Off to the monkeys

We are doing great!!

Our 4 day trip through the desert was otherworldly. We chose a great tour company, the staff were great and there was abundant food.

Natalia making lunch.

Desert and mountains in shades of ochre as far as the eye could see, dotted with ethereal mineral lagoons in striking colours like bright orange, electric yellow, pale green, and thousands of flamingos. Active smoking volcanoes, stinky sulphurous geisers at 5000m, and a salt flat 10 000 square kilometers, blinding white hexagonal tiles in every direction. Goofy looking ostriches sprinting through the desert. Dorky looking llamas and alpacas and their wild cousin, the far more elegant endangered vicuña. I can't understand camelids, grazing on sand with no water source in any direction for dozens of kilometers. Adorable vizcachàs, which sort of look like a giant bunny with a long bushy tail and a tendency to stand on their haunches like a squirrel. Rusty-blond foxes. A bunch of new human friends that hail from South Africa and France, with whom we'd play cards and share travel stories in the evenings in our remote little guesthouses in the desert, lit by a dim bulb powered by a sole solar panel.

the striking red Lago Colorado, a red mineral lake with a big black storm blowing in.

Times that made us wonder if we were dreaming...sitting in a hot spring at 4800m, nothing except for sand as far as we could see, the tall peaks devoid of any green of any kind at all. A few meters from us the blue-green mineral lagoon's shore was crusted with white minerals that looked liked waves caught frozen in time mid-break, and the lake was covered with hundreds of flamingos.

Our land cruiser racing across the salar at 5am, white as far as we could see, the sun just starting to blush the horizon, we arrive at an island that was once a massive coral formation in the ancient inland sea. It's covered in giant cacti estimated at around a thousand years old. We hike to the top of that island, and the confusion of the beaches around island that are not liquid. That the white is not snow.

A gigantic lake the color of canned tomato soup, with a white crusty shore, dotted with flamingos. A hot sun and a fierce wind with a huge black storm system blowing in before our eyes.

one of the many mineral lagoons.

A valley surrounded by mossy hills that appear to be in a strange quilted pattern...vaguely reminiscent of the way hills are terraced for farming in Asia, but strategically different. Upon inquiry I was thrilled to learn it's leftover land division from the Incas. Still intact. The valley floor is covered in large clumps of the ancient fossilized coral, unmistakeably coral shaped, and between these stone masses, the present; endless fields of quinoa, which requires no irrigation. So many layers of history.

the hot spring

Nate is all better, I'm still coughing but it's nowhere near as violent as it was a week ago. What we're surprised at is that we're still struggling with the elevation, we've been between 3500-5000m for the last 8 days. Even Nate with superhuman cardio health struggles to catch his breath. Evidence that altitude sickness has nothing to do with fitness at all. We just arrived in a city called Cochabamba last night and feel noticeably better at 2558m. The first night of our trek our entire group had headaches and insomnia at 3800m.

Our trip ended in a little grim town called Uyuni, and we got right out of there. Took an 8 hour bone-rattling night bus ride on a wretched highway that may have been unpaved the entire way and arrived in Oruro (3700m). The 4 day trek was amazing, and we were exhausted, from lots of very early mornings and a lot of stimuli, and treated ourself to our first hotel room. We needed to do a thorough re-organize of our packs, purge some clutter, sleep in a quiet room without 6 other travelers. We watched mindless television, took overly long showers, slept SO well and we were refreshed. The grandmotherly matriarch of the family that owned the little hotel spoke the best English we'd encountered in quite some time. She told me her best friend moved to Montreal years ago. Upon asking when we needed to check out she kindly told me that it wasn't busy, to take my time, stay til 2 or 3 o'clock. When she tucked us into our cab to go to the bus she squeezed my arms in the most motherly way and told us to come back some day. It was $30 well spent.

We are having little pangs for Christmas and will do our best to call family tonight...Bolivia is really into Christmas and it may be hard to find a place open to make a call from.

Cochabamba, where we are now, is the biggest city we've been to in Bolivia so far. It's bustling and efficient. The outskirts of the cities are very sad slums...Bolivia is the closest thing I've experienced to the poverty I witnessed in India. We really liked Oruro, too. The markets are amazing. Bolivians, especially the indigenous Quechua do NOT want their photo taken, and you either need to be really sly or miss out on many cool photo op's. I tend to chicken out and respect their wish not to be photographed.

Bolivians are jolly. Once again I'm struck by how people in the countries I've visited who possess the least material wealth, seem more generally cheerful and easygoing that the counterpart.

I really enjoy the folk music of Bolivia, the most of any latin American country I've visited thus far. The food is boring, but the fruit is incredible. We're so close to Brazil we're getting amazing mangos, now. Yesterday in the market a jolly plump Quechua woman bullied Nate, to the point that instead of getting the two mangos we wanted, we walked away with 4 gigantic mangos and 6 grenadillas. Grenadillas are in the passion fruit family and I absolutely love them. Her reasoning was that she couldn't give us change for our 20 Boliviano note, and so we simply had to leave with 20 Bolivianos worth of fruit. ($3) We really miss the tasty, (safe) tap water of Argentina and feel acutely aware of the dozens of plastic bottles we are consuming.

There are no backpackers in either city that we've seen thus far, and the backpacker hostels don't exist. We're in modest little "hostales". Our decision to spend two weeks at Parque Machia means we will miss out on a couple of very interesting cities (Potosi and Sucre) but it feels great to be noticeably OFF the gringo trail, and doing something different. Not a single backpacker had heard of the NGO we'll be working with, or even the national park where the refuge is located. We're both excited to do somehing totally new and unfamiliar, and that contributes. At Machia there is a puma who is undersize for a full grown puma. He has malformed legs from being struck repeatedly as an evil circus attempted to train him to jump through flaming rings. He's an example of one of the resident animals that was confiscated from a bad situation and will live out his life in their care as he will never be able to survive in the wild. Apparently he loves women. There are 700 animals there.

Off we go to Villa Tunari shortly, and to Parque Machia tomorrow, to start our two week stay on the refuge.

I wish you all Merry Christmas, Festivus, etc, and a happy new year.

First taste of Bolivia

So we left Jujuy, not feeling awesome but feeling somewhat better, and caught a five hour bus up to the dusty, windy, chilly border town of La Quiaca, altitude 3,442m. The bus ride was BEAUTIFUL, wild desert and canyons, with mountains striated in completely surreal colors from mineral deposits. I have never seen pastel mountains before. The highway cut through the Quebrada de Humahuaca national park and wove through passes of startling color and beauty and we loved it. The bus ride was even more enjoyable because a couple sitting next to us with their six year old daughter were so excited about how excited WE were, watching us snapping photos out the window. I loved how proud they were of their country....if we had returned our attention to our books and something especially cool was around a bend they would get our attention.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebrada_de_Humahuaca

Nate was still really unwell, and barely ate any dinner, and we went to sleep early and slept well in our cold hostel room with ample heavy blankets. After breakfast we walked the couple kilometers to the border.

What an easy border crossing! Lots of weary Bolivians with heavy loads, it looks like people cross the border back and forth between Argentina and Bolivia a lot, and it seemed like maybe people shop for things in Argentina that are difficult to obtain, or expensive, in Bolivia. It took about an hour and a half in a lineup to cross.

Our first impressions of Bolivia are awesome. It's the first time in my life I've encountered friendly and cheerful border staff. The border town on the Bolivian side of the border, Villazon, is chaotic and poor. We waited a few hours for a train to take us to Tupiza, where we are now.The three hour train in the lowest class of car cost us about $2.50. The train was mainly filled with Quechua people, bogged down with heavy loads, lots of colorful clothing, tons of kids. Quechuas wear hats with so much style. It was a pleasant ride. I always like riding trains.

Our hostel in La Quiaca had called ahead to reserve a room for us in Tupiza. Hostels in the Hostelling International network tend to be very helpful. We were pleasantly surprised to get off our train in the darkness, people and chaos everywhere, and there was a girl of about twenty and a teenage boy in a vest with our hostel name on it looking for us. She must have scoped out the assorted backpackers and taken a guess cause she asked if my name was Jessica. It felt nice to be met at our train!

Today is kind of practical stuff, banking and laundry, communication, and tomorrow we depart on a four day tour of the Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat. The trip is in a 4x4, and is costing us about $180. We'll see smoking volcanoes, geisers, mineral lakes in bizarre colors, Andean flamingos...Jon did the same tour last week and gushed and gushed about it. It's one of the bigger splurges of the trip but we're really pumped.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Uyuni

We finish in the town of Uyuni and then make our way to the animal refuge, to start a fifteen day volunteer stint. The organization has three different refuges, and they're all appealing in different ways, and they all need help, and they aren't even remotely near to each other, so we're still trying to choose which one we'll go to...although I think it will be Parque Machia. It looks like we'll be on the refuge for Christmas and New Years.
http://www.intiwarayassi.org/articles/volunteer_animal_refuge/volunteer_parque_machia.html

feeling low in Jujuy

So what is with us getting sick?! Not cool.

After Salta we headed to this quiet town called Jujuy about 300km south of the Bolivian border. It's a beautiful place and historically important to Argentina so we thought we'd make a quick stop on our way to Bolivia. The day we left Salta Nate woke up with a really sore throat and felt generally crappy, and once we arrived in Jujuy (it was only a three hour bus ride) he went straight to bed and slept for the rest of the day, got up to eat a little dinner, and then went back to bed and slept for seventeen hours straight.

We're in a very quiet hostel which is good, since now Nate is quite sick. He's been sleeping a lot for three days and has an ongoing bad headache. This is the first time I've seen him sick, the guy has a great immune system. We went to emergency today to get looked at, the both of us. Nate was rather reluctant but after I checked out his throat with a headlamp I was rather bossy about it cause it looked like an infection...and sure enough he's been put on a round of amoxicillin.

I continue to cough and cough and cough, it's especially bad at night, and she prescribed diphenhydramine, which surprised me. While the quick exams in this very ghetto ancient hospital inspired less confidence than the one I went to in El Bolson we picked up our medicine and we're giving it a shot. She seems sure I don't have an infection in my lungs, but rather some congestion and inflammation.

Morale isn't awesome, I'm not going to lie. We're both looking forward to Bolivia and want to get better. The weather is really grey and bland and we've got cabin fever. I'm just burning through books to pass time mostly. We're bored. None of the WWOOF farms up here worked out, either full for volunteers or we got no reply, so we're ready to move on to Bolivia. Regardless of how we're doing tomorrow we're going to move on in the morning. It's a five hour bus, and then we walk over the border and get another bus to a town about three hours further.

I'm sorry it sounds whiny...oh boo hoo, poor Jess and Nate are having a tough week traveling in a foreign country and not working the winter in Canada...but it's not fun to be sick when you're not at home. It's still beautiful, we still feel so fortunate to be able to be away for so long, but we want to get back at'er. It feels like we're stuck in a rut.

There are only three WWOOF farms in Bolivia but we found something else we'd like to do. It's a paid volunteer situation (I understand that's a paradox, but there's lots of volunteer stuff out there that costs money) but it's really not very much money, and the rewards are high. We're quite excited. It's the rainy season in Bolivia and apparently they're DESPERATE for volunteers at this time of year. We don't need to apply, we can just show up.

http://www.intiwarayassi.org/articles/volunteer_animal_refuge/home.html

I haven't mentioned the national pastime of daily naps here. People take siestas every day, and the majority of business close from 2-5pm. You can't find anything much of anything that's not an official office or essential service open in that time slot. The occasional ice cream shop or fast food joint, but they're far and few between. It's actually quite surreal, anywhere other than Buenos Aires becomes a ghost town. Yesterday afternoon I wanted to pick up some bread and I had to walk fifteen blocks to find some. I could have been doing naked cartwheels down the middle of the street and no one would have noticed. It's kind of annoying cause we're not accustomed to it. Sundays are also closed, there is no one on the streets.

People are really pumped for Christmas but it feels so weird to not be a part of it. I admit to having pangs of longing for home and seeing everyone. It happened last year too.

I've read a streak since leaving home.

The Help (loved it)

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (sad, dark story, but worth the time)

Dreams of Joy by Lisa See (reminded me a little of Joy Luck Club)

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett (so good)

Bossypants (fun, light read, by Tina Fey formerly of SNL)

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (amazing)

The Cookbook Collector (meh)

Little Bee (very good also)

and I'm about halfway through Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, and loving it.

We have crossed into the land of beautiful wools..there are lots of shops selling exquisite alpaca and llama wools and I want to pick up some needles and make some scarves. Good way to pass the long bus rides. It's pretty expensive here, like what it costs back home, so I'll wait and get some alpaca stuff in Bolivia.

That's all folks! I'm going to pick up some empanadas and humitas and head back to the hostel to see how my sick boyfriend is doing.

Now we´re in Salta!

We loved Cordoba. As Argentina´s second biggest city, of 3 million people, you might think it would be kind of draining but in the same way Buenos Aires is leafy and walkable, Cordoba is really pleasant too...but with a grittiness I rather liked. The beautiful architecture, colonial era buildings, cobblestone streets, but without the glossy veneer of B.A.

There were more things that I associate with places that aren´t home- Buenos Aires had no street food, but here there are lots of street stands selling roasted and/or candied nuts (nuts are a big crop in Argentina), fruit, and these delicious sandwiches called choripan - big crunchy bread rolls with a barbecued chorizo and a bunch of chimichurri sauce and occasionally some veggies. Lots of elderly ladies sitting on sidewalks with big baskets of produce. They grow beautiful garlic here, big fat heads with a few massive cloves instead of many tiny ones. The skin has a purply tinge and it has excellent flavour. Cherries are in season and we ate lots. The peaches are extraordinary, too. Down in patagonia the green veggies were gorgeous but the fruit was boring, local red delicious apples (not my favorite variety at all) oranges, grapefruit and bananas...but up here the stone fruit is all in season and it´s very good.

The museum in Che Guevara´s childhood home was a huge learning experience and I feel like I understand his life so much more now. It´s located in a tiny town called Alta Gracia, about an hour from Cordoba. Che´s severe childhood asthma led their family doctor to recommend a move from Buenos Aires to Alta Gracia and the family home is now a musem. The extensive texts mounted around the museum were beautifully translated into binders in the language of your choice and we spent quite some time there. Lots of museums don´t have any translations available so this was a treat.

There also happened to be a tattoo convention in town while we were there and it was a fun evening going to that. There was some fantastic music, and unsurprisingly a lot of very talented tattooists from around the country.

The Quebrada del Condorito national park was wild and beautiful, so unlike any mountains in Canada, and it´s a sanctuary for condors. It turned out to be a rather intense day for us... Despite the fact that we know perfectly well never to trust the weather in the mountains, we left Cordoba without raincoats...it was a dazzling bluebird day. The bus to the park was about an hour and a half or so, and we were about 10km into the 20km+ hike when we got pummeled and soaked to the core by a really scary thunderstorm, complete with hail. The temperature dropped like crazy and we got much too cold and wet.

We rushed back to the visitors center, and the soonest bus back the the city was 2.5 hours later, with nowhere close to the park to go, in any direction for many kilometers. The visitors center is no Le Relais...nowhere to sit and get comfortable, and totally indifferent staff. We were wringing out our clothes in the bathroom with teeth literally chattering. All my merino layers were sopping wet. There were 2 nice Spaniards in the same boat as us and were quite the comical sight, all in our underwear rolling out layers of toilet paper onto the counters to attempt to dry our clothes. The visitor center closed but we could at least continue to access part of the building with the bathrooms and we were just miserable, so cold, until the storm broke and the sun came out. The four of us draped our clothes all over the fences and hung them on random things and sat out in the sun to dry a little. It was quite funny. Eventually we had to put our wet clothes back on to catch the bus and I was way way way too cold on the airconditioned bus back, and I can´t help but wonder if it was a factor in my cough coming back. We didn´t see any condors, they aren´t so into storms either. We felt really stupid for not being prepared for weather. Looking back, it was an adventure, and it was still a really gorgeous hike until we got drenched.

That´s right, I´m sick again. I was 90% better when it turned around and decided to take another go at me. This time I have no fevers, no sinus issues, but my awful hacking cough is making me crazy. Nate is being amazing.

So overall, we think Cordoba was our favorite big city so far, not including El Bolson.

We just arrived in Salta yesterday. We´re settled into a slightly lame city campground...it´s not so bad but it´s a big developed city campground, with plenty of pavement and cars. It´s so cheap though...instead of paying the equivalent of about $60 in hostel fees for two days, it´s $10.

Salta is really cool. Salta and Jujuy provinces have the most indigenous presence of the whole country, and while we started to see hints of it in Cordoba, on the bus here we must have passed an invisible border because it´s totally different here. There´s a bunch of cool new regional foods to eat, and the market was the first crazy chaotic market I´ve seen and we loved it. It reminded me a lot of the San Jose central market in Costa Rica. People look noticeably different too, darker skin and the beautiful wide Incan faces of Bolivia and Peru. People are really nice here. They´re very welcoming of tourists.

These are the only two provinces in Argentina where selling and chewing coca leaves is legal, and in the same way you see the red streaks of paan all over sidewalks in India you see big clumps of
green chewed up leaves on sidewalks here. It´s got lots of health benefits before it´s refined into the monster that is cocaine, and it´s for sale everywhere. It´s about as stimulating as a big cup of tea or mate, and is a powerful antioxidant. All over the Andes it´s used both in whole leaf form, chewed, and as tea to combat altitude sickness. Our travel books advise consuming coca leaf tea when we arrive in high altitude places to help us adapt.

Salta has some incredible museums, and Nate and I were dazzled by the exquisite MAAM museum this afternoon. I was stunned, I had no idea about the high altitude Incan sanctuaries on about two hundred Andean summits. The child mummies that reside at the MAAM were removed from the summit of Llullaillaco, a peak on the border of Chile and Argentina, and it´s the highest altitude archaelogical site in the world. The mummy on display that we saw today was the Lightning Girl. The cold temperature, thinner air and lack of bacteria has kept the mummies extremely well preserved. There was plenty of controversy about the decision to remove the mummies from the site. They're stored at -20 degrees, and the museum itself is kept cool and dim to preserve all the artifacts that were found in the tomb with them.

I had an expected emotional response to seeing her...if you wish to see photos there's lots in google images.

The mountaineering footage of the dig on the summit was fascinating, as was the extensive information to read about Incan rituals.
http://maam.culturasalta.gov.ar/index.php?lang=english

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llullaillaco

Yikes, 3 minutes left on this computer. Gotta run!