Archive for April, 2010

What’s This?

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria

Pablo Escobar’s grave in Jardines Montesacro cemetery, Itagui, Colombia. Click the photo to see it full-size. The inscription translates as:

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria

Dec 1 1949 – Dec 2 1993

“When you see a good man try to imitate him; when you see a bad man take a look at yourself.”

No comment.

Three weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend some time in the Parque Natural Nacional de Tayrona on Colombia’s Carribbean coast. I first heard of it when it was featured in a Top 10 Beaches list in the Guardian a few years back, and within hours of arriving in Colombia, fellow travellers began talking about it as one of the places to see whilst here.

La Piscina, Tayrona

And, of course, they were dead right – it’s a wonderful place; wild, beautiful, unspoilt, unique and utterly charming. If you are in Colombia it should definitely be on your list and to help you here are some tips based on our experiences there to help you get the most from your visit:

• a bus from Santa Marta to the park entrance costs 5000COP – if you are staying at the wonderful Dreamer Hostel, you can pick the bus up from the main road a couple of blocks away
• entrance to the park costs 34000COP for non-Colombians, 12000COP for the locals
• from the entrance a minibus to the start of the trail costs 2000COP
• there are 3 official places to stay – Canaveral, El Paraiso (Arrecifes) and Cabo San Juan plus a private campsite about 10 minutes walk from Arrecifes
• only Arrecifes and Cabo San Juan are actually on a beach, and it’s only safe to swim at Cabo San Juan (a sign at Arrecifes reminds you of this by telling you over 200 people have drowned there!)
• Arrecifes is roughly an hour from the start of the trail, Cabo San Juan another 45 mins from there – both trails are rough and involves a fair bit of scrambling and clambering
• prices for Cabo San Juan are 15000COP with your own tent or hammock, 20000COP to rent a tent or hammock, 25000COP to rent a hammock in the outlook, 50000COP in a room in the outlook (all per person, per night)

The Outlook, Cabo San Juan

• having spoken to 3 people who slept in the outlook it can get very windy and cold at night, take a sleeping bag if you can or just try it for one night and see how you get on!
• food is available at both Arrecifes and Cabo San Juan, but is expensive – 8000COP for a breakfast, 20000-30000COP for a lunch or dinner
• the best swimming is at La Piscina between Arrecifes and Cabo San Juan
• the sun is STRONG – wear sunblock at all times – especially when swimming / snorkelling (this is from painful personal experience!!)
• keep an eye out for the blue landcrabs in the last 200 metres before getting to Cabo San Juan
• bring a torch / flashlight and mosquito repellent
• there is a boat to Taganga which leaves at 2pm and costs 40000COP, otherwise you have to walk back and get either a taxi or the bus back to Santa Marta

I think that’s about it – the most important thing is plenty of money – it was more expensive than we were expecting (and we’d been told it was not cheap) and we had to leave a day earlier than planned because of this. These tips are all personal opinions and the prices are correct as of March 2010 when we visited. I really cannot recommend Tayrona enough, it is absolutely amazing and unspoilt place and a highlight of any trip to Colombia!

I recently offered my services as a contributor to Dave Lee’s Colombia site, Medellin Living and to my surprise, my services were accepted! My first post went up today – and more are on the way, so head on over there, take a look, there’s plenty of good stuff to check out.

What’s This?

Parque National de Tayrona, Santa Marta, Colombia

What’s This?

Jumping the Equator

Just north of Quito, Ecuador is La Mitad del Mundo, the Middle of the Earth which allows you to mess about and take lots of pictures, like this one. As you look at the picture, the Northern hemisphere is on the left and the Southern hemisphere on the right. I’m in neither.

What’s This?

Bandeja

Lunch in Colombia. That’s fried egg, rice, beans, avocado, fried mature plantain, sausage, ground beef, chicken and deep-fried pork rind. What you want me to say – it’s wonderful.

If there’s one way of impressing somebody who has never been to South America before, it’s by saying, “Oh I’m going to such and such tomorrow, it’s a 20 hour bus ride”. To someone who has been here before then all you’ll get is an unsympathetic nod and a change of subject, but to the uninitiated you will a short pause while their mind assimilates what you’ve just said and then a gasp of horror. “20 HOURS?!” they will squeak, while you nod with the unbearable smugness of the seasoned traveller.

So, this is for all you who have never had the pleasure of dealing with the terms Cama and Semi-Cama, to whom Andesmar and Crucero del Norte sound like beach resorts. Firstly, let’s be clear about this, if you’re travelling round Argentina (let alone other South American countries) on any sort of budget, you WILL encounter at least one 12+ hour bus trip. There are planes, but they’re expensive and  don’t always go where you want to go. Which leaves the bus. Forget trains, I’m aware of one train line that could be considered an inter-city line here in Argentina, and trust me they ain’t 2 cities you’d want to go to. Plus it’s slower than a bus,

So, you’re stuck with a bus. You bravely head to Retiro bus station in Buenos Aires to buy your ticket. This is where the problems start. There are intergalactic spaceship docking stations smaller than Retiro. This place can take over 100 double-decker buses at a time, is always full of people you’re convinced want to steal your bags (or your kidneys) and it’s bloody chaos. Upstairs is the ticket section, which is not a simple question of walking up to a desk and asking in your shabby Spanish for a ticket to El Culo del Mundo. You first have to figure out which company goes there and then ask each one if they have a bus on the day you want to go. Most of them don’t. Eventually you find one that does and then they ask you what class you want. Class? On a bus?

Well yes, there are 3, and within that varying levels of food and drink service. To keep it simple there is Semi-Cama (cama is spanish for bed) which is the cheapest and gives a fairly standard coach seat which reclines about halfway. Then there is cama, which despite the name is still a reclining seat, but reclines more and is wider (3 across the bus) and at the top of the tree there is Ejecutivo or First Class which is the same width as Cama, but the seat goes all the way down to make a flat bed. Pretty much all 3 classes feed you, although alcohol usually only comes with Cama and Ejecutivo.

I’ve tried all 3 and have come to the following conclusion. Even if it means waiting in El Culo del Mundo for another 3 days, I ain’t ever going Semi-Cama again. The recline is not bad, but of course the idiot in front of you reclines too which limits your personal space to a very small tube and sleeping just is not an option. Plus people reclining in front of me inspires sheer hatred in me. Not the picture of reasonableness I know, but in my mind, it’s one step away from child abuse. Cama is better and is an option, although the person reclining in front of you is still a problem. Which brings us to Ejecutivo which, in my humble opinion is the ONLY way to go. Each seat is cocooned in its own space (a suite is the marketing term) therefore nobody can impinge on your space. And you have a bed. A flat one. It’s wonderful.

This has been on my mind a lot recently as yesterday I took my first 20 hour trip (from Buenos Aires to Bariloche in Patagonia), and I stumped up the extra 50 pesos (£10) to go flat. Now, 20 hours on a bus is still 20 hours regardless of the shape of your seat, but by God is it easier when you do it in comfort. For a start you spend the first hour playing with the recline button, thinking, this IS a comfy seat. So only 19 hours left. Then you have to get to grips with the lie flat mechanism and make your bed. Luckily they tell you how:

How to make a bed

The result is something like this (although it does actually go flatter – this is just chillin’ mode)

Chilling

Pretty good huh? However, even this little marvel of modern engineering cannot compensate for the sheer size of and boredom induced by crossing the Argentinian pampas. However, given that you have no choice in this, I know where I’d rather be…

This post was originally published in May 2009 Confused?
Many times on my travels I’ve found myself in a well-known place that I somehow never imagined I would get to. Uruguay, Tierra del Fuego, Rio and blow me if I haven’t added and crossed off another legendary place to my list. After Uyuni we headed north through La Paz, Lake Titicaca (another place on the list actually) and arrived at Cusco in Peru. Before coming here and meeting other travellers, pretty much the only thing I knew about Peru was that Paddington Bear came from the deepest and darkest part. Really couldn’t have told you much more about the place. Not so any longer. The home of Inca Kola (the wikipedia article describes it as yellowish-gold in colour, don’t believe them, it looks like bottled piss), pisco sour and baked guinea pig, is also home to one of the greatest tourist sites in South America, a place where everybody, and I mean everybody, you meet here has been.

I speak, of course, of Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. Not lost anymore I can tell you, but still not that easy to get to. The main route is through Cusco, a very nice little place, once the capital of the Inca Empire, and from Cusco there are over 350 tour agencies ready to strip you of your gringo dollars and ship you up there in some form or another. We opted for the 4-day Inca Jungle trek (not to be confused with the Inca Trail which has limited numbers and is booked up for months in advance). This involved a 40km downhill bike ride (my kind of road), 2 days of walking to get to Aguas Calientes and then on day 4 the trip up the mountain to the big old pile of rocks itself.

Dawn, Machu Picchu

On the day in question, we were roused from our beds at some ungodly hour in order to get the first of the buses up the windy road to get there in time for dawn. At 0530 sharp a veritable army of buses turned up and filled with sleepy backpackers and set off for the entrance. They don’t miss much the good folks running Machu Picchu. In Bolivia I’d paid $7 to go from Villazon to Sucre, a (hellish, admittedly) bus ride of 13 hours, and here I was stumping up the same amount to be taken up the hill for 20 minutes. But buggered if I was walking.

So anyway, we all got in at around 6am, one of the first groups to get through and we basically had the place to ourselves for well over an hour. It being such a familiar sight (and site) I was prepared to be somewhat underwhelmed. For some reason I had an image of a South American Stonehenge in my mind with only one viewpoint (the one everybody knows), and barbed wire everywhere to keep the gum chewing hordes at bay.

All of it

Well, it was nothing like it. It was like a huge archeological playground, we were free to wander around, clamber over walls, steal rocks (only kidding folks) to our hearts content. I was blown away, seriously. It’s essentially stuck on top of a mountain itself sitting in a bowl of higher mountains. A highlight, not just of Peru or my trip, but one of the most amazing things I’ve seen and done in my life. I loved it.

More Peru pictures from the whole trip can be found here

Early Morning Shadows

This post was originally published in March 2009 Confused?
During one of my moments of meditation sitting staring at the cruise ship (seriously, just how do those things float?) I decided that I was going to head back to Buenos Aires for a variety of reasons. Send me a stamped SAE and I’ll tell you what they are. This of course meant deciding how I was going to get there. I had a few days so just 3 hours on a plane felt like overkill, plus goes against my principles (yup. I’ve grown principles). There is a weekly boat which went up the side of Chile from where I could get a bus back to Bariloche and then on to BsAs. But for some South American reason, they decided to skip a week in the schedule. No boat, so that was that. Which meant I was left with the bus, which didn’t feel right. So I decided to hitch hike the 600k back up to Rio Gallegos and then get a bus from there.

I set out on Friday morning (after 4 hours sleep), took a picture of the sign which told me I had 3040k to go, and stuck my thumb out. Took 5 minutes of walking and thumbing to get a lift to the Police Checkpoint at the edge of town, where I put my backpack on the ground, turned round to see a lorry pulling up, and the driver asking me where I was going (um, North please). I hadn’t even put my thumb out! This was the way to go! So, I trucked the 200k to Rio Grande with Manuel the chain-smoking, mate drinking Chilean feeling like king of the world. Didn’t have as much luck that afternoon in Rio Grande (and to be honest felt a little awkward hitching next to the Memorial to the Fallen Soldiers of the Falklands War) so after an hour I called Matias, a guy who lives there whom I’d met earlier in Ushuaia, and he helped me find a room for the night.

Ended up having a grand old night out in Rio Grande, drinking for free in a private bar, run by some friend of Matias’s uncle’s coke dealer’s accountant’s window cleaner or something. The owner was hugely excitable and wouldn’t stop telling me that I was the very first tourist he’d ever had in his bar and insisted on taking lots of pictures of me against various signs and bits of furniture to prove I’d been there.

Rio Grande Crew

The next day I headed off (4 hours sleep again) and walked for an hour to get past the bloody War Memorial to the next strategic hitching point, where a couple of fisherman picked me up and took me to the Police Checkpoint where after about half an hour a Belgian couple stopped and told me I could ride in the back of their pickup truck they’d hired. Yeah! Proper travelling. I leapt at the chance and jumped in the back and settled myself against my backpack and away we went. What I’d overlooked of course was that I was in Tierra del Fuego, and it might well be summer, but Tierra del Fuego is cold. God, I was freezing, but it felt fantastic. I loved it.

Cold

Even when we got the gravel road and I slowly became coated in a fine film of Fuegian dust. Even when a 20 peso note fell out of my pocket and blew over the side of the truck. Even when the Belgian guy was driving too fast, skidded off the road and we ended up in a ditch with a burst tyre. A shout must go out to the 3 amused Chilean truck drivers who stopped, towed us out of the ditch and then changed the wheel. These boys could work for McClaren. I was so impressed.

The Rescue

Finally at 9 in the evening, after 36 hours on the road eating dust, I arrived dirty, shivering but very happy back in Rio Gallegos. Took the Belgians to the same hotel I’d stayed in the week before where I was met with a cheery “Hola Senor Jonathan” from the nice lady. Took a good, long, hot shower and fell into bed, happy to be home.

One of the joys of travelling in a country where they don’t speak your language is that occasionally you’ll come across a name that has one meaning for the locals and another entirely for you. And you can take a picture and giggle at the crazy foreign names.

Moron, Salta

Spotted this one in Salta, Moron Firekillers (fire extinguishers). Quite a common one this, it’s also a town in Buenos Aires province.

Farto

A chain of chemists in Brasil. Saw this in the bus station in Sao Paulo which is not normally the sort of place I would recommend walking round with your camera, but I had to make an exception for Farto. Had already spotted it a couple of times, but had been unable to get a picture, so was very happy to catch this example. Kind of like trainspotting – patience and a little bit of luck. You even get a bonus shot of Laura with her backpack.

Barfy Burger

I purchased these fine burgers from my local supermarket here in Buenos Aires, based solely on the name, a mistake I will not be committing twice. Rarely have I come across a product that so ably Does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. God, they were awful.

Wanka Turismo

I was kind of at a loss with this one. Spotted on a tour of bodegas in Mendoza last year. Not my first Wanka spot – there was a poster in the street advertising a Peruvian music concert which featured this word heavily. Was unsure if it’s the music or the group. But again, Google comes to the rescue.

Fanny Tuna

Like the BarfyBurger, I bought this one simply for the name – it’s tinned tuna, it’s called Fanny. This is going to be funnier if you’re English more than if you’re American…