SITE MAP Front Page
Our Homepage
Travelling Brazil Peru Chile 1 Bolivia Chile 2 Easter Island New Zealand Australia Singapore & Thailand Cambodia Vietnam Thailand India
Chile
This is an edited version of our travel log. The red text is from our online travel log and the blue handwriting is from our travel journal.
July 21, 2005, Arica
Third day in Chile, just over the Peruvian border in a little city called Arica. Its really nice here, we both really liked Peru, but this town is almost like a European one. I kind of feel like we've come out from behind the iron curtain!! They have real coffee and supermarkets and beaches and everything!!!
The hostel we are staying is probably the best one since we left England (ok, some in Brazil were technically better) they have proper breakfast and comfy beds and a nice clean kitchen and its quite and the shower has pressure and hot water. (the government in Peru actually passed a law making it an inprisonable offence to have a shower that had both full water pressure and was hot, so most places opt for one or the other, some have got round the problem by having neither)
Ok, that's a bit unfair, I'll give you a run down on our experiences in Peru now we have moved on and have had time to think it over...
Almost all the people in Peru are incredibly friendly and helpful, when you first meet many of them this is not immediately obvious, but as soon as you have broken the ice they are really warm and friendly.
Particularly I will remember our friends we met through the Amigos Spanish school and all of the hostel owners we stayed in Cusco as well as our Peruvian guides and porters on the Inca trail. The porter particularly are a classic example; most of the time they looked really dour and serious (probably having something to do with carrying a metric ton on their back), but as soon as some said a joke to them their face would break into the widest smile/grin. Apart from one guy called Juan who wore an infectious smile the whole time!!
Sadly the other side to Peru is that lots of people are quite poor; and as a result try to make money out of tourists. Most of this is fine; although in Cusco the wandering street sellers are a little annoying (I purposely wore trainers a lot of the time just to avoid the shoeshine kids). Unfortunately we (me!!) were the victims/near victims of some people trying to rip us off. In Pisco a guy cleaning the room obviously took a shine to me as when I came back later in the day a pair of trousers and a jumper were missing. (There is now either a guy in Pisco wandering round dressed like me, or he has made a few Soles, I don't know which I'd prefer).
At the start of Peru more than the end we were more naive about people trying to rip us off, but even then we didn't get caught out. It was just annoying having to always watch your bag and always go into a restaurant/tour agency/bus company/taxi thinking they were going to try it on before you'd even spoken to them (and about 1/2 of them would!!!)
Gemma has just told me she read a story this week on a travel forum about a guy getting mugged in Cusco by three 5 year olds so it could be worse!!!
There are loads of really cool things to see in Peru and it is a crazy country geographically. Allegedly it has all but 3-4 of the world's climate zones. We saw quite a few from jungle to desert and snow capped mountain, although it seemed to me that about 50% or more of the AREA or Peru was desert. All the archaeological things are amazing. My only gripe would be if you don't know what something is, it is OK to say so. Not everything has to have a name and a purpose!! All the museums/sites without fail have an explanation for everything and present it as fact, even though they have no hard facts! "yeah this is the temple of the medium sized monkey where everyone got naked and sang David Bowie songs. Can you see there that rock is like a monkey with no arms, legs or a head, look there's its tail and over there that kind of looks like a head and if you look closely there's its eyes and one is different to the other. David Bowie!!! Right onto the temple of giant fish thing."
Ok; its not that bad. In all honesty I did kind of enjoy the crazy theories, its just a different approach to European museums and the scientist inside me was a little sceptical.
We both want to come back to Peru sometime, I'd like to see Cusco again and visit some of the lost cities in the North. Gemma says Cusco has changed a lot since she was there 5 years ago, so it will be interesting to see if it becomes a totally tourist/traveller ghetto (I hope not).
Finally, some human stuff, instead of self indulgent ramblings. Neither of us have cut our hair since you last saw us. Mine is a state. I've lost all the weight I put on in Brazil, and I reckon I'm down to about 10 1/2 stone. So I'm like a dirty trimmed down version of me. Gemma is exactly the same but with longer hair. We spent the last few days cooking for ourselves, which is much better than cheap restaurant food.
Ok, Gemma wants to go and see Chile and you've all stopped reading ages ago.
July 20th
Today we rented some bikes and set off up the valley which leads from Arica - by the sea, all the way through the desert and up onto the altiplano. I think we underestimated how far we had to ride! We first went to a mueseum in a village called San Miguel about 14km
out of town. We saw some mummies from 8000bc which were pretty freaky - especailly a baby which still had hair and fingernails.
We then went up to the site of a fortress, not that impressive, but the views back down the valley were quite strange. The sides are arid and devoid of life, but the valley floor has been extensively irrigated, so it is a lush green. We then went back down the valley and saw some petroglaphs; rock drawings of llamas, people, etc. No-one knows what they were put there for.
July 22, 2005, Putre
Have you ever noticed how all the places we visit have only slightly different names?
We got the bus this morning (6am start) to a village on the boundary of a national park in Chile (National Park Lauca). We're now back above 3500m above sea level and its freezing.
I really feel like today we are seeing the "real South America" that all the idiots on the Lonely Planet message board bang on about.
Putre is really quaint in its own way, but it is fairly rustic. Its kind of like a Chilean "Marboro country", the men are all hardy and leathery faced and do a lot of leaning and staring and looking mysterious. I've even seen a couple of cowboy hats. The wind threatens to blow the village off the side of the mountain and the temperature today might have climbed to 5 oC!! Its bleak, lets put it that way!
We are here for tonight and tomorrow night and are doing a tour of the national park tomorrow morning. Hopefully we'll get a picture of a snow capped volcano mirrored in a glassy lake at 5000m, as we get to see three volcanoes (two extinct, one thinking about it) all capped with snow and there are lakes about.
I've just gone to all the shops in town (4) to buy food to cook for tea. There is only one restaurant here and when we went for a drink earlier, it went something like this (in Spanish);
Me: Hello sir
Chef guy: yea
Me: Ummm
C: You want drink? food?
Me: Uh, One Coke, one coffee. (Condensed for sake of clarity, in reality this took about 5 minutes)
C: you want food?
Me: Do you have a menu?
C: No
M: Oh, no then
C: I've got eggs, you want me to cook you eggs?
M: No that's OK
C: Meat? I have meat.
M: We'll just have the drinks thanks...
I am therefore going to make some pasta and tomatoes and hide from the real South America, it frightens me.
July 23rd
Another fairly early start to meet our guide for the national park. It had been hailing in the night and was fairly overcast, the weather got worse as the day went on and it snowed more and more, until we were in a blizzard.
I thought this made the trip better though. It was strange to see a desert with snowdrifts on it. The first stop on the tour was to see a mini-glacier and a cave that had been occupied in prehistoric times.
We then went to see a whole network of lakes and lagoons, bordered by snowy mountains as well as some weird desert plants.
Unfortunately the blizzard meant we could see any of the volcanoes in the park, so instead our guide took us up to the Chile-Bolivia border and we got some cheesy photos straddling the border.
We spent another boring night in Putre, cooking and watching Chilean Pop-Idol, with a special disability section called "I can do it too!" How non-PC can you get?
25th July
We came back to the same hostel, and met a really strange Austrian family. The all seemed normal enough, apart from the father, who always wore lederhosen. We didn't think anything of it until we were wandering through the town centre the next day and he was busking with an accordion, playing oompa music in his full lederhosen gear, leather sandals and red knee-high socks and a jaunty little hat. Gemma and me both looked the other way and didn't bring it up back at the hostel. Maybe he is part of a crack UN-stereotype tack force. We'll probably come across a Frenchman riding a bike in a stripy shirt and beret, with a string of garlic round his neck.
July 29th
We left Arica and got a bus to Iquique, which wasn't great. From there we travelled into the desert to see a ghost town called Humberstone, which was a nitrate mining town abandoned in 1961. We could barely walk in the sun for more than 5 minutes, so what it must have been like braking rocks up in the summer with no shade is unbelievable.
We then got a bus to San Pedro de Atacama, which is quite a popular traveller town; which, like Cusco has good and bad sides. Good as you can get lots of home comforts, bad as it costs you loads and tend to attract all the worst sorts of travellers. Still on balance we like it and are planning to stay for a while, we are going to take a 4-day tour to the Bolivian salt-flats.