This one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wzQzDvKCGI show one of our campsites including the big blue tent which was set up for every meal where there was a big table and chairs and we were fed gourmet meals!

This one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IRggwdSrYE has me talking at the beginning, then shows many of us who were on the walk.

The latest I have heard is that Machu Pichu is only now open to tourists again, after part of the train tracks to/from the site were washed away in January. Apparently Peru has realised how important Machu Pichu is for their tourism, as numbers dropped dramatically when people couldn’t get to the ancient site.

Apologies that you all had to guess who was writing each post.  This time it’s Anna.  I thought it would automatically come up who wrote the post! Anyways, keeps you on your toes!

Most of you will probably know, but for those who don’t, I have now found myself a 2 bedroom villa-unit (like a mini-townhouse).  I have a 2-day-a-week job at a primary school in Melbourne where I am the garden specialist for the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Project. I take classes of Year 4/5 kids for an hour in the garden, then they spend 2 hours a week in the kitchen where they cook and eat the yummy produce they have grown. You can check out Stephanie Alexander’s setup for schools around Australia at http://www.kitchengardenfoundation.org.au/. I’m still looking for something to fill my other 2 or 3 days.

Jordan is still in Australia, in Queensland with her parents, before she heads off overseas again for another job.  I’ll let her fill you in on that one.

Hope you are having/have had a relaxing Easter. I’m heading down to a National Park by the beach for a few days today with another 30+ Quaker. You know, I have to get away from my busy life where I have a 5-day weekend!!

Well, we are actually back in Australia (got in last night to Sydney), but I had these photos in my phone camera that I never got around to downloading until now, so am finally telling the story of teh Choro Trail about a month and a half late.  So, let me take you back to a time, not in the too distant past (around 10 January 2010), when Anna went to a little place called Oruro (which she told you all about in a blog, I think) and I went back to La Paz in yet another attempt to try to do a walk, and at which time I succeeded (yay), and went on a three day trek from a little town just outside of La Paz, down the mostly pre-columbian (I think meaning before Cristopher Columbus) trail.

First camp

I went with one guide, who, I am sorry to say, stank.  He had been on a five day trek, come back to La Paz, and immediately took me on my trek, so I am sure he did not bathe (pretty cold, anyway, so durign the trek, I didn’t either – but there is a certain stench that someone can get from at least 10 days not bathing, which I am glad to say I have never gotten, but this guy had).  I was kind of happy that he also seamed to be a guide that liked to stay out in front most of the time, and anytime he came close, I created space between us again.

Guide out in front on Choro Trail

Other than the stench, he was a lovely guy and we chatted a bit, but he mostly stayed out in front and I had plenty of time to just wander along the trail, thinking lots of things (none of which I remember anymore of course, but I’m sure they were profound at the time).  It was a bit hard of a walk, but not too difficult, just constant walking every day, starting out at 8am every day and finishing about 4pm every day.

The top of the mountain in the Choro Trail

The trail was pretty, though, from beginning to end, with picturesque camping sites both nights.  We caught up with two other walkers and their guide from the same company that afternoon at the first camp site.  The couple were from Denmark and had just started on their 1 year travels around south and central america.  They were nice, and we were all the type of people that like to walk and walk and walk without really talking much, which was good. The trek was wonderful, except for the last day, in which it started to rain and continued to rain hard for the entire morning until we got to the bus stop to go back to La Paz at about 2pm that day.  I got back to La Paz at about 5pm, to freezing cold and rain and wet everything all throughout my bag as well : ( I had a hot shower at the hostel, met up with Anna and other friends we had met in Sucre who were also in La Paz that night, and had no time to dry my clothes, becasue we were off to Argentina the next morning, so you can imagine what my bag and clothes stunk like when we got to Buenos Aires.  The guy at the security section of the airport was not very impressed with me, as he had to check my bag and I only had my dirty, smelly, wet clothes in it : )

Anyway, now you can go back to all the previous blogs about Anna and I in Argentina for the rest of the trip : )

The second time I went across was a for a shopping errand for Jordan! I found some cute cuddly toys and they were exactly what she wanted as presents for children of friends (and one lucky friend, I believe!). It was an eventful journey with the local bus leaving me stranded at the Brazilian border with me with no idea what to do next! I managed to get 2 more buses to go the short way to the border, and got there after the falls closed but before the shop closed. Phew! I had temporarily forgotten that Brazil is 1 hour ahead of Argentina in the summer time. But all was good.  

Care for a bit of water?

So I went to see the panoramic view of the falls.  Wow!! There´s a lot of water moving through those falls. I´d love to be able to show you a short video of it, but I´m technically challenged in that area – hopefully my computer-savvy cousin can help in a few days. As you know, pictures can´t do it justice, but I can always try!  

Iguazu Falls, Argentina

The next day Jordan and I went together to the Argentinian side. You can get up close and personal on this side – there is a spectacular upper walk, where this was taken from. We also went on a boat trip where they take great delight in ensuring you get as wet as possible! Every view was breathtaking and I wanted to take lots and lots of photos, but I let my eyes do a lot of the looking this time.  

Continuous water spray

This shows you the haze of water spray that was ever present at some points of the falls, from the sheer force of the water crashing downwards. Keep an eye on our flickr site – www.flickr.com/travellinganna - for the videos and if you want to see more piccies.  

Coati babies

These little bubs are a relative of the racoon – sorry, I forget the name of them in Spanish (like that will help you recognise them!). They were very bold around people because although it was forbidden to feed them, some tourists did, and petted them too (I admit, they are very cute!). But they really are a nuisance particularly around the cafeteria area. Similar rules to not feeding native animals anywhere – it´s possible that they can bite, and they might attack a small child who doesn´t have food when they really want some.  Fortunately I didn´t see any instances of this, but I really think we should remember that they are wild animals and treat them as such.

The End of the World team

This was our last, all-included-trip, organised through GAP adventures, called the End of the World tour, visiting Patagonia on the Argentinian side and the Chilean side. We finished up in Ushuia, the southern most city in the world. Patagonia is a region rather than a country. We were travelling with 14 other people from Australia, England, Peru, Croatia, Denmark and Hong Kong. Our guide was a Spaniard who has been living in Chile for about 5 years, Anna, and our assistant guide for the 3 days of walking was a Chilean, Rodrigo who comes down to Chilean Patagonia in summer for the tourist season and back up to Santiago for the other 6 or so months.

Ammon and Sharon

Fortunately there were many avid photographers on the trip, and we are most grateful to Ammon and Sharon from Hong Kong who shared some of their photographs with us. But it has got to be said, a lot of what we saw really couldn´t be adequately captured by camera. Many of the views were just too large, an others, like the glaciers, were difficult to photograph because of the contrasts, or lack of contrasts.

Perito Moreno Glacier, Argentina

That said, Ammon got a great photo of the Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest moving glacier in the world. It is 30km in length. The middle part of the glacier moves on average at about 2m per year, but the front part moves only at about 20cm per year (I think that´s right – please correct me if I´m wrong!). This difference creates the cracks and fissures that give the glacier the light blue colour. We visited this glacier by boat and then saw the top from platforms. You can no longer go right up to the base of the glacier as many people have died that way from falling ice. A piece can fall off that´s the equivalent or 10 (or maybe 20?) floors of a building. The above-water height is about 70m and the below-water height is about 170m.

A hanging glacier

Here is a different kind of glacier – a hanging glacier. This is because the glacier is coming down the side of a steep mountain and then it stops short of the base of the mountain. If part of this kind of glacier falls to the bottom of the mountain, it is then called an alpine glacier, I think. The bottom part of this glacier, where you can see a grey area with some white, has collected soil from higher on the mountain where it falls when the ice falls. There are also strong winds around here. And here´s some basic information that I didn´t know – glaciers are formed from snow on the top of the mountain that has an enormous amount of pressure on it from gravity so that all the air is squashed out of the snow and it turns into the ice of a glacier! There´s some useless information for you!

Sheltering from the wind

Wind. Let me tell you about wind in Patagonia. It is very rare for there to be no wind in Patagonia, and the area gets its fair share of rain as well (or maybe more than its fair share!). On our first day walk it rained nearly the whole time, and I´m pretty sure the wind was fairly relentless as well, and some people quickly realised that either their waterproof gear wasn´t very waterproof, or they really did need some of those waterproof pants (that was me)! It´s difficult to describe to you what it is like to be in a place where there are strong winds nearly all the time. It´s quite exhausting, apart from anything else! But in Patagonia you kind of just have to put up with it if you want to see some of the amazing views and glaciers and mountains. I guess it´s understandable that there is so much wind, as there is not much land mass around the very south of the continent. I´m sure there´s a more technical meteorological explanation for the wind, but all I know is that after a few days of constant wind there was a sigh of relief on the odd days or places where there wasn´t much wind. And the sound of the wind from a little tent? Noisy! It was even loud in some of the hotel rooms! So we´re glad we´re up in Buenos Aires again. I love Patagonia, but really, the wind is really a force to be reckoned with and I think it would start wearing away at my sanity.

We are now in our last week of travelling – kind of hard to believe! Our itinerary now is stay in Buenos Aires tonight, fly to Iguazu Falls up near the Brazilian border tomorrow and stay up there a few days. I will go to the Brazilian side of the falls using my British passport, but Jordan´s not prepared to pay for a visa to go to Brazil for 1 day. Damn the Australian Government who now charge Brazilians to visit Australia! Means us travellers have to fork out USD100 to go into Brazil or to fly in to Argentina and Chile. Oh well, I´ll take photos and she´ll go trekking in the National Park near the falls and we´ll both check out the Argentinian side of the falls.

Then we take a long bus trip to Gualeguaychu just north of Buenos Aires where we will spend the weekend enjoying Carnivale before returning to Buenos Aires to catch our flight back to Australia on Monday 8th. Might get to see you soon! Yay!

Quirquincho

They were made from the hardened shell of an animal called a Quirquinchu (pron. girginchoo) which is a relative of the armadillo (thanks Wikipedia for the photo!). They had some kind of mechanism inside which you twist to make a percussive sound, and you could swing them around to make a whirring sound.  If only I still had the little video! Never mind. We´re back on track now with another new camera which I will guard very closely.

I´m sure we´ll see more amazing things in Gualeguaychu, Argentina that we can photograph and show you from the Carnivale there.

Oh, and the other photo I can´t show you was of the popcorn-making man who had a little cart where he cooked the popcorn in a little metal tub and sold little bags for 1 Boliviano (a few cents Australian). I became addicted to popcorn ever since Peru, especially when I was sick – salty carbs, mmmmm!

The things I noticed right near the airport were the big open spaces next to the road of mowed lawn. I haven´t seen that since Melbourne! And it actually reminded me a lot of Melbourne - expensive looking houses with lots of space around them and with green verges. It really emphasised that we have entered a country that is _much_ richer than any of the others we´ve been staying in. We passed parks, green areas in the middle of road triangles where people were playing soccer on a mini field, and of course scatterings of eucalyptus trees. It looked like some were mini plantations (we´re talking small plots of land here), just back from the road.

Sturdy eucalyptus

I´ve heard from Australian foresters working at Burnely that eucalypts are a great plantation tree in South America because they grow quickly with the plentiful rain in the wet season, and the varieties selected grow quite straight which is great for using the trunks for structural purposes like holding up rooves and holding up rocks in tunnels in the mines. They also don´t have the same pests and diseases as cucalypts do in Australia, so they are quite healthy. The leaves are used by indigenous women as a dye for the alpaca and llama wool – it produces a grey-green that is then used in weavings. And the branches and twigs are used as fuel for cooking in the countryside. Cool, huh?

The gang of girls

So our other exciting adventure in Bolivia was going to visit the Salt Flats near Uyuni in the far south west of Bolivia. Pretty much at least 6 hours on a bumpy bus to get there from any direction. Jordan met a friend in Sucre, Ankea from Holland, and she joined us, along with 4 students from Brazil on the 3-day treck. Here we all are on the blinding snow. We took some really cool pictures of optical illusions, but they were on Ankea´s camera so you´ll have to wait to see those ones.

Salt bricks

We visited a salt hotel and just outside this is the construction of another building. They have to use rooves with big eaves to prevent the bricks from getting washed away! They said the rain doesn´t come sideways much, so they´re pretty much ok.  Not sure how much upkeep they have to do, and how often. But the bricks are kept in place by a finer kind of salt.

A salt llama

Inside the salt hotel, where we could have stayed if we chose, on salt bed bases in a salt bedroom, they also had salt statues.  There are chunks of salt that are quite big and able to be carved. If you look at this picture carefully you will see that there are a number of smaller blocks of salt balanced on top of each other to create the llama. The stripey look is because the salt gets layers of dust blown in on the wind from the surrounding mountains.

Salt and sky

I´m quite  proud of this photo. We had a storm brewing and I was so taken with the clouds. You can see that the salt is quite clean at this part of the salt flats. Maybe the mountains are further away.

The next blog, which might be a few weeks away, will give you a sneak preview of Carnivale in Oruro in Bolivia – _the_ place to be in Bolivia for Carnivale. I´m a bit sad we won´t be there, but we´re heading to a tiny place in the north of Argentina which is meant to be good. In a few days we´re flying down to Patagonia and doing an ¨End of the world¨ tour. Hopefully my body is healthy enough and well adjusted to the altitude to cope with the walking. Of course! It will be great!

Ciao for now.

Anna

OK enuf boring info about my health. What have we been up to since our last blog? Sadly Kate has left us, but she hasn´t left South America yet. I think she´ll either be trekking to get to Machu Pichu (on a different trail to ours) or she´ll be in the jungle being eaten by mosquitos. Jordan and I have been travelling together again for a bit, but tonight we parted ways again for the next few days – she wants to do more walking and I most certainly do not! So she´s on a bus to La Paz and I´m here in an internet cafe at 9.30pm and I have to wait until 5 minutes past midnight to catch my train to Oruro. So plenty of time for tapping away I´m even being optimistic and trying to upload some pictures to add to this.  See how we go.

So, first things first. We travelled from Sucre to Potosí which is an old mining town. In Spanish times it was a booming town in more ways than one. The Spaniards mined Cerro Rico – Rich Mountain – until it was no longer profitable. Apparently 45,000 tons of silver were extracted between 1556 and 1783. Dynamite was used to extract the silver, and the indigenous people were used as the miners. There were many accidents and many deaths during this time but from what I understand this was not seen as a problem – there were always more men to work the mines, and African slaves were brought in once the indigenous population diminished.  Many of the deaths were apparently from mercury poisoning as the workers mixed the silver ore and the mercury with their feet.

Miners do it tough

The main cause of death now is silicosis from the dust in their lungs and miners rarely live past 40. There are children as young as 10 working in the mines now, mostly because their fathers have died and they now need to support the family. The miners do it tough, hauling trolley loads of rock and minerals by hand on old wooden tracks that badly need repair. Makes the work even tougher as the trolleys constantly come off the rails.

Cool minerals

The mines are still working but at a much smaller scale, owned by cooperatives of miners now, where they make their money only from the profitable veins they find.  There are a number of minerals that are currently being mined by groups of 2 to 10 men, including tin and zinc. I can´t remember the name of this mineral but I really liked the look of it. Each group or cooperative has their own area of the mountain that they mine, at many different levels where it gets hotter as you get lower. Air is pumped in via big pipes with valves at intervals, as is water to be used when drilling. Most work is done by hand including the dangerous work of making and setting the dynamite. Some miners use drilling machinery, but mostly it´s done by hand as this keeps more miners employed.

El Tio (uncle)

This is El Tio, or Uncle.  Each mine has one of these.  He protects the miners and assists in finding profitable minerals. He does have horns like the devil (or diablo) but he is _never_ called diablo. He has a large penis, where the green is, to assist in the fertility of the mine. On the last Friday of every month each miner comes here, near the entrance to the mine, to give offerings to Tio for continued protection.  Two cigarettes are placed, lit, in his mouth, coca leaves are spread over his head, on his lap and at his feet. Alcohol (¨Bolivian rum¨ at 96% proof!) is also sprinkled around el Tio. I believe that at the time of Carnival in February he is also decorated with the coloured streamers you can see. Once a year an offering of a llama´s blood is also made, and this blood is splattered at the entrance to the mine and around the wall behind el Tio. The llama is then cooked and shared by the miners and their families.

Protector to keep el Tio in the mine

This is another protector in the mines. I can´t remember the name of it – it was not as easy to remember as el Tio. The main purpose of this shrine is to keep el Tio inside the mine. I think it´s connected to the church because once a year it is taken outside, I think at Carnival, because this is the time that the devils create havoc in our world, the world above the mines. Similar offerings are made here.

It´s tough, hot, dangerous work in the mines, but this is the way many families make their livelihoods. A new way of making money by ex-miners is taking tour groups inside the mines, explaining the processes and a bit of the history. Makes for a strange but memorable tourist activity.

New Years Eve in Sucre

I hope your New Years Eve was a fun one. There were 5 of us celebrating in Sucre, Bolivia – Kate, Jordan, Kate´s friend Staja, Staja´s friend Nicola and me. Unfortunately for this holiday it was me not feeling so well again.  What is going on with my body?! I was however well enough to go out for dinner and eat plain carbs and sit around drinking hand-made limonada until about 11pm. We all headed to the central plaza – the 25 de Mayo that every Bolivian town and city seems to have. I think it´s related to one of the revolutions…but I´ll have to check on that one.

The square was packed, with a band playing. There were plenty of little stalls selling confettii or fireworks or food or grapes.  The significance of the confettii passed us by, but everyone threw it all over everyone else at midnight. We even had a few girls throwing it over us so we wouldn´t miss out on the action. The significance of the grapes is that everyone needs to have 12 grapes – one for each month of the year – so that on the strike of midnight you eat the grapes as quickly as possible, whilst making a wish as you eat each one. Your wishes should then come true as each month rolls around in 2010. Another Bolivian New Years tradition we all followed was that if we wanted love in 2010 we had to wear red undies and if we wanted money we had to wear yellow undies. Not telling which colours we wore!  You could even wear a pair of each if you wanted!

The Bolivians believe that whatever you do on New Years Day will be what happens for the rest of the year.  So Nicola chose not to eat sugar, all the others went for a walk, Kate and Staja ate home-made chocolate balls and Jordan felt a little seedy from the night before! It appears that my 2010 will be characterised by lots of sleep (and therefore less tiredness?), good times with friends and good food.  Sounds great to me!

Kate and her craving

One of the highlights of being here in Sucre with Staja and Nicola has been the food we have been cooking.  Staja is a vegetarian, like Kate, and has found that cooking is easier than finding good vege food in any of the restaurants. Fortunately the hostel has a 2-burner cooker we can use.  So the day starts for most of us with yummy porrige with bananas, saltanas and nuts and soy milk. Jordan´s more of a Fruit Loops girl. Then a cup of tea with soy milk (such a luxury!). Luch has been yummy brown bread rolls Staja and Nicola have found with a variety of yummy toppings, and dinners have been amazing. Kate has been craving chick pea curry with brown rice for the last 3 weeks, and finally she got her wish! Last night was a dhal and I think tonight red bean tortillas have been planned. Eating out has not been nearly as good, so we´ll stick with cooking.

We will now all be in Sucre until Tuesday when I think we all disperse to different parts of Bolivia and Peru, except for Staja who we hope will not feel too lonely. Kate heads to Peru for the start of her Machu Pichu and jungle adventure, Jordan and I head to the silver mines in Potosí and then on to the Salt Flats near Uyuni for 3 days, and Nicola heads north to do some WWOOFing – Willing Workers On Organic Farms – in an indigenous community. It´s been a real treat to be all together in the same place for quite a few days.

Unfortunately I had been a bit sick and then Kate got hit by the same travel bug, so here we are, still in Cochabamba, having spent most of the last 3 days at the hostel. We gave in and got a telly in our room to distract us.  Just watched the da Vinci Code which neither of us had seen.  Oh, how I wish it were true! Interestingly, it was in English with Spanish subtitles, standard for some films on telly here (most are dubbed into Spanish), but there were bits in French and bits in Latin I think that I had to translate on the run for Kate, because there was only the Spanish translation! I think I mostly translated from the Spanish with a few words heard from the French.  She got the gist.

Christmas dinner

So Christmas was a very low key affair.  Kate slept for most of it and I got some take-away chicken and baked potatoes with their skins on, so it was a rather solitary meal, but much tastier than my earlier diet of plain rice and packets of plain chips! Ahhh….again I wish I had Jordan´s iron stomach! Anyways. I had a little bit of home with me – my bonus-Mum Margaret gave me 3 gifts when I left Australia.

Check out my new necklace

One to keep til Christmas (a lovely necklace), one to open on the plane for a bit of distraction (soduku) and one for that time when I felt that pang of homesickness (a vacuum packed t-shirt with Ozzie flag). Thanks Margaret!

My Peruvian Christmas present

I also wanted to show off these funky boots I bought for myself from Peru. Kate bought some too but hers are full boots. And they´re comfey too!

Although Bolivia is mainly a Christian country, Christmas did not seem to be a huge affair. Or maybe it was just a family affair, like it is in many places. I felt sad for the many beggar families and old ladies – I hope they had something to eat somewhere.  I think there was a fairly big town celebration on Christmas Eve, but I was not up to going on my own, as Kate was bedbound.  I probably should have gone, for the experience….but, you know, sometimes it´s just hard to do.

Kate´s now feeling much better so we might get to travel to our next destination – Sucre, or maybe Uyuni, where the amazing Salt Flats are. Kate´s flying out on the 6th I think, a brief but fun visit (except for the sick parts). But she´s not going home for a few more weeks. She´s going on the Lares Valley walk for 4 days, an alternate route to get to Machu Pichu, and she´s also going into the jungle.  Hope the mosquitos and chiggers don´t eat her up! (It´s ok, chiggers are as small as mosquitos but unfortunately they give a longer lasting itchy bite. Just ask Jordan to show you her scars)

So I will probably return here, to see dinasour footprints that they believe were made in some kind of soft substance (mud? volcanic lava?) and then hardened rock hard and still exist now. I´ll let you know how clear the prints really are.

There was so much that I wanted to write about where we´ve been before now….but I can´t remember any of them! Oh, wait, to add to Jordan´s post about Arequipa and the ice girl, Juanita, I was also amazed by this girl. One tidbit I found interesting was that they found Asian DNA when they analysed her DNA. The world really is a small place.

 Just a small village, but the jumping off point to go to the Island of the Sun, which was a very religious place, where they also sacrificed girls (there seems to be a theme here – too many girls?) as offerings to the Sun. Anna and Kate caught up with me at Copacobana, and we made plans to go to the island.  Unfortunately, the weather did not agree with us and we got rained on in the morning as we woke up, it cleared while we were on the two-hour boat ride to the north of the island, and then it decided to not only piss down, but also there was a wind that whipped the rain sideways as we made our way walking from the north of the island to the south.  The walk was only three hours (maybe four because we were slow), but it was miserably cold ans wet the whole way.

Luckily, it was not raining when we visited the ruins at the north of the island, so we enjoyed seeing the puma stone, sacrificial table and what is called the labrynth, but was really just the houses of the people who lived in that part of the island – probably the priests who sacrificed the girls.

When we got to the south of the island, we were cold, wet and tired – and it was Kate´s birthday – sorry Kate : (  We all snuggled together in a bed in a hostel at the top of the hill, and read to each other the book Kate was reading at the time, Jordan dried her shoes, jacket and thermal underwear (which was all she had brought with her) over the stove of the hostel, and we had a early night in the hopes that the next day would be better.

The next day was not better…it was still raining a little and freezing cold and miserable, so we left the island to return to Copacabana, which was also wet and miserable, and had not electricity for some reason, so we bought out tickets and travelled the whole afternoon to arrive in La Paz at about 6pm.  This was Jordan´s birthday : /.  The view of La Paz as you come in is spectacular.  The photos do not do it justice.  The city is in a valley and goes up every mountain on every side – all the way to the top.  The top is the Altiplano, which is the plateau of 3800m above sea level of Lake Titicaca and surrounds.  The centre of La Paz is 3600m above sea level. So on every side, there are houses built into the mountain for 200m above the centre of the city.  You have to see it to believe it : )