Hello again!

OK, there's a lot to catch up on...

In Buenos Aires I also spent a day looking around the Recoleta district with Frenchman Leo. We saw the huge cemetary with what were like miniature houses on streets, and including Evita's burial place as well. Wandered through the first nice park I'd found in Argentina and had lunch watching thick lines of black ants removing the grass back to their home. In the evening I took a free tango class at the hostel, followed by a visit to a 'milonga', a local place to go and dance with some live music. Tango, it turns out, is HARD! The whole thing is improvised and everything has to be communicated from man to woman and both be in harmony with each other. Was great to learn abou i before seeing people dancing it in their own way, and of course the live music, with four accordionists at the forefront! The next day I met up with Lizzie and Julia, friends I'd made in Valparaíso, Chile, and after catching up we went to the Museo de Bellas Artes, an art gallery full of some really nice bits, and was nice to do something so calming. I ran off to eventually miss my bus to Puerto Iguazú. After initially being in a bad mood, the new bus I'd been booked on was the top class, including spacious seat, private telly, wine with dinner and champagne to follow, so I felt better pretty quickly! That was a 16 hour journey I think and arrived in dusty red, fairly charming Puerto Iguazú for a day of chilling out, only visiting a special spot where it's possible to sit in Argentina and look at Brazil AND Paraguay over a couple of different rivers. The magnitude of that possibility really amazed me, even though it wasn't all that pretty!

The thing to do there is of course to visit the Iguazú Falls, which can be done from both Argentina and Brazil for different views. I did Argentina first and was really blown away by the beauty of it. Platforms wind through semi-jungly nature (with toucans, monkeys and huge spiders!) to put you right at the top of some of the waterfalls and get a sense of their power. There are apparently 280 separate falls as part of the area so it's a wide vista of a line of white water, with rainbows all over the place, and some condors hovering as well. I met another Frenchman, Camille, there and we enjoyed having a look around, including El Garganta del Diablo, The Devil's Throat, which is a bit like a tighter Niagara Falls and features a lot of water actually going up because of the power! I made a fairly snap decision to go to Brazil for the day(!) and did that the following day, being rewarded with completely different views of the area and enjoying it just as much. Sadly no stamp in the passport as I forget to get them but I promise I went!

That evening I got a 23 hour bus ride to Túcuman, the closest I could get to Salta in Northern Argentina. This was also an OK ride, watching GI Joe, Bounty Hunter, Old Dogs and 9 on the way! The only thing I found were some amazing empanadas and a matambre sandwich thing with oh so tender steak and salad in it, YUM. Onto Salta the next day and was a lovely city. Streets away from the centre were small and ineresting, yet the beautiful main plaza had shops that would allow you to get whatever you wanted in a push. The hostel was a bit grimey (some cockroaches joined me in the toilet one day) so I spent a lot of time away from it, wandering the pretty streets and visiting the hill via cable car for great views of the area. I was also there while the 200th anniversary of Argentina's independence was being celebrated with gusto all over the country. I tried to queue up for a free performance at the provincial theatre with no luck, and after waiting for other things to get going in the bustling plaza, left early to go back to the hostel to make sure I stayed safe.

From Salta I followed a recommendation to go to tiny Purmamarca in the Andes, and it was so incredbly worth the trouble. Only a couple of hundred people live in the dusty village with plenty of adobe buildings that look a bit like plasticine, and they're surrounded by mountains of unbelievable colours. Red, orange, blue, purple, white and green all feature in the stone, most notably all together on the Seven Colour Mountain looming nearest. I met some lovely people here, Catia, Benjamin, Cécile, Nicky and Matt and spent a blissful couple of days walking around the mountains and soaking up the villagey atmosphere. We had a nice dinner with some live panpipe music on the last night to say a bit of a goodbye.

Then back into Chile, to San Pedro de Atacama, a town set in the middle of a massive expanse of flat nothing, which was made clear by the staggering views coming over the Jama pass from Argentina. The Atacama desert is supposed to be the driest in the world, and although I didn't see it, the picture here is El mano del desierto, way in the middle of nowhere and a bit far to visit from San Pedro - sorry Isey! San Pedro is mostly adobe and more dusty streets, with wind often whipping it up along the main street. It's quite touristy as it's a lift off for the Uyuni salt flats in Bolivia, but I made a really great group of friends there and so enjoyed every minute, feeling at home there by the end thanks to Pablo, Ali, Ella and Javier! We hired bikes and rode out to the deserty mountains and found a gorge to ride through just like something out of Indiana Jones or Star Wars Episode 1. Then went sandboarding on a huge dune, and I was surprised to get the hang of it, so will give snowboarding a try sometime soon! We were then taken to the Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) to watch a spectacular, heavenly sunset over an alien landscape in the desert - very special. Then somewhere else to taste Pisco Sour and watch the moon rise. Disappointing because of the clouds but the Pisco became a theme for San Pedro! Took some time to chill out the next day, only going on an astronomy tour in the evening in the middle of nowhere, given by a funny French chap. This was so nearly amazing as there were no clouds, but the moon was full and bright and stole the opportunity for the perfect, dazzling night sky I'd expected. But still good, learning about the stars and seeing Saturn, the moon, coloured stars and star clusters through the telescopes. I was tired and heading home afterwards when Pablo, Ali and Ella surprised me with a lovely hello and we went off to a nice outdoor bar with pit fire and enjoyed more piscos and laughing there. Unfortunately a Chilean TV presenter was there filming stuff intended to embarass herself or other people, and I naturally was picked on, having to dance on camera and be interviewed a bit too. But it was all part of the crazy experience so I laughed about it.

I teamed up with Ella to cautiously book ourselves on a tour through the Salares de Uyuni, and on into Bolivia. We paid rock bottom but got very lucky with a safe, enjoyable trip! It was right up to nearly 5000m in the Andes over three days, seeing blue, green, red and white alpine lagoons, miles and miles of dry, rocky desert, rock formations, volcanoes, snowy peaks, flamingoes, llamas, ghost towns in the middle of nowhere and of course the salar (salt flat). Worth mentioning our first night's accommodation was pretty basic and it got down to -18 degrees so we were a bit chilly! But got the night sky I'd hoped for in San Pedro and was really breathtaking. The salt flat is something like the size of a quarter of Switzerland and is basically miles and miles of flat, white, nothing. We went to Incahuasi island in its middle, populated by eery giant cacti and some giant gerbil-like vizcachas. It's very hard to put into words how giant the expanse is, but it's like being in the middle of a giant lake with the mountains around miles away, and always surrounded by nothing. Did some silly photos of altered perspectives, and rocked into the town of Uyuni later on, perched on the edge of the salar. This gave the first taste of Bolivia, with more street snacks (papas rellanas, fried potato things filled with meat, veg and egg being my new favourite thing) rubbish all over the streets, very poor people and beautifully dressed women. The women wear puffed-out skirts, cardigans, luminous coloured sheets as rucksacks, long hair plaited in two lines, and unique felt bowler hats. They really are something, and unique to Bolivia from what I understand. By luck bumped into Cécile from Purmamarca in a restaurant so enjoyed comparing notes on our different routes. Because Uyuni wasn't very interesting, got the bus straight away the next day to Sucre, saying goodbye to Ella in Potosí, and that was yesterday.

Sucre is lovely, and not like the dusty, falling apart, dirty other places I've seen on the way to get here. It has lots of blinding whitewashed buildings, lovely plazas and a warmer temperature as it's only 2700m up. My Spanish has just about coped with a couple of museums and there's plenty more to see, though not much time! Will go to Oruro in a couple of days and perhaps experience something a little more like most of Bolivia, before heading to La Paz, Lake Titicaca and onto Cusco for my Inca Trail to start on 16 June.

The end is really in sight now it's one month today that I get back home and I'm really looking forward to it. In all, things in South America have been so interesting that the time is flying by and I'm happy with that. Everything that's been up in the Andes (that's from Purmamarca through to now and all the way until I hit Lima in Peru at the end of my trip I think!) has been so much more interesting than the cities I was looking at in the early stages of SA, with more indigenous people, deserty, mountainous landscapes and a much more basic way of living. I feel a million miles away from home and I guess that's the idea!

Can't wait to see you all again and hope everything is well with you all.

Dave

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El saludo de la luna con su bellaza nos abruma...