Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
I arrived in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile on Wednesday 19th November with the crowd I'd been with on the Salt Flats trip and had a few lazy days there. Over the next few days I tried sandboarding, visited an observatory and ate a number of fantastic empanadas (130 different flavours).
The sandboarding was really good fun but a lot more knackering than I'd anticipated. Going down the hills on the sandboard was the easy bit, it was climbing back up to the top of the huge sand dunes again that was the hard bit. The only run I managed to get on video was also the only one where I fell over and it's now on the video section of this site for your amusement.
The skies in Chile are very transparent and ideal conditions for observatories. We went out to an observatory in the desert run by a French astronomer. He told us about the differences in the night skies in the southern and northern hemispheres and pointed out different constellations to us with his laser pointer. Orion can be seen in both hemispheres which pleased me as it is generally the only constellation I can ever identify. He also pointed out the Seven Sisters which made me feel at home as it is also my nearest tube station. We saw loads of shooting stars as well as planets, stars and galaxies. There were 6 or 7 big telescopes set up for us to look at them more closely.
On Sunday 23rd November I caught a bus to Salta in Argentina with Amerjit and Rob, having decided that it would be better to travel south through the west of Argentina rather than through Chile as there were more places I wanted to stop and visit in Argentina and Chile is pretty expensive complared to the rest of South America.
Argentina seems very European comapred to other Latin American countries. There were a lot of European immigrnats to the country between the late 1800's and early 1900's - half were Italian, a quarter Spanish and the rest French, Portuguese, Russian, Irish and Welsh. The people here seem lighter skinned than in other countries also, so I think there is a smaller indigenous community here.
The cities are very developed and the streets, squares and cars (lots of old Fiats and Citroens) all remind me of European cities, you could easily think you are in Spain or Italy. For a while, until the 1920's, Argentina was the world's 7th richest nation, but it fell to the status of a third world power after a series of recessions and one military coup after another. They seem to be on the up again now and also seem to be holding a lot of politicians, etc accountable for their past crimes. The last couple of weeks in Argentina have seen a former police cheif committing suicide live on TV as he was being interviewed. The police were on their way to arrest him for his part in the 'Dirty War' in the late 1970's where tens of thousands of people were 'disappeared' by the death squads employed by the military rule at the time. See here for more details.
Also - former President of Argentina Carlos Menem has been charged with arms traficking. See here.
In Salta we took a cable car up to the top of Cerro San Bernado and then got stuck there as high winds meant it was unsafe to use either the cable car or pathway to get down again. We finally got down to find branches blown everywhere, a tree across a road and the power out in the neighbourhood where our hostal was located.
We ate at a parillada, a traditional grill restaurant - a carnivores idea of heaven. I shared a parillada with Rob. Amerjit, who is vegetarian showed great tolerance by coming with us and not making too many disparaging comments. We ate beef ribs, chorizo sausage, black pudding (inedible due to the bits of skin(?) in it with hairs still attached), kidneys, intestine (I like to try new food but this was vile, I don't even want to know what was inside it), thymus gland (not too bad actually) and chicken breast.
We hired a car for a day and drove to Cafayate - the wine capital of the northwest region. We passed some stunning scenery on the way, driving through mountain ranges which the wind and water have eroded into weird and wonderful shapes like tree roots or spinning tops. Unfortunately my camera had been complaining ever since I took it sandboarding in San Pedro so I couldn't take any photos. (It's now working again although it cost me 60 quid to get it fixed). We arrived back to Salta to an asado (BBQ) being held at our hostal - more red meat and red wine - yum.
On Thursday 27th Amerjit and I caught a bus for the 20 hour journey to Mendoza further south.
- comments