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Published: February 18th 2010
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Atacama
That's all you see in 35 hours. The locura, the craziness, I'm referring to started in Santiago de Chile and only ended in Quito, a little more than a week later. I said good-bye to my Austrian homeboy Matthias, a friend I made before New Year's Eve in Pichilemu and who was a big help in my ATM- and VISAless time, and boarded, in lack of reasonable offers on part of the flight companies and a lack of general reason on my part, one of the many buses that would take me to Quito.
I won't go into details on the rides, since it won't surprise that bus rides are boring and wearing. Just some facts: my first ride was 32 hours to Arica, I coastal town I visited on my way south before. Crossing the border: 2hrs in a crappy collectivo which I enjoyed most, it was really genuine. Further north to Lima: 18 hours through the most boring land-scape in the world - plain and dry. 10 hours from Lima to Trujillo, another 9 to Mancora and finally the worst ride: 19 hours to Quito in a really uncomfortable bus with a lot of stress at the boarder.
One of the few highlights though
Tacna
The beautiful main square of that southern Peruian city. were that I could see Brenda and Lucia again, the two sister who hosted Sean and me on my first stay and who are still as beautiful as I remembered them.
Up next was Trujillo, a busy town close to the coast with a beautiful main-square and splendid colonial houses in amazingly great shape. I booked a tour there, to visit the nearby ruins of Cha-Cha, which are incredible. To be honest, at first it just looks like a giant sandbox in which an angry kid rampaged, but as soon as you realize that this adobe city has survived centuries of earth-quakes and several El Niños, and you see the better preserved parts, you can't help but be amazed. Plus, the size was tremendous, imaginations of how busy the city must have been kept occupiing my head.
Afterwards we visited a temple from another culture - the outside walls where styled in very colorful symbols. The special thing was that they built a new level and layer with each new emperor, so the temple not only grew bigger and bigger, but all the artwork had to be done again. For some walls, up to ten layers of symbols
existed, of which 9 couldn't be seen anymore.
During that tour I met a Californian dude who was a marine and was deployed to Afghanistan twice and who gave me his position on the development there. He said there is a lot of progress which isn't broadcasted and that Afghans in general want to get rid of the Taliban. The problem is that the armed forces can't be everywhere, and as soon as they leave one of the clustered villages, the remaining Taliban get back on the people who supported the central government, so the villagers get passive and don't take sides. I thought it interesting to get this inside view, as biased as it might be, and thought I should share it with you guys, especially due to the latest developments there.
Back to South America: my next stop was Mancora, a praised surfer's town in the North. Peruians make a big fuzz about it and talk about it as it was Saint Tropez or Acapulco - so there was disappoint on my PART when I arrived and basically saw an accumulation of shacks and low-key houses, and I managed to stay and poorest of the former
Cha Cha I
Adobe ruins ones: it rained into my room, it was open so mosquitoes that tortured me all night and I rather not tell you about the toilet - but hey, it's Peru.
There was one new and very solid building though, the famed Loki hostel, where I couldn't get a room at, they had a waiting list for days. They had an open bar though, and I spent two very nice nights there - one of them watching the Super Bowl.
One day rain, one day nice weather and a little afternoon surf. People from Germany, Sweden, Denmark and the US - Mancora.
The next day my last and fatal bus ride: first I took a mini-van which took me close to the border, a cab to the border, a walk crossing it, dropping of my luggage at the bus in a hurry, a cab to the Ecuadorian border station from where I barely got my bus in time after I had went through the formalities. The border was amazingly open, you can actually just walk through, the immigration offices are somewhere in town and you're free to drop by, which I did so I wouldn't get in trouble when
leaving.
The bus was crammed and uncomfortable, and I didn't get any chance to buy food before I hopped on. Fortunately, it's very popular to sell warm food in the buses in Ecuador and I got myself pork with rice and beans..... and a diarrhia. I arrived at 1 a.m., got myself a bed only to wake up the next morning with fever and an urge to visit the bathroom.
So my two days Ecuador and my first days in Colombia where a quest for working medication and solitary in a single bedroom with a television to kill time. Somewhere in the middle I had to take a flight from Quito to Cartagena changing in Bogota. I had bad fever that day, but I somehow made it through with Aspirin.
But I'm up and running again and spent the last two days exploring Cartagena, partly with David, I guy I met by chance in Patagonia, Lima and here, which I think is pretty wicked - all the way in the south and all the way up in the north of the continent.
Cartagena is amazing, a colonial venice. They have this rather wide-spread city core in
which there are mostly building of the 16th and early 17th century - the colonial houses that impressed me so much in every other city of the continent, you find them plentiful here - actually, that is all are all there is in the old city. Some of them are in perfect shape, some look as they might crumble anytime. There is a city wall encircleing the center, and if you climb it you get a view of beaches and the ocean at one side, and of the city on the other. There is a huge cathedral and it's yellow dome thrones over the city, which makes an amazing site and a good help for orientation from afar.
I'm in the Carribean here, and I like the vibe, people are smooth, friendly and pretty careless. There is always something going on, people do business mingle on the busy street and the whole vibe was that contagious that I was inclined to change dollar to colombian pesos on the street, which was of course a trick to steal. I knew it was sketchy, and did it mostly out of interest, and luckily I was alert enough to avert being robbed.
Ecuador
Crossing the boarder to Ecuador So, tomorrow I'll see a beautiful beach, a beautiful Island and beautiful sea-life in an aquarium. Overnight I'm headed to Medellin, and after that Bogota's up. My last days here. It was a good trip, but I can't wait to get home. I'll keep you posted, you keep it up!
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