Disjointed Thoughts

I am extraordinarily pissed off right now... I had just written a small novel that I was about to post up on this frickin´ blog, when I pressed some button on the keyboard that powered down the computer automatically... Please do not ever, ever buy anything from the company Olidata, because these stupid motherfuckers place a key on their keyboards (next to the Enter key) that powers down everything immediately... How fucking stupid can you be.... They must let monkeys design their keyboards. Anyway, needless to say, by the time that I had powered her back up again, my lifeswork was gone ... just like that ... oblivion... !

So here is a short, unamusing version of my life since my last update: from El Calafate (Glaciers etc.) to Ushaia (Tierra del Fuego, end of the earth, blah, blah, blah...) From Ushuaia, a cheap flight to Bariloche in the Argy Alps (or Andes if you like)... Deadly fun for a week in Bariloche skiing and apres-skiing. From there, I cross the Andes to Santiago (stopping off in a volcano on the way up). Was very wrecked after my weeks skiing, so very quiet week in Santiago reading books and going to bed early-ish...

Chile is very long and narrow. In the south, you freeze your titz off and dance around on glaciers and in the north you fry in the desert by day and break the icecles off your eyelids by night. So, only really the centre of Chile is inhabitable, and that is where Santiago is and where the majority of the Chileans live...

I was never going to stay in Chile for very long cos its ridiculously pricey compared with the rest of South America... However, I didn´t want to just burn right through it, so I went for the easy option of a tour of the north from Santiago through the Atacama desert to San Pedro de Atacama beside the Bolivian border...

It was a good call, because I was in a bus with seven other cool people for five days and saw most of whats good to see in the north... (the others were from Canada, England, Scotland, Brasil and Portugal)... At night, we either stayed in hostels or camped or stayed in chalets and we had great nights barbequeing, boozing etc. etc.... (Photos here)

Pretty much have my fill of desert now: amazing sunsets, sunrises, desert lagoons with flamingoes, lots of sand and rocks, the moon at night (and sometimes during the day), some llamas sometimes, salt plains, the stars at night... and a partridge in a pear tree.

Anyway, my next plan is to break for the Bolivian border tomorrow in a three-day 4x4 tour ending up in Uyuni near the Salt Plains. Can´t wait to hit Bolivia and the Bolvian prices... don´t have any kind of a plan yet, but am generally looking for somewhere to do some volunteer work and stuff like that.

Am reading James Joyce at the moment (the intellectual that I am), more specifically "A portrait of the artist as a young man". Apparantly Joyce invented the "stream of consciousness" style of writing with this book, whereby he describes thoughts as they enter the narrators head, no matter how useless and random they may be. So please don´t be put off if some of this has rubbed off onto my blog. Either way, its doesn´t matter, cos´ I still have to collect my laundry.

Oh yeah, and I haven´t had a warm shower in a week... you may think that thats all right when you´re in the desert, but you would be surprised how cold the desert can get. The room where I´m sleeping tonite goes down to about three or four degrees at night, and outside it goes down to minus five or seven, so when you get up in the morning and go out to the outhouse thats supposed to be a shower, you actually have to wait for the ice in the pipes to melt before you go for your shower...

So, dunno how conjusive (condusive?) Bolivia is to writing blogs... so I may not update for a while, but I´ll try my best (where have you heard that one before, huh?)

Anyway, I´m going to get some grub, I better post this frickin´ thing before I press that monkey key again ( I just nearly did )... Hasta luego