Steaked Out

Our final stop in Argentina was in the north western city of Salta - back into the Andes for us. Great big country Argentina - 8th biggest in the world, apparently just behind India - about 960million less peoples living there though! Salta is a good place to do outdoor pursuits and to party but we didn't do any of that because we had a cold each so we slowed our pace down and did some coughing and sneezing instead. On a Sunday afternoon we sat in a cafe with the locals and watched a couple of footy games whilst having a few beers which was fab - we liked it especially whenever a goal was scored because the commentator shouted 'goooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllll' with all his breath which was very amusing for us especially as we were lucky to see quite a few 'goooooooooooaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllsss'.

We visited a museum they have there where they keep these three 500yr old mummies they found close by just 9 years ago on an expedition up the Andes. The mummies are all children who were sacrificed and buried (as an offering to the gods) 500yrs ago - their bodies (skin, hair - the lot) have been pretty much perfectly preserved by the extreme cold and dry air at the 6000m plus Andean peak they were buried at. One of the mummies was on display in a special dry chamber maintained at minus 20 degrees - it was really spooky looking at a 500yr old kid - the skin and all of her features were pretty much perfect! She didn't look at all happy though - we have a few theories as to why - it could be that she was narked off at having to scale a 6000m + peak, the views probably would have been great but sadly not everyone likes to go trekking - maybe it was the sacrifice bit, being sacrificed can put a downer on anyones day - or maybe it was just being dug up out of the ground after a nice 500yr kip and then being put on display for tourists to gorp at - we'll never know for sure.

We visited another museum, this one on Andean culture, and were asked to write in the comment book after our tour. The last comment in the book (written by a York University student) read 'The contemporanous compilation of historical significance on display truly highlight the fascinating juxtoposition that is the relationship between true Andean culture and Catholism' - or something like that. The next entry in that book, our entry, the one from Halifax, reads 'We thought the museum was really good, we especially liked the Inca earrings - hopefully we can find some like that in the shops'. Just a slight difference in terms of expression from the two parts of Yorkshire there! In truth, we thought the museum was dull, but the owner was looking over our shoulder whilst we wrote in the book so we bottled it and wrote something nice - Janine did like the earrings though. We left quickly in search of earrings and the meaning of the word 'juxtoposition'. ;-)

We ate a lot of steak whilst in Salta - a place can't be a bad place if you can both dine out on big steaks and a litre of house red for less than a tenner! The Argentinians eat more beef than anyone else in the world - the average Argie eats 70kg of the stuff a year!! - holy cow batman, that's a heck of a lot of the red stuff. We've really enjoyed Argentina and all of the steaks but by now we were steaked out maaan - time to move on.

We left Salta on a big posh bus and headed west up up up and over the Andes and back into Chile - into the Atacama desert - the so called driest place on earth! This jouney was spectacular, snow capped peaks, wiggly windy roads, multicoloured mountains, Llamas and Alpacas running around, salt flats.......all that. We were a bit apprehensive before this bus journey as it takes you up from Salta, at an altitude of around 1000m up to an altitude of 4700m - this sort of quick altitude change isn't terribly good for the body and we'd heard that some people get a bit ill on this trip. Fortunately for us we got through it ok although we were a bit breathless and felt a bit weak. The chap in front of us at the Argentinian customs point (4200m) felt so weak he had to sit down.

The bus dropped us off on the outskirts of San Pedro de Atacama - we weren't too impressed at first as it seemed we'd been dropped off in the middle of nowhere but we quickly found life and civilisation and we ended up having a grand old time of it there. San Pedro is a small dusty and lively desert town with a surprisingly large number of quality restaurants offering good grub in an uber cool setting. There´s loads to do around San Pedro so we booked ourselves on a few trips. First off we set the alarm for 4am (an early start record for us) to go see the El Tatio Geysers. We were due to be picked up from outside our hostal at 4:30 but we waited until 5am and they still hadn't turned up! Imagine how pleased with ourselves we were when we realised (upon talking to some passers by) that we should have moved our clocks back an hour when we crossed the border into Chile - we did in fact wake up at 3am!!! Apparently Argentina is an hour in front of Chile for all but 3 weeks of the year as the Argentinians do their daylight saving change 3 weeks before the Chileans. When we crossed from Chile to Argentina a couple of weeks previously the two countries had been on the same time and we had assumed that that was always the case - aarrrggghhh! Anyways, after we'd been waiting out in the dark and cold for an hour our tour company turned up, bang on time as it happened. The reason we were up so early to see the geysers is because they're at their most active as the sun comes up and so we were treated to quite a spectacle. It was very cold before the sun came up, minus 8 degrees in fact which probably doesn't sound too cold but to a pair of winter dodging sunshine softies like us it was painful. Janine also had a bit of trouble with the altitude, nearly collapsing at one point in fact but fortunately that hard core Yorkshire blood came good and she managed to stay on her feet like a guddun. We also did a couple of sunset trips, one to see the sun going down on the high altiplano (flamingo spotting included) and another to the Valle de la Luna which like the name suggests is a moonlike landscape - both trips super good.

Next we headed off to the north and east to Uyuni in Bolivia on an exciting three day off-road trip in a jeep. At the check in for our trip we found a couple of chaps who had been waiting for an hour as they hadn't realised that Chile was an hour behind Argentina - that news made us smile heartily :-). For some reason we had to wait at the Chilean border for hours (with many others) before we were given the go ahead to race towards Bolivia. It was an interesting route to the border, first along a road (headed back towards Argentina) and then all of a sudden we left the road and belted along a dirt road at top speed towards a little hut seemingly in the middle of nowhere - the Bolivian immigration hut. With our passports stamped again we were off in our jeep across the high altiplano on a 3 day jouney past dark peaks, snow covered peaks, all sorts of differently coloured lakes and finally across the largest salt flat in the world - the Salar de Uyuni. Throughout the duration of the trip we were at a seriously high altitude but no worries for by now we had more heamoglobin in our viens than the average tour de france cyclist! The trip was mucho spectaculouso and we had a great time with the other people in our jeep - in fact one of the highlights of the trip was Janine trying to 'play' Willie Wonker (of the chocolate factory) in a game of charards - Janine really used her imagination whilst trying to get the word 'Willie' into our heads but unfortunately, incredibly funny though it was her audience didn't quite get the right answer! A 'natural´highlight of the trip was the Salar de Uyuni - a salt flat so vast that it made us feel as though we were in another world - the vast emptiness was calming indeed. This salt flat is so big and so empty that there's not much on it to give you any perspective of size which allowed us to take some funny pictures - well we thought they were funny anyway. Our trip wasn't without incident though as our driver was a bit of a naughty chappie - each day he drove as fast as he could (he would have been better suited to the Dakar ralley) so that he could get as plastered as possible each evening. On the last day of the trip we woke at 5am to go see the sunrise from the top of an island on the salt flat but unfortunately our driver had become so drunk the evening before that he'd lost the keys to the jeep. Instead of looking for said keys he chose to sleep off his hangover whilst we had to make our own breakfast (his job!). When he sobered up enough to be bothered he sawed off the ignition to the jeep (to take off the steering lock) and then hot wired it and eventually we were off - several hours after the sunrise. Later that night we learnt that our driver was supposed to take us to some pleasant island but he'd spent our entrance fees (included in our trip fee) on booze so he just didn't bother! Still, twas a good trip anyways but we wouldn't recommend Pamela Tours to anyone.

After a night in Uyuni we headed south in another jeep to Tupiza - the place where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid did their last robbery 100 years ago - the Bolivian police caught up with them and shot em dead! The journey down to Tupiza was uber scenic - all off-road - we crossed countless mountain passes and passed through numerous canyons - at one particular hair pin bend we stopped to allow our driver to pay his respects where a driver and cook had plunged to their deaths just 4 days previously. We could see the wing mirror at the bottom of the steep and long drop reflecting in the sun - they had been returning home to Tupiza after dropping off a tour group in Uyuni off the back of an altiplano/salt flat trip like the one we'd just been on. The scenery around Tupiza was fantastic, it's likened to the USA's wild west - Butch and Sundance probably felt quite at home here up until the point where they were deaded! To take in the scenery we booked ourselves on the´Tupiza Triathlon' trip which involved a couple of off-road mountain bike rides (one flatish ride and one excitin downhill with all hairpins and all that) and a horse ride through the canyons - Steve's horse was a bit crazy and it kept on trying to get rid of him by walking/running under low branches which wasn't that funny for Steve but was very funny for Janine - fortunately for Steve he can limbo off the back of a hoss so he just about managed to stay on board - it was a great trip - loved it a lot.

After the fun of Tupiza we headed up north, deep into Bolivia on an 8hr bus trip bound for Potosi, the highest city in the world (4060m). We spent as much time on unsurfaced roads as we did on the surfaced variety and at one point we suffered a blow out, no drama's though and we all got out to stretch our legs and watch the driver put the spare on. As we've come to expect in South America we were treated to some tip top scenery - the Andes becoming less dusty and more green along the way. As well as being the highest city, Potosi also used to be the richest city in the world thanks to it's very large silver deposits. The silver mined from there effectively bankrolled the Spanish empire for like loads of years. No Spanish now though and not that much silver left either although there are still chaps down there eeking a living from what's left. In fact, you can do a mine tour to experience the incredibly harsh conditions the poor blighters have to put up with. Frankly, we didn't fancy it, so we jumped straight on a bus headed for Sucre, Bolivia's judicial capital which is where we are now, it looks to be a fine place too, so it does.

We'll stay here a while and then we're going to head north to La Paz and then into the Amazon Jungle!!!! Excitin...........

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