We started in Chile way up in the north in San Pedro de Atacama. The de Atacama part refers to the desert that it is situated in, and it really was very very dry and dusty. Town proper was only four or five blocks square of shops, a wee plaza, a church or two, and a whole heap of hostels. It was one of those towns where just about everybody else on the street was foreign too (or at least on holiday).

We had a really good time renting some bikes and pedalling out to a ruined incan-period fortress on the edge of town. The fortress was built on a steep bluff overlooking the river, and without much investment in the way of walls the locals were able to fight off the Spanish twice when the came a calling.

We pretty quickly ran out of enthusiasm for the desert and started heading down the coast to Santiago. We broke our trip at La Serena which was a pretty ordinary town where ordinary folk go about their lives, nothing much for tourists to do but wonder why half the student population of the town were dressed in designer rags and were begging for money. My big excitement in La Serena though was that directly behind the bus terminal was a great big mall, complete with a movie theatre showing Watchmen. It was even in english as they don't seem to get around to redubbing things before the DVD release.

To all my geeky friends out there if you have not read the original Watchmen comic or seen the movie you are missing out. But if your not that geeky (or at least nerdy) you should probably avoid it.

Anyways Santiago beckoned and we pretty quickly heeded its call.

La Paz led into Oruro and Uyuni soon enough. Oruro is a dusty little mining town 3 hours south of La Paz. I actually enjoyed being stooped over for a half hour or so while exploring the mining museum, which turned out to be quite by surprise a fair bit of old disused mine shaft sunk into the hill behind the town. Amusingly enough the entrance to the mine is at the back of the nave of one of the best decorated modern catholic churches we've visited. Go the colourful murals of demons I say. Much more entertaining and educational than the ever bloodier icons of the north.

Oruro's other claim to fame is their entry in the inaugural 'Matt the Big Worst Restaurant Service' awards. For about half an hour we moved through a growing retinue of bewildered staff who couldn't work out that feeding one of us while charging (in advance) for two separate and different meals just wasn't up to code. In the end I had to reconstruct the entire itemized bill from memory before they realized that the half a meal they had gladly presented s with didn't quite make sense.

We moved onto Uyuni which is really just a staging post for tours into the incredible Salar de Uyuni. We managed to find a cheap as room in a really nice hotel without quite realizing that it was only half finished. After I had carefully balanced some polystyrene in the bathroom window and carefully checked the reflective properties of the window the bathroom became usable during daylight hours (as long as it wasn't overcast). We also picked up a pair of dutch bargaining buddies which proved to be essential when negotiating our way into a good Land Cruiser for the trip across the salar and the desert beyond to Chile.

The salar is a huge salt flat that once was a salt lake, that once was the ocean before it decided to move to the mountains. When we visited it a lot of the salt was covered with an inch or two of brine making for a truly incredible first day cruising across the salt with the landscape perfectly reflected to all sides. The desert beyond the salt flat appeared to be painted on by some rather gifted renaissance chaps for most of the way and was spotted with several large flamingo infested alkali rich lakes in a multitude of colours for variety. Honestly as far as messing with preconceptions by providing an amazingly scenic mostly lifeless desert to drive through, Bolivia does very well indeed.

At the border with Chile we transferred to a wee bus for the down hill decent to San Pedro and were greeted by Chilean customs officials who hadn't heard that they share a land border with three other countries and that fruit will smuggle itself without my or anyone else's help.

Welcome to the Santiago high bandwidth multimedia spectacular:

My favourite Olmec head from the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City


Standing on top of the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihucan looking at the Pyramid of the Moon


A whole load of Monarch butterflies


Obligatory Machu Pichu photo


The Train Graveyard near Uyuni

Uyuni Salt Flats

Obligatory Uyuni Salt Flats silly photo

Wow its been two weeks since I last posted anything. So without further ado

Our last stop in Peru was a small town called Puno on the edge of Lake Titicaca. The coolest thing we got up to was a little boat ride out to the floating islands on the lake. The story goes that the Uros were quite peaceful and they were getting a whole lot of grief from the other folks around the place so they decided to make themselves some islands out of reeds and hang out in the middle of the lake. And it seemed to work since some of them are still there, and happily making a decent trade off all the tourists. The islands themselves are quite squishy and get refreshed seasonally as the bottom layer rots away they just gather up some reeds, and throw them down on top. Some of the trickier guys have little trout ponds and vege gardens built-in.

We also visited a really old burial ground called Sillustani, which was fairly impressive. For several hundred years local big wigs were buried in large cylindrical stone tombs (chullpas) sitting on a hill above another lake. All the chullpas were in various states of repair but the 12m tall big daddy was still intact enough to be suitably impressive. As we escaped the approaching thunderstorm in our tour bus we got stuck in another carnival as the local villagers turned out in droves all dressed in their fanciest and brightest clothes, to alternately dance, play music and shoot foam at one another and any tourists foolish enough to be caught in the crossfire.

Bolivia was another overnight bus ride away, and garnered us our first walk over an international border. We were pretty tired by the time we arrived in La Paz, but the view of the city as we came in from the high plains and swooped around the motorway above the valley containing the city perked us up. Unfortunately this was fairly short lived as at almost 3700m, and with so many steep streets up and down the valley, Oxygen was continually in short supply.

We found a quiet hotel in an area known as the witches market where a whole bunch of middle-aged ladies (and one bloke in a soccer shirt) trade in exotic teas and lucky dried llama fetuses. Not as worrying as it sounds we got to explore a fair bit, and visited a string of small museums, the most interesting of which was the Coca Museum. Having been exposed to the concept that Coca is just the stuff that the nuns try to sell you so you can have some tea or the stuff that the old mountain folk chew (kind of like tobacco but without the ill effects) to combat exhaustion and altitude sickness. The museum reinforces the point that Coca only became a problem for the South Americans once whitey started abusing it.

We also took a really long public bus ride down the valley to the local badlands (yup that's a technical term) known as the Valley of the Moon. As soon as we stepped from the bus there was a thunderclap and we rushed right inside the startled ticket guys booth. The area itself is a chronically eroded patch of earth and stone with classic boulder perched on pinnacle of earth next to treacherous sinkhole geography straight out of a roadrunner cartoon, and made for a very diverting afternoon of wandering from one rain shelter to the next (and complaining about the lack of Oxygen).

During our time in Peru & Bolivia I've crossed some tasty tasty animals off my checklist. Both Alpaca and Llama have succumbed to my rabid hunger. And the verdict is that Alpaca is much like good beef, and Llama is like bad beef (this makes a certain sense as Llamas are the bigger and grumpier of the two).

The real carnivore highlight though was the two Cuys (pronounced Koo-Eee and read Guinea Pig) that I demolished, the first was fantastic and quite big for a Cuy but you are presented with the whole Cuy (minus feet and head if your lucky) which you have to then dismember it extensively to extract the pinky meat (it seriously resembles suicide chicken). Of course the second one cost more and was really poor, but you get that when travelling.

Somehow we ended up in the party hardiest of all the Cusco hostels, set far too far up one of the valley hillsides, luckily for us the old colonial mansion that Loki occupies has literally metre thick stone and rubble walls so most of the continual partying was filtered out. And unlike most hotels you stay in hostels take security really seriously so there were lock boxes in the never abandonded reception area, a pack lock-up for day trippers, and an armed guard at the door. Cusco is a city built in a long valley at somewhere over 3300m, so as Loki was very near the top of the valley we

1. had an incredible view of the city from the common room
2. almost died everytime we ascended the street back to the hostel

The street was so steep that it is was necessarily one way, with taxis having to take a six block detour to wind up to the top of the street.

Cusco had some big negatives, the whole town seems to be setup to part tourists from as much money and time as possible, all the minor ruins have formed a syndicate which requires you to buy a NZD100 ticket to visit any of them (so they say, the ones out of Cusco will actually let you in a for a pittance but the ticket sales people completely lied about it), and the prices for Machu Pichu were astronomical, I think we spent over NZD600 on the train, bus and entry for the two of us.

Cusco also had way too many dogs (and dog by-products) none of which seemed owned, and way too many try-hard backpackers who haven't heard that no-one smokes any more. The upside was that almost none of the locals seem to smoke at this kind of altitude so I didn't feel too much of the normal Gringo shame as I felt all the locals were looking down on them too (instead of feeling they were all acting as free advertising).

But all in all we actually had a really good time, we visited a monastery that was built directly on top of the old Incan foundations of an Incan monastery-anologue (where they kept and educated all the pretty children they would eventually get around to sacrificing). Machu Pichu was actually pretty cool, but just because it was set amongst incredible peaks and had fantastic scenery, the ruins themselves were far inferior to most of the sites we visited in Mexico (and about 50 times the price). Half of the enjoyment may have came from the fact that it is about 500m lower than Cusco so I actually ran up some of the steps and continued to bounce around till our return train journey.

I think we may have actually had just a good time on our day trip out Uribamba in the Sacred Valley near by Cusco. We managed to time our trip to conincide with the start of Carnival which aparently this town celebrates quite heavily but neither of us had paid particular attention to what form the celebrations took. But we were pretty sure what was going down by the time we had parted ourselves from our Colectivo (a 50 Sole note proving impossible to change anywhere but the bus terminal at the far end of town). Strangely a lot of the gutters were flowing with a lot of water even though it hadn't rained for a couple of days, and sales of shaving cream seemed to be absurdely strong amongst teenage boys and girls. We carefully made our way to the main square where we rapidly made our way to a first storey restaurant and a window seat where we proceeded to watch the towns youthful population drench each other with water bombs, buckets, super soakers, and home made (and very effective) pipe squirters. At times it looked strikingly similar to footage of rioting you see on tv with swarms of young boys flowing back and forth across the square, returning to the almost dry central fountain to reload.

The restaurant owners four year old girl and friend were perched in the table next to us armed with sly smiles and a bucket of water so big I was surprised she didn't just drop it on herself. But sure enough eventually a pack of boys strayed under the restaurants overhang and were doused at which point we hurriedly tried to close all the windows before the return fire saturated us and our lunch (which included a kind of miso soup with a pear in it). We were only partially succesful and Jacquie got a damp back, but we were mostly OK.

Things calmed down after that as the fountain was running low on water, and even the overly excited youths must have been getting tired from all the running around. But then the local Police decided it was good time for them to drive past the square and make sure every one was behaving. As is the habit in these parts the patrol took the form of nine men standing together in the back of a Hi-Lux. They made it down one side of the Plaza unmolested but as they turned down the second side the attitude of every boy in the square turned from stunned silence to yelling and running and fully forty or fifty boys converged on the ute and completely doused all its occupants.

Now in the 'west' you could probably imagine the police response would make the six o'clock news but here it seemed to be considered appropriate behaviour, and the only response seemed to be the Hi-Lux running a red light out of the square (which isn't even necessarily unusual as the driver was safe inside and probably laughing almost as much as Jacquie).

We decided this pretty much signalled the end of festivites and tried to slink out of town, Jacquie came upon the winning strategy of following about six inches behind a little old lady (complete with bowler hat). The elderly seeming to be rigourously avoided we had seen three middle aged folk quitely enjoying an ice cream in the middle of the plaza during the chaos. Apparently I was lagging a bit far behind (the lady hadn't stopped and given me a funny look about why I was so close) and was picked as a target of opportunity by a giggling twelve year old girl who managed to hit me with a full washing basin of water before being caught in a counter ambush herself. Luckily it was a pretty hot day (and the air is always very dry in the Andes) and I dried reasonably quickly.

We rounded off the day with a couple of quick visits, one to a salt production facility that has apparently been running since Incan times. Up in the hills above Uribamba there is a salty spring which is diverted out to a whole series of terraced pools on the hillside to evaporate. Quite scenic and very cool for its historical usefullness.

We then headed up the hill to the Moray ruins (10 Soles made us very happy we hadn't succumbed to the syndicate ticket). Moray is quite different, it is only terraces but they are arranged in circles and patterns (the largest of which you can see on the wikipedia link). It was quite restful and quiet with very few other people around. The only excitement was the discovery that the only way up and down most of the terraces were the Incans 'flying stairs', which are just three or four longer rocks protruding from the terrace walls.

With all of Cusco's chosen attractions ticked off we got yet another bus, this time to Puno near the Bolivian border.