La Paz, Bolivia,
People told us that La Paz´ setting as a city is one of the most amazing in the world, but any physical description we got doesn´t match what our eyes woke up to yesterday morning in the bus. As we were parked along the street for an hour and a half, for no apparent reason, just two blocks from the terminal, we waited for daylight. This revealed two things, almost everyone else had already gotten off, and two sheer cliffs on either side of the city covered with houses which seem to be stacked upon each other. The city centre is located at the bottom of a 400m canyon. The views only got better as we walked around, revealing beyond one cliff the snowcapped Illimani at an altitude of 6402m.
We are in the world´s highest capital, but we spent the weekend in the world´s highest city, Potosi. After our last blog on Friday, we took what was by far the worst busride of this trip. And it´s not because we were spoiled in Argentina. I had to force myself to stay awake because any position I fell asleep in resulted in a sore neck. There was no legroom, the whole trip was on a gravel road over a distance of 200km which took seven hours. Being a recovering diarrhetic didn´t help either. But hey, it was only $2.
Potosi is a beautiful city, a UNESCO world heritage site, with over 2000 listed colonial buildings, reflecting its rich heritage. The copper coloured Cerro Rico (Rich Hill), can be seen in the background. Potosi was founded in 1544, after the Spanish found out from the natives that there was silver, and alot of it, inside Cerro Rico. 30 years later it had a population of 120, 000, the size of London, and bigger than Paris or Madrid. The expression ´vale un Potosi´ or ´worth a Potosi´ which Cervantes had Don Quixote quote in his book, is still used in Spain for anything very valuable. Things were awesome for the Spanish, but for the natives and imported slaves from Africa life was very bad. I´ll spare you the details, but it is said that 9 million workers died in these mines over a period of 200 years.
Our main reason for coming to Potosi was to visit one of these mines. Bolivians still mine them, but now for less lucrative metals like tin and copper. There is very little silver left. Our tourguide was Pedro, a former miner who spoke English perfectly, as well as four or five other languages. When visiting a mine it is a custom to buy dynamite, glycerine, fuses, and pop to give to the miners as a gift. There weren´t many miners, since it was Saturday, but we were able to visit with some, being greeted by an enthusiastic ´Hola, Gringitos´, every time we walked by. One of them was only 15 and had been working there for three years. Many miners only work for 20 years. Those who keep working usually die from lung disease between the age of 45 and 55. That´s not hard to understand. We spent two hours underground, at moments manouvering through a shaft just large enough for our bodies. There was a constant thick grey dust in the air, impossible to not breathe in. Somehow, the miners were all in good spirits, joking the whole time. Pedro told us that was the only way for them to forget about the conditions they were in. This was an eye-opening experience for us, but thankfully that also meant some things weren´t quite as bad as we thought. One guidebook said that miners die ten years after entering the mine. That´s not true. We were also told that, though some make very little, most miners make a decent living. I don´t mean to make it sound like a good job though, cause it´s not. It´s hard work, it´s dangerous, and it would take someone alot stronger than any North American or European that I know to be able to do it.
After the visit to the mine came the fun part. I got to stick a fuse into a stick of dynamite and hold it while it was lit. This was a milestone in my pyromania career. Then the guy ran with it, put it in the ground, and five seconds later it exploded. Just kidding, it was more like 5 minutes. The rest of our time in Potosi was spent eating, not going to a Bolivian wedding (Pedro invited us but didn¨t realize the groom was from a rich family, so we couldn´t get in even though we bought gifts and everything), and watching Real Potosi beat Aurora Cochabamba 2-0 on a perfect, hot Sunday afternoon.
Manana, vamos en bicicleta en el camino mas peligroso del mundo. Moms and sisters, I wrote that in Spanish for a reason, translate it at your own risk. I´m sorry, but we used up all our space on flickr so we won´t be able to put on more pictures till May 1.
Thanks for reading,
Pieter

San Vicente and the Salar

Clayton here. We arrived in Tupiza, Bolivia on Sunday. First on the agenda was to find a way to San Vicente, this being the small town where Butch and Sundance met their doom, 1908. Five hours in a jeep, mesmerized by the flight of two condors, an interesting life story from our driver (a coke addict saved by Jesus Christ), and we arrived in San Vicente. If I have the story right, after their stay in Argentina, attempting to ranch but finding the time to rob a couple of banks too, they headed north to Bolivia. After less than a year, sometimes working as guards for the mine payroll, but mostly casing out new "jobs", they robbed a caravan of horses carrying money for the mines. Fleeing to nearby San Vicente, they were finally cornered by a group of four Bolivian law enforcers. The shootout went into the night. Eventually, the yankee bandits stopped firing, and in the morning they were found dead. There is some speculation that they may have ended their own lives, but in any case, it wasn't quite like the movie. After posing for a couple of pics as the heroic bandidos, we had to stand in the town square and shout, "Don Federico!" until the Don came to let us into the museum. This was the oddest museum in the world, I have no doubt: one small room, a couple of old typewriters, an old jackhammer and a couple of kerosene lamps from the mines, the official suitcase of Butch Cassidy (riddled with bullet holes), and a human skeleton, missing some bones and having duplicates in other places. Odd.
The next day we set out on a four day tour of the southwest corner of the country. Day one was almost a repeat of our trip to San Vicente. We enjoyed the people we were with, that being a good thing because four days in a jeep together wasn't easy. Day two involved seeing Lago Verde, a vibrantly green lake; flamingoes; swampy hot springs that we swam in; and geysers spewing sulphur at 150-200 degrees celsius. Day three started with laguna Colorada, the "red lake" (which wasn't really red in the morning light); rock formations that looked like trees sticking out of the sand; a smoking volcano on the border with Chile; and it ended with a hot shower and a warm bed, neither of which were included in the first two nights. The food was nothing to complain about though. Day four was the climax of the tour: the Salar de Uyuni, a salt flat measuring about 12,000 square kilometres. It is hard to describe but I will not forget that sunrise. Blazing white nearly as far as you could see, and some parts were covered in water that created a perfect mirror. We drove across the salt mesmerized, then stopped to help another jeep with a flat tire. We discovered we also had a flat. After a half hour of taking "pictures without perspective" (you'll have to see them), we were on our way again. Ten minutes later we had another flat. Every day of the tour averaged about three breakdowns, which we are growing accustomed to. The rest of the morning was spent driving across this lake of salt, and I would recommend it to anyone. An interesting fact: they export the salt, using shovels and small trucks, at a price of five Bolivianos for 50 kgs (that's about 70 cents). Not a great cost-benefit ratio, but that's life in Bolivia. So far this country is as cheap as it gets. One of the restaurants gave us a steaming skillet with steak, hot dogs, eggs, french fries, fried bananas and an incredibly tasty mix of onions and tomatoes, all for two dollars (there should be a picture). It fed us both. Besides that, the land is some of the most unique I have seen: varied coloured mountains, green hills, bleak desert, llama ranches, fields of quinoa, trees of rock, sulphurous geysers, hot springs, green and red lakes, flamingoes, and a lake of salt. Most of the tour was spent above 4000 metres in elevation, the highest point being just over 4900. You do need time to acclimatize: walking up stairs will take your breath away, the sun seems to burn a little more brightly, and it's cold up there. Something I did not anticipate was the dramatic increase in bodily gases. Amazing really. In any case, you come to realize that Bolivians are survivors, besides being some of the nicest.
What else... in an hour, we will leave for Potosi, a mining city with the distinction of being the highest city in the world. Then it's on to La Paz, after which we will probably update the blog again. Hope all is well, and thanks for reading.

Return to the Jungle

After spending the last month and a half in an area that looks more or less like parts of North America, we´re back in unfamiliar territory. Right now we´re in Salta in NW Argentina, just waiting to catch a bus to Bolivia. It´s a nice city, the second oldest of Argentina, with a lot of colonial buildings still remaining. That´s one thing southern Argentina didn´t have. Also, there are many more native Americans here compared to the almost 100% European population of Buenos Aires and the south. There´s supposed to be a big street party here tonight. We´re catching the bus at midnight so we´ll see how much of it we can take in. By the way, we´re not in the jungle right now. We were there earlier in the week.
I´ll stop boring you and talk about the main event of the week: Iguazu Falls. Actually, there´s not much to say, you´ll just have to look at the pictures. We arrived there on Tuesday morning after another night bus. This time however, we went in Salon Cama instead of semi-cama; it was only $5 more. We have been wanting to try this. The main difference is that there are only three seats across instead of four, so they´re wider (to state the obvious). They´re supposed to have more legroom too, but there was a board blocking our feet from going under the seat in front so really there wasn´t more legroom. The service was decent, but we´ve had better, so all in all we prefer semi-cama. Like I said, we arrived in Puerto Iguazu Tuesday morning. We spent the day relaxing by the pool, and had steak (again) for supper. This time we cooked it ourselves. Puerto Iguazu, 20 minutes from the falls, is located in the narrow province of Missiones in Northeast Argentina, which is hugged by the Rio Parana and Rio Uruguay, across which are Paraguay and Brazil. You can actually see all three countries at the same time from one part of the city. I´m sorry, I´m still boring you. To the falls now.
We hadn´t heard about Iguazu Falls until we started planning this trip. The more we heard people talk, the more we realized we had to go there. And we weren´t dissapointed. They are located on the border with Brazil, from where they can also be seen. I don´t have any information on volume of water or anything, but I can´t imagine any falls being bigger. Upon seeing them, Eleanor Roosevelt said : ¨Poor Niagara.¨ It´s a series of 20 to 50 (I have no idea) individual falls which look like one continuous waterfall from a distance. All we could do was stare for hours. We walked all the circuits so we got several different viewpoints. At one point we were only about 50 yards from Brazil. That was pretty cool. At the end of the day we were right above the biggest falls under which is a perpetual cloud of spray. We got soaked a couple times.
We got this Uruguayan guy to take a couple pictures of us, mostly cause he had two hot daughters. Anyway, after they left, his wife came back and asked us if we knew Ryan Barton from Canada. It´s funnier when it really happens, than when you hear about it. We tried to contain ourselves, realizing the opportunity that was in front of us. No, we didn´t say: ¨Yes we know Ryan Barton.¨ We did however, manage to get the girls to sit down with us at the patio for something to drink. Then they left.
Thursday morning we left for San Ignacio Mini, to visit the Jesuit ruins, another UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was fairly impressive considering the story behind it. There was a large plaza surrounded by ruins of a church and several dwellings. The Jesuit Order came to this area in the early 1600s and founded several missions. They preached Christianity to the Guarani Indians and created these community housing projects where each family had a dwelling, and everybody shared the land, and shared the work. These communes became so powerful, about 30 towns with a total population of 140, 000, that the Spanish eventually had them expelled. The history behind the whole thing is amazing to me. Our whole trip has been somewhat of a history lesson. Here´s what I learned this week. The Spaniards used Christianity as a reason to invade South America. They imposed their European way of life onto the Indians, forcing them to work the fields and mines for coffee and silver which the Spaniards sent back home to reap all the profits from. In return, the Indians were given the right to be taught Christianity. The Jesuits, on the other hand, believed so strongly in the gospel that they risked their lives by coming into the jungle. They did all their teaching in the Guarani language, and taught them farming and domestic skill, all for the benefit of the Guarani themselves. The Jesuits gained nothing. Throughout the centuries they were repeatedly attacked by the Paraguayans and Portuguese, until their eventual expulsion by the Spanish in the early 1800s. I think they understood the meaning of faith.
At this time tomorrow we will be in Bolivia, if all goes well.
Happy Easter,
Pieter

A Time for Fasting, Now for the Feast

Clayton here. Though we'd like you to feel sorry for us, thinking we are starving, we must tell you the truth. We have eaten better on this trip than ever before in our lives. In my father's earlier years, it is said that at the dinner table all the food would start on his left, and he would finish whatever remained when it came to him. Perhaps this runs in the family, for in high school I was once dubbed "The Garburetor". (The name never stuck and I must admit I've met bigger eaters than myself.) I tell you all this for the purpose of explaining how much food we ate at El Boliche de Dario, an all you can eat grill. It started with a basket of bread and four meat empanadas. Then came the real meat, half of which I didn't recognize: ribs, steak, some type of organ (I think), chewy tubular things, sausage, and some stuff that I will never try again. Also delectable cheese patties, and four plates of the "best fries outside of Belgium". They just kept bringing it. I've never been that full. I was so full my vision began to blur. Took us twenty minutes to walk the five blocks back to the hostel. The sad part is that Piet beat me by a half a steak. No, you simply cannot feel sorry for us.
Buenos Aires has been a delight. We've done a lot of walking, seen a lot of sights: Recoleta Cemetery, where people are buried under big mausoleums of different sizes and shapes (mini Taj-Mahals you might say); the Plaza de Canada, in the middle of which is a large totem pole, but that's all; in one of the main squares we watched a group of mothers march around the centre, each holding banners or photos of the loved ones that they had lost during the "Dirty War" of the 70's; we toured one of the top five opera houses in the world, Teatro Colon; a couple of different museums; a circus/art show; and the first ever world cup of horseball (I had never heard of it either). Lots of things that would take too long to write about. But we must mention the football game.
Piet has been saying all along that we would be going to a soccer game in Buenos Aires, hopefully between Boca Juniors and River Plate, one of the greatest rivalries of sport in the world. We were one week too late for that, and the tickets had been sold out for a year anyway. So we toured the Boca Junior museum and stadium, where Maradonna played. Then we caught the River Plate game yesterday afternoon. Waiting for the bus, we could hear it before we could see it. I would bet the rest of my bank account (which isn't a whole lot any more) to say there were 100 people on that city bus. Most were dressed in red and white, half of them were singing, the young guys were pounding the roof to keep time, and all the old ladies were smiling. I asked Piet if we were going to be able to sit with these fans, and he said, "what do you mean, 'sit'?" Sure enough, besides half time, we stood for the entire game, right in the very centre of the rowdy crowd. I've never experienced anything like it. My first NHL game, the crowd was silent and I was bored to tears. My first NBA game I actually fell asleep! But now... well, it's hard not to fall in love with soccer after that. We guess there were more than 50,000 fans. The singing never stopped, from the bus 'til a half hour after the game. Drums and cymbals were just below us, pounding out the carnival beat so you could feel it. Some guys didn't even watch the game, rather they stood on rails and took up the role of conductors, urging everyone else to join. I think we were the only two not singing, though we were doing our best to show support for the home team. (From the bus Piet had seen a Boca fan beating up a River fan on the street. They take it seriously.) Pretty hard to describe... sometimes I thought the concrete was shaking, and sometimes you could catch the echo from the rest of the crowd. Twice, a giant flag was unrolled from the top of the stadium to the bottom of our section, covering probably a fifth of the stadium. We missed the final goal because we were under the flag. It didn't matter because noone really stopped singing to cheer when there was a goal. When the other team scored, everyone sang louder. And not a drop of alcohol in sight. It was an amazing experience.
Anyway, today we leave for Iguazu falls, then to Bolivia, as we have decided to skip Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay (there is just too much, as we have been saying). Argentina will most likely occupy a special place in our minds, there has been so much, and yet there is still more we would like to do here. Someone told us, "a good traveller always leaves something to come back to". Maybe he's right. Until next time...

Buenos Aires

Hi everyone,
The last five days have been fairly laid back, although we´ve covered alot of miles in between a couple of sights. We´ve decided that we really like the busses in Argentina. The people here aren´t an average of one foot shorter than us so there´s plenty of legroom. Most are double deckers, they are never full, and some even have self-serve coffee. Last night we had steak and rice. It´s not often that we get served a hot meal. And we watched Cellular for the third time. I tried, but with the combination of a full stomach at 11 pm and already knowing the end to the movie, I wasn´t able to stay awake through the whole thing. By the way, we are really getting used to this eating very late thing. It´s after midnight now, and we still haven´t had supper.
Anyways, we left Comodoro Rivadavia, right after posting our last blog, on a night bus for Puerto Madryn. Our guidebook, and everybody else, says this is the place to see marine wildlife, and they were right. Upon arriving we decided to rent a car, rather than paying a tour company twice as much to tell us which ones are sealions and which ones are orcas. Plus, we get the car for 24 hours. It wasn´t going to be ready till 6 pm, so we spent the day reading, writing postcards, drinking coffee (which by the way is real coffee here, not instant like everywhere else in Latin America; it´s the Italian influence), buying groceries, and I think we even fit a nap in there somewhere.
Our car was a VW Golf Rally Edition (not really, but we treated it like one.) It would be pretty nice to have a car all the time. We dropped off our laundry, then tried to locate another confluence (it´s a gps thing, where you stand on the spot where whole number latitudes and longitudes meet.) It was already getting dark, and we got on the wrong gravel road, so we just raced the car through the Argentine countryside instead, before heading to Puerto Piramides, an hour away on Peninsula Valdez. The peninsula is protected as a marine wildlife refuge. We had rice and lentils for supper and camped overnight. We got up around 7:30, and drove one hour to Punta Norte. As we walked down the path we saw a colony of sealions, about 100 metres away, and then another a little further. Each colony had 100 to 200 sealions. It wasn´t long before we saw four orcas off in the distance. They started swimming in our direction, along the beach, at one point only 50 metres away, and then swam on towards the point. We stayed here about four hours, and figure we saw seven orcas in total who kept going back and forth, in groups of four, along the beach. Each time they passed the sealions they inched closer to the shore, literally at the edge of the water. It seemed like they were eyeing the sealions, planning an attack, but the attack we were all waiting for never came, even though on a couple occasions it looked like it might.
We drove another hour to the next point. On the way, while Clay was napping, I got out to check out the edge of the ocean, which I thought would be cliffs. Instead, there was a beach of little pebbles, about 200 m wide. In the distance I saw a lone penguin. I went closer, and got so close I could touch him (but didn´t, not sure if they bite.) He looked at me, then continued scratching an ithy spot with his beak. At the next point, we saw some more penguins, and two colonies of elephant seals, both with a male and his harem of40 females. Being satisfied with our day we drove back to our campsite, and had rice and beans for supper. (Notice a pattern? We´re trying to eat for $5/day between the two of us, so we eat a lot of rice. We actually bought too much food today for $4.) After playing fetch with a stray dog, we drove back to Puerto Madryn. We gave the car back to the Italian rent-a-car clerk, who sounded exactly like Mr. Bean in that movie "Rat Race". You know: "Itsa a race-ah."
We took the night bus to Esquel and watched the "Butterfly Effect", a weird movie. There was only one thing to do in Esquel, take a bus to Cholila, and visit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's cabins. Yes, they, along with Etta Place, lived here from 1901 to 1907 and farmed sheep and cattle. In front of the cabins a family of gauchos (cowboys) was cooking a huge piece of meat over a woodfire. We must have looked hungry cause they invited us to eat with them. They gave us each a piece of meat, some bread, and a knife. They kept bringing salads but we had no plates or forks, and looking around we couldn't figure out how they ate it so we just took whatever they offered us and put it on our meat and ate it with our hands. It was some of the best meat I've ever had. They had spent the morning branding cattle, and this was their annual cattle branding feast. We visited as much as we could considering the language barrier, and the children were eager to show us their bare-back horse riding skills. It was one of those unplanned things that will probably turn out to be one of the best memories of our trip.
We went to a tea house, because we thought they had pictures of Butch and Sundance, but that was a different tea house. We came in and sat down. They asked us if we wanted tea and we said yes, but didn´t order anything else. She brought out the tea along with some toast and crumpets. Then she brought out ten pieces of different cakes and tarts. I guess that´s what British tea time is all about. We realized this was going to cost alot, at least 30 pesos. It was 40, that´s $13. There went our daily budget. We had to hurry back to the road, a km away, to catch the bus, the only bus that day. We knew we were late but the busses are always late down here. Not this time. Part of the family was on their way home and informed us that the bus had already gone by. They offered us a ride to the next town, and thankfully the bus was still stopped there. We were pretty embarrassed. Back in Esquel we camped for the night, and had, you guessed it, rice, this time just rice, for supper. Yesterday we left for Buenos Aires, and arrived here this morning. Yesterday afternoon there was a roadblock on the highway for teachers´wages. I asked a guy if that was normal, he said yes.
Clay and I had an argument the other day, the first big one. Some kind of communication problem. What? Pieter and Clay, communication problems? It´s all good now.
It´s really good to hear all your comments, especially from people we don´t expect. We´re kinda flattered. Thanks for reading.
Pieter