Cusco

We made it to Cusco at around 4 a.m. after an uncomfortable bus ride. Unfortunately, nobody told us we were at Cusco, so we sat on the bus for at least an hour outside the locked gates of the bus station. Eventually, we grew tired of this, determined we were in the right city, disembarked and stole our own bags off the bus to head to our hostal.
After a long nap, we spent a good portion of our first day here getting ourselves organized for the next few days.
The plan is this: tomorrow we´ll bus to a town called Urabamba, where there is a huge Inca fortress, then get back on a bus to Ollataytambo (or something) where there´s another major Inca site. At 5:45 the next morning we´ll catch the train to Aguas Calientes, last stop before Macchu Pichu. It should get us there around 7, and then we´ll bus up to the lost city. A lot of people do a four or five day hike to Macchu Pichu, but we´´ve fot another hike coming up, so we´re taking the easy route.
We´ll have most of the morning, or most of the day at Macchu Pichu, depending on whose information is right, and then train back to Cusco. That should be Sunday night.
At 6 A.M. Monday we´re getting picked up to begin our trek into Manu national park. The first day is a 12-hour bus ride to the edge of the park. It´s just the beginning of rainy season, so our guide William--who gave us a briefing the other night--said the road can get pretty mucky. We´ll be travelling in a convoy, so we shouldn´t get into any big trouble. Over the following four days we´ll go through cloud forest and rainforest, sail down some rivers in the Amazon basin, swing from vines like tarzan, bathe in hot springs and mud and see all kinds of birds, monkeys, caiman and so on. I have already opted myself out of the night walk to see tarantulas ¨the size of your hand.¨
I´m going to live in denial of their existence the rest of the time. William said the cloud forest will be in the mid 30s celsius and the rainforest could get into the 40s.
All things being equal we will return to civilization on the 22, though he cautioned there are times the road is impassable and it´s necessary to spend a night on the bus. Oh, as it turns out, there´s no sleeping in tents involved in the jungle. I am happy about this.
So, unless we´re back early on Sunday, we may be incommunicado until we´re out of the jungle. Think happy non-tarantula thoughts for me.

Today we did an 8 km hike through four significant Inca sites near Cusco, including the large Saqsaywaman just above town. It was a fun day and we enjoyed spending it with a friendly German couple staying in the same hostal.

Early to bed tonight to get ready for the busy week ahead.

Puno

Hola todos!

Last night we supped on lamb and alpaca, then this morning headed for the jetties and boarded a boat to the Uros´ floating islands. The islands are made of big banks of reeds, and they literally do float, it´s a sort of trippy feeling to be out there just bobbing around.

The second island we visited seemed entirely designed to trap tourists, but the first did give us a bit of a glimpse into the island life, and we rode a reed boat between the two, which was cool.

This afternoon we´ve mostly just been wandering Puno, getting a feel for Peru. We´re killing time now til we eat dinner, and then we´re boarding a night bus to Cusco. Peruvian drivers suffer from a lot of machismo of the passing on the right variety, so I have to admit I´m a wee bit nervous about the bus. It should be fine though, and next time I write we´ll be in Cusco.

Might be a bit less in touch then - we´ll do the Sacred Valley and Machu Picchu first, then we´re doing our tour in the Manu rainforest. We´ll head to Lima through Arequipa (which is actually about halfway between here and Cusco, but breaks up the bus journey to Cusco so it´s two 10-hour stretches rather than one 24 hour one.)

Seems like we left Bolivia just in time - a general strike seems to have crippled transportation and the like there today.

I think I am about done with this cafe, which is a bit full with underwashed web game types...

Peru

We{ve arrived in darkest Peru (is that the right adjective?)
We{re still on the shores of the massive Lake Titicaca in the small city of Puno. Tomorrow we plan to visit the floating islands, which are acually made of reeds and inhabited.
Last night we stayed on the Isla del Sol in the Bolvian portion of the lake.
It was a gorgeous setting. The view from our $5 hotel room was worth a million (though, breakfast unexpectedly cost another $5...however, I should mention that the Titicaca region seems to be the breakfast capital of South America: eggs, fresh bread, fresh juice, the coffee{s still fake, but I had good hot chocolate this morning).
Before venturing on to the lake, we spent a couple nights in Copacabana. It was a nice base, though we{d walked every inch of it before we were halfway through the second day. Oh, we did make one earlier foray onto the lake, in a little paddle boat. I vetoed the swan shaped ones, but I think Rhia wasn{t too heartbroken.
We also watched a ceremony one morning at which people who are headin out on the highway deck their cars out in bouquets and get priests to bless them, some alo shower their cars with champagne. Of course, you{re guaranteed to have a safer drive when your windshield is sticky and strewn with flower petals.
Meals tended to be more of the hunk of meat and lots of starch variety, but every place also offered fresh trout from the lake, which was quite good.
So, on to Isla del Sol. The day got off to an inauspicious start.
I{d continued to battle signs of a cold in Copacabana. That morning (no idea which day of the week that was) the congestion plus altitude--still at about 3800m there--resulted in a nosebleed that wouldn{t quit.
We debated hopping off our ferry to the island, but gladly didn{t.
The boat was probably the slowest I{ve ever been on, for no discernable reason. We could have got out and walked faster. We also had the pleasure of sucking in gas fumes fro the motor for the two hour ride.
However, it did get us to our destination on the north side of the Isla del Sol.
There a guide magically appeared to lead us on a trek to some Inca ceremonial sites and ruins on that end of the Island. He was very good though, so we were glad he was along. He, and most of the group we arrived with left us at that point. Just day trippers, I think.
Rhia and I found a nice spot on the rocks with views in all directions to have a little picnic lunch.
It was a great and relaxing time. We were glad we each managed third tuna sandwiches though, as the trek to the south end of the island turned out to be longer and steeper than we{d expected.
Perhaps it{s not such a wise idea to tackle a 9 km, mostly uphill trek, when you{re already at altitude and trying to shake a respiratory illness. Nonetheless, this is what we did.
Parts of it weren{t exactly fun, but it was certainly worthwhile. We took it very slow, having no boat to catch at the other end, and used our water and powerade wisely.
The views of the island, of the lake, of the Andes in Peru to one side and Bolivia to the other were breathtaking (...groan). Most of the time our only companions were sheep grazing on the hills. It was stunningly quiet and clear. At one point we met a fellow blowing his little flute and herding pair of burros with big bundles of sticks on their backs...pleasant moments like that.

By the time we reached the village where we hoped we would find a room, we were totally bagged. Way to tired to put up much of a fight with the woman who blocked the path with two llamas and three tots and insisted we pay to take their photo.
We did find a room, put on all our warm clothes and got some great trout for dinner while watching the most spectacular sunset ever.

So, I woke up this morning feeling like death warmed over, but honestly, I{m much improved already.

We took our time heading down an ancient stairway to the lake to meet our return boat.
While we were waiting there another boat arrived from the mainlnd and a bunch of folks got off with supplies including a coffin.

They had flowers and a couple cases of beer--we suspected some kind of wake. There were burros there to meet them and we wondered whether they would enlist the animals to get the coffin up the steep hill.
Nope. And they didn{t carry it among two or four men either. We watched in disbelief as they rigged a sling up on one guy{s back, loaded in the coffin, so that it hung way out over his head, and then this poor fellow carried it up the hill on his back. He{d probably need it himself when he arrived.

We made it back to Copacabana in time to retrieve our larger bags, change our Bolivianos for Soles, have a bite and catch our bus to Peru.

It was a pleasant ride. Even the border crossing was made entertaining buy a shoe shine kid who read the countries off people{s passports then tried to guess where in the country they were from. He knew some big cities in Canada, but Halifax was a new one on him. He seemed pleased to learn it though. He must have run through a dozen states before another guy took pity and said he was from Alaska.

So, yeah, Peru. Here we are. The last South American country on our trip.
We{re both pretty excited for Macchu Picchu, which we should hit in a couple days.
Take care all.

Titicaca

Holas!

I'd like to start with some general musings on (highland) Bolivia.

- Bolivia is full of little farms, tiny herds of llama (their ears tied with little tassles to show whose is whose), sheep, cows, donkeys, and, increasingly as we head toward Peru, pigs. There barely seems enough plant life to support anything, but people seem to manage to raise these animals. They scratch out little plots of earth too, waiting to be seeded or already starting to push forward plant life.

- Bolivians are friendly! We've not felt any sort of threat at all, nothing of the kinds laid out in the guidebook. On the contrary, everyone we've had cause to approach has been undendingly polite, warm, and friendly.

(this internet cafe is full of fumes...)

- (Highland) Bolivia is dry. Chapped lips, crackling nose, waking up in the morning with your tongue twice its size and pasted to your mouth dry. We're not enjoying this part.

- Bolivia is another country big on the hunk of meat, lump of starch school of food. Though I did see a woman eating a big bowl of soup containing what looked like half a sheep's head the other day, which I suppose is an interesting take on the theme. I have to admit we've been playing it pretty safe on the food front - my stomach has been touch and go until now. Fried chicken with fries seems to be the national dish, though. Food seems to be a catch as catch can affair, with the majority of people sitting down at impromptu soup or roast stands. Forget running water and refrigeration...


Some general impressions of La Paz, from whence we've just come.

- The city is a rambling, shambling mass of fading glory and crumbling decay. There are roadworks everywhere which currently seem to be not much more than a nuisance. We walked directly under someone arc welding yesterday.

- The smell of pee is everywhere (this is sort of a South American constant, so far).

- Everywhere you go the streets are packed with private cars, delivery trucks, taxis, and converted minivans with people leaning out of the side window hollering out the destinations and price of this particular 'microbus'. We took a couple. It's kind of trippy.

- One of these microbuses, for just cents, will take you about 45 minutes out of the city to crazy eroded landscapes, the Valley of the Moon, where you can hike for about an hour through fabulous badlands, then catch a bus back for pennies more.

- There are mountains all around the city, most of them built well into, like Rio. Most of the streets run upwards from (or down to) a couple of major avenues. This would be fine if not for the altitude, which leaves one huffing and puffing after going anywhere. Some of the mountains are spectacular, snowcapped ones.

- We saw a fabulous Franciscan church, with a very enthusiastic tour guide. We even got to go out on the roof, where John walked a few feet of the ridgepole.

- Our trip in Bolivia keeps getting affected by the Double Copacabana Cycling competition, which seems to go throughout Bolivia. It closed the highway for a while when we were heading for La Paz, and finished up for the day here in downtown Copacabana.

This morning, we went up to the bus station to get a bus here. Only they don't leave from the bus station. We were able to mail a package of souvenirs home, which was nice, and then got another cab to the Cemetery area of La Paz, where the buses actually leave from. We boarded this semi-ramshackle one, because it was sort of a case of which bus operator had the loudest voice and sharpest elbows, and we're sort of useless in the face of that. Other passengers proceeded to demand that the windows all be open, which led to a very cool, very windy four hour ride. (I hate riding in cars with the windows open!) We got to this certain point on the way around the lake (Lake Titicaca is HUGE!) and all the cars, busses, and the like had to load onto these barges to be ferried across to the Copacabana side. It was pretty trippy.

The hotel we hoped to stay in was full (probably with cyclists) but the one next to it is perfectly lovely, for $14 a night, with breakfast. John's incubating a cold, so he had a good nap, even though we'd missed lunch. We wandered out around 5 and had supper as soon as we found a decent place. I had some pretty amazing lake trout. John's supper was less impressive, but it looks like the place is full of great restaurants so we'll do better tomorrow night.

We watched the sun set over the lake, and I'm going to go put John to bed as soon as he's done dealing with his hockey crisis.

To Eden:

Beard pictures come after the Buenos Aires photos, and really, unless we find some decent bandwidth, which I'm starting to doubt at this point, we probably won{t manage them until we're home. And then you can see the real thing.

Short update from La Paz

We made it to Bolivia´s largest city and we´re quite enjoying it. We found the hotel we´d booked is right in the middle of the witches´market, so for Christmas, everyone is getting dried llama fetuses.
It´s a nice walkable city, but hilly, so we´re taking it slow. It´s also in a setting almost as spectacular as Rio: subtract the ocean and add more mountains, BIG mountains.
Yesterday we walked to the nearby square and toure the Iglesia San Francisco, which was reall gorgeous. The church itself is huge and gothic and there are cloisters attached filled with beautiful religious art done by natives, thereby lending some interesting twists to the imagery.
They also let you walk right out on the centre of the roof of the church, but only half way.
We were thrilled last night to find an Indian restaurant right in our neighbourhood. We´ve been getting pretty tired of huge hunks of meat with piles of starch for all our meals. It was spicy and delicious. Afterwards we went into a little folk music club around the corner, which seems to be more geared for the tour bus crowd than our guide book suggested. But it was fun nonetheless. I hadn´t even had the chance to order a drink before I was pulled up to dance with a Bolivian lass. I think I managed not to embarrass myself--Rhia may beg to differ--although it´s tough to be spun by a five-foot girl.
Today we set off early to the Valle de la Luna just outside the city. We managed to find the appropriate bus(this city, like some others we´ve visitied, lacks a public transit system...there are just a bunch of guys who drive vans, and if you want to go to one of the places listed in the window, you flag them down). Rhia had a nice chat with an Andean lady on the way out, she was pleased to see a bunch of pictures we´d brought from home, especially those of me in a skirt. They were having such a good chat we missed the spot to get off. But we got back and had an interesting walk through this lunar landscape.
More exotic food for lunch: Burger King. Sometimes you just want something fast and familiar. We´re off to do a bit more wandering now.
Rhia has added a few more pictures to Flickr. Check em out.
--John

Holita de Rhia

Hello all!

I´m making a pretty good recovery, thank heavens. It was the kind of tummy bug that makes you feel pretty sure you´d be better off dead, especially when you´re being jostled halfway there in a big jeep on rattletrap roads. Anyway, my miracle soup and toast came from Minuteman Pizza in Uyuni, and should you for any reason find yourself in this part of the world, you really must go. The pizza is amazing too!

The wait for the train was long and cold. By the time we´d wandered the tiny town two dozen times, seen most of a cow skinned and stacked up in the back of a station wagon, stocked up on food for the journey and had our supper at Minuteman, it was all of 8:30. We headed for the station waiting room, hoping it would be warm. It was not, particularly, but around 9:30, we had some tea in an attached cafe and played some rounds of rummy. Then it was back into the cold (and the baños were actually out on the platform)to pretend to sleep for hours and hours and hours and hours. Around 12:30 they let us onto the Salon class carriages. Which were colder than the waiting room. We were very glad for the fleecy blanket we´d bought. (you know what a weird side-effect of the altitude sickness drug we´re taking is that it makes your fingers and feet tingle. Gross.)

Anyway, the train did eventualy get underway and they did eventually turn the heat on and I did eventually get some sleep until at 6:30 they turned on some lovely loud music and then showed some bizarre football movie, but I went back to sleep anyway. John watched it, you can ask him about it.

Anyway, we ended up here in Oruro in a reasonably plush $25 hotel with a good shower and we tried to sleep and John succeeded and we skipped breakfast and were super cranky with eachother when it came down to getting lunch, which we were late for and people were starting to close up, and in general I´m finding Bolivia pretty frustrating.

We looked around a few markets, including one that had all kinds of llama fetuses and other fetishes and were sort of repelled and fascinated at the same time. Did a bit more stocking up on warm clothes, napped some more and checked out a place billed as the local ´Cordon Bleu´option. It didn´t quite live up to that but we did have some amazing lamb with wine and bread and salad and everything for .... not quite $10.

Slept really well. We planned to move on to La Paz today around lunchtime, but apparently the road is closed for some kind of international bike race. There were originally plans to see Cochabamba, which seemed pretty nice, but we seem to be a bit behind schedule and don´t want to be shortchanged for Macchu Picchu. Anyway, we´ll get on the three o´clock bus. We came up to the Plaza del Folklore, which should anyone come to Oruro, they should make a first stop, because it made me a lot more sanguine about the city. They have bleachers here and close the street for their Carnaval, which looks amazing. Apparently there´s a dress rehearsal on Sunday, but I don´t think we could possibly find anything at all to entertain ourselves here until then. We were going to visit a museum to see us through to lunchtime now, but it´s closed til Friday. Ah Latin beaurocracy.

Anyway, just trying to find somewhere to sleep tonight... no way to upload photos here even though the speed seems decent. I´ve sort of given up.

Weather in Oruro - feels like about 10 degrees and windy, unless it feels like 2 degrees and windy.

Things about travelling.

I have new standards for cleanliness. I settle for germ-busted by sanitizer hands most of the day. I will wear the same clothes a few days in a row. Heck, on the jeep tour I was sleeping in them and then wearing them (we were severely understocked on warm clothes.) All our bags are deeply ground in with desert dust.

The Canadian politeness is wearing off a bit. It´s not very useful here.

I am getting used to being the kind of person who packs up everything she owns every morning and sets out for points unknown.


Things you might not pack while traveling and will wish you had:

- nail brush (having clean nails improves outlook a great deal.)
- more hand sanitizer than you think you could ever use (it is grimy)
- many many tiny ziploc bags (they have been invaluable)
- toilet paper, the good kind (even just one roll. You can get it wherever you are, but it won´t be the good kind, and if you´re sick...)
- conditioner (don´t think you can get away without it.)


Things we packed that haven´t come in very handy yet:

- Sleep sack. (We´ve just being staying in nicer hotels than that for the most part)
- Envelopes (I thought they´d be good for leaving valuables in hotel safes but mostly we just lock them in the bags or give them the money belt.)

Actually, I think that´s about it.


Ok.... over and out. Need to walk off this tingling. And find some non-instant coffee.

We´re in Uyuni, Bolivia with almost a dozen hours to kill before we catch a train at the ungodly hour of 1Ñ45 a.m. We survived our four'day trek though south'western Bolivia, though some of us just barely.
I managed to catch up on my paper journal while we were ensconced in a comfortable hotel last night, but I´ll just give some highlights, rather than the day'by'day, blow'by'blow )no idea where the proper punctuation is here=.

So, we rendezvoused with our driver, cook, fellow passengers and well'used but sturdy looking Nissan 4X4 at 9 a.m. on Nov. 1, a Tuesday or Wednesday, I think. There were four of us on the tour, not counting the staff. It´s slightly more expensive to go with four than with six, but I really can´t imagine being jammed in three to a bench for eight to ten hours a day over the sort of roads we would see in the coming days.
Our co'passengers were Tom and Claire of Dublin''seriously, everyone we meet seems to be Irish. Juan Carlos was our excellent driver-guide, though he was a man of few words. And Moises cooked for us.

So, leaving Tupiza, we were almost immediately climbing into pretty serious mountains via narrow dirt roads with sheer drops. It was intense. I was always struck to see, here and there a house or a llama pen in the absolute middle of nowhere. You have to imagine the residents must almost never stray far from home. At one point there was a small school way up in the mountains and just enough space had been levelled off for a little soccer pitch.
We also started right away with the oddball soundtrack that would accompany us through four days of surreal terrain. JC and Moises would put on a CD of MP3s, sometimes traditional Bolivian music or contemporary Latin pop, but more often an interminable stream of American pop songs that I imagine came collected under titles like Every Single Song Recorded from 1991'1995, in no particular order. So when we reached the top of the first mountain and were gazing at these incredible vistas in all directions, we were hearing Careless Whisper by Wham! Sometimes, by sheer chance, the songs would be totally appropriate. There´s no better place to hear Where the Streets Have No Name than when you´re blazing a dusty trail across a high plain.
Anyway, before we knew it, we were up at 4200 metres and we were feeling it.
We finished that day in a tiny village called San Antonio de Lipez totally exhausted. I had a throbbing headache )not helped by the bone rattling jeep ride= and I think Rhia was beginning to be a bit queasy at that point.
We were trying to fight the altitude sickness with coca tea and chewing coca leaves. The former is more pleasant, but the latter you can do on the go. It would help temporarily, but we both had pretty sleepless nights.
When I lay down I could hear the blood rushing by my ears. I got a nosebleed at one point. I also had this weird sensation where when I seemed to be drifting off it felt like my body would forget to breath and I had to gasp, which didn´t help my headache.
It´s so dry you get very congested, your tongue literally sticks to the roof of your mouth and your lips begin to split.
So we both got up'before 6'the next day, feeling pretty crappy.
Our drive took us through a little town that had spring up around gold but been abandoned when it was overrun with these rabbit'like rodents. There was one sitting definatly on the wall of an abandoned home as we passed.
One highlight of the day was a visit to a hot spring where we were glad to get out of the howling wind and let some of the previous day´s grime wash away. I´m sure we got equally as coated immediatelt after we stepped out of the water into the dusty gale.
After a lunch break we came to the gorgeous Laguna Verde, a lake at the foot of the 6,000 metre'high Volcano Licancabur. It´s a bright teal colour and was blown into a pleasant choppiness that afternoon. The surreality continued as we entered a desert appropriately name after Dali.
The mountains surrounding the desert were all striped with colour.
It was amazing how you could travel through these absolutely different landscapes in relatively short time.
In short order we were at a spot called Sol de Manana where the volcanic activity caused geysers to shoot out of the ground and made all these sulphur smelling puddles of bubbling grey water.
Nobody caught the name of the town we stayed in that night, but nobody really saw anything of it either. It was absolutely freezing, and still up over 4,000 metres.
I was totally sapped and headachey again. The cold didn´t help.
Rhia couldn´t keep dinner down that night and it was the beginning of a few really miserable days for her.
We started taking some prescription drugs we´d brought for altitude sickness and went to bed wearing virtually all our clothes, including the alpaca toque I´d bought from a girl standing by the side of the road halfway down a mountain the first day.
The drugs were helping me by morning, but we think Rhia must have caught some weird bug at some point, because things kept getting worse for her.
Let me tell you, there´s just about no worse place to be really sick than in the mountains of south western Bolivia. Even if we could have abandoned the tour, we´d have been in a village with no services hours in every direction from any kind of care. Through that day and the following ones, Rhia put up with this admirably, even though we were stuck in a hot dusty truck for hours at a time going over incredibly jolting terrain that would make even a well person nauseous. Our hosts were concerned and compassionate, but realistically, there was little they or anyone could do.
So we all soldiered on.
That day we saw the amazing Laguna Colorada. It´s a deep red coloured lake full of flamingos. I didn´t expect to find flamingos in this otherwise barren spot way up in the mountains, but there they were.
We passed through another desert with strange rock formations that seemed to have droppd out of the sky. An indication of how deeply Star Wars shaped my imagination as a lad''I kept expecting a sandcrawler to appear on the horizon or Ben Kenobi to pop out of a cave.
We also got to explore some volcanic rock at the foot of a still smoking volcano.
We finished the day at what turned out to be a relatively posh hotel )it not only had a shower, it had hot water= right on the edge of the Salar de Uyuni. I was back to feeling normal by then. Rhia managed some broth at supper but was still pretty sick.
The salar is the world´s biggest salt flat. When you see pictures, it looks like the prairies covered in snow, but it´s just salt, four to 20 metres deep and layered over water.
We set out to catch the sunrise the next day but were minutes late. The landscape was just unforgettable though. Absolutely flat and empty in all directions. There´s an island in the middle, where we had breakfast and climbed a bit to look at the ring of mountains around it. It rains occasionally on the salar and the water leaves these amazing honeycomb patterns all over the ground. In spots these openings allow the water to come through''I can confirm it tastes very salty''and our guides plundeg their arms in to retrieve crystals of salt. It was an amazing day.
They do harvest and process the salt to sell and we learned a bit about that in a village right on the edge of the salar. From there it was a short drive to Uyuni where we asked JC and Moises to drop us at the nicest hotel they knew of. The spot we ended up in was not luxurious but entirely acceptable. A warm sleep in a double bed and a very accomodating chef in the restaurant resulted in a much better Rhia today I am pleased to report. Now, I think she has some pictures to post, so I´ll sign off.
Salud!

In Bolivia

Killing time in an internet cafe yet again!
We crossed the border from La Quiaca, Argentina to Villazon, Bolivia this morning. It turned out to be just a matter of crossing a short footbridge. Official types stamped our passports on either side and that was it.
Apparently, crossing that few feet bought us an hour, cause it turned out the time is different here too.
As predicted, getting money here turned out to be a challenge. We´ve read that the town we´re headed for, Tupiza (where Butch Cassidy used to hang out and apparently died), has no ATM. So it was imperative that we got cash here.
Bank number one: No ATM
Bank number two: ATM isn´t on the plus network
Last ditch bank number three: the ATM is temporarily out of service

That caused a little stress.

We hauled our gear across town to the train station and bought our tickets for this afternoon with some of our remaining Argentine pesos, getting back 16 Bolivianos in change ($2 Can). That was all our worldly wealth for a while.

We checked our bags and went back to stake out bank number three where a guy was actually fixing the machine.

Eventually we decided we had to eat and went back to retrieve a bit of American cash from our bags to exchange at bank number one. This was successful (although the teller rejected one bill that had a little tear in the corner, while returning us Bolivian bills that were so old they were almost pulp).

We ate at a chicken restaurant where you could order: chicken.
The chicken came with rice, spaghetti noodles and french fries. Apparently carbs are good for managing the altitude, but that was kind of silly. Two very filling plates of food were 20 Bolivianos, just under $3.

Fortified, we did a bit more wandering around Villazon. The indigenous culture is really strong here, even compàred to over the bridge. Everywhere there are squat women with wide brimmed hats and aprons, most of the younger women are either carrying babies in slings over their shoulders or nursing them.

Everywhere we´ve been in the last two or three days they have this ¨boom-chicka-boom music¨ playing. On the bus yesterday there was a boom-chicka-boom cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart playing! (There was also an entire album of Spanish language Roxette covers)

Anyway, after wandering we cruised by the bank to discover, wonder of wonders, the machine worked. Our plan was to take out as much cash as possible, using all of our cards if necessary. Fortunately, it seems like they don´t have the strict withdrawal limits here they do in Argnetina, so we kept pounding in zeros and now Rhia has so much money in her belt, she looks like she´ll soon have a baby in a sling. That´s after I took a good chunk of it in my holster wallet thingy.

So, bus goes in a couple hours. We plan to head into the Salar de Uyuni salt flats from Tupiza so we may go incommunicado for a few days.
Happy Halloween all.

Altitude Wobbles by Rhia

Hola from 3454 or 3600m, depending which sign on the entry to La Quiaca you believe.

Last night we ended up looking at some art then hanging out on the hostel's covered patio with a bottle of wine (the most expensive in the store, security tagged and everything, and it set us back $11). We watched the new rainstorm come down and the lighning crash - impressive lightning. We had a snacky supper, since we'd eaten well at lunch, and packed and went to bed.

This morning was a bit of poking around before catching our bus, which took 5 hours to cover about 300km, mostly because it stopped in every single town, and a variety of places in between. Also becasue I{m not sure it ever got over 60km/hr! It was nice to cover some of the Quebrada territory more slowly, the colours are som different depending on the time of day, and then once we'd got past where we'd been it was more high plains, and mountains mixed between sediment and hard rock, river gorges, and actual llamas by the side of the road. There was a cute baby next to us too, who was completely obsessed with John. Sadly, there was no air conditioning.

We descended into the altitude and walked very slowly with our bags to find our hotel. Altitude sickness is a lot like having a hangover, but we've also not eaten much so we{re hoping it will improve after supper.

We found a place to drop off laundry (they charge by the item, which is super insane) and the laundress was also a teacher at the elementary school, who had us explain about halloween to a few kids who she had at the laundry working on decorations for the next day's party. Super-cute.

We also saw an artisan shop, where there were super cute, super soft, super fine alpaca (or vicuña?) sweaters for about $11! Good lord. And Bolivia should be even cheaper. Yesterday I bought a huge (about 200g) ball of chunky, supersoft, llama/silk yarn for just under $3. Depressed economies are depressingly great.

Ok. We're going to go see if we can rustle some food - it's still early, but surely SOMETHING will be open by now.

Simultaneous update

Hola!

We are in a super-crappy internet place sheltering from the rain. We were going to go see some lagoons or something today but it was too hot and then we couldn't find the bus stop and then it was raining... so we just were hanging around here, and boom, rain.

Ah well.

John wrote a little bit about the Quebrado de Humahuaca yesterday, but I thought I'd weigh in too. The colours, as he noted, were amazing. The hills were very young mountains, full of silt and minerals. They had great forms in them from erosion, all sorts of folds and hoodoos and the like.

The towns along the way were all tiny and whitewashed and adobe, with people who looked like storybook pictures of Bolivians, including ladies walking around with their children strapped to their backs. It was pretty cool, and we probably would have bought more in the markets if it wasn't for teh fact it was all stuff we associate more with Bolivia. We have a sort of informal rule not to buy any alpaca until we've seen a few that aren't in pens.

It was also neat to see a little variety on the menus. Up here you can get tamales and humitas, whih are like tamales with fresh corn, and also lots of mutton and goat, plus suckling pig and llama meat. We're being medium adventurous with it all.

We had a goat stew up in Humahuaca, at about 3000m of altitude. I guess we'll start chewing coca leaves soon... it's a kind of simultaneously cool and disgusting idea.

I'm trying to upload some photos from the Iguazu waterfalls, but it's slow going.

I{m also putting a video of something into youtube, but ditto.

more random stuff

Ducked into an internet cafe because it started to rain and the nearby art gallery was closed for siesta (we{ve been lucky in that we really haven{t been rained on apart from the downpour at Iguazu)

Speaking of luck, Rhia and I both got pooped on by birds last week. She got hit by a pigeon and a passing woman said "Money!" in Spanish. The next day, while we were horse riding, somethnig else got me. I think this whole luck thing is, well, crap.

When we went to a movie in Rosario, we want to see the one showing on screen number five, so Rhia asked for "cinqo." But the ticket guy misheard her and gave us tickets for a show on another screen: Sicko.

Funniest thing ever, also in Rosario. At the place we went for dinner after the movie one of the options was an all you can eat barbecue. For a smaller price you could get "1/2 of all you can eat.[ We weren{t sure how they figured out when you were half full.

This is a problem that must plague locals too, but in Argentina, we{ve had to go to an ATM at least once per day. The machines will only let you take out the equivalent of $100 Canadian a day, or 320 pesos. If you get 320 you get three 100s and a 20 and virutally nobody wants a 100 bill, especially since the cost of most things is in the single digits. We figured out that if you got 280, you at least get a 50 a 20 and a 10. But we always end up with a stockpile of 100s and spend a good deal of time trying to find a place where we can spend enough to break one. I think this problem will only get worse in Bolivia and Peru.

There are stray dogs everywhere, just wandering around. I think this is largely the reason for the piles of poop that are ubiquitous in cities, although dogs with owners contirbute to this too. Most of the dogs have no apparent interest in people. They just sleep in the middle of the sidewalk and people step over them. Yesterday we did have one mangy fellow begging at our table at a restaurnt, but that{s been surprisingly rare.

I{m always ammused by the way stores tend to congregate by theme. So you get blocks of women{s clothing stores, then men{s then children{s, then hardware type stores, blocks of banks and so on. There are lingerie and underwear districts, but you can also buy underwear on virtually every street corner and in every subway station. It{s weird.

Walking around town yesterday and today we kept running into news photographers and videographers covering the election. There was a TV reporter doing streeters today and a bunch of print reporters scrumming a candidate. I must admit I did get a little thrill, so maybe I will be able to get back into the swing of my job in a month after all.

Another pedestrian woe: all over the place, in the middle of city blocks, there are underground or multi-storey parking lots from which cars are likely to emerge and run you over at any minute. In Brazil there were warning lights outside them, but they just flahed all the time so weren{t much good. Here they seem to have bells, but again, they don{t seem to tell you anything about when a car is actually coming.

All the school kids seem to wear uniforms. At lunch time or after school you see dozens of different uniforms but we don{t actually see that many schools. It doesn{t seem to add up. The schools we do see don{t often look like North American school, so I suppose I{m just not spotting them.

The people of Argentina in particualr are really proud of their country. They love its beauty and its diversity and will tell you about all its various great places and figures. The national rugby team finished third in the world cup a couple weeks back and everyone was thrilled. They also seem to have athletes excelling in every sport: tennis, polo, golf...and they adore these people. On the street it seems like every third person is wearing a blue and white football or rugby jersey.

Hmmm...that{s all for now.

Hola! John here.
I´m writing from Jujuy (pronounced who-hooey) in Northern Argentina. We are having a do nothing-day and it´s been very successful so far. This was partly planned, partly just necessary. It´s both Sunday and the day of the national election so practically everything is closed. The place was like a ghost town for much of the day, except for the cops on every street corner. We were told yesterday that the people of Jujuy province were so fed up with the local governor (his job is also up for grabs today) that they tried to set fire to the legislature. It´s all blocked off and also surrounded by cops. It sounds as if Christina, the wife of the current president is way out in front in that race, no word on the provincial election.
So, today we slept in, we bought somre bread and salami at a grocery that was open and walked down to a park for a picnic. We discovered a public swimming pool that was open and made use of it. We´d brought our bathing suits thinking we may go to some hot springs outside town, but a cool pool was much better since it was yet again blazing hot with a cloudless sky.
We´ve done some reading and napping and that´s about it. We did pick up our bus tickets to the border. We´ll stay in the Argentine town of La quiaca on Tuesday, then on WEdnesday we´ll cross the border and take a train to the town of Tupiza, where we´ll likely begin an excursion into the salt flats called Salar De Uyuni.
We arrived here by a semi-circuitous route from Salta, a larger city.
Salta was pretty, with a lovely and busy central square.
We visited the museum of high altitude archaeology there, which has a controversial exhibit of the perfectly preserved body of an Inca girl who was sacrificed on a mountain top 500 years ago--scroll bak a few entries for a photo. There were very interesting (at least by Rhia´s translation) displays on the Inca practise of making offeriongs of high-born and beautiful children to earn the favour of gods. And they went into their beliefs abot what happened to the children and the significance of all the items that were placed with them. At then end, you could choose to look at the body or not to. I think many Inca descended people feel it´s inappropriate to display her this way. However, we looked at the exhibit and it really was very fascinating. The cold, dry conditions kept the body entirely intact. She really could have been and young teen who´d nodded off on her knees. The texture of her skin was completely natural and you could see the tiny braids in her hair ad so on. While I had a sense that this wasn´t something anyone had intended I would be regarding 500 years later, it was a worhtwhile experience. I did wonder how the guard who has to stand with this body all day felt about it.
So yesterday we took an organized trip from Salta through the canyon of Humahuaca. Having grown up on the prairies, I´m easily impressed by any kind of mountain at all, but these were really dazzling. They were large mountains, though not yet the Andes proper, but the remarkable thing was the colour of them. They had names like the painter´s palette and the hill of seven colours and had patterns of red and green and orange for geological reasons Rhia understood better than I, being the duaghter of a geologist man.
We also stopped at several little towns along the way. We´re clearly moving toward a more aboriginal culture. Homes and villages are built in age old style of local materials and takiong into account heat and wind and earthquakes. We definitely stand out even more as white people.
We had a good time, on the trip, though we grew tired of our guide who talked a blue streak (thankfully, I think, in English) with little opportunity for questions and occassional tirades about lazy poor people. We reversed course at Humahuaca and came back here to Jujuy. Another great thing about Jujuy: it´s crossed by the Ria Xibi Xibi (heebee heebee)--though the river turned out to be maybe two metres wide. I´ve been having fun saying who-hooey, heebeeheebee.

So, random notes from almost a month of travel: We really miss the rights afforded to pedestrians in Halifax. Here, lots of intersections are just uncontrolled, so you´re just running whenever you can. Most that are controlled only have traffic lights and often they´re hard to see from the street corner, but you try to go on green and again, you usually run. Even when there are pedestrian signals, they don´t give you the right of way or anything crazy like that. If a car is turning or something, the car goes. i suppose it just means you´re somewhat less likely to get killed. We´ve each had moments when we judged it safe to cross and dashed only to find the other still at the corner and cringing.
We hear the Rihanna song Um-ber-ella everywhere all the time. I don´t now any words except Um-ber-ella, which, since eating that sandwich as big as my head in Sao Paulo, I always replace with mortadella. The next most popular artist in South America is clearly Bob Marley, and there´s always some kind of reggae playing.
All the mandated safety measures that seem to affect everything we do in North America, no one has any time for here. And yet there arençt catastrophic things happening every minute. You take a taxi with no headlights and no seatbelts up a very windy, cobbled street late at night and you survive. Trucks with loads of kids in the open cab do not send them flying all over ecration. People are welding in very crowded markets with no protecttion and nobody loses any eyes. The concrete slippery with beer steps at the futbol stadium are entirely corwded top to bottom with people the whole game and there are no stampedes or tramplings...those sorts of things.
The whole population seems very young. There are mind boggling numbers of pregnant women out and about and loads of teens and young kids and tots every where. And people go out with their kids a lot. If they´re shopping, or having dinner at 11 p.m. or whatever, they just bring the kids along. And we wnjoy how affectionate they all seem to be with their kids. Actually, they´re just kind of affectionate. Park benches everywhere are kind of evenly split between homeless old guys and teens making out.
I´m beginning to master the kissing on the cheek greeting/parting thing, though I´m probably prety scratchy now, being into week two of project grow a beard. It still has a lot of filling in to do, but it´s clearly at a going to be a beard stage rather than a forgot to shave again stage.

Rhia´s busily uploading some photos of Sao Paulo and so on, I don´t know if any beard shots will get in there.
Salud!

Nonupdate

Nothing much to say today, but just wanted to let you know that I managed to squeak a few Rio highlights into Flickr while John´s on the phone now. Some day in Bolivia when we´re exhausted from travelling and have nothing better to do, we´ll find someplace where I can spend an hour just sending photos in.

Anyway, boat on over to flickr via that cute little box to the right. We´re off to get some dinner.

Lost in Cordoba again.

We spent yesterday mostly being lost in Cordoba, says Rhia.

I have to admit, we wasted a great deal of the morning on terrible coffee and sending back some stuff to Canada. The post office here, if your parcel weighs more than 2kg, is a bit like the twelve tasks of Asterix. First we went to the guy to weigh it to confirm it had to go through customs (we already knew this). Then we waited for the customs guy to open some other parcels. Then the customs guy poked at the stuff we were sending. Then they sent us to the packing centre, where a completely blind guy wrapped the parcel. Then we had to go back to the weighing guy and give him a ridiculous amount of money, most of which went to cover the 45 seconds the customs guy spent on the parcel. Oh dear.

We looked at a few historic buildings from the outside, doign minimal walking in circles, and then headed out to this park where there was a fine arts museum. Only we somehow ended up on one street instead of another, and a hell of a way out of where we wanted to be - though we did find the university campus. When we did eventually turn up the museum, it was under construction and entirely closed. We had some beer instead.

Then the beer place was changing so we just wandered some more then meandered up to a hostel to arrange something out of the city for today. We had another drink at a slick restaurant attached to another artsy place which we opted not to explore, instead aiming for a nice lie down.

We ended up at a place serving Salteña food for dinner, which is sort of ironic, because we´re boarding the bus for Salta tonight. After all that wandering in 30+ degree weather, and the requisite bottle of wine (a cab franc, instead of malbec!) we were pooped. Plus we needed to get up for today´s adventures, so we collapsed into sleep around midnight.

I don´t seem to sleep well in Cordoba. Could be the two-inch-high pillows, or the rock hard mattress, or the traffic noise, but still. It´s no fun to wake up unrested two days in a row!

I was in good cheer regardless, because once we were packed, with bags stowed behind the hotel desk, we headed back up to the hostel from the day before to pick up with our Trail Riding guide. We piled into a jeep, picked up two irish boys along the way (there were supposed to have been four, but one was still sleeping it off and the other missing at the crucial moment) and drove off to the outskirts of the city.

About 15 minutes beyond the city limits, we found the prettiest little farm and proceeded to mount a fivesome of beautiful horses. We rode along a river, and along some roads, and it was just nice to be on a horse again. It´s been years and years. The scenery was incredible, and I really enjoyed the experience of being on horseback. I´ve had mixed experiences in the past, but an obedient horse is a joyful thing.

When we returned to the ranch they had huge slabs of barbecued pork ready for us, and for the first time since we´ve been in Argentina, I ate with real appetite!


We´ve been very sweatily wandering the city for a couple of hours now, and have taken refuge in this internet cafe as protection from the sun. I suppose we´ll wander out shotly to kill an hour or so before having an early (for Argentina) supper around 7:30, collecting our bags, and heading for the bus station to board our charriot to Salta.

Salta´s looking to be just amazing, and the bus ride oughtn´t to be terrible for 13 hours. We should be able to sleep through most of it.

We´re doing our best to find somewhere to upload photos, but a lot of machines don´t have CD drives, and it´s hit or miss whether we´re carrying the camera cable, and doubly so whether it will work if we are.

Keep the comments and emails coming, really! It makes us so happy, even if we don´t manage to reply to all of them promptly!

That beach trip...not quite as successful as we´d hoped.
We did a little strolling around Rosario yesterday morning, saw the building where Che Guevara´s family lived when he was born and a big national monument to the flag. It took a while to figure out where we could get the appropriate bus to the beach and all the while it was clouding over. It turned out to be a longish ride too and by the time we arrived we were starving and it wasn´t really beachy weather anymore.
We ducked into a mega shopping mall in the middle of a park(!) and had fast food lunch--I said to Rhia it was the equivalent of going to Bayers Lake for a bite--then walked a bit along the waterfront. The nearest section of beach turned out to be covered in rats and garbage, and people fishing. Not that appealing after all. I believe we´d have reached a more hospìtable section if we´d stayed on the bus a little longer.
We taxied back into town, changed and did a little more wandering, finally ending up having dinner at a large restaurant/cafe joint where there was a jazz band playing.
We´re getting pretty accustomed to the late dinners. It was about 11:30 by the time we ordered dessert.
We got our bus at 8:30 this morning and arrived here in Cordoba around 3:30. The buses are really comfortable and punctual. We´re planning to take an overnight bus Thursday when we leave here for Salta--a 13 hour ride--and it should have fully reclining seats and the whole bit.
We haven´t had a lot of time to find our way around Cordoba, but it looks pretty appealing. It took a while to find a hotel in the price range we were looking for but without toilets that gave us flashbacks of the Rosario Inn. But we did get settled, back near the bus station. The guy who runs the place seemed kind of surly at first but really warmed up and was quite amused by my total lack of Spanish.
I actually can do some of the very basics: ordering food and asking prices and stuff. But anything remotely complex falls to Rhia. While it´s unfair she has all that responsibility. it occurred to me yesterday that I really don´t mind having conversations exclusively with her...pèrhaps I´ll just stay in my hobbit hole when I get home.
Oh, I´m on day three of Project: Grow a Beard. It´s purely born of curiousity, and this seemed like a good time to do it. Three days in we´re still in pretty well charted territory, beard wise. It´s like a long weekend or something. I think I´ll be able to muster a decent beard, with poissibly a couple gaps in the chin region, unless Rhia exercises her veto very soon.
The great thing about taking on a hobby like growing a beard is it takes no effort at all--it´s actually less effort than usual. I am keeping a photo diary of the beard.
Possible side effect of growing a beard: I might be elected president next week. There´s a federal election and many of the candidates (well, the men anyway) have big bushy moustaches at the very least.
I´m also hoping to do a photo essay on the mullets of Argentina: they´re all over the plaxce and totally unironic. I even see rat tails with regularity. As president, I will outlaw these dumb haircuts.

Analysis...

Rhia speaking...

I´ve tasked John with the where-what-when update to try and spend a few minutes on analysis of the experience. It hasn´t even been three weeks and Í already can´t imagine being someone who gets up in the morning and goes to sit at a desk five days a week. At the same time hotels and restaurants are definitely starting to lose their appeal.

Some things we keep noticing are that huge segments of the South American population appear to be heavily pregnant. Argentinian males seem to sport mullets with an alarming frequency. People are generally super-nice, unless they´re suer-surly. There were an awful lot of Irish in Brazil. Brazillian Portuguese is a strange beast.

Being confronted with poverty happens more often here. There are shantytowns on the outskirts of everywhere, houses thrown up with whatever comes to hand. On the other hand there are lots of people who seem to be pretty comfortable. There are lots of people making small livings as well - some of them seem happier than others. The people with temporary stands to sell amazonian jewellery, or random trinkets, or pop and peanuts and the like... they seem to be doing ok. The people, and especially the children, going table to table... it´s a different story. And there´s no way to buy from one child, or give coins to one child. For one thing, who knows where the money goes. For another, as soon as word gets out, you´ll be swarmed. I guess there´s some solace in the fact that, aside from insane things like this trip, or, you know, getting married, we tend to tread pretty lightly. We´re not big conspicuous consumers - I´d rather buy second hand than branded, and we try to eat local and the like. Still, I wish I, or someone, could imagine a solution for all the hunger and poverty out there.


Topic two - things we miss.

All our friends and family, of course; the cat, a great deal; cooking at home; speaking without thinking about it first; wearing jeans; decent public washrooms; knowing where we´re going... not a whole lot, which is nice.


Topic three - details on bathrooms.

It´s funny how little this bothers me, because, overall, it doesn´t. But I´ve been playing this sort of public toilet bingo... a blackout would involve a washroom having: a seat, toilet paper, hot water, soap, paper towels, and no charge. I have not yet managed to fill the card. In fact, making a line of more than two or three is rare. It´s funny what you can get used to. I don´t expect this to improve as we head into Bolivia.


Topic four - food.

Steak all the time sounds really good in principle. I have to say I´m getting pretty meated out. It wasn´t bad in Brazil, there were lots of fruits and vegetables to be had, but around here? Argentina seems to survive on meat, potatoes, cheese, and bread. Plus icecream, coffee and sugar. It´s not my ideal diet, I have to say. The cheese in particular is pretty difficult. I´m trying to have some yogurt every day, to help the little stomach beasties along.


Topic five - travel.

The buses in Argentina are pretty great with these semi-bed seats that have integrated leg rests and deep reclines that don´t really cut into the space of the person behind you. We´ve spent a lot of time on our four to six hour hauls dozing and reading. The hitch is mainly the completely insane airconditioning, which has everyone shrugging into blankets. On Thursday night we´re going up a class of bus and trying out the full bed style, taking advantage of an overnight ride to Salta - if you have a 13 hour trip, it´s probably best not to waste a whole day, we figure.
Long distance bus travel seems to be the same most places. Lots of empty space between cities, lots of fields, lots of cows. Lots of stopping in tiny towns you never find out the name of. There are certain albums that make a good soundtrack for that sort of thing...


I thought I was going to be deeper here... but I guess that will still have to wait.

October 21 - Rhia from Rosario

Good gracious we´ve been busy! We did manage to dine with Howard that evening(the 18th), and it was really nice to catch up. Was still a bit tuckered with some kind of stomach thing (nothing serious, just tummyaches) so don´t know if I was good company or not!

We headed out the next day(the 19th) to visit every leather goods store downtown to find John his leather satchel. He fell in love with one eventually, at the fancypants Galleria Pacifica. We tried out Palermo viejo again after taht and poked through a good selection of terndy boutiques and designer/craft fairs while sneezing our faces off due to the fluff from some fancy sort of tree.

We ate in because I couldn´t face a restaurant menu, and then headed down to a place called Torquato Tasso for a tango show. We were a little disappointed to learn there´d be no dancing but the music more than made up for it. Tehre was a septet from Austria or something similar (who knew?) and then this virtuoso guitarist called Juanjo Dominguez. Staggered home at midnight under the weight of a bottole of wine.

The 20th was the first day in a good while I felt healthy. We had a lie in and skipped the unimpressive hostel breakfast, having our medialunas and cafe downtown instead. We descended to the nearest subte station and were delighted to discover we´d found Line A, the oldest in the city, perhaps in Latin America. The stations arerun down, but ornate aret-deco, and the carriages still have their wooden interiors, big mirrors, the whole deal. We had to transfer after just a few stops, unfortunately. We got bus tickets for teh following day at teh big bus station, then headed for La Recoleta. We had lunch before exploring the cemetery - it´s big, with lots of impressive crypts. Evita´s isn´t really very exciting, but we did eventually locate it wand were done with that.

We took a look at some of the impressive architecture and found our giant flower sculpture, which was sponsored by Lougheed Martin, and does, in fact, look quite like it was constructed from airplane parts. Being the middle of the day we did not catch it in motion, but it was impressive nonetheless. There was a giant crafts fair nearby and we stocked up on things to bring/send home before heading back to our suite for a rest. ç

We headed out around suppertime for the Cafe Ideal, where we were going to either see a tango show or a dance, whatever we could get our hangs on. The room was big and clearly once-impressive. It had descended to a sort of shabby magesty. The show was also a little gritty, though the singers and dancers were all very good. I enjoyed it a great deal. Our camera was out of batteries and we weren´t sure if taking photos at the dance was couth, but we managed to strike up a conversation with some othere visitors from New York, who were happy to share their photos, so hopefully we can show you a few.

We took our time getting up and out on Sunday morning, packing, etc. Then we got a taxi to the bus station and took our super-plush seats for the ride to Rosario. Not before waiting about 40 minutes for Empanadas and coffee.

Four hours later we were here and dragging around town with heavy bags - just like real backpackers. We took a look at one of the hostels recommended by our guide, and it looked pretty basic and more expensive than the book said, but acceptable, so we took it rather than haul stuff around any longer. Anyway, it´s the Rosario Inn, and if you find yourself here DO NOT STAY THERE. The room itself was OK, though the door didn´t lock, but not one of the three bathrooms actually worked properly. Ehn.

We headed our though, because it certainly wasn´t the sort of room you lounge around in, and we wanted to make the most of our time. Also we were hungry. Fortified with sandwiches, we poked around town a bit - mostly it was closed up tight and entertainment options for a Sunday night seemed slim.

We ended up going to see I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. I didn´t really have any interest in that whatsoever, but it turned out to be surprisingly good. We had a parrilla for two for supper, which unfortunately turned out to be a wide selection of organ meats. I am still feeling a bit digestively fragile, so I mostly focussed on the ribs and let John be adventurous with blood puddings and kidneys and intestines and other exciting bits. I think I sampled all the pieces, but couldn´t make myself invest.

This morning after being sort of disgusted by the bathroom situation, we decamped to another place around the corner. This one was sort of cleaner, had private baths, and was 15 pesos a night cheaper. I think we´ll be happier tehre.

John´s researching our options in Cordoba as I write this. We´ll head off tomorrow morning. We plan to see a few sights now then head to the beach! Much love!

Hi from Buenos Aires, and forgive me any weird errors due to the strange Spanish keyboard.
I think when Rhia left off we had just crossed into Argentina. We had a pretty quiet evening in Puerto Iguazu on account of the steady rain, though we splurged for a comfortable hotel to spend it in. Our plan for the following day was to get up at the crack of dawn, eat and get to the park on the Argentinian side of the falls when it opened.
Our alarm went off at 6:45 and it sounded like a tropical storm outside, complete with thunder and lightning, so we decided to go back to sleep and see if the weather cleared up a bit.
It didn´t.
We got dressed, went and had our breakfast and hemmed and hawed a bit. Finally we decided to heck with the downpour and went to see the falls. I went in my swim trunks. Rhia bought a garbage bag style poncho. The hitch here was we had to go straight from the park to the airport--our flights didn´t leave us a lot of time in the region--so we wanted to minimize the soggy clothes we´d have to pack. Sure enough we did get pretty wet; the rain didn´t ease until we were ready to catch the bus to the airport, naturally.
But the trip was worth it. On the Argentinian side you can go on catwalks out over the falls themselves. Again, the water was lower than usual due to lack of rain, but it was still pretty amazing to stand right over the precipice where the water goes craching over, sending up this heavy mist. You can hear and feel the power of it. I think it`s impossible to be there without getting cuaght up in big tour groups, and they were kind of annoying, and a little dangerous with their umbrellas, but we escaped with our eyes and another sight we´ll remember for ages. We did get into dry clothes and onto our plane and arrived in Buenos Aires (I´m working on a computer that inexplicably closes the browser every few minutes...thankfully, this is autosaving).
It´s been gorgeous weather-wise again, so we landed from a clear blue sky to what seems to be a dazzling city.
We hopped a cab to our hostel in the San Telmo district--an old part of the city and touted as the home of tango, though we´ve yet to take in a proper show. We have a nice penthouse´´unit with a kitchenette and a bit of a living room and a terrace. It´s quite lovely. After another long day full of travel, we took it pretty easy on Tuesday, getting settled and getting our bearings. I got to enjoy a great Rhia-cooked meal for the first time in ages.
One of those weird coincidences that make travel a lot of fun: a friend from Saskatchewan, whom I haven´t seen in years was also in BA this week. We´d hoped to connect for dinner or a drink...but somehow connections didn´t quite work out that night or the next morning. We´ll have to catch up in Canada I guess. We did discover this morning, though, that Rhia´s uncle Howard from the U.K., currently of Miami, is in town at the moment and we´re going to meet him for dinner tonight!
We´ve also had random meetings with people we don´t really know at all. For instance, there were these Irish girls we shared a water taxi with on Ilha Grande in Brazil. We met them again at the bus station on the mainland when we were trying to get to Sao Paulo...ending up in Paraty. At the moment, they seemed to be having some credit card crisis and were a little upset. Then when we were killing time stranded in Paraty, we ran into them again. Then, several days later, I walked out the door of our hotel in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina and bumped into one of the Irish girls again. Bizarre.
Anyway, I´m getting off track here.
We´ve gone out in several-hour stretches at a time here in BA and tried to siesta in the mid afternoon.
Rhia´s Spanish makes life a lot easier here and we´ve found the people extremely friendly. She keeps getting into conversations with old men at newsstands. Yesterday we headed in the direction of Palermo and saw an interesting but uncritical museum on Eva Peron, walked through several large parks--trying to dodge ubiquitous heaps of dog poop--and to another museum of contemporary latin American art. They had a Frida Kahlo and a Diego Rivera and several great pieces by a guy whose name is escaping me now.
We wanted to go to a tango show in the evening and set out for dinner beforehand. We were both too early and too late. At about 8:30 I think we were the only people actually having dinner in the place we chose, but we lingered too long over it to make the tango show.
Oh well, the Malbec was great. You can get good wine for about $3 in grocery stores here.
This morning we took another long walk to the Boca neighbourhood. The stroll through a working-class neighbourhood was pleasant and then we arrived at a colourful but rather touristy market area where we had lunch at a place with a pleasant but kind of running-through-the motions tango show. I got my picture taken with a dancer with her leg halfway up my torso...I was hoping to upload some photos now but I can´t quite figure out the set up here. More soon I promise.
After lunch we got a city bus and eventually managed to pay our fare and got down to the Plaza de Mayo, where for 30 years now mothers who´ve had children `disappear` in political turmooil here and their supporters march in front of the government building asking for justice and answers. They´re few in number today but their protest is still powerful. One woman was obviously still deeply pained by her loss and wept and cried out during the march.

So tonight, dinner with relatives! We´re here at least until Saturday and we may stay Saturday night too if we´re really in love with the place. There´s a lot we haven´t seen yet.
We plan to get to the city of Cordoba some time next we but we´re thinking we might head into Uruguay over the weekend, just to see another country and maybe take advantage of their beaches if the weather holds.
Peace everyone.

Comments and Emails

Please keep the comments and emails coming! We like knowing we have readers! And we miss you all a lot!

Kisses!

Rhia and John

From Ilha Grande on!

Rhia writing!

October 11th -

We had a lovely evening after the snorkling, though John´s still boasting his sunburn.
Unfortunately, it was the start of hard times for our team. Initially we temporarily lost our key on the way back from snorkelling. They let us into our room at the hotel, though, and it turned out my shorts have a secret pocket, so that day was saved. The following morning started off ok, it´s true, with breakfast on the beach, getting our stuff together, and ferrying across to Angra dos Reis.

This, however, is where things started to go seriously wrong. First off the busses to Paraty and Sao Paulo ended up being full.

We were goin to experiment with going to Paraty and buying a bus ticket there, when the sales guy suddenly comes up with two seats on the three o`clock bus to Sampa. We`d been planning on getting the noon, so this was a bit of a pain, but we were game enough to wander around town, having a beer and such. We made it back to the bus in lots of time, and rode a pleasant 90-minute journey to Paraty. There, we discovrered that the attendant had ¨Somehow¨managed to sell us tickets from the day before`s bus. I am not proud of my dissolution into tears, but I was not relishing the idea of scrounging for a room when we´d been previously quoted inflated prices, nor the idea of buying a new ticket. Of course, when I´m upset, my Portuguese becomes even iffier, and so the whole thing was a debacle. They somehow found us seats on the otherwise sold-out next bus. The hitch? It left Paraty at eleven-thirty pm. Ugh.

It was about six by then, so we had a long wait ahead of us. The left luggage office was only open until 7, so it was a bit of a loss. We did, however, discover a drop off laundry place, which lightened our loads a little. We had no alternative but to wander into Paraty with all the rest of our possessions on our backs. It´s a gorgeous little town, and I´m sure that under any other circumstances I would have loved it.

We were a little limited in our options, though, with the bags, so it was a matter of exploring a few steets and killing time until we could eat dinner. We had an amazing filet mignon, with a fancy sort of salad, and headed back to pick up our laundry before they closed for the evening.

Then there was nothing to do but wait for the bus, then sleep in discomfort until we rolled into Sao Paulo at 5 a.m.

October 12th -

Fortunately, our hotel was OK with us checking in that early, so we grabbed a taxi over to what turned out to be a slightly dodgy neighbourhood, and fell into the bed. Several hours later we emerged for some lunch, and to get some cash. Once again, we couldn´t convince any of the bank machines to give us money, which was full of stress until we finally stumbled on a Citibank, and succeeded. We went back up to the room to stash some of the money, and passed out again for another few minutes. Later, we tried to find our way to a park to hang out in the warm weather and maybe see some museums. We got a little lost, though, and it was REALLY hot, and the whole combination of the slight scariness of Sao Paulo and all the rest... well. So we gave up on the Park and tried out Avenida Paulista, which was a better bet. We poked around some shops, saw a Peter Greenaway exhibit, accidentaly stole some free internet... had a few beers.

By then we were seriously craving vegetables, so we aimed for the asian area of town for supper. It was actually pretty scary up there too, dark and ominous, but we found somewhere open and had some pretty decent Chinese, then back to the hotel and fell into bed.

October 13th-

Saturday in Sao Paulo was finally a nice experience. We wanted to track down the city food market, because I´m a bit of a fanatic that way. It took us a few tries in the end, but in the meantime we navigated a good number of completely thronged shopping streets, and really enjoyed the atmosphere. We managed to separate ourselves from a few bucks in the process, but we got some good gear! After those few false starts, we did find teh market and it was everything I´d hoped. I acquired myself a fat slice of pineapple for about 50c and then we got our lunch. John had the mortadella sandwich, a veritable mountain of meat, with a tomato-onion sort of sauce. Me, I tried the Pastel de Bacalahu - a deep-fried salt cod fritter. Yum. All kinds of awesome.
We made our way back to the main train station and joined up with a free metro-based tour group. This took us to the Luz metro and train station, a beautiful building initially completed in 1901. Tehre was a fire there at one point and part of the building was completed in a similar style in the 40s. The guide was very good, but the whole thing was in Portuguese, so I had my hands full translating for John. We got some good pictures in a nearby park, then had a quick turn through a sacred art museum.

We decided that staying out for the day was our best bet, so headed back to the Asian neighbourhood to check out the end of the street fair there. It was pretty well wrapped up, so we settled in for some beers and Japanese snacks. Then, eight hours after leaving the hotel, we collapsed back into bed. (after a serious degriming shower).

October 14-

We overslept due to the time change and missed our free breakfast! We headed back to Paulista and took in a couple of street fairs, acquiring some souvenirs and wandering the Trianon Park. We were thinking about checking out the art museum tehre, but gave it up as not quite interesting enough. Had a giant churrasqueria lunch again. We tried once again for the park of our first day tehre, and it turned out to be a heck of a long walk. We saw the Afro-Brazillian museum, and attempted another art museum, which, as it turned out, had no exhibit at all. Huh.

We went back to the room to pack and chill out in preparation for our 5 a.m. flight. John watched the futbol on TV and wanted to catch the second half in a little local bar. So we did. We ordered the `plato del dia`, an absolutely enormous plate of canned-like spaghetti noodles in a pinkish sauce with a chicken leg on each plate. Way too much food. We were feeling guilty about how much we were leaving on our plates, especially with the entirely too concrete poverty all around us - but things ended well!

There were a couple of guys at the next table, and when some kids came begging for scraps, he sent them to the bar to get a takeout plate. Then he scraped the spaghetti he hadn´t finished into that. We handed over our leftovers in a heartbeat. The guy topped it off with some of the fries he and his friend were sharing, and we gave the kid some of our bottles of pop, as well. The look in his eyes. There´s not much more I can say about that. IT felt good, but also sort of in a ... well. I´m sure you understand.


TODAY! October 15th.

I got up all stressed today, sure that it was 5 after 5 and that we´d missed our alarm and they´d failed to give us our wake-up call. Only after I´d brushed my teeth and woken John did I finally realize it was 5 after 3... Ooops. We did get our wakeup call at the appointed time, and made it to our flight and Foz de Iguazu without a hitch. A city bus took us to the national park, we paid our entrance fee, and a second bus delivered us to the trail at the top of the falls. The Brazillian side gives a sort of overview - and what an overview! Even in this year where people keep telling us how little it´s rained, it´s pretty impressive. Not so much the lesser falls, which are loud, but not whitecapped right now, but the Devil´s Throat is just amazing. The photos will really have to speak for themselves. (Not today, this place is pretty rustic).

Then we caught another city bus to a hotel on the outskirts, and switched over to one that, for $2 R(about a buck) would take us to the Brazillian border. The bus didn´t wait for us to finish our exit formalities, but when we caught the next one it did stop at the Argentine border for us to get stamped in. Kind of incredible.

In the torential rain, that same bus delivered us here to Puerto Iguzu, where we´ve checked into a fairly luxurious (for us, anyway!) hotel, found some pesos, finally had lunch, and this here internet cafe.

Looks like tomorrow is the Argentine side of the falls in the rain, then a rush to the airport and on to Buenos Aires!