we cannot pronounce buenos aires

lima, quito, and the worst border crossing in south america

2009-07-19T11:12:00.000-07:00

hey folks!

well, it was an eventful 22-hour bus trip to Lima! it should have been 20 hours, but there were manifestaciones (protests) again, so we had to wait for the police to clear the highway so that the bus could pass. when we did eventually pass, we were warned to close all the curtains on the bus because the protesters throw rocks at the passing buses. but no windows were broken, so it was all good.

a guy on our bus got stopped a few weeks earlier on the arequipa-cusco highway, and the bus couldn´t get through at all: so he ended up walking with his backpack for two days until he could find somewhere to catch another bus to cusco. he could have gone back to arequipa, but everyone told him he`d only have to walk two hours to catch another bus, and by the time he realised they were wrong there was no turning back!

(but if that had happened to us there´s no way we would have walked, because it would have been impossible for me. we would have gone back to Ica and waited a few days.)

anyway, Lima was lovely! we stayed in Miraflores, which is the upmarket area of Lima with all kinds of fancy shops and restaurants, shopping centres, cinemas... it looked so classy, and there were stores selling Reebok and Sketchers and Billabong and other such international brands... I actually had a little bit of culture shock for the first couple of days. honestly, even Santiago and Buenos Aires didn´t have the same ¨rich suburb¨ feel, and we´ve been in some pretty basic places for a while now!! I was really wierded out.

I enjoyed Lima though. we stayed there for a week, mainly so that I could see a decent doctor and my knee could have a chance to get better. it´s healed now, hurray! (amazing how fast it did get better after I found a decent doctor and a decent bandage!!) there´s still an ugly-looking scar, but that just ups my hardcore factor I reckon.

we went out one night in Barranco (another suburb of Lima) and met a group of students, originally from Arequipa, who were AWESOME. only the girl, Daniela (who was lovely), spoke English but our Spanish is at enough of a level now that we can have some very basic conversations, and other than that we just had a dance with them. it was a really fun night. I guess you never really have very in-depth conversations in bars anyway so the language barrier´s not such a big deal?

they all added us on facebook afterwards and left heaps of comments on our photos full of spanish slang, almost none of which I understand, which saddens me indeed!

also while we were in Lima, we were eating dinner in the hostel one night and watching over the shoulders of some Peruvians watching the news, and I was (bizarrely) understanding more Spanish than I usually do, and I realised they were talking about a murder : someone had killed someone else, and one of them seemed to be famous, and both were young men, and there was a lot of talk about an apartment? ¨this needs to be cleared up,¨ I thought, and asked the Peruvians to explain. apparently, a famous hairdresser - Marco Antonio - had been murdered a few days earlier by his boyfriend and a few accomplices for his money!! woaaahh crazy stuff. pretty big news in Peru!

anyway, our plan from Lima was to fly up to Bogotá, in Colombia, and head for the Carribean coast. that plan was completely scrapped after we basically spent all day with a travel agent trying to find an affordable way to do it! (the travel agent was lovely: she told us all about her baby son, and gave us a cookie that her mum made, and searched through a million flights for us.) it´s holiday time for Peruvians so flight costs are through the roof: and we just don´t have enough time left to make the cost worth it. plus, we had to buy a flight back to Buenos Aires as well, to get home. ouch!

so we went to Ecuador instead!

we took a 19-hour bus overnight to the northern border of Peru, which left us in Tumbes. from Tumbes, we had to somehow get across the border into ecuador. we´d been warned ahead of time that this border crossing is notorious for fake officials who try to steal your passport, rip-off taxi drivers, ¨money-changers¨ who give out fake US dollar notes, border officials who try to convince you that there is a fee for entry to ecuador (there isn´t), et cetera, and therefore has earned the title of ¨the worst border crossing in South America¨ (no mean feat)!

a note for Mum: nothing we read said the border crossing was actually dangerous. you´re just very likely to lose money over it!

we´d planned to catch a bus with Cifa, who take you across the border on the same bus and leave you in a town about two hours from the border, in Ecuador. but the minute we got off the bus in Tumbes the bus company wouldn´t let us walk down the street to find Cifa´s office, claiming that we had to catch a taxi because it was dangerous to walk around town. I was very skeptical about this, thinking it was more likely that they were working with the taxi drivers, but what can you do in that situation? we had to reassess. (my Lonely Planet was once again useless, containing the wrong address for the Cifa office that had apparently moved years ago.)

anyway, another option presented itself. a girl Lion had been sitting next to on the bus, Anna (who spoke fluent Spanish), was on the verge of outstaying her Peruvian visa and needed to go over the border and re-enter the country to be given a new visa. so she had arranged with the bus company to take a taxi to the border: the taxi driver´s friend would help her with the visa formalities and then take her back to Tumbes. she suggested we come with her: once we´d been through the Peruvian immigration, the driver would take us onto the Ecuadorian immigration and help us find an onward bus to Quito. the price was reasonable, so I figured why not? with their help, the border crossing might work out a little easier.

this probably sounds incredibly dodgy to you, the casual reader (especially if you´re my Mum, or worse, Lion´s mum). Anna did assure us, however, that the taxi drivers frequently worked with Cruz del Sur, the bus company we´d come with from Lima (who are the best - and safest - bus company in Peru). I probably wouldn´t do it again (to be honest the decision was a little rushed), but it did all turn out okay. the taxi driver took us through as planned, and didn´t even rip us off! (incredible!)

Anna, translating from the driver, told us on the way that the border was reknowned for dodgy fake-officials asking to see your passports. so when Lion was accosted by a policeman demanding to see her passport for no apparent reason (he hadn´t asked anyone else) she was understandably reluctant to hand it over. he wasn´t impressed, and displayed his discontent by slamming his fist into his palm and yelling ¨RESPETO!¨ (¨respect me!¨) in the end she had to hand it over and hope for the best because he wouldn´t let her any further into the immigration office. turns out he was a real police officer (how were we supposed to know?!), and it all worked out okay.

then we had to walk over the border between Peru and Ecuador with all our bags and the taxi driver, which is probably the most threatened I´ve felt in South America because the border town was complete madness, with people everywhere.

we dropped our bags and bought a bus ticket at one of the dodgier-looking bus offices I have seen in South America, although apparently they are a major bus company in Ecuador. they were okay in the end, despite the flaking paint and bare concrete and rusting security barriers.

anyway, after dropping our bags we had to catch a different taxi to the Ecuadorian immigration office, about 5km away, to get our entry stamp. we had to pay one US dollar for the taxi and the smallest note I had was a 20, so I was glad our driver was still with us to make the grumbling Ecuadorian driver give us change rather than just taking the whole 20! the Ecuadorian immigration process went smoothly, except for one of the policemen asking me a lot of suspicious questions about our driver, who was still helping us out (reassuring?!)

then we took the taxi back to the border town (the driver left to pick up Anna and take her back to Tumbes - I hope everything worked out okay for her!), and waited there for two and a half hours until it was time to catch the bus. finding vegetarian food for lunch was almost impossible and we were starving, but in the end we went into the cleanest-looking café we could find, disregarded the meaty menu, and asked them to make us an omelette and a cheese sandwich. (I could have eaten meat, of course, but I have had more than enough food poisoning experiences on this trip!!) they looked at us rather oddly, but a very greasy omelette and a cheese sandwich we did, in fact, get (and quite cheaply too)!

the bus trip to quito was pretty fun until sunset. tropical climate wind blowing in through the windows, banana plantations, women in midriff tops and men in wifebeaters (the men were mostly middleaged and potbellied though, not that interesting).

oh, and a big shed with a painting of the world trade centre falling with ¨taliban here¨ painted on the side - i had noooo idea what that was about until Lion googled it and found out that it´s a rather famous (or infamous?) ¨Taliban-themed brothel¨. iiiiiiiinteresting?! here is a photo I stole from someone else´s blog (hobotraveler.com), because we went past too fast to get a snap:

kind of disturbing to come across after that monumental border crossing!!

come 5am, and after a night with no dinner (ugh), we were in Quito and taking a taxi to our hostel. the hostel is lovely, one of my favourites so far, and the staff are really friendly. we´ve booked a five-day tour into the Amazon with them (our reason for coming to Ecuador in the first place). we leave for that tonight, and I am excited!

we went out last night in Quito (in the old town, which is full of police all night on a weekend and is therefore quite safe, although we still took taxis everywhere rather than walking, to be on the safe side). once again we discovered the uselessness of Lonely Planet when their recommended pub was shut down some years ago, and nobody we asked had ever heard of it!

but we met a family on the street - one of whom, a man called Jose, had lived in Sydney for a year and spoke amazingly good English - whilst trying to ask the police for directions, and they showed us the way to the best part of the old town for nightlife. it was a pretty good night in the end, filled with Ecuadorian folk music (much better than Bolivian or Peruvian folk music which is way too panpipe-heavy), mulled wine, tango and salsa and a surprisingly helpful policeman who helped us catch a taxi home. ¨Ecuadorian police : a mixed bag?!¨

coming up next...... THE JUNGLE!!!

jungle trek: an aborted version, including the tale of how a guide is fired

2009-07-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

hello folks!

so you have now learnt of caroline´s jungle trek experience, which was very exciting and enjoyable (if you have not read this yet go to the previous two entries). my experience was a little different, unfortunately!

so we bus´ed about four hours to the top of a mountain (about 4000 metres asl). the guide got the bikes off the top of the van and prepped them. we put on our helmets and wooly hats and jumpers and raincoats (for the cold wind) and gloves, and after a quick briefing off we scooted, or rather cycled. the van followed about 100 metres behind us.

we were on a fancy new bitumen road, heading down a mountain, keeping to the right as you`re supposed to on peruvian roads, and keeping away from the steep cliff-face to the left dropping off to a considerable fall were you to go over (no railings). to the right, there was a deep, steep-sided triangular, cement ditch to collect rainfall run-off and/or the frequent rockfalls.

i was daydreaming, scooting down with a smile on my face and thinking of a time i rented a bike in christchurch (i´d completely forgotten about that day). literally about three minutes into the ride i suddenly realised how close my bike wheel was to the ditch at the right. too late!! looking down, i saw the wheel drop slightly into the ditch; i tried to correct it back onto the road but the next thing I knew I was lying on my back on the bitumen a few metres in front of my bike, and a number of body parts hurt. (nothing was broken.)

thirty seconds later i was surrounded by people, and nothing hurt at all. in fact, i felt so good that I wanted to get back on my bike again! (luckily, nobody would let me.)

they helped me sit up, and i could see that my leggings had ripped off both my knees and i´d skinned the right one well good. there was a little blood on my left elbow, and quite a lot of bruising there and on my right knee (though I didn´t realise this til later). i´d ripped my left glove completely in half (though my hand was fine). i scratched my face, too, but not very badly.

one of the guys, John, who was a lovely wouldn´t-hurt-a-fly fellow from Scotland who was very kind to me in the coming days, suggested that he could take a photo of the wound on my knee. I think he was trying to cheer me up. unfortunately for him, i react to stress and pain by becoming a rather unpleasant human being, so i replied with an agressive, ¨NO I DON´T WANT A F***ING PHOTO! WHAT THE F*** IS WRONG WITH YOU? WHAT AM I GOING TO DO, SHOW IT TO MY MOTHER?! I DON´T F***ING THINK SO!!¨ .... everyone laughed, kind of nervously. sorry John. if you ever read this, I apologise!

Lion said by the time she reached the group again everyone told her, ¨yes she seems to be alright but i think she´s just a little pissed off about the whole thing.¨ hahaha. i know i shouldn´t be, but i´m vaguely proud of that. at least they didn´t say i was a crybaby!

the guide Frank turned up and held out some sort of dirty tissue that he proposed to place onto my right knee. I refused adamantly (at least my aggressive state was good for something)! this is when I found out that he did not have ANY kind of first aid kit. not so much as a bandaid! luckily, i had a few clean bandages and a little bottle of iodine in my own bag in the van, which i purchased in australia five months ago (at the time i felt vaguely like a hypochondriac but now i am very glad)!

nobody else in the group had brought a first aid kit (even though a number of them had one at their hostel back in Cusco) because they were told the guide would have one. in fact, out of all the tour groups we met on the way to macchu picchu in the coming days, all of them said that a) their guide told them he´d have a first aid kit and b) he didn´t. I will come back to this later.

anyway, I had to sit in the van the rest of the day watching everyone cycle down the hill. it looked like fun. we stayed in Santa María that night, by which point I established that I could not walk without the help of Lion´s walking stick. this state of affairs continued, despite my hopes, for the next two days, so in fact I did no trekking whatsoever. two colectivos (a kind of shared taxi), a train and a great deal of boring waiting later (thanks to John for lending me a book) I met the others in Aguas Calientes, and caught the offensively expensive 25-minute bus to Macchu Picchu.

Macchu Picchu, I´ve gotta say, was completely worth it. and my leg did feel well enough that day (sort of - i´m paying for it now) to do a 45-min hike to the Sun Gate, where you get a view from above. not quite as exciting as the ladder-mountain Lion climbed, but it probably felt like as much of an achievement!

anyway, there is more to this story. in Santa Teresa, where we were staying the second night, I attempted to find another bandage so I could change the one on my knee, but I couldn´t. all the tiny pharmacies or tiny medical clinic (with one nurse, and an assistant) had available was some coarse guaze that I knew would stick to the wound, so I figured I was better off leaving my bandage on. (if you recall, none of the guides had first aid kits.)

unfortunately my bandage stuck anyway, and I woke up on the morning of day three in considerable pain. my knee hurt so much I was worried that it was infected (it wasn´t, luckily, and still isn´t), but I learnt to my consternation that I was eight hours´ bumpy bus ride from Cusco and the bus wouldn´t leave til that arvo, so I had no choice but to risk the nurse in the tiny medical clinic. I didn´t trust her and she knew it, but to her credit she was very lovely and explained everything she was going to do.

the bandage was so badly adhered to the wound that it took her half an hour to remove it. (one of the more painful experiences of my life, and by this time I was DEFINITELY a crybaby.) she spoke no english, so the guide came with me to translate. he also had to translate, due to her curiousity, the meaning of the word ¨f***¨ that I was yelling periodically. sorry, nurse. well, I´m sure she´s heard worse in Spanish.

this cost me 45 soles, which is not that much money (about 20 australian dollars) but because the guide didn´t have a first aid kit (if he had, I would have been able to change the bandage myself, and also I felt the agency should learn that not taking a first aid kit is NOT okay) I decided when we got back that I wanted the agency to pay me back for it. we´d booked the tour through our hostel, and they agreed, so they gave the ol´ boss a bell.

the boss and the guide were supposed to turn up at the hostel in half an hour to discuss it. Lion and I had the feeling Frank, the guide, was going to get blamed, but I believed (and I still do) that it´s the agency´s responsibility to make sure the guide has all the right safety stuff. so we were planning to stress that belief; but they didn´t turn up. the manager of our hostel, after 45 minutes, gave us the money back himself and told us that the guide had admitted he didn´t have a first aid kit, and that because of that he was going to lose his job.

I doubt they were joking. after I reported them to the hostel they had to do something drastic, otherwise the hostel would have stopped referring their guests to them and they would have lost a lot of work.

the manager of the hostel claimed that the agency gave all their guides first aid kits, and that they just don´t take them on the treks. I don´t believe this at all. there must periodically be accidents: and none of the guides had kits! surely some of them would be responsible enough to take them. and if it is, as they claimed, a sackable offense not to take them, surely they´re not all idiots? but I will never know, I suppose. I feel a little bad for Frank. but the manager claimed he´d find another job with a different agency, so I suppose he´ll be okay.

perhaps I got the message across to the agency about the first aid kits, even if they did choose a scapegoat first. I hope so.

anyway my knee: is very slowly getting better. after five days there´s still a lot of skin missing and I have to use Lion´s stick to walk, so I`ve been told I have to keep it immobilised and elevated for a while. BORING. we`re about to take a 20-hour bus to Lima, so that will be a bit of forced immobilisation at least! I still haven´t been able to find a decent bandage and I had to go through the rip-off of a stuck bandage procedure twice more (not as bad as the first time luckily). I´m hoping to find something decent in Lima.

okay I´m hungry and this is a great deal for you all to read so time to finish! can´t wait for my knee to get better so I can regale you all with more adventures. make sure you read Lion´s posts as well, her stories of that hike are hardcore. LATER, robocop xxx

A Magical Journey: Dia Tres

2009-07-06T08:27:00.000-07:00

Hello! Apparently my parents want me to finish writing about the Inca Jungle trek so I guess I will have to. Incidentally you will note that my experience of the Inca Jungle trek was quite different to Ro's. Long story.

Well. After the monkey shenanigan it seemed like nothing would ever be exciting again but I was incorrect. That night over dinner (spaghetti Napolitana for the vegetarians, much like the spaghetti Napolitana we had eaten for lunch that day in fact) our guide Frank told us that we had two options for DAY THREE. The typical trek involved walking for a couple of hours along a road to the hydroelectric station, then another couple of hours along a train line to Aguas Calientes, the small town that acts as a base for all tourists to Macchu Picchu. Our other option was to take a collectivo (small painful bus) to the hydroelectric station before hiking along the train line and arriving at Aguas Calientes around 2 or 3pm. We could then spend the next couple of hours climbing up and down a mountain called Mt. Putucusi in Aguas Calientes to get our first glimpse of Macchu Picchu at sunset, from an angle most people don't get to see.

This was clearly a more enticing option. As we sat on the collectivo it was evident we weren't missing too much. It was dry and dusty and not overly jungly and if you don't think "jungly" is a word then I suggest you consult the Scrabble dictionary where you will find it along with "junglier" and "jungliest." The walk along the railroad was nice, though. A lot junglier, though not the jungliest place we saw.

Eeeeeeeeeentonces we got to Aguas Calientes and dumped our backpacks in the hostel and got READY TO RUMBLE. I try not to swear in this blog since my mum once told me she read it to my nana but just imagine I am about to swear now. HOLY SNOOT it was a tough climb. It was really really tough. It started out with some steep stairs. Okay, we thought, this is not so bad. We are tough and can handle it. There were only four of us by that stage, excluding our guide, and we had been powering along the railroad like nobody's business, so we thought we were pretty intense.

One thing about Mt. Putucusi (this means "Happy Mountain" in Quechua, a fact that I find simultaneously pleasing and untruthful) that nobody told me is that the path includes seven vertical ladders with steep gaps between the thick wooden rungs. They also failed to inform me that apparently over seventy-five percent of people who begin the climb decide to turn back once they hit the first of the ladders. Actually I am glad I didn't know this. I assumed I was just being a big pansy. It wasn't the scariness of the ladders that scared me, you understand, but my general unfitness. I haven't been jogging in South America, you know. So once I was halfway up the first of the ladders I thought to myself "Holy snoot, this is probably going to kill me, but I am going to have to continue because it will hold everyone up if I slow down." The longest of the ladders is over 100 feet.

I recommend you click here to see a picture of the nasty thing.

Our guide Frank scampered up there like he did it on a weekly basis, which of course he did. We took probably an hour and a half to get up there as a group, which actually wasn't too bad, although it didn't feel brilliant after seeing Frank rocket up like a sherpa. The vertical wooden ladders stopped after about 45 minutes, but the climb along the Inca trail (not the Inca Trail(tm), but one of many Inca trails) was still steep and vicious with huge crumbly steps and loose rocks. We were simultaneously discouraged and encouraged by passing about ten people from another tour group, the only other people we saw on the mountain, who each invariably told us we were "almost there" and it was "worth it" and a splendid view of Macchu Picchu was "just around the corner" and gave us wildly different estimates of the time required to make the summit (two minutes; fifteen minutes; eight minutes). But when we got there... ahhh. We really had been almost there, and now we were there. And it was worth it.

It actually made my eyes water a little, the combination of exhaustion and thrill. From where we stood we couldn't see a single tourist. Just beautiful expansive terraces sprawled across the side of the mountain, and Huayna Picchu, the mountain that you see in every picture of the ruins. We were so excited to have made it that we were jumping around and whooping and high fiving and just exhaling with pleasure at the sight. I felt like an Inca.

On that note I'm going to leave off for now. I'd like to write more but I have places to be. Tonight we get on a bus to Lima, a real twenty-four hour mare. ("Mare" is a really ridiculous phrase we learnt from Rosie and Anna, our English parters-in-crime from Bariloche and beyond. It means "nightmare" and I don't really know why I just decided to use it.) We're indulging in Cama mode, though, because we've trod much of the terrain before and it's hideous. Cama mode means your seat goes back really far and is nice and wide and sometimes made of leather. They often give you wine and whiskey before bed. Probably not in Peru though. You can also get Semi-cama, which is tolerable, and Classico, which means it goes back just a tiny smidgen and is probably a bit like being in hell. Semi-cama is standard. In Cama mode they show Slumdog Millionaire and in Classico they show films that are written by, directed by and starring Nicholas Cage. In Semi-cama it can go either way.

(When we were fledglings, we took the 32-hour trip on deadly boring Ruta 40 from El Chalten to Bariloche in CLASSICO mode. We had no idea what we were missing out on. It wasn't even that bad a trip, but you wouldn't believe how much mileage we've got out of this story. Whenever anyone tells us about their nightmare bus trips we can crap all over them.)

So I suppose I will finish this tale of wonder later. I'm more likely to remember if you pester me so if you want to hear how it ends then shoot me an email.

Love love love
Lion

A Magical Journey: Dia Uno y Dos

2009-07-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

I am officially an intense person!

That is correct. Last night I successfully completed the Inca Jungle trek. Which isn't necessarily the most intense trek in its own right, but we supplemented it a bit to make it more intense.

The first day was MOUNTAIN BIKING. I am not really a mountain biking sort of person, to be honest, but I was still pretty excited. We took a long and winding road up a mountain; definitely the naked version, there was no soothing Spector effect at work. That's a Beatles reference for all you non-fans. What I am trying to say is that it was a very uncomfortable and bumpy bus journey that made me quite nauseous. So I was quite relieved when we started biking.

We started out on the road. It was all downhill and the road was lovely and smooth but it was kind of spooky, because there were rather a lot of hairpin bends and such. I ride my bike in Perth quite a lot but generally I do not have the opportunity of falling off a cliff so this was a bit more frightening. Later we found out that a girl died on one of these bikes in February. She was hit by a truck coming around a corner. I don't think she was with our company though. The road was beautiful, anyway. It was freezing at first, with cold cold winds coming from the mountains, but after an hour of riding you could feel the first hot breaths from the jungle rising up to the road. So it was kind of odd, alternating between going "Ooh that's a bit chilly" and "Ahhh well now that is just lovely".

We rode like that for a couple of hours but then it was time for some hella intense biking! The scenery changed from alpine to JUNGLE and the road switched from asphault to bumpy old rocks that jolted you around like nobody's business. I was kind of spooked, but actually I found it much less scary than the road section. Reason being that there were no longer the huge drops from the side of the road, and the hairpin bends lessened just a little. Also the cars had to go slower. So after clutching the brakes desperately for the first two hour, I finally CUT LOOSE. Man, was I awesome! Barrelling all over the shop like a ROCKET with my cycling gloves making me look like someone incredibly tough.

We stayed at hostels the whole time, which was sort of nice and sort of disappointing. Tents are more intense.

Okay! I hope you are not too intensed-out because it is time for me to tell you about DAY TWO. This was the first day of hiking! Actually it was a pretty chill day. We hiked along a road for a bit. Then we hiked up a hill, which was sweaty work in the hot ol' jungle but fairly manageable, and then we hiked downhill. There is not much else I can tell you about the hiking so instead I will tell you about the CASA DEL MONKEYS.

We stopped at a great little hut high in the jungle for a rest and to buy snacks, if you wanted. It had been a steep old climb up until there so we were happy for the rest and were reclining on the ground with another tour group when we saw an odd creature come galumphing up to us, looking exactly like a cross between a beaver and a wombat. He leapt onto a wooden stump and seized hold of a waterbottle full of purple liquid in his little paws. Then he stood on his hind legs and poured it into his little buck-toothed mouth. I still have no idea what type of animal he was.

I noticed that the other tour group was looking at something and wandered over and there was a MONKEY! He was tied to a tree on a sort of bungee cord, so that he could scrabble up the wall and fling himself between trees. He didn't really show much interest in the tourists, but there was a cute American girl patting him when he came close and feeding him banana and asking people to take pictures of her with the monkey and I watched her primate progress with jealousy. But then a sweet little kitten came up to me and sat in my lap so I happily patted it and didn't mind too much about the monkey.

Then the tour group got bored and wandered away to lie in the hammocks, so I wandered down to watch the monkey in action. He flung himself about the trees for a bit and scrabbled for food. Then he started glancing at me with those big funny disconcertingly human eyes, then flung himself about a bit more. Then he crawled onto a rock near me. Cautiously I stretched out my arm a little closer to him. I thought he would probably try to bite me, but I had my rabies shots and besides he was the family's monkey and I have incredible reflexes (not really though). Instead of biting me, though, he grabbed my arm and wrapped his arms around it, like he was hugging it, and pressed his face to it gently, almost like he was kissing it.

I was kind of ecstatic and sat there a while longer, watching him wander off and jump around some more. After a while the señora who lived at the house came up to him and removed the bungee cord, so the monkey was free to move around where he liked. At first I had thought the cord was so he couldn't escape and run away, but actually I think it was just so he didn't crawl though the tourist's bags and steal things (I saw him trying this). The monkey came straight up to me, hugged my arm again and then crawled into my lap. He then stayed there for the next ten minutes, sometimes scrabbling for food and sometimes flopping relaxedly. Ohhhhh he was so great! He let me scratch and pat him and he was so sweet and soft and small I thought I was in love.

Our tour guide Frank called us all together and told us it was time to move on, and by that stage the monkey (Marty I believe he was called. Or perhaps Ma-Ti, like in Captain Planet) hopped his way out of my lap. The señora picked him up and picked up one of his paws to make him wave goodbye to me. "Ciao, Señorita!" she said. "Ciao, amigo!" I said to the monkey, and reached out an arm to wave. But he grabbed it and hugged it again and then climbed on my shoulder and nuzzled into my neck. Everyone laughed indulgently and the woman went to gently remove him and he curled his tail around my arm to make it harder for her to pull him off. Unfortunately she eventually succeeded and we were at last to be parted. But I guess that what I am trying to say is: Mark, it is over between us. I am sorry. But I have met someone else.

More details of the journey to Macchu Picchu coming soon! Unless I get lazy and can't be bothered! Quite possible.

Love love love
Lion

You make me feel like blogging, I wanna blog the night away

2009-06-29T09:54:00.000-07:00

Not really or I would blog more often. But I am waiting for Ro to do whatever it is she does so I am here in a net café and suppose I should update this.

Weeeeellllllll! We are in Cusco, our most touristy destination so far. Actually I really like it! It is a beautiful city and although there is a McDonalds around the main plaza, it is so discreet that I didn't even realise what kind of establishment it was until someone told me. The Plaza de Armas is an absolute cracker - Peru seems to do plazas quite well. The only problem is that you are constantly attacked by people offering massages, meals and cheap paintings. There are so many people selling so many paintings and they are so cheap that Ro suspects they are paint-by-numbers jobs executed by slave children and I suppose there is no reason why she might be wrong.

FACT ABOUT PERU! They looove Aerosmith.

We went to the Nazca lines and despite my initial reservations (not so much about the lines but about spending money; four months of travel have not cooled off my inherent stinginess) they were grrrrreat. Really they were. The plane made both of us feel a little sick though; I was quite pleased it was only a half hour flight. But apart from the surprising clutch of nausea it was grand. The spaceman! So creepy! The hummingbird! So elaborate! The tree! Less interesting but aesthetically pleasing. In fact I bought a little wire-cut necklace of it from an old hippie who told me that he was a true artisan and all the other guys running jewellery stalls were hacks. He showed me how he cut the necklaces which was genuinely quite impressive.

I also bought a Nazca Lines tourist shirt which Ro has since been mocking me for(my thriftiness apparently does not extend to vile tourist parephernalia). Personally I think it is very cool. It has pictures of the Inca astrological calendar on it, which is a bit silly because it has since been debunked that the Nazca lines were supposed to represent the calendar, but I rather think this adds to its charm.

That afternoon... we went swimming! There was a pool at our hostel. It was such a great hostel, in fact, that we are now staying at their sister hostel in Cusco. Also very nice (probably not as nice but the people are good.) And we made friends with a wacky Englishman called Rob who works as an English teacher in Saudi Arabia and played Connect 4 with him. I was amazing at it to be honest. Ro also managed to make the boy who worked at the hostel fall in love with her so nice one, Ro.

Oh but the bus to Cusco was a NIGHTMARE. Probably the worst bus trip yet. It was supposed to leave Nazca at 8 but we were informed it wouldn't leave until 9. This was actually good news because we had just realised that we left our bathers and towels back at the hostel, so we ran back to get them. We didn't eat dinner because they usually give that to you on the bus, but they screwed up and didn't get me a vegetarian meal (even though it said on my ticket, 'VEGETARIAN'. So dinner was a miniscule packet of plain potato chips until morning, when I recieved a chemical-tasting sliver of orange cake and half a foam cup of lukewarm black instant coffee. "Breakfast," apparently.

I couldn't eat dessert either because it was a cup full of gelatinous crap (possibly jelly). Ro wasn't very tempted by hers either and left it on her tray. Later it fell off the tray and much much later, twelve hours later in fact, I found it for her! In the lining of the lovely felt hat I had bought for Mark in La Paz.

There was a poor dear little thing sitting behind us, about four years old, who had been on the bus since Lima. She didn't cry and hardly whimpered but periodically vomited while her mum held up a plastic bag and sprinted off to the toilet with it. It was a really nauseating journey, actually. Ro and I were both quite motion sick and people seemed to be rushing to the loo left right and centre. We were on the top (most overnight buses are double deckers, and the plebs like us go on the top) but when we got out of the bus for a wee break there was a monumental pile of vomit sitting outside the toilet. One must train oneself not to require said facility on these journeys.

We took some Phenergan which helped with the motion sicky and got me four hours of sleep. Shame the trip was thirteen hours long, really. We were meant to arrive at 10 - in fact I've heard of people doing the trip in 9 hours - but we didn't get to the station until 12.30. Then we got absolutely flooded by taxi touts, who are a bit dodgy in Peru, so you have to check their lanyard thingy. We were with two other Aussies and a legitimate yet sneaky taxidriver tried to charge us 20 soles ($8?) to go to the station. But soon enough he seemed willing enough to take us there for 8 soles.

THEN our room at the hostel wasn't ready! Was a bit annoying but didn't matter too much since I was so hungry I couldn't speak by this stage. So we went to a café that served all-day breakfast and I ate scrambled eggs and drank coffee and felt magnificent (comparatively). Anyway, I guess that was the end of the tearful journey and things were much happier from then on in.

We haven't done much in Cusco yet! We'll go to Macchu Picchu soon OBVS. It's a good place just to wander though, and there are an obscene amount of markets. There is some really great international food, too. We went to a brilliant Israeli restaurant the other day. 10 soles ($4) for a semi-set menu - I got hummus and pita, falafel with fries and salad, a drink and a pancake with dulce de leche all of which was brilliantly tasty. Oh and they gave us a starter of bread and dip too as if all that other stuff wasn't enough. And there is a pretty famous place called Jack's that you have to queue up to get into, but the food is great, the milkshakes excellent and the servings obscenely generous (I couldn't finish my meal, which typically is not a common scenario in my life).

There are many humourous tourists here, up to their eyeballs in khaki for no apparent reason (disguising themnselves from the llamas I suppose) with enormous SLRS just waiting to be liberated from their ostentatiously knifeable shoulder straps. In fact I've never been in such a touristy place in my life. There are lots of little alleyways full of gringo hangouts and the occasional person offering to sell you marijuana. Apparently they offer cocaine too, but it hasn't happened to me yet. In fact the only times anyone's offered drugs have been when I'm hanging out with someone of the male persuasion. Perhaps in Peruvian culture it is considered unladylike to snort stimulants from a toilet seat. Anyway, I find the sells slightly amusing as they tend to come from people whose main line of work is touting. "Dinner amigos! Very good, very cheap! Happy hour! I give you free Pisco Sour!" And then sotto voce, "I sell you weed, good weed for you amigo."

I have so much crap in my pack and I don't want to get rid of ANY of it. Travelling is traumatic. I have two pairs of silly trousers now. And the top section of my back is overflowing with ludicrous gifts. Oh well. When I get back to BA I can get rid of my cold weather gear. I guess.

Man. Who needs a drink?

Love love love
Lion

from Arequipa to Nazca to see a few lines

2009-06-23T14:32:00.000-07:00

sometimes overnight buses are a blissful and cheap way to time-travel between cities: get on a bus in Mendoza, go to sleep, blank out the next 12 hours and wake up in Córdoba. awesome!

then there are those times when they are a sleepless 10 hours spent listening to the man behind you snoring, periodically bumping against the freezing window, feeling motion-sick as the bus winds through the mountains in the dark, eating crap food (that you´re vaguely worried will make you sick; how long ago was this beef cooked?!) and then being unceremoniously deposited on the streets of a strange new town in pre-dawn darkness and trying to sort through the mobs of hassling taxi drivers and folk selling rooms in their hostels. ¨amiga, amiga!¨

luckily, we booked a brilliant hostel for Nazca: they said (in spanish that i half-understood in my bleary state), ¨the beds you have booked are still occupied, but here, in the meanwhile you can have this room (worth twice the one you booked): feel free to sleep in the beds, use the soap (soap! we got hotel soap!) and generally mess it up until your actual room is ready at midday.¨

so we slept til midday. ahhhhhh. thanks guys.

so why are we in Nazca? well firstly because I wanted to see the Nazca lines and Lion agreed to come to see them with me, and secondly because we are then going to Cuzco for Macchu Picchu and the road from Arequipa to Cuzco is blocked by ¨manifestaciónes¨ (protests) and there are no bus companies running that route except really dodgy ones that might apparently dump you miles outside Cuzco and force you to hitchhike whilst protesters are throwing rocks at you (one story we heard from another traveller). alternately, they might take backstreets around the protests and construct makeshift bridges of wood for the buses to cross (our friend Martin´s experience). so while that does sound like a fun adventure (except for the rock part), we figured the Nazca route might be a bit easier.

it´s quite odd to be finally going to Macchu Picchu, one of the supposed ¨must see¨, ¨this will be the highlight of your trip¨ destinations. not to be ¨one of those people¨, but I have a feeling my highlights are going to be things like the time we went into a step-back-in-time diner in the middle of nowhere in Chile, truly resembling a scene in a Western, where all the customers were drunk old men enjoying their siesta a little too much. but I am sure that Macchu Picchu will be great, and I will have to admit to being a pretentious jerk and eat my words within days.

by the way: I did get a bit sick in Chivay, which was boring, but I got better real quick and because we had to stay an extra night we ended up seeing a pretty big street party: the folks of Chivay were having the 184th anniversary of their town. other than donkeys and llamas and dancers galore, we saw a giant sculpture of bamboo being constructed during the day, which we took to be some kind of street art until Lion realised the entire thing was covered in live fireworks. (there were also a few extra firewords on the ground, which small children were playing with.)

we heard it set off at midnight and rushed out onto the street (look, I´d like to say we partied with the locals all night and all that, but guys, there was still ice in the gutters at midday the next day: it was TOO COLD). anyway, picture spinning wheels of fire, spraying sparks all over the streets, and cheering crowds. it was WACKY. so something good came of the lettuce-incident!

we have 45 days left now!! ...oh my goodness, that´s not very long at all!!

Ro is Sick of Peru

2009-06-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Oh wait I mean she is sick in Peru. Yes it is true, the Deital Department of Health and Hiking has once more blighted us. We have made our way to the APPARENTLY breathtaking Colca canyon. Yesterday we arrived in Chivay after ascending on the old bussy-wuss to a monumental 4700m (Chivay itself is only 3700, though. Still high enough for me to get a spot of head pain.)

Upon arrival we caught a cab to the hot springs just out of town. Well, not hot springs but hot pools. They weren't quite hot enough for my liking but they were pretty good, surrounded by cliffs. One thing that really tickled my fancy was the woman coming around with a menu in a plastic sleeve. So you could order drinks and food to ingest whilst luxuriating in the thermal baths! Hel-lo! That sort of thing is not usually my bag, but the fact that I could actually afford it made it more my bag. So I went craaazy and got a Cuba Libre. Ro went insaaane and got a Sangria. Ugh. Nightmare. The woman came and bought them to us with a little bendy straw in each and it was quite a thrill.

Since we were already firmly ensconsced in the lap of luxury we decided to go hogwild and get a half-hour massage too! Talk about hedonism! Ro was massaged by a nice friendly looking Peruvian woman in a comfortably-fitting t-shirts and cotton trousers. I was massaged by a sweaty gentleman who appeared to be an amateur boxer, attired in a gorgeous shiny singlet that stretched invitingly over his magnificent gut and a pair of red budgie-smugglers that might have been a decent fit for Harry Potter. But he was very professional. And the entire exercise, baths and rum and all included, worked out to about $20 each, which is really not so bad.

But thennn we woke up nice and early today, all ready to hike our way along the fine old canyon, when Ro woke up sick! We blame the lettuce. Sheesh guys, are you just trying to punish me for buying a walking pole or something? Or perhaps this additional blight is because I accidentally said ¨shite¨ when I bumped into some holy table in the delightful convent in Arequipa the other day. (A woman with red hair gave me a filthy look, but why? At least I had the decency to Gaelicise it.) Eeeeeeentonces (that is Spanish for ¨So.¨ A little touch of culture for you) we might just catch an ol' autobus to the canyon instead.

Oh by the way. Ro and Greg both kindly informed me that the reason no one comments much is because it is a labyrinthine and near-impossible process so I ´spose you are all forgiven.

Where's the love y'all? I don't know.
Caro

copacabana, running out money and heading for Peru

2009-06-17T12:55:00.000-07:00

Hey all!

So after our last post Caro and I both got sick within a day of one another (not very sick, just enough to have to each spend a day in bed) and by the time we were better we were sick of La Paz and didn´t want to wait around another couple of days getting our strength back and getting everything sorted out again, so we didn´t go hiking on the Choro trail. This is still a source of some misery to me.

However, we went to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca instead and that was lovely.

We caught a minibus (another one) from La Paz. After about two hours´ driving, the minibus stopped next to Lake Titicaca and the rest of the bus got out and wandered off. ¨They must all be getting off at this town,¨ we thought, remaining on the bus. Not so. Two armed sailors (Bolivia has a Navy, and yet not a coastline) wandered up to our bus and indicated that we should get out. After a little bantering in Spanish we established that they wanted us to catch a ¨ferry¨ (a small rickety motorboat, through the wooden boards of which we could see water below) to the other side of the lake, and that the minibus would meet us over there. ¨Um... how?¨ we wondered. The mystery was soon solved when we saw the minibus drive onto a similarly rickety wooden barge. We all made it across okay.

Copacabana in Bolivia is not the Copacabana that the song is about... that place is in Brazil. Nevertheless it´s a fairly peaceful town on the bank of what appears to be an ocean but is actually high-altitude Lake Titicaca.

There is an island in this lake, called Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) which most people catch a ferry to from Copacabana. However since we missed the Choro trek, Caro and I and our new friend Martin (from Germany, who we met on the minibus from La Paz) decided to hike 17 kilometers to another town on the edge of the peninsula, and hire a motorboat from there to take us to the island.

The trek was beautiful; it went along the shoreline of Lake Titicaca most of the way, past all these little farming villages with donkeys and llamas and pigs and cows and sheep and dogs gazing at us from beside the dirt road.

Halfway along we saw a ¨floating island¨. Way back in the day, some folk in Bolivia and Peru used to live on floating islands built from reeds, fishing for trout all day. Supposedly some people still live like this but it is difficult to know whether this is true or not because all the ¨floating islands¨ advertised by tour companies are now just (quite literally) built for tourists. But since we were walking past, we went to have a look anyway. It was kind of cool, I guess. They were using empty plastic drink bottles, tied together, to support the raft, as I could see through the reed fronds hanging down. I don´t think that´s quite traditional but I suppose it´s pretty sensible. The guy running us, in answer to Martin´s question, said that he lived there because ¨there is great fresh fish and the tourists come to see the raft¨. We appreciated his honesty.

Catching a little motorboat from the end of the peninsula was pretty fun - again, we could see the water through the wooden planks, but we made it across okay. Our driver (who saw us walking along the road and ran out to offer the services of his boat) dropped us at the island, not at the usual landing bay, but at what appeared to be a small cliff. ¨There is a little path up there,¨ he told us, ¨You can walk to the town from there. Twenty minutes.¨

Forty hard-slog minutes later, we did in fact reach the town. And then we had the new dilemma of trying to find something to eat, exhausted after hiking all day (hiking at altitude is kind of tough by the way) because everything was closed - the locals were having a fiesta. This means they were all down at the plaza in their Sunday suits (men) and shiny party dresses (women), swigging from beer bottles and dancing around drunkenly. But we found an open restaurant eventually and boy howdy was it good to eat!

My bed had a window at the end of it. Miraculously, I somehow awoke in time to watch the sun rise over the lake without getting out of bed. It was pretty great.

We walked around Isla del Sol a bit the next day and then caught a ferry ¨back to Copacabana¨. This meant, we discovered, first being deposited at the other end of the island for an hour and a half, and being forced to pay 5 Bolivianos to get off the boat. Not that good of a time for Caro and I, since we were once again starving (and badly needed lunch), but also because we had run out of cash. There is no ATM on the island, obviously, but what we didn´t realise before we left La Paz is that there is no ATM on Copacabana either. We knew we were going to be pushing it with money, but after having to pay that 5Bs we had to borrow money from Martin for lunch.

It would be okay, we reckoned, because we´d be back to Copacabana before 5pm and we could get a cash advance from the bank. Well, after this ¨now you have an hour and a half to wait on the island¨ that we were not expecting from the ferry, we did not get back to Copacabana until after 5pm and the bank was shut. It did not open again until 2.30pm the next day.

Caro and I spent the intervening time living on a few emergency US dollars hidden in Caro´s pack, about $5 worth of Chilean currency I was planning on taking back to Australia as a souvenier (changed for a pretty poor rate, since we were miles from Chile), and some torn Bolivian bank notes that we´d been hoarding for a while (we begged the girl at our hostel for some sticky tape to fix them up again - bingo, another 40 Bolivianos! magic!)

Anyway, the bank eventually opened, I eventually got through the inevitably huge queue and we eventually got enough money to pay for our accomodation and leave town!

After a slightly hellish night bus and bording crossing we are now in Arequipa, Peru. Hurray! It is already clearly richer than Bolivia here, which for some reason feels really strange. For example:

People selling empanadas (yummm) and fruit juice (yummm) and magazines (muy interesante!) are selling them from shops, rather than little trolleys on the street;
I haven´t seen any little old ladies in traditional dress selling piles of mandarins/bananas/eggs laid out on cloth on the road;
Haven´t (yet) seen any super-dodgy looking markets selling super-dodgy looking food;
Even the advertisements on television look richer!!

And all kinds of other small things. Hell, even the beggars look richer! Also, people are taller and more European-looking. Some of them are taller than us!! Wiieerd.

We're not getting any Yunga

2009-06-08T10:35:00.000-07:00

Hey hello gringos. I hope everyone is going well?

I am sort of curious about how actually reads this blog. Word on the street is that there are more than two of you, but I am not certain whether this is. If you read you should comment. It makes us post more when we feel we are not alone in the universe.

I had a great great great birthday! Thank you for asking. Ro and I went for a wonderful old hike down into a valley in Coroico. There was a river at the bottom thick with butterflies, including those enormous bright blue ones fringed with black around the edges of their wings that you think only exist in documentaries or something. A butterfly even landed on my shoe and chilled out there for a while which I am pretty sure means good luck. It was a lovely little patch of river; we only saw two other people and found a delightful watering hole to swim in, and then just lazed around in the sun.

The walk back up to town was kind of tough. It involved a spot of bushbashing our way up a steep hill. But it was worth every second of it. And it was a perfect day, probably the sunniest and warmest birthday I have ever had.

We were pretty beat by the time we climbed back up to town, so we went straight to Cafetál, a hostel restaurant that apparently does the best food in Coroico. I myself can only report on the quinoa casserole, but I can unreservedly say that it was extremely tasty. We also befriended a very nice girl, a student of art history from Amsterdam wearing a red poncho, and invited her to join us at our table. We had heard from someone in town that there was a fiesta on the top of the mountain that night. So we asked her if she wanted to check it out with us, which she did.

It was a very odd sort of celebration. When we arrived there were cars and taxis parked everywhere. The top of the hill was mainly bare, except for satellite towers and a church. And obviously cars and taxis, and lots of people, and little stalls, and a band playing pachanga music (this rubbishy genre that I truly hate, not entirely dissimilar to Michael Crawford singing Cat Empire songs, or maybe Ricky Martin's ¨Cup of Life¨ on repeat play) on a little stage.

Coroico is a wonderful place, one of my favourites that we have been to. It is lush and green, and we stayed at a beautiful hostel. The sort of place that calls itself an ¨Eco Reserve,¨ but unlike most ¨Ecotourism¨ it only cost $7 a night for a beautiful spacious double room, with enormous windows through which you could see hummingbirds and big squirrels and mysterious enormous rodents.

But nooowwwwww we are back in La Paz! Staying in a slightly less gringo part of town. Before we were on Jiminez, which is so gringo that stores in the surrounding streets have everything written in Hebrew to support the outrageous volume of Israelis in alpaca jumpers.

Tomorrow we hike again! A nice little three day baby called the El Choro trail. It leaves from high up in the mountains, almost 4700m, but then runs downhill, almost down to Coroico again in fact. We were both a bit worried that it might be a bit tough on our knees, all that walking downhill. So today I bought a walking stick and I think now I can officially announce that I am the sort of person who hikes! Congratulations me. And it was only $20 (a pair of poles is usually five times that amount, I don't know what kind of jerk blows that kind of money on glorified freakin' dowelling rods.) So those mountains should WATCH OUT.

One wacky thing about La Paz is that there are some quite decent restaurants of the Asian persuasian. Sorry, I will never say ¨Asian persuasion¨ again. Or will I? Before we went to Coroico I ate some pretty rad tenpura at an Asian fusion place (they accidentally served me shrimp at first which was odd since I ordered ¨Tempura de Verduras¨ off the ¨Menu Vegetariana¨ but boy were they apologetic when I embarrassedly pointed out that I don't eat seafood), and last night I got pad Thai at another Asian fusian place which was even better, and then tonight I ate tofu yakisoba at a modest yet enchanting Japanese place! BELIEVE IT OR NOT. Mannn it's great, being able to afford to dine out.

We'll be back on Saturday. Just in case you are wondering.

Love love love
Lion

wacky transport day

2009-06-05T09:00:00.000-07:00

hello everyone! let me tell you about our wacky transport day. it was one of those days where you spend most of it thinking, ¨boy we are definitely not in australia right now¨.

after la paz, we decided to go to a little town called coroico, a few hours and about 1500m down the mountain. most gringos do this journey by taking a mountain bike tour down ¨the world´s most dangerous road¨ but Lion wasn´t keen and I couldn´t be bothered so we just took the bus.

the ¨bus station¨ was apparently in a suburb of la paz called villa fatima, so we took a taxi. (you can´t fit on a bolivian bus with a backpack.) the taxi driver drove reasonably smoothly, except that at one point he took a wrong turning and thus decided to reverse approximately two blocks to get back to the turning. the rest of the traffic didn´t seem too impressed, but then again people honk for no apparent reason pretty much constantly here so maybe they didn´t mind?

(as an aside, it´s ridiculously cheap and fast to get a taxi in south america at any time, in any location. what´s wrong with our home city that taxis are so difficult?)

anyway, the bus station was an old service station that had been gutted out, and the buses were an eclectic collection of minibuses with cramped seating, each with a very pushy little old lady (bolivia does pushy old ladies VERY well) racing around the grounds yelling the destination and price of their minivan. as we arrived in the midst of this in our taxi, we were not even out of the car when we were accosted by about seven of these ladies yelling, ¨COROICO AMIGA? QUINCE BOLIVIANOS AMIGA! CORIOCO AMIGA? EN ESTE MOMENTO AMIGA¨

this kind of aggressive salesmanship happens almost everywhere in bolivia, and it´s not just targeted at gringos (well, maybe a bit more at gringos sometimes, but the minibus ladies yell at EVERYONE) - so we are a bit used to it now. however, as we were standing there with our packs surrounded by all these ladies I realised they all a foot shorter than us, and so rather than feeling confronted I couldn´t help finding the whole thing a bit funny.

anyway, we chose our Señora (pretty much randomly), and the driver strapped our packs to the top of the minibus as I watched nervously and wondered if they would make it to Coroico (they did), and then we piled in and waited.

Señora, who had assured us that the van was full and that it would be leaving ¨in este momento¨ (i.e. right away) ran off to recruit more customers. I wasn´t that surprised. (the minibuses don´t really have a departure time, they just leave when they are full of people. this works well in a busy city like la paz. however catching the minibus on a slow day, we later discovered, can be a loooong process). luckily, it didn´t take her long to find passengers this time, so when finally the microbus was nice and uncomfortably full we departed.

Lion was sitting in the front, on the gearbox, between the driver and a bolivian man whom (she would later discover) was bus-narcoleptic and kept falling asleep on her shoulder. to his credit though, he held her guitar for her. being in the front, she got a nice view of the driving style, which consisted of the driver crossing himself and muttering a short prayer each time he went to overtake. (but he was a pretty good driver really, most of the time he only drove on the wrong side of the road when there was nothing else coming.)

thus we headed out of the city (past a seedy love motel called ¨hotel paraíso, 24 horas entrada¨), and through a police checkpoint. every police checkpoint in bolivia is accompanied by rows and rows of stalls selling biscuits, drinks, fried chicken etc. the sellers come up to the bus window, holding armfuls of stuff they think you might want. or, as we discovered from watching everyone else, you can also shout your order to them. then they will race back to the stall and grab the bottle of water or whatever and try to get back to the bus before it departs again.

a group of young bolivian guys on our bus asked for a bottle of coke, but they were a little late about it and our bus started to take off just as the señorita passed the bottle through the window (and before they´d paid her). so she had to run after us, and the bus was through the checkpoint by then so they had to ask the driver to stop. ¨un momento, no pagé la señorita!¨. no, mate, you didn´t! by the time she had caught up to the bus she was pretty pissed off and NOT impressed by their fumbling around for change, which they still hadn´t found. ¨cinco bolivianos POR FAVOR!¨ she said again (not very politely despite the ¨por favor¨), rolling her eyes and panting.

anyway, then we were finally off onto the highway. Lion and I had heard it was going to be a four-hour trip, so we were pleased to see a sign that said it was only 82km to Coroico. ¨great!¨ we said to one another, ¨it won´t be far at all!¨ however, we were less reassured when the next sign said 97km. and then when the next sign (about five minutes down the road) said 60km, we started thinking maybe something wasn´t quite right. from here, the signage went back to 80km, down to 40km, back up to 65km, down to 40km, back up to 45km, and then was still saying 40km twenty minutes later.

the journey took two and a half hours, in the end. I still have no idea how far it was.

the most humourous thing about this journey for me (there were a lot of competitors) was the narcotics checkpoint. we saw the sign indicating we´d be reaching such a checkpoint in 500 metres, and looked at each other worriedly (NOT because we were carrying any drugs... we just weren´t looking forward to the wait, and having our backs searched, etc). but that happened was that the driver passed a list of the passengers´ names (which had never, at any point, been checked against any kind of ID) and the minibus sailed on through.

pretty sweet huh? be nice if customs in Australia was that easy!

we have since been through this checkpoint a second time, and I swear that what I saw was the ¨narcotics officer¨ passing a big yellow envelope to the driver, rather than the other way round? nooo idea what was going on there.

anyway now we are in Coroico, safe and sound! and it is lovely. it is in the Yungas, which is a mountain range covered in green sub-tropical rainforest complete with hummingbirds and big colourful butterflies and stunning views and a very, very cold river. there are all kinds of other stories to tell about Coroico but I am out of time. we went for a hike on lion´s birthday yesterday, which was quite difficult and also quite stunning.

anyway now I have to go and meet our new friend from the netherlands for dinner. maybe soon we will go on a three-day hike. good times!

hope you are all well!! xxx

Chompas y Guitarras

2009-05-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you about the hostel we are staying at. It is called: Hostal Cactus. I really like cacti so this is a pretty good name. Inside it is painted white and a pastel cupcake green, and it is full of potted cacti and also of gorgeous 70s paraphenalia such as a plastic parrot mobile. It is laid out like a little old motel, with two stories running down long corridors, and there is also a little roof garden with a kitchen.

They screwed up our booking so we are sharing a matrimonial suite. I have no idea why it is called a ¨matrimonial suite¨ unless your idea of sexy times involves a toilet door that doesn't close, fecal/blood stains on the walls, and a double bed that dents in the middle so that you are forced either to spend the night on tenterhooks, hovering on the edge of the bed, or roll into the centre for some forced snuggling. I suppose the last one is a bit romantic.

The showers and toilets are all in one so you can't have a shower without potentially making trouble for someone in need of a urgent wee, and they are coated with wires so I thought I was going to be electrocuted for the duration. They also have doors with nice big gaps up the top and bottom, basically like saloon doors, so that all someone would have to do to catch me in a state of nude squalor would be to stand on tiptoes and not squint their eyes shut.

In other news, yesterday we went to a Moroccan place, creatively called ¨Marrakesh,¨ for lunch. The woman who served us, who appeared also to be the owner, was odd. She was singing along to a CD in a husky yet tuneless voice and with a tremendous passion. She also flung her arms out and spun around dramatically a few times. When she brought out my drink she attempted to wrap a napkin around it, but failed depressingly. She then beamed at us and serenaded us with the chorus of the song in a most theatrical manner: ¨Mujeres!!!!¨ (that means, ¨Women!!!¨)

¨She's drunk,¨ I hissed at Ro, when she wandered off.
¨What?¨ said Ro. ¨Really?¨
¨Nah, I dunno,¨ I said. ¨She's a bit weird though.¨

But then we noticed she was drinking a large bottle of beer. The cook caught us looking at her and rolled her eyes. I raised my eyebrows at the cook and mimed slugging back a large glass of alcohol. She grimaced and nodded. And so the rest of the lunch was spent being assaulted us with seemingly nonsensical Spanish, the drunken mujer happily ignoring our numerous pleas of ¨No entiendo, lo siento.¨

Despite this misfortune, I am in magnificent spirits. Why?! you might ask. Because... WE HAVE GUITARS! Oh oh oh man I am so happy about this. I have a little ¨traveller's guitar,¨ as they call them around here. It's a funny little triangular thing. It cost about $90, which may make you think ¨holy crap EXPENSIVO¨ but I think it is a pretty good bargain. For one, I bought it off an awesome guy called Pedro, and I bought it from his workshop as opposed to one of the crappy street stalls. He was a crackin' musician from what I could tell, and he was very fond of his instruments, and they were much nicer than most of the street stall ones we played, not to mentioned better priced. So far as silly little guitars go, this is a nice one. And Ro got one toooooooo! A full-sized puppy, also from Pedro. He was a good friend to us.

Plus, here is a really nice trick: when I get back to Australia I can sling it over my back, using my new embroidered travellin' guitar case which I purchased from a separate outlet for $8, and RIDE MY BIKE WITH A GUITAR. Now that is what I call awesome.

I also bought a stupid chompa (jumper) that I have been looking for absolutely everywhere. It is dip-dyed with a picture of a sun on it. I am so happy!

Love love love
Ms. Lion

Our Ladies of La Paz

2009-05-27T10:06:00.000-07:00

Soooo we are still in Sucre. But not for long! Thank goodness. I was growing a little weary of it. Tonight we catch a bus to La Paz.

Still, we have had a pretty good time. The 25th of May went off pretty nicely. There were as many brass bands as you might have imagined. The afternoon was quiet though. We bought hats! When I was in Australia I lost both my cowboy hats. And I hate not having a cowboy hat. So I bought an amazing one off a woman sitting in the street with a rug full of silly hats. Ro bought one too, not a cowboy hat though. Gosssssssh I love hats. When I return to Australia I don't intend to be seen without one.

I didn't buy any fairy floss even though that was my big plan for the day. Disappointing. When it came down to it I just wasn't in the mood.

We had a wacky old night. First we went to Joy Ride, which is Sucre's official Gringo Café. There are quite a few competing for the honour but Joy Ride certainly deserves to own it despite their hopeful catchphrase ¨NO SOLO PARA GRINGOS¨. We danced to some sweet tunes for a while (actually they were awful tunes let's be honest) but then it shut at 2am! WHAT. Bolivia, you are letting down the nation of South America. We got laughed at for trying to go out at 3am in Argentina. Anyway, we didn't really know what to do after that but we befriended a gentleman originally from Kenya but now living in Bolivia, who lightheartedly insisted that he was a hustler and robbed banks for a living (actually he lived with his aunt and studied nursing), and he told us that there was a shisha bar that stayed open late.

Well, I don't smoke, and Ro doesn't smoke, but it was open so that was reason enough to go. It was almost deserted bar a group of some very giggly, sleepy looking folks who were almost horizontal in the corner. They kind of flapped their hands at us in an attempt to wave. Marijuana is as illegal here as it is in Perth, and the menu certainly didn't say anything about it, but regardless I suspect from their demeanour that they had been ingesting. We eschewed the opportunity to order a hookah of tobacco infused with vanilla or rose (actually rose sounds quite good now I think about it SHAME ABOUT THE TOBACCO) and instead nestled into the cushions for some deep and meaningful conversation. It was a pretty good time. Actually I almost fell asleep. It was quite late by then. But they didn't seem to mind.

That is pretty much all that we've done of interest lately. Today we went to the post office. It was a rush. I bought a shirt. We went to the laundry. We are feeling ready for La Paz.

Love love love
Lion

Sweet as Sucre

2009-05-23T16:14:00.001-07:00

Here's something weird. When we were in Argentina we met a girl who seemed convinced that it was virtually impossible to get by as a vegetarian in Bolivia. ¨Well, people in Bolivia surely need to eat vegetables OCCASIONALLY, you might think¨ I suggested, ¨so perhaps I can occasionally buy a salad from a restaurant, or perhaps I can buy a vegetable in the markets once a week, or something along those lines, so as to maintain basic nutrition.¨ She maintained the satisfied disposition of someone deeply knowledgeable who is forced to consort with ignorant morons. ¨No, I don't think so,¨ she said.

I find it interesting that none the people who have said such things about Bolivia/Argentina/South America in general - there have been a few - have been vegetarians (although some have been ¨basically vegetarian¨ and have been ¨forced to eat meat¨ on occasion).

As it happens I think I have probably eaten better in Bolivia than anywhere else on the entire trip so far. The reason? Everything is so flippin' cheap that I can dine out every night if I want to. (I don't, interestingly enough, even though going to the supermarket is just as expensive. Even dining out grows a bit tiring after a while.) I have eaten some truly excellent meals here, and all for less than $10, which usually includes a drink and often a dessert. As to vegetarian options - well, the salads are actually substantial here and usually contain generous amounts of tasty things like baby corn, cheese and olives that are inevitably skimped upon in Australia. The tortillas - ahh, the tortillas. Tortillas in South America are usually of the Spanish variety rather than the Mexican one unless otherwise specified, i.e. a delicious eggy omelette/quiche/pie. They are wonderful with seasonal vegetables, or provolone and champignons, or papas fritas (believe me when I say that an omelette-with-french-fries may just about be the greatest thing you can ever have with your coffee on a Sunday morning, except maybe panqueques con dulce de leche, but really that's a better dessert.)

And let us not forget that Bolivia is the land of QUINOA! Boooyyy do I love quinoa. It is a wonderful grain containing ALL the essential amino acids that I love to cook with in Australia, only it costs $7 for a little box. Here, every menu is liberally riddled with quinoa soup, quinoa casserole, quinoa pie... The quinoa pie at the Bibliocafé is probably the best thing I've eaten since I've been here. With broccoli(!) and other vegetables and really tasty cheese (the cheese in Argentina and Chile is largely so flavourless and rubbery that I can hardly bother to eat it, which is saying something when it comes to me and cheese), it is truly a magical little terracotta pot of joy.

Another thing I'm crazy about is JUGO NATURALES. ¨JUGO¨ is pronounced sort of like how an American or stupid person might pronounce ¨HUGO¨ which I find very pleasing. I'm entirely smitten with JUGO DE FRUTILLA which is none other than STRAWBERRY JUICE! What a concotion! The marvellous thing is that, while one might pay about $6 for such a delightful beverage in Australia, here it is more like 6 Bolivianos. Which is about a dollar! BARGAIN.

Finally I would like to announce that I am a woman at last. The reason for this? I like olives! Congratulations are in order, I think. When I came to South America I had a lucky feeling that if I just gave it a go, maybe I would learn to enjoy this most mature of foodstuffs in time. But I had no idea it would happen so quickly! The last olive I ate in Australia was tolerable, I guess, but only just. It came from a woman sitting next to me at the Leonard Cohen concert who insisted I would like it, that it didn't taste like any other olive on earth. She was talking out of her pooter, it tasted exactly like an olive, but it was nice of her to share her food with me I guess so I shouldn't complain. Then a guy in Bariloche let me try one of his black olives and I kind of liked it. THEN in Mendoza I tried a green olive when I went on the wine tour with Rosie and Anna and BAM! Olive fever! That very night I bought a packet of them from the supermarket and I knew I was an adult. Olives here are super cheap and they are so good, with thick thick smoky skin that tastes of wine and incense. And they come with everything! On every menu! Like little green slivers of magic.

Soooo today I went up to the Sucre mirador with Ro, which is something we've been planning to do for some time but never getting around to, and it was beautiful! A fine view of the old town, but a bit of a hike was involved so we went to the Mirador Café to relax and read a little and I ordered a vegetable tortilla and jugo de frutilla and I enjoyed it so much that I kept thinking ¨I should really write a blog post about how much I enjoy the food here,¨

and then you will never guess what we did on the way home. WE WENT TO A CHOCOLATE FESTIVAL! It was pretty great. I tried a really odd frambuesa creme thingy ('frambuesa' means 'raspberry' in Spanish, and it's a good thing that jugo de frambuesa isn't widely available or I'd probably never return to Australia). Then Ro and I each tried a shot of sweet liqueurs - Ro tried the chocolate blanco and I the ¨leche de tigre,¨ which means ¨tiger milk.¨ ¨No es legal,¨ I admonished the boy at the counter sternly, but he informed me that it was not the milk of real tigers. The best thing about the liqueurs was that the shot glasses themselves were made of chocolate. GENIUS. And theeennn I tried a doughnut sort of thing. It was pretty average to be honest. But still... great?

The other good news is that we finally managed to go to a decent book exchange so I got rid of Jude the Obscure (pretty great but MISERABLE, sheesh, what an indictment on marriage) and Heart of Darkness (blergh) and got Islands in the Stream and freakin' War and Peace instead.

Anyway the point of this post, apart from the last couple of paragraphs I guess, is to tell all those people who don't know jack about vegetarianism to shut the hell up with their fear-mongering ignorant opinions and concentrate on boring other travellers with the superiority of their overpriced North Face backpack instead of pissing me off.

Love love love
CJ Lion

P.S. The internet café is playing ABBA songs in Spanish! It sounds exactly like ABBA though? I'm so confused!

Varsity Blues

2009-05-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

Well boy howdy that was a weekend to be remembered! Last night especially was amaaazing (apparently "amaaazing" is something Australians say a lot).

Karen, a girl from Canberra/Spanish school who reminds me of Joan Cusack when she´s sober and Joan Cusack being drunk in School of Rock when she's drunk, invited us to go to a Britney Spears tribute show on Saturday. Daniel, a charming German gentleman also from school and our hostel also invited us to go to see an band at the Bibliocafè, a kind of hip restaurant/café just round the corner. We weren't quite sure what they were going to be like but Daniel had heard that they were an oi band - hi Mum and Dad, "oi" is a type of punk music that skinheads like. Both seemed deeply appealing so we rejoiced to discover that Britney was on at 7 and the band not until midnight.

Britney was disappointing. I can not pretend otherwise. It was not so much a ¨tribute show¨ as ¨a bunch of jerks dancing around to Britney songs.¨ I would have liked a singer or at least a little bit of mime. But it was still a rocking good time in the old Auditorio Pachamama.

One quite funny thing was that, before the gig, Karen and Ro each bought a bottle of Coke from an old women at a kiosk stall. She stressed that she would like them to return the bottle once they had finished drinking. They recycle glass bottles a lot here, which is of course great. "Certainly," they said. She stressed this sentiment three more times. "Of course," they said uneasily. Then we went into the show and halfway through a woman who appeared to be working at the venue came up to us. Did we have any Coke bottles, she asked, there was a little old lady waiting outside desperate to get them back. I have no idea how she found us ("FIND ME THE GRINGAS" I imagine she demanded) what she was planning to do with them.

After that we headed to the Bibliocafé for food and music, but not before stopping in at little sports stadium on the way to watch the end of a game of futsal between a couple of universities. Kind of like Uni Games. Futsal is just indoor football really. Which is just indoor soccer really, if you're Australian. There were only two minutes left of the game though.

The band was pretty boring to be honest. It turns out that they were not actually oi punk, but were called "Oi." In fact I think they might have been called "Oil." They were sort of like Karnivool only with a couple of guys switching between reed flutes, pan pipes, African drums and didgeridoos. They were not unskilled on the didgeridoo, I have to say. The rest of the band were relatively dull though. One amusing thing, though, was that Ro ordered a Café Moca. Which is evidently just a mocha. What they brought her, however, was a coffee with vodka. Black and instant. After she told the waiter and got her mocha, though, he had the audacity to charge us for this ridiculous International Roast con Vodka concoction, which was as violently foul as you might have predicted. It cost 20 big Bolivianos too! I felt obliged to attempt to drink some of it after that, but I didn't get far.

Sunday night was less of a blowout. We were completely exhausted and decided to have an early night. At 8.30 we were sitting around in the hostel and I was just getting ready to make myself a pre-bed Milo (they have Milo here! In Chile too. It's not quite the same, though), but then a nice Australian gent called Tommy came along and we got chatting about the futsal game we'd seen last night and decided to go see if there was anything else on at the stadium. We'd stay for 20 minutes or so, we thought. So we checked out the end of a men's basketball game, which wasn't overly interesting. Next was the women's basketball. We noticed a strange buzz in the stadium, and found ourselves seated next to the most hyperactive, excited group of students in the WORLD. They were chanting, yelling, jumping and dancing, taking their shirts off, waving flags, banging balloons and bottles together and drumming their feet on the ground to make noise. They had come from Santa Cruz and I absolutely could not fault their devotion to the Santa Cruz women's basketball team. As Tommy said, "I cannot believe that this is happening at a women's basketball game on a Sunday night."

At first there were about 20 of them but by the end of the game the numbers had swelled to around 35, and that didn't include us as we were swept into Mexican waves and chants of "Viva Santa Cruz". I've never felt such devotion to a sporting team before. It was completely awesome and I'm pleased to announce that our girls played a magnificent game, completely crushing Tarija or whoever the other team was. When the final buzzer went, the guys flooded the court and swept the girls into an embrace and they jumped around the court for a good ten minutes.

The really cool thing is that, just before the end of the match, Ro was befriended by a Santa Cruz gentleman who was sitting next to her, and he invited us to come hang out at the after party. And it was amazing! It was held in a big sporting yard... kind of thing... in the open air, with concrete bleachers all around, and there was a stage set up with a band playing, and men and women outside selling pizzas and fried food and this crazy drink in plastic cups made of vodka, milk and cinnamon and served hot. Which sounds awful but we decided to try just a cup and it was incredibly tasty.

Then we danced with our new friend Pierre and one of the girls from the basketball team came and dragged us over into the circle where all the Santa Cruz kids were dancing. And then Pierre pushed me into the circle to dance with this enormous guy who seemed to be, I don't know, Sports Captain or something, and it was kind of terrifying, but I busted some moves and they all cheered for me! Everyone was suuuuper nice, which was exciting because we are sometimes treated with suspicion by the ladies. I think they think we want to poach their men. Honestly you guys, it was like the end of an American varsity film, only BETTER. I kept thinking the camera was going to spiral above us and the credits would slam down over us to the tune of "All The Small Things" by Blink 182.

Now I want to go to Santa Cruz because everyone was so completely great. There were other schools at the after party but the Santa Cruz kids were definitely having the most fun. The best thing was that they had to go back to Santa Cruz that night so we still got to bed before midnight! Party on.

Ro is unwell at the moment. Please give her your love and maybe send her a nice email?

daylight savings and sucre ravings

2009-05-16T11:59:00.001-07:00

So (as I learn from facebook), Perth rejected daylight savings yet again, huh? Classic Perth!

Right now we are in Sucre. Here are some things you should know about Sucre:

it is the unofficial capital of Bolivia and the Supreme Court is here
there are a ridiculous number of lawyers´ offices, which I suppose follows
it is a UNESCO world heritage site and there is lots of lovely white spanish architecture
a number of people here are addicted to absinthe and as a result there is a bit of a schizophrenia problem (obviously you can´t tell this by looking at the buildings)

But the best thing about Sucre is that on the 25th of May they are having a bicentenarial celebration of independence, and right now they are ¨warming up¨ for it. What this means in practice is that when you walk down the street, or are otherwise just minding your own business, you have (at any given moment) approximately a 50 percent chance of being suddenly accosted by:

a marching brass band
a group of folk dancers
a lycra-clad bicycle race
a street parade of extremely excited teenagers in various halloween-style costumes
a man on stilts dressed as Jack from the Nightmare Before Christmas
a sudden firework or smoke bomb
a terrible (or wonderful?) rock band consisting of electric-charango and panpipe players
...or any other such combination of the above.

Lion and I spend most of our time shaking our heads and saying, ¨What is the DEAL with this city?!¨ Turning up in Sucre at the moment is kind of like wandering into Perth during Prosh (minus the newspaper-sellers), except that the craziness here goes on for weeks.

We have been here since last Saturday night, doing a bit more Spanish study and fancying ourselves as people who might, one day in the very distant future, be able to speak fluently in another language (at the moment I oscillate between believing this is possible and believing it is a hopeless dream). But vale la pena (it is worth it) to try and learn anyway, because it´s actually pretty fun!

It has also been v. rejuvenating to stay here for a while and settle in a bit, because before that I don´t think we´d stayed anywhere for more than five days since Bariloche?! Gosh, how long ago was that, a month and a half? Two months? It´s been good to see so many places, but I was getting a bit sick of all the moving on!

Lion and I had our three-month travelling anniversary on Sunday. That is ... such a long time! Also, it´s halfway through our trip. We didn´t do very much, just cheers´d with jugo de naranja (orange juice) glasses at breakfast and then proceeded to get horrendously homesick for the next couple of days. (But don´t worry, we´re hells of perky again now!)

Our next stop will be La Paz, probably on Tuesday... where I am going to buy a guitar!

Tonight we are going to see a Britney Spears tribute concert (which, I would like to clarify, was not my idea) with another Australian chica from Spanish class, and then maybe we´re going to see a SKA/punk band afterwards with a German guy from our hostel. Looks like an action-packed night in Sucre!

Altitude Lovesickness

2009-05-10T16:29:00.000-07:00

Righto so it has come to my attention that neither of us have written about the crossing into Bolivia yet, and since it was one of the most spectacular things we have done all trip one of us should probably do so. Frankly I'm not sure either of us is going to do it any justice, but if either of us is it is certainly going to be me and not Ro so I suppose I had better give it a whirl for everyone's sake. It is going to be long so, you know, go make yourself a cup of coffee or something.

Man, it was completely stellar. A righteous good time. I absolutely recommend the trip to anyone in the vague area, and the company we went with - Pamela Tours - was basically without fault. Our driver Orlando didn't speak any English (unless he was amusing himself with a very cunning prank) but he was helpful and courteous and a fine driver. Not that I'd know. The food and the accommodation was better than I was expecting (the toilets were awful) and I enjoyed both thoroughly. No breakdowns and no food poisoning, which so far as I can tell puts it in at least the top 5% of all tours run across the flats.

The first day wasn't all that salt-themed to be honest. We headed off in a minibus around eight in the morning and after an hour or so arrived at the Bolivian border. This first hour involved a reasonable ascent and I drank a great deal of water so as to ensure I would not grow dehydrated at altitude. I thought myself very sensible at the time, but combined with the diuretic effect of Diamox I was absolutely desperate for a wee by the time we hit the border. ¨Thank god,¨ I thought when we arrived, ¨a border crossing, a fine place to go to the toilet.¨ I didn't consider the fact that the Bolivian border crossing would probably be a little bit less schmicko than the Chilean and Argentine crossings with their fancy pants ¨x-ray machines¨ and ¨security¨ and ¨toilets.¨ It was basically just a tiny brick hut. They didn't seem to give a damn what you brought into the country, in fact the only reason they seemed to exist was so that you could get a stamp on your passport and thus be permitted to reenter Chile.

Long story short I was forced to search frantically around the DESERT for a place to relieve my torment. The only thing I could see was a sort of deserted looking tiny brick hut. ¨Could I go behind that do you think?¨ I asked my travel companions. ¨It's a HOUSE,¨ they said, looking at me in disgust. Eventually I found a mound that provided enough decency to stop me getting shot for public exposure but not enough to hide me from the numerous jeeps that lumbered past, faces glued to the windows (I probably made that last bit up).

Anyway this is supposed to be a story about the salt flats, not my bladder. Sooooooo we transferred into a Jeep with our travelling companions, Jen and Trin from Canada and Stephanie and Oliver from France. PS Did I mention that I love the desert? It is so beautiful. Actually the first few moments in Bolivia were not overly beautiful. I kept thinking of Moriarty´s ¨I don´t think you should go to Bolivia Caroline, it looks really bad in Quantum of Solace.¨ You were right Moriarty!... BUT NOT FOR LONG. Soon the landscape became all wonderful and red and terracotta coloured and the sky was enormous and blue and the mountains were striped with glorious golden shades. We saw some pretty great things. Lagoons that were named for their colours, like the Laguna Verde and the Laguna Blanco. We had heard that you couldn't tell the difference but I guess we got lucky because we could! The coolest was the red lagoon, which was all full of flamingos and surrounded by big old llamas with pompoms on their head, the ridiculous sweet things.

We saw one of the rock deserts that had inspired Salvador Dali, though only from a distance. It was sort of cool but not really that interesting. We saw geysers! Not the shooting hot water in the air type, but the bubbling hotpots of sulfuric water and mud. Vaguely cool although I was sort of worried at this point because my middle finger was turning yellow. It was cold outside.

It was a cruisy day. We arrived at the hotel (NOT ACTUALLY A HOTEL be warned, but less primitive than I had expected. EXCEPT THE TOILETS) really early. So we had lunch and I had a little read and a little chillout sess and then it was time... for afternoon tea! Man do I love afternoon tea, I drank tea and ate galletitas (little biscuits) and it was great. Just when we'd decided we were done with afternoon tea and were thinking about whipping out a deck of cards, they bought out dinner. Sheesh! They gave us some pretty great vegetable soup and bread. Luckily I wasn't souper (oh ho ho) hungry after the whole afternoon tea thing, because dinner was a platter of fried chicken, potato fries and fried banana. When we talked to the other group that went with our company they said that they only got the chicken and chips. Jen and Trin suspect the cook picked up a bunch of bananas that they left on the table after lunch and decided to roll with it. Oh well.

By this stage we were exhausted. It was about 8:30. Oh well, again. We went to bed. But not without... sleepover chitchat! Turns out we got on like a house on fire with our new Canadian friends Jen and Trin so there was much post-lights-out giggling. Also once we had gone to bed and the lights were out and we were all comfortable dozing off Orlando popped his head into the room and happily announced ¨Hola, amigos!¨ which was extremely funny for some reason. He just wanted to tell us what time breakfast was in the morning.

Whooooooooo are we ready to hear about DAY TWO on the salt flats? The first stop was SALVADOR DALI'S DESERT. Well one of them. We saw the big upside down triangle rock! I wanted to have a good old stare at it, but it was surrounded by other people doing the salt flats tour who felt the acute need to be photographed in front of the damn rock. Eventually I got a good look though and some sexy photos. I wasn't in them.

Then we saw what we thought was a salt lake! It wasn't salt, though. It was Borax. Or Ajax, as Jen seemed to think. The wackiest thing ever is that, even though the sun was shining and it was a glorious day in the old Bolivian desert, the lake was coated in ice. Do you know how cold it had been the previous night? I don't either, but it was somewhere between -10 and -20.C. Frosty as all heck! The Canadians were unperturbed but I was going to bed in my thermals and jumpers (chompas) and socks and hat and all that business.

We stopped for lunch by another salty or boraxy or whatever it was lake, this one covered in flamingos again, and had a nice old time eating pasta salad and watching the same people who insisted on clambering all over Dali´s desert now chase flamingos so as to capture photos of them in flight. Which, I feel bound to point out, Lonely Planet says is an ¨Environmental No-No.¨ After lunch we saw a volcano! It didn´t really look like a volcano so much as a mountain having a smoke. Still kind of cool. It was also cool when Orlando pointed out that the rocks we were standing on were in fact hardened lava.

Thennnnnn we hit the salt lakes! Well, the beginning of them. The best was yet to come. We drove on them for a while until we hit the salt hotel which actually was kind of a salt hotel. Well, it still wasn´t a hotel but it was super salty! The walls were made of salt, and the tables and chairs and beds, though not the mattresses. I was excited to see that they had a picture of Evo Morales in one of his trademark chompas (attn MAGDA and TOM, "chompa" is the Bolivian word for "jumper!") on the wall. It wasn't made of salt.

By this stage we had come down by a cool 2000m or so and altitude sickness was vanquished, it seemed. We ate some more vegetable soup and read books and drank cups of herbal tea and it was lovely. (I was reading a wonderful book called 'East of Eden' by John Steinbeck that Jen and Trin gave us. I finished it a couple of days ago. It is a magnificent achievement and I recommend it to all.) Ooooooh and the hostel and the little town surrounding it was full of cacti, which I thought was pretty cool... AT THE TIME. I love cacti.

The next morning we had to get up SOOOOOO EARLY! Well, we left at six or so. That is early, yes. That is because we were to watch the sun rise over the salt flats. "Big flipping deal," I thought grumpily. I sort of changed my mind once we started driving across 200 square kilometres of salt, though. We drove on a little more and ate breakfast by the cactus island. Which is just an island of cacti. If this doesn't sound awesome to you then you are obviously crazy.

I can't really tell you how great the salt flats were. The colours and the expansiveness and the patterns in the salt and such. So here are three of my favourite pictures from Ro's camera (mine had lost its battery by then), on the extreme offchance that you have failed to see them on Facebook by now. You can click to enlarge.

Ro on salt.

Me on salt.

Team Robolion reenacting the Beautiful Ladies hombre on salt.

That'll do, piglets.

Love love love
Lion

Boliviargh!

2009-05-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

We are in Bolivia and it is so Bolivian that I can hardly stand it! Here are some Bolivian things that have happened to me so far:

-We bought a menu del dia - menu of the day - for $2 each. Soup, bread, fried rice with egg and potato and even one or two vegetables in the rice, and a piece of watermelon. Ro got meat with hers!

-We had to use several toilets without seats. Also: we used a squat toilet!

-I bought ludicrous stripey pants which I am currently wearing. Also a tie dyed headband, ohhhhh nooooooo.

-KATE! Pay attention, this bit is about you!! Due to automobile difficulties, I was forced to entertain myself by playing 'Singing Songs To Ro That My Sister Has Written.' She was thrilled to hear joyous and jaunty renditions of 'Big Fat Roly Poly Santa,' 'Poor Wrinkly Kate,' 'Like A Little Russian Peasant Girl,' 'The Hippopotamus Song' and more too I think.

-We got stranded for a night in the highest city on Earth (no dodgy business mum don't worry).

But I have to go and catch a bus to Sucre! I just wanted to assure you that I am doing well and that Boliv is living up to my wildest dreams.

Love love love
Lion

three tales of Ro and Lion

2009-05-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

Alrighty, this post has been on the backburner a while, and we are currently hanging in a very quiet desert town with little to do while we acclimatise to the altitude... so it seems like a good time to finally write it.

Maybe some of you have wondered whether Lion and I still get on after 2.5 months of travelling together, or whether we would rather see one another burn in hell than suffer through another day? Well, (although Lion is of course the worst human being I have ever known... but the finest lover... JUST KIDDING GUYS) it turns out that we actually have a pretty good time!

So to prove it, here you are: three tales of Ro and Lion.

1. Valparaíso, Chile : the popcorn tale

Lion and I decided to go to the cinema. Just the old Hoyts, nothing special.

The english-film selection being a bit thin on the ground, we chose ¨Loca por las compras¨*, grabbed an enormous box of popcorn and headed on in. Surprisingly this movie was super funny? Or maybe it was just the novelty of seeing a movie that wasn´t a) in Spanish, b) dubbed in Spanish or c) dubbed AND subtitled in Spanish (the latter actually being quite good for learning Spanish, FYI).

So, after our hilarious movie-going experience, we were on a bit of a high (too much cocacola perhaps). We headed to the supermarket and we were still being pretty silly, racing around the aisles and singing to the PA-music. Then all of a sudden, Lion stops dead next to me and grabs my arm, points to the floor and orders, ¨Hey Ro, look just down there at that spot on the ground okay? Keep looking, don´t look up,¨ and then she lifts up her jumper and shakes about half a ton of popcorn from her shirt onto the supermarket floor.

...then we both collapsed into laughter like little children, and ran off to find the pasta aisle.

* literally ¨Crazy for the shopping¨ (WHAT? who translated that?!) but known as Confessions of a Shopaholic to the english-speaking world

2. Santiago, Chile : the piropo tale

Lion and I usually get a lot of whistles and comments from men on the street. This is fairly normal in South America when you are a) young b) female and c) clearly not local (this last is not strictly necessary but it helps). Generally it´s just along the lines of, ¨Muy bonitas chicas¨ (beautiful girls) or ¨Linda!¨ (pretty girl) Sometimes it´s annoying, occasionally it´s gross and/or offensive, but every now and then... it´s hilarious. Observe.

We were walking back from the Lavandería (laundry) in Santiago carrying our deliciously freshly laundered clothing (I cannot explain this feeling unless you, too, have ever worn the same pair of jeans for ... let´s not get into how long exactly). I saw a guy notice us from the next block, so I knew it was time for yet another comment, but I wasn´t really caring about it much.

But imagine our surprise! ...when this man suddenly leapt artistically and dramatically in front of us, spreading his arms wide and waving his hands and fingers as though he was performing in a jazz dance, and with an expression of utter amazement cried (quite musically) at the top of his lungs, ¨OYE, BEEEAAAUUTIFUL WOMAN!!¨

We sauntered on past and ignored him as we normally do... but half a block later, we suddenly stopped. ¨Hang on... WHAT the HELL was that? That was really funny!!¨

Lion attempted to recreate the moment later in Vicuña by leaping out when I didn´t know she was there and shouting the same line. I got such a fright that I cried out, thinking she was a mugger, and she nearly got a punch in the snout for her trouble.

But the old man walking on the other side of the street sure had a good, long chuckle.

3. Santiago, Chile: the funicular tale

Lion and I made two visits to Santiago, and on the second we finally got around to going up the funicular to get the classic ¨view of Santi¨ (one of those touristy things). We got a bit bored on the way down and decided to take a bunch of photos trying to get the perfect shot. ¨One for Mum!¨

After a while I was getting a little tired of the whole thing: ¨Geez Caro, what is this... finicky funicular fotography?!¨ There was a pause, and then we looked one another and in unison added, ¨DOT COM!¨ ...and then collapsed laughing.

Soon after this, I decided to stay in Santiago an extra day while Lion headed to Mendoza to meet our English pals Rosie and Anna. So for one day only, the Ro and Lion team were not together... and that morning, I awoke from a vivid dream and straight away burst out laughing. I looked around to tell Lion all about it, because I knew she would love it... only to realise she wasn´t there! What a heartbreaking moment!!

The dream went thus. I was in a grand house, owned by Bruce Springsteen (currently Lion´s favourite singer), who was showing me around. We were walking down a dangerous-looking winding stairwell, each stair more rotten through as we descended, and Bruce was talking, telling me, ¨Yeah, I really love this house.¨

¨It´s just so incredible. It´s like the first time someone tells you that the world is round, you know, and you just have so much trouble believing them? It´s the same thing, the same feeling for me in this house. I´m actually writing a thesis about it at the moment. I call it ´Rickety Railings... DOT COM!´¨

(Don´t worry folks, the story has a happy ending. Lion and I were reunited soon afterward, and she did think my dream was truly hilarious.)

¨A Blog¨ - San Pedro de Atacama, 2009

2009-05-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

I´m in the desert!

I am so excited about this. I don´t know what has happened to me in the last few years but I seem to have developed a fierce love for all things Western. Not Western like McDonalds and anorexia but Western like Hank Williams and people flying out of saloon windows. (I still haven´t watched any Westerns, though, I don´t think. Is The Three Amigos a Western? Cracking film.)

Consequently I am happy - nay, ecstatic - to be rompin´ about in the Wild West! Well actually I am about five minutes away from a Chilean-Argentina border crossing, but SP de Atacama is West of Argentina at least so it is sort of Western. As Ro wrote yesterday, the bus drive was just stupidly amazing. Offensively excellent. It wasn´t just one type of your generic Amazing Desert Imagery, either. It changed from one marvellous desert cliché to the next. I am frankly surprised that we did not encounter Road Runner/the Little Prince. We did encounter: llamas with pom poms on their heads; a man in a wide-brimmed hat leading two donkeys from one arid and isolated location to another for no apparent reason.

Also I should point out that despite my joy at being in the desert, I have been in sort of a grumpy mood this morning and all I have done today is: eaten eggs on bread; drunk 2 cups of tè canela (black tea with cinnamon, quite tasty); read about 200 pages of Jude the Obscure, which is a book by a Mr. Thomas Hardy. I´m really enjoying it, it´s just getting to the sexy bit, but Jude is such a sad gentleman! Is there any hope for happiness for him? Not according to the blurb, so thanks a lot for the spoiler PUBLISHERS.

Anyway what I was going to say is that the desert is a mixed bag of treats. On one hand it is stunning, what with the huge sky and the big white moon that rises in the day and the adobe huts and all, ooh and tonight there is a FOLK MUSIC festival! (I´ve discovered the hard way that folk music here doesn´t necessarily mean croaky-voiced bearded Jesus lookalikes in cowboy shirts so much as it does grinning men bellowing out vibrato-heavy odes and strumming instruments in a silly sort of way, but it is tremendously enjoyable regardless.) But on the downside it is really hot. Actually it´s a nice sort of hot, not humid or anything, and it´s very easy to cool down once you´re indoors, but it does make doing things kind of difficult. For instance this afternoon we were all set to hire bikes and ride out to an oasis pool where one can go swimming and such. But it´s flipping CLOSED! Not just today but for the season. Consequently the thought of riding bikes around seems potentially stupid/fatal. Plus there is the fact that it takes very little to get stupidly dehydrated. Last night I drank almost two litres of water before bed and I still woke up with a crusty old throat.

What´s more we are at 2400 metres. This is the point at which altitude sickness begins apparently, so while we shouldn´t be too bad yet it´s hard to tell if we´re dehydrated or have a spot of the mountain sicky. Ooh here is what Wikipedia has to say on the subject: ¨The town lies at an average altitude of approximately 2,400m (7,900 ft) and visitors often experience mild altitude sickness such as dizziness, lethargy and headaches.¨ That sounds about right. So we are having a lazy day.

It´s been a while since I blogged, hasn´t it? We´ve been having a lovely time. I really enjoyed Còrdoba; it´s a fine city. We went to some wonderful markets and found some A-grade restaurants. All nice and cheap. I bought some excellent (silly) earrings. One of them is a treble clef and the other says ¨CARO¨. Relevant!

After Cordy we caught the nightbus to Salta. Salta is a funny sort of place. About 450 000 people. It has a rather more chaotic feel than the south of Argentina. And the traffic is wacky. Also it is hell of cheap, which is nice. We suspect this is because it is getting close to the old Bolivia - Lonely Planet says the same about Jujuy, which is even closer to the border. But it also has some knockout churches - I say this as someone who is infrequently thrilled by churches - and wonderful plazas. Ro and I spent a delightful 20 minutes paddling a little boat around a scungy old lake filled with ugly geese. It was a good time! We also got our tourist on and climbed the 1070 stairs to the top of Cerro San Bernardo (I managed to irritate Ro by counting them.) By golly it was a lovely sight, so much prettier than Cerro San Cristobal in Santiago - more like Smogiago. Oh ho ho. It was fantastically green and full of exotic and exciting trees (not baobabs, I don´t think, but something with swollen trunks and pears?), and all sorts of interesting diversions - an outdoor ¨gym¨ with poles and rings and benches and stuff, and a playground, and a waterfall and a big old Jesus. Then we caught the cable car down! It was truly a joy.

Right, I think Ro plans to post again shortly so you should be well and truly sated with blog posts in the interim. I think I will try to post more frequently, I´ve been lax of late.

Loooooooooove
Lion

crossing the andes, aka, landing on mars

2009-04-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

IT´S UPDATE TIME, MI GENTE

we are in... san pedro de atacama... in Chile! (AGAIN.) that´s right folks, after 12 days in argentina (I discovered this by examining the stamps in my passport) we are back in the C-town! i am not quite sure how or why this has happened but anyway our next stop is BOLIVIA and that is pretty exciting!

we got here by taking a 12 hour bus. normally we take buses during the night-time if they´re that long but we had to cross a border, which is kind of impossible at 3am, so here we are. also turns out the scenery between Salta and San Pedro de Atacama (i.e. the mountain crossing over the Andes) is pretty much the most amazing thing I have ever seen, so you wouldn´t want to miss it by travelling at night. it was so beautiful I felt like they were making a joke out of it. as Lion said: ¨hey, you want desert? WE´LL GIVE YOU A FREAKIN´ DESERT.¨ the best part (though there were lots of best parts) was when we noticed that the moon had risen over these craaaazy red rock structures. it looked like Mars.

the worst part was experiencing the truly winning combination of 1) altitude nausea and headacheyness (as did Lion), 2) a stomach bug which came upon me halfway through the bus trip as I realised that I was running kind of low on toilet paper (before you are disgusted, don´t worry, I figured it out without anything gross happening) and 3) my mp3 player battery dying. (but Lion was very nice and lent me her mp3 player for a while to take my mind off things. also, she filled out my customs declaration for me and then I just raised my sick little head in order to sign it at the end. thanks, little one!)

all up... certainly a mixed bag of a bus trip. however, several tablets and some coca leaves later I was feeling a bit better. (don´t worry Mum, coca leaves are not the same as cocaine. you would need about a busful of coca leaves to make about a gram of cocaine - okay not that I know the maths but it´s something like that - and I had five leaves. it´s just a herbal-remedy kind of deal. it tasted like crap but maybe it helped a bit?)

oh! also, we saw hookers! that was wierd. we had to walk to the bus station at about 6am this morning in Salta, and it was still (just) dark, and there were all these women in short skirts (I think one may have been a man but I am not sure) standing in the middle of the street near our hostel. ¨things your Mum might not want to read about on your blog #234¨

okay I should go a) find Lion b) rest and acclimatise to the ol´ altitude and c) eat dinner, so that´s all you get for now. but stay tuned... another post is being drafted!

Che and Pablo

2009-04-24T17:52:00.000-07:00

Howdy gang!

Gee willickers we have been having an action packed time here in Còrdoba. Còrdoba is the second biggest city in Argentina, around 2 million people. It feels a tiny bit like Perth in places, except that if you go out at night

Yesterday we caught the bus out of town and went to Alta Gracia. It´s not such a big town, but the main reason you might go there is because Che Guevara used to live there when he was young (when he was older he moved to Còrdoba, for high school, and then to BsAs, for college, and then all over the shop, for Fidel.) We had a nice old time there. It is up on a hill and is leafy and green with some nice open spaces.

So off we trotted to Che's old house. It was a fairly modest sort of house (look it was no patch on Pablo Neruda's that's all I'm saying) but the inside had been turned into a museum, mainly full of wonderful old photos of the big guy. I'm not sure how I feel about Che. The museum really didn't mention all that much about his habit of sending execution squads after AWOL soldiers. But he seems like a terrifically dedicated gentleman and it seems that he never spent a moment thinking he wasn't doing the right thing. Who can ever tell with these things? They were great photos, anyway. I recommend it if you happen to be in the area!

Then TODAY if you can believe it we ingested even more culture! Now that´s just CRAZY! Yes it is true.

We´ve been eating at some fine places lately. We cook for ourselves more often than not but Còrdoba is very cheap by Argentina standards and even by my standards. I´m not sure why but perhaps it has something to do with the large student population? Last night we went out to a fantastic little hole-in-the-wall, all nice and dark and old, serving up big cups of red wine and platefuls of chicken. The walls were lined with notes that people had written - some were romantic and some were just shopping lists and some contained quotations and some were in strange languages although most were just in Spanish. Actually the food was nothing too special - I had ravioli and it wasn´t spectacular, as ravioli tends to be - but the servings were good and the atmosphere was lovely, all buzzing with young studenty types talking in low voices and laughing.

Today we went to a brilliant place for lunch called Sol Y Luna. It´s a vegetarian restaurant in the city centre. You can either order the Menu del Dia - menu of the day - or you can take the buffet lunch and pay for it by the 100g.

Oh freaking awesome! The hostel is playing Hungry Heart! Boy do I love Bruce Springsteen at the moment!

Oh no someone just turned up the TV and now I can´t hear it!

Anyway, the food was ace. I ate a wonderful moist veggie pattie with homemade ketchup and aji salsa (a hot sauce), roast vegetables, and a wee serve each of a tabouleh kind of salad with roast sunflower seeds, a potato salad and a lentil and olive salad. It was all wholesome and flavoursome and nutritious and lovely, just the way vegetarian food should be, none of this grilled halmoumi in pomegranate molasses served in the centre of an enormous plate crap. And all that for about $6! Who´s complaining? NOT ME.

Okay so after lunch we decided to go to the contemporary art museum. That was fun! The only bummer was that there was only one exhibition there. It was a photography exhibition, a bunch of guys (also: gals) from Spain - I think that was the only common thread. My favourite piece was a set of photos from anonymous cities. The interesting thing was that the photos showed absolutely no signs of life - no cars on the roads, no people, no abandoned shopping carts. I have no idea how the artist managed that. They were fantastic, though, all stark and creepy like deserts but with skyscrapers instead of cacti.

THENNNNNN we went to another gallery! It was a magnificent edifice, my goodness. Quite a knockout and with a brilliant chandelier. They had a nice mix of modern and older art on each floor, but the wackiest part of all was on the tiny, dark creepy little top story - I was admiring a sketchy series of dreamlike images, almost lke a comic, when I checked the artist and realised it was a Picasso. Nice one! Almost all of the other work was by artists from Còrdoba or Buenos Aires, so it was quite a surprise to see the little guy jumping out of nowhere. All that for three pesos! I´m not complaining.

Boy, I really enjoy art galleries. They are nice places to wander about.

Tonight Ro and I are going to venture out in the rainy streets and party a little! It´s been a while since we´ve been out. We are fairly eager to find the reggae club in town for purposes of busting sweet moves. Reggae clubs are pretty fun, I am starting to discover.

No one´s emailed me for a while so hurry up you terrible friends.

Love Caroline!

Ladies of the Sauce

2009-04-21T07:54:00.001-07:00

Helloooooo troops! How are we?

Well, apparently people actually read this blog and are vaguely concerned about the fact that we haven't written since Valparaiso. What's more it seems that rumours of the separation of Ro and Lion seem to be floating around the internet creating even more scandal than the Braniston saga. I am currently in the worst internet cafe in the world - well, actually it is very nice: well-priced, modern, and comfortable, but they have a violently foul habit of blasting hip hop when I am trying to Skype my loved ones, a perpetually impossible task - so I thought I should update y'all on the haps.

Haps are good! Ro and I are still travelling joyously together so don't you fret your little heads about it. We did split up for one single night, it is true, but we are back where we belong now.

We've spent the last couple of days in Mendoza. Mendoza is a pretty nice place although truth be told, once you've done the Wine-And-Bikes thing there is not so much to see. So tonight we are headed for Cordoba. I'm pretty excited for Cords! I loved Valparaiso, which is reputed to be the Cultural Capital of Chile. Cordoba, though, is reputed to be the Cultural Capital of South America! Far out that's a lot of Culture! Imagine the hijinx!

The last couple of weeks have been pretty low-key. We spent Easter with our lovely English friends Rosie and Anna in a tiny town called Vicuña, in a tiny valley called the Valle de Elqui. The Valle is a great little place, surrounded with cactus-coated hills and avocado and papaya groves, and it is where much of the pisco in Chile is produced. Pisco is a type of brandy that they use to make the Pisco Sour, a Chilean specialty containing pisco, egg white, lemon juice, maybe some other stuff that I forgot... it is surprisingly tasty. Not revolting at all. Nor is it my drink of choice (I seem to have developed a recent fondness for mojitos, of all things) but I felt the need to try a couple of pisco beverages whilst in the valley and enjoyed them a decent amount.

Actually, the four of us walked out to Capel (!!!), the biggest Pisco distillery in the region. That's just a guess but I think it's a fair guess given the sheer volume of Capel advertising that saturates the Valle. Actually it's a bit revolting really, all the advertising. We couldn't be bothered forking out the big 1000 pesos they were asking for a tour and tasting (a grand total of around $2.50) so we shared a strawberry milkshake instead. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.

Judging from this post you would think all we do is ingest various beverages. But don't worry Mum, we haven't been drinking much really. Once we head into Bolivia it's all horrible anyway, apparently, so we are making the most of the tasty and cheap wine culture around these parts. Although to be fair, most of the Malbecs we tried on the Wine-And-Bikes day were really not that great.

After Cords we are heading to Salta, and across the salt flats to Boliv. Pretty excited! Apparently the salt flats are amaaaazing (also apparently 'amaaazing' is a very Australian thing to say? I never knew!)

Right well that's enough information for you all I think.

Love love love
Lion

ella uso mi cabeza como un revolver

2009-04-07T10:43:00.000-07:00

hey there, mysterious readers! I have lately been assured that some people are actually reading this, so I will endeavour to post occasionally. (lion keeps encouraging me, but I have difficulty believing that my words are not just disappearing into the electronic yonder, ever unread by the living.)

we are in Valparaiso today, on the ¨coast¨ of chile (we have not yet seen any coast, but I am assured there is one close by). we like it so far (it has some ´tude, as Lion puts it) although some travel-friends of ours (two english girls, Rosie and Anna) were apprarently mugged here two days ago so we are a little apprehensive and Taking Precautions. I´m sure we´ll be fine as long as we are careful, though. anyway if we do get mugged all they will get from us is cash now that we are Prepared, so it would suck but not be that big of a deal.

this internet cafe is playing Alanis Morisette, which is a GROAN moment but reminds me to mention the awesome music experiences we´ve had so far:

Rick Astley. (a terrible 80s singer.) this man has followed us throughout South America. Dylan, a great character we met in Bariloche, said, ¨Rick Astley has followed me everywhere in South America¨ and since then we have realised he is right.
La Noche. (literally, ¨The Night¨.) I think Lion has already mentioned them... a fantastically tacky Chileno band, the lead singer has these amazing ¨wet-look¨ long curly locks, dodgy teeth and a seductive smile.
Pappo. An old Argentino singer, singing in Spanish, played over the PA at our hostel in Bariloche... Diego (one of the staff) discussed this band with us for a while after I ventured, in broken spanish, ¨Who is singing?¨ Lion was a big fan, and was ridiculed a little for this by her spanish teacher. ¨Oh, muy viejo!¨ (very old)
The Reckoning. An Israeli band (but singing in English, not Hebrew) that we heard played at Rey Sol. The lead singer (a guy) sounds like Janis Joplin.
Los Pericos. A band recommended to me by Pato, a Chileno boy we met in Santiago. they are a bit older, a bit like The Cure (but singing in spanish). they sing a song called, ¨Ella uso mi cabezo como un revolver¨ (she uses my head like a revolver) of which I am particularly fond.

anyway better go, we have Things To Do (in my case this will be lying in bed all afternoon, because I have been a bit sick the past day or so, nothing serious). did I mention that we are staying in a wicked hostel right now? we get a private room with a televison for about 11 australian dollars per night. we are pretty excited about watching television in bed to be honest. also the guy running the hostel not only speaks no english (this is great) but is very patient about speaking spanish with us (even better). our spanish has really taken a downward slide after coming into Chile because the accent is quite hard to understand. but we are trying, guys, really!

chau, mis amores!

The scariest moment of my life, a.k.a. "A Boring Story For You"

2009-04-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

Hello, favourite people! Let me tell you about the scariest moment of my life. I wasn't planning on telling anyone about this at the time, but I've subsequently realised I should or else I am kind of defying the entire point of the exercise and the potential good that might have come from it. You don't have to read it though!

Soooooo, when Robo and I were staying at Rey Sol hostel in Lago Puelo - that's the Israeli hostel for all those of you who are not good at remembering things - we were happy to discover that they had a couple of guitars. For the first month or so of our travels, we only saw guitars from a distance. It was a little painful, to be honest. We would both look at them longingly when we saw someone carrying one and work out cunning plans to befriend their owners, but never executed them. Luckily, since then we've had a pretty good run with guitars. We had one for two weeks at La Bolsa, our hostel in Bariloche, and were sad to leave it. But two sleeps later and we were back in a hostel con guitarra.

Consequently I was having a little sing and a strum in the backyard one beautiful sunny afternoon, the night before we left Rey Sol and Lago Puelo. I was sitting a pretty long way from everyone, because it seems that whenever you play guitar in front of an Israeli lad they do their damndest to persuade you to sing a song for them. I am, as most of you know, horribly shy with regards to singing in front of others (obviously I'm not including my love of belting out classics by Steppenwolf and Def Leppard here. That's not really singing so much as "being awesome.")

But then Gila from the hostel snuck up to me, and she said, "Heyyyy, why don't you sing us a song at the asado tonight! There are going to be musicians, you should join them!"

And I said "Hahahahah oooohhh no I don't think that is going to happen." And I felt annoyed at myself but also pretty relieved that I wouldn't have to sing.

So that night we were having a grande olde time, eating meat (alternatively: not eating meat), playing frisbee under the stars, sitting around the bonfire and listening to Gila's husband and his friend play the blues. They were pretty good times! And then they finished up a song and Gila said "There is a girl here who sings beautiful! Perhaps she will play for us!"

And I thought, "ooh I wonder who it is" and then Gila came over and whispered to me "Do you have the courage?" and I thought "awwww crap" and then I went up and sung and played a song in front of 35 people!

It was so terrifying, I had the shakes for two hours afterwards. But it went really well I think! Everyone was really kind and a couple of the Argentinians yelled out "Uno mas!" Which means "one more." And later a few of people said pretty cool things, my new friend Coby gave me a really great compliment and also an Argentinian girl accosted me in the toilets and said that it sounded professional and that she would pay money to listen to me! And insisted on hugging and kissing me effusively (Argentinian styles! Nothing dodgy you guys).

I am just showing off now, but honestly after about ten years of being too shy to sing in public it was a really really good feeling to not embarrass myself horribly. (P.S. I forgot the words. But it was okay I think.) And it was so so much fun! My goodness it was a good time! Perhaps one day I will even do it again?!

EVIDENCE!!!

The next post on here will not be all about my social anxieties, I promise.

Love love love
Lion

Oh and p.s., the song I sung was called "Can't Let Go" by Lucinda Williams, you should download it because it is a really great song. Lucinda does it more justice than I did; also she remembers the words.

A week in Bariloche... IN PICTURES

2009-04-01T07:41:00.000-07:00

Did I ever tell you guys about the time I travelled on Ruta 40 for 32 hours? Man, what a rush! It felt incredible to see the same scenery as Che did all those years ago, just sucking in the mindblowing sights that loomed all around me like spectres of a not-so-distant past.

For 32 hours! Actually I have to say that, three Phenergans later, the bus trip turned out significantly better than I had predicted.

Anyway it didn't matter too much that Ruta 40 completely blew because soon we arrived in Bariloche, an event which came with a definite verdict of YAY. Hey check it out! This crappy photo illustrates what I would see out of the bathroom window when I crawled out of bed at seven every morning for Spanish class:

Whoa but hey what is that building that is shaped like a toadstool?

It is a kiosk that, from what I can ascertain, is shut for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Onwards!

Outside our hostel:

Donde esta el punk rock? I would tell you if I could.

Meat!

From the parilla down the road. ~~Milo~~ Matt and Otis and Jonno came and joined us at the hostel for some crackin' meat treats. I ate potato and lentil salad and some soy Milanesas and they were extremely tasty thanks for asking.

Vegetables!

From "El Vegetariano," the uncreatively named vegetarian restaurant in Bariloche. Oh but it was good though. They don't have a menu, just a set plate each day, and me and Ro shared soy cutlets, super tasty vegetables, corn frittatas, spinach crepes... oh my goodness.

Oh and man just check out the sweet marscapone-y goodness we split for dessert:

I am not really much of a food photographer, sorry. Awwww but this was an amazing tiramisu.

We "volunteered" one afternoon at Spanish school.

It was actually pretty silly, we just wound up playing soccer with a bunch of kids, but it was fun anyway I guess. I am not really soccer crazy so I just entertained myself by singing "Born to Run" and practising guitar windmills when I thought no one was looking. It turns out they were looking and the stupid kids thought it would be a great idea to mock their Auntie Caro ruthlessly for the rest of the game. They secretly thought I was incredible, though. Anyway that's Lucy grinning away in the brown shirt, and in the red shirt is a shy little thing who didn't really speak, she was pretty cool though. We had an understanding.

Then on the weekend we hiked! Ro looks offensively outdoorsy here:

And here is Refugio Lopez! On top of Cerro Lopez, where we hiked.

About three hours up and we had a pretty sweet view of Bariloche and all the sexy little lakes and so on.

CROP CIRCLES VISIBLE FROM CERRO LOPEZ :O

Mark if you read this pls inform a Mr J Sherry immediately.

But where am I, you say? Where is my very favourite friend/family member amidst all these sights? So here is a slightly horrible picture of me with an adorable dog.

It wandered into the pub in Pucon and sat on my lap and after this photo was taken it fell asleep for half an hour. Probably the greatest thing in the world. The dogs in Chile are the best. They all run around without collars and are so sweet and affectionate. They don't even mind if you try to spoon them. Which is more than I can say for the men.

Love love love

Lion

a dorm in pucón

2009-03-30T16:52:00.001-07:00

last night:

guy in our dorm: how was your day, mate?
me: good... do we know you?
guy: nope.
me: ah righto no worries. just wondering. you are obviously australian.
guy in dorm: yep. where are you girls from?
me: xxx
guy: yeah me too. well, actually from xxx.
me: wait, we DO know you! weren´t you in bariloche, at hostel 41 below?
guy: nope!
me: oh.
guy: no, i was there for dinner.
me: oh, haha... please dont tell lion, she will be so depressed. she was so disappointed to meet someone from her hometown in south america! and now you´re here again...
guy: well thanks a lot! some women would be STOKED to see me here! i mean i follow you all the way here... sorry i didn´t bring FLOWERS!!
me (laughing): yeah sorry i guess that was a bit harsh huh

I was quite amused by this conversation.

tomorrow i will have been away from home for two months :O :O :O it doesnt feel like very long, but i am a little homesick today (it doesnt help that the weather is so bad). i am not complaining though (i would expect you to be disgusted with me if i did complain!)... i am loving this whole travelling dealio to be perfectly honest with you all! :D

Una Noche en Bariloche

2009-03-26T18:42:00.000-07:00

Actually we are back here for two nights. The title comes from a deeply strange conversation we had with Pablo two of the staff members at Rey Sol a.k.a. Little Israel. I suspect they had been indulging in a little of the herb. Well, Pablo at least. Jonah is only 14 so hopefully he is studying hard at school and not curing his brain in depressants. Up until this moment I had assumed Pablo was a sweet and quiet Argentinian boy who spoke no English. My only contact with him had been when I was washing dishes next to him in the kitchen, and he muttered, ¨Tu nombre?¨

¨....lina,¨ I said, since it is easier for Spanish people to pronounce.

Then he said something quietly and I could not quite make it out. ¨Ahhhh... lo siento,¨ I said embarrassedly, ¨no entiendo, mi español es patetico.¨ He kindly offered, ¨Ahh, mi ingles es patetico tambien,¨ and we smiled shyly. These were the only words I heard him speak in my first couple of days at the hostel.

Anyway, on Tuesday night we ran into Pablo and Jonah down the bottom of the stairs, who began to giggle wildly.

Jonah: ¨El trabajo es triste!¨
We supplied him with blank looks.
Pablo and Jonah: El trabajo es muy muy triste!¨
I look at Ro in confusion. ¨Are they just saying, the work is sad?¨
Jonahs sweet little face lit up. ¨Si si si! The work is sad!¨
Ro and Lion: ¨What? Es triste... para tu?¨ Para tu means, ¨for you¨.
Jonah: ¨No no no!¨
Pablo: ¨Es triste para TODO!!!¨ Which means, it is sad for EVERYONE! We still had no clue what they were talking about. But they found it very amusing.

Jonah: ¨Where do you go next?¨
Ro: ¨Bariloche¨
Pablo, gleefully: ¨Una noche... en Bariloche!¨ Jonah found this extremely amusing.
Lion: ¨Oh wow, that could be the title of a really great song. Una noche...¨
Everyone, singing: ¨...en Bariloche!¨ At which point Pablo and Jonah collapsed at the hilarity of it all. It was quite funny actually. There is a terrible Chileno band called ¨La Noche¨ and ¨Una Noche in Bariloche¨ sounds like something they would call a live album.

I am looking for a picture of them but I can not find one. Which is a shame because Kate at least would appreciate it.

Anyway, that was a prelude to a most magnificent evening, which I intended to write about before I got distracted by recording that ridiculous conversation. But Ro is pestering me to go to the pub with her. Classic Ro; truly a lady of the sauce. So perhaps you will hear about it later. Here is a teaser: I conquered one of my deepest fears. Far out!

Tonight we take Bariloche; tomorrow, Pucon.

Love love love
Lion

A serious post

2009-03-24T07:38:00.000-07:00

Hello internet! This is just a short note because I am feeling lazy.

For the first time in exactly one and a half months, we are not surrounded by Spanish. That is because we are surrounded by Hebrew! We are staying at a wacky hostel just out of El Bolson which is a little hippie town two hours south of Bariloche and everyone here is from Israel. Actually a guy from Michigan arrived last night, which was quite a rush, but apart from that it is muchos Hebrew. It is pretty interesting and I have learnt a LOT about Israel in the last couple of days! So many exclamation points!

Fun things we have done lately: rode child-sized bikes along bumpy road to the supermarket, picked wild blackberries, played guitar, laid in hammocks, played UNO (actually not very interesting), found Twinings vanilla tea in the supermarket in El Bolson (man I can never find this tea ANYWHERE, I thought it was discontinued, I have not had it in three years!), went for a hike to a lake LED BY A DOG. Seriously you guys, the dog showed us the way! Tonight they are throwing a bonfire party kind of thing in the bush, and they are roasting a lamb! (Revolting!) But there will also be music and other fun things, so it should be good times!

We have also met some seriously excellent people lately! Here but also in Bariloche. Seriously.

Gotta go. Guitar to play, hammocks to lie in.

Love love love
Lion

School pictures

2009-03-20T04:21:00.000-07:00

Since I am currently not really able to post my own photographs, here are a couple I have stolen from the La Montaña Facebook page. So that you know I am really in Argentina! I suspect that some of you were having your doubts.

Here is Ro with Gordon from Scotland, engaged in some intimate salsa.

And here I am rockin´out with J.P. from Holland. Jean-Pierre is perhaps not the most naturally adept of dancers, and the fact that were able to execute this move at the moment of photography is a sheer miracle of chance/synchronicity.

You may observe that my hair does not possess the luxurious length that has won it praise and fame in the past.

I am extremely fond of this photograph. Click on it to see a larger version. Matt from Oregon (blue shirt) is clearly regaling us with some kind of wonderful story. I am staggered and Nicolas (green shirt), who is the kind of main dude/teacher at La Montaña, is completely impressed. (Nicolas is an excellent human being. He has a wonderful habit of explaining something in Spanish, then pausing, then saying, So, and proceeding to expain it in English. Why is this so wildly entertaining? I´m not sure.) Otis (black shirt), also from Oregon, and travelling with Matt, has heard the story a million times before but is waiting with vague amusement to see our response, and Ro evidently doesn´t have a clue what is going on and is just smiling dazedly.

Alright I gotta do my homework for the last day of school!

I realise that these photos don´t show you anything of Argentina whatsoever! Sorry about that!

Love love love
Lion

La concha de la lora

2009-03-17T11:05:00.000-07:00

Hellllooooooo fiends!

How are we all? Bien, muy bien, fatal, fenomenal?

Well I am just great thanks for asking. I´m STILL in Bariloche. And still at school! Honestly, it´s great to be back at school. In fact class is probably ten times more amusing than university, what with there being no assignments or grades and never any homework that I can´t do over breakfast. And a million times better than being at high school school because our hormones have settled down at last.

On the weekend we went walking in the mountains. Muy lindo! Oh I´m lame. Anyway we went for a wonderful little hike up Cerro Lopez. You can click here for a nice little picture of the refugio where we had lunch, if you like: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_mTL8Hp1--Y0/SW6fIvU-OBI/AAAAAAAAAhU/ZQQ2I-GJ8Es/s400/refugio.JPG

Sorry. HTML coding on this keyboard is sort of difficult. So is forming parentheses.

Bariloche is lovely and lakey. And mountainy. People seem to think it is touristy and the city is not so pretty, but I really like it. It reminds me a tiny bit of Fremantle, in terms of size and layout. Only on a lake, not a port. But it has a bit more of a ski resort feel. Everything hell of alpine. Woody as all heck. Still, it isnt laid on as thick as in El Calafate. I think most of the touristy stuff happens out of town. Sorry for lack of punctuation, there is something horribly wrong with this keyboard.

My homework for today is to write about my routine in Australia. So I will probably have to write about my last job. How depressingggggggg.

Yesterday at school we met the new students for the week, and one of them was an engineer from Perth who basically lives on the same block as Ro. Since I cannot work out how to get an exclamation mark, I will say in lieu: oh my goodness. This is our first instance of being Perth`d thus far. Last week we befriended two excellent Oregonians called MATT and OTIS, the latter being a most pleasing name, and were sad to see them go. But luckily there are some interesting folks who have signed up this week. Tonight we are going out for St Patrick`s day. Muy Argentinian. Apparently it is a fairly big deal here despite a virtually nonexistent expat population. Way to go Argentina.

Anyway the lack of punctuation is irritating me deeplyªªªªª. They were supposed to be exclamation marks. But it just sounds like I am writing in a cynical monotone.

Chau chau
Lion

(Or Lina, since it seems to be easier for people to pronounce. You don`t get the first bit of my name in case of stalkers, but you know what it is.)

spanish class, day two

2009-03-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

i have a very strong urge to write as much of this as i can in spanish but i feel that might be a bit pretentious since my readers obviously don´t speak it? however please note that while writing this I´m really struggling with english grammar, after concentrating on spanish all morning!!

spanish class: it´s really fun having structure in the day and using our brains again. caro and I are in different groups, because I did night classes in Perth before we left.

on day one I was put in a class WAY above my head. I couldn´t believe how hard it was. the teacher tries to speak in spanish as much as possible during the lesson, and when someone is explaining a concept to you that is a level beyond what you have learnt, using vocabulary you don´t know, and talking about grammatical concepts you don´t understand because australian schools don´t teach grammar... it´s pretty exhausting / demoralising.

I did actually learn a few things, to my surprise, but it was a hellish process.

today was much better. I am in a private class now, since there is nobody else at my level (I pay the same but I only get three hours a day rather than four). it´s pretty sweet.

we have a good set-up at the moment: decent hostel (with a guitar!!!), nice town, meeting some cool people, learning spanish. we´re thinking of staying a bit longer and doing another week´s spanish here. this will suck a bit money-wise, but after a month of struggling through with our Very Average spanish skillz it is also a very attractive concept.

there is a vegetarian supplies shop in town (and a vegetarian restaurant somewhere), also a million parrillas (grilling bars? it´s an argentinian thing, lots of meat basically). we´ll go with some of the other people from our spanish class to a parrilla sometime this week, cos (even though caro doesn´t mind going) I don´t want to be the only one at our table being served some 0.5kg of meat!! (not a joke.) caro can have chips or something.

also: the lonely planet told us ¨bariloche is very touristy¨. well... I guess so, in that ¨there is tourist stuff here¨ but to be honest it´s really quite nice. el calafate (el hellhole) was heaps worse on the tourist factor. maybe it gets bad in winter during ski season, or something?

and then onwards to... we are not sure. bariloche was the extent of our planning...!

Back 2 Skool

2009-03-10T12:25:00.000-07:00

Hello! Today I went... Back 2 Skool.

Yes that is completely correct, yesterday Robo and I enrolled in a one week Spanish course. Actually we only enrolled in four days, since we arrived here on Monday after class began, but they didn´t charge us for the first day. The classes run between 9-11 with a little break halfway through, when they give us tea and coffee and medialunas.

The other students are pretty alright from what I can see - everyone is super friendly. I´m in a class with three others - a guy called JP (Jean-Pierre) from Holland, another Australian called Kerry and a dude from Nottingham/New Zealand called Jonathon. Takes all types to build a world, no? (I don´t know what that has to do with anything.)

Tonight we are going to una cerveceria. To drink una cerveca (I´m guessing). I guess if you stop and think about it, it is kind of cool to go to a brewery on a school trip. Last night we took a salsa lesson, which was a neat trick since we weren´t actually paying for Monday´s classes. I was less incredible than you might have expected. The fact that it was all in Spanish didn´t help though.

Our hostel is cool too. Our new Belgian friends Jurgen and Oliver, whom we met in Chalten, recommended it to us. It´s a nice mix of social and not-full-of-drunk-Australians - in fact most people are Latin American so far as I can tell. Also it has a cubby house with a slide in the backyard. A slide! I´m not sure if we are allowed to use it. The only bummer is that they don´t serve you breakfast. This is pretty crap to be honest.

The weather is warm again! Like a lovely early summer´s day in Perth. Why, I am wearing a skirt as I type this very sentence. Also my Leonard Cohen shirt. DID YOU KNOW?! I love Leonard Cohen.

Somewhat incredibly, I´ve already done my homework for today, but even more incredibly, I am now off to revise a little. Although I shouldn´t get too congratulatory because really this is just an excuse to buy another notebook and some pencils. Stationery!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I like stationery.

I´ve been away for a month today, if you can believe it. I can (why wouldn´t I?)

Love love love love love
Carolion

PS. Yes I know I haven´t finished writing about the hike.

el chaltén, cowboys, break-ya-heart sunrises

2009-03-05T06:29:00.000-08:00

hola chicos!

so we are en... crap this is english... we are in El Chaltén now, and it is basically a collection of hostels, hotels, small supermercados, panaderías and tourist cafes/restaurants in a small valley surrounded by mountains in a national park. there is no bank or atm so I am carrying enough cash to last me until saturday and a bit more for emergencies, which makes me quite nervous, but there are also occasionally guachos (cowboys) to be seen cantering along the streets just out of town, which makes me happy.

it is a beautiful place, but I am frustrated because my knee, while not really a big deal, is still not back to normal after the hike and so I can´t really go on any of the 10-hour hikes or whatever. there are some great short hikes around the town, but even on those I have to be careful and I don´t like it much!!! we might go for an hour or so walk to see a waterfall this afternoon and then i´ll ice my knee for the rest of the day to compensate, argh.

to amuse myself I bought a copy of ¨Soy Rock¨ (Literally, ¨I am (intrinsically) Rock¨ but I think they mean ¨I Rock¨ in the english context, although either translation is pretty funny) and I translated articles about Bruce Springsteen and Amy Winehouse yesterday to ¨improve my spanish¨. it may have had some positive effect...?

I just realised we haven´t written that much about the people we have met so that will have to be my aim from now on.

we are staying in a four-person dorm with two guys from Belgium at the moment, and they´ve been our best buddies this week. yesterday the four of us undertook an ill-fated attempt to climb to a mirador out of town and see the sunrise... the theory is that you get a stunning view of mount fitzroy and other such striking rocky mountains, as they reflect the vivid red colours of the ¨unique patagonian sunrise¨. um yeah to be honest our experience was a bit more ¨very very cold wind¨, ¨very very early¨, ¨so cloudy we can´t actually see mount fitzroy at all¨ and ¨whoops turns out you don´t have to get up at 5am because the sun doesn´t get over the mountains in the east until 8am¨. hahaha oh well.

I took our camping stove and we had coffee at the top, and when we eventually came back to town we had hot media lunas (sweet croissants) from the bakery, porridge and more coffee. then we went back to bed and did very little else that day. I was proud of us for trying.

I was going to write about Leon as well, who is a classic character we met while we were watching the glacier francés drop avalanches into the valley below (he was running the five-day W hike and completed it in two days) and whom has been one of those people you´ll never forget in years to come, and stories about him will probably esclate in the ¨it was THIS BIG¨ kind of fashion, but Caro is waiting for me to finish so you´ll just have to use your imagination.

I found the BEST opportunity yesterday to take a photograph to send to Rory with the caption, ¨Surprise, Rory... I bought you a house!¨ (the chances of him ever reading this are slim to none but oh well)

okay that´s it for you all. I´m heading back out into the cold streets of laredo...

Rad Chile!

2009-03-02T11:23:00.001-08:00

¡Hola amigos y familiaaaaaaaaa!

You´ll never guess where I am!!! Actually I am in El Calafate again; what an overpriced dump. Apparently it is one of the most expensive towns in BsAs. Thank goodness for that; otherwise I would have had to found some sort of cult in order to finance the rest of the trip. Luckily we only arrived a couple of hours ago and we leave in another couple of hours, to go to a smaller (still touristy and expensive but more charming, apparently) village called El Chalten, in a little valley in the mountains, to chill out and do some hiking. I hope I see a cowboy!

Anyway! I am sure you are all desperate to hear about my adventures hiking in the Patagonian Andes!

Well, we had a grand old time. The bad news is: Ro hurt her knee a bit! Also she got some horrible blisters. So we wound up coming home a little earlier than we otherwise might have, and curtailing a little of the trek. But the good news is that we still spent four nights and five days in... The Patagonian Andes!!!

Rookie Mistake No. 1 - We accidentally tried to hike the W backwards.

Yeah so the bus that was supposed to take us to the start of the trail took us to the end of the trail and since we are rookies we just got off and started walking. I mean, we were aware that we were starting the trail from the end but it didn´t seem to matter that much. So instead of doing the ¨W¨ I guess you could say we did the... ¨Backwards W.¨

The first day was outrageously difficult, oh my goodness. We started out with a relaxed glide over a charming bridge and into the rolling Patagonian countryside. THEN WE CLIMBED A MOUNTAIN. Well, basically we struggled uphill with our ludicrously heavy packs for a good hour or two, each thinking to ourselves ¨Why are we doing this oh god what have we donnnnne.¨ It was by far the toughest hiking I have ever done.

And then we walked some more and had lunch. God, it was tasty. We ate at a refugio, which is where people stay when they are too soft to carry their own tent and food. (Alternatively: where people stay when they don´t want to kill themselves in the process of climbing a mountain with a week´s worth of food and shelter on their back). We were too hard for the refugios, though, so we walked on a couple of hours to our camp. It was a bit easier. Then we set up our tent.

Then we chilled out for a bit and left our packs in the tent while we climbed up to... the Torres del Paine! That means ¨The Towers of Pain.¨ Actually it means ¨The Towers of Paine¨ and I have no idea what ¨Paine¨ means, sorry. But it probably means ¨Pain¨ because that is what I felt for the hour it took us to get up there. It was basically vertical and I was clambering over rocks and sand and scree (I have no idea what ¨scree¨ means, probably ¨rocks and sand¨) like some kind of godforsaken daddy long legs.) Approximately once per minute I thought ¨This completely sucks and I am going to turn back.¨ I didn´t though. I was hoping Ro would suggest the same thing first and I could consent in a warm and kindly manner that suggested I was nobly hiding my disappointment.

Luckily the towers completely kicked. They were awesome. From a distance they looked cool and all, I guess, but man it was actually worth that ridiculous joint-wrenching climb. They were the most delicate pale stripes of silver and blue and white and the glacial lake underneath all shimmering aqua from the particles... ahhhh. Brilliant. We sat there for half an hour, three quarters of an hour... a pretty long time anyway. I took one million photos and they all look like a dog´s breakfast, nothing remotely resembling what we saw. Actually I am glad. It´s nice to have some things to hold close to your chest. And if I showed you the photos you might feel as if you had already seen all there was to see, and you wouldn´t bother doing the climb for yourself if you ever get there... so you´re better off that way, as Avril Lavigne is currently singing over the PA. Trust me on this one.

Then we cooked dinner and brushed our teeth and went to bed and I don´t want to pay for any more internet so that´s all you get to hear about the hike for now!

FACTS ABOUT CHILE!

-Puerto Natales has a number of kickin´ rad mom-and-pop style diners that make incredibly tasty and comforting cheap meals. I ate the best sandwich of my life there, at a brightly painted place called El Bote. It was huge - my first proper post-hike meal - and contained lettuce, tomato, cheese, guacamole, mayonnaise, mindblowingly tasty pickles... it was like magic. A magical sandwich.

-Supermarkets in Chile sell textured vegetable protein (TVP), but they call it ¨Carne de Soya¨ - meaning ¨Meat of Soy¨! How odd! Since it is vegetarian! Also it is cheaper than in Australia.

BONUS! MORE FACTS ABOUT ARGENTINA!

-I have heard ¨Total Eclipse of the Heart¨ twice since arriving - once in the airport and once in this very internet cafe. Pretty excited about this, both times.

-I have heard that ¨I´m Yours¨ song four or five times too. I´m actually starting to like it. Reggae is a pretty big deal here.

Okay! That´s enough for you!

Love love love
Lion

Pictures pictures pictures

2009-02-22T07:58:00.000-08:00

Finally I am able to upload some of my pictures! It is taking forever though so I can't put very many up which makes me a bit sad. It is probably good news for you guys though, what could be more boring than looking at photos of my trip? Only watching Judging Amy.

My favourite picture from Recoleta. There are so many more, all very dull. Anyway, you can see more at my flickr. Nothing very interesting there yet (mostly freakin' Recoleta). Will update more when I get the chance. But it's hard to find a computer with a DVD player, which is currently my only option for updating photos.

FACTS ABOUT ARGENTINA:

-In Spanish, two 'LL's in a row is usually pronounced as a 'Y'. For instance, El Pollo Diablo would be pronounced as 'El POY-oh dee-ABB-loh.' But in Argentina, they pronounce it as a sort of soft 'J' sound! Crazy!

-People in Argentina really like Jon Bon Jovi and Amy Winehouse

FACTS ABOUT SOUTH AMERICA:

-People in South America like TV shows that involve an elaborate set-up intended to make someone look foolish (then joyously amused when they are informed of the clever set-up.)

Okay! Also I think I lost my debit card today.

Love love love
Lion

Una dïa en el hielo

2009-02-21T08:09:00.000-08:00

Killing time in El Calafate, since our bus to Puerto Natales doesn´t leave until 5pm.

I had to book accomodation for us in Puerto Natales over the phone, completely in Spanish. It was quite hard but I think I got it right. If we arrive there tonight and discover I was successful I will have an enormous sense of accomplishment. If we arrive there tonight (at 10pm) and discover I was unsuccessful it will be a bit shit because accomodation can apparently be hard to come by around here and we will be homeless and tentless in a windy cold dark and sometimes rainy mountain town. However it is an adventure and I am sure somebody will take us in if necessary!!

So since I am killing time, you can have some wonderful pictures of Glaciar Moreno! It was pretty cool but like Lion says, it´s hard to describe. ¨Cold¨, ¨blue¨, ïcy¨and ¨very big¨is the closest I can get! Also ¨loud¨. You can hear the grinding and cracking echoing through the valley as it advances at 2 metres per day and large chunks fall into the water below (this is called calving). We spent a few hours looking at it and saying ¨wow¨ a lot.

We also spent a while wandering around El Calafate. There are lots of horses and dogs. There are also flamingos! I didn´t get any decent photos because my camera doesn´t have a good zoom so Lion will have to put some up when she gets the chance.

This is my favourite picture of El Calafate, taken on the first day we were here when the light was amazing. The green building is a nightclub!!

I´m glad to be leaving El Calafate, because its´ alpine-scrubbiness (a great novelty at first) is starting to grate on my nerves. Three days was slightly too long. But Puerto Natales sounds cool and we will do the ¨W¨trek there, which takes around five days (so expect us to be out of contact for a little while)!

We´ll also be in Chile. It is very bizarre to say, OK let´s book a bus to Chile tomorrow. I have never crossed a border over land before!

Lion cracked me up this morning. We were sitting at breakfast, discussing the two late-thirties men we shared a dorm with last night. They were very nice and everything, fit trekker-types, but seeing a couple of grown men (old enough to be our fathers) sprawled over their beds in cotton jocks, smelling like sweaty men, snoring loudly and desperately like they were trying to eat their own faces (Lion´s phrase) was a bit disconcerting.

Then the television in the background showed a news story with two big brown hairy sea lions sprawled on a beach on the west coast of Argentina. Lion was like, ¨Look at that, that´s what was lying on a bed in our dorm in its underpants last night.¨I laughed so loudly that everyone else in the common room turned to look at us.

That was considerably more than I intended to write! Better go before I reach 30mins on the internet-cafe counter... otherwise I´ll have to pay another 2.50 pesos!! Rip-off.

I will be in Puerto Natales, Chile, during my grandfather´s funeral. I guess I´ll be asleep, because of the time difference. I feel I should say a prayer for him, but I´m not really religious and I don´t think I know any prayers. I could make something up, I guess! I would like to say something for him when I´m on top of a mountain, or something, when we´re hiking. I think he would have preferred me to be with my family than on top of a mountain in Chile, but obviously that´s not possible. Anyway I hope that he is at rest now.

Glacierzzzzzzz

2009-02-20T13:59:00.000-08:00

My dear sweet friends and family, you should email us more often. Well, me, anyway. I know I´m off gallivanting all day, running into half a lake full of flamingos, partying with new friends called Guido and Enrique and all that business. But in fact, as wonderful and startling and lovely as America del Sur has proved thus far, it seems that Nothing Compares 2 U, and there is nothing more depressing than spending twenty four hours doing incredibly fascinating and enrapturing things and then returning to an inbox full of nothing with no one to tell about it. And when I am sitting on a bus, or waiting in an interminable queue for the internet at a hostel with selfish people pushing in front of me, it is you that I entertain thoughts of.

Today we are in El Calafate, in Argentina. Tomorrow night we will be in Chile! Don´t worry, though, we are returning to Argentina for more adventures soon. I´m not sure what the internet facilities are like in Puerto Natales, our first stop, and we are planning to do a hike that takes about a week. So if you don´t hear from us, we are probably amongst the lagos and montañas, most likely replicating the opening scene from The Sound of Music.

Today we saw the Perito Moreno glacier! Far out, it was a big deal. But I don´t really know how to explain it to you. Maybe I won´t. Ro might though? You can ask her to if you like.

El Calafate is a very odd town. It is cold! After the mid-thirties temperatures of BsAs, this is thrillingly novel. Today I wore a singlet and a thermal shirt and a long-sleeved shirt and a merino jumper and a padded jacket! Not for very long though. Only while I ate lunch at the glacier. The main area of town is trying quite hard to be Aspen, I think, and indeed there are many charming woodsy chalet-style buildings and A-frame homes and chic French girls in quilted trenches and hoops earrings wandering around. But yesterday we went for a walk through town and wound up on the far end. It was sort of a wasteland, especially when you take into account how dry and stark El Calafate is in first place. There was garbage everywhere. We went into a general store and I was worried that a man was going to come out and serve us with a shotgun.

It stays light until around 10 in the evening.

On the aeroplane we watched a television ¨Just For Laughs Gags¨ which you may recall was made famous by Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton! It was so good. I have never seen such an elaborately awful piece of television before. I couldn´t stop laughing. The best bit is that there was no sound, so everyone was in the same boat.

This is all I am going to write for now okay! I don´t want to be one of those using computer-for-ages people.

P.S. They seem to like Celine Dion in South America and also I have heard ¨Uptown Girl¨ by Billy Joel twice.

¨Awesome¨

2009-02-20T03:09:00.000-08:00

AWESOME THING I WAS NOT EXPECTING TO SEE YESTERDAY BUT SAW YESTERDAY:

FLAMINGOS

photos de buenos aires

2009-02-17T15:01:00.000-08:00

photos! i was going to say ´at long last´ but then i realised we´ve only been here a week. (it feels longer, although not in a bad way.) but caro´s been itching for photos (i don´t care AS much but it is cool to put them up) so here you are:

recoleta cemetery. at the edge of the cemetery you could see the craziness of the city behind the craziness of the cemetery, it was basically just insane all around

lion (if you can see her: this computer´s screen is so crappy that we can´t!!) in recoleta´s plaza de vicente lopez

this photo is for mum and dad: it´s the DUCK!!! or possibly a close relative, living in san telmo´s antiques market

the argentian cat empire playing in avenida florida. they winked at us. (and, as lion adds over my shoulder, blew kisses too)

football fans in la boca. they were almost shaking the buses singing and shouting out the windows and they danced off the buses around the corner towards the stadium

la boca

clothes for dogs in la boca. yeah don´t ask me why, i´m sure there must be a reason

cool street graffiti art in palermo (p.s. tom reynolds, this is YOU)

robo trying on some funky latin clothing in the coolest clothing store in the world in palermo (magda, you would have lost your NUT in this store, seriously)

...yes.

posing ´sexily´ (at least that was the aim: i think it may have failed dismally) in palermo (look at the street art on the right!!)

lion posing in front of a ship that we refused to tour because it would have cost 2 pesos (less than one australian dollar). we are super-stingy. we´ve also been washing our clothes by hand because it would cost about 3 australian dollars to do them at the laundromat: what a rip-off

so there you have it: a week in buenos aires. tomorrow we fly to el calafate (we could have taken the bus for three quarters of the cost but it would have taken 44 hours and we´re not that stingy, yet), and I am very excited. hiking! glaciers! mountains!

Stuff!

2009-02-17T04:07:00.000-08:00

I am so danged frustrated, you guys! I have a bunch of photos I´m desperate to upload. But I think I left my camera USB cable in Australia. So every computer I´ve been at I´ve hunted for a card reader, but they were all too old and none of them had one. Yesterday I finally braved the Spanish sitch and went and somehow managed to get my photos put on a DVD. So last night I went to the internet booth at the hostel with full intention of getting these photos up once and for all, only to discover that the CD drive on the computer doesn´t work. I couldn´t even get it to open. SOOOOOO I finally decided to lash out and go to an internet cafe this morning. And now I find... the CD drive is covered up so you can´t even touch it! Man but I am pretty furious.

Anyway, Buenos Aires proves itself to be full of fascination. Tomorrow afternoon we are flying to El Calafate in the south, so that we can check out Patagonia, but I will be sorry to leave. I could easily spend a while here. Luckily we will be back at the end of our trip.

We went out the other night for the first time (the first time for me that is; Ro went to Palermo with some backpackers while I slept the previous night. LAME!) I think I mentioned that a couple of the guys at the hostel told us about a gig. So we had a siesta on Saturday afternoon and then we woke up at 8:30 and in an anguished cry said ¨Oh no everyone has probably left already!¨ We looked all over the hostel for the people we were planning on going with but couldn´t see them anywhere. Trudged down to reception and finally Ro asked the guy working if he knew anything about it. Turns out it was his band. ¨We play at 11.30,¨ he said, and gave us the address. He was a bit too cool for school but we decided to check it out anyway (what else where we going to do?)

Okay, so at 11.30 we caught a cab to the Club de Arte, which was near Palermo (the main clubbing district). It was a grimy looking little place up a flight of stairs; we wouldn´t have picked it from the street on our own. Climbed the stairs only to be greeted by an empty bar, except for the band. But they seemed happy to see us. The guy from reception was suddenly all smiles and gave us the old Argentine cheek kiss which seemed a little odd since we hadn´t even introduced ourselves yet, but of course such is the Argentine way. Turns out his name is Guido, which I found most pleasing. We hung out with the band for a bit (and their friend from the Isle of Mann of all places, another backpacker called Matthew) and they offered us their Campari and orange juice. It was easily the worst thing I have ever tasted. I have no idea why anyone would ever drink it.

At about 1AM the band finally played. Lordy. But oh boy, we had a grande old time! Luckily for me they were much more erring on the ¨ska¨ or ska-punk rather than ¨reggae¨ side of things; reggae tends to put me to sleep. They were dressed much more reggae though. No checkerboards or porkpie hats in sight. Anyway it was uncharacteristic yet great fun skanking away on the d-floor, which was largely empty except for about four guys who were going loco.

(Note to Mum: in this instance, ¨skanking¨ (good) doesn´t mean being a ¨skank¨ (bad). It is a sort of dancing that you do to a lot of styles of music that come from Jamaica. It´s not very ¨skanky¨(bad) at all.)

Once the band finished it was about two - they were the only band on the bill - the club finally started filling up. Slowly, though. You don´t tend to go out until 2 in BsAs. It takes some getting used to. And how odd it was! The DJ played some more ska for a while, but then he busted out some salsa. And people actually started salsa dancing! The men and all. Actually the men were much more into it than the women. It was so bizarre for what seemed to be an indie club (a nice Mojo´s/Amplifier blend.) A friend of the band took quite a shine to Rowena and moved her around the floor like nobody´s business. Unfortunately moving away from him on the floor was a rather more difficult task. A shirtless hippy, not entirely unlike Michael Franti, insisted on dancing with both of us at once. We kind of messed up and he lost interest though. The bald and pierced singer from the band seemed to take an interest in me.

¨You don´t have this music in Australia,¨ he informed me.
¨Well, uh, maybe a little,¨ I said. ¨You can hear it some places.¨
¨But you have to go on the internet,¨ he said proudly.
¨Uh... yes,¨ I said. I couldn´t break it to him.

His big move was giving me a hug. Once I pushed him away (politely! Not like a shove!) he left me alone. Argentine men do seem to be fairly forward, but for the most part they also seem to get the picture fairly quickly.

I was so surprised at how friendly people were, and how many people came up and talked to us. So much for snobby porteños. An indie-looking girl and guy came us to me at one point and said, ¨¡Hola!¨ ¨¡Hola!¨ I said. They started laughing and said something to each other.

Where are you from, they asked me in English.
Australia, I said.
AUSTRALIA! they repeated in delight.

Then they told me, they have a bet going on.
¨What kind of bet?¨ I asked
¨You have to kiss one of us!¨
¨I have a boyfriend!¨ I informed them. ¨I´m not kissing anyone!¨
They looked at each other and groaned, like I was SUCH a bore. ¨But which one of us WOULD you kiss?¨

I don´t know what they were talking about. But they were very sweet and funny. They reminded me of some of the kooky kids you meet out in Perth on a good night.

Argh my internet time is running out!

I had some amazing dreams about Leonard Cohen the other night!

Love Caro!

Hola hola hola

2009-02-14T15:48:00.000-08:00

Hellooooooooooo

God it is oppressively hot in this little internet booth. I am sitting on the roof garden of our new hostel having just eaten that most Argentine of meals, chow mein. Ro had a Lomo de Buenos Aires today (I think that was what it was called, although that translates to Loin of Buenos Aires which seems a bit weird so perhaps not) so I think that was Argentinian enough for both of us.

Tonight we are heading to Palermo Viejo. Last night we saw that there was a jam session a-brewing on the roof of our hostel, so we wandered up in anticipation of finding a guitar to steal and sneak off into a corner. Actually it was more like the staff playing drums behind the bar to entertain themselves, but when we questioned them they handed Ro a shaker and me a tambourine and we had a bit of a boogie. Apparently I am quite the talent. They may have been mocking me. Anyway they told us that one of the staff members is in a band, and they are playing tonight, and we should go check it out. So we are along with a bunch of others from the hostel. To be entirely honest I´m not convinced that ska/reggae is the sort of thing I´d go out of my way to listen to in Perth, but when in BsAs and all that.

Today we went to La Boca and it completely sucked. Boca is a poor neighbourhood but full of wonderful vibrant buildings painted in all sorts of fascinating colours with shutters in contrasting colours and that sort of thing. Unfortunately the citizens have been relegated to the decrepit buildings on the outside, while the centre has been overpainted and glossed and turned into a tourist hell. Tourists are advised not to venture outside the well-trodden streets and they admittedly did look somewhat frightening. It was full of markets selling truly awful things, men wailing with accordians and cafes with tacky tango displays. If you happened to glance at one of the dancers you would be immediately accosted by a young man with a menu and when you walked away, said young man would recite a well practised ¨you so gorgeous,¨ ¨I love you forever¨ and other such versings fitting of St. Valentine´s Day. Or Dia de los Enamorados if you are so inclined (evidently I am).

I´m not averse to a spot of touristy crap (I concede that I was most taken with a t-shirt that said ¨Buenos Fucken´ Aires¨) but it was just miserable. Like a Disneyland Boca in the middle of real Boca. It was probably worse than usual, though. We happened to be going on a game day - Palermo vs. Boca at Boca Stadium. The bus that took us there drove through a scene of near insanity. The streets were packed with illegally parked cars, shirtless porteños, busloads of singing tourists, people playing futbol... actually the only person we´ve spoken to who went to the game said it was too hot to enjoy. A shame since most gringos paid about $100 for the experience.

When we were looking dazedly around, some girls behind us giggled and repeated, ¨Vamos, gringas.¨ ¨Vamos¨ is usually used to mean ¨let´s go!¨ We assumed that they meant ¨Go away, white girls.¨ I´ve been looking up meanings of ¨vamos¨ though and it seems they might also have been saying ¨Hurry up, white girls.¨ We were walking kind of slowly in front of them. Either way it´s hard to blame them. I was embarrassed to be there. La Boca - the parts we saw, that is - is a shithole. The buildings are still beautiful but the people ruin it.

We´ve moved to a different hostel on the same street. It´s great. Much better than the last one. The people are maybe a little older and therefore a bit less braindead, and not just boozy skanky Australians. And the roof garden is kickin´.

So much more to write about, oh my goodness. But I am frying to death and I need water. How are you all? Well, yes? I hope so. Tell me.

Love love love
Lion

dia dos: el mundo de caballos (the world of horses)

2009-02-12T14:15:00.000-08:00

Today bordered on awesome. We wandered around Recoleta, a ritzy suburb with a huge Spanish influence (think leafy tree-lined streets, big plazas covered in grass and shade with people everywhere just chillin' out, mediterranean-looking apartment buildings etc). The famous cemetery was INSANE, all these creepy old family crypts in hundreds of narrow cobbled streets (they really did look like streets since the crypts were mostly the height of small houses, some higher with crazy statues of angels, saints, warriors and so on). I felt like I was in somebody else's travels of Europe.

I stopped by a shop in a small arcade with a saddle out the front on the way back to the hostel, in a typical 'Robo shows her country roots' fashion, and the vendor came out to greet me. I was all, "No, no, I'm just looking," but he was all, "By all means, come inside and walk around and look, it's ok" (in Spanish) and then, "Where are you from?" in English. He didn't know very much English but we went inside, and he showed us around his (tiny) shop, poured us each a drink of Pepsi in plastic cups, and we ended up staying there for about half an hour.

The vendor (whose name was Enrique, or Henry to Ingles-speakers) makes all the saddles and bridles in the shop, and he runs the business with his brother and one other man, whose relationship to him I didn't catch. He showed us everything in his shop and told us all about it with great pride. To be honest I didn't catch a great deal of this part because he spoke so fast, but I picked up bits here and there and nodded, "Si, si, muy interesante!" to the rest. Haha.

I asked him heaps of questions about the horses in Argentina, and I found out something I've been itching to know for a while, as country of me as it is: the typical breed of horse in Argentina is a pony-sized beast called a Criollo. (pronounced cree-o-jo in Argentina or cree-o-yo elsewhere)

The conversation took a while, what with him not speaking English and all, but we got by ok and when we got really stuck I pulled out my spanish-english dictionary and everyone used it to look up key words. It's amazing how you don't have to understand every word of what somebody is saying to have a conversation!

After about half an hour, we took a photo with him, he gave us his email address to send him the photos and he gave me a magazine about polo. We came out laughing our heads off as we walked down the street. It was pretty random.

Lion stayed through this entire conversation, which was nice of her because I'm pretty sure she doesn't have anywhere near my interest in whether Argentians use Western-style or classical/European-style saddles (FYI the cowboys, or gauchos do use western but Enrique only makes classical). But she had fun enjoying the wackiness. I hope! Haha.

Good Spanish practice though. I am amazed at how much we're picking up and how quickly. I picked up the polo magazine while I was waiting for a computer, and was pretty shocked at how much I could figure out.

Oh I nearly forgot! The shop was called El Mundo de Caballos. Literally, The World of Horses. Funny stuff.

The hostel we're in was a good place for us to start out, because it's clean/modern/social etc and the staff are all really helpful (it's rookie-friendly), but we're quickly getting sick of the other backpackers. Lion and I are not adverse to partying but if we wanted to get drunk with other Australians we could a) move back to college and pretend we were eighteen again or b) head to the Obie for a Sunday session. We didn't need to fly to Buenos Aires! So yeah we're planning to change hostels pretty soon.

Other than that, todo bien, it's all good. Tengo muy hambre. Time for dinner.

The journey to... El Mundo de Caballo

2009-02-12T13:24:00.000-08:00

Man I am pretty annoyed, I was going to write a long post with all sorts of sexy pictures but this computer doesn´t seem to have a card reader and I left my USB cable in the bedroom under the assumption that it would have a card reader. And there is a hell of line for the computer so I don´t want to go back up to the room.

Anyway, today was hell of eventful. Ro and I decided to go trekking to Recoleta, which is a fairly fancypants sort of neighbourhood about a twenty minute walk from the city center. Actually it took us longer than that but I suppose we were a bit distracted. It was thirsty work but we got there in the end and by golly it was a site for sore eyes. Everything you read and everyone you speak to tells you to check out the Recoleta cemetary so we went there first. I guess that I like cemetaries and all, but neither am I inclined to wander them restlessly like a sad ghost/Bill Murray. As far as cemetaries go I would have to say that it is a good one. Mark would have gone HOG WILD if he were there, and so inclined to do such a thing. We really saw some kickin´ rad tombs. My favourite were the ones with statues of angels. If you peeked into some of the family graves you could see columns of coffins, which was a bit creepy actually.

We saw Evita´s grave! And the other members of the Duarte family, let us not forget them. It wasn´t especially notable except that it was surrounded by hundreds of irritating people taking pictures. Me, Ro, a couple of others. I took one hundred thousand boring pictures of graves so get yourselves ready.

Once we got bored at looking at the futile housings of the deceased we wandered away hunting for agua and el baño but instead we found ourselves next door at a church! Far out it was pretty. All white and high ceilings, of course, except for intermittent panels that were decorated with intricate renditions of Jesus and Mary and all the usual crowd in gold and turquoise and deep red. It was really quiet with only a few people there, some of whom were taking pictures and wandering around and others who were bowed and praying and crossing themselves. Also we checked out the cloisters, which had been turned into an art gallery of old religious parephenalia from the church, and from other countries in South America too. Zany embroidered vestigial robes (I have no idea what vestigial means), framed gold leaf quillings by bored nuns, ugly (but they certainly put in a lot of effort so let´s remember that)statues of the big guy, that kind of thing. The Virgin Mary certainly appeared to be in a lot of pain most of the time.

Then we really did need agua y el baño and also LUNCH so we went to a little place we saw on the way to the cemetary. It was pretty cute and sold little savoury baked goods, empanadas and such but also fresh homemade pasta. The woman looked completely grumpy but once we attempted to order in Spanish she changed her tune and was all with the smiles and the ciao and the gracias. The same thing happened later when we went to a chocolatier/patisserie type place! They were all, ahhhh, you have a chocolate too!, and I was all ahhhhhh noooooooo and then I was all ohhhhhh ok, un por favor and they cackled with delight and bade us a fond farewell.

And yet the best was yet to come. In fact I might leave Ro to tell you about it since it is really her baby.

Other stuff while I think of it:

-The hostel we are staying at is basically like college except that people at college had an excuse for lying around all day and never going outside (they were students). It has its charms but it also has its tasteless slappers and vacuous surfers. Still we´ve met some fairly cool Israelis and some fairly dense people from everywhere else. There is a ¨celebrity party¨ tonight and I may or may not be in attendance. It will be interesting to move on.

-The weather has been grand, not dissimilar to that of Perth at the moment (no bushfires). Mostly sunny with a few clouds yesterday. Completely sunny today. Warm both days.

-Actually this is all I can think of.

Love love love
Lion

nosotros somos en buenos aires!

2009-02-11T08:56:00.001-08:00

caro is writing a hugely long blog entry next to me, but the internet is free here so i'm gonna go nuts too. here are my thoughts on the city so far:

1. it's been heaps easier doing things like getting around, talking to people en espanol, etc, than I expected. I understand a lot more written spanish than I expected to (when things are in context it's especially easy), but I still struggle with understanding spoken spanish because people speak so fast. but other people we've spoken to in el hostel (muy gringo!) say that argentians speak quite a lot faster than other south americans so hopefully it will get easier. we are picking up a lot just by walking around on the streets.

i had to ask a shop assistant where to find a toilet today (donde esta un banyo?) and we conducted yet another successful spanish conversation, and ACTUALLY FOUND the toilet. we were pretty stoked.

2. being surrounded by a different language is actually really fun! all we've done today is wander round the streets of buenos aires (initially very nervously, expecting to be mugged/harassed at any moment, although when nothing bad happened we gradually got more confident) and it was a major adventure because everything was in a different language. ordering food was pretty fun too: it's a game of charades half the time!

3. having caroline around has been awesome. i'm so much less stressed doing this kind of travelling than i was in new zealand, and new zealand is easy in comparison. it is so much easier to be chillaxed in situations like "we're at a bus station in the rain and we have no idea what to do next" when you are not alone!

4. getting over jetlag still... caro and i seem to be on opposite schedules, because whenever one of us is perky the other is exhausted. but we're making good use of coffee and drowsyflupills where appropriate and we should be better adjusted in a few days' time.

5. i had a wierd moment when i woke up this morning and thought, "it's 9am here... so it's... 7pm in Perth? oh my gosh... they've already finished wednesday!!" for some reason this was an upsetting thought. i wish everyone was behind us in time instead of ahead of us!! haha.

pero todo es bueno! it's all very surreal, and i keep expecting i'll wake up tomorrow back in Perth. but it's also all very exciting and i definitely wouldn't want to be anywhere else!

But my mum says I'm cool

2009-02-11T08:38:00.000-08:00

Honestly I have no idea why people complain so much about jetlag and long flights. It is really very tolerable.

So I flew out of Perth at quarter to one on Tuesday morning, and by six that afternoon I was at our hostel in Buenos Aires. Six in the afternoon Buenos Aires time, that is. I slept like nobody's business on the flight from Sydney thanks to Mr. Phenergan. By the time we got to the hostel, though, I was still feeling pretty wacked out, but Ro's cunning plan was to stay up until 9ish so that we could get into a regular sleeping pattern. So we walked around the block until we found a pizza place and had a very convoluted conversation in which Ro tried to explain that we were after a pizza without meat. We wound up with a pretty tasty Margherita. Then I fell asleep on the bed with a Spanish music show blaring on the TV and Ro couldn't wake me up, even when she shook me and yelled at me. Then I woke up and fell asleep on the toilet briefly. Then I had a shower and passed out for the next twelve hours. In bed, not in the shower, although either would have been possible.

We spent all morning wandering about Buenos Aires and not really having any clue where we were going, thank God for grid streets. It's cool. European architecture and all that. Everything is pretty expensive and Havianas are sold EVERYWHERE. Turns out they're a ripoff everywhere. Went to a very schmick shopping centre that Mum would probably like. In fact it put our very own Morley Galleria to shame. We went to the cheapest cafe we could find, which wasn't that cheap, and I ordered un sandwich con quesa since it was the only obviously vegetarian thing on the menu, and un cafe con leche, my second coffee in five months. I had my first this morning. Neither was that good. Anyway it turns out that was actually a bit of a faux pas since cafe con leche is only meant to be drunk with breakfast. Boy, was my face red!

The hostel is full of gringos, mainly Aussies, which probably a good thing since mi espanol es patetica. I don't even know if that's correct. So far I have heard them playing MGMT, Lily Allen and Regina Spektor. Now they are playing 'Sweet Child of Mine'. Also whenever I sit down I can't seem to shake the feeling that the floor is moving so I suppose I don't have my air-legs yet.

Millions of people want to use the computer so I should probably go even though I have lots more to write.

Love love love
Lion

"Hell Yes"

2009-02-08T17:58:00.001-08:00

helllllllll yes i fly out at midnight

Chickity china the Chinese chicken

2009-02-02T19:17:00.000-08:00

I leave in a week! Not surprising since yesterday I was leaving in eight days. Ro leaves today. In fact she might have left already?

The stupid bank sent my stupid debit card to the wrong address. This is the same debit card that was going to be my main source of Fundz in South America so it is kind of a pain not to have it. I won't get it until Friday, probably, and then I will have a terrible rush trying to transfer Fundz from one bank to another because I can only take out a certain amount each day and ohhhh noooo what a nightmare. Actually I'm not feeling that concerned. My Mum is though.

This morning I woke up and I was REALLY EXCITED! I like catching planes. The novelty never really wore off for me, plus it's been five years since I went anywhere requiring air travel. I've never been on a plane for fourteen hours though. So perhaps this will be the death of my love of air travel.

Ro leaves tomorrow, thank goodness

2009-02-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

Ignore that last post. I am excited today! Seriously though I am probably not going to die of skin cancer when I am overseas. I usually wear sunscreen anyway.

Ro leaves tomorrow night! She's going to Tasmania for a week before we meet up in Sydney. (I just wrote "Sydnay" by mistake, it pleased me so much I almost left it there.) Why? Perhaps we'll never know.

I leave on Monday night next week from the domestic airport. I HATE the domestic airport. It is the least romantic place in the world. It basically looks like my office.

We have booked our first two nights in a completely awesome-looking hostel. I'd give you the link to the website but what if there is some eerie man from Buenos Aires who is for some reason reading this blog with a curiously lascivious delight? He would basically be equipped to stalk us so I will tell you about it once I'm outta there. We lashed out and got a twin room because neither of us have really had to sleep off jetlag before and we thought we might enjoy a spot of privacy while we do so. But after that it is time for DORM CITY. I love sleeping in dorms!

I still haven't decided on my second pair of pants. Most upsetting. I think I have chosen my shirts.

I finish work in three days. I wish I finished NOW. It is so boring.

Shittin' bricks

2009-01-27T18:37:00.000-08:00

You guyyys! I leave in two weeks!

Ro leaves even sooner since she is going to Tasmania before we meet up in Sydney. But who cares about her?

I am feeling really nervous again today. I am in love with probably the handsomest boy in the world, and I am scared about how much I might miss him in six months. (The trip was in the works before we got together, otherwise I might have forced him to earn thousands and thousands of dollars to come visit me). Logically, I'm aware that it won't be that bad when I'm actually there - things never are, plus I'll be all minglin' with Peruvians and chillin' on mountains and such - but right now it seems that it will surely be intolerable. This is probably the thing I'm most worried about, to be honest. What can I say ladies, I'm a romantic. I am also scared that I will cry so much at the airport that I will look completely horrible and that his last image of me will be of a whimpering, moaning, red puffy freak and he will never want to kiss me again.

I'm a little bit scared I'll die and my family will be really upset. I'm also scared that Ro will die and I'll have to call her family, like in the Gringo Trail by Mark Mann. Nightmare. And I'm also scared that someone I think is great will die and I won't have said goodbye to them properly. Also that a member of my family will get sick while I'm away.

I'm scared I'll run out of money and that I'll have a major tooth problem and need surgery and be unable to get it. I'm scared that one of my moles is actually a skin cancer and I won't find out until I get back and the doctor says "you know, if we had found this three months ago, we would have been able to save you." Or that I have any other kind of cancer really. I'm scared that I won't be able to find a place or a job when I get back and I'll have to live with my parents and they'll be like "FOR GOD'S SAKE, WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO GET OUT OF OUR HOUSE, YOU ARE A GROWN WOMAN."

I'm scared that I'm going to hate it even though I know I won't because I've never really hated anything, ever, I'm always happy when I'm somewhere new, but still I haven't been overseas for five years, and even though I like to think of myself as a travel-happy person what if it turns out I'm actually a real homebody, can't leave home for a month without crying every day, the kind of person that always made me think to myself: LAAAAAAAAME! I am regretting this cruelty, now.

If it weren't for the fact that you only get one life to live I'm not sure I'd have the courage to travel anywhere, ever.

One weird thing is that I'm actually very eager to leave in a way, but mainly just so that I can stop this terrible worrying.

It's like she's trying to talk to me, I just know it!

2009-01-27T16:45:00.000-08:00

I have three days of work left (including today). I fly out to Tasmania in six days. I meet Lion in Sydney in thirteen days. We'll be in Buenos Aires in two weeks' time. You’d think I’d be excited, but to be honest my routine hasn’t changed and those numbers on their own are too surreal!

I have been working on my Spanish today:

¿o estoy? – or am I? (emotions / location)
¿o soy? – or am I? (identity)
¿o es? – or is it?
¿o estás? – or are you? (informal)
¿o está? – or are you? (formal – because we’re so likely to say this in a formal setting)
¿o están? – or are youse?
también lo es tu mamá - so's your mum (there's gotta be an easier way to say that)
¡que usted! - that's you!

For example:

¡Oiga Lion, que usted! Es broma... ¿o estoy?
(Hey lion, that's you! Just kidding... or am I?)

This is gonna be great.

También (also), I LOVE the fact that Spanish has a word for “youse” that you can use without sounding like an Emu Bitter drinker. It makes so much sense! Why doesn’t English have a proper word for “youse”?

Updates!

2009-01-21T22:44:00.000-08:00

Hello little ones. I played around with the blog a little bit today, so if it looks strange in your browser please let me know! The photos are of me and Robo. I am the light-haired one whose mouth is always open.

Also, I FIIIIINALLY have a passport! The guy at the passport office was SUPER friendly and said "Ooh, that's definitely you! What a nice photo!" I don't know what he was talking about since I basically look like a rugby player who has been imprisoned for a long time.

A lesson in stressin'

2009-01-15T18:34:00.000-08:00

One problem I have is that, from a philosophical point of view, I am a pretty chillaxed sort of person. I espouse all sorts of maxims like "worrying never got anyone anywhere" and "I don't regret the things I've done but those I did not do" (usually with reference to going out dancing instead of completing an assignment or job application) and "you can't take it with you when you go" and that sort of thing. In college I was prone to starting essays at midnight the day they were due, and once I left college I didn't bother until they were over due (you only lost 2% a day in the Arts department and frankly I had better things to do.)

This isn't a problem in itself, but thanks to my wonderful mother I have also inherited the Worry Gene. So when I fail to do things in a timely manner, which I inevitably do, I stress. I lie awake at night, I grind my teeth, I jiggle my legs rapidly (or my entire body if it's really bad), I walk around with a mantra of "oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck fuck fuck" blaring in my head.

So as you might expect, this whole "travel planning" thing is not so much my bag. Oh, I'm perfectly happy daydreaming itineraries and comparing trail shoes online, but when it comes to going to a bank to open a new account only to find I don't have adequate ID and then searching for ancient documents that I put in a "safe place" years ago and taking more time off work to go to the bank again and blah blah blah... god, it is just so boring, and then I procrastinate, and then I PANIC.

Couple this panic with the three calls a day I've been getting from my mum and it turns into TRIPLE PANIC. Or QUADRUPLE PANIC or similar, I'm not entirely sure about the numbers.

Anyway, despite the terrible panic that has been keeping me awake at night, I'm finally starting to feel as if everything is falling into place.

I still need to:
-Finalise my fucking debit card ARGH
-Buy a completely rockin' warm jacket and two pairs of horrible travel pants and trail shoes (I'm really starting to dread this, but at least I have a Mountain Designs voucher to remove some of the burden, plus it's SALES TIME)
-Take a photo into STA travel for my ISIC card
-Change some money (oh god this process terrifies me I JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND)

But I don't need to:
-Stress about travel insurance
-Stress about my tickets
-Stress about my passport
-Stress about an emergency credit card
-Stress about a backpack (well, almost definitely. Hmm.)
-Stress about my birth certificate (I couldn't find it on Wednesday, ordered a new copy on Thursday, and found the old one this morning, in the "safe place" where I was certain I had left it yet couldn't find it on Wednesday).

Also I've organised a shindig to get rid of as much shit from my unit as humanly possible. And Mark said he would take my books. And Magda said she could possibly store some stuff if needed too. And I'm growing increasingly ruthless with the things I'm throwing out.

I am probably going to make it to South America you guys!

For some reason I find this fact incredibly surprising and still slightly unbelievable? I feel as if I deserve a medal for making it this far.

Four weeks to go (13 work days left)

2009-01-12T18:47:00.001-08:00

Work is pretty slow at the moment, so I've been doing a lot of research, and the more I find out the more excited I get!

I remember having a discussion with C and Lion about drugs a few months ago that made me laugh. Someone from work told me, "Oh, you've got to try cocaine while you're over there, you've just GOT to!" Lion said, when I told her about it, "I'm pretty sure you DON'T." I laughed, because she’s right: I’m pretty sure nobody is going to kick us out of the country for NOT trying cocaine.

C said, "Well it would be about fifty times more dangerous than in Australia... but hey, cocaine’s so cheap over there that it's WORTH it!" (He was joking.)

If I wanted to try cocaine (which I don’t) without spending much money, I'm pretty sure it would be cheaper to stay in Australia than to pay a hefty airfare and head for South America. But hey, what do I know?

I have been doing a lot of research on safety, and asking people I know who've been travelling for advice.

G (who lived in Brazil for 3 months) gave me this advice: don't get on or off or use transport at night, be sceptical, don't eat dodgy meat, stay with other people in dodgy areas, don't go off with dodgy people on your own, wear flotation devices when swimming if you can’t tread water without using your hands for greater than 1 minute (thanks G, you doofus!), dress down rather than up, do your research before you go especially if the area you’re heading isn’t touristy, travel light. He also said: brush your teeth to avoid cavities, and eat 5 serves of vegetables per day!

K's advice boiled down to: trust your gut. If something doesn't feel right, it probably isn't!

Good times. I have also been wondering whether six months is too long... but after breaking it down into how long we'll be able to spend in each country, I'm wondering whether it'll be long enough!

This time tomorrow, where will we be?

2009-01-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

Lion does not have a travel partner. I am just a figment of her violently creative imagination. (And since I don't exist, I can say what I like!)

Right now I have 17 days of "work" left. Craaaaazy times!

I went hiking over the Christmas break, and then to Southbound, and I’m really enjoying the memories of all the “in-jokes”. While I'm away I'm really gonna miss that, “Here I am with all these great mates,” feeling. This morning I was standing across the road from work waiting for the Little Green Man, and thinking there was nobody behind me I started laughing out loud and muttering, “Chhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarlie! We’re back at wooooooork, Chaaaaaaaarrlie!”

Turns out, there WAS somebody behind me, so that was a little awkward.

Moving on. I’ve had all my vaccinations now. The last two didn't hurt, but they did make me feel queasy for an hour or so. Needles don't worry me, so to get a reaction like that seemed bizarre! But K told me that he's fainted for needles before. Or at least I think that's what he said. I was kind of delerious after walking all day on "this is one of the more challenging sections of the Bibbulmun track", and I was half-watching C douse himself in manky damwater in the afternoon sunlight instead of showering (very humourous). So the memory blurs.

To do: get travel insurance, get a blood test to prove my cheapie rabies vaccine worked, buy anti-malarials and insect repellent and altitude tablets, book accomodation, try not to freak out too much.

A disclaimer: I'm TRYING to keep this short in memory of M. Smith, whose sole comment upon my group emails about NZ was "Jeez you've been there two days and you've already written a novel". But look, just suck it up, okay?

Travelling to places that aren't South America

2008-12-30T22:15:00.001-08:00

Hooray! I'm going down South for some serious GOOD TIMES! I'll be back on Monday the 12th. That means no blogging for you so suck it up big time!

As it happens I'm pretty sure no one reads this blog so it doesn't really matter anyway?

Happy new year!

Vaccinations! again

2008-12-23T19:45:00.001-08:00

Buenas tardes mi amigos! (God I completely suck),

Two more shots this morning! Hep A/Typhoid and Rabies: Mach II. That's six shots in seven days! I am a living voodoo doll. Man that is a moronic thing to say. In a couple of weeks I have to get Rabies III: Look Who's Immune Now and then I'll be just about sorted. My right arm is no longer sore from the yellow fever shot last week, although it took its sweet time. Ro's still hurts. Speaking of which, is she ever going to post on here? Did I give her the incorrect password? Do I actually have a travelling partner or is she just a Paluhniuk-esque product of my battered ego? Keep reading. The answers will unfold before your very eyes.

Feliz Navidad everyone! I want to wish you a Merry Christmas from the bottom of my heart.

Love,
Lion

Work is basically the worst

2008-12-22T18:27:00.001-08:00

Planning is actually going kind of well, insofar as I am not completely panicking about it. A good start. I still need a debit card and travel insurance and some shots and quite a lot of equipment (specifically trekking shoes and a warm jacket but also a million other little things). But I'm waiting until after Christmas for that.

Today I realised that there are only (approx.) 22 days left that I have to spend in my office before I finish up at work! My verdict is: this is awesome.

I will probably never get a job again. They are so boring.

P.S. Mum I am just kidding.

Vaccinations!

2008-12-17T15:46:00.001-08:00

On Tuesday morning I got my first cervical cancer vaccine, as paid for by the Australian government. Thanks guys!

This doesn't have anything to do with travel but I thought I would tell you so that you would feel more sympathy when I tell you that last night, Wednesday, I had jabs for:

-Rabies
-Tetanus/diphtheria/whooping cough
-Yellow Fever

My right arm (cervical cancer/rabies) is doing okay but OH GOD my left arm (DTW/Yellow Fever) is so SORE, I couldn't sleep on it last night. The jabs didn't hurt much at the time but hoo boy I am feeling them now.

Ro got it worse than me. She had to have four shots in the one day. How brave!

I still have to get Hep A and two more rabies shots. The first rabies shot was completely gross! A little bubble forms in your skin around the site of the shot. It didn't really hurt though, and it was much worse looking at Robocop's "little bubble" than my own. Also the surgery had a really revolting picture on the back of the door of a man holding up a tapeworm that he had somehow retrieved from his intestines. It was incredibly long. I am so glad that I don't eat meat.

Vaccinations are really expensive you guys!

Packing with Lion, Part I

2008-12-14T19:26:00.000-08:00

Alright! I am awful at packing so I am trying to get prepared well in advance. Here are some things that I am considering taking:

CLOTHES
Sarong: People keep saying that these are basically the best things any traveller has ever packed on any trip to anywhere. I don't really like sarongs but who am I to eschew the wisdom of the travel gods?
Shirts: Can I get away with only three of these? Two for day and one for "dress-ups"? Apparently singlets are considered slutty especially on pale blonde tourist girls so I am kind of angling for t-shirts.
Skinny-ish cotton black pants that are hopefully vaguely stylish: If I can find such a thing. I figure they will dry quickly and transition nicely from day to night.
Not skinny-ish pants that are not at all stylish, colour TBA: Hot daaaamn I hate the thought of wearing cargo pants but they seem like they are a pretty useful thing to have. At least I could wear them hiking and such and with thermals underneath.
A couple of scarves & bandannas: A cotton one for casual/outdoorsy times and for awful hair days. A nice one for INSTANT STYLE. A nice toasty one for when it is cold.
Swimsuit: I am kind of torn here. On one hand you are not really meant to wear revealing swimsuits but apparently in Brasil you get LAUGHED OUT OF TOWN just for wearing an American-style bikini! (Apparently the bottoms look like nappies.)
A light-ish jacket: For days that are not incredibly cold.
A warm jumper: I have a Mountain Designs one, and it is horrible and unstylish, but at least it is fleecy and toasty.
A warm jacket: That fits over the warm jumper. God it's not like I'm going to the Antarctic, maybe I'm just being silly.
A warm hat: For my cold head.
Gloves: Socks for the hands
Two (?) pairs of warm socks: For hiking on chilly days.
Three (?) pairs of sport socks: For chilling on Chile days.

FOOTWEAR
Black low-top sneakers:. For day wear. I have a pair and they are pretty alright, they are more comfortable than Converse low-tops but look better than regular sneakers.
Hiking boots: I don't have any. They are heavy to carry, a pain to wear in and kind of an investment. But a spot of hiking seems probable so maybe I should just go ahead and invest.
Some kind of shoe that I can wear to a restaurant or nightspot: But what? Maybe just black ballet flats.
Rubber thongs: For the beach, oh man seriously do I really need to take four pairs of shoes?

TOILETRIES

Toothbrush: Don't Forget Your.

Toothpaste: Also useful

Hairbrush and hair ties: For my hair.

Mascara and eyeliner: You got me, I am vain. Well-spotted.

Razors: Still vain. May decide to eschew these eventually, but I want them to begin with. To feel at home.

Sunscreen: Can you buy 30+ in South America?

Soap/shower gel: Which is better? I figure that soap is less likely to explode in my bag.

Shampoo/conditioner: Two-in-one makes my hair kind of greasy, but maybe it just needs to get used to it?

Medication with letter from doctor: So I don't bleed to death once a month.

Nail clippers: I figure I can use them for other stuff too.

One of those fancy towels: Are these expensive? Maybe I'll ask for one for Christmas.

OTHER
iPod: On one hand I think I wouldn't mind leaving this behind. But it would be good for keeping my Spanish podcasts and phrases. Opinions?

Lonely Planet: Look this is going to be my first ever international trip without a parent or guardian and I am basically just trying to survive.

Passport & photocopies: Note to self! Important!
Big old notebook: Containing addresses and emergency contacts and all that business. But also for writing things in. OH and a couple of photographs of family members etc., apparently the locals are into that kind of thing.
Pen: Okay this list is getting silly and I am really bored so I am going to stop making it for now.

Oh god oh god oh god.

2008-12-14T17:16:00.000-08:00

At roughly five o'clock this morning I woke up in terror and thought to myself, with a savage revelatory jolt, I leave the country in EIGHT WEEKS!!!. I'd just had a horrible dream about an enormous cockroach trying to crawl its way into my mouth and I'm not sure whether it was the dream that provoked the anxiety or the anxiety that provoked the dream but either way it was most unnerving. Naturally I was aware that I was in fact headed for South America in two months, but I'm sure you know as well as I do that two months is a very different amount of time to... EIGHT WEEKS!!!

I had to wake my boyfriend Mark up and make him wrap his arms around me and talk to me about things other than (for instance) packing up my apartment, the apparent millions of vaccinations that I should have had months ago but didn't, and the panicky phone calls from my mother I was likely to receive in upcoming weeks. So we had a sleep-deprived-yet-animated conversation about what it would theoretically be like in heaven (the main thing we agreed on was that heaven would necessarily entail the rigorous collection of statistics, e.g. someone's job would obviously be to tally the amount of antelopes on earth that were hungry at that precise moment.)

And eventually I calmed down and went back to sleep. Then the alarm went off. So we put it on snooze. And then I calmed down again and went back to sleep. An hour later Mark woke me up and said "Oh shit Caro the snooze didn't work you're late for work" which gave me a whole new set of things to worry about.

Anyway I made it to work so now I'm back onto worrying about things I need to do, and one of the more exciting and less urgent things on the to-do list was "CREATE BLOG" and so now at least I have this gruelling part of the procedure out of the way so I am free to focus on "LEARN TO SPEAK SPANISH WITH FLUENCY AND WIT" and "WORK OUT WAYS NOT TO DIE". I figure it is a pretty good start.