Nickaboy's Blog

Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. I am supposed to be keeping a travel blog, but it has been 20 days since my last posting. I have been through a whole country – Chile – without having written a word about it yet!
So I will try to make amends by giving the highlights of my travels since my last posting from El Bolsón, in Argentina, to Potosi, in the southwest of Bolivia, where I am now.

Bariloche
Pictures here.

My Patagonian adventure ended in El Bolsón, and from there I went to Bariloche, which is the capital of Argentina’s Lake District. The lakes and mountains remind one a lot of Switzerland, and it is very obvious that some of the architects that designed the buildings there were also reminded of Switzerland.
A large part of my second day in Bariloche was spent in hospital emergency ward waiting rooms. I went cycling with two friends and one of them – a woman from Buenos Aires – lost control of her mountain bike on a steep downhill and fell and broke her arm.
Probably the most amazing part of the whole experience (for me) was the presence of mind that she displayed when her father phoned her on her mobile phone as she was lying by the side of the road, in pain and shivering from shock, waiting for the rescue services to arrive.
I had gathered her scattered belongings after the accident and then her phone rang, with the word “Papa” flashing on the screen. “Esta tu Papa!” I told her. I answered the phone and held it to her ear. Her side of the conversation went something like this (translated): “Hi Dad!…Yes, I am having a wonderful time…Listen, the signal is quite bad – I will phone you later. Goodbye!” All not to alarm him unduly at that stage of the proceedings.
In Bariloche I also teamed up with three other people and we rented a car for a sightseeing trip to some of the lakes in the district. I had never driven a car with a manual gearbox and the steering wheel on the left-hand side of the car on the right-hand side of the road. So I was quite jittery when we set out and, quite predictably, my left hand kept bumping into the door when I had to change gears. But fortunately all went well and we clocked up more than 450km in one day without an accident.

Santiago

It was time to cross over to Chile, and I had decided not to spend too much time there because I had fallen behind somewhat on my schedule. My first stop was in Santiago to see my friend Guillermo, a Chileno who studied MBA with me in South Africa in 2003. Gracias, huevon! It was good to see you again! And we must still have that braai sometime.

Guillermo and I in Santiago

Valparaíso
Pictures here.

I had been vaguely aware of the existence of a city called Valparaíso, but would have been hard pressed to tell you exactly where in South America it is if you had asked me. So I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived there (it is on the Chilean coast, about two hours by bus from Santiago) and saw how beautiful and characterful it is.

If I remember correctly, it was founded in the 1500s and is built on 45 hills facing the Pacific Ocean in a wide arc. The streets are narrow and cobblestoned, electric wiring form tangled birds’ nests overhead, the buildings are colourful, and some of them are decrepit in a way that travellers find cute and quaint, but not in a way that the locals might find pleasing in any way.

Bahía Inglesa
Pictures here.

From Valparaíso I headed north up the coast to a small place called Bahía Inglesa. It reminds me a lot of some places on the west coast of South Africa or the Namibian coast. The desert goes right up to the ocean. I guess on both continents it has something to do with cold ocean currents coming northwards from Antarctica and therefore not producing enough vapour for proper rain to fall. And then there are the most beautiful white beaches and an aquamarine ocean – just warm enough to swim in. Another similarity is the wonderful seafood!

San Pedro de Atacama
Pictures here.

This town is in the middle of the Atacama desert in northern Chile. The Atacama is reportedly the highest and driest desert in the world, but I have my doubts. Shortly afterwards I would travel through deserts on the Bolivian side of the Andes that are definitely higher, if not drier as well.
The town is quite small and is a base for all kinds of travellers and tourists who want to experience the desert, so it is also quite touristy. However, the battalion of bed-lice I had to battle all through my first sleepless night in town feel fuck-all for the reputation of their town as a tourist destination. I still bear the scars a week afterwards, though the itching has subsided.
For the record, the name of the louse-ridden hostel is Hostel Eden de Atacameña. Don’t stay there, and please spread the word.
However, I went for a very nice mountain-bike ride into the desert: up a valley with the only river (actually just a small stream) in that part of the desert, and into a very narrow and twisty and turny canyon called Gargantua del Diablo – the Devil’s Throat. With the red, craggy mountains rising up on both sides of the little canyon it is easy to see why it has been named thus.

San Pedro de Atacama to Uyuni
Pictures here.

One of the ways to get from Chile to Bolivia is with a three-day 4×4 trip through the Andes into Bolivia and then through various deserts in the Bolivian Andes to the Salar de Uyuni – the Uyuni Salt Flat – the biggest in the world at more than 10 000 square kilometers.
This was a most memorable trip – it took me to the coldest, the highest and maybe the driest places I have ever been. And it is one of the most beautiful. (New Zealand still occupies the first place for beauty.)
Our driver and guide, Serapio, is a Bolivian who had been conducting these trips for 26 years. We did it in the same vehicle – a Toyota Land Cruiser – that was brand new when he started doing the tours 26 years ago, and it showed. We had to stop several times for some tinkering to the engine, and the left-hand side mirror came off just a few kilometres before the end of the trip.
We visited some beautiful saline lakes in the middle of the desert. Their respective colours – e.g. blue, white, green, and red – are determined by the prevalent kind of mineral deposits to be found in the water and the mud of the lake.
The conditions were quite challenging. The highest point of the trip was above 4 800m and the night temperatures were below minus 10 degrees Celsius. These were the highest and coldest conditions that I have ever experienced.
Added to that there was the matter of altitude sickness. All the members in our group had one or more of the following symptoms: headache, shortness of breath, increased heart rate, loss of appetite, insomnia and unusual dreams.
My usual resting heart rate is around 60 beats per minute. On this trip it was around 90 beats per minute. I also had headaches from time to time. I would wake up at night with that feeling in my chest that you get when you try to swim one length of a swimming pool under water and you realize at about three quarters of the way that you are not quite going to make it. It took some concentration and deep breathing to get the oxygen in my lungs back to a comfortable level. (Even here in Potosi at 4 000m, where I now am, I sometimes have to concentrate and breathe consciously to get enough oxygen into my lungs.)
On the salt flat itself we did the usual touristy thing by taking trick photography pictures that make one thing or person look much smaller or bigger in relation to another. This is possible because the white surface of the salt flat is quite featureless and…well, flat, making it difficult to get a perspective of how far away things are from one another and from the camera. In one of the pictures I am a giant stomping on one of my fellow travelers; in another I am sitting on a giant banana.

Silly salt pictures here. (Thanks to my travel companions Fabian, Fernanda, Laylian and Rosie for sharing these pics with me. My camera did not work at that stage.)

Uyuni and Potosi

The 4×4 tour ended in the town of Uyuni, where I went to a very strange pub that specialises in cocktails and shooters with very suggestive names. And in some cases they don’t tell you in which kind of vessel they are going to serve you your cocktail in, with the result that I had a drink in mug that was shaped like a woman’s bottom (with a little skirt and all) and one has to suck your drink from a certain orifice. Clue: it is not from the arsehole. (Pictures here. Not for sensitive people!)
On the bus on the way from Uyuni to Potosi I was severely taken aback when we were making small talk with two Bolivian women and one was asked to guess my age. She said 50 years!
Potosi is the highest city in the world (La Paz is at “only” 3 600m, being the highest capital in the world) and it exists because of the silver mining industry surrounding it. The “tourist” thing to do here is to go on a tour of the mines, but they warn that you should not go if you are claustrophobic or asthmatic. I have claustrophobia, so I decided not to go on the tour with my current set of travelling companions and rather do this long overdue blog posting.

The rough plan from here is to go to La Paz and Lake Titicaca, and from there to cross over to Peru to do the multi-day hike through the Peruvian Andes to Machu Picchu. And from there roughly Colombia, Venezuela, down to Manaus in Brazil, down the Amazon on a boat to the Atlantic Ocean, and then down the coast of Brazil back to Buenos Aires by the end of August.