S.A. to N.Z...Moving on.

Here are a few of my highlights from the last 2 days in South America, in Santiago, Chile.

Sunset on Santiago, view from Cerro San Cristobel

A few of the cool murals around Santiago

Grapes growing from the telephone lines!

The Beautiful old downtown Architecture

I don’t know, Its kind of weird leaving South America and although the trip isn’t over I can’t help but feel like part a big part of it may be, the cultural differences and stuff, the differences that make just walking down the street an adventure. Sounds kind of spoilt saying that when I read back over it, because after all I’m still on the other side of the world, but let me explain. Arriving in Auckland last night was exciting and as the bus drove down through the clean streets on the left hand side of the road I almost felt as if I was arriving back home, a lot of the vegetation and scenery around the outskirts of Auckland is similar to England and the coins and notes had the old familiar Queen Elizabeth and her snooty nose on them. But today as I wandered around the centre of Auckland and the parks and stuff a few funny things happened as I slowly adjusted to being back in civilization after 7 months.

I went into this internet café and instinctively greeted the Japanese lady working there with hola!, and at another place I ordered my food starting with ‘quiero’ too. Now I’m not saying I’m fluent or that I’m thinking in Spanish or anything like that, far from it, but there are little phrases which just stick and result in some strange looks from the kiwis!

Over the time spent in South America I have become expert at avoiding the vendors and trying to check out the prices without their knowing, and avoiding any hassle that I don’t really want to deal with. It’s hard to get used to the fact that, over here, you’re not actually going to get that hassle. Its funny when I look back at how I behaved when I got out the Auckland airport, actually, lets compare events at Santiago airport and Auckland airport.

Santiago

Ok so it’s the first thing in the morning when I arrived, about 3am, as soon as I cleared customs and got into the airport Taxi! Taxi!, “no gracias” and I go off looking for the two things I need, Chilean pesos and wifi to see where I’m going to stay. Typically the atms aren’t working and I look for another one, weaving a route around the taxi drivers hawking around inside the terminal at each door. After I successfully have both money and an address I walk out the front door, instantly there is someone trying to direct me to his taxi. In my badly pronounced Spanish I’m like “No gracias donde esta la terminal de buses” and he tells me that it’s over there, but they don’t start until 6am… literally lying to me as the bus pulls into the stop, I run after it and load my things on, saying “centro por favor, quanto tiempa?” trying to gauge how long it will take to get to the centre so I minimize the taxi expenditure. I’ll get off after about 40 minutes.

Auckland

I clear customs but then go through a ‘biohazards’ section to make sure my wooden guitar or the soil on my soles won’t wipe out wildlife or something and then I enter the front foyer of the airport. There are a few people waiting to greet friends and family and I go over to the ATM that works first time. It gives me my card back before my cash ‘that’s the way you do it’, I think. When you go to a machine you want money, so giving you that last ensures that you avoid situations like the one time in Bolivia when I walked off without my card. Fortunately, although on the whole they are desperately poor, the people in Bolivia are so kind and honest that some guy ran after me with the card when he could have cleared my account completely. Anyway, I go out the front door, I’d prepared the hostel in advance this time and remember reading something about the bus being the cheapest way. So I’m looking around for signs. I actually swerved away from the guy running the airport shuttle thing thinking he was going to start trying to convince me to use his services when I knew I didn’t want to, but I hit a dead end. When I go back round and walk past him he doesn’t even say anything. I think ‘that’s a bit weird’ but also find it relieving at the same time. I saw a bus and asked the driver if it was going to Queens street, “yea this is the one mate” “cheers, how much is it?” I reply, “Do you know where the Base hostel is by the way?”  “yea $16, 3^rd stop mate”. Amazing, I thought.

As much as street dogs, horns and putting toilet paper in the bin is annoying when you’re in South America, it all kind of goes to constantly reinforce the fact that you’re somewhere completely different, after a while you just kind of get used to it. Here it’s going to be the opposite, getting used to the real world again (ok that sounds bad... the 'world I was used to'). Hopefully though, there will still be a lot of exciting adventures and things to do and see despite the civilised backdrop… Here goes NZ!

Sky tower - people like to jump off this... with bungees of course

Cosmopolitan Auckland

South America Newsreel & Free Reggae Download

In an effort to keep learning Spanish I've decided to start translating an article from a newspaper once a week. Now my Spanish is a long way from being able to do this without google translate, but it does help in familiarizing yourself with sentence structure and the little essential pronouns.

I'm not sure if you've heard about this on the news in England, but I found this story really shocking especially after visiting the mines in Potosi, Bolivia, which I blogged about a while back.

There are currently 33 Chilean miners trapped 600m underground in the San Jose mine in northern Chile.

So far the miners have been trapped for 20 days, and an 8cm supply hole has been drilled to provide oxygen and supplies, a telephone line has also been set up so that the trapped workers can communicate with loved ones. What the trapped workers do not currently know, however, is that it could take 4 months to drill a hole wide enough to rescue them. 

The temperature that far underground is around 35 degrees Celsius, and the men are currently taking refuge in a shelter off one of the main tracks that is just 50 square meters. Obviously this also poses serious health risks with so many people in such a small space.

Chilean President Sebastian Pinera has told the workers that  "We will knock on every door, we will search for every bit of technology, equipment, every expert, so we can get you out alive. Because for us, being able to rescue you alive is a promise that signifies the soul, the love and the spirit of the Chilean people." Hopefully they will be out before Christmas.

ACS - The News

While I mention the news, I wanted to share a track by my buddies from back home - ACS. They have just finished the final touches to these recordings they did in Barcelona earlier in the year. They play an eclectic reggae fusion, with a style that has been refined through many years of practice and good times. I really hope this album works out for them.


The News is probably my favourite track off the album, you can download it by following the link above.


Website
http://www.acertainshade.com/home.html


Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/feelacs?ref=ts

Desert Driving

From the dusty desert town of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile, a group of us booked a 3 day tour through the Atacama desert and the salt flats to Uyuni, Southwest Bolivia. Absolutely the best experience of the trip so far and definitely worth the cold, showerless nights!

The first thing we saw were the brilliant coloured lagoons. Although it was difficult to understand our guide, I think he said, addressing us in formal spanish, that this was because of oxidized copper minerals in the water. We then went to some thermal springs where the water was 30 degrees, lovely to get into but not so nice getting back out into the freezing wind! It was pretty funny, we saw about 3 people stack it on the slippery algae on their frantic entry into the pool, which was met each time with great applause.

It's hard to do the scenery justice in these photographs but it was like being on another planet driving through the desert. Since we went during the month of July, the sky was a crisp dark blue and the contrast of this against the reds and oranges of the surrounding landscape was fascinating.

We stopped at some huge volcanic boulders to see the surreal effects of the wind and heat erosion (onion skin erosion if my year 9 geography is correct). This also released the inner rock climber in me.

On the second night we stayed in an awesome salt hotel, and Javier gave us the option of getting up at half 4 so we could see the sunrise over Salar Uyuni, the highest and largest salt flat in the world, formed through the evaporation of the sea water that was cut off like a giant rock pool by the surrounding mountains and volcanoes.

So rising early, we raced against the sun to a coral island called Isla Incahuasi, covered in cacti, in the middle of the salt flats. I climbed to the highest point of the Island which absolutely knackered me out because of the altitude. As I waited up there for the sun to slowly rise, illuminating the brilliant white crust and for the moon to disappear from the purple sky behind me, it was all worth it.

We took a load of photos that mess around with perspective on the salt flats which was awesome, some of the best ones are on my mates camera but here are a couple anyway. Apparently the salt crust is around 80m deep in the centre of the flats.

Finally we stopped off at the locomotive graveyard in Pulacayo which contains the rusty remains of the train stolen by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

For those interested we used the tour company 'Cordillera' and our driver Javier was sound, not a fingerless, one eyed, drunk driver as the hype surrounding these desert tours would have you believe. So I'd definitely recommend booking with them. Also, beginning the tour from Chile meant ascending from 3,665m at San Pedro de Atacama, to around 4,900m within an hour or so (the ascent is more gradual if you start in Bolivia) , I'd heard loads of stories of people suffering really badly from altitude sickness but honestly everyone on our tour (2 4x4s with 11 people altogether) was absolutely fine, apart from a few headaches in the night which a few pills can easily calm. It does get pretty cold though so layers + a sleeping bag (can be hired) are essential.