Blogs from South America - page 5363

Three hours from Copacabana, on the other side of Lake Titicaca is Puno. Everybody who comes here makes a visit to the floating islands of Uros on Lake Titicaca. The islands are made of totora reeds, which grows abundandly in the shallow parts of the Lake Titicaca. The reed seems to be quite a versatile plant. The people living on the islands use it for pretty much everything: they use it for the islands, they eat it, they burn it, and they build houses and boats and all sorts of things of it. We took a one day boat cruise on Lake Titicaca visiting the floating islands and Isla Taquile. Visiting the floating islands was an interesting experience but Isla Taquile was less impressive. After seeing Isla del Sol, Isla Taquile was just another island on ... read more

Arrived in Sao Luis Monday (I think at least). Sao Luis really reminds me of France and Montpellier - no wonder since it was founded by the Frenchies. I have had time to explore the hostorical center and I have met a very nice girl, Patricia from Brazil, that I went to les Lencois Maranheses with. That is a national park with huge sanddunes. When it rains the water gets filtered and makes blue lagoons everywhere. This is of course not the good period to come, but we got to take a swim in one of the lagoons and do some sand-surfing on the dunes. Very nice. I also got my first sun-burn - less nice. Since Sao Luis is the capital of reggae in Brazil, we decided (we being Patricia, me and two French guys ... read more

On the return journey from Iruya and on our way to Purmamarca, we passed by what is known as "The Painter's Palette". We could only take a semi-decent picture of this, not easy from a moving vehicle, but the bus didn't stop here. We stayed just the one night in Purmamarca to see "The Mountain of 7 Colours" in the morning, a unique rock formation where many different layers have been exposed by the forces of nature. This colourful mountain really is stunning to see, one can't stop looking at it and taking pictures, it looks almost impossible that nature could have created it so beautiful and harmonious. The stopover in Purmamarca also helped to break up a long bumpy road journey from Iruya to Salta, where we headed to next. The main reason why we ... read more

Well A trip finally materailized for last Saturday, I went hiking and it was good to get out of the city. I went with the same person from the school who has tryed to organize several other trips that he cancelled but this one finally happened. I arrived at the school at 8:30 am and there were three other students in the car. Two were from the other big language school here and one was from my school. The two women were from Belgium and spoke French. The guy was England. The guy and one of the girls were living in the same residental house here in Cordoda. They were exhaused and we had not even begun the trip. But this trip for them was only a continuation of the night before. They arrived home from ... read more

The start of my trip was really left footed. Why was it left footed, you ask? Well, for starters we had a really great flight: Our plane from Tel Aviv to Madrid was late by an hour, so we had 15 minutes to catch our connection to Rio De Janeiro. When we came running to the terminal, we discovered that our plane to Rio was going to be late by another one and a half hours. Then when we finally had landed in Rio, we went to take our baggage, but of course, it hadn't arrived. Apparently the Iberia people has decided that it ought to rest some time in Tel Aviv... There was a really long line to declare our lost baggage in the airport, as they lost the baggage of half of the airplane ... read more