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Published: March 3rd 2007
Down at the port of Valparaiso in Chile it's similar to most other major ports throughout the world, in other words 'buzzards', plenty of hardened sailors who look willing to take out a few tourists if you dare give em a second glance!
We quickly escape the port to the surrounding hills and the reason we ended up here, for the fascinating art culture, coffee houses and street graffiti. We spend the day, doing just that, supping coffee and admiring a place willing to let the 'artists' spraypaint their talents on the walls of the houses and in the process bringing a relatively run down place to life. On the evening we try the local speciality dish, chorillana, which is a huge share plate with a base of fries, then scrambled eggs, onions and loaded with steak. Surprisingly Elaine didn't look to happy with this huge plate of grease and left me to polish off the majority.
We moved on to Santiago for the weekend, hoping for some city partying BA styley. Unfortunately it didn't pan out that way. Santiago to me had always conjured up images of a romantic, latin party capital, let's just say it's not how
I imagined it! At all! For alternative entertainment I managed to attract the attention of the local scallies, being offered a fight by both a street begger and a punk within 5 minutes of each other, the punk only being able to shout the word 'money' at me! I did think about teaching him the words 'gimme' and 'yer' for future reference.
Leaving the capital we took the long bus journey north to the Atacama Desert. The highlight of our time, on Valentines Day was a sunset trip to the Valle de Luna which claims to be the most inhospitable place on earth. It only rains for one week each year in San Pedro. The Valle was awesome with great views and the colours were pretty amazing. The best views are from the top of a giant sand dune which we climbed and duly recorded for posterity. We also visited other places such as Death Valley which fortunately we managed to survive. Well we had to, the next day was Elaine's birthday, so a day of shopping for pressies, eating and drinking champagne, she wouldn't have it any other way!
The next day we left Chile for Salta
in the North of Argentina. We got stamped out of Chile after 3 hours of waiting, then our bus broke down 2 hours up the road and returned back to Chile. The replacement bus turned up another 2 hours later and got us back to the border, only for someone to be in possession of a stolen passport which took an hour to sort out! The second bus then started playing up, before finally giving up just cross the Argentinian border. So we had to wait for another replacement bus the next day. Our 9 hour journey managed to take a grand total of 29 hours, the joys of backpacking. We arrived at our hostel ready to sleep, only to find an Argentinian family had booked the place out with kids screaming and running all over the joint! No chance to relax here then!
Salta, famous for cheap wine and huge steaks led us on a mission of debauchury. It made sense really, with Bolivia's reputation for poor food we needed to feed ourselves up. When I said huge steaks, I mean seriously huge (check the picture of Elaine tackling the beast); 600 grams of sirloin, the wine was
essential to wash it all down.
As I've told anyone that will listen, I managed to lose 1.5 stones on this trip, then Argentina happened.... oh dear, I´ll hang my head in shame on my return. We leave Argentina for Bolivia joking that a case of the famed dysentry rife there might not be such a bad thing for us!
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Ste
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You could re roof a house with that steak. I see you got your wish then. a dose of the Bolivian toilet tango to get back in shape for your return to the old country! All the best and see you both soon.