Kepfram & Ellie's Travel Journal

y ahora... ¡¡Buenos Aires!! por mala suerte llegamos el día antes de un día ferial, y por eso no podemos ver muchos departamentos hasta la semana que viene....
Nos quedamos en el barrio de Palermo, no pasé mucho tiempo acá la ultima vez que estuve en Buenos Aires. El barrio tiene muchos cafés, tiendas, restaurantes, unos lugares para bailar el tango, u mucha arte. Nuestro hostel es muy bonito en una casa vieja, tenemos una habitación privada con baño (amo Argentina, donde tener los recursos para esta cosa lujosa otra vez), la cocina tiene todo que necesitamos, y los dueños son muy simpáticos.
Cuando hayamos conseguido un departamento, vamos a conocer Iguazú, y después regresamos para vivir acá, tomar mas clases de castellano, y ¡unos de tango!

Tomamos la decisión de conocer Mendoza porque llegamos en la Argentina antes de que hubiéramos anticipado, por eso teníamos tiempo y también teníamos ganas de comer parrilla y probar vino. Fuimos con nuestros amigos Yvan y Cécile de Francia (nos conocimos en Bolivia).
La ciudad es grande, pero no tan grande como Santiago o Buenos Aires), y interesante:

• con muchas plazas y parques - nos dijeron que éstos son útiles en caso de terremoto, para que uno pueda escapar el peligro de los edificios
• todos las calles con arboles a los lados - dos veces mas arboles que personas en la ciudad
• con muchos perros de la calle, pero no son exactamente perros salvajes. Uno nos adoptó, muy simpático era, muy submisivo, y muy fiel - resultó que tuvimos que perderlo: entramos el mercado de una puerta y salimos de otra puerto (pero todavía pudimos verlo esperándonos con paciencia a la primera)
• Tiene el zoológico más grande del país, con muchos animales de Sur América y unos mas del mundo

Tuvimos unos tures de los alrededores:

• Las Bodegas de Mendoza son muy conocidas, sin embargo los tures que ofrecen son muy diferente de lo que había anticipada por mis experiencias con las bodegas de Estados Unidos. La diferencia más grande era que acá no nos dejaron probar más de dos variedades de vino en cada viña (supongo que poca gente compra vino en esos tures y por eso no quieren darle mucho vino, pero no voy a comprar algo que no he probado...)

• Mendoza es también conocido por sus áreas de esquí y sus altas montañas como Aconcagua. No nos dijeron nada cuando hicimos las reservas, pero en otoño no se puede ver nada por el tiempo mal que hay casi diariamente. Resultó que todo el día estábamos sentados en una camioneta con poca vista y solo paramos para conocer el Puente del Inca en el nieve y de otro lado del rio....

A slight miscalculation...
San Carlos de Bariloche, which pretty much everyone just calls Bariloche is very pretty (I say that a lot, I think I need some new adjectives). Located in the Lake District of Northern Argentine Patagonia it's the major destination city for the region because of all the outdoor stuff that we didn't get to do.
It's early winter in Argentina so it's rainy, windy & quite chilly here. Because of the weather we're not boating, or swimming, or fishing, or skiing, or horseback riding, or biking, & because I still have doubts about Ellie's sprained ankle we haven't done much hiking either. The ski season doesn't open till June 20-something so I don't think we'll get our chance this visit, oh well... So the lesson learned is to check the weather/season before planning your trip. We do now know how nice it is here & would happily come back here for the summer or the winter ski season.
So making the most of our time here we along with Yvon & Cecile visited Cerro Campanario (1,050 meters high) in Parque Nacional Nahuel Haupi to check out the park. The views were incredible from up there. Beautiful, but it was cold. We were SO glad we took the raincoats they offered @ the base of the mountain. At the top was a nice cafe with some tasty pastries & submarinos (semi-sweet chocolate disolved in steamed milk).
& that was the most interesting bit of our time in Bariloche. Our hostel was nice, smoke-free, & warm with a good kitchen, internet, & a nice DVD library. I think I'm going to like Argentina.

Kepfram

Welcome to Argentina!Population: 39 million people
Currency: Argentine Peso, $3.08310AR = $1US
Capital: Buenos Aires
Food: Beef, lots of beef (distinct cuts of grass fed meaty goodness, salted, grilled & slow roasted). There are also lots other grilled specialties that we won't be trying like different sausages, & roasted organs that don't sound so good, but the dulce de leche we will be trying.
Roads: Still nice & there lots of options for busses (from 1st class to coach).


Black People Count thus far: about 12, we encountered a tour group from the West Indies on a mountain overlook so I'm not sure if I should count them or not. Ellie's past exprience in Argentina led her declare it "The Whitest Place on Earth," we'll see if that holds true this visit.
Itinerary: skiing in San Carlos de Bariloche, wine tasting in Mendoza, visit the Iguazu Falls Park, study spanish & tango in Buenos Aires for a month, & take a ferry over to Uruguay for a weekend.

Bye-bye Chile!
So our bus trip was comfortable & uneventfull. It was a pretty ride across the Andes, even on a rainy day it was impressive. It was kinda like going from the US to Canada, the customs people weren't tense, they did random searches of our bags, & we didn't feel like our bus was going to leave us.
I'm really hoping that our money will go a bit further here than it did in Chile, we'll see...

Kepfram

Things I learned in Chile:

• Modern freeway systems, plumbed hot water (even in the kitchen sink!!), safe fruits and vegetables, drinkable water, and solid plumbing systems that can handle toilet paper do exist in South America.
• You can buy pet food even in the little corner markets. (This is the first place we've been where people can actually afford to have and take care of pets.)
• Just because people have pets doesn't mean there's a shortage of street dogs (or their excrement).
• People with physical injuries and disabilities have access to modern medical equipment in Chile. I was somehow shocked every time I saw someone walking with Canadian crutches, and I never saw a legless or otherwise crippled beggar dragging themselves along the ground with skin protectors made of old tire rubber.
• It´s really difficult for us to understand Chilean Spanish! (They speak quickly, swallow their s´s and put t´s where there shouldn't be any, and have plenty unique words....)
• You get receipts (facturas) for everything you buy - a pack of gum, an empanada, a cup of tea....
• Tips are again expected in restaurants.
• Our French friends don't believe in tipping as a percentage of the bill.
• There area clean and abundand public bathrooms, but you have to pay for them all....
• In the public bathrooms you´ll find TP and toilet seats (!!), but remember to look for the paper OUTSIDE of the stalls.
• Buses are of good quality again, and with several varieties of service - bus cama actually means something again, as does the familiar semi cama and the luxury cama suite. We only took semi cama buses because of the expense, but even these were MUCH better than most of their Peruvian equivalents.
• Laundry is REALLY expensive here (and we thought it was bad in Costa Rica!). Recall our hotel in San Pedro de Atacama that charged guests $10 per load to USE the machine & hang up your own cloths - we never found laundry for less than $8 per load for a wash and dry in the whole country. (Is this because only tourists need to take their laundry out?)
• When you send your things out to get laundered, they don't all always come back. (I lost my favorite of my warm shirts - and although the shop gave me another shirt to replace it, I was quite disappointed!)
• Even if you separate your laundry, the place might mix it all together to wash - I discovered this the hard way when I put my NEW blue shirt (the one I'd been given to replace my lost one earlier) and the place put it right in with the whites I'd separated. (I did make them take the whites and bleach them for us, but it was quite a fight!).
• It´s really hard to travel in a country with a strong economy when you have no money coming in.

Ellie

El sur de Chile es bonito, pero también hace frió en otoño y no hay mucho de hacer en la estación baja. Fuimos a Pucón y Puerto Montt (y por unas horas a la isla Chiloé para conocerla). No pudimos ir al sur en barco como habíamos querido, pero quizás sea mejor por el frió....

Circa Pucón visitamos las aguas calientes y tuvimos la oportunidad ver por la noche el volcán en erupción ¡que impresionante! No subimos el volcán por el día porque todavía tengo problemas con el tobillo y no creí que no pude (aunque nos dijeron que es muy divertido hacerlo....). Pucón es un lugar turístico en el verano por el lago y en el invierno por el volcán (se puede esquiar en un volcán activo), pero en el otoño....

Estamos decepcionados con nuestro viaje a Puerto Montt. La ciudad es fea, no hay NADA de hacer por un fin de semana, y aunque hemos leído que había barcos hacia el sur en el otoño, resultó que en la semana que viene no había nada. Por eso decidimos hacer un tur de la isla Chiloé que es cerca, pagamos el pasaje por el día siguiente pero resultó que el tur no fue por el tiempo (había lluvia y hacía frió).

Entonces decidimos ir solos en bus publico a la isla Chiloé. Para cruzar a la isla el bus tiene que embarcar en un ferry (un ferry no mucho mas grande que el bus!). Traté de bajar del bus para aprovechar el viaje en ferry, pero hacía tanto frió que no pude disfrutarlo, y aunque había delfines en el agua, volví al bus para estar cómoda (como Kepfram). Fuimos al pueblo de Ancud, un pueblito de pescaderos, con casi nada de hacer por un domingo frió y lluvioso, nos almorzamos, y regresamos a Puerto Montt.

Si tuvieramos la oportunidad, regresaríamos en el verano para conocer las partes del sur.

I was first introduced to the poetry of Pablo Neruda in the Italian film Il Postino. I was imediately drawn to the way he mixes down to earth with mystical images. From the film I learned a little about his biography, but until I visited his houses I didn´t really know much about HIM - a man who surounded himself with art, nature, science, history, color, and friends.

The first of his houses that we visited was in Valparaiso - La Sabastiana. It´s on one of the many hillsides overlooking the port. It´s a duplex (the property shared with some good friends), a tall thin homey place with panoramic views and a beautiful round fireplace the center of his living room. Kepfram didn´t like all the narrow stairways or the abundant collections of objects, but I loved them, probably for the reason Kepfram didn't - whimsical, fanciful, impractical at times.... You aren´t allowed to take photos inside the houses (the sale of souvenirs helps to fund the foundation set up by Maltilde Urrutia, his third wife), or I would have taken MANY.

We then took a bus down the coast to the town of Isla Negra (which is NOT an island despite its name). Neurda's house is on a cliff above a rocky beach with hard breaking waves. The house is huge and rambling. A collection of buildings with each room different in purpose and atmosphere from the next, many rooms filled with various collections of all sorts of objects - wooden statues formerly fronting ships, shells, masks, musical instruments, colored glass balls.... You can appreaciate the beauty and power of the sea while strolling the grounds or happy and warm inside looking out.

Our final stop on the Pablo Neruda tour was La Chascona (Neruda's nickname for his then mistress, later wife Matilde Urrutia - he was referring to her crazy hair). The property is in a lovely neighborhood of Santiago full of gorgeous houses, but Neruda´s is the most impressive - small in scale by grand in scope. Of all his housed this one seemed the most lived in. A small dining room for private meals, a large dining room for dinner parties, a bar, several spaces for work quite relexion, more collections of beautiful things, books, art, warmth, light, history, modernity, peace.

Neruda died shortly after Pinochet's takeover of his beloved country (of a broken heart it's said). But he lived a full and inspiring life, and I'm glad to have had the chance to see where he lived it.

Ellie

Thankyou & goodbye: 3 days in Santiago
Random Facts & Observations:
population - 5.8 million more or less
current books - A Short History of Nearly Everything (Kepfram), The Family Arsenal (Ellie)
black people count - over 10 our first day so we stopped counting, apparently it's an urban thing since we only saw about 5 in Chile prior to Santiago

There is never enough time.
Or rather we never have enough of it (after all time is infinite, it's us who are finite). We scheduled 3 days for our visit to Santiago, planning to take a night train south to Temuco the last night & continue on from there. The problem with all this is that with cities above a certain size it is hard to see all their attractions. It would have been nice to search out all the street art & ride all 15 ascensores in Valparaíso or visit each of the volcanoes around Quito, or more of Santiago's parks & neighborhoods, but it didn't happen.

I liked Santiago. Old buildings, tall new buildings, a well maintained subway, & plumbing systems that can accept toilet paper! Our hostal, had a HUGE, well equiped kitchen so I made dinner every night of our stay, often in stark contrast to the meals of the other guests (my lemon zest on one counter while someone else was making ramen noodles, or I'm making polenta as somone fries up a grilled cheese). I was asked numerous times if I was a chef. The hostal also had abundant HOT WATER, I don't know @ what point this became so precious, but I took a decadent 1/2 hour shower in celebration, just because I could.

We visited the Children's Museum & Aquarium with Cécile & Yvan, then La Chascona, Cerro Santa Lucia, & the Fine Arts Museum the next day. The kid's museum/aquarium were a bit dissapointing & not that interesting to me. Ellie liked La Chascona, but I prefer Neruda's poetry to his taste in architecture or interior design.
Cerro Santa Lucia was pretty. A hill turned park in downtown Santiago. Close to sunset the city smog turns a lovely golden orange & you can see the panoramic beauty of a city with lower air quality than Mexico City. For me, the fine/contemporary arts museum was good & bad. Some beautiful paintings, photos, & sculpture, & some contemporary work which I have not yet learned to appreciate in any language.

I'd like to visit Santiago again if not for the smoke. Everyone & everywhere we went, it was hard to escape. In the mall, the hostal, the subway station, even on our train out of town there was little consideration for those who didn't smoke. In our hostal when we asked the smokers to leave the kitchen if they weren't cooking anything they told us they could smoke in the hostal (kitchen included) & then were kind enough to put out their cigarettes so our food didn't taste like ash. The smoking "section" on the train is at both ends of the car by the bathrooms which does little to keep the smoke away from the rest of the passengers & nothing for anyone visiting the bathrooms.

Ellie´s Thoughts:
I suppose Santiago was once a beautiful city - before industrialization and the resulting air contamination (think Pasadena where you´d hardly know the valley is surrounded by mountains). Interestinly enough, although we were in town during a low air quality alert, you couldn´t smell the polution and our eyes didn´t burn.
The best thing about the city for me was the fabulous weather - quite a surprise after feeling so cold due to the constant fog in Valparaiso (only 300km away on the coast).

Incomplete Thoughts on Chile: Valparaíso
This city is beautiful. It's the legislative center of Chile (the congress was moved here some years ago so it would be less influenced by the president), but it doesn't remind me as much of Washington, D.C. as it does San Francisco (which I've never visited in case you were wondering). Valpo, as it's also know is spread over 44 hills by the sea & is Chile's major port city. It's full of lots of old buildings (apparently well constructed as there's little apparent evidence of earthquake damage), beautiful plazas, & old hillside elevators/ascensores/funiculares that work primarily by using the elevator going down as a couterweight for the up elevator. The most striking thing about the city was the volume of street art. There are some incredible murals and graffiti in sections of the city, I would love to spend a week here to take it all in.
The only downside to our visit was the dog poop in the streets (this town could really use Bob Barker)& it was a cloudy cold weekend.

Random Facts & Observations:

• Black person count since we arrived in Chile: 5, all in or near Valparaíso. I am still a novelty, yet I people don't seem to stare here like they did elsewhere.
• Abarrotes in spanish means groceries.
• Our hostel, Casa Aventura, was great despite the name (adventure house, or affair house depending on the context). It was not a party house, but quite the opposite a beautiful old building with a well equipped kitchen, really comfy beds, owners who were really welcoming & helpful, & the building was completely smoke-free (YEAH!).
• Smoking is incredibly common here! It's like the US maybe 30 or 40 years ago, there are no non-smoking sections or thought that anyone might be bothered by the smoke.

Kepfram

La Serena:
We were supposed to connect with a friend of a friend here, we also wanted to visit one of the world famus observatories just outside of the city, but none of this happened & still we had a great time.
La Serena is a pretty & not as expensive as San Pedro de Atacama, there are parks (including a Japanese garden we didn't get to visit), colonial style buildings, & our hostel, Hostal Jofre was comfortable enough (HOT water!) that we finally felt like we'd returned to civilization. Our long bus ride (17 hours) wasn't that bad except for the movie, but I try to think of bad movies as educational since I can read the subtitles or listen if they're dubbed. Actually our bus was really nice, it was new, & had a bathroom with TP (you have no idea how much of a rarity this is or how much of a contrast this is compared to Bolivia), and the roads here are excellent.
The highlight of our short stop in La Serena was actually outside of it. We took a tour along with our friends Yvon & Cecil (still with us since Bolivia) to Islas Damas & Choros. We saw a pod of dolphins, a bunch of sea lions, & a few different types of birds, including a few penguins.

Kepfram

San Pedro de Atacama is a dry, dusty, expensive, touristy town. We stayed there for 2 nights because we arrived on a holiday weekend (International Workers Day was Monday May 1st), and couldn't get a bus out until Tuesday night. Example of expense: the hostel we stayed in charged the equivalent of $10 per load to USE their washing machine & hang up your own clothes on the line......
The town certainly has some tourist attractions, but the price tags were quite a shock after our time in Ecuador, Peru, & especially Bolivia. We did take one tour - to see la valle de los muertos & la valle de la luna. We took this tour the afternoon we arrived along with the rest of our group from el Salar de Uyuni (Rafael had a night bus north, Franck & Charlotte took a bus north Monday night, and Yvan & Cécile stayed with us until Tuesday night to head south to la Serena). It was actually quite a good tour, with a unique landscape (lots of incredibly fine soft sand, beautifully warm weather, and incredible rock and salt formations), and a tour guide who gave us MUCH more information in a few hours than our Salar guide had given us in 3 days!!
We spent the next day killing time and Kepfram cooked up some great food in the hostal kitchen for our new friends. Because of dinner we didn't take the recommended star tour on Monday night (the constantly clear skies make this part of the world idea for star gazing), but if you ever go, it's supposed to be quite good...

Ellie

What I learned in Bolivia:

• Dogs sometimes have homes! this is only in the cities or larger towns, and we still seem plenty of street dogs, but even those who have homes don't have groomers....
• Dirt roads don't have to be full of pot holes - they're not bad in places where there is not much rain (although we did have to ford some streams in our bus) Costa Rica still maintains it's title of worst roads in Latin America...
• No Bolivian buses have bathrooms - the buses will generally stop once or twice along a long route - but one of our buses actually stopped at a store/restaurant (during a 6 hour trip) at a spot with NO BATHROOMS - the passengers had to go looking for bushes (this was unfortunately the day I sprained my ankle, so Kepfram had to carry me into the bushes & then back out again... what an experience!)
• I learned to dehydrate myself before getting on a bus.
• On long bus rides the extra driver sleeps in a compartment UNDER the bus, next to the luggage compartments.
• Bus drivers here double as mechanics - in fact the only travel issues we've had in our journey so far has been in Bolivia - on 2 out of the 3 bus trips we took.
• TP does not come standard in hotel rooms - even those with private baths, neither do towels.
• Especially useful to know for the last morning in a hotel room - you can use the bed sheets to dry off and thus avoid having to pack wet towels for your journey.
• Bolivia is full of arid, mineral rich highlands and tropical lowlands - but has no sea access - and therefore a LONG history of political/economic problems.
• Bolivia is the poorest country we'll visit (poverty rate about 65% of the population with extreme poverty for over 35%), and as a result the least expensive - meals and hotel rooms for $2 per person...
• It's actually cheaper to eat out here than to shop for food in the supermarket!
• Common houses here are still mostly made of adobe and sometimes stone, with better constructions made of cement (there is still very little wood, at least in the highlands).
• In the cities there are baños publicos all over the place (of course you have to pay to use them) - you still see men peeing in the streets - these bathrooms are so common in fact that I wonder if poor people's lodging could be lacking certain facilities...
• Bolivian people are much more chatty than Peruvians or Ecuadorans, therefore Kefram and I have had plenty of opportunity to practice our Castillano (don't call it "español" - the Spanish are the conquerors, the theives, the exploiters...)
• We observed many Bolivians using the "vos" form when speaking to each other.
• There are HUGE herds of llamas and many wild vicuñas in the highlands of Bolivia.
• All the salt in Bolivia's salt flats is harvested by one community, and just used for local consumption.
• There is no science to putting iodine into salt in Bolivia, we took a tour of a salt "factory" where they told us that they use 1kg of iodine to 600,000kg of salt - when asked how they measure it out, the guide sort of shrugged and told us they put in the amount that feels right...

Ellie

addendum:

• Since we left Bolivia on April 30th, we weren´t there to witness the reaction to President Evo Morales´s nationalization of the Bolivian gas industry on May 1st (International Labor Day). If you want to read more about this story, try Wikipedia.