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

The Argy East Coast

I left Buenos Aires a week ago and have been travelling down the East coast of Argentina since then. One thing that I have noticed about this country, which I hadn´t really considered previously, is that it is big... very f&*king big! When you´re looking at the map, you don´t really realise it, because it is dwarfed by Brazil, its northern neighbour. According to an American I met on a bus (another case of verbal diarrhea), its the eighth biggest country in the world!

These massive distances manifest themselves in very long bus rides, so of the past seven days, I have spent the last four on a bus.

My first port of call was a town called Puerto Madryn, about two thirds of the way between BA and the southern tip of the Americas, and a 22 hour busride away. There a world heritage site slash national park there called Peninsula Valdes, which I did a guided tour of. We had a fairly happy-go-lucky (a couple of sambos short of a picnic) tourguide called Martin, whose English was more or less non-existant. We went out on a boat to see White Whales, which in fairness to them, are pretty amazing animals... they are awsomely big and the day we were out, they were jumping around the place happy as larry. It was a pretty awe-inspiring sight.

After the whales, Martin informed us that our little Renault Kangoo might not be able to manage the gravel roads on the Peninsula but that we would give it a bash anyway. As soon as we came off the paved road and onto the gravel one, we got stuck in a ditch, up to our knees in mud... It was a bit of a disaster to say the least.

Luckily enough, some nice argies in a 4x4 came by and pulled us out. I was convinced that Martin would call it a day and throw in the towel considering we had another 169 kilometres left on our circuit of the Peninsula, but he decided to persevere. I was kinda thinking to myself that this lad was a bit of a loo-la and if he thought we were going to be able to do 170 muddy kilometres in this bucket of a car (while every other car that passed us was some kind of massive SUV / Jeep / 4x4), he was seriously delusional.

However, with some swerving and skidding on Martin´s behalf and the occassional "get out and push" on ours, we eventually got some serious distances behind us and got to this beach where we saw elephant seals. Our guide had worked on the beach previously so was able to get us right down to the seals (about 5 metres from them)... Second massive mammal of the day.... Elephant seals are the ones where the males have this kinda disgusting trunk like thing on their faces... But all the males were off in Antartica so we could get close to the rest of them without being attacked and wripped to shreds.

On the way back to the mainland, our guide decided that we should travel in convoy with another tour bus in case we get stuck (cos they had a radio and it was getting dark)... It should have been a two hour journey back to Puerto Madryn, but it took us seven, cos we spent most of the time behind the car (as well as the other bus who was supposed to be our saviour) pushing it. Conveniently, both us and the bus kept on getting stuck in the same places... which meant that we could push our car out, and then go and push the bus out... (they couldn´t push themselves cos they were all geriatrics)... we would continue for about ten metres and then we would both get stuck again... this pattern repeated itself for about four hours... bit of a nightmare... The funniest thing about it was that our guide had forgotton to fill up his water tank before he left, and we ran out of bottled water so he couldn´t clear the windscreen and had to drive with his head out the window... to tell you the truth, he was a bit of a disaster-zone...

Got back at around 11pm (original plan was to be back for six) covered in mud from head to toe... my walking boots, which had been brand spanking new that morning, were completlely fucked, but it was a great day all the same... Went for drinks later that night with two brits and a scot who had been in my car to finish off bonding after our adventure! (more pics here)

Will update on the South (El Calafate, Pereto Moreno Glacier and Ushuaia - where I am now - as soon as I feel like it)

Iguazu & Inertia

Went to Iguazu Falls last weekend. Bren, Dave and I took an 18 hour bus from BA to Puerto Iguazu on Thursday and arrived on Friday. Although the ride was long, the argies don´t really have any trains so they know how to bus it in style. The seats are like big Lazy Boys and if you knock back a couple of sleeping tablets you can get a good nights kip on the bus. Plus, its full service like on a plane. You get your dinner, your brekkie and a plethora of snacks and drinks in between. They also show movies in English so the whole experience isn´t altogether that bad. (especially if you´re into Jean Claude Van Damme movies)

So we arrived in Puerto Iguazu to find that the fact that we had driven due north for 18 hours makes a big difference to the temperature. The weather was stunning ... and our hostel had a pool as well, so we duly planted ourselves beside it and started knockin´ back the pina coladas... To tell you the truth, I hadn´t seen the sun for some time before that, so it was a very welcome surprise.

We took it easy the first night so that we would be bright eyed and bushy tailed for the following mornings hike of the Iguazu Falls. We actually managed to get out of the hostel at 9am the next day and attacked the Falls on a beautiful Saturday morning.

Because its the off-season here (it being winter as you may gather from the pics), the crowds were very manageable indeed and we had a great day walking around the various routes and circuits that let the masses ogle the falls.

The falls themselves are pretty impressive. I´d love to give you all the natural and geological stats but I don´t know them. What I do know is that its a very impressive amount of water splashing down and it is absolutely awesome to see. They´re also very accessible, as in you can get great views of them from all around the valley below.

And when you´re not looking at the waterfalls, you´re looking at the subtropical rainforests through which you wander on the circuits... We saw monkeys, in fact monkeys pelted us with apples... and we also saw toucans from afar (that was my objective for the day, to see a toucan - the guinness bird).

So we did our day at the falls, and then we just relaxed by the pool in the hostel for a couple of days (a chance to turn my milkbottle white to ruby red). The lads split to Rio on Monday and I decided that I would stay in Iguazu until Wednesday but accidently came back to BA a day earlier because I didn´t realise what day it was. (More photos of the falls here).

On a more sombre note, when I got back to BA, I realised that my new room which I had been promised, had been given away to a Frenchman in my absence. Furthermore, my efforts to find gainful employment have reached an all-time low as I haven´t had a single positive reply from any of my applications. Hence the inertia... I´m not quite sure what I´m going to do now, but having got my first taste of the sun, I think that I might head north fairly soon (in two weeks or so) and just land myself in some kind of wildlife sanctuary or something where I can chill out for a couple of months... the weather in BA is not really playing ball either...

That´s all for the time being. Eins will Ich aber noch sagen, die Deutsche Einheit die diesen Blog liesst soll auch ruhig Kommentare hinterlegen denn Ich weis dass Ihr da seid.

Am going to ponder my future for a couple of days and I´ll get back to you with an action plan as soon as I come up with one.

Oh yeah, and see the albums for more pics of Iguazu.

Iguu Azuu...

I{ve decided to stop apologising for my lack of posts or else it{ll be all I ever do. Furthermore, this post will be written with a weird bracket ({) in the place of an apostrophe as my keyboard doesn{t seem to be down with the english vernacular.

So anyway, I{m not going to rabbit on about what I{ve been up to cos its not very exiting. Suffice to say that my liver has registered its intent to seek asylum and I caught it trying to jump ship while I was sleeping the other night... Dave & Bren had their last day in BA yesterday so we went to "our favourite" french restaurant (which by this stage we should own).

Today, I{m going to accompany the two lads to Iguazu Falls (waterfall malarky - see http://www.etravelphotos.com/argentina/iguazu.html for an elaborate amount of generic photos) and they will continue on to Rio after that and I will come back to BA to sort out my life.

That{s all I have to say really. Hopefully I will have some generic pics of myself under a waterfall by monday in which case I{ll shag them up on the old blogaroo to keep you punters happy...

I don{t know how to sign off on these posts. I mean, its not a letter, so there{s no point saying "luv, conor"... but at the same time I feel I should indicate that I{m finished drivelling on about things... I suppose its kind of a diary, but do you sign off from a diary... who knows? Maybe I{ll copy Bridget Jones and start giving you my daily stats (that would be a good way to freak out my mum... bridget jones would be the patron saint of abstinence compared to yours truly....)

Anyway, I{m finished for now.... luv conor (hehe)

Oh actually, if you{re reading this, then I want you to post a comment .... I{m fed up with this being a monologue... surely you people have something interesting to say... (seriously, just rant on for a bit... )... thanks to those got the ball rolling!

Now I{m definitely finished... 1 billion ciggies, 6 vats vino tinto, 4 large cows

Selling myself

Forgive me father, for I have sinned: It´s been a week since my last post...

All is still good down here, 10,883 kilometres from home... apparantly the earths radius is 6,376.5 kilometers which means that I´m a little under the earths diameter (12,753km) away from my leaba back in Porterstown. In terms of geographical position, for those of you with GPS gadgets, my latitude is just below the 33rd parallel south (at 33 degrees and 8 minutes south) and my longitude is 64 degrees 2 minutes west... Right so, now that we know where I am, what exactly am I doing... well not very much to tell you the truth...

I´m still doing the spanish classes although now my rate of attendance has dropped slightly to about 70%... but considering that the rest of my class are all a little bit behind me (grace au francais) it´s good to give them some breathing space..

I´m still living with this american dude but am actively looking for a shared apartment for a couple of months... (the argies don´t seem to have the tendency towards wohngemeinschafts or living communities that the germans have, so its not that easy).

I´ve done my cv and a covering letter and plan to drop into all the UN agencies / NGOs in town and try to get something to keep me ticking over for (literally) a couple of months... The plan is just to ambush them with "Hello, I would like to work for you for free for two months, interested?" and I´m hoping that one of them will be able to recognise a good thing when its standing in their doorway looking to solve that long-term filing problem when they see one. Fuck it, we´ll see what happens on that front... By the way, if anyone has any south American NGO/UN/Development contacts, then get on the blower....

According to the grand plan, I am also supposed to have started a tango class this week, but I haven´t. Although its not altogether as easy as one might assume. I don´t want to be in a tango class with chubby tourists (pot calling kettle...), but I would prefer to have a couple of locals in there, so that the spoken language is castellano and not "well gee honeey, you shuddna worn those darn hagh heels"... this would also be a cheaper option... anyway, I got an address of a place last night that could be promising, so I´ll check that out over the weekend...

Apart from that one of the lads left on wednesday so we went out to a great steakhouse on tues night for some bife de bife... very nice... unfortunately forgot me camera so didn´t take any photos...

Haven´t really been doing that much touristy stuff, but we decided that we would treat ourselves to a night at the theatre tonite. We´re going to see BA´s philharmonic orchestra and originally wanted to get great seats in the presidents box (for 10 euros), but everything was sold out so now we have had to console ourselves with seats where we can´t actually see anything. But I suppose seeing people moving their arms up and down vigorously isn´t what orchestras are renowned for so hopefully it´ll still be good. Might go to the opera next week if we can get good seats...

thats it for now... Will try to lash up some photos tomorrow if my camera plays along... hasta la proxima