So freaking sweet to be back. Except for the fact that my favourite hostel in the entire world was apparently booked out solid up until the end of August ie until AFTER I'd flown home. I found out later - when I went to go visit them and collect the stuff that I had left there 6 months ago - that they were RENOVATING the dorms and thus no room available....so sad. But it was really nice when the lovely Ceci opened the door and was all exclaims and hugs and kisses and wanting to show me her new baby (she was preggers when I left to gallavant around South America).

I then decided to stay at Palermo House with a friend that I met in Cordoba, the wonderful Emily from Canadia. Palermo House was a party hostel, not as bad as crazy Milhouse, but still, up there with the party hostel clan. The owner and the staff always went out with us, cracking onto anyone who was blonde with a fevor that smelled slightly of desperate desperation. There were some great pals to be made, special mention to Andy from Perth who cooked the best curries in a hostel in Buenos Aires ever and let me eat them too. Very special.

The days in Buenos Aires involved sleeping in, having coffee and reading at the bookstore-cum-cafe next door, buying clothes/shoes/anything and trying to get someone to go to the Jesus Themepark with me (never happened, plus, the once time where it looked like it would actually happen, I was sleeping and determined not to get up at the ungodly hour of 11.30am. AM). The nights involved steak, red wine, Fernet y Coke, Algerian food, music, wandering around town and doing the Pogo. It was the best. The very best.

I met up with my lovely friend Ximena who I met in Mexico and went to see the flamingoes with (perhaps you remember?) and she took me and the American boys to a university party which was awesome. We danced like crazy people, like actual crazy people, and I even ran into a random French dude I had met in Arequipa, Peru. What ARE the chances?

Photo montage...

A rad bar near our hostel



( ....and a hundred meters from The Finish..... )

And then from the snowy fields of Las Leñas back to Mendoza I went. For, what is it now?, the THIRD time. Boy, I must love that place. Luckily for me, English Boy Glenn was also there, indulging in a 3 dollar bottle of gin with me for mostly, Old Times' Sake. Mendoza didn't/couldn't fascinate for long, due to me having worn it out a long time ago. Bearing a very fond farewell to the town that I knew thrice, I headed to Cordoba, the University City.

A lovely little hostel, many a day trip, miles of meanderings throughout the city and a multitude of late-night/early morning visits to the local nightlife made for a very good time indeed.




( ....so close....to...the...end... )

For no other reason than that I had a lot of spare time on my hands, and clearly, money was burning a hole in my pocket, and Ollie kept planting the seeds of snow-love in my brain and all of a sudden, I was off to the snow. And now just any snow, Las Leñas snow. Las Leñas is like the little international ski resort of the South Americas. Everything is stupidly expensive, all the socially elite flock here to swish down the slopes in designer Versace and the night-life is all full of Paris-Hilton-wannabes. Why? WHY? I really can't tell you why, except that I went and I even left early.

I decided that I wanted to learn how to ski. It was a ridiculous decision. I arranged ski hire and snow gear hire. The shop that I went to very seriously wanted to hire me out a fantastic looking bright yellow onesie, circa The 80's. They just could not fathom why I was insisting on separate pants and a jacket in the more demure shades of gray, blue and black. I was clearly just not fashionable enough for Las Leñas. I lined up some lessons, I fell on stupid "chair lifts" that consisted of some kind of device you wedge between your groin and I watched little 5-yr-old kids whizz past me on the slopes. It was very humiliating. And, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it would've been totally different if I had strapped on a snowboard because, clearly, I'm pretty much an expert at that. No, not at all. But I'm sure that I'm at least a little bit more comfortable on that kind of snow-device. Better one than four things to impale yourself with.

The scenery was dramatic, the days warm and sunny and the drinking at night, very agreeable. But I sucked at skiing and the boys were all off doing the double black million diamond snowboarding runs and having a great time because they weren't confined to the bunny slopes and banned from the weird playground-equipment-looking things that were masquerading as chair lifts.




( Snowmen, snowshoes, snowballs, snowsleds, snowmachines, snowgoings )

There was a town near Mendoza called Uspallata. Apparently where most of Seven Years in Tibet was filmed. Very surprisingly, not in Tibet, as one would have assumed.

Due to me being lazy and buses that wouldn't let me on, I arrived in the town at nighttime, and didn't get off the right bus stop to get to my hostel. Luckily, the HOTEL where the bus dropped me off at, gave me a lift to the HOSTEL which happened to be 10km out of town. I walked in all starving and delirious and met this bunch of mendocinos hanging out in the kitchen, talking about music, cooking meet and drinking red wine. For a change.

They very kindly included me, gave me unlimited glasses of wine and fed me delicious steak.



( Two days in Tibet )

Mendoza. World class wineries everywhere. I'm pretty sure they were that delicious. Got a posse, caught a bus, and off we were to the one of the greatest wine-making regions of the world! Trumpets please.



We met this crazy guy, who got on the bus a few stops before the one where all the tourists get off. His name was Hugo, he was offering bikes for rent and he rocked. We ended up haggling him out of five bikes, full day hire for a grand total of FIFTEEN PESOS per bike for the whole day. Otherwise known as five dollars. It was sweet. We got a map, we got some recommendations, and off we went.


( bikes and wines... )

Nightmares on buses. Who would've thought? In Argentina, where they are luxurious, they feed you and bathe you, this journey was a nightmare. There was a dilemma. Bus from Cafayate to Tucuman, took seven hours and left at 6am. But, bus backtracking from Cafayate to Salta and THEN bus from Salta to Tucuman, left slightly later and took maybe eight hours. I clearly didn't calculate the time the bus would remain stationary due to the farmers' protests that had been going on for a while now. I'm a sucker for NOT getting up at 5am and so did the Cafayate --> Salta --> Tucuman route. The Salta to Tucuman journey, normally about five hours, took nine. Hurrah. Keeping in mind I was still mildly suffering from Bolivian-related illness, it was huge fun. Huge fun.

I then got into Tucuman at 10pm, had to battle with the sourest reception girl at the hostel who I wanted to punch in the face and then spent the night not trying to converse with a drunk Argentinean guy who couldn't speak English and was convinced that I was fluent enough in Spanish to have a detailed discussion about his university course which I think was engineering or maths or something. Added to this was the receptionist, constantly flouncing past, trying to flirt with Argentinean guy and then lasering me with The Evil Eye for some reason that I couldn't fathom and I was pretty sick of Tucuman. So, I was pretty ready to hightail it to Mendoza the very next day.

The next morning was much more enjoyable, having met a super awesome Israeli guy and his two French friends at breakfast, walking around town and having some really good conversations. Anyways, it was not meant to be as that night we were all going to be on buses going to very different corners of Argentina. At least I got one photo of Tucuman in that time...

Onwards ho! To Northern Argentina. First stop, Salta. After an extraordinarily long night bus from the Bolivian-Argentinean border. And yes. I was still sick. Which meant we didn't really do much/did nothing at all. The hostel was a bit of a dead-end, no cool people hanging about, and the town was a bit of nothing-special too. It may have been awesome, but that slipped by me and my sickness pretty quietly. One thing that I did do here was to climb up a bazillion stairs to the lookout point. And then come down on the chair lift, which, incidentally, was only of the only pictures I took. Which isn't even true, because I didn't even take the pictures.



Yup, it's a pretty big, polluted city.

Surprisingly* I was still sick. It may have been because I didn't see a doctor for my illness and it may have been because the antibiotic for my illness negated the drinking of alcohol for the duration of its course. No one knows, really.

*not a surprise at all

So I wanted to get to someplace/anyplace warmer and that, unfortunately, meant bypassing a good portion of Bolivia so that I could head into the much more temperate and altitude-friendly region that they call Northern Argentina. On the way there I wanted to make a brief stopover at a little Bolivian town called Tupiza. Much closer to sea-level (although, don't get too excited, not quite there yet), the days were sunny and warm-ish, and the nights were less inviting to frostbite. Also, the area around here is where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were killed after they robbed a nearby bank. For more information, you should see the movie.

Horseriding was the business here and yee-ha! I said. I sure did.

So I randomly found some pictures from things I did in La Paz. Very randomly because they were neither in my flickr account OR my photo CDs and ONLY on my old camera memory card. Weird.

The good news is that we went to a lovely little music museum. Which was fun because we got to play on random instruments made of bottles and bang on drums to our hearts' content! And also, there were strange-instrument-like objects displayed, such as like,


...meant to be played like so...

Bearing a heartfelt goodbye to Isla del Sol, we headed to the highest capital in the world - La Paz (at 3600m or so). I spent quite a few days here, mostly because of the sickness that had crawled itself into my gut. That made me unable to eat and bed bound for a couple of days. It wasn't all bad though. I lost a whopping 5kgs or so, actually, it was probably more, and adopted the really hot "anorexic chic look". It was hot. I love skeletal.

Entonces, I didn't really have much ability to take photos. La Paz was high. Really sunny in the day and really cold at night. There was a weird French guy at the hostel that claimed he was "from the world" and told an Israeli guy at the hostel (whom I met later on in my travels, and relayed this story to me) that one day, he was going to go to Israel and kill all the Jews. Huh. And then, at some point, he pulled a machete on a Japanese guy staying at the hostel too (also relayed to me by Israeli guy). That guy was definitely creep central. One day we tried to find the black market to buy some cool stuff and we couldn't find it. Yup. Great story.

And so, when French guy had sufficiently creeped me out to the extent that I left La Paz, whilst still majorly sick with gastro, plugged up with a lot more anti-diarrhoeal tablets than was safe, to spend five hours on a bus and then a further seven hours on a train, to get to Uyuni, the town from whence I would adventure off to see the amazing Salar de Uyuni or the Uyuni Salt Flats. Phew. Yeah. That guy was really that creepy.

Uyuni is the town where good weather comes to die. The train arrived at the town at 3am. We only had to walk 300m to our hostel, during which time my feet had completely frozen over and I really and truly could not feel them at all whatsoever. THREE HUNDRED METRES. That's all it took. It was FREEZING. Below zero type of freezing.

We managed to wrangle the regular four-day-three-night tour of the salt flats and got chucked in a old, rustbucket of a four-wheel-drive with two Texans, a Japanese guy living in the States and two Belgians.

First stop: The Train Graveyard
Stacks of fun because we could climb all over rusting, craggy bits of metal to our hearts' content! You just CAN'T do that shit in Australia...

The strike ended and we ran for the buses earmarked for Bolivia, along with 30 million other tourists and locals alike who had been stranded in Puno for the last couple of days. Next stop, Copacabana, situated on the Bolivian side of Lago Titicaca. From Copacabana, we caught a boat across to a fabulous island known as Isla del Sol (Island of the Sun) where the Incas believed the sun god was born.

It was beautiful/amazing/all manner of crazy descriptive words for awesomeness. The island is at around 3800m from sea level, as is the lake, which made walking around the hilly terrain incredibly exhausting. But still, incredibly incredible. Watch. And this is all the view from our very basic, very chilly variety of accomodation.

(Yes, that is a snow-capped mountain range you see in the wee background there)

Then, bearing a teary goodbye to Hanneke, who had accompanied me all the way from Colombia, through epic bus journeys and whatnot, I trudged onwards to Puno, a little town on the Peruvian shores of Lago Titicaca, apparently the world's highest navigable lake (or not, as Lonely Planet disputed itself within the same South America on a Shoestring book). It's really high (about 3800m) and really beautiful.

I got my shoes shined by some kids who insisted on charging us TWENTY DOLLARS for it until we laughed and gave them 10 soles (the local currency and also, in this particular case, a hilarious pun). They did a good little job though.

Sorry folks, I´ve had Fernet. Which is like a herbal, alcoholic beverage that hurts. And so this post will either be (a) HILARIOUS OR (b) incredibly tedious.

I wanted to climb a mountain over 6000m. And for no other reason than that, I signed up for such a stupid feat.

This mountain was actually meant to be one of the few mountains over 6000m that could be easily summitted without the use of technical climbing techniques. Which was handy, because I didn´t possess any technical climbing techniques.

Two of the girls at the hostel (somehow, Hanneke included) wanted to go along with me.

It started off happy. A long ride in a 4WD with many vicuñas (a cousin of the llama that only grows at greater than 3000m or something genetically unselective) running free and wild.

 

So after suffering a brain aneurysm of some sort, I decided to bypass the rest of Ecuador and most of Peru (including Machu Picchu - but that was a moral stance that I can rant about another day, preferably when drunk)and head to Arequipa, which is in Peru but mighty close to the Bolivian border. Luckily, Hanneke had had the same kind of brain aneurysm and decided to accompany me on the three day, multiple-bus change journey. We almost were left at the border by the super-efficient international bus company whilst changing money, and then realised we had been royally ripped off because we hadn`t checked it all properly in our haste to chase down the bus. I could`ve punched the lady in the face when she hopped off the bus, all innocence, claiming "Did you two go to the toilets?". No, I shouted in her stupid face, we were changing money, right in front of the immigration counter where you were meant to be making sure that everyone got back on the bus BEFORE YOU DROVE OFF INTO PERU, you giant piece of work. That was exciting. I hadn`t been angry in months. I missed anger - it plays such a big role in the day-to-day functioning of my life...

Anyway, made it into Arequipa, three days later, where the hostel was incredible, the food, amazing and the weather very very agreeable.

And so, for no other reason than we managed to stumble upon a nice-looking tattoo parlour whilst on our daily wanderings of the city, I spontaneously decided to get a tattoo. Hanneke actually had the idea for the design and I thought, why the hell not, what a CRAZY souvenior of Ecuador this is going to make.



Goodbye forever naked neck! Never will you be the same again! 

And then I arrived in Quito, for the second time in my travels, but this time I was carting around a blonde Dutchie with me as well. We went to see the equator. Fascinating stuff.



That says "City - Middle of the World" 

And after horseriding and eating thai curries, I was en route back to Ecuador. We actually met a DJ from England at our hostel in San Augustìn who was really good friends with Groove Armada even slipping in that "we both DJed on the Ibiza circuit in the 90`s". So Philip decided to backtrack to Bogotà to score a free backstage pass to Groove Armada (which was apparently awesome) and while the offer was really really really tempting and I really couldn`t decide, I flipped a coin and the coin said that I was waking up at 5am and heading to Ecuador tomorrow.

My destination was a town called Otavalo, well known for it`s gigantic Saturday markets. Tomorrow was Friday. I was hoping to get to the town by Friday night. Unfortunately, it had bucketed rain on Thursday night. I woke up super early Friday morning to walk the half hour into town and to catch the first of many a bus that would get me into Ecuador. Because of the rain, the downhill dirt path into town had turned into a mud slippery slide and between my backpack and my thongs, pretty much everything went wrong. First my thongs kept getting bogged in the mud, suction style. So I took them off and was squelching barefoot in a mixture of mud and horse manure. Deliciously warm and gooey. Secondly, my sense of balance is never really great at the best of times but when you strap a 20kg backpack on me and send me traversing down mud plains....well let`s just say it was very slow work, with baby steps and trying not to fall on my back, turtle style. If that had happened, I would`ve been stuck there until the sun came up and Pancho arrived for his morning horseriding appointment.

Luckily, I didn`t fall. Unluckily, the mud/manure had wedged itself into my toenail crevices and the slow goings made me miss the 5.30am minibus to the next biggest town where there was a direct bus to the border. The 6am minibus arrived at the town just in time for me to see that bus pull out and drive off into the distance, along with all my hopes and desires. I then had to catch a bus from that town to another town and then another bus from THAT town to ANOTHER town and then one more to the border. Que terrible. And because all that took forever I ended up at the border at about 9pm. Now the border isn`t the safest place to be hanging out at daytime, and now it was becoming increasingly clear that I would be forced to stay overnight. At the border. It was interesting.

Woke up super early again on the Saturday and caught the first bus to Otavalo just in time to catch the afternoon part of the markets. Relief.

 

So after a night that involved alcohol, a Spanish guy, an angry-but-in-a-hilarious-way emaya, a humourless Brit and a Dutch girl who spoke English with a high-society accent (later on I found out that she also spoke Dutch with the same pretentious flair), me and Philip left extraordinarily early to go to San Augustìn. In true New Zealander-who-lives-in-Australia fashion he decided to combat his hangover/bad mood with more beer. For a seven hour bus ride. I then decided to combat my hangover/bad mood with increasing quantities of bitchiness.

We arrived in San Augustìn hating eachother, hungry and definitely not shiny. We heard it was a good idea to stay out at this hostel/farm about 1km from town and up some kind of dirt road. It was owned by a Swiss-German expat who cooked delicious thai curries. How`s that for a random combination of cultures. Hilarious American Girl turned out to be there so that lightened the mood somewhat indeed. I also bumped into a couple of people that I had met in Bogotà. The girl, due to some unfortunate mugging incident, had her left arm in a cast and the guy, due to some unfortunate incident involving a ceiling fan, had his right arm in a cast. And somewhere between Bogotà and San Augustìn they had hooked up, traveller-style and had made for the most hilarious couple I had seen in a while. THEY BOTH HAD CASTS. ON OPPOSITE ARMS. So great.

Since me and Philip were both pretty much experts at riding horses, we signed up for horseriding the next day.

Our guide was Pacho and he was great. There are some anthropomorphic ruins hanging about in the area too and they were visited along the way. The scenery was also spectacular. And these horses weren`t for the faint of heart. They weren`t your regular variety tourist-horses that are trained not to go a wisp above a slow trot. These horses galloped. It was exhilarating.


 

I could feel my time in Colombia coming to an end as I inched closer and closer to the Colombian-Ecuadorian border. Next stop. Popayàn. Bypassing plastic surgery mega-town of Cali (breast implants for only a THOUSAND dollars)(apparently). Mainly because I wanted to make it to some indigenous markets that were only held on Tuesday and the nearest town which was Popayàn. Not a great deal to do here. Churches and stuff. You know the deal.


A street vendor selling something seemingly yummy out front...


SEEMINGLY yummy. Those are wedges of coconut sauteed in sugar caramel. And those are bees. Not flies. BEES.
 

So there was a massive group of us and as I mentioned briefly before, we all piled into a little jeep like clowns in a clown car. The valley, was indeed beautiful. And muddy. And involved climbing a mountain and thus, automatically became loads of fun. Lots of Indiana Jones-style bridges, hummingbirds, some delicious cheese and soldiers. And not necessarily in that order.