Golden Anniversary

I´m in Peru, and it's country #50 on the way (no, I'm still not counting you Bosnia and Moldova - I feel like I need to cover more than 5km of a country for it to count), so in honor of this exciting round number, I got to thinking about all the borders I've crossed in the past 15 plus months. Which quickly brings me to the conclusion that traveling in South America really is rather pleasant - they seem to have figured out how to make the border crossing formalities as painless as possible. To wit:
- crossing the channel separating Uruguay and Argentina, you get joint immigration desks at the departure point in Colonia, Uruguay - the Uruguayan official stamps you out of his country, then hands the passport over to the Argentinian guys sitting right next to him, who promptly stamps you into Argentina. Fast, efficient, sensible...
- Brazil to Argentina: Cyrus and I go across in a Brazilian taxi. Nobody actually bothers us or asks to stop, it's really done as more of a courtesy to the customs guys. The process takes a full 15 minutes, 10 minutes longer than it would have if I hadn't lost my Brazil arrival card
- Chile to Peru today: they have an actual border, so you really have to stop, twice (Chile, then Peru). Yet, the whole thing takes barely 10 minutes, the most time consuming parts being me trying to understand Spanish when the Chilean guy points out that I ought to take my passport out of its cover and the Peruvian guy, upon seeing my backpack, inquires if I'm carrying a parachute...

On the other hand, a few "highlights" from some prior border crossing experiences:
- New Zealand didn't even want to let me in because instead of a ticket for onward travel I just had the name of a boat that Nate was sailing on... Eventually they figured they were stuck with me, but still confiscated my boots and only returned them after having sprayed them with some vicious acid designed to kill any and all remaining traces of SouthEast Asia
- Vietnam searched my bags, but not all that thoroughly. Then we discussed the US primaries going on at the time and I was surprised to find out that the Vietnamese customs officer supported McCain, a former Vietnam POW
- China chose to search my bags quite thoroughly, checking all the books I was carrying, then opening up my laptop and requesting to see all of my photographs. I suppose that's what you get for being the only American they had seen that week (month?)
- crossing by train from China to Mongolia requires the trains to be raised up in the air and the wheels swapped out because China uses a different gauge of rail than Russia and Mongolia
- crossing from Mongolia to Russia, you sit for two hours on the train (without your passport) while the Russian customs officials thoroughly search the entire train. To their credit, the Mongolian women were smuggling all kinds of things across the border
- Kosovo explained to us how we needed to pay 50 Euro for each car because our insurance policies did not cover Kosovo... And then all the lights went out. And then we still had to pay, under the faint lights from a generator. "Or you can go back to Albania" - I still don't like that guy!
- Greece, where Cyrus chose to celebrate us reaching our 6th country in under 24 hours by spilling scalding hot coffee on Liz' lap...
- entering Turkey by car requires going to about 12 different stations to get various pieces of paperwork stamped. A lot like Turkmenistan, except that I could at least speak the language in Turkmenistan. Well, and Turkmenistan charges a lot more
- I ripped the exhaust pipe off the manifold coming off the ferry from Ukraine to Russia, then had to drive the next two hours with the car making horrible noises. On the bright side, the Russian customs agent was very cute in her exceedingly short skirt uniform, and seemed more interested in taking pictures of the mini with her cellphone than actually making me do paperwork
- Uzbekistan confiscated my contraband Sudafed - that's Cyrus' fault, really. And the lady felt really bad about it.
- The customs agent at the Kazakhstan border decided to show Lott and I a porn video on his cellphone while we were waiting for somebody else to get back from dinner and finish our paperwork. Thankfully, the movie was not of him.
- Mongolia, the only country that's more difficult to leave than it is to enter as they absolutely insist on searching everything you've got to make sure you are not carrying any priceless Genghis Khan artifacts with you out of the country.
- the Canadian customs agent was simply confused when I presented him with a Carnet de Passage for the mini, clearly never having seen one before. 20 minutes later he managed to put all the stamps in the right places
- and finally, of course, there's Moldova, which turned the mini right around after noticing that the VIN number on my paperwork didn't actually match the one on the car.

But you are not really here for my border musings, you want pictures. So, let's have some pictures from my first day in Peru:

I started off in the border town of Tacna. I had 2 hours to explore it while waiting for my bus, and found this Cathedral (quite busy on Easter Sunday), designed by Gustave Eiffel (of tower fame, as the Lonely Planet, oh so helpfully, points out)

I've always found the juxtaposition of palm trees and European architecture a bit surprising

The arch (not a replica of the one in St. Louis) celebrates some Peruvian generals. Even though they lost the war and Tacna was under Chilean control for a while, until Chile voluntarily returned it...

This is just a crazy random sight in Tacna. For a little Peruvian city in the middle of the desert it did actually have a surprising number of green areas

And then there was this sight: an honest to goodness Bajaj tuk-tuk on the roads of Peru! Just like the ones we had in India (it occurs to me that the blog doesn't actually have any good pictures of our beasts). We did see a couple of these things in Costa Rica too, but there's more of them here, so I managed to get a picture. Before I leave this country, I must get a photograph of me behind the wheel of one!

From Tacna I had an unexciting seven hour bus ride to Arequipa, my destination for the next couple of days. The most memorable things on the journey were the immense desert outside, the woman sitting next to me, who had the worst breath imageanable, and the one hour delay we had early on, when Peruvian security forces apparently decided to prove to me that their customs and immigration facilities don't all run as seemlessly as I may have imagined earlier: here, everybody's luggage was removed from the bus and examined (with varying degrees of thoroughness - my backpack attracted no interest whatsoever). As for the rest of the passengers on board, I'm not going to say there was a bit of smuggling going on, I just found it a bit surprising that everyone had giant boxes and satchels full of childrens's toys, baby carriers, and unopened skateboard/helmet sets. The only thing I can't figure out is where could the smuggling be possibly coming from - cross-border Chile is much more expensive than Peru?

By the evening, I arrived in Arequipa, and have so far found it to be a city of interesting contrasts. On the one hand, you see the cars and city buses prowling the local streets, and the words "Third World Country" scream out of your mind. On the other hand, I walked a couple of blocks down the street from my hostel in search of food and was greeted with an unexpected variety of restaurants, eventually settling on a Turkish kebab. All the restaurants even appeared to take credit cards, so not so third world at all... On your third hand in Arequipa, you've got a smattering of colonial architecture, including some very impressive churches, nicely lit up at night, all around the center of the old city. So, all in all, Arquipa seems rather fascinating, I understand three 5,000+ meter peaks surround it, along with the 2nd deepest canyon in the world (or South America, I can't quite recall). And I did get to see a little more of the city than I had bargained for as my cab driver from the bus station tried to take me by a few of the hostels that would pay him commission instead of going directly to the one I had actually wanted. Considering that both the Lonely Planet and my hostel had warned me that this was quite likely to happen, I actually found the entire experience amusing - gave me plenty of practice for my Spanish for "No, this is not where I wanted you to go."

PS. And as a final parting note for this long seemingly rambling post, this picture really should have been in the Lauca post, but better late than never:

We haven't had anything crossing the road in a while, so here's what Chile uses to warn you of crossing vicunas... llamas too, if you want to be technical about it...

In Arica

Well, as long as I'm spending another day here in Arica, and am feeling too lazy to pull on a wetsuit and go sufing, might as well get a few more thoughts and observations about this little outpost of a town on the Northern edge of Chile.

Arica is actually a thoroughly pleasant and tranquil town. Generally, most travelers just make a brief stop here on the way to/from Peru or the Lauca National Park. The place is certainly helped by a nice quiet Sunny Days hostel, run by Ross, a New Zealander, who can provide a wealth of information about the area, rent a bike or a surfboard, give you a ride to the bus station at 6:30 in the morning, and provide a nice hostel bed, along with some of the best breakfast I've had yet. That (and the fact that I don't need to be in Cuzco for another five days) was actually the main reason for me to have stayed here an extra day - just a chance to relax (and upload pictures). As for the rest of the town? Well, it's a regular stop for cruise ships, so it's got a lot of people running around trying to convince the passengers to go along with them on a tour of the city. Not sure why you'd pay to go though as you can walk around the entire city in about an hour, and here all the highlights you´ll find:

There's a 110m high rock overlooking the city. Christ the Redeemer sits on top. Did you forget it was a Catholic country? Yesterday was Good Friday, a national holiday. A procession of people went by our hostel at night singing, holding candles, and carrying a cross...

Arica's a beach town, hugging the Pacific coastline - look out from the top of the big rock

As mentioned in the last post, the sunsets over the Pacific from the top of the rock are pretty spectacular too

There's a couple of guns stationed at the top of the rock, guarding it, I presume?

Speaking of guns, this was the scene in the middle of the city the first day I was here... Don't know the details, but this used to be either Bolivian or Peruvian territory, and I believe the soldiers were commemorating the conflict with Peru, which apparently left both sides feeling rather sore


There is, of course, a nice church in the center of town too

Arica's pretty serious about protecting your lungs too - smoking's bad, mmmkay?

Additionally, about 10km along the coastal road South of the city, there are some limestone caves created by the waves eroding the coastline, so yesterday, I picked up a bike and pedaled my way down there to have a look:

Waves splashing against the rocks on the way South

And the caves right in front of the water

And from 'it's a small world department,' it took me coming to Arica, Chile to find a most unexpected acquaintance - Tatiana, a woman, also from Moscow originally, currently residing in Connecticut and good friends with my aunt who lives in New Haven... Oh, and Tatiana's son had gone to the same school as I did back in Russia, and they know my former English teacher quite well, the one I had rather wanted to look up while back in Moscow last summer... Well, I suppose you travel long enough, you are bound to run into all kinds of fascinating people!

Well, that's about it, honestly. I'll relax here for another day today, then tomorrow, it's off to Peru! Hope the buses run on Easter Sunday... Did get a chance to upload another batch of pictures, now that I'm done with Chile: Chile in pictures.

And then I got high...

Up in the mountains, of course - what did you think I meant!? Well, actually, first, I came back down to sea level - San Pedro, in the middle of the dry desert was about 2500m above sea level, but a 12 hour overnight bus ride placed me in Arica, back at sea level, right on the Pacific coast and less than 40km South of the Peruvian border.

Arica's tranquil, but not all that interesting of a town, but the sunsets over the ocean and the cruise ships in port are pretty cool

My next destination, however, was Cuzco, Peru for the Machu Pichu trek, but that wasn't starting till the 20th, and even with a few extra days in Cuzco to get used to the altitude, I had a good 10 days to get there, so I made a sharp right turn and headed towards Bolivia to Parque Nacional Lauca - a picturesque mountainous valley residing high up in the Andes - most of the park lies at over 4,000m above sea level... Which makes for some very cold evenings!

Having experienced some fun with altitude back in Nepal last February, I figured I needed to go up slowly, so the first stop was Putre, just outside the park, and at an altitude of 3,500m. With a population of about 1,900 people it's also the biggest town near the park, and the best place to organize any sort of tours/transport. The park is apparently growing in popularity, and Putre is being compared to a budding San Pedro - a tourist oasis in the middle of the wilderness, but, let's just say, it's not quite there yet. In reality, what I found in Putre, was approximately nothing. It's a small town, with a few tour agencies and even fewer tourists. I had my own private room at my hostel because there was all of five of us staying that night.

I didn't really have much to do in Putre as it was really just an acclimtization stop on the way up, so I wondered around the town a bit

Found this rock that looks a lot like a face. Here's the Siberian version...

and read about 200 pages of my book (The Bourne Identity book is not all that similar to the movie). Talked to some travel agencies in town too... and found that it's best to be in a group, if the tours are to be affordable. That evening, I met Jes and Tiggy, a pair of Brits, and two of the others staying at my hostel, and lo and behold, it turns out they had rented a car! And were heading further up the next day, and were more than happy to take me along. This was a far better solution than paying a lot of money to a tour agency, so we made fast friends.

Next morning, it was up to Parinacota, the next town up the mountain, this one at 4397m above sea level. It was everything that Putre had been, but smaller, much smaller... and older:

This church was first built in the late 17th century and is the oldest church in Chile

This Lada may as well have been built in the 17th century and while it is still technically recognizeable as the same model Lada as the one Theo, Cyrus and I drove to Mongolia in 2006, I'm afraid this one has seen better days

Some other differences: I don't know what the exact population of Parinacota was, but it was described as '3 families,' so not much. Putre had a hostel, Parinacota had Guillermo's little hut, which was lacking heating and hot water. I had some alpaca stir fry at a tourist restaurant in Putre, we each had some alpaca soup in the only place open in the village 5km away in Parinacota. So, all in all, pretty rustic - I took a liking to it immediately. We'd eventually spend two nights there, and it was cold as advertised, but my sleeping bag was actually more than up to the challenge. Around 5 in the afternoon on the first night, Xavier materialized out of nowhere - he's a Belgian volunteer spending about 6 months in nearby Bolivia, but as he only had a 3 month visa for Bolivia, had chosen to go across to Chile for a few days to get his visa clock restarted. He didn't have a car, so had hitch-hiked his way up to Parinacota. The first evening, the four of us sat around playing cards...

The next morning, we were finally figuring we'd spent enough time acclimatizing, so it was time to head out and see the park. First stop: Lake Chungara, surrounded by a pair of 6,000+ meter volcanoes and a wide assortment of wild life:

The lake and Volcana Parinacota in the background

More flamingoes in this lake

This was the point where I started to think this place reminded me of Mongolia: not a lot of people, a seriously beat up road (albeit paved), mountains all around, and animals crossing the road right in front of your car. Admittedly, there were no llamas in Mongolia.

Upon reaching the lake, we headed off to the CONAF office, which was the local equivalent of a park ranger. The office informed us that the hiking trails we had on our map (given to us by the CONAF office in Putre) didn't exist anymore, but we were welcome to do the 1km hike right outside his cabin... We did the 1km hike... And were unsatisfied. So, we drove on a bit further around the lake, passing the Chile customs point and explaining to them that no, we weren't really going to Bolivia, and then took off for a walk across the open plains on the far side of the lake.

The lake continued to offer impressive sights

At one point there was a small tornado attempting to spin up not far from us

After finding some comfortable rocks for a brief lunch break, we decided it was time to start heading back to the car, as the clouds were starting to look a bit ominous.

On the way back to the car, we found a bit of a rain/snow/hail mixture, giving a bit of nostalgia to San Pedro a week ago, where it was so dry, you couldn't even find a cloud, much less actual precipitation. That morning we had actually noted that some of the peaks around Parinacota were a little whiter than they had been the day before, suggesting that the rain we had gotten in Parinacota overnight had actually been snow just a couple hundred meters higher up.

All this precipitation was, however, quite mild, and we were back at Guillermo's little hut in no time trying to figure out how to occupy ourselves for another evening. Xavier had moved on back towards Bolivia, and the three of us decided to warm up by firing up the gas stove that the hut came with and making our own dinner (Tiggy and Jes had come prepared with rice and vegetables to stir fry). The stir fry was both excellent and warm enough to make the cabin somewhat less freezing.

All along, the plan had been for the next day to be the last day up on the mountain. However, we had planned to climb the nearby 5,000m peak of Guaneguane, assuming that a few days at 4,500m would be plenty for acclimatization needed to reach 5,000m. Jes and I were feeling OK, however, Tiggy had returned from our Lake Chungara excursion with a headache, so we were starting to have some doubts as to whether or not going up higher was a good idea. And then, the morning arrived and greeted us with this:

The prior two days had both started with clear blue skies in the morning, clouds rolling in by the middle of the day, and rain starting by late afternoon...

The inclement weather seemed like a sign, so we packed up, said our chiao's to Guillermo and headed for warmer cimates back down at sea level. But it was too soon to head all the way down just yet, so we made a couple more stops along the way:

A thermal bath/hot spring just above Putre, providing a very welcome opportunity to soak in some hot mineral water, with the cold air surrounding us. Very much like the onsens back in Japan actually...

The final stop on the way down was at Eco Truly, a Hare Krishna temple/farm on the way down to Arica.

We had been hoping for some vegetarian lunch their signs had been advertising, unfortunately we were too early, so instead got a brief tour of the temple and the farm and a quick explanation of what it is that they do there. Unfortunately, the explanation was in Spanish, so some of the more intricate details were lost on me... The major points did involve 'Love everybody, including all the animals,' strict vegetarianism, bordering on being vegan (no eggs, but they can drink some milk), and a poster of a fat Statue of Liberty holding up a hamburger instead of the torch, which, I think, was supposed to symbolize something about the consumerist American society which didn't love animals, and made hamburgers of them instead. The girl giving us the tour clearly found the poster quite amusing. I did too, actually, even if I am not planning to give up meat any time soon (excellent fish dinner back in Arica that evening...). The girl also showed us the temple (which included a yoga studio) and sang the Hare Krishna song for us... She's a good singer, even if I don't have any particular intention of joining her religion. The three of us quickly agreed that spending a week on their farm would be extremely pleasant and relaxing. Any more than that and you would go insane out of boredom. The girl giving us the tour had been there three years... We met an Australian girl at the hot springs who was going to volunteer at the farm - not sure for how long, but probably longer than a week... so, uhmm, good luck with that...

Now, I'm back at the beach in Arica, enjoying the warmth, the sunshine, and the availability of internet (just uploaded a bunch more Argentina pictures here). Will possibly try for a little surfing tomorrow, before crossing over to Peru on Sunday and heading for Arequipa for a couple of days before finally making my way up to Cuzco by the 15th of April. April 20th, start trekking towards Machu Pichu!

It's the driest place on Earth

Really? I do kind of want to know how exactly they keep track of these things. Well, the Sahara desert has had 3cm of rain in the past century, while the Atacama has had 2.75 - driest place on Earth! Ok, it's probably a little more scientific than that... Either way, the Atacama desert is where I headed after Santiago. I didn't have much of a plan starting out, so I just took a bus to the town of Antafagasta and figured I'd find my way from there. What I found in Antofagasta was a Radisson on the beach, one hostel, which was booked for the next week solid, and not a lot of tourists...

On to Plan B: Pachamamabybus is a tour company that does bus tours starting from Santiago and heading up to San Pedro de Atacama. They had left Santiago a few days ago, but I knew they were scheduled to be in Antofagasta that day, so after 20 frustrating minutes trying to figure out how to make a long distance phone call from a Chilean pay phone, I had learned that the bus had not left Antofagasta yet, and they'd be more than happy to come pick me up for the ride to San Pedro, so all of a sudden, I had all kinds of plans for the Atacama desert.

Our first stop was at a monument (a.k.a. rock) marking the Tropic of Capricorn. I spent some time trying to decide what exactly the significance of the Tropic of Capricorn might be, but my answers weren't terribly scientific

So instead I climbed on top of the rock for a picture

Next stop: Baquedano, home of a railway museum/graveyard

Some of these trains are over 100 years old, but it's so dry here, that there's absolutely no rust or decomposition

And now we entered Salar de Atacama - the Atacama Salt Flat, the 3rd biggest salt flat in the world, behind the Salt Lake in Utah and the one right across the border in Bolivia

In the middle of the Salt Flat, there's a few lagoons, where all the wildlife congregates. Specifically, three different types of flamingoes

The next day, we were in San Pedro and headed out to the nearby Valle de Luna (Moon Valley because, well, it doesn't look like anything you'd normally see on Earth). This is either a broken heart or the face of T-Rex... Also, that's not snow around it - that's actually salt

And pretty soon we were treated to a spectacular sunset. The nearby mountains are all salt formations, while the ones in the back are the Andes

Next on the agenda: rent bikes and sandboards, ride out to Valle de Muerte (Death Valley - funny story: it was actually called the March Valley, but the Spanish words for March and Death are quite similar, and the Frenchman who named it March valley didn't pronounce the word correctly... so Death Valley was born) and go sandboarding. Sandboarding is basically snowboarding on sand. Except you have a much smaller board and a lot more traction. I miss snowboarding...

And then at 3:52AM this morning, my alarm went off, so I could roll out of bed, pull on all the layers of clothing I had in my bag, and go off on a tour of the El Tatio Geysers, which lie at an elevation of 4300m, making them the highest geyser field in the world. We got their for sunrise at 6AM. Temperature at 6AM at elevation of 4300m: about -8 Celsius. Temperature in San Pedro when we got back in time for lunch? Probaby around +32 Celsius...

All the geysers steam. Some send little spurts of boling hot water up too. Nothing quite as impressive as Old Faithful in Yellowstone, I hear...

And that is the end of my Atacama adventure as tonight I'm getting on a bus to Arica, right on the Peruvian border, where I plan to spend a few more days before crossing over and heading for Cusco and Machu Pichu. Maybe I'll even see a cloud one of these days - such things do not happen in the Atacama.

Valparaiso y Santiago

I spent a few days in Santiago, I honestly wasn't finding it all that interesting - it was just another big South American city - granted a much better organized than most, but in the end, most of the attractions involve churches and monuments commemorating revolutionary leaders... My favorite attractions of the city actually were the food (I managed to have Thai, Chinese, sushi, and, well, pizza) and the odd music tastes the locals have - on my first night in town, Iron Maiden was holding a concert... I didn't even know Iron Maiden was still performing. The next night was a Radiohead concert - that I would have actually enjoyed seeing.

The food and the music weren't enough to hold my attention though, so I started branching out from the town. Step one, a day trip to the Santa Rita winery. Now, Tim and I had visited a few wineries back in Mendoza - this one blew them all away. Whereas in Mendoza they generally focus on making wine and let some tourists come in for a look, the guys in Santa Rita have created a bona fide tourist attraction that happens to also produce something like 120 million bottles of wine a year.

The Santa Rita courtyard

So, I had lunch there, did a tour, and visited the museum. Getting to the winery wasn't quite as easy as in Mendoza: 40 minutes on a train, another 15 on a bus, and a 10 minute walk from the front gate to the actual winery. By the time I had gotten there, I was reasonably certain I was the first person to have reached the place without an organized tour (this did cut the cost by some $50 of course). The people at the winery seemed to pick up on this also and being the friendly Chileans that they are offered me a ride back into town on the employee shuttle bus...

The next day, I packed up my bags, and headed to the coast, to the town of Valparaiso. The entire town is a UNESCO World Heritage site, so I figured it was definitely worth a weekend trip. I don't know much about the UNESCO criteria, but I did find Valparaiso a very pleasant and relaxing destination for a weekend getaway. The city is generally famous for a few things:

Being built on a side of a steep hill, and the ascenseur's (elevators) they've built all over town to simplify the process of getting up the hill

The beautiful views of the bay from the tops of the hills. The city also serves as a major port - both commercial and for cruise ships. I met a few people at my hostel who were there waiting for their cruise ship that was delayed a couple days coming around Cape Horn


And the graffiti that covers most of the town, but not the 'East Side Rulz' we might be used to back home, but beautifully artistic designs. Graffiti is legal here and is usually done by artists

Ok, some of it was also pretty funny...

After Valparaiso, I came back to Santiago, just in time to witness the entire city celebrating its national team's victory over Peru in a World Cup qualifying match. I wasn't leaving for another day, so I had a chance to scout Santiago for a few interesting sites too:

A church juxtaposed next to glass-covered modern office building makes for a cool reflection shot

Fountains in front of the Presidential palace. If this were the Presidential Palace in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, I wouldn't have been allowed to take this picture... just a random thought...

And a bit of graffiti here with a slightly more political angle

And after seeing all that (and determining that I couldn't get anything resembling an affordable ticket to Easter island), I headed out of Santiago, on my way up North towards Machu Pichu and Peru. More on the Chilean North coming soon to a post near you.