. The most amicable conversations are conducted at a level that suggests imminent violence. Open sewers. Offensive smells. There´s even a witches market.
Great, messy, crazy place. We´re off to see more of it.
Cusco, Peru
May 17, 2006
We're about to set off on the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. No time to write everything up so here are some photos and quick idea of what's been going on.
From Riobamba in Ecuador we took a train into the south of the country. Four hours sat on the roof of the train as it wove through the Andes.
From there we headed to a small village called Vilcabamba, in the far south near the border with Peru. The area is known as the valley of eternal youth. We sat around there for a few days and read and had a bit of a holiday, then spent 48 hours on buses getting down to Cusco, which is where we are now.
This is such a beautiful ancient city with Inca ruins dotted around. Today we start the climb to Machu Picchu, which is at an altitude higher than the top of Mont Blanc.
