Potosi At 4070 metres above sea level I'm fairly sure Potosi is the world's highest city. After the cold dorm rooms of the salt flat tour we decided to treat ourselves to a nice room, with such luxuries as an ensuite bathroom, TV, and, best of all...............heating!!! I now realise how little I appreciated central heating when I had it. Potosi has been designated a UNESCO world cultural heritage site with a pretty main square, and lots of colonial buildings which look like they might belong in Elizabethan London with their second storeys overhanging into the street. There seemed to be [View Full Entry]

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I´d heard a few things about Bolivia before arriving: the buses are rubbish and never on time, the food's decidedly dodgy and there's a general disregard for time.......forewarned is forearmed! My first conversation with a Bolivian, the taxi driver, went like this: 'Hola' 'Hola' '¿De que pais son?' 'Inglaterra' 'Ah, Bobby Charlton!' Brilliant! A similar conversation with a Thai taxi driver 7 years ago ended with 'Ah, David Beckham!' I think Bolivia are a bit behind the times. We caught a train to Tupiza which was actually very comfy, just not very speedy. The windows opened all the way down; perhaps [View Full Entry]

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Salta is a pleasant town in the North of Argentina with a pretty main square, and an Irish bar which showed the European champions semi-final! (poor Liverpool) The surrounding areas though have some of the most spectacular scenery I have seen so far this trip. South of Salta is the Parque Nacional Cordones - the cactus national park! I know we'd already seen a cactus forest in Chile, but that was like a window box in comparison to this place. There were literally thousands of them......as far as the eye could see. Some were up to 10 metres tall, and they [View Full Entry]

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San Pedro de Atacama is the driest desert in the world. It was also our first experience of being at high altitude - not so bad, a little breathless, but the main difference was the weather. It could be 30 deg C in the day, though cooler in the shade, but freezing at night, yet we still camped.........impressed? (no, of course not, that's just plain stupidity). Of course no South American campsite would be complete without its share of canine friends. The comments book of a few months ago talked of the dogs being a little too boisterous (the girls all [View Full Entry]

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I've always been fascinated by Easter Island, the idea of a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific, miles from anywhere, populated by a people who would then spend hundreds of years obsessively building these slightly bizarre looking stylized statues in ever-increasing sizes. So, time for a bit of history……… Easter Island was populated in the 5th or 6th century, probably by Polynesians and the Moai building (the big heads!) began around 300 years later. They were built on a platform, or Ahu, to commemorate important ancestors from the village, and would always be facing towards the village ‘square’, usually [View Full Entry]

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Our overnight bus to Valparaiso wasn't really - we arrived at 4.15 am and sat very cold and forlorn looking on the side of the road nursing a hot chocolate (yes, bizarrely at that time of the morning the only thing open was a little one-man stall selling hot chocolate - a niche market perhaps???) until 6am when the bus station opened, and we could sit in there looking slightly less like tramps. Valparaiso is very much a working port and the 'flat' part of town around the port is not that exciting. Its charm lies in the hills surrounding the [View Full Entry]

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So the plan was to spend some time visiting some of the bodegas in the wine region of Mendoza, and of course sampling some of the produce. It had taken 3 days of travelling to get here from Ushuaia. We met Helen and Fergus in Santiago en route and found a brilliant hostel in Mendoza called Chimbas, with a pool and a lovely terraced outdoor area - the perfect location to enjoy a glass of wine......... Mendoza was a pretty town, though fairly quite on a sunday, lots of plazas, pavement cafes, shops and the large and peaceful parque San Martin. [View Full Entry]

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El Calafate Back to Argentina.......we arrived on Easter Sunday, and what to all good catholic girls do on Easter Sunday? Eat easter eggs of course. This place was full of yummy chocolate shops and of course it would be rude not to purchase. I did actually go to church as well - it followed the same general pattern as in England, except in Spanish (to be expected). Other differences of note were the stray dogs wandering up and down the aisle (probably after my easter eggs) and the hugging and kissing towards the end, rather than the polite shake of the [View Full Entry]

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We had a week in the Torres del Paine National Park - so named because by the time you leave your legs will feel like 2 towers of pain. Not really, I don´t know where the name comes from, but your legs are guaranteed to hurt a little when you leave. This is when I discovered that I am not destined to be a professional hiker or mountaineer, but I did find 3 things that greatly improved my enjoyment of a week of hiking: Chocolate - motivation, reward, pure indulgence - it is possible that I consumed close to my own [View Full Entry]

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Plagued by strays.......... So the first night in Chile didn´t go all that well. Our first campsite was lacking in hot water and flushing toilets, and there were little frogs hopping all about the showers. Its only redeeming feature was that the trees there smelt like mulled wine :-) The next day we found another campsite which had all the essentials: hot water, laundry service, lights, table and chairs, barbecue and stray cats and dogs. The cats weren´t really a problem, just scrounging for food, that was until they actually stole our cooked chicken (I couldn´t believe the little b@ggers; it [View Full Entry]

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