If everything goes according to plan, tomorrow I'll join some other guides on a trip to the East Coast. Maybe we'll see a polar bear!!!!

Today it was only -27 Celcius. Still haven't broken the record. Must do better.

Uha, in Norway again. Icecold Svalbard!

It was a long journey. Santiago - Buenos Aires - Paris (where I had time to leave the airport and take a short trip into the city...) - London - Oslo (where I spent the night on a bench at the airport, discussing the Israel/Palestinia-conflict with a Syrian - guess whose side he was on!) - Tromsø - Longyearbyen. The winter became more and more prominent the further north I went, and on Svalbard it was "only" -25 Celsius, compared with the -30 they'd had the day before. Ouch, I thought my face would fall off in one piece. 55 degrees is quite a leap in two days, isn't it?

Probably won't do much updating from now on, as it's all work and work again. However, maybe I'll put in some pictures later, but first I have to earn the money to develop my films from S-America (I "only" have 31 of them... !!!!).

Well, can´t say I did much hiking in Putre because... Arnon had troubles with the altitude and I was lazy as usually. Anyway, Putre is a good place to be lazy and have a headache, and that is what we did! Didn´t see more of Lauca park than just what driving through it in rain and oncoming fogshowed me, but I believe it is very beautiful. Just a shame that the border posts are so ugly. Hmmm, at the Chilean immigration in Chungará (in Lauca) we had to take ALL the luggage out of the bus for inspeccion (the chileans are so worried about us wanting to smuggle fruits or cheese or even semen into Chile) and somehow my walking stick fell off my backpack. As I was putting the pack on the x-ray device a guard came in with the stick in his hand, asking whose it was. "Oh, hey, that´s mine, thanks!" I said, and got a funny look from the guards: "What is this???" They had obviously never seen a Leki walking stick before so I told them the truth: "Ah, it´s for beating up my husband". This made their day completely, and as I went into the bus again the first guard blinked to me and said: "Just make sure you beat him REALLY hard". It takes so little to please small hearts :)

Now we are in Arica (Arnon needed low altitudes again, and I needed someone to see me off at the bus terminal tonight) where it is hot and humid and the cormorants nest in the palms. Note this: the cormorants nest in the palms. Hey, so far I´ve only seen cormorants nesting in cliffs in cold Iceland or next to the penguins down in the Antarctic. What on earth are they doing in palm trees in North Chile??? We got here yesterday and I am leaving for Antofagasta on a bus tonight, then I´ll jump on a plane to Santiago tomorrow morning and... uff, it´s over. The plane to Paris/London leaves Santiago in the early afternoon of the 10th. Less than 48 hours remain. Hard to believe. Where should I go next???

still on the surface of the planet. Am leaving La Paz in a couple of hours, first I´ll run to lunch in my family´s house. La Paz is SOOOOOO great, I love this city. The idiots at Air France changed the time of my flight to Paris, made it go 11 hours earlier, so I have a nice long wait at Paris airport, and have to fly to Santiago on the day before, and not on the same day as my overseas flight. Bo, I don´t like Santiago and was looking forward to not having to spend too much time there... But, hey, there are nice people in Santiago, such as my friend Ruddy and his wife Claudia. And Hugh and his girlfriend (that I´ve never met), Hugh, where are you??? Write me an e-mail, so we can meet somewhere!

So, next stop is Putre in Chile, next door west of Parque Nacional Lauca. Will meet my friend Arnon there again, for a couple of days of hiking before going south... to go north... to the brrrrrr temperatures of Svalbard.

Many Bolivian presidents have been idiots. Let´s see what Lonely Planet´s Bolivia has to say about one of them, the "bizarre, cruel General Mariano Melgarejo, who ruled from 1865 to 1871...":

"Melgarejo is ... credited with a host of .... gaffes, including murdering a penitent conspirator, appropriating Indian lands..., ceding territory to Brazil in exchange for a horse, and tying the British ambassador naked to the back of a mule and banishing him for failing to drink enough beer. This last infringement, which was the last straw for Queen Victoria, led her to declare that Bolivia did not exist and that it would thenceforth not appear on British maps."

I´m in La Paz now, arrived here yesterday morning after a wonderful bus ride from Uyuni via Potosì (the bus broke down x times...). Checked into a nice cheap hotel right in the center, and went to see my guest family in the afternoon. It was good to se them, I even recognized (almost) all of them again :)

The bad news is that somehow I got sick on all these travels (again!!!!!) and am now rather miserable. Can hardly breathe and probably have a fever. Shit. Excuse my language. My guest mom built herself a house in the Yungas, near Coroico, and we wanted to go there together, but I don´t know if I can if I don´t get better VERY soon. Am simply lying in bed, except for when I have to go out to get some food and drink.

The Salar trip was great, as you guys can imagine. Our drivers were a bit weird, we had the feelig all the time that they were lying to us about everything they could make up a lie about, but the trip was wonderful and the landscapes surreal. It was so good to see all the water on the Salar, but it also meant that I did now get a permission to sit on the roof!!

I´ll be back later with more detailed news, ok?

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!!!

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!

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!

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!!!!

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!!!!

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!

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!!!).

So, what can one do for 12 days in Torres del Paine National Park??? Not escape the rangers, that´s for sure, so we paid our entrance fee of 6500 chilean pesos (10 dollars). This one is actually the only park in Chile which charges tourists more than locals. Now what do you think of that???

I guess people have different ways of letting time pass but we passed it mainly walking. Did the famous ´Circuit´ and also the now even more famous (at least more popular) ´W´, had some rest and lazy days inbetween and enjoyed life. Ok, the park is a big tourist attraction and has become very commercial (I hope we will never build hotels and all that in the Icelandic highlands) but still I absolutely love it and can actually not think of any single trek I´ve done so far that I´ve enjoyed more. The weather played a big part, it was so good that it was almost uncanny. Sun every single day. Not windstill and not entirely dry either, but we never got wet walking and never had to wait for the weather to clear up. Pretty good for an area notorious for its unstable weather.

Hey, it´s been a long time!

Torres del Paine National Park is absolutely great. Spent 12 days there. Smelt terrible afterwards. Tell you more about it later, now I have to run so as not to miss a tour to the Milodon Cave...

Wow, the 14 hour bus ride yesterday as a killer. Made it to Punta Arenas and am now waiting for the bus to Puerto Natales. Buses are terrible.

The first morning in the Antarctic Peninsula was amazing, pretty much like the first morning of the first cruise I did in Spitzbergen. Dennis, the expedition leader, woke those of us silly enough to be still asleep through the loudspeaker system at 7 o´clock. We were in the Neumayer Channel, the sun was shining and not a ripple on the sea. It took a while for the eyes, even with sunglasses, to get adjusted to the light. Every little patch of land was covered with snow, not a single dark spot to be seen. Steep steep glaciers descend into the sea, broken and crevassed. All the peaks are jagged and white. We even caught a sight of a huge avalanche before breakfast! Later in the morning we made our first landing, at Port Lockroy. There is a big gentoo penguin colony there but since there is so much snow down there this season most of the penguin eggs didn´t make it. It was a sorry sight. Some blue-eyed (now for some odd reason renamed Bransfield) shags were nesting within the penguin colony, they had better success and already had chicks in their nests. Poor penguins, some were still trying to incubate the eggs while the others were just roaming around the colony, not quite sure what to do with themselves.

In general we tried to make two landings pr. day but this was not always possible. On New Years Eve we didn´t make a single one, because of wind and ice conditions. Our cruise had the goal of reaching the Antarctic Circle at 66 deg. 33 min, but we encountered ice which held us back. For a while we were breaking the ice (the Polar Star is an icebreaker modified for passenger transport) but in the afternoon of Dec. the 31. we got stuck in the ice. It wasn´t really thick ice but still attached to land and completely unbroken, so it had nowhere to go when we broke it. The captain decided to turn the ship 180 degrees in the ice, instead of simply backing out the lane we´d made, and this kept us occupied until late in the evening. It was a cool experience for most of us, even if it wasn´t quite as dramatic as some other instances where ships have become trapped in the ice. Shackleton´s Endurance Expedition for example... he seems to be THE hero in most people`s minds nowadays (we saw two movies about that expedition and had one lecture about him, on his 80th death anniversary, the 5th of January), well, and in my mind too. If you don´t know what he and his men did you´ll have to find out, by for example reading his own account of the expedition, a book called South. You won´t believe what you´re reading.

Even if the average age of the guests on this cruise was some decades lower than on most cruises to the Antarctic (the geologist on board, James Collinson, said he´d never been on a cruise with such young people) there wasn´t too much of a party going on on New Years Eve. The Filipino crew came and sang us a gospel song (later in the night my Norwegian friend Tine and I found out that the favorite pastime of the crew is to sit in their lounge and sing karaoke... we were invited to join them but bailed out after watching them perform Cliff Richard and Stevie Wonder af mikilli innlifun), and then the youngest member of the cruise got the honour of ringing the ship´s bell (16 times!!!) to signal the arrival of the New Year. She is only 5 years old and wasn´t happy at all with the attention and the terrible noise of the bell. People were dancing for a while, but by 2 in the morning most of us were in bed. Except for Emily, the oldest passenger in the boat; she was dancing with the filipino guys until 5 in the morning. She´s incredible. Over 80 years old, she used to teach creative writing in South California and she still speaks Norwegian even if she moved to the US at the age of nine. Dirty old woman who had us in stitches the whole cruise, especially when she started reading her erotic poetry...

New Years Day came with fog and snowfall. We went on a Zodiac cruise which was very cold but absolutely beautiful. The snow falling formed a mushy slush in the surface of the water, damping the waves and making everything feel like Christmas. We had about 5 cm of fresh snow on deck! There were a lot of small icebergs (called bergy bits down there) in the sea and when Mike (our assistant expedition leader and zodiac driver) stopped the engine and told us all to be quiet (which was incredibly hard for some people in the boat...) we could hear the swell (undiralda) beating softly against the bergs. Even the small `pop´ made by the air bubbles trapped in the ice breaking loose as the ice melts could be heard, but not for long as some people just could not keep their mouth shut. The engine was not going for a while longer (providing a perfect opportunity to discuss such important things as which brand of rubber boots keeps your feet the warmest) and even if we did not hear the silence we were rewarded with a school of krill swimming under the boat and all around it. This is not a common sight Mike told us. These tiny creatures (bonsai-lobster as Ingrid, our marine biologist, told us) are the base for all life in the Antarctic seas and form red spots on the surface of the ocean as they sim around in groups looking for plankton to eat.

As we sailed north again it became easier to do landings. We went to Point Hannah on Livingston Island (in the South Shetland Islands), a beautiful place with 3 different species of penguins, seals and giant petrels, plus fossils and you name it. I went on a small `private excursion´ there, climbing up a scree ridge ending in impressive lava walls and made my way over to the other side. It was absolutely wonderful, to be finally alone in the Antarctic and not surrounded by guides and other tourists. Not that I have anything against these people but sometimes it is just sooooo good to get away. Am beginning to understand my tourists at home better ;) We also went to Deception Island (where we had a bath in some hot springs dug out by the Expedition Staff, with heavy rain falling), Paulet Island (millions of penguins and the remains of the hut some members of the 1901-03 Nordenskiold expedition overwintered in) and also Paradise Bay, an absolutely beautiful spot of Earth. Can´t but recommend a trip to the Antarctic to all of you!!!!

It was brilliant, can´t put it any other way. However, I´m not going to tell you all about it now, you will have to wait a bit because I have to pack, sleep a bit and then get on a bus at 8 o´clock tomorrow morning to Punta Arenas in Chile. 14 hours, it´ll be wild fun. From there I´m heading to Puerto Natales where I´ll join Arnon again. Guess we are going to Torres del Paine National Park straight away (we´ll have to get there while the CONAF-people (N.P. wardens) are still on strike, then we won´t have to pay the entrance fee!!!) and do the circuit.

Anyway, the penguins really won my heart over, and the whales we saw were really tourist friendly, breaching (jumping out of the water and falling on their backs) and swimming around the boat. The scenery was pretty wild as well, and a personal highlight was our landing at Brown Bluff, a hyaloclastite volcano erupted under ice a long time ago. As some of you know I was studying similar volcanoes in Iceland in 1999 and at that time read some (pretty scary, actually) articles about Brown Bluff. Did not for a second, at that time, think I´d be standing on shore there looking up at the volcano anytime within my lifespan. And now I have. Cool.

Since there are no man-eating creatures in the Antarctic (as far as I know) I didn´t try to moon any of them (as I did in Svalbard way back when). Instead I managed to scare the shit out of some of the penguins down there (imagine standing outside the supermarket buttoning your coat and when you look up there is Hulk or King Kong standing an arms length away. I´m sure you´d squeak and run into the supermarket again), it was actually hard to avoid it because there were simply so many penguins. And they are so comic, I just love them.

More later!!

Oh, forgot: Happy New Year!

Returned, safe and sound, from the Antarctic!!!!