Well, not on the jeep-tour yet, but on my way to it. Hope tomorrow. Had some errands to do in Antofagasta, so missed all buses to San Pedro. Fall er fararheill :)
Calama is actually a much nicer town than I remembered (last time I was here I was going to spend a night but "fled" to San Pedro on the last bus), especially the market which reminds me so much of Bolivia. Some special feeling about buying your food from vendors with small stalls, all gathered under a plastic roof. Much better than the supermarkets. You can bargain and ask for some small supplements (now give me some of that terragon, I`m buying SO much from you...), simply lovely.
Heard that all my guest family in La Paz is fine, my "granny" and "mommy" and "brothers" and "sisters" were actually volunteering, helping those who lost their homes. Am looking forward to meeting them!!!
laugardagur, febrúar 23, 2002
fimmtudagur, febrúar 21, 2002
Does anyone know of anything cheaper than Icelandair flying to Iceland these days? Such a shame that go! quit. I would really like to go home for an ultra-quick visit between South-America and Svalbard, but the prices they give me on the Icelandair-web are just absurd, 720 dollars for a return trip from London. GARG!!!
It`s good to know I haven`t been missing anything all the time I haven`t been in Santiago. Just wished my friend Ruddy and his wife Claudia lived in Castro, or La Serena, then I`d have stayed with them all the time. But sorry, Santiago is just terrible.
Anyway, I have definitely been far from skyscraper-civilization for long enough, since they looked like big towers of rock to me when I arrived here :) Still under the influence of Torres del Paine and Fitz Roy...
And I have discovered why travelling with buses is much more dangerous than hitch-hiking can ever dream of becoming: The guy sitting next to me on the bus ride from Puerto Montt to Santiago was so ridiculously (wow, that`s hard!) boring, I nearly had to throw him out of the window and so make a killer of myself. Viva hitch-hiking!
Ruddy took some time off from work to come and pick me up at the bus terminal. It was so nice to see him again!!! For those who don`t know, we were good friends in Bolivia 10 years ago, when I was there for a year as an exchange student. Actually, we were in the same class and he did all my homework while I still didn`t speak any Spanish (and probably after I learned to speak Spanish as well...). We went for some food, since I was hungry after sitting on the bus for so long, and then he sent me to his home in a taxi, home to where his wife Claudia was waiting for me with a cup of tea. Brilliant service!!!
After the life-threatening situation on the bus this morning I decided not to jeopardize the lives of any more innocent but boring people and take a plane to Antofagasta. That also means that I can enjoy the evening with Ruddy and Claudia, and sleep in a decent bed!! Tomorrow then I`ll find myself in the far north of Chile, in the tiny winy kruttiputti town of San Pedro de Atacama, simply THE most lovely town in this country (as far as I know). Saturday: The famous and ever-popular jeep trip into Bolivia via the Salar de Uyuni and a bunch of oddly colored lakes and lagoons. 3 days. Vei!!! But, as you probably all know bad things are happening in Bolivia now, floods and a state af emergency in La Paz. I just hope everything is fine with my guest-family there!
Anyway, I have definitely been far from skyscraper-civilization for long enough, since they looked like big towers of rock to me when I arrived here :) Still under the influence of Torres del Paine and Fitz Roy...
And I have discovered why travelling with buses is much more dangerous than hitch-hiking can ever dream of becoming: The guy sitting next to me on the bus ride from Puerto Montt to Santiago was so ridiculously (wow, that`s hard!) boring, I nearly had to throw him out of the window and so make a killer of myself. Viva hitch-hiking!
Ruddy took some time off from work to come and pick me up at the bus terminal. It was so nice to see him again!!! For those who don`t know, we were good friends in Bolivia 10 years ago, when I was there for a year as an exchange student. Actually, we were in the same class and he did all my homework while I still didn`t speak any Spanish (and probably after I learned to speak Spanish as well...). We went for some food, since I was hungry after sitting on the bus for so long, and then he sent me to his home in a taxi, home to where his wife Claudia was waiting for me with a cup of tea. Brilliant service!!!
After the life-threatening situation on the bus this morning I decided not to jeopardize the lives of any more innocent but boring people and take a plane to Antofagasta. That also means that I can enjoy the evening with Ruddy and Claudia, and sleep in a decent bed!! Tomorrow then I`ll find myself in the far north of Chile, in the tiny winy kruttiputti town of San Pedro de Atacama, simply THE most lovely town in this country (as far as I know). Saturday: The famous and ever-popular jeep trip into Bolivia via the Salar de Uyuni and a bunch of oddly colored lakes and lagoons. 3 days. Vei!!! But, as you probably all know bad things are happening in Bolivia now, floods and a state af emergency in La Paz. I just hope everything is fine with my guest-family there!
miðvikudagur, febrúar 20, 2002
Forgot to tell you that from now on I won´t brag about not being seasick. Tha catamaran trip between Chaiten and Castro yesterday finally destroyed that myth. Had to stay outdoors all the 4 hours it took, the minute I went in I started to feel nausea. Tried to have a nap downstairs, the try lasted approx. 5 minutes before I had to run upstairs and out, green in the face, and swallow the vomit with some fresh air. Ok, the sea was a bit rough, and the boat simply went into the air every now and then. The Drake Passage is just peanuts compared to this.
Guess what I saw in a bookstore here in Castro, Chiloe: 101 Reikíavik!!! A Spanish translation of a fairly recent Icelandic novel. Detti mer allar daudar lys ur hofdi is all I can say.
Castro is great, the atmosphere is almost Carribean, with all the pastel-coloured houses and the breeze from the sea. Very relaxed little town. My bus to Santiago leaves at five in the afternoon, which is soon enough, and I´ve already called my friend Ruddy to meet him there. Mind you, we haven´t met for more than 10 years!
Castro is great, the atmosphere is almost Carribean, with all the pastel-coloured houses and the breeze from the sea. Very relaxed little town. My bus to Santiago leaves at five in the afternoon, which is soon enough, and I´ve already called my friend Ruddy to meet him there. Mind you, we haven´t met for more than 10 years!
þriðjudagur, febrúar 19, 2002
Not in Bolivia yet! Actually I am still on the Camino Austral in Chile, didn`t start my bus ride to Bolivia until yesterday. Spent last week going south from Coyhaique, to a small town called Villa Cerro Castillo. Did a 4-day trek there in the Cerro Castillo area, this Castillo thing is another tower-shaped mountain (to me it actually looks more like a Gothic temple than a medieval castle). It was simply a great trek, the scenery wonderful and the weather too, but it was quite hard. Especially the first day, when we lost the trail on the way up a wooded hill and ended up bashing through the bushes. Good fun, though :)
So, I just bought the ticket for the catamaran to Castro (THE town on Chiloe, the biggest island in Chile (I think)). Everything was wrapped in fog here in Chaiten when I got up (after a killer bus ride from Coyhaique yesterday, 14 hours, we arrived here at midnight) but it seems the fog is slowly melting away. It is probably going to be a perfect day for sitting with some peaches on the plaza and simply enjoying life.
Oh, yes, and my brother and his long-time girlfriend Addy are getting married!!! Jibbi!!!!
So, I just bought the ticket for the catamaran to Castro (THE town on Chiloe, the biggest island in Chile (I think)). Everything was wrapped in fog here in Chaiten when I got up (after a killer bus ride from Coyhaique yesterday, 14 hours, we arrived here at midnight) but it seems the fog is slowly melting away. It is probably going to be a perfect day for sitting with some peaches on the plaza and simply enjoying life.
Oh, yes, and my brother and his long-time girlfriend Addy are getting married!!! Jibbi!!!!
Not in Bolivia yet! Actually I am still on the Camino Austral in Chile, didn`t start my bus ride to Bolivia until yesterday. Spent last week going south from Coyhaique, to a small town called Villa Cerro Castillo. Did a 4-day trek there in the Cerro Castillo area, this Castillo thing is another tower-shaped mountain (to me it actually looks more like a Gothic temple than a medieval castle). It was simply a great trek, the scenery wonderful and the weather too, but it was quite hard. Especially the first day, when we lost the trail on the way up a wooded hill and ended up bashing through the bushes. Good fun, though :)
So, I just bought the ticket for the catamaran to Castro (THE town on Chiloe, the biggest island in Chile (I think)). Everything was wrapped in fog here in Chaiten when I got up (after a killer bus ride from Coyhaique yesterday, 14 hours, we arrived here at midnight) but it seems the fog is slowly melting away. It is probably going to be a perfect day for sitting with some peaches on the plaza and simply enjoying life.
Oh, yes, and my brother and his long-time girlfriend Addy are getting married!!! Jibbi!!!!
So, I just bought the ticket for the catamaran to Castro (THE town on Chiloe, the biggest island in Chile (I think)). Everything was wrapped in fog here in Chaiten when I got up (after a killer bus ride from Coyhaique yesterday, 14 hours, we arrived here at midnight) but it seems the fog is slowly melting away. It is probably going to be a perfect day for sitting with some peaches on the plaza and simply enjoying life.
Oh, yes, and my brother and his long-time girlfriend Addy are getting married!!! Jibbi!!!!
sunnudagur, febrúar 10, 2002
Ooo, old age is coming closer! Have only 10 more days until I´m even older than I am now.
The ferry ride from Puerto Natales to Chacabuco (or Svakapúkó as my friend Kidda pointed out to me) was ok. Food almost terrible and definitely not too much of it. The landscape was pretty, especially in the southern part where the trees weren´t blocking the view. Saw a lot of albatrosses, petrels and skuas, and an innocent duck paddling on the water with a lot of splashing almost caused a riot on the front deck as people rushed over to see the ´whale´. Rain actually hid a lot of the scenery from us almost all the time.
Am now in Coyhaique, the biggest town along the so-called Carretera Austral. Tomorrow I´ll start my long journey to Bolivia... wow, taking buses over half of the South-American continent will be interesting!
The ferry ride from Puerto Natales to Chacabuco (or Svakapúkó as my friend Kidda pointed out to me) was ok. Food almost terrible and definitely not too much of it. The landscape was pretty, especially in the southern part where the trees weren´t blocking the view. Saw a lot of albatrosses, petrels and skuas, and an innocent duck paddling on the water with a lot of splashing almost caused a riot on the front deck as people rushed over to see the ´whale´. Rain actually hid a lot of the scenery from us almost all the time.
Am now in Coyhaique, the biggest town along the so-called Carretera Austral. Tomorrow I´ll start my long journey to Bolivia... wow, taking buses over half of the South-American continent will be interesting!
þriðjudagur, febrúar 05, 2002
Back in Chile now, after a week in Argentina. We left Puerto Natales for El Chaltén, Argentina, the base for exploring the Fitz Roy area. Hitchhiked, since the buses in Argentina are terribly expensive, and met (as almost always) some nice and interesting people on the way. The weirdest ones were probably the two pals from the US who picked us up at Cerro Castillo border station and took us to El Calafate. Actually we never intended to go there, just to a junction nearby, and they were going some few hundred km in the opposite direction, but they wanted to be nice and took us to Calafate anyway. The unpredictability of hitchhiking is wonderful! Both of these guys studied at Berkeley, the one who drove is a physicist with a Ph.D. in string theory (as if anyone can be expected to know what that is) and the other one (the one reading Stephen King and drinking 1l/hr. of Coke) did physical chemistry. No wonder the back seat was littered with pieces of paper with equations and obscure symbols...
Getting from Calafate to El Chaltén was no small challenge, it took us two days hitching and one night on the loneliest junction in the world. We almost gave up and took the bus but finally got the ride we needed!
Fitz Roy and all its pals are absolutely amazing. Wow. Someone said it is the most perfect mountain in the world... For those of you who don´t know, it is a 3400 m peak of granite with cliff walls too steep for snow to settle on them. To either side you have lower peaks, called Aguja (Needle) this and this, and only a few km away is the famous Cerro Torre, a 3100 m needle of granite that was for most of history considered absolutely impossible to climb (until someone managed to do so in 1970). Its top is covered with so-called ice mushrooms, accumulation of rime formed when the moisture in the air freezes directly onto the cliff in the howling Patagonian winds. We felt those howling winds once, they´re so strong they almost knocked us over!
The trek we did was an easy one. On the first day we walked to the basecamp for climbs to Cerro Torre, Campamento Bridwell. The campsite was really crowded, not only with trekkers but also with climbers. Ropes and other gear hanging from almost every tree. Actually I thought that this is what would also be the case in Torres del Paine, but there we saw no climbers. Strange. It was pretty cloudy and we could not see Cerro Torre itself, but did the mandatory walk to the viewpoint in the evening anyway, just in case the weather would be even worse the following day.
Believe it or not, the next morning I woke up and got out of the tent at 5:30!! The sky was completely clear, promising a beautiful sunrise. I took on all my warm clothes and went out with my new camera, spending half a roll on the spectacle of the night turning into day. Poor guys who slept too long and came running with their cameras to get the last traces of pink on the peaks at just before seven... Anyway, that day was a lazy one for me; I slept until noon and went out walking, found myself a good spot to lie down, have a sunbath, listen to the surroundings (avalanches, ice breaking off the glaciers, rockfall) and read a bit. Good life :)
The following day we walked from Campamento Bridwell (probably named after some mountain bloke) at the foot of Cerro Torre to the Campamento Poincenot (a French mountaineer who died in 1952 attempting to cross a river nearby) at the foot of Mount Fitz Roy. The weather was still with us so we walked up to the Laguna de los Tres (Lake of the three), the traditional viewpoint for the mountain. They´re so elegant, these cold granite giants, and Fitz Roy especially so with the row of smaller peaks on either side of it. Like soldiers. Tindátar. It was just as well that we did this view-walk that evening because the next morning we found the sky heavy with clouds and some rain falling. No sunrise photography that day. Can´t say I was too sorry to stay in the warm sleeping bag...
The weather didn´t want to cooperate again for sunrise pictures, so after the second night in Campamento Poincenot we ate all the food we had left (not too much...), packed our bags in the pouring rain and hiked back to El Chaltén through rolling granite hills and what to my Icelandic eyes looks like heath vegetation. Low bushes, some patches of woods (rarely seen in Iceland) and tiny flowers, all of them preparing for the coming autumn. It felt almost like walking in Jokulsargljufur. The last trek in Patagonia was over.
The hitching back to Puerto Natales worked out, even if we had to take a bus once and then pay a tour operator for taking us from the lonely border station in Argentina (where there was a small puppy sharpening his teeth on our backpacks and Arnon´s hand) to Puerto Natales last night. It was such a bleak prospect having to spend the night in the tent in this rather God´s forsaken place. The best ride: On the top of a huge truck through the endless plains on Ruta Nacional No. 7, with the sand from everywhere blasting your face and covering everything, and fantastic views of the Torres del Paine massif.
Next Friday we´ll take the Navimag ferry to Chacabuco (still in Chile, close to a town called Coyhaique on the Camino/Carretera Austral), from there I´ll make my way up north as quickly as possible to visit my host family in Bolivia (I found them!!!).
Getting from Calafate to El Chaltén was no small challenge, it took us two days hitching and one night on the loneliest junction in the world. We almost gave up and took the bus but finally got the ride we needed!
Fitz Roy and all its pals are absolutely amazing. Wow. Someone said it is the most perfect mountain in the world... For those of you who don´t know, it is a 3400 m peak of granite with cliff walls too steep for snow to settle on them. To either side you have lower peaks, called Aguja (Needle) this and this, and only a few km away is the famous Cerro Torre, a 3100 m needle of granite that was for most of history considered absolutely impossible to climb (until someone managed to do so in 1970). Its top is covered with so-called ice mushrooms, accumulation of rime formed when the moisture in the air freezes directly onto the cliff in the howling Patagonian winds. We felt those howling winds once, they´re so strong they almost knocked us over!
The trek we did was an easy one. On the first day we walked to the basecamp for climbs to Cerro Torre, Campamento Bridwell. The campsite was really crowded, not only with trekkers but also with climbers. Ropes and other gear hanging from almost every tree. Actually I thought that this is what would also be the case in Torres del Paine, but there we saw no climbers. Strange. It was pretty cloudy and we could not see Cerro Torre itself, but did the mandatory walk to the viewpoint in the evening anyway, just in case the weather would be even worse the following day.
Believe it or not, the next morning I woke up and got out of the tent at 5:30!! The sky was completely clear, promising a beautiful sunrise. I took on all my warm clothes and went out with my new camera, spending half a roll on the spectacle of the night turning into day. Poor guys who slept too long and came running with their cameras to get the last traces of pink on the peaks at just before seven... Anyway, that day was a lazy one for me; I slept until noon and went out walking, found myself a good spot to lie down, have a sunbath, listen to the surroundings (avalanches, ice breaking off the glaciers, rockfall) and read a bit. Good life :)
The following day we walked from Campamento Bridwell (probably named after some mountain bloke) at the foot of Cerro Torre to the Campamento Poincenot (a French mountaineer who died in 1952 attempting to cross a river nearby) at the foot of Mount Fitz Roy. The weather was still with us so we walked up to the Laguna de los Tres (Lake of the three), the traditional viewpoint for the mountain. They´re so elegant, these cold granite giants, and Fitz Roy especially so with the row of smaller peaks on either side of it. Like soldiers. Tindátar. It was just as well that we did this view-walk that evening because the next morning we found the sky heavy with clouds and some rain falling. No sunrise photography that day. Can´t say I was too sorry to stay in the warm sleeping bag...
The weather didn´t want to cooperate again for sunrise pictures, so after the second night in Campamento Poincenot we ate all the food we had left (not too much...), packed our bags in the pouring rain and hiked back to El Chaltén through rolling granite hills and what to my Icelandic eyes looks like heath vegetation. Low bushes, some patches of woods (rarely seen in Iceland) and tiny flowers, all of them preparing for the coming autumn. It felt almost like walking in Jokulsargljufur. The last trek in Patagonia was over.
The hitching back to Puerto Natales worked out, even if we had to take a bus once and then pay a tour operator for taking us from the lonely border station in Argentina (where there was a small puppy sharpening his teeth on our backpacks and Arnon´s hand) to Puerto Natales last night. It was such a bleak prospect having to spend the night in the tent in this rather God´s forsaken place. The best ride: On the top of a huge truck through the endless plains on Ruta Nacional No. 7, with the sand from everywhere blasting your face and covering everything, and fantastic views of the Torres del Paine massif.
Next Friday we´ll take the Navimag ferry to Chacabuco (still in Chile, close to a town called Coyhaique on the Camino/Carretera Austral), from there I´ll make my way up north as quickly as possible to visit my host family in Bolivia (I found them!!!).
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