Ok, so it's a bit late to start this after 12 weeks and 24 new entries in my passport, but here it is - the first part of my little East African Adventure, the second time round (I really had to come back after spending all of summer 2009 just hanging out at Stilts in Diani Beach, Kenya). As a result, I'm going to split this first entry into a few separate pieces.
Anyway, here's the basic itinerary and plans I had before coming:
- 14th July, leave Edinburgh for Rwanda
- 15th to 31st July, hang out in Rwanda. Try to figure out some things about why the genocide happened, how the country has managed to progress so far to the stage it's at now, and go gorilla tracking and hiking in the Virungas.
- 31st July to 9th August, go to Kenya, base myself at Stilts and be the driver for a safari in Tsavo.
- 9th to 30th August, go to Ethiopia, see Erta Ale (lava lake), hike in the Simiens and check out the tourist industry to see if it'd be sensible to start another Condortrekkers-style non-profit trekking company there, and have a look at some of the ancient Ethiopian ruins and rock-hewn churches.
- 30th August to 22nd November, base myself at Stilts and do some trips from there. Maybe go to Jinja, Uganda for white-water rafting, maybe try to climb Mount Kenya (including rock climb to the true summit, not the walkers' summit), go to Zanzibar, Tanzania, maybe check out the flamingos at Lake Nakuru, and generally just try to meet people at Stilts with good ideas and join up with them.
All the plans kind of changed on about 6th August though. More on that in the next post. For now I'll start at the beginning.
When I arrived in Kigali, Rwanda, at about 2am on 15th July, it turned out that the hostel I was staying in does not in fact have the advertised 24h reception, and I had to sleep on the sofa in reception. They were really friendly and apologetic in the morning, gave me the free breakfast anyway, and the tour group that was organised from the hostel (Discover Rwanda) told me to come along and play football with them against some orphans. So I did.
I thought I'd hang out with the Discover Rwanda people for a bit longer when they said I could come with them to visit some of the important genocide museums and meet a student survivor group and just pay costs. Considering they also had a Rwandan volunteer guide who was 4 when it all kicked off, I thought this could give me a valuable insight with a pretty unique opportunity to ask questions. I won't go into details on genocide stuff, just check out the Wikipedia page if you want the nasty facts:
http:\\en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide
With the Discover Rwanda guys I also went on a quick safari in Akagera National Park, and for a quick trip to Kibuye to see Lake Kivu. I mainly just stuck around in Kigali with other backpackers in the hostel, went to the genocide memorial a couple of times (an externally curated museum that tries to be as unbiased as possible in Rwanda, which means it basically just doesn't mention the RPF who now rule the country...) and generally just tried to get myself a good picture of how and why the country has managed to become by far the most prosperous-feeling East African country.
Essay time, you're welcome to ignore the rest of this post - it's just been done for me to organise my thoughts.
In the end, about a week of my time was spent making the following conclusion - (His Excellence[!]) Paul Kagame is an all-powerful dictator who actually wants to do good for the country. I was struck when getting buses through the countryside that almost all the houses seemed to be at least weatherproof (very much not the case in Kenya), even though loads of NGO workers thought they were absolutely awful because they were still overcrowded. I read a paper and laughed out loud when I got to the opinions section and every single one explicitly applauded the government or Kagame himself. Reading more of it I realised the press freedom was poor, and I sent an email home saying the press freedom was what I expected in Venezuela, where Hugo Chavez is mental and shuts down TV stations that criticise him - turns out it's much worse than Venezuela, slap bang between Cuba and China, about 8th worst in the world. Political freedom is also awful, but economic freedom to invest is great, so people can pump money in easily and the country develops at a phenomenal rate.
Rwanda has had loads of cash and development work as aid since 1994, the intercity roads and main roads within cities are all excellent, and more importantly they are exceptionally well protected from erosion (useful in a hilly country, and to be expected of Kagame's long-term strategies - he doesn't even let NGO's in if they don't register and prove themselves to be actually beneficial [or try to help people he doesn't like, as I found out when reading James Orbinski's An Imperfect Offering). Interestingly, however, Rwanda is trying to be fully independent of aid money by 2020, and that was just one of the many ways they show themselves to be fiercely independence-minded; the government blames France, Belgium and the UN (as well as pretty much everyone else) for the genocide happening, and for it lasting so long and gaining so much momentum (to be fair, they do kind of have a point).
The main thing is though, loads of African countries have had tons of aid. And many of them are, frankly, crap. I mean that in the way that a large chunk of the populations would have no access to clean water, weatherproof shelter, or adequate food for long-term survival. The only way Rwanda does so well is because Kagame hates corruption, and he has been either president or puppet master for 17 years.
Having come to the conclusion that Kagame was probably/hopefully a benevolent dictator (which happened to be the exact words I read in an article in the Telegraph a day or two after deciding this - see http://tinyurl.com/KagameTelegraph), the next thing was to work out what happens if/when he stops running the show. From the sounds of it, he's planning on officially stepping down in 2015 or at the 2017 election, but I'm really not convinced he trusts anyone to actually do a good job, and I would be surprised if he doesn't try to do a Putin. Interestingly, through an Aussie girl called Marissa who spent much of her time trying to convince me to go to the Congo, I met a guy who works in the presidential office who gave the good news that from next year the political succession is going to be planned, and he was suggesting that political freedom will be opened up significantly. While Kagame's ideal Rwanda is based on Singapore, I think his main target was to get the economy and future development sorted so that normal freedoms could be introduced without ruining everything (presumably some people didn't like being displaced to put a business park in and stuff like that, and if they didn't move he would have just disappeared them while there are fewer basic freedoms, along with a bunch of beggars because he doesn't like them).
Still, the main conclusion from Rwanda is that it's an incredibly successful story of African development, and that that's entirely down to Kagame. He's also trying to make sure another genocide is impossible, for example by outlawing the use of Hutu and Tutsi as racial identifiers (which seemed to have been more like economic identifiers at one point anyway), although there does still seem to be a lot of simmering tension, as demonstrated by a grenade that was thrown at the memorial centre earlier this year.
Has to be said, Rwanda was a weird type of holiday!
Edit: While I started writing this on Sun 21st August, it was posted on Wed 5th October, which is when the 12 weeks and 24 passport entries bit was accurate.
Sunday, 21 August 2011
Friday, 1 October 2010
Day 101 - More Climbing to Coup Attempt
Ok, I got back to the UK on day 94 and didn't bother updating, and the coup attempt wasn't until day 99, so it's all good!
Nienke and I decided to bugger off to either Cuenca or Baños the next day, and eventually we found out going to both meant loads of travelling and Cuenca was much easier to get to on a bus, so we went there. We basically just chilled out for 3 days (I slept a LOT, and was still eating enough to make up for all the exercise), met up with Nienke's cabinmate from the Galapagos (Angela) by chance in a chocolate shop, and found a good restaurant that has a salsa band on our final night. I nearly had cuy from a street food person, but they wanted $15 and it didn't look that appetising, so I thought I'd save my money. I was also feeling a bit lacking in karaoke, but Rafael Correa has recently imposed a new law that shuts the bars at midnight during the week (and properly closes them on Sundays) so we couldn't really get both that and salsa in. We headed back to Guayaquil on the Thursday, and Floridan Tony made his amazing chicken wing recipe when we got there (having brought caipirovska ingredients - we thought we should bring something! :D). By the end of the evening my plate was almost covered in bones and I was a happy man!
The next morning was day 93, and time to leave. Nienke was getting a train to Sibambe for the Devil's Nose train ride so because the bus station and airport are right beside each other she came along to keep me company until I went through security. The airport tax was a little more than I'd been told it was, so I didn't have enough money for a coffee, meaning I now owe her a beer next time I see her! Anyway, got the flight to Miami ok without a single cent left, when I got there it was pouring so I couldn't go to the beach and I had an argument with someone in a Pizza Hut about prices not including taxes. Having got up early it was probably about time to sleep when I got on the BA flight to London, but I stayed awake with the films and just waited til I could get some nice cheese back home. And I did, for the first time in over 3 months. :)
Since I arrived back in Britain, I've moved into the new house in Oxford, slept loads, ate even more and still not got over my ridiculous appetite, so I'm thinking I'll head to the doctor to see if it's something to worry about (I've got a medic telling me I must have absorption issues or something to be able to eat so much). Ecuador also flared up massively on day 99, with its neighbours closing its borders after the police force nearly killed the president with tear gas then blockaded him into his hospital (they were pissed off about austerity measures meaning their benefits were reduced). The army got him out by shooting at the police after 10h of what he called kidnap, and he said the whole thing amounted to an attempted coup. The police and bits of the armed forces blocked most major roads and closed the international airports, meaning Angela possibly wasn't able to get to New Zealand on time and may well have had to wait for an extra 17 days. It's probably a good thing I got out when I did, there were reports of massively increased mugging and looting rates.
And I've been telling everyone Ecuador was safe...
Day 82 was very much a day off, looking at other volcanoes to climb before going to the football. I realised Sangay was too remote (it's a minimum of a 5 day trek, and I didn't have time), but decided I fancied climbing Chimborazo instead - it's the point furthest from the centre of the Earth and the highest point in Ecuador or anywhere in the Americas north of it. Couldn't get anything booked up immediately, and went off to the football that evening with Michael and Thomas from the Cotopaxi hike. We were watching La Liga (the team from Quito that won their version of the UEFA Cup then the Super Cup to be crowned South American champions the Wednesday previously) against Universidad Catholica, also from Quito. La Liga won 1-0, and the atmosphere wasn't exactly what we were hoping for because La Liga weren't really as interested as they should have been, but it was still my first match in about 10 years and it was a good bit of fun. Michael and I also decided we wanted to do some more climbing, and Guagua Pichincha sounded good when Thomas' Spanish teacher told us where to go from. Later that night Michael said his wife wasn't keen on him doing more climbing that week because she wanted to actually see him, so I thought I'd bum about and hang around at the top of Rucu again or something for acclimatisation before booking Chimbo.
The next morning Michael called, his wife had got him out of bed early and told him he could still go climbing up Guagua (pronouned 'wah wah', Quichua/Quechua for baby - it erupted and covered Quito in ash in 1999), but not Chimborazo. We met up at around 10, got to a village called Lloa a bit before midday and started walking. It didn't look too far, and the guy who'd told us the route said it was 4h up, so we were kind of surprised when 3h later we were only just leaving the road and it did take us almost 4h to get to the top. It was cloudy, a bit cold, and yet again I was in shorts (but I had prepared this time and brought a jumper!). I also found out Michael rowed in the Olympics for Norway in Seoul 1988 and has a world championships medal to boot. No pressure on me then... However, we eventually made it, both pretty tired, to what we thought was the top, but to be honest there's a ridge along the edge of the crater, and we could only ever see one other peak (which looked a tiny bit lower, but not much). It does now seem (from Google Earth) that we did get to the proper summit at 4784m, and it also seems like the walk was a LOT further than planned. We'd thought it was maybe 1000m or so of vertical to the summit from Lloa, but it turns out it was more like 1750m, and the horizontal distance looks like it's about 14km each way (although we hitched for the last 5-6km). Still, not quite the simple little acclimatisation wander about that I'd been hoping for.
That night I got back to La Mariscal (dodgy area of Quito where all the hostels and tour agencies are) and managed to book up my Chimborazo tour for $40 less than expected (but still $310, and I was the only client). It was booked for the Thurs/Fri, with the plan being to meet Payal and Tony from Kenya in Guayaquil for a beach trip immediately after. This left the Wednesday free, so I took the agency up on their offer of a $5 hostal a bit further south and closer to the volcano, which was also at a slightly higher altitude of about 3200m - all the better for acclimatisation! I did have to grab a bus at 7 the next morning though, meaning no going out and meeting up with Marie (French Belgian who slept on our couch after my first 1 day trek in Sucre!).
Day 84 came, and I got to the cheap (and half price) hostel where I'd paid for a shared 2 person dorm and got a double bed, before realising I had absolutely nothing to do, so I joined up with a cycling tour for Cotopaxi about two or three minutes before the bus left (the hostel was owned by the tour company, and that's where they keep the bikes). This meant going to Cotopaxi for the third time in my life, climbing up to the refuge again, having a look at the glacier, walking back down to the car park and then cycling down from there (4500m) to Lago Limpiopungo (3800m), all for $35 plus another 10 for park entry. Having paid for this, I realised it would be a bit dull compared to death road, so when we got to the car park I asked if I could cycle down from the refuge instead. I was wearing shorts, and there was a bit of a blizzard going on, but thankfully an English guy leant me some waterproof trousers to keep me warm. The guide said if I could get the bike up there, we could cycle down, so I grabbed one, stuck it on my shoulders, and started hiking while everyone else (about 12-15 tourists) decided I was utterly insane.
After getting to the refuge (not last, despite the bike), the guide who was taking the group to the glacier asked me to be an auxiliary guide for him and tell him if people were having problems or whatever because I'd just climbed the mountain and was finding the altitude really easy, so I ended up half-carrying an English girl up to the glacier, and then when she started suffering from the altitude up there I pretty much carried her down with the help of an Israeli girl (ok, so her feet were on the ground, but I was supporting a very significant proportion of her weight the vast majority of the time! Thankfully she was only wee). We got back to the refuge, had some food, then the stupid part came around - cycling down. Luckily all the snow and ice (which normally isn't there) meant that the volcanic ash path was a little harder than normal and less dangerous for a bike, but it also meant a lot of the large rocks were less visible. I tried to go all the way from the top on the bike but it was just too steep at the very top (over 30°, maybe even approaching 40°) and I couldn't control the bike or sit far enough back to let me use the front brakes reliably without immediately pitching forward and risking a roll over the handlebars. I walked down about 20-30m vertically to a slightly flatter bit, then went very very slowly from there. Needless to say, when doing something so stupid and not being great on a bike (the guide who also brought a bike just went at a decent speed with his back wheel locked the whole way), I did fall over. I got to just in front of a rock I hadn't seen, tried to turn the wheel to get out of its way, then the front wheel dug in and the whole bike went straight over it, dumping me (after falling off in the air and being catapulted from the bike) on my back onto the nice soft ash. Having realised there was absolutely no damage to me I just burst out laughing, got back on, and got down to the car park after most of the people who had just walked it. Some people decided cycling down the road was too dangerous for them (ahem...), and got back on the bus, but about 6-8 other people got bikes and started cycling down. I got to the front reasonably quickly with my recent death road experience making me quite up for a stupidly fast downhill cycle ride when the surface is relatively safe, and when I got to the end of the proper downhill bit I stopped to see who was behind me. After about 10-15s the guide caught me up, then we waited for AGES to see who else was there. That took over 10min. Apparently they'd been stopping for photos too much (I already had better ones than I could get on an overcast, snowy day) and one guy had waved for the camera just before a pretty dramatic crash. Still, people eventually caught up, we got to the lake, put the bikes back on the car and I finally realised that my bike was a good couple of kilograms heavier than anyone else's. Gracias Señor Guia!
Back to the hostel, I grabbed a jacuzzi and ate as much as I could to stock up for Chimborazo. The next day I met my guide, Jaime, and we picked his mate up from Latacunga and I found out I was going to kind of have a second guide for free! Alex used to guide in Ecuador, then got married to a half-Scottish girl (whose dad speaks Doric) and now lives in Australia, and did a bit of guiding there. Anyway, I could chat to him in English, which I thought might be kind of handy in my more tired moments. We didn't bother with any more glacier training, so it was really just a rest/eat day before getting up at 10pm to go climbing, from the lower of the two huts (4800m) because the wind was making the higher one a bit more dangerous - rocks fall when the mountain warms up during the day or when it's windy, so we'd take a route along a ridge to avoid them more.
We got up, and finally left the hut about 20min late at around 11:20pm. Before we even reached the ridge, Alex said he was struggling with altitude, and when his watch with the altimeter said he'd reached 5000m he gave up. I'm pretty glad he was willing to go back on his own (and that he was ok when we got back down in the morning!), because otherwise I would have made him pay for my whole climbing trip since I had paid to have a private tour! Anyway, Jaime and I carried on, and it seemed to be taking a shockingly long time to reach the glacier. I wasn't sure if this was just us moving slowly, or if the glacier was much higher than I'd expected, but it now seems to be a combination of both (I don't think we got to constant snow until about 5500m, and Google Earth seems to confirm this). A lot of this distance was using crampons because there was a little bit of ice around, and using crampons on a mainly rocky surface is not easy! It basically means you don't really know which way your foot will want to fall because you don't know if one spike is going to hit a raised bit of rock or fall through the gaps. Anyway, after a lot of bits where it was 'one slip and we die if the person at the other end of the rope gets dragged with you', we finally got up to the glacier proper. There were loads of bits of very slow walking (I think I might have been physically tired before starting, and I knew all too well that I couldn't do a Cotopaxi pace the whole way up!) but then I'd get a third or fourth wind and have a good thirty minutes to an hour. While one of these was happening (4-4:45am) on the glacier, I was feeling great until I made a wee mistake... I dropped my ice axe because my mittens (which were on over the top of my ski gloves) didn't let me grip the axe well, and it slid a LONG way down the glacier, way out of sight and the range of the head torches. After a few minutes of discussing what to do (could we even keep going? I was probably tired enough by this point to actually cry if we couldn't) we decided I'd take Jaime's second ice axe, which was his own personal equipment, but we'd tie it to me and if I lost it he'd kill me. We kept going, and the great energy I'd had for the previous 45min was gone, so it was slow.
All the way up from then on was hard. From around 6000m onwards I was really feeling the altitude, and every 10-20 steps I would have to stop, bend over on my ice axe and just pant for a bit. My eyes closed every time, and to be honest I probably got a few seconds of sleep each time (to make up for the little over 2h I got in the refuge I guess), but Jaime just shouted 'vamos' at me and I opened my eyes (somehow) and started walking again. He also shouted 'bajamos' (let's go down) at me a few times, but I kept saying no and kept walking because it looked like we were near the top. Most of the glacier is just a walk up a 30-45° incline in not especially hard snow, and if you venture off the not-very-beaten path you sink in up to your knee, or if your ice axe unexpectedly sinks in to the handle you fall over. Or if the guide yanks on the rope you might fall over. Or if the wind catches you (it was VERY strong, and coming straight from the summit!) you might fall over. Or you might just hit a patch of snow that's so loose that your crampons slip and you fall over. Guess what happened to me somewhere between 50-100 times on the hike! Anyway, the top of the first summit is nicely rounded, so for about the last 1-2h it looked like I was only 50-100m from the top. We probably passed 6000m around dawn, and finally reached the first summit at maybe around 7:45am. I was in a bad way but still remembered to get a photo (before the camera battery died from the cold) of me looking freezing, clutching an ice axe but managing to stand. I then sat down, ate chocolate and discovered ALL of my water was frozen and inaccessible. I didn't even remember to have a proper look round other than at the other summit (a view that will haunt me until I get there), and that was just because the guide pointed it out and said we couldn't go there because it was too late and big rocks would start falling on us on the way down. I was pretty glad of this, because it looked like it was about a kilometre away (on relatively flat ground), and at that altitude (the full summit is either 6310m according to Ecuadorians, or 6268m according to Wikipedia, and Jaime said we were about 42m lower than the main summit with about a 50m drop between them) and my ridiculous level of exhaustion and coldness I really didn't think I could do it. So we headed back down, with me having made it to a summit well over 6000m and thinking if I didn't have a guide with me I would have already fallen asleep and died of exposure.
The way down was quite a lot quicker than the way up, mainly because it was so steep. Cotopaxi and many other mountains where most of the route is a fairly shallow gradient (like Guagua) take about half as much time to get down as they do to get up, so I was kind of surprised to be finishing up the glacier bit after only about an hour. We also had a very happy moment when we spotted my ice axe! Jaime saw it first, and that saved me $120 in replacement fees. This led to me telling him in Riobamba later that if he found me a cash machine he'd get a decent tip. Anyway, we were racing down the mountain to try to avoid the sun getting onto the rocky bit and making the bigger rocks heat up and break off, but I was still knackered so I was trying to stop as often as possible (which usually meant somewhere behind a big drop so that rocks would fly straight over us). At one point, still pretty much on the ridge, I decided to try my water again, and found that squeezing the bottle really hard made the ice at the top explode out! A big ice cube landed about 5m from me after a surprisingly long time in the air, and I could drink again! It woke me up a bit, but I still had very little energy. On the rocky bit you just saw rocks rolling down at scary speeds (probably 20-30mph), and we had to run between ridges and frozen waterfalls a number of times, with crampons still on and loose rocks making me fall over even more. The adrenaline was exhausting, and it was pretty damn scary, but eventually we made it down to the top refuge (5000m). I sat down to take my harness off, started talking to some Ecuadorians and just stayed for ages while Jaime went on down to the bottom. Eventually I got myself back up and walked on after maybe 20-30min, so by the time I got back to the refuge at the bottom I'd been on the mountain for a full 12h. I just sat down and finished my chocolate, then lay back in the shade with no possibility of me getting up for quite a while. Jaime and Alex started joking about what I'd been like at the top, and I was just happy that I'd made it up and down, and not killed myself doing it! I went into the refuge for the passport stamp, and the guy was impressed enough that I'd made it to a summit that he gave me the full summit stamp too. The other group that was climbing that day turned back, but I've got no idea when because they'd left the refuge by the time we got down there.
Anyway, the Friday afternoon was a basic affair of driving to Riobamba, giving Jaime a tip and jumping on a bus to Guayaquil to meet Payal and Tony! They were pretty amazed to see me again after Kenya, since they'd buggered off to Ecuador, but we grabbed a couple of beers and had a tasty BBQ. The next day we got up at 5, left at 6 and got their mate Tony (from Florida, world rodeo champion 1972, just imagine the southern accent!) to drive us to the beach at Ayampe. Beers were opened at 8am, and when we got there an hour or so later we found out Nienke (met her in Sucre) was already there, although the last I'd said to her we were expecting to arrive in the late afternoon because I wasn't expecting to get to Guayaquil so quickly. Anyway, there was more morning beer, a lunch in Puerto Lopez (a neighbouring beach) with a coconut I found on a tree and opened with a knife, back to Ayampe for an afternoon siesta and then out to Montañita that evening for a bit of a party. I was pretty much too tired to dance for a change. The next day we hung about on Ayampe until check out before going to another beach for the afternoon, and there was a little bit more sun than I thought there was. Still, it was great to get a properly relaxing weekend after 8 days of volcano climbing, and I did manage to get from somewhere over 6200m to under the sea in less than 36h!
The next morning was day 93, and time to leave. Nienke was getting a train to Sibambe for the Devil's Nose train ride so because the bus station and airport are right beside each other she came along to keep me company until I went through security. The airport tax was a little more than I'd been told it was, so I didn't have enough money for a coffee, meaning I now owe her a beer next time I see her! Anyway, got the flight to Miami ok without a single cent left, when I got there it was pouring so I couldn't go to the beach and I had an argument with someone in a Pizza Hut about prices not including taxes. Having got up early it was probably about time to sleep when I got on the BA flight to London, but I stayed awake with the films and just waited til I could get some nice cheese back home. And I did, for the first time in over 3 months. :)
Since I arrived back in Britain, I've moved into the new house in Oxford, slept loads, ate even more and still not got over my ridiculous appetite, so I'm thinking I'll head to the doctor to see if it's something to worry about (I've got a medic telling me I must have absorption issues or something to be able to eat so much). Ecuador also flared up massively on day 99, with its neighbours closing its borders after the police force nearly killed the president with tear gas then blockaded him into his hospital (they were pissed off about austerity measures meaning their benefits were reduced). The army got him out by shooting at the police after 10h of what he called kidnap, and he said the whole thing amounted to an attempted coup. The police and bits of the armed forces blocked most major roads and closed the international airports, meaning Angela possibly wasn't able to get to New Zealand on time and may well have had to wait for an extra 17 days. It's probably a good thing I got out when I did, there were reports of massively increased mugging and looting rates.
And I've been telling everyone Ecuador was safe...
Sunday, 12 September 2010
Day 81 - Death Road to the Summit of Cotopaxi
Woo!! Mission accomplished! Cotopaxi has been on the cards ever since Ecuador 3 years ago. More later.
I left Uyuni as planned on day 69, getting the bumpiest and shakiest night bus ever (the road was basically a 100km washboard for the first 4h, meaning I only got about 4h sleep in total). I arrived in La Paz at about 7am, got to Adventure Brew Hostel - they've got a microbrewery and they're right beside the station, so 60Bs (GBP6 per night including a free beer) seemed acceptable considering the number of recommendations I'd had for it. Anyway, I got there, dumped my stuff, went down to ask about laundry and bumped into Hayden, Claire and Dominic who I'd met in Sucre a few times. They gave me free breakfast (it was all you can eat pancakes), and said they were doing Death Road that day, leaving pretty damn soon. I thought I might as well join them, so went to cycle down the most dangerous road in the world when I was sleep deprived, wearing completely the wrong clothes, and it just happened to be snowing at the top of it. Also, when we got to the top, it turned out they'd forgotten to grab extra knee/shin pads for me when they nipped to the office to get the bike.
Either way, it was a pretty exhilarating ride. Hayden works with bikes back in Oz and is a pretty good downhill mountain biker, so he was pushing the guide the whole way down the mountain. That meant if I wanted the benefit of the guide and knowing where to break I had to absolutely nail it! Very nearly crashed into the cliff face a couple of times, but managed to avoid having any close calls with the 600m drops that give the road its name. Dominik was slightly faster than me, but he was having exactly the same problems, and he had a lot more close calls, so I think in the state I was in I made the right call on speed. Claire (Hayden's girlfriend) was absolutely not a biker before that day, so was at the back but never really going at all that slow a pace. There's a big descent from 4700m to 1100m (the lowest I had been in over 2 months), which means that when you get to the bottom, despite a massive adrenalin rush and lots of exercise, you barely need to breathe! Anyway, our guide was a bit of a party animal, so we grabbed some bottles of Cuba Libre and went to a little hotel with a pool and a buffet lunch. On the bus back to La Paz we were all drunk enough to forget I hadn't paid, and the next day I got a call to the hostel asking for money. I told Cello (he didn't know English when he got his nickname) to come in for a beer, and he gave me a wee discount!
The rest of my time in La Paz was a little more restful. I got to know the hostel staff a bit, got a tour round the brewery and invited for a first taste of the filtered amber beer they were opening on my final day there, and just generally chilled out a bit - not what most people seem to do in La Paz!! Anyway, just as I was leaving I met an Aussie guy who was also going to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca, so we grabbed the bus together, and managed to find a 10Bs hostel - we were pretty happy!! The next day we went to the Isla del Sol (birthplace of both the Sun and the first Inca, according to that crazy extinct civilisation) and finished the bottle of Ledaig I'd brought from Oxford, then went our separate ways on buses in Peru that night. As you might have guessed from how quick that was, I can't really be arsed with Inca culture and history - it's just over-touristified for the wrong reasons. Was still a really cool day, a nice wee walk and we got some excellent trout.
Anyway, Peru. It's now just a week ago that I got to Cusco, and I must have been absolutely nailing it round the gringo circuit to get there so quickly! After arriving in town at 5am (I don't get it why so few buses in South America arrive/leave at sensible times), I went to a hostel that a few Aussies (seeing a theme?) on the Isla del Sol had recommended - Pariwana. It was good, friendly, and they let me and a Swiss girl I met on the bus sleep in the TV room that was covered in cushions until we could actually organise something about checking in. Since check in was at 1, I also got on the internet and found the cheap way to get to Machu Picchu (make sure you pronounce both 'c's, otherwise you're saying 'old penis' in Quechua). When I was out trying to find some snacks and water for the trip I bumped into Carmen and Kirsty, a pair of English girls who had been volunteering in big cat sanctuaries in the Bolivian jungle, who were about as foolish and cheap as me, so I told them to come along.
On Monday (after dancing with a Peruvian girl til about 4am), I met them at the bus station at 6.30 in the morning. Turns out it was the wrong bus station, so we went to the other one, got a bus to Santa Maria (at the far end of the Sacred Valley) that left 30min late at 7.30, and finally arrived after being hit by a minor landslide (no damage, just a few scared tourists and a lot of scared Peruvians) 7h later. We then grabbed a collectivo to the new hydroelectric plant that's 12km from Aguas Calientes, the girls stopped for a piss and I got at least 90 mosquito bites, then we walked for a couple of hours beside the train tracks. Arrival in Aguas Calientes cost us 28 soles (about GBP 6.50) compared to a train from Cusco for USD56, as well as throwing in a bit of an adventure. When we got there we grabbed our tickets for the park the next day and ran off to the little spa that kind of gave the town its name. Having been out so late the night before, I had barely been able to eat all day (breakfast was 3 croissants at 4.30pm), so we needed dinner pretty badly after the spa. An alpaca heart just wasn't enough, so I wolfed down a 2 person pizza as well, but having spent 50 soles already on a meal I couldn't justify sating my hunger properly with another main or a desert.
It was another night of minimal sleep that night, I got about 4h and then we were up and out at 3.30 to walk up the hill to make sure we got the stamps on our tickets for Huayna Picchu - the big hill that's in all the photos. Unfortunately (this doesn't seem to usually be the case), the bridge at the bottom of the valley was shut until 4.55, so we wasted quite a bit of time hanging around that could have been spent sleeping. Then there was a mad adrenaline-fuelled rush of a couple of hundred people up the 400m vertical staircase to get in the queue (they let 2000 people into the Machu Picchu site every day, but only 400 can climb 'young penis' as we kept accidentally calling it). Kirsty wasn't feeling so good that morning, but she decided to walk up anyway instead of getting the bus, and Carmen and I stormed up. It turned out Kirsty was worse than we thought - she vomited 13 times on the way up, but still did it in a time that the guidebooks reckon isn't bad, and was probably one of the last people to get a stamp! Still, she wasn't in a fit state, and we left her on a rock to sleep for a bit while we went exploring.
As it happens, Machu Picchu is just like a massive playground if you're used to high altitudes. It's down at about 2450m or so, so we could run about on all the staircases without issue. I ended up trying to get down to the lower terraces, then realised at 9.50 that I had to run up the hill again because I'd promised to meet Carmen and Chris (guy I'd met in the hostel in Cusco) at 10 for climbing Huayna Picchu. Chris and I then basically ran up the hill until we bumped into a slow group, waited for the next slow group to almost reach us then did the same again, so by the time I got to the top my legs were kind of exercised, but my lungs were barely feeling it! Still, we had to get some funny photos for the Varsity Trip photo competition (back up for if my Cotopaxi plan failed), so I grabbed a bottle of water I didn't really trust because I'd found it in a cave, faced away from the camera, and pretended to pee on Machu Picchu. Classy, I know! On the way down, I convinced Carmen to go to the Gran Caverne without really knowing where it was, and it was a beautifully treacherous path that descended much further than I'd hoped. We both had the shakes in our legs on the way down, and it was a pretty long walk, so by the time we got back to Machu Picchu village, neither of us could be bothered climbing Machu Picchu mountain. We walked back down the hill to Aguas Calientes to save the $6 bus ride, and Kirsty (who was still not exactly feeling good!) was quicker than either of us. We were knackered at the bottom, pretty hungry, and couldn't get a daytime train that day (the 'adventurous' way I'd found to get there didn't really appeal by this stage, and the train ride is utterly stunning in the day), so we grabbed the train the next morning to Ollantaytambo and grabbed a collectivo from there - saving $22 compared to the standard train to Cusco and missing out the more boring bits of scenery (for some reason they only charge foreigners in dollars for the train).
Getting back to Cusco on the Wednesday at about lunch time meant I only had another 24h of wasteable time in Peru, so I played tabletennis in the hostel and had another night out - I thought it might be a plan since you barely have to pay for drinks as a gringo in Cusco, they just hand out loads of free vouchers to get you to go into their clubs! The next day, we realised Chris and I were on the same flight to Lima, so after more tabletennis we grabbed a taxi, and left each other there. About 10min later I met a pair of Irish girls who were on my flight to Quito, then an American who was on the same flight but staying on the plane while it waited to go to Cali, Colombia, and he told us about how lovely and unsafe Quito was, especially the Mariscal area where all the tourists stay (thanks Matthew!). He had been here for 3 months last year, and did give us a good tip for a hostel, so we went for the Magic Bean which gives the best free breakfasts of any hostel I know of.
Day one in Quito (Friday, because arriving at a hostel at 11 at night does not count as day 1!) I had a quick look at how to climb Cotopaxi, found a tour leaving the next day for $200 (turns out I paid $30 more than if I'd actually bothered to find the climbing place - Condor Trekk [woo!] - myself) with 4 people on it already, and decided that while I'd just been to all the high altitude places and there would be 3 guides (allowing lots of other people to drop out), this would be by far the best time to go! I hadn't really bothered checking whether going way down to Machu Picchu and Lima had wrecked my acclimatisation, so I went to the teleferico (goes to 4100m) and then stormed it up Rucu Pichincha (4698m). I facetiously said to a couple of Americans who were on their way down when I couldn't even see the top that I might see them on the way back down, (I must have been 35min from the top at fittest ever and best acclimatised Gav pace, and I'd only been walking about 75min, often not exactly the right way), and then I did indeed see them just before getting back to the teleferico! That made me decide I was ready for day 80, the start of the Cotopaxi tour (which was already paid for, and I was screwed if I'd decided otherwise)!
A Norwegian guy, Michael, joined up after me, which added to the 3 Swiss Germans (a married couple and a younger guy called Thomas) and an American girl, Lauren, who were already signed up. Michael and Thomas were both ridiculously sporty, and Thomas seemed to be even better acclimatised than me, so suddenly I wasn't feeling as if my 80 days of preparation was enough! When we got to the car park at the bottom of the mountain I got a little bored with the slow pace we were going up the mountain, so I kind of zoomed up to the refuge. The Swiss woman was struggling and made her husband carry her large rucksack, and we didn't see them at the glacier climbing practice bit, so I wasn't all that surprised when the guides decided to get them to leave a couple of hours before the rest of us in the morning. It was obviously early to bed after dinner that night (the other 4 of us were due to leave at 2, to let everyone else get out of the way for us preparing), but it was SO hard to sleep. It was really noisy in the massive dorm room with people coming in and out every so often with plastic boots on, what sounded like a party downstairs, and I was feeling slightly sick. If I'd been able to conk out I think I would have been fine, but after a couple of hours of lying awake I felt shit and ran for the door (through a maze of beds, down some stairs and then making sure I took the second right so that I didn't vomit in the kitchen). I made it to the door and absolutely not a step further before what may have been the biggest puke in my life, then Michael (who had seen me when coming back from the outhouse-toilet) decided to throw a couple of buckets of water on it to clean it up. He couldn't really sleep either, and fairly shortly after I got back to bed people started getting up and clumping about to climb the mountain. I reckon I got about 1-2h sleep in total all night, Michael reckons he had less than 5min, Thomas slept really badly too, and I'm assuming everyone else was the same. The older couple dropped out before starting and just went back to bed.
In the morning proper (i.e. 1am today, which seems like a lifetime ago now!), Thomas was down at breakfast and his head was really suffering from the altitude. He reckoned it was trying to sleep there that did it, because he hadn't actually slept any higher than Quito, just been for short 1 day climbs. Either way, he dropped out before we started, leaving 3 clients and 2 guides (1 stayed back to take people out for sunrise). Lauren went with one guide, with Michael and I together with the other. We left at 2.25am and all walked together to the bottom of the glacier (much higher than it was 3 years ago, about 5100m, a full hour into the hike!), and then we took a while getting crampons and ropes on and ice axes out. Lauren set off first, and it took us ages to catch up with her, maybe about another hour. We were all fairly close for the next hour or so as well, and then Michael and I just didn't slow down with the altitude while Lauren's leg was giving her gyp (which had been an issue the previous day too). At around 5.30 it started to get light, but we were on the wrong side of the mountain for sunrise - we got to see the towering shadow of Cotopaxi instead, and we kind of wondered how far up the shadow we were! Anyway, shortly after sunrise we got to the bottom of the hard bit, and kind of crapped ourselves. It's a really steep path on the glacier, and we could just see loads of people barely moving up it, if at all. We'd already passed loads of people who had given up, and it was still slightly too early for people to have summited (they would have stayed for sunrise), but still there were a bunch coming down looking exhausted. We went for it (we were only a couple of hundred metres short of the top, we couldn't give up there!), and kind of nailed it compared to everyone else, meaning that we passed a group who had set out 2h 30min before us! Oddly enough, ridiculous altitude, exhaustion, pace and a bit of illness made the last couple of hundred metres the hardest thing I've ever done, but we did eventually summit almost exactly 5h after leaving the hut (the guide was proud, and all the estimates I've seen say between 5 and 8 hours to get to the top). We also saw Lauren and her guide at the bottom of the really hard bit, then didn't see her later, so found out when we got to the bottom that her leg had been in agony, and the steepness of it was just not possible and she'd given up after trying a short section of it.
Anyway, back to the top. (Woo! 5897m!) Almost as soon as we summited (about 25th ish out of 60 or so attempts and 30 or so completions) we got to see an eruption on Sangay, claimed to be the most active volcano in the world (and Cotopaxi is apparently the highest active volcano... Ok, it's the highest one currently smoking, but it's still a lie! Not sure if the Sangay thing is really true). It's a 5230m volcano about 100-150km south of Cotopaxi, but still very visible above the few clouds and less clear bits that there were, and we got a great view of the cloud of ash it chucked up. Anyway, once we were done with that (obviously I'd had a little celebration in the minute or so before we noticed the eruption), Varsity Trip photo competition was the name of the day, and I'd been trying to come up with a good photo idea for ages. Yesterday when I saw the ice axe I just knew what it had to be - crawling out of the crater with the axe and crampons. I shoved the tshirt on over my fleece (the ski jacket had to come off, which was a bit chilly!) and slid down as far as I safely could towards the beautifully smoking crater, then put on a compulsory silly face. When you've been trying to come up with a photo idea for ages, and you don't know either the prize or the closing date, it does kind of feel good when you've taken the best one you think you can.
Unfortunately I found out the prize and closing date a couple of hours ago. I can't be arsed with the prize (tickets to Freeze Festival at Battersea Power Station, for 3 days with crap bands in the middle of a term when I'm going to be very busy), and I need to get them my photo by Tuesday, but I feel I've tried so hard that I can't give up now! Let's see if I can find a Kodak photo shop tomorrow, otherwise I'm screwed.
Anyway, I might try to get to a football match tomorrow (an actually cultural experience considering I've done nothing but gringo trail for the past couple of weeks!), and Michael was kind of tempted to climb Sangay, and I kind of want to see lava, so we might do that at some point soon. Not sure about the safety of it, it usually erupts in the same direction apparently (about every 10min), but I'll have a look, see if I've got time, and maybe give it a shot!
I left Uyuni as planned on day 69, getting the bumpiest and shakiest night bus ever (the road was basically a 100km washboard for the first 4h, meaning I only got about 4h sleep in total). I arrived in La Paz at about 7am, got to Adventure Brew Hostel - they've got a microbrewery and they're right beside the station, so 60Bs (GBP6 per night including a free beer) seemed acceptable considering the number of recommendations I'd had for it. Anyway, I got there, dumped my stuff, went down to ask about laundry and bumped into Hayden, Claire and Dominic who I'd met in Sucre a few times. They gave me free breakfast (it was all you can eat pancakes), and said they were doing Death Road that day, leaving pretty damn soon. I thought I might as well join them, so went to cycle down the most dangerous road in the world when I was sleep deprived, wearing completely the wrong clothes, and it just happened to be snowing at the top of it. Also, when we got to the top, it turned out they'd forgotten to grab extra knee/shin pads for me when they nipped to the office to get the bike.
Either way, it was a pretty exhilarating ride. Hayden works with bikes back in Oz and is a pretty good downhill mountain biker, so he was pushing the guide the whole way down the mountain. That meant if I wanted the benefit of the guide and knowing where to break I had to absolutely nail it! Very nearly crashed into the cliff face a couple of times, but managed to avoid having any close calls with the 600m drops that give the road its name. Dominik was slightly faster than me, but he was having exactly the same problems, and he had a lot more close calls, so I think in the state I was in I made the right call on speed. Claire (Hayden's girlfriend) was absolutely not a biker before that day, so was at the back but never really going at all that slow a pace. There's a big descent from 4700m to 1100m (the lowest I had been in over 2 months), which means that when you get to the bottom, despite a massive adrenalin rush and lots of exercise, you barely need to breathe! Anyway, our guide was a bit of a party animal, so we grabbed some bottles of Cuba Libre and went to a little hotel with a pool and a buffet lunch. On the bus back to La Paz we were all drunk enough to forget I hadn't paid, and the next day I got a call to the hostel asking for money. I told Cello (he didn't know English when he got his nickname) to come in for a beer, and he gave me a wee discount!
The rest of my time in La Paz was a little more restful. I got to know the hostel staff a bit, got a tour round the brewery and invited for a first taste of the filtered amber beer they were opening on my final day there, and just generally chilled out a bit - not what most people seem to do in La Paz!! Anyway, just as I was leaving I met an Aussie guy who was also going to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca, so we grabbed the bus together, and managed to find a 10Bs hostel - we were pretty happy!! The next day we went to the Isla del Sol (birthplace of both the Sun and the first Inca, according to that crazy extinct civilisation) and finished the bottle of Ledaig I'd brought from Oxford, then went our separate ways on buses in Peru that night. As you might have guessed from how quick that was, I can't really be arsed with Inca culture and history - it's just over-touristified for the wrong reasons. Was still a really cool day, a nice wee walk and we got some excellent trout.
Anyway, Peru. It's now just a week ago that I got to Cusco, and I must have been absolutely nailing it round the gringo circuit to get there so quickly! After arriving in town at 5am (I don't get it why so few buses in South America arrive/leave at sensible times), I went to a hostel that a few Aussies (seeing a theme?) on the Isla del Sol had recommended - Pariwana. It was good, friendly, and they let me and a Swiss girl I met on the bus sleep in the TV room that was covered in cushions until we could actually organise something about checking in. Since check in was at 1, I also got on the internet and found the cheap way to get to Machu Picchu (make sure you pronounce both 'c's, otherwise you're saying 'old penis' in Quechua). When I was out trying to find some snacks and water for the trip I bumped into Carmen and Kirsty, a pair of English girls who had been volunteering in big cat sanctuaries in the Bolivian jungle, who were about as foolish and cheap as me, so I told them to come along.
On Monday (after dancing with a Peruvian girl til about 4am), I met them at the bus station at 6.30 in the morning. Turns out it was the wrong bus station, so we went to the other one, got a bus to Santa Maria (at the far end of the Sacred Valley) that left 30min late at 7.30, and finally arrived after being hit by a minor landslide (no damage, just a few scared tourists and a lot of scared Peruvians) 7h later. We then grabbed a collectivo to the new hydroelectric plant that's 12km from Aguas Calientes, the girls stopped for a piss and I got at least 90 mosquito bites, then we walked for a couple of hours beside the train tracks. Arrival in Aguas Calientes cost us 28 soles (about GBP 6.50) compared to a train from Cusco for USD56, as well as throwing in a bit of an adventure. When we got there we grabbed our tickets for the park the next day and ran off to the little spa that kind of gave the town its name. Having been out so late the night before, I had barely been able to eat all day (breakfast was 3 croissants at 4.30pm), so we needed dinner pretty badly after the spa. An alpaca heart just wasn't enough, so I wolfed down a 2 person pizza as well, but having spent 50 soles already on a meal I couldn't justify sating my hunger properly with another main or a desert.
It was another night of minimal sleep that night, I got about 4h and then we were up and out at 3.30 to walk up the hill to make sure we got the stamps on our tickets for Huayna Picchu - the big hill that's in all the photos. Unfortunately (this doesn't seem to usually be the case), the bridge at the bottom of the valley was shut until 4.55, so we wasted quite a bit of time hanging around that could have been spent sleeping. Then there was a mad adrenaline-fuelled rush of a couple of hundred people up the 400m vertical staircase to get in the queue (they let 2000 people into the Machu Picchu site every day, but only 400 can climb 'young penis' as we kept accidentally calling it). Kirsty wasn't feeling so good that morning, but she decided to walk up anyway instead of getting the bus, and Carmen and I stormed up. It turned out Kirsty was worse than we thought - she vomited 13 times on the way up, but still did it in a time that the guidebooks reckon isn't bad, and was probably one of the last people to get a stamp! Still, she wasn't in a fit state, and we left her on a rock to sleep for a bit while we went exploring.
As it happens, Machu Picchu is just like a massive playground if you're used to high altitudes. It's down at about 2450m or so, so we could run about on all the staircases without issue. I ended up trying to get down to the lower terraces, then realised at 9.50 that I had to run up the hill again because I'd promised to meet Carmen and Chris (guy I'd met in the hostel in Cusco) at 10 for climbing Huayna Picchu. Chris and I then basically ran up the hill until we bumped into a slow group, waited for the next slow group to almost reach us then did the same again, so by the time I got to the top my legs were kind of exercised, but my lungs were barely feeling it! Still, we had to get some funny photos for the Varsity Trip photo competition (back up for if my Cotopaxi plan failed), so I grabbed a bottle of water I didn't really trust because I'd found it in a cave, faced away from the camera, and pretended to pee on Machu Picchu. Classy, I know! On the way down, I convinced Carmen to go to the Gran Caverne without really knowing where it was, and it was a beautifully treacherous path that descended much further than I'd hoped. We both had the shakes in our legs on the way down, and it was a pretty long walk, so by the time we got back to Machu Picchu village, neither of us could be bothered climbing Machu Picchu mountain. We walked back down the hill to Aguas Calientes to save the $6 bus ride, and Kirsty (who was still not exactly feeling good!) was quicker than either of us. We were knackered at the bottom, pretty hungry, and couldn't get a daytime train that day (the 'adventurous' way I'd found to get there didn't really appeal by this stage, and the train ride is utterly stunning in the day), so we grabbed the train the next morning to Ollantaytambo and grabbed a collectivo from there - saving $22 compared to the standard train to Cusco and missing out the more boring bits of scenery (for some reason they only charge foreigners in dollars for the train).
Getting back to Cusco on the Wednesday at about lunch time meant I only had another 24h of wasteable time in Peru, so I played tabletennis in the hostel and had another night out - I thought it might be a plan since you barely have to pay for drinks as a gringo in Cusco, they just hand out loads of free vouchers to get you to go into their clubs! The next day, we realised Chris and I were on the same flight to Lima, so after more tabletennis we grabbed a taxi, and left each other there. About 10min later I met a pair of Irish girls who were on my flight to Quito, then an American who was on the same flight but staying on the plane while it waited to go to Cali, Colombia, and he told us about how lovely and unsafe Quito was, especially the Mariscal area where all the tourists stay (thanks Matthew!). He had been here for 3 months last year, and did give us a good tip for a hostel, so we went for the Magic Bean which gives the best free breakfasts of any hostel I know of.
Day one in Quito (Friday, because arriving at a hostel at 11 at night does not count as day 1!) I had a quick look at how to climb Cotopaxi, found a tour leaving the next day for $200 (turns out I paid $30 more than if I'd actually bothered to find the climbing place - Condor Trekk [woo!] - myself) with 4 people on it already, and decided that while I'd just been to all the high altitude places and there would be 3 guides (allowing lots of other people to drop out), this would be by far the best time to go! I hadn't really bothered checking whether going way down to Machu Picchu and Lima had wrecked my acclimatisation, so I went to the teleferico (goes to 4100m) and then stormed it up Rucu Pichincha (4698m). I facetiously said to a couple of Americans who were on their way down when I couldn't even see the top that I might see them on the way back down, (I must have been 35min from the top at fittest ever and best acclimatised Gav pace, and I'd only been walking about 75min, often not exactly the right way), and then I did indeed see them just before getting back to the teleferico! That made me decide I was ready for day 80, the start of the Cotopaxi tour (which was already paid for, and I was screwed if I'd decided otherwise)!
A Norwegian guy, Michael, joined up after me, which added to the 3 Swiss Germans (a married couple and a younger guy called Thomas) and an American girl, Lauren, who were already signed up. Michael and Thomas were both ridiculously sporty, and Thomas seemed to be even better acclimatised than me, so suddenly I wasn't feeling as if my 80 days of preparation was enough! When we got to the car park at the bottom of the mountain I got a little bored with the slow pace we were going up the mountain, so I kind of zoomed up to the refuge. The Swiss woman was struggling and made her husband carry her large rucksack, and we didn't see them at the glacier climbing practice bit, so I wasn't all that surprised when the guides decided to get them to leave a couple of hours before the rest of us in the morning. It was obviously early to bed after dinner that night (the other 4 of us were due to leave at 2, to let everyone else get out of the way for us preparing), but it was SO hard to sleep. It was really noisy in the massive dorm room with people coming in and out every so often with plastic boots on, what sounded like a party downstairs, and I was feeling slightly sick. If I'd been able to conk out I think I would have been fine, but after a couple of hours of lying awake I felt shit and ran for the door (through a maze of beds, down some stairs and then making sure I took the second right so that I didn't vomit in the kitchen). I made it to the door and absolutely not a step further before what may have been the biggest puke in my life, then Michael (who had seen me when coming back from the outhouse-toilet) decided to throw a couple of buckets of water on it to clean it up. He couldn't really sleep either, and fairly shortly after I got back to bed people started getting up and clumping about to climb the mountain. I reckon I got about 1-2h sleep in total all night, Michael reckons he had less than 5min, Thomas slept really badly too, and I'm assuming everyone else was the same. The older couple dropped out before starting and just went back to bed.
In the morning proper (i.e. 1am today, which seems like a lifetime ago now!), Thomas was down at breakfast and his head was really suffering from the altitude. He reckoned it was trying to sleep there that did it, because he hadn't actually slept any higher than Quito, just been for short 1 day climbs. Either way, he dropped out before we started, leaving 3 clients and 2 guides (1 stayed back to take people out for sunrise). Lauren went with one guide, with Michael and I together with the other. We left at 2.25am and all walked together to the bottom of the glacier (much higher than it was 3 years ago, about 5100m, a full hour into the hike!), and then we took a while getting crampons and ropes on and ice axes out. Lauren set off first, and it took us ages to catch up with her, maybe about another hour. We were all fairly close for the next hour or so as well, and then Michael and I just didn't slow down with the altitude while Lauren's leg was giving her gyp (which had been an issue the previous day too). At around 5.30 it started to get light, but we were on the wrong side of the mountain for sunrise - we got to see the towering shadow of Cotopaxi instead, and we kind of wondered how far up the shadow we were! Anyway, shortly after sunrise we got to the bottom of the hard bit, and kind of crapped ourselves. It's a really steep path on the glacier, and we could just see loads of people barely moving up it, if at all. We'd already passed loads of people who had given up, and it was still slightly too early for people to have summited (they would have stayed for sunrise), but still there were a bunch coming down looking exhausted. We went for it (we were only a couple of hundred metres short of the top, we couldn't give up there!), and kind of nailed it compared to everyone else, meaning that we passed a group who had set out 2h 30min before us! Oddly enough, ridiculous altitude, exhaustion, pace and a bit of illness made the last couple of hundred metres the hardest thing I've ever done, but we did eventually summit almost exactly 5h after leaving the hut (the guide was proud, and all the estimates I've seen say between 5 and 8 hours to get to the top). We also saw Lauren and her guide at the bottom of the really hard bit, then didn't see her later, so found out when we got to the bottom that her leg had been in agony, and the steepness of it was just not possible and she'd given up after trying a short section of it.
Anyway, back to the top. (Woo! 5897m!) Almost as soon as we summited (about 25th ish out of 60 or so attempts and 30 or so completions) we got to see an eruption on Sangay, claimed to be the most active volcano in the world (and Cotopaxi is apparently the highest active volcano... Ok, it's the highest one currently smoking, but it's still a lie! Not sure if the Sangay thing is really true). It's a 5230m volcano about 100-150km south of Cotopaxi, but still very visible above the few clouds and less clear bits that there were, and we got a great view of the cloud of ash it chucked up. Anyway, once we were done with that (obviously I'd had a little celebration in the minute or so before we noticed the eruption), Varsity Trip photo competition was the name of the day, and I'd been trying to come up with a good photo idea for ages. Yesterday when I saw the ice axe I just knew what it had to be - crawling out of the crater with the axe and crampons. I shoved the tshirt on over my fleece (the ski jacket had to come off, which was a bit chilly!) and slid down as far as I safely could towards the beautifully smoking crater, then put on a compulsory silly face. When you've been trying to come up with a photo idea for ages, and you don't know either the prize or the closing date, it does kind of feel good when you've taken the best one you think you can.
Unfortunately I found out the prize and closing date a couple of hours ago. I can't be arsed with the prize (tickets to Freeze Festival at Battersea Power Station, for 3 days with crap bands in the middle of a term when I'm going to be very busy), and I need to get them my photo by Tuesday, but I feel I've tried so hard that I can't give up now! Let's see if I can find a Kodak photo shop tomorrow, otherwise I'm screwed.
Anyway, I might try to get to a football match tomorrow (an actually cultural experience considering I've done nothing but gringo trail for the past couple of weeks!), and Michael was kind of tempted to climb Sangay, and I kind of want to see lava, so we might do that at some point soon. Not sure about the safety of it, it usually erupts in the same direction apparently (about every 10min), but I'll have a look, see if I've got time, and maybe give it a shot!
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Day 69 - A Quieter Week to Uyuni
I guess I lied about updating this every week or two, three is definitely becoming standard. Ah well!
The week after Brid left was a relatively quiet one. I got some more salsa dancing in, Jen (just finished at Balliol) and Laura (my second Bolivian sister, after Brid) arrived and hung about in Sucre for a bit, and instead of another Folklorica night in Amsterdam on the Thursday Rohan had a vege dinner party (which was fantastic! It was the first and only time I felt I could have actually coped without meat for a significant period of time - quite imprssive!). I think Potosí opened up that week (it was relatively shortly after it made European headlines), but nothing has been resolved and there was talk of it shutting down again in September. They had had to open the roads for emergency food and medicine supplies earlier though, so everyone was probably just a bit too tired, hungry, and out of booze to keep blockading.
That weekend we sent out 3 treks on the Saturday, a big trek to Tarabuco with me and Sam as the volunteers (with Romina, Sam's girlfriend coming along too) and Nienke and Rohan finally coming on a trek! The other treks were a one day for Randall and the 3 day for Patrick and Franz with Jen and Laura.
The Tarabuco trek was absolutely stunning, and nice and easy too. You get a trufi (that's the phonetic spelling in Spanish, so think 'trooffie' and assume I spelt it wrongly) to Tarabuco on the Saturday before you walk for 2-3 hours with the guide (a good 3 including lunch) to Pisili, the village he's from. When you arrive, his mum lets you have a shot on the weaving board before you go and play with the local kids and his mum gets cooking. The food's great (I had extra and earned the nickname 'the Hoover' from Sam), then you camp in the garden. The next day there's a massive breakfast (where Sam put me to shame by eating more than I ever could) before trying on the local indigenous clothing to much amusement for Humberto the guide, and then it's a quick walk back to Tarabuco for the market. The best thing is that everyone in Pisili is really happy for us to be there, happy for us to take photos (normally kids ask for money if they see a camera) and everyone can see exactly where some of the Condortrekkers investment is going, which is really cool!
On the Monday I decided to clean the apartment (the floors were muy manky), but I had to get out to the supermarket first for some food. I ran into the Belgians while I was there, and they'd just left a message at the office for us to say they wanted to move in (I always run into them when they want to see any of us, it's as if it's fate!), so I told them to just come round at 3. Cleaning the floors and dishes did my head in enough that I went for a random wander, but it got done and I got back in plenty time for us to have new housemates again!
Nienke was leaving on the Wed, so we had been planning to do the quiz at Amsterdam and karaoke on the Tuesday night (this is day 55 by now), but on Monday evening I found out I was doing a 3 day trek the next day with a Swiss German girl called Camilla and a French guy called Thomas. That meant trilingual trekking - Camilla is fluent in English, French and Spanish so I could avoid relearning my German for quadrilingual trekking! Still, I'm willing to miss a brilliant final night party for an awesome trek. I also missed salsa dancing on the Monday because I was busy doing the trek prep (lots of shopping, getting stuff out and ready, and chopping of vegetables - I left before the cooking of stir fry and salsa because I kind of wanted to get a ton of sleep), but there was always Friday and the next Monday.
It started off a bit odd, Ruben (he was the only guide I went with in my entire time at CT other than my first trek and Tarabuco, which can only have Humberto) had some stuff to do that morning so was going to meet us at the roadworks. This meant my backup plan in case he didn't turn up was to do the easy 3 day, because I didn't quite know the camping one properly myself. Anyway, he did arrive, but not before phoning Randall saying that his bag was too heavy ('he wasn't a donkey', was the phrase used I think, although mine was heavier and Camilla's wasn't far off - I think hers was heavier than his by the end because he kept giving her stuff!) and he wanted more money. Still, he was placated enough to come and meet us (not with the offer of money, mind. None of the other guides say we pay too little!) so the tour happened as planned. He did mention that it was his last tour with CT though.
Day 1 was cool as always, didn't eat til we got to the river because the guy whose house we wanted to eat in was out, and I was surprised to see both Camilla and Thomas taking a wash! Needless to say I couldn't be bothered, you're meant to smell after 3 days of trekking... We got to the campsite half way up the hill (to avoid a steep climb first thing in the morning) just before it got too dark to put the tents up easily, then had a muy tasty dinner. On day 2 we got away pretty early so decided to take quite a long break at the waterfalls and caves. Camilla followed me on my waterfall rockclimbing bit, and luckily there was a much easier way to get up for her - there were handholds that work for shorter people. I fell asleep just after the tough climb in baking sun to get out of the crater before we had lunch, but despite that we still made it to the good campsite by the river where we had stayed the previous time. This was kind of lucky because the previous week Sam's group had had loads of trouble from a local guy when they had camped within range of his greedy eyes - normally all the local people are friendly, but this guy was just taking the piss and trying to extort money in every way he could think of. Anyway, Camilla decided to wash herself AGAIN in the freezing river, before we had a great fire and I aired my feet to save Ruben from suffocation. I also had to fix both Camilla's and Thomas' backs, meaning I got a decent massage by the fire in return. On day 3 we did the quick walk down to Telula and just jumped in the thermal pools for an hour (meaning Camilla managed to wash on every day of the 3 day trek, probably a CT first) while we waited for the camion, which was small, took ages and I was sitting up on the front for more than half the journey!
When we got back, Camilla decided she'd change her flight and stay in Sucre for a bit longer to get some karaoke in after our excellent entertaining of the entire camion (she'd already changed it once to be able to go on the trek - it only costs GBP3), but it turned out the flight had left without her already (she'd managed to rebook for the same day the first time), so she had to replan everything the hard way. It was Thursday, so Folklorica night, so I told Camilla and Thomas to go there. I found out that the Spanish lesson I'd tried to arrange with Rita was going ahead when Patrick turned up to the office and told me she was waiting for me (after talking to some Guatemalans about the tours for about 20-30min in Spanish), so I arrived at my lesson both mentally and physically exhausted! We just went through loads of vocab stuff because it's easier to look at again when you didn't get your head round things perfectly, and arranged another lesson for the next day.
That night at Amsterdam I ran into the Belgians, Jen and Laura (who pointed out very correctly that Camilla looks just like Uma Thurman!), and a guy called Max who was driving to Ushaia from Quebec. It was all v good fun, but we were kind of tired so everyone went home at 1. However, we'd decided to do a Belgian dinner party the next night, so when we were passing the karaoke place 150m up the street from our house, the Belgians and I decided to go in and see if it was any good for the next night. We had to get a beer to see the song menu, which meant we had to sing Enrique Iglesias - Heroe (in Spanish), which meant Bolivian people started cheering and giving us more drinks. Dries (Belgian guy) and I stayed quite a while after Kim (Belgian girl) went home, and we were plied with more alcohol while I was told one of the Bolivian girls liked the look of me. She said she was 23, looked more like 16, but I kind of wanted a dance anyway. They dragged us out to Nanos afterwards for more dancing, and Dries and I grabbed the first girls who seemed to want to dance and started salsa-ing and merengue-ing like maniacs! It was great, quite impressive, but despite that the Bolivian girl I was dancing with decided she preferred Dries and I could barely stop laughing every time she tried to drag him off somewhere quiet! The unplanned night out did make the Spanish lesson the next day a little tricky though...
Belgian dinner party happened the next day [Day 58] as planned despite everyone being a little borracho when it was talked about (and I think it was Jen's final night in Sucre, cue lots of wine), and the cooking was well above the standard anyone would have expected (i.e. somehow it was even better than Rohan's)! Rohan had to go home early in the end, so the Saturday was his final night in town (as well as Sam and Romina's final day - so cue a large lunch at a chicharía, and lots of chicha - another difficult Spanish lesson ensued but I learned about mate de boldo - excellent for the liver!) which meant karaoke was a necessity. Especially because the trek the next day was only 1 day!
Patrick and I both went on the 1 day with a couple of Aussies, 2 English sisters and Uma Thurman, and it was a fairly quick walking pace so we spent ages at the waterfalls. I think almost everyone took a swim, and when people were sunbathing I decided to do a bit of a barefoot rockclimb/scramble up to the final waterfall that's kind of hard to take clients up to (because the rockclimbing bit is just a bit too technical). On the way back we ran into Max again, and it turned out he possibly wanted to drive to Tupiza on the Wednesday or Thursday after he'd spent a few days in the countryside near Sucre climbing and camping. I told him to tell the office when he got back to Sucre if that was happening, and I might jump in for a lift. That night I finally got to catch up on sleep properly, because I went home after seeing El Origen (Inception) again and had a massive lie in.
Michelle from the States moved in as a couch surfer at some point while I was on the 3 day trek, then I barely met her before she went on her trek with Franz, but I met her properly at some point on the Sunday or Monday. Monday was my final Spanish lesson, and as homework I had to write out the condor story about my chin scar! It was the first time I'd written a full sentence in Spanish, so a full page was tough, but it came out pretty well! At salsa class that night my teacher made it very clear she wanted me to stay for an extra lesson on the Wednesday, even though it didn't really fit into my plans, but it's really good fun, very cheap, and she was quite attractive so I was quite tempted!
On the Tuesday [Day 62] we had been going to try to go to the campo and do all the bits in the communities we were trying to help: Chaunaca wanted us to paint a door; Socopampa wanted their solar electric system fixed; Irupampa wanted a composting toilet; and another village wanted 1000Bs worth of dynamite (it's good for shattering hail stones before they destroy crops, and you can pack dust on top of it in a tube before you detonate to make the rain come out of a cloud - the water nucleates around the dust particle). Unfortunately the guy with the toilet couldn't do Tuesday, so it didn't happen, and Laura had been going to come along because she has money she wants to give to a good cause and she'd love to see how it gets spent. Anyway, it'll happen soon, I just won't be there, but Laura's probably going to return to Sucre for it.
Alternate plans for Tuesday were made. I decided to have a pizza party as my 'final night leaving party' (if I was going to salsa on the Wednesday I wouldn't want to have my party then anyway!) and Laura, Camilla and I decided to go to a house my upstairs neighbours were building near Yotala. It was an epic construction (better than anything you've seen on Grand Designs), and they also had workawayers (www.workaway.info - what I used to find Stilts last year and had been going to use this year for a Venezuelan jungle lodge. That guy was bad at replying to emails, but one of the volunteers at this house had been there and he's very good at replying to females! Apparently not a great guy to work for though) doing the buildings that would eventually be a hostel/restaurant etc - stuff to do while vaguely retiring. Johnny and Kathy (who I'd met after my 4th trek on the camion) were still working there after a month, and we just had a good catch up in the sun. The party was a laugh, but unfortunately we had to move it to our house from Randall's because there was trek prep going on there, and our oven is much worse, which kind of put a downer on things because everyone got hungry waiting. Anyway, Laura was pouring my drinks, and despite not feeling too bad that night I realised I should have been when I saw how much of everything was drunk in the morning.
I did feel kind of rough on the Wednesday, but it just got worse and worse and eventually I realised it wasn't a hangover - the Belgians, Patrick and Camilla had all felt or been very ill in our house in the past few days, and I'd finally managed to get the bug that was going round. Wednesday night leaving/salsa never happened due to illness, and I was going to try to leave on Thursday morning to Potosí with Michelle (there had been no word from Max, and we'd spend the day there before catching a night bus to Tupiza) but just felt too ill to get up and pack my bags. I eventually managed to leave Sucre that evening for Potosí - the Tupiza bus was sold out - and I got a bus the next morning to Tupiza. Still feeling horrendous with the joys of diarrhea, I met an English girl called Roz in the bus station waiting for the same bus with the same plans, so after the journey we decided to go to the nice hotel that runs a tour company that goes to the Salar, has its own pool etc. For GBP9 per night for a twin room with a good hot shower, breakfast and access to a pool, it seemed reasonable enough, and we met an English couple (James and Paul) there who wanted to do the same tour as us the next day, so everything got going nice and quickly and losing a couple of days in Sucre with illness didn't matter.
The Southwest Circuit tour (or Salar tour as everyone calls it) was brilliant. The first day out of Tupiza you don't see an awful lot, which suited me nicely because I was still feeling rough, and actually puked out the window after lunch. That didn't stop me trying to play football (for the first time in over 2 years) at 4200m with some kids in the village where we were spending the night. The second day was REALLY cool. There was loads of driving, which meant an early start, but you go to an old abandoned mining town, some hot springs (the only wash I've had in the last 4 days) a bright green lake (due to lots of crazy minerals including arsenic which stops anything living there), more lakes with flamingos, some mud geysers (not the kind that send water tens of metres into the air, just mud a foot or two and some powerful steam vents, but still cool!) and you see tons of volcanoes. The night was utterly freezing, but at least I could eat a little more by this stage - I'd had 2 rolls in 2 days after Wednesday afternoon - and cold nights just mean you wear loads in bed. Day 3 had a red lake (coloured by the bacteria, and it's probably the one that started the myth about flamingos getting stained by the water), the stone tree (that EVERY Bolivian tourism book has a picture of, despite the other rock formations around it being just as cool), and there were loads of lakes as well as a good look at a volcano with a smoking fumarole. The evening was spent at a salt hotel on the edge of the Salar, where some of the guides' kids were waiting (cue cute photos), I played cards with some Brazilians and we taught shithead to our guide (I had to explain it all in Spanish), before we taught the Brazilians - one of them in Spanish and the other in English. Today, day 4, was a shorter one, we saw dawn from some random point on the Salar de Uyuni, went to the Isla del Pescado (which is covered in cacti, one of which died in 2007 at over 1200 years old and 12.03m) and met Max there! He'd known Roz would be going there in the next few days (he met her in Peru and again in Sucre) so he'd driven out to spend a couple of days there and have a bit of a quiet time in the middle of nowhere (after breaking down in the middle of the world's biggest salt flat and having to camp there). I also met Michelle while I was walking about on the island, and then played football with an English guy, a couple of French and a couple of Bolivians at 3653m on a desert... I was panting for a full 15min afterwards. We took a bunch of silly photos with Leo the Lion (who we found in the village where we spent our first night) and generally just had a bit of a laugh on our way to Uyuni, where I booked my bus to La Paz tonight!
Anyway, things seem to be on schedule ish and according to plan (apart from my lack of a solid shit in almost a week, although proper appetite returned today), so I'm looking good for having a fun cycle ride, trekking on Lake Titicaca and going to Machu Picchu before I fly off to Quito in 9 days.
I am also beginning to wonder if I'll have a house to go back to when I finally return to Edinburgh in December...
The week after Brid left was a relatively quiet one. I got some more salsa dancing in, Jen (just finished at Balliol) and Laura (my second Bolivian sister, after Brid) arrived and hung about in Sucre for a bit, and instead of another Folklorica night in Amsterdam on the Thursday Rohan had a vege dinner party (which was fantastic! It was the first and only time I felt I could have actually coped without meat for a significant period of time - quite imprssive!). I think Potosí opened up that week (it was relatively shortly after it made European headlines), but nothing has been resolved and there was talk of it shutting down again in September. They had had to open the roads for emergency food and medicine supplies earlier though, so everyone was probably just a bit too tired, hungry, and out of booze to keep blockading.
That weekend we sent out 3 treks on the Saturday, a big trek to Tarabuco with me and Sam as the volunteers (with Romina, Sam's girlfriend coming along too) and Nienke and Rohan finally coming on a trek! The other treks were a one day for Randall and the 3 day for Patrick and Franz with Jen and Laura.
The Tarabuco trek was absolutely stunning, and nice and easy too. You get a trufi (that's the phonetic spelling in Spanish, so think 'trooffie' and assume I spelt it wrongly) to Tarabuco on the Saturday before you walk for 2-3 hours with the guide (a good 3 including lunch) to Pisili, the village he's from. When you arrive, his mum lets you have a shot on the weaving board before you go and play with the local kids and his mum gets cooking. The food's great (I had extra and earned the nickname 'the Hoover' from Sam), then you camp in the garden. The next day there's a massive breakfast (where Sam put me to shame by eating more than I ever could) before trying on the local indigenous clothing to much amusement for Humberto the guide, and then it's a quick walk back to Tarabuco for the market. The best thing is that everyone in Pisili is really happy for us to be there, happy for us to take photos (normally kids ask for money if they see a camera) and everyone can see exactly where some of the Condortrekkers investment is going, which is really cool!
On the Monday I decided to clean the apartment (the floors were muy manky), but I had to get out to the supermarket first for some food. I ran into the Belgians while I was there, and they'd just left a message at the office for us to say they wanted to move in (I always run into them when they want to see any of us, it's as if it's fate!), so I told them to just come round at 3. Cleaning the floors and dishes did my head in enough that I went for a random wander, but it got done and I got back in plenty time for us to have new housemates again!
Nienke was leaving on the Wed, so we had been planning to do the quiz at Amsterdam and karaoke on the Tuesday night (this is day 55 by now), but on Monday evening I found out I was doing a 3 day trek the next day with a Swiss German girl called Camilla and a French guy called Thomas. That meant trilingual trekking - Camilla is fluent in English, French and Spanish so I could avoid relearning my German for quadrilingual trekking! Still, I'm willing to miss a brilliant final night party for an awesome trek. I also missed salsa dancing on the Monday because I was busy doing the trek prep (lots of shopping, getting stuff out and ready, and chopping of vegetables - I left before the cooking of stir fry and salsa because I kind of wanted to get a ton of sleep), but there was always Friday and the next Monday.
It started off a bit odd, Ruben (he was the only guide I went with in my entire time at CT other than my first trek and Tarabuco, which can only have Humberto) had some stuff to do that morning so was going to meet us at the roadworks. This meant my backup plan in case he didn't turn up was to do the easy 3 day, because I didn't quite know the camping one properly myself. Anyway, he did arrive, but not before phoning Randall saying that his bag was too heavy ('he wasn't a donkey', was the phrase used I think, although mine was heavier and Camilla's wasn't far off - I think hers was heavier than his by the end because he kept giving her stuff!) and he wanted more money. Still, he was placated enough to come and meet us (not with the offer of money, mind. None of the other guides say we pay too little!) so the tour happened as planned. He did mention that it was his last tour with CT though.
Day 1 was cool as always, didn't eat til we got to the river because the guy whose house we wanted to eat in was out, and I was surprised to see both Camilla and Thomas taking a wash! Needless to say I couldn't be bothered, you're meant to smell after 3 days of trekking... We got to the campsite half way up the hill (to avoid a steep climb first thing in the morning) just before it got too dark to put the tents up easily, then had a muy tasty dinner. On day 2 we got away pretty early so decided to take quite a long break at the waterfalls and caves. Camilla followed me on my waterfall rockclimbing bit, and luckily there was a much easier way to get up for her - there were handholds that work for shorter people. I fell asleep just after the tough climb in baking sun to get out of the crater before we had lunch, but despite that we still made it to the good campsite by the river where we had stayed the previous time. This was kind of lucky because the previous week Sam's group had had loads of trouble from a local guy when they had camped within range of his greedy eyes - normally all the local people are friendly, but this guy was just taking the piss and trying to extort money in every way he could think of. Anyway, Camilla decided to wash herself AGAIN in the freezing river, before we had a great fire and I aired my feet to save Ruben from suffocation. I also had to fix both Camilla's and Thomas' backs, meaning I got a decent massage by the fire in return. On day 3 we did the quick walk down to Telula and just jumped in the thermal pools for an hour (meaning Camilla managed to wash on every day of the 3 day trek, probably a CT first) while we waited for the camion, which was small, took ages and I was sitting up on the front for more than half the journey!
When we got back, Camilla decided she'd change her flight and stay in Sucre for a bit longer to get some karaoke in after our excellent entertaining of the entire camion (she'd already changed it once to be able to go on the trek - it only costs GBP3), but it turned out the flight had left without her already (she'd managed to rebook for the same day the first time), so she had to replan everything the hard way. It was Thursday, so Folklorica night, so I told Camilla and Thomas to go there. I found out that the Spanish lesson I'd tried to arrange with Rita was going ahead when Patrick turned up to the office and told me she was waiting for me (after talking to some Guatemalans about the tours for about 20-30min in Spanish), so I arrived at my lesson both mentally and physically exhausted! We just went through loads of vocab stuff because it's easier to look at again when you didn't get your head round things perfectly, and arranged another lesson for the next day.
That night at Amsterdam I ran into the Belgians, Jen and Laura (who pointed out very correctly that Camilla looks just like Uma Thurman!), and a guy called Max who was driving to Ushaia from Quebec. It was all v good fun, but we were kind of tired so everyone went home at 1. However, we'd decided to do a Belgian dinner party the next night, so when we were passing the karaoke place 150m up the street from our house, the Belgians and I decided to go in and see if it was any good for the next night. We had to get a beer to see the song menu, which meant we had to sing Enrique Iglesias - Heroe (in Spanish), which meant Bolivian people started cheering and giving us more drinks. Dries (Belgian guy) and I stayed quite a while after Kim (Belgian girl) went home, and we were plied with more alcohol while I was told one of the Bolivian girls liked the look of me. She said she was 23, looked more like 16, but I kind of wanted a dance anyway. They dragged us out to Nanos afterwards for more dancing, and Dries and I grabbed the first girls who seemed to want to dance and started salsa-ing and merengue-ing like maniacs! It was great, quite impressive, but despite that the Bolivian girl I was dancing with decided she preferred Dries and I could barely stop laughing every time she tried to drag him off somewhere quiet! The unplanned night out did make the Spanish lesson the next day a little tricky though...
Belgian dinner party happened the next day [Day 58] as planned despite everyone being a little borracho when it was talked about (and I think it was Jen's final night in Sucre, cue lots of wine), and the cooking was well above the standard anyone would have expected (i.e. somehow it was even better than Rohan's)! Rohan had to go home early in the end, so the Saturday was his final night in town (as well as Sam and Romina's final day - so cue a large lunch at a chicharía, and lots of chicha - another difficult Spanish lesson ensued but I learned about mate de boldo - excellent for the liver!) which meant karaoke was a necessity. Especially because the trek the next day was only 1 day!
Patrick and I both went on the 1 day with a couple of Aussies, 2 English sisters and Uma Thurman, and it was a fairly quick walking pace so we spent ages at the waterfalls. I think almost everyone took a swim, and when people were sunbathing I decided to do a bit of a barefoot rockclimb/scramble up to the final waterfall that's kind of hard to take clients up to (because the rockclimbing bit is just a bit too technical). On the way back we ran into Max again, and it turned out he possibly wanted to drive to Tupiza on the Wednesday or Thursday after he'd spent a few days in the countryside near Sucre climbing and camping. I told him to tell the office when he got back to Sucre if that was happening, and I might jump in for a lift. That night I finally got to catch up on sleep properly, because I went home after seeing El Origen (Inception) again and had a massive lie in.
Michelle from the States moved in as a couch surfer at some point while I was on the 3 day trek, then I barely met her before she went on her trek with Franz, but I met her properly at some point on the Sunday or Monday. Monday was my final Spanish lesson, and as homework I had to write out the condor story about my chin scar! It was the first time I'd written a full sentence in Spanish, so a full page was tough, but it came out pretty well! At salsa class that night my teacher made it very clear she wanted me to stay for an extra lesson on the Wednesday, even though it didn't really fit into my plans, but it's really good fun, very cheap, and she was quite attractive so I was quite tempted!
On the Tuesday [Day 62] we had been going to try to go to the campo and do all the bits in the communities we were trying to help: Chaunaca wanted us to paint a door; Socopampa wanted their solar electric system fixed; Irupampa wanted a composting toilet; and another village wanted 1000Bs worth of dynamite (it's good for shattering hail stones before they destroy crops, and you can pack dust on top of it in a tube before you detonate to make the rain come out of a cloud - the water nucleates around the dust particle). Unfortunately the guy with the toilet couldn't do Tuesday, so it didn't happen, and Laura had been going to come along because she has money she wants to give to a good cause and she'd love to see how it gets spent. Anyway, it'll happen soon, I just won't be there, but Laura's probably going to return to Sucre for it.
Alternate plans for Tuesday were made. I decided to have a pizza party as my 'final night leaving party' (if I was going to salsa on the Wednesday I wouldn't want to have my party then anyway!) and Laura, Camilla and I decided to go to a house my upstairs neighbours were building near Yotala. It was an epic construction (better than anything you've seen on Grand Designs), and they also had workawayers (www.workaway.info - what I used to find Stilts last year and had been going to use this year for a Venezuelan jungle lodge. That guy was bad at replying to emails, but one of the volunteers at this house had been there and he's very good at replying to females! Apparently not a great guy to work for though) doing the buildings that would eventually be a hostel/restaurant etc - stuff to do while vaguely retiring. Johnny and Kathy (who I'd met after my 4th trek on the camion) were still working there after a month, and we just had a good catch up in the sun. The party was a laugh, but unfortunately we had to move it to our house from Randall's because there was trek prep going on there, and our oven is much worse, which kind of put a downer on things because everyone got hungry waiting. Anyway, Laura was pouring my drinks, and despite not feeling too bad that night I realised I should have been when I saw how much of everything was drunk in the morning.
I did feel kind of rough on the Wednesday, but it just got worse and worse and eventually I realised it wasn't a hangover - the Belgians, Patrick and Camilla had all felt or been very ill in our house in the past few days, and I'd finally managed to get the bug that was going round. Wednesday night leaving/salsa never happened due to illness, and I was going to try to leave on Thursday morning to Potosí with Michelle (there had been no word from Max, and we'd spend the day there before catching a night bus to Tupiza) but just felt too ill to get up and pack my bags. I eventually managed to leave Sucre that evening for Potosí - the Tupiza bus was sold out - and I got a bus the next morning to Tupiza. Still feeling horrendous with the joys of diarrhea, I met an English girl called Roz in the bus station waiting for the same bus with the same plans, so after the journey we decided to go to the nice hotel that runs a tour company that goes to the Salar, has its own pool etc. For GBP9 per night for a twin room with a good hot shower, breakfast and access to a pool, it seemed reasonable enough, and we met an English couple (James and Paul) there who wanted to do the same tour as us the next day, so everything got going nice and quickly and losing a couple of days in Sucre with illness didn't matter.
The Southwest Circuit tour (or Salar tour as everyone calls it) was brilliant. The first day out of Tupiza you don't see an awful lot, which suited me nicely because I was still feeling rough, and actually puked out the window after lunch. That didn't stop me trying to play football (for the first time in over 2 years) at 4200m with some kids in the village where we were spending the night. The second day was REALLY cool. There was loads of driving, which meant an early start, but you go to an old abandoned mining town, some hot springs (the only wash I've had in the last 4 days) a bright green lake (due to lots of crazy minerals including arsenic which stops anything living there), more lakes with flamingos, some mud geysers (not the kind that send water tens of metres into the air, just mud a foot or two and some powerful steam vents, but still cool!) and you see tons of volcanoes. The night was utterly freezing, but at least I could eat a little more by this stage - I'd had 2 rolls in 2 days after Wednesday afternoon - and cold nights just mean you wear loads in bed. Day 3 had a red lake (coloured by the bacteria, and it's probably the one that started the myth about flamingos getting stained by the water), the stone tree (that EVERY Bolivian tourism book has a picture of, despite the other rock formations around it being just as cool), and there were loads of lakes as well as a good look at a volcano with a smoking fumarole. The evening was spent at a salt hotel on the edge of the Salar, where some of the guides' kids were waiting (cue cute photos), I played cards with some Brazilians and we taught shithead to our guide (I had to explain it all in Spanish), before we taught the Brazilians - one of them in Spanish and the other in English. Today, day 4, was a shorter one, we saw dawn from some random point on the Salar de Uyuni, went to the Isla del Pescado (which is covered in cacti, one of which died in 2007 at over 1200 years old and 12.03m) and met Max there! He'd known Roz would be going there in the next few days (he met her in Peru and again in Sucre) so he'd driven out to spend a couple of days there and have a bit of a quiet time in the middle of nowhere (after breaking down in the middle of the world's biggest salt flat and having to camp there). I also met Michelle while I was walking about on the island, and then played football with an English guy, a couple of French and a couple of Bolivians at 3653m on a desert... I was panting for a full 15min afterwards. We took a bunch of silly photos with Leo the Lion (who we found in the village where we spent our first night) and generally just had a bit of a laugh on our way to Uyuni, where I booked my bus to La Paz tonight!
Anyway, things seem to be on schedule ish and according to plan (apart from my lack of a solid shit in almost a week, although proper appetite returned today), so I'm looking good for having a fun cycle ride, trekking on Lake Titicaca and going to Machu Picchu before I fly off to Quito in 9 days.
I am also beginning to wonder if I'll have a house to go back to when I finally return to Edinburgh in December...
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Day 48 - Dinner Parties to Brid's Abandonment
Ok, so it's been a good three weeks since the last post, and some family members might think I'm dead. There is good reason for this - my liver probably thinks I should be. As a result some bits of the last three weeks are a little hazy, it's been pretty hectic! Note that this may not be entirely suitable for grandparents.
Back on evening 25, Stacey (South African from the ear group) and Kathrine (Dutch girl from my third trek) did indeed do the dinner party on their last night in Sucre. It was great, but a little bit lacking in meat for my liking, so I decided to have another one the next day (which they were gutted they were missing!) based on chicken satay and egg-fried rice. Easy enough at home, but peanut butter here is so lacking in flavour that the sauce wasn't one I'm proud of. It still went down well though, despite the portions being a bit big. Turns out it was even better re-fried for lunch. :D
Obviously dinner parties mean lots of wine, so on evening 27 I was going to have an early-ish night. However, I saw Randall in a bar 50m from our house so I thought I'd go in and see what was up, so ended up playing poker with him, Tom who was an ex-volunteer at CT, and a bunch of Tom's mates who he was meeting in Sucre to travel with later. After poker I kind of felt like karaoke, so we went to a place called Nanos. When I was at the bar I said 'hola' to a girl called Clare and she immediately asked if I could salsa, so I had to quickly finish off my cuba libre before dancing the night away. I saw Tom an hour or so later and he started complaining to me that after 5 minutes in the place I was dancing with the only really attractive girl in there. I just told him it was the scar, and that there was nothing I could really do about it!
I can't remember if an awful lot happened for the rest of that week, I just know I didn't have any treks, and I probably slept a lot for the next night or two to make up for everything. I will have gone to the Folk music night at Amsterdam (really cool non-profit Dutch bar) on the Thursday, it might have been that week that we had a massive sing-a-long with George afterwards (he's an English guy who learnt guitar to go busking in Spain a few years ago), and it could well have been that week that we met Rohan and Nienke (some Dutchies) who are dinner partying it up this week. It could also have been the week before, but I'm assuming it was that week because otherwise I can't remember what I was doing! Anyway, lots of going to Amsterdam, because that's been happening for the last 4 weeks. One thing I do remember VERY well is that after what was presumably a big night out on the Friday, Brid and I had the biggest brunch ever of pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon and tumbos (like unripened passion fruits) before heading up to the Mirador (excellent view point over Sucre) for sunset (yes, it did take that long to get up, eat and clean the dishes), then we went over to Randall's cinema (we stole a projector from a German guy, and he has since stolen it back. GRR!!) to watch what might well have been District 9 or How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. We made good use of that projector, so it's hard to know exactly which films were which nights.
I do remember the next week surprisingly well, however! Patrick moved in with us (sharing my room) on day 34 after getting evicted from his 250Bs/month room for being too messy and arguing back when his landlady shouted at him unreasonably. She was a bit mental to be fair to him - she told him to scrub the walls when he left (so he said she was 'loca', check your Ricky Martin tunes). Evening 34 was a great night out at the Amsterdam pub quiz, despite the fact I had a trek the next morning, had told people not to give me beer (didn't work), and ended up winning a tequila pinky bet over what the biggest city in the world was (it's Tokyo, the guy who argued that it was Mexico City lost us the quiz, and therefore more beer!). After the quiz things got really cool though. George got out his guitar, and I started drumming along for him with some empty plastic water bottles while everyone at the table who knew the words to the songs sang along.
Day 35 was a 1 day trek (hence me not wanting to drink much the night before - but the countryside air does help a lot the next morning!) with Patrick leading the way, and a couple of French Belgians and two Aussies. After going to the world's most important dinosaur footprints site (because it proves the 4 main types of dinosaurs coexisted in the same place on the same day), and getting the necessary photos of clients sitting on my shoulders so that they could reach up to the anus on the life-size argentinosaurus (one of the sauropods - bit like a brontosaurus I think) model, we went off for a great wee trek to some waterfalls. Luckily Patrick got us slightly lost - he thought the road would go a different way so we hitchhiked for a few kilometres - so we got an extra hour of walking along a beautiful ridge. When we got to the waterfalls I decided I fancied a bit of a rockclimb before swimming, but got a bit stuck and it took me so long to get back that there was only enough time for a quick paddle and a dunking of my head in the waterfall. When we got back, the Belgians (who had been going to leave that day) decided they'd stay an extra night (on our sofas) and ended up helping out loads with the trek prep for the next day. The plan had been to meet the Australians at a salsa place, but preparation took to long and we ended up going to Nanos after picking Brid up (I'd guess in Amsterdam) because I'd had such a good salsa night there the week before. However, at Nanos you always do the thing you weren't planning on doing, so we did karaoke instead! It was a great night, and I ended up joining up with a bunch of English girls when the others went home because I wanted to sing more and unlike Patrick I wasn't having to get up early the next day to help send the trek off, unlike Brid I didn't have Spanish lessons, and unlike Marie (the Belgian who stayed out with us) I didn't have to faff about buying a bus ticket in the morning.
The next night was the Thursday folk music night at Amsterdam, always great fun, and I ended up joining up with a bunch of volunteers who worked for Nanta (one of the organisations we support). With them being from Quebec, and their leader being French, I knew it wouldn't be simple English for the night, but I reckoned I could handle a bilingual night. Unfortunately it was trilingual, because one of the Quebecois was drunk and refused to speak anything but Spanish to me! Still, it was good fun, and I got a good taste of Mitos - the club that Ruben (one of the Bolivian guides) had been telling me about. I think Delphine (the French one) took pity on my crap Espancais (I was mixing them up pretty badly!!) because she spoke a reasonable amount of English to me.
Friday was dinner party night again, Brid's turn to cook this time, and my liver was starting to feel the pain after 3 late drunken nights in a row. Still, some wine, beer, tequila and rum later I was drumming along for George again (this time I had one real drumstick and a hand on a soft chair - was a good sound!) before leaving at a not-too-unreasonable time of 12.30 on a Friday night. We still had a couple of complaints to our landlord though... Anyway, it was another night in Mitos, but I just needed my bed and had to go home at what was beginning to seem the early time of 4am.
I'd stupidly promised to meet up with the Quebecois and Delphine again on the Saturday, but by the 5th night out in a row I could only cope with a small amount of alcohol and needed a relatively early night. The next day I was lucky, Randall decided to sober me up by sending me on a three day trek with a Dutch couple and a Swiss French girl, so Ruben and I had another good trek together and I was able to avoid having a Sunday night out!
The trek left last Monday, which must be day 40. The first day is so much less rushed than the 2 day (it's all the same route for the first day, but you stop earlier and camp), which was great because we got a campfire and kind of did a bit of singing along to songs Ruben and I had on our phones! The second day is just brilliant on the 3 day trek. You climb up the last bit into the crater, then see it in the full light of day (and the views from the north and west sides and from near the middle are just so much better than from the south side which is what you get on the 2 day! I took a bunch of photos but won't bother uploading anything til I'm home or find a really good internet connection and a computer that works with my camera). You've got time to visit the caves and waterfalls (well, you can see the caves if you don't get stuck rockclimbing down the waterfalls... This will be a recurring theme for my last few weeks I think!) which are pretty stunning, and then once you've climbed out over the top of the crater (about 3500-3600m ish, it's not easy when you're suffering from a cold that you've not bothered to rest enough to recover from!) you go through some incredibly weird and colourful scenery towards some dinosaur footprints that are on a suitably inclined rock plane that they won't slide off and crush the tourists (unlike Parque Cretacico on the one day), so you can actually go over and touch them. After a couple more hours of walking (and yes, we were pretty tired already!) through a few Quechua communities where we can offload unnecessary extra food, we camped down by a river bank on a wee beach. Day 3 was quite easy in the end, we got to where the camion/'bus' stops after only about an hour of walking, and Ruben said we could either go to where you're meant to get the bus from a couple of hours down the road, or dump the backpacks and check out the gorge and hot springs. Was quite an easy choice!
I got back on the Wednesday for another quiz (hosted by the Quebefrenchies), and needed plenty of sleep that night. Having woken up a little early to get some breakfast, I just went back to bed until 4.45 on Thursday afternoon. Thursday was the Nanta people's last night, so obviously I had to join them for more trilingualism after the folk music, and by Friday our house (other than Franz, who was at some Bolivian student party) all had a very much needed night off.
Saturday was Brid's last night in Sucre (and she has left a void that only another crazy Irish woman could fill! Although a Belgian couple are hopefully moving in at the weekend and the girl likes making chocolate brownies...) so it had to be more karaoke, more Nanos, and more Toto - Africa. Sunday afternoon was spent up at the Mirador again (biggest and best fruit salad in town!) and she left in the evening on a night bus. Unluckily for her, Potosi is blockaded, has been for ages, and things are getting worse, so she had to go along the worse roads to Cochabamba on her way to La Paz for a 20h+ journey, and we still don't know if she arrived ok because she had no time to spare once she got there - she had to meet friends in a nearby town who were leaving on a 5 day trip to the jungle this morning.
Sunday and Monday were relatively quiet, so I'll just say a bit about the Potosi thing to give people an idea and myself a reminder about the social issues in Bolivia. Potosi was a town founded by the Spanish way up at about 4300m altitude because they found an excellent silver seam there, and ever since millions of slaves and local workers have died in the mines while all the wealth was redistributed to almost anywhere but Potosi and the local countryside (Spain and Sucre both benefited a lot). There's always been a bit of angst there. More recently, in the 1950's, the government gave Bolivian people the right to the land they lived on, but didn't give them papers. Now, rich city folk are using dodgy methods to get papers saying they own land in the countryside, leading to some fun territorial disputes (and mineral wealth or suspected mineral wealth may also be involved). Obviously this has pissed off the campesinos, who started blockading roads and going on strike.
This was a bit of a cue for everyone else in the city and surrounding area to go on strike and block roads/railways etc if they had any gripes with anything, particularly with the people who were already blocking roads. There was talk of a 100,000 people demonstration in Potosi (the largest in Bolivian history), there was a Molotov Cocktail thrown in Oruro which burnt down a sizable area by the looks of the photos in the papers, the mayor or Oruro appears to have been kidnapped or something, and large swathes of the country are now practically inaccessible. Sucre is still perfectly safe, despite a couple of small demonstrations that started yesterday, but the only places it is possible to get to from here are Cochabamba (and from there La Paz), Santa Cruz, and you can also fly south to Tarija (and from there you can get to Argentina). As a result, I might be unable to do the salt flats tour (Bolivia's Machu Picchu - by far the most popular tourist thing in the country), but that would mean I could stay longer in Sucre, so I'm not sure I'd mind all that much!
Anyway, don't worry about me, Sucre's safe and I'll be sensible. If things get dodgy I'll fly out to wherever I can get to before they block the airport (they did that in Potosi, where it sounds like there might be a bit of a lack of food after a good two weeks of blockades, but I did hear about an American guy who got out in a media helicopter). The situation is pretty localised, and is exceedingly unlikely to spread to La Paz AND Santa Cruz (and not likely to reach either of them, to be honest) due to the extremely different social makeups of the cities. I shouldn't have any difficulty making it to Peru with enough time to visit Lake Titicaca, Machu Picchu and still make my flight to Quito on time!
Back on evening 25, Stacey (South African from the ear group) and Kathrine (Dutch girl from my third trek) did indeed do the dinner party on their last night in Sucre. It was great, but a little bit lacking in meat for my liking, so I decided to have another one the next day (which they were gutted they were missing!) based on chicken satay and egg-fried rice. Easy enough at home, but peanut butter here is so lacking in flavour that the sauce wasn't one I'm proud of. It still went down well though, despite the portions being a bit big. Turns out it was even better re-fried for lunch. :D
Obviously dinner parties mean lots of wine, so on evening 27 I was going to have an early-ish night. However, I saw Randall in a bar 50m from our house so I thought I'd go in and see what was up, so ended up playing poker with him, Tom who was an ex-volunteer at CT, and a bunch of Tom's mates who he was meeting in Sucre to travel with later. After poker I kind of felt like karaoke, so we went to a place called Nanos. When I was at the bar I said 'hola' to a girl called Clare and she immediately asked if I could salsa, so I had to quickly finish off my cuba libre before dancing the night away. I saw Tom an hour or so later and he started complaining to me that after 5 minutes in the place I was dancing with the only really attractive girl in there. I just told him it was the scar, and that there was nothing I could really do about it!
I can't remember if an awful lot happened for the rest of that week, I just know I didn't have any treks, and I probably slept a lot for the next night or two to make up for everything. I will have gone to the Folk music night at Amsterdam (really cool non-profit Dutch bar) on the Thursday, it might have been that week that we had a massive sing-a-long with George afterwards (he's an English guy who learnt guitar to go busking in Spain a few years ago), and it could well have been that week that we met Rohan and Nienke (some Dutchies) who are dinner partying it up this week. It could also have been the week before, but I'm assuming it was that week because otherwise I can't remember what I was doing! Anyway, lots of going to Amsterdam, because that's been happening for the last 4 weeks. One thing I do remember VERY well is that after what was presumably a big night out on the Friday, Brid and I had the biggest brunch ever of pancakes, scrambled eggs, bacon and tumbos (like unripened passion fruits) before heading up to the Mirador (excellent view point over Sucre) for sunset (yes, it did take that long to get up, eat and clean the dishes), then we went over to Randall's cinema (we stole a projector from a German guy, and he has since stolen it back. GRR!!) to watch what might well have been District 9 or How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. We made good use of that projector, so it's hard to know exactly which films were which nights.
I do remember the next week surprisingly well, however! Patrick moved in with us (sharing my room) on day 34 after getting evicted from his 250Bs/month room for being too messy and arguing back when his landlady shouted at him unreasonably. She was a bit mental to be fair to him - she told him to scrub the walls when he left (so he said she was 'loca', check your Ricky Martin tunes). Evening 34 was a great night out at the Amsterdam pub quiz, despite the fact I had a trek the next morning, had told people not to give me beer (didn't work), and ended up winning a tequila pinky bet over what the biggest city in the world was (it's Tokyo, the guy who argued that it was Mexico City lost us the quiz, and therefore more beer!). After the quiz things got really cool though. George got out his guitar, and I started drumming along for him with some empty plastic water bottles while everyone at the table who knew the words to the songs sang along.
Day 35 was a 1 day trek (hence me not wanting to drink much the night before - but the countryside air does help a lot the next morning!) with Patrick leading the way, and a couple of French Belgians and two Aussies. After going to the world's most important dinosaur footprints site (because it proves the 4 main types of dinosaurs coexisted in the same place on the same day), and getting the necessary photos of clients sitting on my shoulders so that they could reach up to the anus on the life-size argentinosaurus (one of the sauropods - bit like a brontosaurus I think) model, we went off for a great wee trek to some waterfalls. Luckily Patrick got us slightly lost - he thought the road would go a different way so we hitchhiked for a few kilometres - so we got an extra hour of walking along a beautiful ridge. When we got to the waterfalls I decided I fancied a bit of a rockclimb before swimming, but got a bit stuck and it took me so long to get back that there was only enough time for a quick paddle and a dunking of my head in the waterfall. When we got back, the Belgians (who had been going to leave that day) decided they'd stay an extra night (on our sofas) and ended up helping out loads with the trek prep for the next day. The plan had been to meet the Australians at a salsa place, but preparation took to long and we ended up going to Nanos after picking Brid up (I'd guess in Amsterdam) because I'd had such a good salsa night there the week before. However, at Nanos you always do the thing you weren't planning on doing, so we did karaoke instead! It was a great night, and I ended up joining up with a bunch of English girls when the others went home because I wanted to sing more and unlike Patrick I wasn't having to get up early the next day to help send the trek off, unlike Brid I didn't have Spanish lessons, and unlike Marie (the Belgian who stayed out with us) I didn't have to faff about buying a bus ticket in the morning.
The next night was the Thursday folk music night at Amsterdam, always great fun, and I ended up joining up with a bunch of volunteers who worked for Nanta (one of the organisations we support). With them being from Quebec, and their leader being French, I knew it wouldn't be simple English for the night, but I reckoned I could handle a bilingual night. Unfortunately it was trilingual, because one of the Quebecois was drunk and refused to speak anything but Spanish to me! Still, it was good fun, and I got a good taste of Mitos - the club that Ruben (one of the Bolivian guides) had been telling me about. I think Delphine (the French one) took pity on my crap Espancais (I was mixing them up pretty badly!!) because she spoke a reasonable amount of English to me.
Friday was dinner party night again, Brid's turn to cook this time, and my liver was starting to feel the pain after 3 late drunken nights in a row. Still, some wine, beer, tequila and rum later I was drumming along for George again (this time I had one real drumstick and a hand on a soft chair - was a good sound!) before leaving at a not-too-unreasonable time of 12.30 on a Friday night. We still had a couple of complaints to our landlord though... Anyway, it was another night in Mitos, but I just needed my bed and had to go home at what was beginning to seem the early time of 4am.
I'd stupidly promised to meet up with the Quebecois and Delphine again on the Saturday, but by the 5th night out in a row I could only cope with a small amount of alcohol and needed a relatively early night. The next day I was lucky, Randall decided to sober me up by sending me on a three day trek with a Dutch couple and a Swiss French girl, so Ruben and I had another good trek together and I was able to avoid having a Sunday night out!
The trek left last Monday, which must be day 40. The first day is so much less rushed than the 2 day (it's all the same route for the first day, but you stop earlier and camp), which was great because we got a campfire and kind of did a bit of singing along to songs Ruben and I had on our phones! The second day is just brilliant on the 3 day trek. You climb up the last bit into the crater, then see it in the full light of day (and the views from the north and west sides and from near the middle are just so much better than from the south side which is what you get on the 2 day! I took a bunch of photos but won't bother uploading anything til I'm home or find a really good internet connection and a computer that works with my camera). You've got time to visit the caves and waterfalls (well, you can see the caves if you don't get stuck rockclimbing down the waterfalls... This will be a recurring theme for my last few weeks I think!) which are pretty stunning, and then once you've climbed out over the top of the crater (about 3500-3600m ish, it's not easy when you're suffering from a cold that you've not bothered to rest enough to recover from!) you go through some incredibly weird and colourful scenery towards some dinosaur footprints that are on a suitably inclined rock plane that they won't slide off and crush the tourists (unlike Parque Cretacico on the one day), so you can actually go over and touch them. After a couple more hours of walking (and yes, we were pretty tired already!) through a few Quechua communities where we can offload unnecessary extra food, we camped down by a river bank on a wee beach. Day 3 was quite easy in the end, we got to where the camion/'bus' stops after only about an hour of walking, and Ruben said we could either go to where you're meant to get the bus from a couple of hours down the road, or dump the backpacks and check out the gorge and hot springs. Was quite an easy choice!
I got back on the Wednesday for another quiz (hosted by the Quebefrenchies), and needed plenty of sleep that night. Having woken up a little early to get some breakfast, I just went back to bed until 4.45 on Thursday afternoon. Thursday was the Nanta people's last night, so obviously I had to join them for more trilingualism after the folk music, and by Friday our house (other than Franz, who was at some Bolivian student party) all had a very much needed night off.
Saturday was Brid's last night in Sucre (and she has left a void that only another crazy Irish woman could fill! Although a Belgian couple are hopefully moving in at the weekend and the girl likes making chocolate brownies...) so it had to be more karaoke, more Nanos, and more Toto - Africa. Sunday afternoon was spent up at the Mirador again (biggest and best fruit salad in town!) and she left in the evening on a night bus. Unluckily for her, Potosi is blockaded, has been for ages, and things are getting worse, so she had to go along the worse roads to Cochabamba on her way to La Paz for a 20h+ journey, and we still don't know if she arrived ok because she had no time to spare once she got there - she had to meet friends in a nearby town who were leaving on a 5 day trip to the jungle this morning.
Sunday and Monday were relatively quiet, so I'll just say a bit about the Potosi thing to give people an idea and myself a reminder about the social issues in Bolivia. Potosi was a town founded by the Spanish way up at about 4300m altitude because they found an excellent silver seam there, and ever since millions of slaves and local workers have died in the mines while all the wealth was redistributed to almost anywhere but Potosi and the local countryside (Spain and Sucre both benefited a lot). There's always been a bit of angst there. More recently, in the 1950's, the government gave Bolivian people the right to the land they lived on, but didn't give them papers. Now, rich city folk are using dodgy methods to get papers saying they own land in the countryside, leading to some fun territorial disputes (and mineral wealth or suspected mineral wealth may also be involved). Obviously this has pissed off the campesinos, who started blockading roads and going on strike.
This was a bit of a cue for everyone else in the city and surrounding area to go on strike and block roads/railways etc if they had any gripes with anything, particularly with the people who were already blocking roads. There was talk of a 100,000 people demonstration in Potosi (the largest in Bolivian history), there was a Molotov Cocktail thrown in Oruro which burnt down a sizable area by the looks of the photos in the papers, the mayor or Oruro appears to have been kidnapped or something, and large swathes of the country are now practically inaccessible. Sucre is still perfectly safe, despite a couple of small demonstrations that started yesterday, but the only places it is possible to get to from here are Cochabamba (and from there La Paz), Santa Cruz, and you can also fly south to Tarija (and from there you can get to Argentina). As a result, I might be unable to do the salt flats tour (Bolivia's Machu Picchu - by far the most popular tourist thing in the country), but that would mean I could stay longer in Sucre, so I'm not sure I'd mind all that much!
Anyway, don't worry about me, Sucre's safe and I'll be sensible. If things get dodgy I'll fly out to wherever I can get to before they block the airport (they did that in Potosi, where it sounds like there might be a bit of a lack of food after a good two weeks of blockades, but I did hear about an American guy who got out in a media helicopter). The situation is pretty localised, and is exceedingly unlikely to spread to La Paz AND Santa Cruz (and not likely to reach either of them, to be honest) due to the extremely different social makeups of the cities. I shouldn't have any difficulty making it to Peru with enough time to visit Lake Titicaca, Machu Picchu and still make my flight to Quito on time!
Sunday, 18 July 2010
Day 25 - Illness to Dinner Party (Hopefully)
And via injury, more later.
Immediately after my last post, there was a dinner party a casa Randall, but I felt like crap and went down with the shits half way through. I then picked up Pol's cold (another volunteer, who had been ill before going on a trek, getting drunk, and then it came back with a vengeance) while my immune system was down, and that kind of laid me out for a few days. After that it was time for trek 2!
It was the 2 day Maragua trek again, this time with a group of Quebecois who were un poco fussy, and really quite slow. While on the first trek one of the girls was ill and I was suffering from altitude, but this time there were no problems at all, we stopped FAR less, and still arrived at the same time (8.30, after 2h walking in the dark, and that made them complain a lot more even though we'd told them that would be the case). My French got a little work out, but I wasn't really quick enough to join in on many of the conversations, but I don't think they realised until I told them the next morning that I'd understood almost everything they'd said while they were complaining!
Still, I shouldn't complain about them, 2 of them who I had dinner with later loved the experience overall, and actually recommended us to a guy they met (and was later on my third trek) after they'd left Sucre. I had found it pretty stressful though, and decided to drink lots of whisky and wine that night! The next day was not so fun, it was kind of a Gap Yah day, probably more because I'd shared a bottle of water with a guy who was complaining that he was feeling a bit sick (and I'd ignored this because I assumed he was just complaining in the same vein that a couple of others had been the evening before) than the alcohol. This laid me out for another few days.
During my two illnesses I was looking at a few apartments with Franz (another of the 5 volunteers), because Randall's house is technically only meant to sleep 4, and the legally binding contract says so. One house we looked at was utterly beautiful, more of a castle than a casa, with 6 large bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a 'guest bathroom' without a shower for people in the massive downstairs party/restaurant/lounge room and excellent views over Sucre and the surroundings. One balcony had a huge BBQ area, and we were wondering how expensive inflatable swimming pools were for the other balcony (and yes, 'balcony' obviously does NOT do it justice). Unfortunately, at $550/month, small budgets and a preferred minimum lease of a year it was a little out of our price range unless we could find people to stay with us, and we only had a day to do that before the landlord went back to La Paz. Yes, I did consider phoning the bank of Mum and Dad to ask if they'd buy the place to retire to!
The apartment we ended up getting was 3 bedrooms for $300/month, much more centrally located and well-furnished. Franz is staying for 6 months so that's the length of lease we went for, and we have since found a third flatmate - Brid from Ireland - who is staying for a couple of weeks and can pay a bit of rent during that time.
Around the time we actually moved in (I think it was last Saturday) there was a group out with Patrick on the same 2 day trek (it's pretty popular!) who will forever more be known as 'the ear group'. They had a little problem when a French girl suddenly started screaming 'It's alive!!' in the middle of the night, and after a few minutes of panic and questioning found out that it wasn't a spider or a mouse, but something in her ear! Obviously this had to be questioned, but she'd just been to the jungle and when the guide asked here if it made a noise 'like this' she said yes, so she got a bit worried that something was about to start munching on her brain. Cue Patrick having to get up and phone Randall to find out how the hell you get an ambulance to Irupampa (the village we stay in in the crater), which meant a good 30min walk in the pitch black, exceptionally bad signal and running out of credit. Randall then spent ages phoning back, phoning emergency services and even phoning rival companies who had 4x4s that could make it there, but no-one could be bothered getting up in the middle of the night to drive there and help someone who could technically walk. This had to happen the day after Randall damaged his manly parts in a bike accident (I would be more specific, but it seemed to be most of them!). In the morning they ended up having to walk down to the end of the trek anyway, and the bus (I'm being kind and some people seem to think misleading - it's a flatbed truck with loads of people and standing room only for most gringos) was full so it didn't stop to pick them up. Eventually they convinced the nearest doctor with an ambulance-ish 4x4 vehicle to give them a lift to the hospital back in Sucre, but on the condition that they walk out of town and he meet them another way so that the locals wouldn't know and get pissed off. Still, they all apparently loved it, and recommended it to loads of other people!
I think my third trek must have left on day 19, with a bunch of people who had met Patrick and the ear group in their hostel and thought it sounded good. We found out about this on Sunday night, far too late to go to the market, but luckily we'd made too much salsa for the previous trek and it was in the freezer. In the end it was a great group, and I've now had a few good nights' drinking with those who remained in town and the remnants of the ear group (for the record, the hospital said it was an ear infection), one of whom decided she was going to host a dinner party in my lovely new apartment tonight! I don't know much more about this, but hopefully I'll know more if she turns up with food.
The real excitement of the trek was my little injury though. There was an old campesino woman (think stereotypical rural Bolivian) with a baby in the sack on her back, and I saw a condor swooping down towards her and got a bit nervous. They're quite closely related to vultures, and the baby was asleep, looking kind of dead. Needless to say I ran over to intervene, and luckily I did manage to save the baby, but not before the condor managed to slice open my chin with one of its talons. They're bloody huge beasts, so I guess I was lucky not to come away with a lot more damage, but I think I managed to teach it a lesson by knocking more out of it that it took out of me (as some bloodstained feathers we found 50m down the path showed - shame I was too much in shock to take a photo!). Hopefully at least the scar will stay as a memento.
Day 24 was the start of trek 4 ('the cheese group', and still the same trek! I told you it was popular), and we had a Swiss guy and a Canadian guy, both in decent shape. I'd thought the third trek had been quick (arriving nearly an hour earlier than the previous two, despite a few good stops and a decent splash about in the river), but this time we managed to actually see the crater in the last of the light for the first time in ages (there are roadworks on the way to the start of the trek that slow us down by over an hour). When we got to the mountain hut the electricity was out, so we cooked by torchlight while we ate some cheese and crackers (1 Boliviano/10p for the crackers, and we'd picked up the cheese that was meant for a 3 day trek with 11 people on it, rather than a 2 day with 4, so we thought we'd make the most of having loads of really tasty cheese!). We also had a bit of an interesting time trying to cook quinua (neither Ruben the guide nor I had ever done it before, and it took AGES), so we played candlelit chess and draughts in the mean time. I should probably add that we got fairly drowned in typically Scottish weather which is exceptionally untypical in the Bolivian dry season (there is usually zero precipitation in June, July and the first half or more of August), but to be honest it did make the place look prettier to me! Also, it meant we kind of wanted to eat indoors, so we found a campesino guy and asked to use his house to have lunch, then we gave him a small lump of our 2-3kg of cheese along with a little bit of bread and veg to say thanks after we were warm, dry and well-fed.
Needless to say, 2-3kg of good cheese doesn't last long. We had left it in the office overnight (we couldn't be bothered taking lunch stuff away to Randall's house and back when it was going to be used the next day anyway), and this only made it better than the bit we tasted in the mercado when we bought it. We then accidentally left it in its box with the lid off overnight in Irupampa, and it tasted even better, so by the time we'd got the 'bus' back to Sucre (and met the people from the three day who'd actually bothered to turn up on the same 'bus') we thought it was high time we finished it off in the office.
Anyway, it turns out the dinner party is definitely happening tonight - Sam just got a call saying they were starting the cooking, so I think I might just have to head back home! Ciao for now!
Immediately after my last post, there was a dinner party a casa Randall, but I felt like crap and went down with the shits half way through. I then picked up Pol's cold (another volunteer, who had been ill before going on a trek, getting drunk, and then it came back with a vengeance) while my immune system was down, and that kind of laid me out for a few days. After that it was time for trek 2!
It was the 2 day Maragua trek again, this time with a group of Quebecois who were un poco fussy, and really quite slow. While on the first trek one of the girls was ill and I was suffering from altitude, but this time there were no problems at all, we stopped FAR less, and still arrived at the same time (8.30, after 2h walking in the dark, and that made them complain a lot more even though we'd told them that would be the case). My French got a little work out, but I wasn't really quick enough to join in on many of the conversations, but I don't think they realised until I told them the next morning that I'd understood almost everything they'd said while they were complaining!
Still, I shouldn't complain about them, 2 of them who I had dinner with later loved the experience overall, and actually recommended us to a guy they met (and was later on my third trek) after they'd left Sucre. I had found it pretty stressful though, and decided to drink lots of whisky and wine that night! The next day was not so fun, it was kind of a Gap Yah day, probably more because I'd shared a bottle of water with a guy who was complaining that he was feeling a bit sick (and I'd ignored this because I assumed he was just complaining in the same vein that a couple of others had been the evening before) than the alcohol. This laid me out for another few days.
During my two illnesses I was looking at a few apartments with Franz (another of the 5 volunteers), because Randall's house is technically only meant to sleep 4, and the legally binding contract says so. One house we looked at was utterly beautiful, more of a castle than a casa, with 6 large bedrooms, 3 bathrooms, a 'guest bathroom' without a shower for people in the massive downstairs party/restaurant/lounge room and excellent views over Sucre and the surroundings. One balcony had a huge BBQ area, and we were wondering how expensive inflatable swimming pools were for the other balcony (and yes, 'balcony' obviously does NOT do it justice). Unfortunately, at $550/month, small budgets and a preferred minimum lease of a year it was a little out of our price range unless we could find people to stay with us, and we only had a day to do that before the landlord went back to La Paz. Yes, I did consider phoning the bank of Mum and Dad to ask if they'd buy the place to retire to!
The apartment we ended up getting was 3 bedrooms for $300/month, much more centrally located and well-furnished. Franz is staying for 6 months so that's the length of lease we went for, and we have since found a third flatmate - Brid from Ireland - who is staying for a couple of weeks and can pay a bit of rent during that time.
Around the time we actually moved in (I think it was last Saturday) there was a group out with Patrick on the same 2 day trek (it's pretty popular!) who will forever more be known as 'the ear group'. They had a little problem when a French girl suddenly started screaming 'It's alive!!' in the middle of the night, and after a few minutes of panic and questioning found out that it wasn't a spider or a mouse, but something in her ear! Obviously this had to be questioned, but she'd just been to the jungle and when the guide asked here if it made a noise 'like this' she said yes, so she got a bit worried that something was about to start munching on her brain. Cue Patrick having to get up and phone Randall to find out how the hell you get an ambulance to Irupampa (the village we stay in in the crater), which meant a good 30min walk in the pitch black, exceptionally bad signal and running out of credit. Randall then spent ages phoning back, phoning emergency services and even phoning rival companies who had 4x4s that could make it there, but no-one could be bothered getting up in the middle of the night to drive there and help someone who could technically walk. This had to happen the day after Randall damaged his manly parts in a bike accident (I would be more specific, but it seemed to be most of them!). In the morning they ended up having to walk down to the end of the trek anyway, and the bus (I'm being kind and some people seem to think misleading - it's a flatbed truck with loads of people and standing room only for most gringos) was full so it didn't stop to pick them up. Eventually they convinced the nearest doctor with an ambulance-ish 4x4 vehicle to give them a lift to the hospital back in Sucre, but on the condition that they walk out of town and he meet them another way so that the locals wouldn't know and get pissed off. Still, they all apparently loved it, and recommended it to loads of other people!
I think my third trek must have left on day 19, with a bunch of people who had met Patrick and the ear group in their hostel and thought it sounded good. We found out about this on Sunday night, far too late to go to the market, but luckily we'd made too much salsa for the previous trek and it was in the freezer. In the end it was a great group, and I've now had a few good nights' drinking with those who remained in town and the remnants of the ear group (for the record, the hospital said it was an ear infection), one of whom decided she was going to host a dinner party in my lovely new apartment tonight! I don't know much more about this, but hopefully I'll know more if she turns up with food.
The real excitement of the trek was my little injury though. There was an old campesino woman (think stereotypical rural Bolivian) with a baby in the sack on her back, and I saw a condor swooping down towards her and got a bit nervous. They're quite closely related to vultures, and the baby was asleep, looking kind of dead. Needless to say I ran over to intervene, and luckily I did manage to save the baby, but not before the condor managed to slice open my chin with one of its talons. They're bloody huge beasts, so I guess I was lucky not to come away with a lot more damage, but I think I managed to teach it a lesson by knocking more out of it that it took out of me (as some bloodstained feathers we found 50m down the path showed - shame I was too much in shock to take a photo!). Hopefully at least the scar will stay as a memento.
Day 24 was the start of trek 4 ('the cheese group', and still the same trek! I told you it was popular), and we had a Swiss guy and a Canadian guy, both in decent shape. I'd thought the third trek had been quick (arriving nearly an hour earlier than the previous two, despite a few good stops and a decent splash about in the river), but this time we managed to actually see the crater in the last of the light for the first time in ages (there are roadworks on the way to the start of the trek that slow us down by over an hour). When we got to the mountain hut the electricity was out, so we cooked by torchlight while we ate some cheese and crackers (1 Boliviano/10p for the crackers, and we'd picked up the cheese that was meant for a 3 day trek with 11 people on it, rather than a 2 day with 4, so we thought we'd make the most of having loads of really tasty cheese!). We also had a bit of an interesting time trying to cook quinua (neither Ruben the guide nor I had ever done it before, and it took AGES), so we played candlelit chess and draughts in the mean time. I should probably add that we got fairly drowned in typically Scottish weather which is exceptionally untypical in the Bolivian dry season (there is usually zero precipitation in June, July and the first half or more of August), but to be honest it did make the place look prettier to me! Also, it meant we kind of wanted to eat indoors, so we found a campesino guy and asked to use his house to have lunch, then we gave him a small lump of our 2-3kg of cheese along with a little bit of bread and veg to say thanks after we were warm, dry and well-fed.
Needless to say, 2-3kg of good cheese doesn't last long. We had left it in the office overnight (we couldn't be bothered taking lunch stuff away to Randall's house and back when it was going to be used the next day anyway), and this only made it better than the bit we tasted in the mercado when we bought it. We then accidentally left it in its box with the lid off overnight in Irupampa, and it tasted even better, so by the time we'd got the 'bus' back to Sucre (and met the people from the three day who'd actually bothered to turn up on the same 'bus') we thought it was high time we finished it off in the office.
Anyway, it turns out the dinner party is definitely happening tonight - Sam just got a call saying they were starting the cooking, so I think I might just have to head back home! Ciao for now!
Monday, 28 June 2010
Day 5 - New House to New Shorts
Ok, so there was the first trek in there as well, but the new shorts are exciting to me! It was a very accurate url choice. I got a wee bit burnt on the trek (and sunburnt lips really hurt!), but otherwise everything went reasonably well. More later.
I moved in with Randall and a few other Condor Trekkers people on Thursday, then we got pleasantly pissed before Zero (one of the guys in the house) got a bit too drunk. I offered to take him home because my alcohol tolerance was surprisingly good considering I was sleep-deprived and unacclimatised, and unfortunately he was convinced he lived somewhere completely different. I overruled him despite not knowing exactly where the house was myself (Day 1, it's acceptable!) and more by luck than anything else we made it back.
The next morning there was a marching band, loud traffic, a hundred rings on the doorbell and all the other things you just don't want when you're jetlagged and trying to get into the right time zone. The doorbell isn't for us, but for some reason it's right against our flat and the Bolivians who live next door can't hear it. A hundred rings is probably not even an exaggeration, everyone who comes rings about 3 times every 30s until it's answered.
The other part of Day 1 was getting a Bolivian sim card when I didn't know the Spanish for anything involved with a mobile phone (or basic sentences). Eventually it was done, and someone helped activate it, but he did it in his own name and now the credit disappears on its own. A waste of 20B$, and I'll get myself a new one in case he actually is siphoning off my credit.
Day 2 was fairly chilled, Patrick joined us as a new volunteer and we did the prep for a trek the next day (buying lots of vegetarian food, plenty of chopping to make a sauce etc).
Day 3 was the start of my first trek! Sucre's at about 2800m, and the trek goes about 1000m higher. I was a bit nervous because of the altitude and I'd just realised I was the most unfit I've been in years (bloody finals), but it was still fun! We had three girls along, as well as Patrick, a Bolivian guide called Henry and another Bolivian called Hugo, who was just coming because Randall had promised him he could be a guide when he's qualified (but there are still 5 years of high school to go first).
The trek was a 2 day one, going to the Maragua crater along part of the Inca trail (link below, check out www.condortrekkers.org for a full description of the trek). Beautiful scenery (unsurprisingly) but a lot of busing to get there - there was a micro then a big flatbed truck, then we had to wait at some road works until the workers buggered off for their lunch (which is one thing you can guarantee Bolivians will be on time for!), then a dust shower (excellent sun block!) because we were following traffic. The walking started off with loads of downhill, then lunch, then loads more downhill, before a little swim/paddle (depending on personal taste) in the river. It got dark just before we started climbing into the crater, but with a full Moon there was really no need for torches, so about half of us didn't bother with them.
When we arrived I was pretty knackered, the altitude had really taken it out of me and everyone else was at least acclimatised to Sucre. I could barely eat my dinner, but then I had some coca tea just as the cheese and crackers came out so I didn't starve. Helen decided we should play a dice game with the rum she'd brought after that, but oddly enough no-one felt like drinking, so because I won I had half a bottle of rum to take down the mountain the next day.
The way down wasn't exactly simple. There was a fair bit of climbing to get out of the crater (which is probably a bit too big to actually feel like a crater when you're in it - try it out on Google Earth) and we had to rush all the way because there's only one bus a day out to Sucre. Henry had to run on ahead to make it wait for us (it was earlier than expected), leaving me as the most qualified guide to try to make sure we ended up on the right path down. The bus was absolutely packed, so in the end I had to stand up and hang on for dear life round two of the girls. It was better than having old women mocking me in Quechua!
The afternoon and evening were relatively relaxed, with a game of The Settlers of Catan to accompany the opening of the beautiful bottle of Ledaig I'd brought in the Stilts pipe bomb case. We're playing again tonight while I write this, and I'm hoping my beginner's luck (it probably wasn't just from calculating odds) doesn't run out!
Today has actually been alcohol free (so far - probably soon to change now we've realised this), but it has been fairly productive. Patrick taught me to make guacamole, we did loads of post-trek stuff, I got my visa extended thanks to a note from Zero and some fabby Spanish (which improved a bit on the trek, especially the understanding), and the highlight of the day is the new shorts! Some people will remember the scabby shorts that were made from jeans with great pockets that got chucked out on Tuesday because of the huge holes in the bum. I've decided to make new ones out of some trousers I found in the market with at least 12 pockets in them (with the help of my trusty Swiss army knife), and they fit perfectly! That might change if I lose weight out here though.
Anyway, while I could very easily talk about the shorts all day, I won't bore everyone. Happy holidays!
P.S. Link for the trek - crater is obvious at left hand side, Sucre's at the right. Henry reckoned there was about 43km of walking involved, I doubt it was more than 30.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=sucre,+bolivia&sll=-3.337954,-65.039062&sspn=73.946681,158.027344&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Sucre,+Oropeza,+Chuquisaca,+Bolivia&ll=-19.055628,-65.330544&spn=0.147327,0.308647&t=h&z=12
I moved in with Randall and a few other Condor Trekkers people on Thursday, then we got pleasantly pissed before Zero (one of the guys in the house) got a bit too drunk. I offered to take him home because my alcohol tolerance was surprisingly good considering I was sleep-deprived and unacclimatised, and unfortunately he was convinced he lived somewhere completely different. I overruled him despite not knowing exactly where the house was myself (Day 1, it's acceptable!) and more by luck than anything else we made it back.
The next morning there was a marching band, loud traffic, a hundred rings on the doorbell and all the other things you just don't want when you're jetlagged and trying to get into the right time zone. The doorbell isn't for us, but for some reason it's right against our flat and the Bolivians who live next door can't hear it. A hundred rings is probably not even an exaggeration, everyone who comes rings about 3 times every 30s until it's answered.
The other part of Day 1 was getting a Bolivian sim card when I didn't know the Spanish for anything involved with a mobile phone (or basic sentences). Eventually it was done, and someone helped activate it, but he did it in his own name and now the credit disappears on its own. A waste of 20B$, and I'll get myself a new one in case he actually is siphoning off my credit.
Day 2 was fairly chilled, Patrick joined us as a new volunteer and we did the prep for a trek the next day (buying lots of vegetarian food, plenty of chopping to make a sauce etc).
Day 3 was the start of my first trek! Sucre's at about 2800m, and the trek goes about 1000m higher. I was a bit nervous because of the altitude and I'd just realised I was the most unfit I've been in years (bloody finals), but it was still fun! We had three girls along, as well as Patrick, a Bolivian guide called Henry and another Bolivian called Hugo, who was just coming because Randall had promised him he could be a guide when he's qualified (but there are still 5 years of high school to go first).
The trek was a 2 day one, going to the Maragua crater along part of the Inca trail (link below, check out www.condortrekkers.org for a full description of the trek). Beautiful scenery (unsurprisingly) but a lot of busing to get there - there was a micro then a big flatbed truck, then we had to wait at some road works until the workers buggered off for their lunch (which is one thing you can guarantee Bolivians will be on time for!), then a dust shower (excellent sun block!) because we were following traffic. The walking started off with loads of downhill, then lunch, then loads more downhill, before a little swim/paddle (depending on personal taste) in the river. It got dark just before we started climbing into the crater, but with a full Moon there was really no need for torches, so about half of us didn't bother with them.
When we arrived I was pretty knackered, the altitude had really taken it out of me and everyone else was at least acclimatised to Sucre. I could barely eat my dinner, but then I had some coca tea just as the cheese and crackers came out so I didn't starve. Helen decided we should play a dice game with the rum she'd brought after that, but oddly enough no-one felt like drinking, so because I won I had half a bottle of rum to take down the mountain the next day.
The way down wasn't exactly simple. There was a fair bit of climbing to get out of the crater (which is probably a bit too big to actually feel like a crater when you're in it - try it out on Google Earth) and we had to rush all the way because there's only one bus a day out to Sucre. Henry had to run on ahead to make it wait for us (it was earlier than expected), leaving me as the most qualified guide to try to make sure we ended up on the right path down. The bus was absolutely packed, so in the end I had to stand up and hang on for dear life round two of the girls. It was better than having old women mocking me in Quechua!
The afternoon and evening were relatively relaxed, with a game of The Settlers of Catan to accompany the opening of the beautiful bottle of Ledaig I'd brought in the Stilts pipe bomb case. We're playing again tonight while I write this, and I'm hoping my beginner's luck (it probably wasn't just from calculating odds) doesn't run out!
Today has actually been alcohol free (so far - probably soon to change now we've realised this), but it has been fairly productive. Patrick taught me to make guacamole, we did loads of post-trek stuff, I got my visa extended thanks to a note from Zero and some fabby Spanish (which improved a bit on the trek, especially the understanding), and the highlight of the day is the new shorts! Some people will remember the scabby shorts that were made from jeans with great pockets that got chucked out on Tuesday because of the huge holes in the bum. I've decided to make new ones out of some trousers I found in the market with at least 12 pockets in them (with the help of my trusty Swiss army knife), and they fit perfectly! That might change if I lose weight out here though.
Anyway, while I could very easily talk about the shorts all day, I won't bore everyone. Happy holidays!
P.S. Link for the trek - crater is obvious at left hand side, Sucre's at the right. Henry reckoned there was about 43km of walking involved, I doubt it was more than 30.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=sucre,+bolivia&sll=-3.337954,-65.039062&sspn=73.946681,158.027344&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Sucre,+Oropeza,+Chuquisaca,+Bolivia&ll=-19.055628,-65.330544&spn=0.147327,0.308647&t=h&z=12
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