You are on a bus. Not a modern bus with new innovations like suspension, but one with a lot in common with a WW1 tank. Old is too new a word. Batterd to the point where you can't imagine it ever being new.
Cold rain is pelting down outside. You are sitting next to the door, or you would be if there was a door, but there is merely a gap in the side of the bus through which rain is now pouring. Your trousers are soaked, and you wished you had put on boots this morning instead of open sandals as your feet are now freezing, but it was sweltering on the way to the bus station- now you are in the mountains.
Next to you there is a young girl, with a baby, and all around stand local people (there are no other foreigners on the bus - they are in short supply here) with unlikely amounts of luggage - at least you have a seat. The road is a dirt track consisting of a series of potholes sewn together by ridges, grooves and cracks.
Your body is being shaken into numbness and your breakfast of eggs and rice (again!), despite only being given a one way ticket, is climbing from your stomach to get a look out of the window at the vistas that would be before you if you weren´t encased in cloud, its crampons seemingly digging in your throat as it scales its way up. At least an hour of the journey has already passed and there is only a further five to go.
The driver is equipped (as they all are) with an extra large bladder to avoid him having to stop; the comfort of the passengers is hardly his concern. He swerves the bus round each bend challenging the single track to grip the sliding hunk of junk and keep it on this most single of tracks.
Suddenly the rain stops and you are transported to a magical world of deep gorges carved from high mountains by what from this height look like no more than tiny streams. As the sun beats down it reveals the texture of the mountains - slashed with the scars of tiny rivers. Some peaks are covered in trees, other bare apart from a covering of velvet in stunning shades of green. It´s wonderful, more than you could have imagined.
A couple of hours later, long after my breakfast had returned to base camp, the almost endless wonderment is interupted by a schreeching halt, this time not a head on encounter with a bus or truck going the opposite way, but a god given stop for a piss ... and food. All it is wise to consume is a thin soup, which after finding unexpectedly sweet, I discover is made from sugar cane and water - and it is accompanied by a large slab of semi-soft cheese which you are supposed to dip in it.
As soon as the bus drivers spoon hits an empty bowl we are chasing him back to the bus lest we be permanently separated from our luggage, and soon pounding the road again, sitting like chickens on a spit in the roasting sunshine.
Not long after we are confronted a roadblock manned by teenagers bristling with assault rifles, and grenades attached to their tunics. Thankfully it is an army checkpoint. . We debus and all the men are frisked all over, including the groin (fully clothed I should mention, this is not a ´tackle out´ occasion) and baggage searched.
All of this is nothing out of the ordinary. This is Colombia.
Is it dangerous here? Well nowhere near as bad as the press and government advice would have you believe. Sure, there is always the chance of being mugged or even kidnapped, but the place is swarming with military and police, and you take all the precautions you can. And anyway if you had come all this way, and found out that it was really perfectly safe, then you would be really pissed off!
Since the beginning of December when I left Galapagos Islands I have spent a week in Banos in Ecuador trying to learn more Spanish, and then following a brief stop to visit a indiginous market, headed north tothe Colombian border. I crossed after dark (well I had to do something to make it more interesting) and have wound my way up to Bogota, all by bus - there are no trains here.
High points
- Not been mugged yet.
- Not been robbed yet.
- Not been kidnapped yet.
- Not been shot yet.
I reserve the right to retract any, or all, of these foolish statements, at a later date.
- The scenery so far (inn the south west of Colombia) has been breathtaking - and I have spent many hours on buses in the past week and a half, plus four days in the mountains. The rock here is soft and hence there are very deep and steep gorges, surrounding jagged peaks. The roads are usually carved into the rock along the sides of the gorges providing excellent views.
- San Augustin - Remains of a lost culture up to 5,500 years old. There are hundereds of statues (some like totem poles, others like a childs drawing), from half metre to 4 mertres high carved out of stone and to guard the graves of the dead and to worship them. All statues were buried underground to save them when the Incas conquered the civilisation probably in about 1450 AD. Powerful symbols of an advanced civilisation with some evidence (although in my mind not conclusive, but then I am 'septic') that they had links with Egypt and India.
- Tierradentro - A similar but different civilisation carved out underground tombs in solid rock to store the remains of the most important people. They are up to 3m high, and 5m radius (semicircular in area) with the entrance about 6m deep accessed by steps carved down into the rock.
- The indiginous market in Sasquisili, Ecuador. I arrived early and was the only non-indiginous person around for a while. To my delight they sold nothing I could buy, apart from traditional pastries and fruit. I could have bought 30 kg of carrots for US$5 (3 British pounds), or a llama, but I didn´t enter negotiations on that one. All the people were wearing their usual dress, the women in bowler hats and colourful skirts and socks. The men struggle (ie dont do) with the traditional dress although some manage to wear a hat.
- As there is a shortage of guerillas to fight here in Colombia (they have retreated to the mountains) the main function of the police (apart from standing around trying to look threatening) is to maintain a large crib right outside the police station and stick as many figures on it as possible (almost everyone is catholic here). The records so far for plastic sheep in a crib outside a police station, is 70, plus all the attendent, shepherds, kings, donkeys etc.
- The lack of foreigners in Colombia - usually this is a good thing, but it does have drawbacks like being stared at by the locals and if a group is required to hire a jeep for the day then you either have to wait a few days to get enough people or miss out.
Low Points
- Homework! Never thought I would ever do it again, but it crops up a lot when learning spanish. Four hours of brain numbing conversation and learning about the structure, followed by Homework! in the afternoon.
- The Xmas decorations are exactly the same as at home. Snowflakakes, snowmen, icicles etc... And this is the equator! I came all this way to get away from that.
- Bus rides. Up to 11 hours a day on some bouncy roads does not endear buses to me. Loads more to come though - maybe the roads will be better if I dont go to such remote places. Oddly enough it is always the locals that throw up. This may be gods way of telling them to build better roads!
- Watching Colombian football on TV. It is constantly being interupted by adverts ( about 10secs every minute) where the bottom third of the screen is taken over by an advert and the commentry is cut to allow the advertisers to annoy you. This is random so if a goal is being scored at that moment - tough. I haven´t watched much football here.....
Next it if off to Venezula ... after Xmas.
Feliz Navidad y neuve ano (Happy Xmas and New year) from Bogota.
Luv
Pete
Showing posts with label Ecuador. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ecuador. Show all posts
Saturday, 20 December 2003
Tuesday, 9 December 2003
Where 21 - Galapagos Islands, Ecuador --OR-- Dancing with Sealions
HI there,
It doesn´t seem 5 mins since I left the cold and rain of England for the slightly warmer climes of the equator, but time is moving on, unfortunately faster than I am and the Xmas trees with flashing lights are taking over the shops and houses here making me think it is time to think about where I will be for Xmas and new year - Colombia or Venezula seem to be the very likely answers right now, but who knows.
Since leaving on 11 Nov I spent as little time as possible in Quito (Ecuador) and flew out to Galapagos where I have spent a couple of weeks (several days too long - see later) but then they are a unique ecosystem, infact a whole string of unique ecosystems as each island has it´s own.
The Best Bits
- The whole of the Galapagos is wonderful, its animals, some unique others not, are more friendly than an especially cuddly cat! In particular...
- Dancing with sealions - on the beach they are approachable (within a metre) but most of the time just lie there sunbathing. In the water they are not only agile, fast and curious they actually play games with you. Imagine a torpedo whizzing past, by the time you realise what it was, it´s gone. But it returns, this 1.5m sealion, effortlesly accelerating through the water straight for your mask and veering away when only a metre from your nose, then going eyeball to eyeball with its enormous drugged out bulging eyes, and having it swim round you, do backflips in perfect circles in front of your nose, bubbles pouring from its mouth, squarking 'can´t you do this' before it picks stones from the bottom in it's mouth and tries to give them to you. After a while you realise that it is trying to teach you tricks - just a bit of role reversal, after all we clumsy people can teach them nothing about agility in water. After 20 mins or so with the same animal you begin to understand it, know what to expect next. Then it hangs upside down in the water grinning at you - too close to take a picture as it will be out of focus - somehow I feel it knows that - Just Playing it is. It made my day, I hope I added something to its.
- Blue footed boobies - And yes there are loads of t-shirts on sale with a piture of 2 blue feet and the line ´I love Boobies´ underneath. They really are birds with blue feet and so entertaining they are named after the spanish word for clown ´Bobo´. They look pretty stupid and act even stupidier e.g. showing its blue feet is the way of attracting a mate, whether it washes them first I dont know. They are the best fishers though, zipping vertically into the water with swept back wings at incredible speed and gobbling its catch before surfacing else the Frigate birds (with huge red, heart shaped inflated chests will nick its fish).
- Pelicans - The most clumsy animals I have ever seen. They crash in to the sea with a large element of random precision and rely on scooping out a huge slice of water with their expanding pouches filtering it for small fish. In the air they are flying dinosaurs, and on land waddle awkwardly over each other and anything that gets in their way, usually resulting in them falling over each other or into a hole, constantly using their unweildy wings as surrogate arms to stop themselves or pull themselves up. They even steal the fisheads from the fishermen, store them in their pouches and sit their quite contentedly until they are alone, then having to spit out the fish only to realise it is too big for them to eat. Next to them stands the super efficient heron, bewildered by their antics and losing out to the numbers and brute force of its clumsy competitors.
- Penguins - yes they have penguins on the equator - watching them fly through the water chasing shoals of fish is remarkable. Where their power comes from is not clear, but they are elegant and ..... and they are penguins ... what more do you need!?
- Tortoises of the Giant kind - 1.5m long and living to over 150 years old - the oldest know one was 152 when it died in an accident, but no-one knows how old the current ones are. The are prehistoric, stretching their wrinkled necks out to reveal toothless grins, they rip the grass out by its roots and clamber with painful awkwardness over to a new patch of grass. Each one has a different personality, retracting with a hydraulic hiss, in its mountainous shell or posing elegantly for photos, they are magnificent animals - though why anyone thought it necessary to invent them is difficult to understand...
- Hanging out with the white tipped reef sharks about 10m down whilst scuba diving in the harsh and unpredictable currents whilst scuba diving. More evidence of our clumsiness as we desperatly cling onto the rocks to avaid being swept away, they just hang in the same spot hardly making any movement. They swim within a couple of metres and look curiously at me with their tiny squinty eye. I wonder what it was thinking? I know what I was thinking ... that´s probably close enough... And then a 4m hammerhead shark cruises by with eyes sticking out of its hammer - strange them sharks.
- Getting bored yet, well there was hanging out with the turtles as they fed on the weed on the rocks just below the surface, calmly being swept back and forth in the swell; The yellow, 2m long land iguanas, black marine iguanas unique to here - every few minutes they spit out salt to keep their bodies pH balanced - they are dragons with wry smiles, wrikled skin and spikes along the back and head - punk rock started here!
Enough Enough - we want to hear some bad bits! I hear you, so here they are:
- Missing Englands triumph in the world cup - it wasn´t on tv in Galapagos - England World Champions! (rugby that is, and for all you who dont know the game - its like american footbal witout the padding or the time outs - and more than one team competes in the world champships). And to all those Aussies reading this ...Unluckly mates HaHaHaHaHaHa....etc.
- Rice, rice bloody rice. Asia is the home of rice and South America the home of the potato.... so why do they serve rice with everything? Potato comes with rice, spaghetti comes with rice, and if you are nieve enough to just ask for rice you get a double helping. Rice twice a day really is too much of a (cheap but) indifferent thing.
-The Galapagos cost a fortune, over US$1,000 to: fly there from Ecuador, national park entry, 8 day boat trip, so l will have to survive on the delicious rice they serve here from now on!
- Taking the round trip to the airport twice and failing to get on a plane (7 hours each time inc the 4 hours waiting at the airport). Third time I was lucky.
- The equator at sea level. It's got to be really hot right. No. Its cloudy nearly all the time and there is a slight chill in the evening. I mean it´s not like an english chill, but this is the equator - I had to wear long trousers in the evening, how ridiculous is that ... But the water must be warm? Sometimes - but then sometimes the cold Humboldt current from Antartica suddenly rises to the surface and it is like having an ice cold shower! BBBBrrrrrrr.....
- In a protected area of the Darwin Research station there is Lonesome George - a giant tortoise just hanging out. He is lonesome because he is the last of a species. They very last tortoise from a particular island, all the rest have been killed by man. They dont know how old he is, but he wont mate with similar species of tortoise from other islands at the moment, maybe he will in 50 or 100 years time, who knows. Imagine being the very last of a species .. now that´s tough.
Heading off to learn a bit more spanish in Banos and then into Colombia - maybe then it will get mote interesting - for you at least!
Bye for now
LuvPete
It doesn´t seem 5 mins since I left the cold and rain of England for the slightly warmer climes of the equator, but time is moving on, unfortunately faster than I am and the Xmas trees with flashing lights are taking over the shops and houses here making me think it is time to think about where I will be for Xmas and new year - Colombia or Venezula seem to be the very likely answers right now, but who knows.
Since leaving on 11 Nov I spent as little time as possible in Quito (Ecuador) and flew out to Galapagos where I have spent a couple of weeks (several days too long - see later) but then they are a unique ecosystem, infact a whole string of unique ecosystems as each island has it´s own.
The Best Bits
- The whole of the Galapagos is wonderful, its animals, some unique others not, are more friendly than an especially cuddly cat! In particular...
- Dancing with sealions - on the beach they are approachable (within a metre) but most of the time just lie there sunbathing. In the water they are not only agile, fast and curious they actually play games with you. Imagine a torpedo whizzing past, by the time you realise what it was, it´s gone. But it returns, this 1.5m sealion, effortlesly accelerating through the water straight for your mask and veering away when only a metre from your nose, then going eyeball to eyeball with its enormous drugged out bulging eyes, and having it swim round you, do backflips in perfect circles in front of your nose, bubbles pouring from its mouth, squarking 'can´t you do this' before it picks stones from the bottom in it's mouth and tries to give them to you. After a while you realise that it is trying to teach you tricks - just a bit of role reversal, after all we clumsy people can teach them nothing about agility in water. After 20 mins or so with the same animal you begin to understand it, know what to expect next. Then it hangs upside down in the water grinning at you - too close to take a picture as it will be out of focus - somehow I feel it knows that - Just Playing it is. It made my day, I hope I added something to its.
- Blue footed boobies - And yes there are loads of t-shirts on sale with a piture of 2 blue feet and the line ´I love Boobies´ underneath. They really are birds with blue feet and so entertaining they are named after the spanish word for clown ´Bobo´. They look pretty stupid and act even stupidier e.g. showing its blue feet is the way of attracting a mate, whether it washes them first I dont know. They are the best fishers though, zipping vertically into the water with swept back wings at incredible speed and gobbling its catch before surfacing else the Frigate birds (with huge red, heart shaped inflated chests will nick its fish).
- Pelicans - The most clumsy animals I have ever seen. They crash in to the sea with a large element of random precision and rely on scooping out a huge slice of water with their expanding pouches filtering it for small fish. In the air they are flying dinosaurs, and on land waddle awkwardly over each other and anything that gets in their way, usually resulting in them falling over each other or into a hole, constantly using their unweildy wings as surrogate arms to stop themselves or pull themselves up. They even steal the fisheads from the fishermen, store them in their pouches and sit their quite contentedly until they are alone, then having to spit out the fish only to realise it is too big for them to eat. Next to them stands the super efficient heron, bewildered by their antics and losing out to the numbers and brute force of its clumsy competitors.
- Penguins - yes they have penguins on the equator - watching them fly through the water chasing shoals of fish is remarkable. Where their power comes from is not clear, but they are elegant and ..... and they are penguins ... what more do you need!?
- Tortoises of the Giant kind - 1.5m long and living to over 150 years old - the oldest know one was 152 when it died in an accident, but no-one knows how old the current ones are. The are prehistoric, stretching their wrinkled necks out to reveal toothless grins, they rip the grass out by its roots and clamber with painful awkwardness over to a new patch of grass. Each one has a different personality, retracting with a hydraulic hiss, in its mountainous shell or posing elegantly for photos, they are magnificent animals - though why anyone thought it necessary to invent them is difficult to understand...
- Hanging out with the white tipped reef sharks about 10m down whilst scuba diving in the harsh and unpredictable currents whilst scuba diving. More evidence of our clumsiness as we desperatly cling onto the rocks to avaid being swept away, they just hang in the same spot hardly making any movement. They swim within a couple of metres and look curiously at me with their tiny squinty eye. I wonder what it was thinking? I know what I was thinking ... that´s probably close enough... And then a 4m hammerhead shark cruises by with eyes sticking out of its hammer - strange them sharks.
- Getting bored yet, well there was hanging out with the turtles as they fed on the weed on the rocks just below the surface, calmly being swept back and forth in the swell; The yellow, 2m long land iguanas, black marine iguanas unique to here - every few minutes they spit out salt to keep their bodies pH balanced - they are dragons with wry smiles, wrikled skin and spikes along the back and head - punk rock started here!
Enough Enough - we want to hear some bad bits! I hear you, so here they are:
- Missing Englands triumph in the world cup - it wasn´t on tv in Galapagos - England World Champions! (rugby that is, and for all you who dont know the game - its like american footbal witout the padding or the time outs - and more than one team competes in the world champships). And to all those Aussies reading this ...Unluckly mates HaHaHaHaHaHa....etc.
- Rice, rice bloody rice. Asia is the home of rice and South America the home of the potato.... so why do they serve rice with everything? Potato comes with rice, spaghetti comes with rice, and if you are nieve enough to just ask for rice you get a double helping. Rice twice a day really is too much of a (cheap but) indifferent thing.
-The Galapagos cost a fortune, over US$1,000 to: fly there from Ecuador, national park entry, 8 day boat trip, so l will have to survive on the delicious rice they serve here from now on!
- Taking the round trip to the airport twice and failing to get on a plane (7 hours each time inc the 4 hours waiting at the airport). Third time I was lucky.
- The equator at sea level. It's got to be really hot right. No. Its cloudy nearly all the time and there is a slight chill in the evening. I mean it´s not like an english chill, but this is the equator - I had to wear long trousers in the evening, how ridiculous is that ... But the water must be warm? Sometimes - but then sometimes the cold Humboldt current from Antartica suddenly rises to the surface and it is like having an ice cold shower! BBBBrrrrrrr.....
- In a protected area of the Darwin Research station there is Lonesome George - a giant tortoise just hanging out. He is lonesome because he is the last of a species. They very last tortoise from a particular island, all the rest have been killed by man. They dont know how old he is, but he wont mate with similar species of tortoise from other islands at the moment, maybe he will in 50 or 100 years time, who knows. Imagine being the very last of a species .. now that´s tough.
Heading off to learn a bit more spanish in Banos and then into Colombia - maybe then it will get mote interesting - for you at least!
Bye for now
LuvPete
Wednesday, 17 July 2002
Where 20 - Quito, Ecuador --OR-- Does it Really Rain in Rainforests?
Hi Guys, For maybe the last time......
Since Cusco, Peru it has been none stop overnight bus journeys (mainly uncomfortable). First went to Arequipa home to the 2 deepest canyons in the world, then up the Peruvian coast to Nasca, Lima and Trujillo and then into Ecuador to Guayaquil, Banos, into the jungle in the NE of the country and then to Quito, the capital, virtually on the Equator and the end of this six month trip.
Highs First for a change....
- The Nasca lines are a massive mess of lines drawn in the desert containing huge pictures of animals and other shapes. The lines were drawn about 1,500 years ago and are only visible from the air so we had to take a flight over them. The largest animal is a bird 285m long although some of the smaller ones (around 50m long) are better drawings. Why they were drawn is still a matter of great debate ranging from a map of where to find water, a map of the stars, solstice lines to pictures to appease the gods. How they did it is another matter. The lines themselves were made simply by removing dark stones to reveal the lighter desert stone beneath. How they achieved the accuracy of patterns is not so easy to explain. Some people claim they must have been able to see them from the air by using a primative hot air balloon, or perhaps they were geometrically advanced and had inveted a method of enlarging small pictures. Unfortunately even if they were advanced they (like all other Andean tribes prior to arrival of the Spanish in 1532) had no system of writing and so we know little about them.
- In Trujillo, Chan Chan is the largest mud city in the world and the largest pre Spanish city in the Americas was built around 1300AD and housed 55,000 people. They simply moulded mud into brick shapes without baking them and built a city. The advantage they had was that it can go for decades without raining here although even in those days the odd El Nino did a lot of damage. There are still many walls left although the water damage is obvious. Amazing that something so basic could last so long and that a civilisation advanced and organised enough to organise 55,000 people did not want (or maybe didnt need) to use more advanced methods of building.
- The 5 day trip into Ecuadors rainforest was a great experience - well at least it was when it wasnt raining.
Two things should ye know about the rainforest before ye enter. Firstly, it is a FOREST.
Secondly, it RAINS.
This may seem rather obvious but I have met people on trips into Rainforest who express surprise that it rains. That is rather like going to London and being surprised that the River Thames is a river! I know there are exceptions - like Panama hats being made in Ecuador and the Hundred Years war lasting 126 years , BUT some things are obvious and rain in a Rainforest
is surely one of them.
When it wasnt raining we say loadsa monkeys, birds, butterflys and a few mammals. We slept in mossie nets on a covered wooden platform in the middle of nowhere - there is nothing like going to sleep and waking up to the sounds of the jungle. No electrity or showers but we had candles and a river to swim in and it was just perfect. Perfect except for the mossies that is, they took a liking to my feet for some reason and my insteps did a fair impression of a relief map of the Andes.
A few LOWS
- Lima in Peru. A large costal city not far from the Equator. Rio is further from the equator and has fantastic water and beaches so I was hoping for something similar here. But.... to start with the sky was the most dowdy shade of grey imaginable as if it was just off to a particularly large
and important funeral. The sea was pretty much the same colour, as was the beach (just pebbles) and not only was it cold but there was a cold wind blowing. Just to top it off there was a small pier and a single mad local swimming. Yes I was actually in Brighton on a summer weekend ....... and the water temperature ... I didnt get close enough to find out !
- Rice, Rice, Rice. Dry, Dry, Dry. At every meal in this part of the world they serve rice .... with everything! Even ordering a portion of chips guarantees an accompanying mountain of rice sufficient to keep a large Asian family for a week. Whoever first introduced it here didnt actually tell the locals how to serve it properly ..... Dry chicken, dry chips and dry rice.
Of course hardly anyone actually eats the rice ... even the locals who you would of thought must be used to it by now are adept at pushing it towards the edge of the plate as if saving it for last .. and then just as they are about to start the arduous and painful process of consumption, they declare they are already full.
- Endless overnight bus journeys. Compared to most of SAm Peru does not look that big .... but it is enormous and many of the roads are not the best, and neither are the buses. Plus the people here are fairly short and so they design buses without legroom. Apart from that its great - what I mean is - they are cheap !
The Rest
- The Equator - The thing itself is hardly a highlight - I mean it is just a line (about 6cm wide in this case) and its yellow - Amazing that on all maps its always black but in reality its yellow ! How did the cartographers get that wrong?
But getting there (and having the usual crap picture taken) means the end of this journey. In the past 20 months I have been to 31 countries including almost every meaningful country in the southern hemisphere, across 6 continents (Antartica will have to wait for next time or when I have some money). I have spent far too long on buses but even though I never got travel sick , maybe now I am sick of travelling and want to sit in the same place for more than a couple of days.
Of course the trip would not be complete without a few Awards so here are a few random samples ........
Hottest place - Yangon and Bangkok just before the monsoons. Nobody did anything cos it was very hot and 100% humidity.
Coldest Place - My parents house near London
Most expensive place - London
Cheapest Place - Sumatra, Indonesia (For what a pint of beer costs in London you could live here for a day including accomodation, decent food and a beer !)
Cheapest Beer - Hanoi, Vietnam (Beer Hoi on the street cost 10 US cents (7p) a glass and it was pretty good. We still haggled over the price though!!!!)
Worst Food - Lao and Easter Island
Best Food - Argentina
Highest (Legal) Adrenalin sport - Skydiving, NZ
Highest (Legal) Adrenalin sport that I would actually do again - White water rafting down the Zambezi, Zimbabwe.
Best Man made wonder - Cities and temples at Angkor, Cambodia (Absolutely stunning)
Best Natural wonder - View of Southen Ice Field and glaciers, Torres del Paine, Chile
Although notable runners up include
- Mount Bromo at Sunrise, Java, Indonesia
- Iguassu Falls, Argentina/Brasil
- Moreno Glacier, Argentina
Favorite country - Myanmar (Burma)
Most played record worldwide - YMCA by Village People. That just proves it is a really sad world we live in!
I will be back in England on 19 July and will be staying at my parents as I cant afford to get my house back until I have a job ......
Several people have asked me what I intend to do when I get back - as if after 20 months I havent thought about it. I know exactly what I will do..... I will sit on my sofa at my parents house and think What the hell am I going to do now!
Thanks to all the people I have travelled with for making this such a great experience - if youre still on my email list then it cant have been that bad !
See you soon
Love
Pete
The End (?)
Since Cusco, Peru it has been none stop overnight bus journeys (mainly uncomfortable). First went to Arequipa home to the 2 deepest canyons in the world, then up the Peruvian coast to Nasca, Lima and Trujillo and then into Ecuador to Guayaquil, Banos, into the jungle in the NE of the country and then to Quito, the capital, virtually on the Equator and the end of this six month trip.
Highs First for a change....
- The Nasca lines are a massive mess of lines drawn in the desert containing huge pictures of animals and other shapes. The lines were drawn about 1,500 years ago and are only visible from the air so we had to take a flight over them. The largest animal is a bird 285m long although some of the smaller ones (around 50m long) are better drawings. Why they were drawn is still a matter of great debate ranging from a map of where to find water, a map of the stars, solstice lines to pictures to appease the gods. How they did it is another matter. The lines themselves were made simply by removing dark stones to reveal the lighter desert stone beneath. How they achieved the accuracy of patterns is not so easy to explain. Some people claim they must have been able to see them from the air by using a primative hot air balloon, or perhaps they were geometrically advanced and had inveted a method of enlarging small pictures. Unfortunately even if they were advanced they (like all other Andean tribes prior to arrival of the Spanish in 1532) had no system of writing and so we know little about them.
- In Trujillo, Chan Chan is the largest mud city in the world and the largest pre Spanish city in the Americas was built around 1300AD and housed 55,000 people. They simply moulded mud into brick shapes without baking them and built a city. The advantage they had was that it can go for decades without raining here although even in those days the odd El Nino did a lot of damage. There are still many walls left although the water damage is obvious. Amazing that something so basic could last so long and that a civilisation advanced and organised enough to organise 55,000 people did not want (or maybe didnt need) to use more advanced methods of building.
- The 5 day trip into Ecuadors rainforest was a great experience - well at least it was when it wasnt raining.
Two things should ye know about the rainforest before ye enter. Firstly, it is a FOREST.
Secondly, it RAINS.
This may seem rather obvious but I have met people on trips into Rainforest who express surprise that it rains. That is rather like going to London and being surprised that the River Thames is a river! I know there are exceptions - like Panama hats being made in Ecuador and the Hundred Years war lasting 126 years , BUT some things are obvious and rain in a Rainforest
is surely one of them.
When it wasnt raining we say loadsa monkeys, birds, butterflys and a few mammals. We slept in mossie nets on a covered wooden platform in the middle of nowhere - there is nothing like going to sleep and waking up to the sounds of the jungle. No electrity or showers but we had candles and a river to swim in and it was just perfect. Perfect except for the mossies that is, they took a liking to my feet for some reason and my insteps did a fair impression of a relief map of the Andes.
A few LOWS
- Lima in Peru. A large costal city not far from the Equator. Rio is further from the equator and has fantastic water and beaches so I was hoping for something similar here. But.... to start with the sky was the most dowdy shade of grey imaginable as if it was just off to a particularly large
and important funeral. The sea was pretty much the same colour, as was the beach (just pebbles) and not only was it cold but there was a cold wind blowing. Just to top it off there was a small pier and a single mad local swimming. Yes I was actually in Brighton on a summer weekend ....... and the water temperature ... I didnt get close enough to find out !
- Rice, Rice, Rice. Dry, Dry, Dry. At every meal in this part of the world they serve rice .... with everything! Even ordering a portion of chips guarantees an accompanying mountain of rice sufficient to keep a large Asian family for a week. Whoever first introduced it here didnt actually tell the locals how to serve it properly ..... Dry chicken, dry chips and dry rice.
Of course hardly anyone actually eats the rice ... even the locals who you would of thought must be used to it by now are adept at pushing it towards the edge of the plate as if saving it for last .. and then just as they are about to start the arduous and painful process of consumption, they declare they are already full.
- Endless overnight bus journeys. Compared to most of SAm Peru does not look that big .... but it is enormous and many of the roads are not the best, and neither are the buses. Plus the people here are fairly short and so they design buses without legroom. Apart from that its great - what I mean is - they are cheap !
The Rest
- The Equator - The thing itself is hardly a highlight - I mean it is just a line (about 6cm wide in this case) and its yellow - Amazing that on all maps its always black but in reality its yellow ! How did the cartographers get that wrong?
But getting there (and having the usual crap picture taken) means the end of this journey. In the past 20 months I have been to 31 countries including almost every meaningful country in the southern hemisphere, across 6 continents (Antartica will have to wait for next time or when I have some money). I have spent far too long on buses but even though I never got travel sick , maybe now I am sick of travelling and want to sit in the same place for more than a couple of days.
Of course the trip would not be complete without a few Awards so here are a few random samples ........
Hottest place - Yangon and Bangkok just before the monsoons. Nobody did anything cos it was very hot and 100% humidity.
Coldest Place - My parents house near London
Most expensive place - London
Cheapest Place - Sumatra, Indonesia (For what a pint of beer costs in London you could live here for a day including accomodation, decent food and a beer !)
Cheapest Beer - Hanoi, Vietnam (Beer Hoi on the street cost 10 US cents (7p) a glass and it was pretty good. We still haggled over the price though!!!!)
Worst Food - Lao and Easter Island
Best Food - Argentina
Highest (Legal) Adrenalin sport - Skydiving, NZ
Highest (Legal) Adrenalin sport that I would actually do again - White water rafting down the Zambezi, Zimbabwe.
Best Man made wonder - Cities and temples at Angkor, Cambodia (Absolutely stunning)
Best Natural wonder - View of Southen Ice Field and glaciers, Torres del Paine, Chile
Although notable runners up include
- Mount Bromo at Sunrise, Java, Indonesia
- Iguassu Falls, Argentina/Brasil
- Moreno Glacier, Argentina
Favorite country - Myanmar (Burma)
Most played record worldwide - YMCA by Village People. That just proves it is a really sad world we live in!
I will be back in England on 19 July and will be staying at my parents as I cant afford to get my house back until I have a job ......
Several people have asked me what I intend to do when I get back - as if after 20 months I havent thought about it. I know exactly what I will do..... I will sit on my sofa at my parents house and think What the hell am I going to do now!
Thanks to all the people I have travelled with for making this such a great experience - if youre still on my email list then it cant have been that bad !
See you soon
Love
Pete
The End (?)
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