Archive for the ‘South America’ Category

The Rules of Travelling

During our trip in South America we always joked about the Rules of Travelling: basic rules of thumb that ensure that you get the most out of your travels with the least amount of hassle/pain/irritation, especially when backpacking. These will also work on city trips.

The Rules have been developed and refined on the numerous trips we’ve collectively made throughout the last 30-or-so years. As my last post, I want to share them with you.

1. Drink water whenever you can. Sub rule: Always take a water bottle with you wherever you go.
2. Use the toilet whenever you can. You never know when/what the next toilet is going to be like.  Sub rule: Always carry toilet paper and antiseptic hand gel on you.
3. Withdraw/exchange money whenever you can.
4. Sleep whenever you can. You never know when the next comfortable bed will be available.
5. Eat whenever you can. Sub rule: Always carry snacks with you, ideally enough to cover one whole meal.
6. Always take a water/wind proof jacket with you. It can rain/blow even in the most unlikely places.
7. Always have basic medication with you to last two days. Someone is going to need it.
8. If in doubt, add more sun tan lotion. You get burned in the most unlikely places.
9. If in doubt, take the photo. You can always delete it later. Subrule: Upload the photos whenever you can. The next internet caf is likely to have a really slow connection
10. Finally a top tip for preventing “holiday hangover”: start planning your next trip while travelling. Even better if you can book it before you go!

P.S. Check out our 50 favourite photos from the trip

More pics

The backlog is going up online at last – back in the land of fast connections, hurrah.

Final posts will be up later….cheers!

Lake Titicaca

We just got back from a cool trip on Lake Titicaca, the famous body of water that borders Bolivia and Peru. We took a boat out and visited the man made reed Islands of Uros, and then continued on to the lovely Island of Amantaní, where we stayed with a local family that put us up for the night.

Life is very basic on this island, but the people seem happy and are very hospitable. Our adoptive mother cooked us amazing local food in the most basic of kitchens, which would put most of us with our fancy kitchens to shame! We played football against the locals (not sure who won really), then we had a really fun dancing party in the evening where the locals dressed us up in traditional clothes for the occasion. The womens garments were really beautiful and colourful, whilst the men had to make do with ponchos (i quite liked mine) and those silly pointed woollen hats that abound in the Andes. We had a really good night, bit of wine and dancing with the locals to music from the local bands which included 2 kids from our family. 

The family we stayed with where really nice, and had 4 kids, including their 5 year old son Oscar who was a real character. It definitely was a worthwhile experience and once again showed us how different life can be around the world.

Now we are back in Puno, and the next stops will be Cuzco, the Amazon jungle and Machu Picchu – cant wait!

World’s Most Dangerous Road

We’ve just had the most exhilarating, scary, amazing and mind numbingly mystifying experience possible. After chilling for one day in La Paz (world’s highest capital at 3,600m above sea level), we decided that it was time for some action.

Yungas Road, also known as the World’s Most Dangerous Road, has more fatalities per km than any other road in the world.  The 64km single-lane gravel road has a straight dropoff of 400m on the left, and a straight mountain wall on the right. It has no guardrails, and due to it’s twisty nature you can’t see the opposing traffic.

It was replaced by a new, wide, paved road so most of the motor traffic is now gone, leaving the Yungas road for the mountain bikers.  Gravity Assisted Mountain Biking has one of the best safety records for organising mountain biking trips down the Yungas road, and until last Saturday, they had not had any fatalities during their 10 years of existence…

Us and 12 other travellers with a slight death wish met with our two guides Dale and Jube at 7am to start what has got to be one, if not THE, scariest thing I’ve ever done. 

By 9:30am we were at 4,700m high in the Bolivian Andes and started our 4,5hr ride down the mountain. The first 5km were on the new road (the wide, paved one), which was otherwise fine except we were going down at 40km/hr, overtaking trucks and other bikers. And that was the easy part.

Due to the recent accident (56-yo American guy fell off his bike and 400m down),  our guides were pretty paranoid about the safety and scared us to death with their horror stories of how long it would take to get the helicopter/ambulance to the road should any of us fall down the mountain. On a positive side it made sure that all the adrenaline nutters in our group also slowed down!!!

The next 3,5 hrs we drove down this amazing, beautiful, mystical mountain road, riding through water falls and stopping every now and then to admire the most awesome forest covered mountains everywhere . It truly was like Jurassic Parc - you half expected a dinosaur to stand on the road after the next turn.

Fortunately no dinosaurs, cars, people, animals or indeed anything else was standing on the road (at least not on our group’s path) and we got down the whlo 64km without incidents. During the three hour decent from 4,7km to 1,1km we peeled off layer after layer of clothing as the climate at the bottom is tropical.

Our efforts (four hours of squeezing the breaks and standing on the pedals at high altitude!) we were rewarded by cold beer and a nice lunch buffet at the local animal sanctuary. Photos to follow (sorry, still not able to upload any), but in the meanwhile have a look at some of the photos on the Gravity website.

Uyuni, Uyuuniiii!

After Potosi we took off for Uyuni and the Salt Flats, it was another 6 hour bus journey through bumpy gravel roads, but the scenery was really spectacular – amazing mountain ranges and lamas all over the place!

Uyuni is a town out in the middle of salty nowhere, not much going on apart from the tours to the salt flats and the amazing pizza (see below).

You wont believe the salt flats until you see them – huge expanses of bright white salt, stretching out for miles. We cruised into them in our 4WD jeeps, it was so much fun. We stopped off for lunch at a small salt hotel (made from salt bricks), it reminded me of the Police song “Tea in the Sahara”. After that we did our first round of taking crazy photos – basically you get really weird effects with the aid of well placed props and people because you dont get a sense of perspective out there. Check out our photos soon for some crazy shots!

We also went to visit some really cool caves nearby which had fossiled coral in them, and an ancient Indian burial cave (cue poltergeist music), a sort of island in the middle of the flats that had crazy giant cacti, and stayed the night in a salt hotel – which was actually remarkably comfortable!

Oh, and for the Pizza lovers out there, this town has AMAZING PIZZA. We stayed in the Tonito hotel, and as its restaurant it has a brilliant bar/restaurant that makes killer pizzas. Its owned by an American guy, i think he ran some pizzerias in Italy too. Man, he knows his stuff! Sanni and I highly recommend the spicy Llama pizza.