May I eat your flesh please...

I´m in Puerto Maldonado, the gateway to the Southern Peruvian Amazon Basin, and what a shithole it is...

Luckily enough I´m away out of here tomorrow to my Jungle research centre. But the journey here was unbelievably long... It was 26 hours of backbreacking, skullshaking, eardrumbaking, crazymaking bus... It was just a local bus, there´s none of this posh tourist bed buses here... so I was thrown in with all the toothless peruvians and was the only gringo on the bus...

We were treated to the two worst movies in the history of cinematography... the first was about a chimpanzee called Jake, who is an ice-hockey star and manages to be a world-class skateboarder in his spare time... the ultimate in daytime shite movie! But the second was called Night of the living Dead (part 7 if you don´t mind) and had zombies terrorising some small town for a change... Now to tell you the truth, I am actually a bit of a fan of zombie flicks (a foible of mine), but this was a complete farce... First of all, the zombies spoke... I mean, the first rule about zombies is that they are devoid-of-personality, flesh-crazed halfwits... they do not assemble and debate the pro´s and con´s of their actions... Yet the zombies in this film actually held conferences and spoke to each other (in Spanish)... You can get the picture!

Anyway, when the television wasn´t blaring out this ridiculous shite, it was used to play terrible soppy folk music (= love songs of every concoction... yo perdio mi amor, el amor, grande amor, amor en mi casa, amor perdido, mejor amor etc. etc. etc.). So anyway, I only managed to get asleep cos I tanked myself full of valium (Mum, ignore that remark), but the road stopped after about two minutes and we had a dirt track for most of the time, so I was shaken to pieces... The bus shook so much that I got a rash on the back of my head where it touched the seat...

One good thing about the trip was the scenery... We left Cusco at 3pm and climbed until about 7pm when it started snowing... We continued in very heavy snow, with a very bright full moon among mountainy peaks until we started to descend at about 3am in the morning... After that, the mountains were barren at first but then got plusher and plusher until it was thick jungle at about 10am this morning. Eventually we arrived into the flatland jungle (pampas at about 2pm and arrived in the town at 5pm.

Anyway, I bumped into the owner of the lodge here earlier so that took care of a lot of info getting for me... I have a six hour boat trip upriver tomorrow and then my time the Jungle can begin...

The owner said that I might be able to make it up to the town in about a week or two so I`ll update then... I´m thinking of continuing in the written form and then uploading it, but I´ll probably be too lazy...

Seeya soon

PS: When the bus stopped for lunch today, the only thing on the menu was Cordero, so I went for it not knowing what it is... Anyway, its guinea pig... lovely stuff though!

The New Plan A

I stayed one night in Cochabamba and decided to split straight to La Paz the next day (remember, de facto capital of Bolivia, not the administrative one). I thought that with the hustle and bustle of a big city I would be able to concoct a new plan. Plus, I have the pleasure of Helen Breens company here (Irish friend from Berlin) to inspire me.

Not only do I have a new plan, but I have it booked and payed for: Tomorrow I will fly from here to Rurrenebaque. (Thats right, the second flight of my odyssee, and a slight cheat to my claim of South America Overland)... and guess where Rurrenbaque is... let me give you some hints... Indiana Jones, Tarzan & Jane, the King of the Swingers... thats right mi amigos... I am now officially going into the Jungle at long last!

Before I came to South America I had visions of this... visions of yours truly hunting for giant anacondas, swinging from vines and battling with piranhas and leeches for Amazonian domination. So thats the new plan... Myself and Helen are flying to Rurrenbaque to do a three-day Jungle tour... after that she will return to La Paz and I will stay on and do a three day Pampas tour (dunno what Pampas really is, but its supposed to be wet and have lots of wildlife). I'll come back to La Paz afterwards to relax here for a while because its a pretty impressive city. (More about La Paz in a later "La Paz dedicated" post).

Two things that I have done here in the past few days, I do have to reveal though.

First of all we went to the Coca Musuem and learnt all about Bolvia's coca leaf. Not Cocoa, but Coca... the plant that cocaine comes from... Anyway, Coca to Bolivia (and other South American countries, but especially Bolivia), is what the pint of Guinness is to Ireland... except a lot more important...

It has mythical, religious, social and health ramifications in Bolivian society and has done so since approx. 2500BC (the European Bronze age). Remember that La Paz and much of Bolivia is at very high altitudes (La Paz is at 3500 metres, thats three and half kilometres above sealevel) and at these altitudes, the air pressure is significantly lower which has many effects on the human body (throbbing of the muscles, headaches, shortness of breath etc. Collectivly known as altitude sickness)... When you walk up a flight of stairs here, you feel it a lot more than you would at sealevel.

Chewing coca leaves is supposed to relieve these symtoms and in my experience, it does that quite effectively (I have not suffered from any symtoms of altitude sickness except for that I am seriously out of breath after even the lightest exertion)... for more information about the coca leaf and cocaine, click here. And don't worry mum, chewing coca is not like taking cocaine... they even put coca into coca-cola (would you believe).

Also, yesterday, we rode mountain-biked down the aptly named "Road of Death"... a mountain biking tour in one of the most dangerous roads in the world. After brekkie, you get a bus up to an altitude of 4.700m where you cycle down 3600m in about 5 hours. (some pics here, more to come)

The first part of the road is asphalt which is great for some seriously fast cycling... then you get onto this death road... which begins nice and gingerly and then goes uphill for about 25 minutes (an absolute fucking feat of endurance at this altitude) before you start to plummet down this ridiculously steep and narrow dirt road only inches from dropping into some canyon to your death...

If you can tear your eyes away from the road (this is dangerous, cos you may just have to pull over in case an articulated lorry comes your way and leaves you teetering on the edge), then the landscape is pretty amazing, because of the change of the nature from the altiplanic zone till the subtropic zone. You also go under two waterfalls and get generally soaked and muddy. It was quite foggy when we did it but it was an unbe-fucking-lievable adrenalin rush...

The last part is quite low, so the weather is nice and warm and the roads are a little wider. I realised half way down that if I lifted my arse off the saddle and only held the handlebars loosely, the the rocks wouldn't shake me senseless and I would have more strength in my hands to pull the breaks (which is more or less necessary all the time)...

When we were finished we went to this hotel for lunch and then had a gruelling six'hour journey back up the road of death in a bus... where there were serious traffic jams... and oul' ones risking life and limb to sell anything to the waiting punters..

Actually, the oul' ones here deserve their own paragraph at least... according to my observations, they are the only ones who seem to work in Bolivia... the men sit around chatting while the women run a street stall for anything and everything ("dried llama foetuses... two for a pow-end")... They wear these ridiculous hats which don't do anything against cold, wind or sun and they wear more rugs, blankets, dresses and general layers of material than you can throw an empenada at... apparantly, its trendy to wrap yourself up so that it looks like you have a huge arse (huge arse=wide childbearing hips= fertile, good potential partner)... But for all I know, all the bolivian women are skinny rakes packed in various layers of clothing...

Furthermore, they work like oxens... they open their little street stalls at five or six in the morning and sit there (with their childer strapped to their back in another ten inches of carpet) until about eleven at night... I'm afraid to say that this lifestyle isn't conjusive to good looks, and the Bolivian women seem to age before their time... they seem to go from 15 straight to 45 without passing the years in between...

It's quite sad actually, you can see every day of work on some of the older womens faces... !

Anyway, enough of the depressing stuff... all that coca and biking was great craic and I will shag up some pics once I'm back from my alligator arm wrestling in the jungle...

Thats all for now... hopefully will update from the jungle, if not, then from La Paz when I get back...

Arividerci amigos...

If its not wet, it's not a river...

I stayed one night in Cochabamba and decided to split straight to La Paz the next day (remember, de facto capital of Bolivia, not the administrative one). I thought that with the hustle and bustle of a big city I would be able to concoct a new plan. Plus, I have the pleasure of Helen Breens company here (Irish friend from Berlin) to inspire me.

Not only do I have a new plan, but I have it booked and payed for: Tomorrow I will fly from here to Rurrenebaque. (Thats right, the second flight of my odyssee, and a slight cheat to my claim of South America Overland)... and guess where Rurrenbaque is... let me give you some hints... Indiana Jones, Tarzan & Jane, the King of the Swingers... thats right mi amigos... I am now officially going into the Jungle at long last!

Before I came to South America I had visions of this... visions of yours truly hunting for giant anacondas, swinging from vines and battling with piranhas and leeches for Amazonian domination. So thats the new plan... Myself and Helen are flying to Rurrenbaque to do a three-day Jungle tour... after that she will return to La Paz and I will stay on and do a three day Pampas tour (dunno what Pampas really is, but its supposed to be wet and have lots of wildlife). I'll come back to La Paz afterwards to relax here for a while because its a pretty impressive city. (More about La Paz in a later "La Paz dedicated" post).

Two things that I have done here in the past few days, I do have to reveal though.

First of all we went to the Coca Musuem and learnt all about Bolvia's coca leaf. Not Cocoa, but Coca... the plant that cocaine comes from... Anyway, Coca to Bolivia (and other South American countries, but especially Bolivia), is what the pint of Guinness is to Ireland... except a lot more important...

It has mythical, religious, social and health ramifications in Bolivian society and has done so since approx. 2500BC (the European Bronze age). Remember that La Paz and much of Bolivia is at very high altitudes (La Paz is at 3500 metres, thats three and half kilometres above sealevel) and at these altitudes, the air pressure is significantly lower which has many effects on the human body (throbbing of the muscles, headaches, shortness of breath etc. Collectivly known as altitude sickness)... When you walk up a flight of stairs here, you feel it a lot more than you would at sealevel.

Chewing coca leaves is supposed to relieve these symtoms and in my experience, it does that quite effectively (I have not suffered from any symtoms of altitude sickness except for that I am seriously out of breath after even the lightest exertion)... for more information about the coca leaf and cocaine, click here. And don't worry mum, chewing coca is not like taking cocaine... they even put coca into coca-cola (would you believe).

Also, yesterday, we rode mountain-biked down the aptly named "Road of Death"... a mountain biking tour in one of the most dangerous roads in the world. After brekkie, you get a bus up to an altitude of 4.700m where you cycle down 3600m in about 5 hours. (some pics here, more to come)

The first part of the road is asphalt which is great for some seriously fast cycling... then you get onto this death road... which begins nice and gingerly and then goes uphill for about 25 minutes (an absolute fucking feat of endurance at this altitude) before you start to plummet down this ridiculously steep and narrow dirt road only inches from dropping into some canyon to your death...

If you can tear your eyes away from the road (this is dangerous, cos you may just have to pull over in case an articulated lorry comes your way and leaves you teetering on the edge), then the landscape is pretty amazing, because of the change of the nature from the altiplanic zone till the subtropic zone. You also go under two waterfalls and get generally soaked and muddy. It was quite foggy when we did it but it was an unbe-fucking-lievable adrenalin rush...

The last part is quite low, so the weather is nice and warm and the roads are a little wider. I realised half way down that if I lifted my arse off the saddle and only held the handlebars loosely, the the rocks wouldn't shake me senseless and I would have more strength in my hands to pull the breaks (which is more or less

necessary all the time)...

When we were finished we went to this hotel for lunch and then had a gruelling six'hour journey back up the road of death in a bus... where there were serious traffic jams... and oul' ones risking life and limb to sell anything to the waiting punters..

Actually, the oul' ones here deserve their own paragraph at least... according to my observations, they are the only ones who seem to work in Bolivia... the men sit around chatting while the women run a street stall for anything and everything ("dried llama foetuses... two for a pow-end")... They wear these ridiculous hats which don't do anything against cold, wind or sun and they wear more rugs, blankets, dresses and general layers of material than you can throw an empenada at... apparantly, its trendy to wrap yourself up so that it looks like you have a huge arse (huge arse=wide childbearing hips= fertile, good potential partner)... But for all I know, all the bolivian women are skinny rakes packed in various layers of clothing...

Furthermore, they work like oxens... they open their little street stalls at five or six in the morning and sit there (with their childer strapped to their back in another ten inches of carpet) until about eleven at night... I'm afraid to say that this lifestyle isn't conjusive to good looks, and the Bolivian women seem to age before their time... they seem to go from 15 straight to 45 without passing the years in between...

It's quite sad actually, you can see every day of work on some of the older womens faces... !

Anyway, enough of the depressing stuff... all that coca and biking was great craic and I will shag up some pics once I'm back from my alligator arm wrestling in the jungle...

Thats all for now... hopefully will update from the jungle, if not, then from La Paz when I get back...

Arividerci amigos...

Dino-mite

here´s just a quicky to say that I am leaving Sucre today to go north east through Cochabamba to a place called Villarroel where apparantly I can get a five day river trip to Trinidad... (all still in Bolivia for those of you who didn´t pay attention in your Bolivian Geography lessons) since I´m assuming that they don´t have internet access in the jungle on the river... I thought I would just say a quick "howaryah" before I go...

This morning I went to see dinosaur footprints from 150 m/billion years ago ... I only did it cos I couldn´t sleep... it was the first time that I have done anything of touristic value since I got to Sucre, but everyone said that it was shit so I wasn´t going to bother.

But I decided to go for it this morning and even got up before 8am to go there. Actually, I have to say that it was pretty awesome... there was a limescale wall which had been flat but was pushed vertical when the Andes were formed.... The plain had been at the bottom of a lake and the footprints were pretty immaculately conserved. (Dinos from the Cretaceos period for the geeks among you).

It was good for reflecting on the dinosaurs and how as much as we like to fictionise them, they actually did "rule the roost" for quite a while... My tranquil ponderings were interrupted by some little bolivian bastard dynamiting the living bejayzus out of the side of some mountain beside us (little did the dinosaurs know that they were walking on what was to become a cement/limestone mine)...

Anyway, am looking forward to the jungle, cos that it was the image that I had of South America all during my planning phase... (was a bit surprised to find snow and desert here to tell you the truth... )... and at least there are no llamas there... (fucking llamas are doing my nutz in!)

Will update upon return to civilisation... adios!

o solo mio

hola compadres,

so, here I am in Sucre, the administrative capital of Bolivia (La Paz being the "de facto" capital). I{ve gotta say that this place is absolutely great. First of all, the weather is glorious: this makes a nice change from the artic temperatures that I have experienced over the past couple of weeks/months. At last, I can walk around in a T-shirt and shorts and generally bask in the sun. Secondly, the city is really beautiful. It{s whitewashed houses with their tuscan roofs are a UNESCO World Heritage site and its easy to understand why. Thirdly, I{m in a great hostel. Its a really nice Spanish colonial style building with courtyards and passageways and great people. Its very expensive though, at 2 euros a night, I won{t be staying here long, hehe.

When I arrived in Uyuni, I literally jumped onto another bus straight to Sucre... well, I say straight, but in reality I mean to Sucre via Outer Mongolia. I went with the two Irish girls from the Salar trip and we had a five hour ride to Potosi first, on a road that was as much a road as I am a smoked salmon sambo. I got the livin bejayzus shaken out of me for those five hours. We were relieved when we got to Potosi, but we had to sit in the bus from 1am in the morning until 7am in the station while we waited for it to leave for Sucre. To say it was feckin artic is quite the understatement: I wore every ounce of clothing that I have as well as my sleeping bag. Finally, we left for Sucre at 7am and arrived via a fairly decent road at about 10am in the morning.

Being the complete gobshite that I am, I hadnt written down the address of my hostel so I had to treck around looking for an internet cafe, decked out with in all my glory with the biggest and heaviest rucksack in the history of travel. (thats another post alltogether). Eventually, I got to my hostel, had a two hour long hot, hot, hot shower and slept like a baby in clean sheets after three days of cold-induced insomnia.

But now Im here, and I think that I[ll stay here for a bit while I sort myself out with an itinerary for Bolivia. (Plan to stay here for about a month).

When you{re travelling, the choice of hostel that you stay in is of upmost importance. It WILL dictate how much you enjoy yourself in a place. It also depends on what mood you happen to be in. If you are all boozed out, and want a couple of days of tranquil existance, then you do not go for the party hostel, but rather something slightly quieter with a more "mature" clientele. But mostly, you look for a hostel with a capacity between 30 and 60 (not too quiet but not too impersonal either, don{t like "factory" hostels), one with good showers and clean rooms, where the people will be nice and "easy" to get to know.

This whole "easy to get to know" lark is h-actually important too. When youre travelling on your own, you obviously need to get to know people or you will be a lonely little bunny. To get to know people quickly and easily, you have to be more open to new people than you would otherwise be at home. You know the way, when you{re in work, and theres a new face around, sometimes you pass them in the corridor with a "I should know you but I don{t" kind of look. Or when you are in the elevator with another random person in an otherwise closely knit environment... there{s this kind of awkward silence. Well, it can be the same thing in a hostel, you see the same people around and pass them all the time, giving them a kind of faint smile.

I have found that if you just go over to people and say something like "by the way, I[m Conor, whats your name" or something along those lines, then you can instead pass them and say "hey jimbob whats the craic". It make you and them feel more comfortable. Nine times out of ten, if you introduce yourself randomly, you get a very positive response cos the chances are that the other people are feeling the awkwardness too. And you make for a much better environment.

When you meet people for the first time, you usually have a fairly standard conversation along the lines of "Nationality? Name? Where have you been so far? Where are going next?" etc. etc. blah, blah! Sometimes this can be a little bit monotonous, and you would really be better off printing it all on a T-shirt to save your time. But its usually a necessary step, although sometimes you just jump into some obscure conversation without knowing anything about your partner.

Obviously sometimes you meet complete bastards, but for the most part you meet great people and end up doing great stuff with them.

When I got to my hostel here in Sucre, the second I got there I was invited out with a crowd for dinner and we had a great night. Last night, we took it easy with chicken and chips and a dvd (Be Cool, the followy-upper to Get Shorty, quite an entertaining flick) and tonite I{m going out to a Chineser with some other people.

Anyway, thats enough about the dynamics of solo travel. I booked myself into two hours of Spanish course tomorrow to answer some of my long term questions and maybe learn a new tense or how to use pronouns or something... but the only time that was still available was 9am so must take it easy tonite.

So, I promise that I{ll update with photos as soon as I fill my memory card... (by the way, for my retard family, there are lots of photo albums on the toolbar to the right at the bottom)

Hasta luego compadres, and as always feel free to comment... Pics of Sucre here

PS: Finished "A portrait of the artist as a young man" today... I feel like I should get a medal or a trophy or something.... its the national enquirer for at least the next couple of weeks.

Funny Hats

hey dudarinos,

so I have just arrived in Uyuni, Bolivia after three days crossing the Bolivian Altiplano (flatlands above 4000 metres) from Chile. It was a frickin fantastic three days but I am well and throughly shagged from head to toe. Up in the Altiplano it is sunny during the day with the clearest bluest skies... but if theres a wind blowing, then its quite cold. However, at night it gets frickin artic to say the least, on the first night it dropped to minus 25 celsius. These Bolivianos havent heard of heating so nighttime is a bit of a nightmare to say the least.

During the day we saw loads of cool stuff: more flamingos and llamas (I have llamas coming out my ears), also lots of different colour mountain lagoons and other generally mountainous stuff.

The highlight of the trip was the Bolivian salt plains though. These are plains of salt (from old salt lakes pushed up from the ocean yonks ago) that stretch for 12500 square kilometres (half the size of Belgium). The "Salar de Uyuni" is the biggest salt plain in the world. There is no perspective when youre out there so it makes for some funny photos (to be posted in the near future)...

On the second night we stayed in a hotel made entirely of salt, pretty cool (literally, very frickin cool). But the salt does isolate a little bit so it wasn{t as cold as the first night. Its also ridiculously dry and I have a serious case of dandruff... on my lips!!!

Luckily enough, I did the tour with a great group as well, a belgian couple and two irish birds and we had great craic. Our driver was also a laugh and we had a nice cook who did some great meals (llama for lunch today).

Anyway, my bus is leaving soon enough so I have to rock and roll... will update with photos once I have chilled out in Sucre a bit.

Oh yeah, and the old women here wear these crazy assed top hat type thingys like from the 18 century.. hence the title of this post.... (for those of you who were wondering)!

Hasta luego!!!! (Photos of the trip here)

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