Travelbugs - Around the World '07-'08

We're back in cold little Belgium, having to find somewhere to live asap and mentally preparing ourselves for going back to work. Both of us are finding the change in tempo a little hard, much slower here than in much of the rest of the world. But we're glad that we made it, although we would happily carry on for a few more years, there is still plenty to see.

So you'll definately be seeing us pretty soon. Thanks for following us throughout the year, and for all your mails!!!

It felt really good getting to B.A!!!

We´ve spent the past 6 days here and visited all the main tourist attractions and have gone shopping a great number of times.

The hardest thing about this place is the getting used to the hours, the people eat really late here 11pm is the norm and then go to bars around 1am and on to discos at 3am, staying out past 7am is the norm.
Perhaps I'm getting too old for all this but Irgen seems to manage ; )

We got down to the coast to spend some time with the family. Mar del Plata is Argentina's main beach resort, and during summer it fills up with most of the rest of Argentina.

Seeing the family was great, they really looked after us, the argentinian form of hospitality is to feed you so we've managed to put on some extra kilos.

One of the days we visited an estancia and met a man that domesticates wild horses, a true gaucho experience!!!

Back in B.A. for a final days shopping and then the final flight back to the UK.

It was so nice getting to Uruguay, its like a miniature Argentina. Montevideo feels so safe (which after Brazil, most places would). The city is quite small and the architecture is very "turn of the century" european. We didn't do an awful lot there. We spent our days eating meat between a bit of sightseeing. Had a great meal at the Mercado Modelo, which is an old market that has been converted into a restaurant area.

We decided to skip Punta del Este, as it would be too busy (and expensive) at this time of year and headed west to Colonia, the oldest town in Uruguay. Although pretty it wasn't enough to hold our attention for more than a couple of days and we caught the catamaran to Buenos Aires.....

We finally got to Brazil, and unbelievably it was raining, not only raining, absolutely pouring. We booked ourselves in to a nice hotel in Sao Paulo and slept. The following day it was still raining so we headed off to one of the large malls. This city is so big we didn't even leave our neighbourhood while we stayed here.

A few days later we moved on to Ouro Preto, a charming little village which was once the heart of the gold mines for the Portuguese. This hilly little place is undeniably pretty, everywhere you turn you are confronted with churches and it is all very old worldly.

We needed to catch a flight from Belo Horizonte, so that was our next destination. It's a little difficult to say anything nice about this city, it's ugly and that all.

A short flight brought us to Salvador up on the north east coast. Salvador has a very different social make up from the rest of Brazil, there is a very marked African influence in this area.

We stayed in the Pelourinho which was the main slave market area during the colonial period. This city is very beautiful, but definately one of the least safe places we have visited on this whole trip.

Christmas was quiet, the strong catholic sentiment and the importance of being with family meant that most things were closed, it was even difficult to find a restaurant. We were relieved, the nights are very noisy in Salvador, lots of groups are practising for carnival.

We also visited Praia do Forte to the north. this was a special little place where there is a turtle protection scheme in place. The beaches here were very pretty.

Another flight got us to Rio de Janeiro, just in time for new year. The land on which Rio is built is so beautiful, but it is hard to see Rio as a beautiful city, the buildings are dated and apart from a few neighbourhoods the city looks quite run down.

We luckily stayed in Ipanema which is currently the trendy/gay neighbourhood. So lots of nice looking men for Irgen to look at, but I didn't need to get jealous ; )

We spent New Year on Copacabana beach along with the other 2 million people that turned up. The fireworks were amazing, 16 minutes of explosion after explosion, truly a once in a lifetime experience (although we could say that about the whole of this trip).

After Rio, we spent a few days in Paraty, this is Ouro Preto's sister by the sea, we liked it alot there, it was so picturesque.

As we started to run out of time and we wanted to make sure that we could visit Uruguay before getting to Argentina we made a move back to Sao Paulo and straight away bought tickets to Montevideo for the same night....

We had a 6 hour stopover at the airport in Santiago, we weren't looking forward to it, but this was soon forgotten: Boca Juniors were on their way back to Buenos Aires after playing the final of the Club World Cup, which they lost to AC Milan

We couldn't believe it from all the places in the airport they came and sat right next to us. It was so cool, Riquelme, Palermo, Ibarra, Palacio were all there!!!

Could this possibly be the best airport stopover ever?

Back in Colombia we booked flights straight to Cartagena, on the caribbean coast and completely the other end of the country.

We can honestly say that Cartagena is the most romantic and colonially stunning city in South America. The old part of the city is incredibly well kept and seems to not have changed much since the 16th century. The old city is ringed by a wall that used to protect the city from pirate attacks.

The only downside to Cartagena is that it lacks good beaches, so we took a boat out to some small islands in the Caribbean. We rented some hammocks and slept on the beach for a few days, it was truly idyllic!!!

The nightlife begins very late in Colombia, and seems slow to warm up but when it does, it is hot!!! Some of these people really now how to shake, as Shakira says "the hips don´t lie!!!".

For our last few days in Cartagena we decided to spoil ourselves and we booked into a hotel on a private island facing the city...

Colombian women seem to have really taken to plastic surgery, just walking around it is impossible to count how many fake breasts you see, I tried and Irgen thought it was funny (incredible, my wife actually letting me count breasts!!!)

We flew down to Bogota and stayed in the old part of the city, right in the centre.

There is a strong police and military presence in the city, this makes you feel safer and more at danger at the same time, I suppose that they are there for a reason.

We´re now off to Sao Paulo, Brazil, an 18 hour flight, via Lima and Santiago (it was the cheapest we could find).

Upon arriving in Colombia, we soon figured out that we could not visit any lodges in the Colombian Amazon, due to too many insecurities (the FARC control much of this area). Luckily the Brazilian border was not very far so we ended up visiting a lodge there. It took about 5 hours to get to the lodge with a combination of boats and buses.
We really enjoyed it there, we were able to go kayaking and trekking in the jungle, and lucky to see a number of animals.

We only stayed at the lodge a couple of nights because besides it being expensive we were excited about moving on to Colombia and finding some beaches.....

The weather turned against us in Lima, so we changed our flights and flew up to Iquitos a little earlier than planned.
Iquitos is possibly our favourite destination in Peru, it feels completely different, the people look completely different, and the weather is hot and humid.
We visited Belem, by far the most interesting part of the city. When the water level rises the houses in Belem float. During the dry, which we are now at the end of the houses are high above you, raised on stilts.

Our original plan was to take a cargo boat to the Colombian border, but after already taking some long boat trips and seeing that the Amazon river is incredibly wide and that we wouldn´t see anything, it was agreed that the best way to get there was by speed boat.

10 hours later we were in Colombia.....

Peru, the land of the Incas, pisco sours and pan pipes... We were exposed to a heavy dose of all of them within the first week we were there: we arrived in Puno - the 'most folkloric city in Peru'- during Puno week, the colourful highlight of this region´s year. Between all the celebrations we managed to visit the floating reed islands on the edge of Lake Titicaca (built by the Uros people to live peacefully away from the Incas), it was quite a sight to see how people lived but now you can´t help but feel that it is all a bit of a show for tourists...

An overnight bus got us to Arequipa, the white city. We enjoyed being there very much, there was a friendly atmosphere and the architecture is stunning!

After hearing more versions of El Condor Pasa than you can imagine we decided it was best to visit the Colca Canyon to see if we could spot some condors for ourselves. We did... ...they are huge!!!

Another overnight bus and we reached beautiful colonial Cusco. Really very picturesque. The area surrounding the town is scattered with Inca ruins, so we spent a few days sightseeing and finally took the train to Aguas Calientes, possibly the ugliest town that we have seen on this whole trip (even though the surrounding landscape is beautiful the locals have made a real mess of trying to build a town). The one and only reason to go there was Machu Picchu, which sits at the top of a mountain high above the village.
It is expensive to get to Aguas Calientes and the entry fee for Machu Picchu is extortionate, but once you are up there looking over the ruins you soon forget just how much you spent to see them, they are magnificent!!!

More overnighting on a bus and we arrived in Lima. Lima was the first place that felt like a big city that we had been to in months. We stayed in a nice neighbourhood and got to watch Argentina lose to Colombia (football) in a Brazilian bar, from all places!!!!

The Salar de Uyuni was an incredible sight, a huge plain of white salt, as far as your eye could see. The fact that there was no horizon made you lose your sense of perspective.

In the middle of the salt lake there is an island full of giant cactus and inhabited by a colony of viscachas. The views were magnificent.

A bus took us to Potosi, which was once one of the richest cities in the world, and much of its glamourous past can still be seen in its buildings. The town looks as though it hasn´t changed since the Spanish left. The architecture of the whole city is very much like northern Spain, it really reminded us of Valladolid, especially the cathedral!!

From there we moved onto Sucre, the legislative captial of Bolivia, this was another very beautiful city, but grander than Potosi, the government buildings were huge.

Things don´t appear well in Bolivia, all over Sucre there are signs demanding that the city gets reinstated as the capital, and protest marches are a constant scene.

An overnight bus got us to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the weather was a lot more tropical in this region that borders Brazil. The city in itself is one of Bolivia´s largest and is the main economic powerhouse for the country. There wasn´t much to see here, except for a good friend, Carolina. She took us out to local restaurants and showed us what the city had to offer. There were protest marches in Santa Cruz, which became violent, the army was called in and there was rioting in the streets.

It was time to leave so we got on a plane to Rurrenabaque, into the Bolivian Amazon. The plane was tiny, a 12 seater, but the views out of the windows were great, and the landing on a dirt strip in the middle of the jungle was exhilerating.

In Rurre, we went on a tour into the backwaters, an interesting few days, where we saw lots of wildlife and got seriously bitten by mosquitos.

A short flight brought us to La Paz, a very high altitude city, the aeroplane felt as though it didn´t even need to descend.

It´s hard to catch your breath in La Paz, a hilly city, that we spent a few days wandering around. There are lots of markets that sell just about anything that you could imagine, one of the most interesting being the Witches Market, that sells powders and objects (like stuffed frogs and llama foetuses) to cast spells on others.

Near La Paz, is Tihuanaco, Bolivia´s main archeological site, some of the ruins here are quite amazing....

We decided it was time to move on and so we caught the bus to Copacabana on the edge of Lake Titicaca. This "fishing village" was nothing like what we were expecting, it was a miniature holiday resort and you could rent duck shaped paddle boats to go around in circles on the lake!!!
But it´s the embarkation place for boats to Isla del Sol (the spiritual home of the Inca Empire). The little Isla del Sol, is pretty enough, with a couple of sites, and the cruise out to it, across the lake, is beautiful.

Next stop Peru.....