The Earth + Nat

Cochabamba ended up being a lot like Sucre - a lot of things, but not that much to do. There's only a couple of attractions in the city itself, but it's a good place to get to a bunch of national parks, which I will get to in another post.  First one I went to was the big Jesus statue on a hill overlooking town. Apparently larger than Rio de Janeiro's Jesus, it sits atop a flight of 2,000 stairs carved into the hill. I unwisely decided to wear trousers instead of shorts which resulted in me spending a lot of time standing still trying to catch my breath in the thin air. Jesus turned out to be a bit odd - I though his face looked like an elf with the outrageous cheekbones and jawline. You can climb up inside the redeemer but only on Sundays, so our Wednesday visit was a little anticlimactic. And Jesus said "I fed the hungry a fish THIS BIG!" The other main spot is the central market. This place is enormous. According to some locals I met on a bus, the to...

Somehow I ended up spending a week in this town and I am still not sure why. I suppose part of it was letting my shell shocked body recover from the wild time it had in Potosi, part of it was a little R&R after hopping from place to place with 3 days or less per location for a few weeks, part of it was to get more used to the altitude which was still a nagging problem. Still, this really wasn't a very exciting town. Charming, yes. Pretty, absolutely. But fun? Weeelll.... The road to the Mirador Though this is the officially the capital of Bolivia, only the Supreme court actually resides here, the president and congreso  are in La Paz. The whole town is a vision of white walls and terracotta roofs, which you can get a great view of from the Mirador de la Recoleta, a nunnery perched on top of a steep hill. The central market is good fun, not the biggest market in town but a good spot to sit down with a newspaper while about 20 ladies vy for the chance to make you a deli...

Hola from Bolivia! I am finally in my third new country on this trip, one of the only landlocked nations in the Americas and home to some of the highest cities in the world. My first stop is Potosí, the highest of the bunch. At 4,000m above sea level, this town is tough to get to grips with but well worth the effort. For starters, this town is much older than anything I have seen so far. While it is true that Santiago and La Serena were set up earlier, they didn't see much action until later in their history. By contrast, Potosí was a thriving town from the day it was founded by the Spanish due to the presence of silver in the mountain overlooking the town, appropriately named Cerro Rico (rich hill), and the Incas were in the area long before that for the same reason. Evidence of those glory days is all around in the form of churches. There are at least 30 large churches or cathedrals in the city centre alone, and some of them show a fascinating fusion of Catholic tradition and n...

My trip to La Serena was the product of my constantly changing travel plans. There are so many places on both sides of the Andes that I want to visit, and originally I wanted to return to Mendoza after Valparaiso and head north through Argentina. However, the buses in Chile are much cheaper, so that made my choice easy. Then the bus from Santiago to the desert town of San Pedro de Atacama was 25 hours long, which was a bit too much for me, so after looking for places to break it up I settled on this sleepy coastal town. Now, when I booked, I was told there was hiking to be done. On this I was grossly misinformed. So what I ended up seeing was even more Penguins! The penguins here are Humboldt Penguins, an endangered species which are much harder to find than the Magellan Penguins in Puerto Madryn. Getting there involved a crazy bus trip across a desolate, lunar landscape, then a long ride in a boat to a group of 3 islands. We only saw about 30 penguins but they were very active thi...

So my time in Patagonia was not exactly what I had in mind. I had hoped to go down to the end of the world at Tierra Del Fuego, see the Perito Moreno glacier crash down into Lago Argentino at El Calafate, and take the classic touristy snaps with the sharp peaks of the Torres del Paine. Unfortunately, it was not to be. The thing about Patagonia is that it's very expensive. I knew it wouldn't be cheap, but I hadn't realised just how costly it would be. Transport is a huge factor, with long, expensive overnight buses needed to get to new places. When you get there, you also normally need to get buses or rentals to the attractions. Add to that the expense of staying in what is basically a string of tourist towns, and you're looking at a serious bill before you've even seen anything. Get a room you two That said, I did have a fantastic time in the bits I could see. I never thought I would see as many penguins in 5 lifetimes as I did in Puerto Madryn in one after...

One thing I have learned on the road through Chile is that they really don't speak Spanish. They speak Chileno, which looks and sounds like it might be Spanish, only it's been dropped on the floor and kicked around a bit and left behind the couch until it's nigh incomprehensible. Chile is to Spanish like New Zealand is to English. For starters, they speak really really fast. Not only that, a lot of them kind of speak into their lips, fudging the sounds. To make things even harder, they don't pronounce the ends of most words. For example, a simple sentence in regular Spanish like " Tu eres de que pais?"  (which country are you from?), sounds like " Tu'ere de que pai", which to grommits like me, sounds like nonsense. Most of them also have no idea how to speak in a 'neutral' accent, so if you ask them to repeat, you just get the same gibberish, at the same speed. To compound this, they chop in an unbelievable amount of slang: Huevo...