Kuna indian molas in Casco Viejo, Panama City.

Back to being backpackers again after disembarking from Tahina and ending two great weeks spent in the San Blas archipelago. After setting foot on mainland Panama we caught a bus from Colon across the whole country over to the Pacific side and Panama City – actually only a couple short hours away. Our first day in Panama City we went to the historical part of town, Casco Viejo. It has lots of colonial buildings, some were being renovated at the moment but many parts of the area feel quite rundown. We found a museum about the Panama Canal – it was mostly in Spanish but I picked up some things…for example over 22,000 workers died in the first attempt to build it, from yellow fever and malaria, before the French gave up and the US took over! Later in the afternoon when we were leaving a restaurant the waiter told us there was going to be a big protest outside and we better get out of the area – we had actually seen some police in riot gear walking around earlier… Unfortunately no taxi drivers knew our hostel or street though, and we had to walk around for another half an hour, asking five different cars, before we finally found one that would take us.

View towards Panama City from Parque Metropolitano.

The next day we went to the Metropolitan national park – it is an area of forest enclosed on three sides by the capital city, but connecting to a series of protected areas all the way to the Caribbean on the north side creating a long wildlife corridor. Panama has been clever enough to protect the forest in the catchment area for their freshwater supply and canal (in Malaysian Borneo for example, once a new mega-dam is built they usually use the all new access-roads to log and destroy the forest in the catchment area, so the (taxpayer funded..) dam gets stilted up and useless in just a decade..). The first trail we walked was short – we could still hear the traffic – a second trail took us a little deeper into the forest. It looks like a mostly dry forest – open canopy and not too many epiphytes but an amazing tangle of lianas everywhere. We had fun watching the leaf-cutter ant super-highways on the ground – they have a dedicated class of bigger ants that clear the ant-trails, removing stones and twigs, so that the smaller ones can work on chopping up and carry the leafs around and down into their underground fungus plantations. Amazing non-stop workaholics. We saw another funny animal as well, Coati’s – the same long-nosed cuddly-looking raccoons we spotted all the way down in Argentina a couple months back. A viewpoint on a hill in the park had nice views over the forest, with the skyscrapers of the downtown city and the ocean visible further away.

Geoffroy's Tamarin in Boquete.

We left Panama City for Boquete, figuring this would be our last chance to fit a couple of long uncomfortable bus rides in before we finish the trip! This one didn’t disappoint – the bus was probably about twice the age of the driver, a boy who looked only around 15. His driving was better than anticipated though, and the gear-box actually lasted most of the 7-8 hour trip, finally collapsing an hour outside the town of David around nightfall. It was dark by the time we got to David, after waiting by the roadside and switching to another bus, but luckily in David the buses to Boquete had still not stopped running for the day. Boquete is quite popular it seems – we walked around for quite a while with the big backpacks finding all hostels full (or closed for the night) – got stuck with an expensive hotel room for the first night in the end and hopped over to a nicer hostel in the morning. And of course by the time we had finally secured a place to sleep there were no places open to eat…we were lucky to find a small ice-cream parlor that still hadn’t closed. Any day that ends with strawberries and ice-cream for dinner is Ok in my book!

Margay cat in Paradise Gardens.

Boquete is a cute little mountain village, famous for coffee growing (and strawberries actually!) – it has become popular as a retirement location for Europeans and Americans during the last decade or so, and all the nice little German bakeries and cafe’s gave me a great chance to try to get my coffee drinking up to speed before visiting friends and family in Sweden… The first thing we did though was visit an animal rescue center a few kilometers walk outside town – they had adorable little Tamarind monkeys with babies and lots of colourful macaws and other birds but my favourite was a Margay cat. An amazingly beautiful jungle cat, quite similar to an Ocelot but more adopted to a life in the trees – jaguar pattern fur and about twice the size of a house cat. Most of the animals had previously been kept as pets, ending up here when owners couldn’t take care of them properly – many had stories of the horrific conditions they were found in on signs outside the cages, but occasionally they get rehabilitated enough to be released. Another amazing animal there was a Kinkajuo – a “cat-monkey”-like raccoon-family creature, sleepy-looking (nocturnal) and with a tail as long as the body and a tongue three times as long as the head!

Cloud forest in Volcan Baru national park.

The next morning in Boquete we started early to walk the Quetzal trail, a famous bird-watching trail in the cloud-forests of the Volcan Baru national park. We took a taxi from the hostel to be at the trail-head at 7am, at 1700 meters altitude. The cloud-forest was dense and dripping, covered in epiphytes – more and more the higher we got. The first few kilometers followed a 4×4 track, then the trail took off as a narrow path climbing higher up the slopes of the volcano – some parts were destroyed by landslides but it was quite easy to follow. The bird song in the early morning was amazing – we probably only saw 5-10 species (and we didn’t spot the famous Quetzal) but we must have heard a hundred different species sing during the first couple hours after sunrise. And the forest was stunning, mist drifting in and out as we reached the higher slopes at 2500 meters, trees covered in long beards of lichens and branches so heavy with bromeliads that they sometimes break off and fall to the ground. It started to rain a bit during the last couple of hours while we climbed down the hills on the other side of the mountain, and at the opposite trail-head we were lucky to find a bus waiting for a group of Americans we had met on the trail. We hitched a lift with them back to Boquete via the town of David, rounding the volcano on the south side to return (there are no roads on the north side, although an unpopular Panamanian politician once wanted to pave the famous trek through the cloud-forest national park, unintentionally giving birth to the country’s environmental movement!).

Coffee plantation in Boquete.

The day after the trek we took a tour to a coffee plantation, run by Casa Ruiz. The guide, who belonged to one of Panama’s indigenous groups, was very good and toured us by the plantation and processing plant and explained all the different steps the beans have to pass through before we finished with a tasting session (chocolatey, vinagery, or fishy…? – the experts can pick out some 150 different subtle flavours apparently). I was amazed how well the plantations are thought out – coffea arabica bushes need a bit of shade so there are lots of trees above, a mixed forest with lots of fruit trees to harvest from and places for birds to make nests – more birds means less insects so less need to spray. Some of the shading-plants had been chosen because they can absorb nitrogen from the air, meaning less need to fertilize. For roasting they burn the husks from the beans and some firewood from the trees (which are trimmed every year so they don’t shade the coffee too much) – the ash in turn is spread back on the farm as fertilizer. Very clever – nearly a closed system, and some of their farms were fully organic. At the moment they were planting a lot of a low-yield variety called Guessha (Geisha) which has won Panama a lot of best-coffee-in-the-world prices – it’s the second most expensive after Asian palm-civet coffee (where the beans have passed through the digestive tract of a civet – I was slightly tempted to try a 25 euro cup of it back in Hong Kong…). The guide also talked a little about how Boquete has changed since becoming a westerner retirement spot – few locals can afford land any more and some coffee plantations are actually disappearing as they get turned into gated housing estates… At the same time people are happy for the income of course, and several of his friends who had sold houses or land for hundreds of thousands of dollars had retired themselves afterwards (..although somewhere else in Panama where it is much cheaper!).

Back to Panama City again – no mishaps on the bus this time. We went out for a nice dinner in Casco Viejo with Frank and Karen from Tahina, and their new crew Lara and Jason. We had hoped to make it back to join the two-day Panama Canal transit originally, but in the end we didn’t have enough days (though if the the canal authorities had given them more than a one-minute notice of delaying them for a day extra we probably could have – we spotted them going through on the canal webcams at least though).

Hummingbird in Soberania national park.

Our final excursion in Panama before catching a 2am flight to Miami was Pipeline Road in Soberania national park. It is another famous bird-watching location, only an hour from the city, and we set out to be there before 7am (making for a very long day with the flight out the same night). This location has the world record for maximum-bird-species-spotted-in-24-hours – an amazing 350! For a comparison in all of Europe there’s less than 1000. I can’t help to think though that if someone is still able to tell bird 347 from bird 348 after looking through a pair of binoculars for 24 hours straight it probably says nearly as much for the quality of Panamanian coffee as it does for the country’s astonishing biodiversity!

Forest in Soberania national park.

We first spent a while by the park headquarters, trying to take photos of all the different hummingbird species making rapid dashes back and forth to the sugar-water feeders hanging outside. Very fast – sometimes they take off from the shutter-release sound from the camera before it has even taken the photo! When I felt I had enough blurry tail-feathers on my memory card a guide from the park took us to a canopy tower nearby. This was the place to be to see birds – they had a powerful telescope mounted on a tripod up there and we saw several species of toucans, doves, birds of prey – and howler monkeys. After another short walk by a water hole, kingfishers and jacanas, we spotted several sloth and more howler monkeys before the guide sent us off to walk the pipeline road alone. It was past 10am now and it was starting to get very hot – fewer birds out and we spotted mostly leaf-cutter ants, and more howler monkeys. The forest was nice though, but not as pretty as the Soberania cloud-forests. Lowland forest is always a little less exiting to walk in, as most life is invisible high up in the canopy. The taxi back to Panama City picked us up at 2pm, and we spent our last Panama hours in a shopping center, starting to work on replacing those of the clothes in our backpacks that had to be thrown out after a year on the road (…nearly every item I own according to Edel, and especially the hat! – ..but I managed to hold on to a few! At the end of our last year-trip in Bangkok I gave a big bundle to a homeless guy on the street, but there is probably noone in Panama City who would wear my leave-behinds from this trip..).

Miami beach.

We landed in Miami in the morning of March 28th. Our final flight home was in the evening of the 30th, and Edel had planned another big round of shopping. Coming from Panama City I actually found it pretty cold in Miami, which didn’t look good for heading back home to Sweden (which still had snow on the ground) two days later! We took a stroll on Miami beach in the morning since the hotel didn’t have our room ready until noon – the city reminded me a lot of the Grand Theft Auto Vice City computer game I played years ago – I recognized lots of things from the game and felt a slight urge to steal a golf cart to try and run over joggers on the beach with…and see if I could find a rocket launcher hidden by someone’s swimming pool! I should try to sleep more on flights… More insanity: Miami is quite possibly the trendiest place on earth – during our days there I saw several people actually bump into and falling over things because they refuse to stop wearing sunglasses after dark!

Then it was over – 356 days on the road. On the way back we nearly didn’t have a flight home from Miami as BA had chosen exactly this day as the culmination of their striking efforts…and a couple of weeks later I nearly didn’t have a flight from Sweden to Ireland due to eruptions of the unpredictable (and unpronounceable) Eyjafjallajökull. A sailboat is sounding better and better…

The catamaran Tahina.

Google Earth has been a big obsession of mine since we got home from our first round-the-world trip, and I’m not the only traveller smitten with the tool. Frank Taylor writes the Google Earth blog, and we’ve been in touch every now and then for the last couple of years – Frank and his wife Karen have now set off on their own five year circumnavigation by sailboat on a trip they named the Tahina Expedition. It looked like our routes might intersect in Colombia so we decided to try and meet up, and after me and Edel decided to call off our Venezuela plans Frank and Karen kindly invited us to join them onboard Tahina for the passage to Panama, spending some ten days on the paradise islands of San Blas on the way! (Now maybe we should be thankful to Hugo Chavez and his power-cutting riot-inducing ways…)

Sunset over Cartagena.

Frank and Karen had an eventful passage from Aruba, with 20 feet waves and gale-force winds, but made it safely to Cartagena where we set off to to meet them, leaving Taganga once I finally felt better. Tahina is a beautiful 50 feet catamaran with lots of space, and me and Edel settled in to our own room in the left, sorry port-side, hull. Frank had to wait for a replacement water pump to arrive so we had a couple days in Cartagena before setting sail – used them to see some of the sights we had missed on our last visit before Taganga. The San Felipe fort overlooking town and the gold and history museums, pre-Columbian artefacts and post-Columbian torture instruments from the slavery and inquisition days.

BBQ island, San Blas.

In the morning of the 3rd of March we set off from the Cartagena harbour on the 24-hour passage to the San Blas islands off Panama, making a short stop to scrub some barnacles off the hull which added nearly a knot to the speed. Still amazing to me how you can sail against the wind – it was only some 30 degrees off head-on when we started, adding a few more degrees during the day. Apparently it can even be faster sailing like this than when the wind is on your back! It was fun to learn a bit about sailing while watching our progress on the screen at the helm – and learning a bit about how to use all the nautical terms properly instead of the way I like to shout them when I’m in a paddle-boat or kayak with Edel (note to self: it seems you don’t “keel-haul the square-rigged spinnaker on the starboard side to make westing!”).

Edel-foot and David-foot.

We set a couple fishing rods once we were on the open sea – and an hour or two later they both hooked a small tuna within seconds of eachother. One of the fish was big enough to keep and Frank set the other one free. Karen is a great cook luckily, and during our days on Tahina I quickly put back the kilos I had lost while sick in Taganga. In the evening we spotted a huge cruise-ship on the AIS – heading straight for us at twice our speed. Sailing ships always have right of way on the open sea, and it wasn’t without some delight that Frank radioed them to politely get them to take their three hundred passengers and get out of our way! Me and Edel took the first night-watch, until mid-night, but the only thing moving on the radar during our hours was a few squalls. Great feeling to be sailing – amazing to move from one country to another without using a drop of fuel. As a catamaran Tahina doesn’t roll much, and we slept well even though the wind picked up during the night and we gained speed.

West Holandes Cays.

In the morning we arrived at the San Blas – beautiful tropical islands with post-card beaches; white sand and coconut palms overhanging the turquoise water. We stayed five nights at our first anchorage near BBQ island – a small uninhabited island where sailors by tradition meet every monday. We spent the days doing little expeditions to various islands with the dinghy and going snorkelling (though there was mostly sea-grass in this area), and watch pelicans dive for fish. Most of the San Blas islands are only sandy beaches or mangrove, but a few of the bigger ones have little banana plantations owned by the indigenous Kuna indians. The Kuna come around by the boats occasionally, selling lobster, crab or molas – colourful decorated textiles.

One of a hundred sandals on the beach.

Most of the islands we visited had lots of plastic trash lying around all over the beaches, bottles and sandals…more than I probably would have guessed – ten bottles for every coconut in places. This is more of less how all “pristine” islands look today though, sadly, unless there is someone actively cleaning them. This was actually the case with BBQ island, where we had seen hardly any trash at all – one of the sailors anchored in the area had “adopted” the island and did a cleaning round every morning, picking up the pieces brought in by the waves – really lovely thing to do.

Frank working the kite photography unit.

Since BBQ island stood out (and was of a handy size) Frank picked it for trying out his kite areal photography unit. Him and I set off in the dinghy on the one day we had at this anchorage with good sun and wind, and put the kit together on the beach, slowly sending the DSLR high up in the air before making our way around the island. Some of the coconut palms on the beach were quite high, making it difficult to work the line – we were wading waist-deep in water on one side of the island and went out in the dinghy on the other side with the kite still in the air. Kite-boating actually, the kite was pulling the boat along at about one knot speed without the engine on! Frank gets these kite-photos stitched together, corrected for topography, and then included into the base satellite imagery for Google Earth (the current resolution around San Blas is very bad, but hopefully at least this island should soon be sparkling!).

Edel with Frank and Karen.

We had a couple of days with bad weather while at the first anchorage (it does rain in paradise..) so we didn’t get as much time in the water as I’d liked – me and Edel started every morning with a pre-breakfast swim from the boat though, rain or no rain. The BBQ on the island on the monday was fun, meeting some of the other sailors and cruising couples. When chatting with other travellers me and Edel are normally used to being the ones out on the road the longest, but our 11 months is nothing among cruisers – most people we met had been sailing around for years or even decades!

Inviting turquoise waters.

The morning after the BBQ we sailed to a new anchorage by the West Holandes Cays group of islands in San Blas. This spot was excellent – sheltered on two sides by islands and with great coral reefs to snorkel just a short swim from the boat. We spent four days here, and I think I probably spent more time in the water than out, nearly knowing all the reef dwellers by name before we left. There was a big sandy area close to the anchor where lots of sting rays would be buried in the morning, and nearby over the sea grass I’d usually find a school of reef squid – great fun to watch as they swim in formation and change colour. Also saw big trigger fish, file fish and trumpet fish and so many parrot fish they were swimming in schools which is rare. There were two big reefs going all the way to the surface, a lion-fish hiding in a cave in one of them, fields of brain-coral and sea-fans in between. Swimming back to the boat there would be a huge school of tiny fish, tens of thousands, hiding in the shade under the hull, amazing to watch as the school morph in shape when you swim closer or swim up from below to be completely surrounded by the fish. One day we did another barnacle scrub – I’d spent so much time snorkelling by now that it was no problem to stay down below the keel to scrub – walking around upside down underwater below on the hull to joke with Edel. A big spotted eagle ray came cruising below the boat while we were doing this so I took off to follow it for a while – beautiful to watch, slow gentle movements of the nearly two meter wind-span as it was flying around over the bottom.

Check out some of Frank’s underwater photographs from San Blas in this National Geographic article or this Picasa Album.

VideoRay waiting to explore.

We also used this spot to play with another of Frank’s cool techie toys – a VideoRay underwater robot/camera! It is attached by a long cable to a control unit on the boat, where you can watch the video output and steer the little submarine around. Great fun, and at least as much fun to be out snorkelling next to the robot – watching it chase around and try to keep up with the reef squid or pretend to be one of them swimming along in the same formation!

One evening Frank set the lights under the boat and we used a strong flashlight to see what strange animals we could attract from the dark – first just lots of plankton, then jellyfish started showing up and some fish – the squid came by as well for a quick dash in and out of the light. Some animal was shooting off neon-green bioluminescence as well here and there in the waves, glowing for 5-10 seconds each time (…maybe a prawn fishing or scaring off predators? – didn’t look like the usual shiny blue dots of bioluminescent plankton). There were lots of stars out as well, the sky clear and no cities anywhere near us – never short of cool techie toys Frank had an image-stabilized pair of binoculars with enough magnification to pick out the nebula in Orion’s sword.

Chichime Cays anchorage.

When it was time to leave for the next anchorage me and Edel did a final snorkel in the morning, saying goodbye to the two meter barracuda that had taken up residence under the catamaran, and then we set off. In addition to the flying fish we also got to see dolphins this time, jumping and swimming next to the boat. After one tack to be able to get as close as possible without engine we motored in the final short bit. Chichime Cays anchorage was more busy – a couple dozen boats instead of the one or two neighbours we’d had at our last stop, and there was a small Kuna indian village on one of the islands. Me and Frank went out with the dinghy outside the fringing reef to try the snorkelling – there was a good bit of current so hard to swim but we did get to see a huge elkhorn coral, 7-10 meters. The second spot we picked was nicer, several big coral heads rising up from a deeper sandy bottom, and enormous boulders of brain coral with caves underneath where squirrel fish and bigeye were hiding.

Flying the spinnaker.

From San Blas it is roughly one day of sailing to get to Colon by the Caribbean side of the Panama canal. There is a spot halfway called Isla Grande which we sailed on to after it was recommended by the captain from another boat (who visited us wearing a pair of speedos that even Borat would have found shocking). After seven hours of sailing we reached the island just around sunset – continuing to Colon the next morning. Now we had the wind in our back so Frank took the opportunity to show us the most magnificent sail on Tahina. The spinnaker is a bit of work to get set (and even more to try to put back down in its sack while the wind is catching it), but it looks great when it is full of wind and it pulled us along splendidly. We saw more dolphins on the way also!

Karen's artwork on deck.

Arriving in busy Colon was a little strange after nearly two weeks of solitude on the islands – hundreds of massive cargo vessels were waiting outside the harbour for their turn to go through the canal. The AIS on the screen at the helm showed so many ships the marina entrance looked completely impenetrable! After arriving in Shelter Bay marina we spent two more nights on Tahina, getting the passports stamped and everything organized before it was time to say goodbye. We had a really great time with Frank and Karen, and it was a little strange to be back to being backpackers again now for the final ten days of our trip. It was very nice to get an introduction to sailing, another mode of long-term travelling which was new for us, but certainly very interesting. Round three perhaps…

Sea shell on the beach, San Blas.

Taganga bay.

After finishing the Ciudad Perdida trek we settled in again for a few days in Taganga. The first day we went out to try the diving – the dive center was a little bit sloppy (or just Caribbean laid-back?) and didn’t check our certs or do briefings pre-dive etc. The first dive from the boat was in the Tayrona national park and the visibility was quite bad, just 5-7 meters, and we lost the group for a while. Nice fish though – we’ve done most of our dives in the Pacific so it was nice to see the difference when hopping in on the Caribbean side – lots of trumpet-fish, box-fish, black-and-white moray eels and a few lion fish what aren’t supposed to be here (they are a recently introduced species – munching their way through everything on the coast during the last couple years…escapees from a hurricane-damaged Florida aquarium possibly). I saw an octopus on the second dive which was in a spot with a bit better visibility, with lots of nice huge boulders of brain coral.

View over Taganga.

Next I got sick – turned out I had picked up some stomach bug on the trek probably…not something quite as vicious as the amoebas that visited me a few times in India, each time sending me to bed with a fever for several days, but not something that seemed to be in a hurry to leave me either. I still felt ok and had appetite, but the belly was completely broken, day after day. There was a small hospital across the road from the hostel we were staying in Taganga – conveniently located but that was about the only thing it had going for it. They spent two days telling me they’d have a result in an hour, then on the third day told me it didn’t seem to be amoebas or parasites, so it must be something else – “maybe a virus or something”. Great. I was starting to feel skinny at this stage. I had already started a course of Flagyl antibiotics when I got tired of waiting for them, and went on the medicine they prescribed as well – now I really felt sick. It seemed to work though finally – I felt better again some eight days after we had returned from the trek, but I had lost a full 5-6 kilos. My tiny rounded belly that Edel had been joking about (…built up on gorgeous Sichuan cooking a few months earlier) was all gone. At least I was back in the land of the eating again – went in to the Santa Marta shopping center and wolfed down a big greasy burger!

Recovering in Taganga.

After Taganga and the Caribbean coast of Colombia we had originally planned to continue overland in to Venezuela, but that plan now seemed roughly as difficult as trying to stop my pants from falling down. The country is always a bit turbulent of course, but it has gotten more and more so over the last few years while Colombia has gotten safer and safer. The situation had particularly deteriorated over the last couple months while we had kept an eye at it – a once-in-a-hundred-years drought had worsened to crippled the country’s water and electricity supply, and Hugo Chavez has taken a break from nationalizing everything that moves to spend some time randomly cutting power in various parts of the country resulting in lots of protests. Riots in Merida, which would have been our first stop, left several dead. The UK government travel advisory page was saying to not go anywhere near the border with Colombia – but then again the language on these pages can be a bit overly alarming…their Sweden one warns about swine flu and terrorism and the Colombia one says not to do the Sierra Nevada trek we had just done even though it’s been perfectly safe for half a decade. I found some blogs on the internet from people who had been in towns in Venezuela during the riots, but what we never found was anyone who had been there recently and had anything positive to say about the country. The currency situation sounded very messy also – there’s one official rate and one unofficial black-market rate, the first is over three times higher but if you want to use the second you pretty much need to bring all the money you plan to spend in the country throughout your whole stay with you in dollars, stashed somewhere in your backpack (which wouldn’t have been fun even in a country that wasn’t known for muggings). And finally the unusual drought that is crippling the Venezuelan economy is also crippling several of the natural wonders that we had wanted to come to the country to see in the first place. Angel falls, the worlds tallest waterfall, is only a thin ribbon of water even during a normal dry season and so is almost completely gone during this one, the river to get there unnavigable. An amazingly strange phenomena called Catatumbo lightning, near-constant electrical storms, lightning without thunder, that for centuries has lit up the skies above lake Maracaibo stopped completely in January this year. There’s something tragically ironic about a petrol state crippled by a climate change related El Niño event…

This just doesn’t seem to be the time to visit, and while we were a bit disappointed about missing the table mountains of the Gran Sabana something even better did come up…

The Ciudad Perdida ruins.

The Machu Picchu of Colombia, Ciudad Perdida is a series of ruins three days worth of trekking into the jungles of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Discovered only in the 1970′s by illegal grave-robbers (extremely organized, grave-robbers here even have their own union) the ruins are centuries older than the more famous lost city in Peru. After a few years of grave robbers duelling each other on the mountain (an open area among the ruins is named Plaza Muerte after one such event…) word finally got out and proper archeologists could analyze what was left, and eventually the area would also be opened to tourists. Though not without risk…one group of tourists were kidnapped by left-wing guerrillas back in 2003 but nothing has happened since then (…one unconfirmed rumour has it there’s some sort of “protection money” included in the fee we paid to trek there) and the hostages that time were treated fairly well – some Israeli tourists in the group apparently said afterwards that they were happy to get a several month long jungle-trip even though they only paid for six days! Anyhow, for this reason it is not a particularly good idea to trek there independently – everyone has to be part of a group with a guide.

Kogi village in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

My other interest in trekking this region is to catch a glimpse of the Kogi, the indigenous people of the area. Probably the most fascinating indigenous group I’ve ever read about, the Kogi has been called the only civilization in South America to survive conquest, maintaining most of their traditions and way of life throughout the past centuries. They, together with the Arhuaco or Ika and Wiwa, are direct descendants of the Tayrona who built the lost city, and who retreated higher and higher into the mountains to escape Spanish greed for gold and slaves. To them the Sierra Nevada mountains are the Heart of the World, a place to be guarded and a place essential for keeping the entire world in balance. In the dawn of days all humans lived here, but today only them, the Elder Brothers, have stayed behind to act as guardians of the world while the Younger Brothers (the name for all outsiders) threaten this balance with mining, deforestation and the general wanton destruction we like to get up to in order to further civilization. There is a great documentary called “From The Heart Of The World: The Elder Brothers Warning” about the Kogi (they invited a filming crew in the 90′s after the snow cover on the peaks of their mountain started rapidly disappearing), and a short National Geographic article here (there is a beautifully written book called One River by the same author, about indigenous people in the Amazon).

To the secretive Kogi the lost city, known to them as Teyuna, was never lost, but kept in secret for generations and visited regularly by shamans for ceremonies.

Edel after a night in hammocks.

The start of the trip wasn’t very comfortable – a couple hours on a bumpy road in a big truck/jeep leaking exhaust fumes until we reached the trailhead. We were in a group of 13 plus guides, and the walk the first day was quite short – starting near sea level and climbing some 500 meters to the first camp. The coastal hills of the Sierra Nevada are fairly dry and open, some of the area farmed – we will get deeper into the forest as we climb higher. The day was hot, but there was a a nice swimming hole in the river along the way and lots of stops for fresh fruit. Mules were carrying the bulk of our supplies so we had only daypacks with camera and some extra clothes to carry ourselves. The first night we slept in hammocks, open air with corrugated iron roof above and mosquito net over the hammocks. By the river right next to the camp was a lovely swimming hole, under a big waterfall with tall trees full of lianas and epiphytes towering above.

Horses at our first camp.

Something else we were a bit less enthusiastic about was that in the morning we were offered the chance to visit a clandestine cocaine-factory a few kilometers deeper into the jungle! It wasn’t an official part of the trek, but for 15$ extra per person some campesinos at the camp could bring us there… I admit I was a bit curious to see this shady operation, but after all the horrible misery brought down on this country by foreign demand for the drug it didn’t feel like something we wanted to contribute to, even just to take photos. Everyone else in the group went though. In addition we were close to the national park now, and national parks are the one place the US war-on-drugs programme aren’t allowed to air-spray extremely toxic leaf defoliants….with the obvious consequence that the coca plantations are now moving in to deforest some of Colombia’s most biodiverse and protected areas.

Kogi man in the Mutanyi village.

The second day we met the Kogi. From the first camp we climbed a 700m hill then down again into another valley to enter Kogi territory. The first village we came across was just a couple houses – some made of wood and some clay, all of them round, roofs made of dried palm-fronds. One man, an older woman and a number of children were home, and the guide introduced us and gave the children some sweets. All dressed in pure white, this is the first time we’ve met an indigenous people who still wear their traditional clothes. Beautiful kids with long black hair (both men and women keep it long) – quite reserved and neither shy nor particularly curious, I didn’t get the same mad giggling response that we were used to from remote villages in Asia on showing children their picture in the camera…did find a moment to play peek-a-boo with one of the youngest though which is fun across all cultures! The men all carry a gourd with crushed lime inside (from sea-shells traded from other tribes) and a stick to fish out the lime – it is used when chewing coca to activate the chemicals inside the leaf. The tribes here and all across the Andes have used the properties of the plant for thousands of years, as a mild stimulant, appetite-suppressant or for dealing with altitude, before getting caught up in the guerilla-wars in the last few decades after it got turned into a mindless drug. Kogi men can start to carry the gourd at 16 the guide was telling us, when they are old enough to take a wife. The Kogi villages around here are the ones with the most contact with outsiders – ones higher up in the mountains are still very isolated.

Kogi children by the river.

We passed a bigger village not long after the first, some twenty huts including a bigger ceremonial house, though in this village no Kogi were home. The guide still showed us around a little, before we made our way to camp 2. This camp was actually run by some of the Kogi – nice that some of the tourism money reach them also. There was another fantastic swimming spot in the river close-by, a bigger stream with a series of waterfalls a little higher. Kogi children showed up every now and then – on the opposite riverbank washing clothes or running across the river behind us, never taking much notice of the strangers. Usually moving without a sound and fading in and out of the forest so quickly, they were almost like forest spirits from some Japanese animated movie. I might just be getting nostalgic since we’re getting close to the end of our trip, but I think it’s one of my favourite moments from the year, sitting there on the riverside after a swim watching them, the youngest members of an ancient culture, dressed in their traditional white and going about life by the riverside like they always have. Precious and fragile…if you watch for too long they might be gone forever.

Kogi children in the Mutanyi village.

As Colombia has gotten safer and safer and there are fewer and fewer left-wing guerilla or right-wing para-militaries on the mountain the biggest threat to the Kogi today is probably from different types of well-meaning idiots… One of the first hits if you google the tribe is from a group of people trying to bring them homeopathy … useless quack medicine which the WHO recently issued a warning against as it contains no active ingredients whatsoever and cost thousands of lives globally every year when used in place of real medicine. Missionaries would be another group…always there to help save another soul by converting them to the one true religion, but in indigenous cultures spiritual beliefs and mythology are usually intertwined with their medicinal knowledge and their history so robbing them of the first takes away much more. A third type of well-meaning idiots could be the one I belong to…tourists. I’m hoping that the Ciudad Perdida trek, bound to increase in numbers as tourism grows in Colombia, will help keep the mountain safe as the government won’t want to loose the income, and it looks promising that the Kogi has some say in how things are run, but you never know how things play out. Independent and self-sufficient they are quite rich since they’re not operating within our economy, but entering the cash economy they might likely end up poor. Their elders are apparently discussing some sort of rotation between the villages as the ones close to the touristed areas are changing faster than the ones higher up in the mountains – a rotation might help the Kogi keep their identity homogeneous.

Kogi child by the river.

Steps to Ciudad Perdida.

Day three we started the climb up towards the lost city, first balancing on a narrow path above the river then crossing it before climbing another ridge to enter a new valley. The forest was deeper here, though in a few places we passed small Kogi banana plantations and in one spot, on top of a hill overlooking the valley, a small Kogi hut containing a wooden sugar-cane mill. The guide cut down a cane and gave us a piece each – dripping in sugar as you chew it before spitting out the raw fibers. The forest here is real cloud-forest, trees so heavy in bromeliads and other epiphytes that branches break off and fall to the ground. Some bromeliads were growing mid-air even – attached to thin areal roots certain types of trees send down. We followed the river for an hour, crossing it eight times, before reaching the old Tayrona stone steps leading up from the river to the lost city. Roughly 1200 narrow steps, a 300 meter climb, hidden well behind the jungle and hardly visible from the river if you didn’t know where to look.

Steps to Ciudad Perdida.

The first area we came to contained a number of round stone terraces, still overgrown with moss, trees and roots – very atmospheric. There would have been a house in the center of each terrace; round houses, round plazas, everything round in Tayrona cities, everything square in ours. The entrance area had functioned as a purification place to be visited before going to the temples of the higher ceremonial city. Small paths and narrow stone steps led off in all directions – we followed the one leading higher. After passing a few more terraces still shaded by jungle trees towering above we came to the main stairway – wide and straight unlike the rest – which lead to a long series of terraces culminating in the biggest one in a fully cleared area at the top at roughly 1300 meters altitude (this terrace is now also occasionally used as helipad by those who don’t want to trek for three days to get up here). The group had split up along the climb so we were exploring almost on our own – everyone met up again at the top. There were also a handful of Colombian soldiers stationed there, standing guard at the main terrace with their tents a little further up the hill. The views from the top terrace were terrific – layer after layer of forest-covered mountains in shades of blue towards the horizon, clouds obscuring the peaks.

Ciudad Perdida ruins.

Our camp was slightly higher, on an opposite hill looking down over the ruins. Apparently we were the last group to spend the night there – the new camp will be down by the river below all the ruins, per Kogi wishes in order to respect their ancestry. This is still early days of tourism to this site, which could in time perhaps rival Machu Picchu, and it is nice to see that the Kogi get to have a hand in shaping the future of tourism at the site already from an early stage.

Ciudad Perdida ruins.

In the morning we did a three hour walk around the ruins before starting the climb down. The guide pointed out two map-stones, the carvings thought to represent the streets and roads in the old Tayrona city (interesting to have maps but no written language). We visited the lower “residential” areas below the ceremonial city, walking many of the narrow paths and steps through the jungle, and passing two Kogi shaman huts before starting to climb down. It had rained during the night and the steep steps were very slippy, me and Edel fell once each. After all the river crossings on the way back we spent another night at camp 2, the next day walking past the Kogi villages again before the final night in hammocks in camp 1, the next morning arriving back to our home in Taganga.

Kogi child in the Mutanyi village.

View over the Sierra Nevada.

Balconies in Cartagena old town.

From Bogota we moved on to Cartagena out by the coast. Cartagena is adorable – full of old colonial architecture and flowers hanging down over the street from wooden balconies. It is much hotter here than in Bogota, and the town feels strongly Caribbean. The old city is walled, with cannons still pointing out over the sea where Francis Drake and other pirates used to lurk, plotting to steal from the Spaniards the gold they in turn had only just stolen from the Indians. A couple of replica pirate ships were actually parked in the harbour. Cartagena was an important port in the early colonial days and nearly all the gold shipped home to Spain was shipped from here. It also became important for the slave trade, with the main plaza where you enter the walled city once being a slave market. First local indigenous were used, but the priests started protesting that it wasn’t right to use these people for slaves since they had souls just like catholic people – for slaves it would be much better to import blacks, without souls, from the west of Africa.

Cartagena cannons and city walls.

With a charming city center and fantastic seafood the only thing that wasn’t nice in (contemporary) Cartagena was the place we were staying – we had arrived late and picked a random hostel in the Getsemani part of town near the walled city. It looked a bit shoddy and Edel was suspecting it was a rent-by-the-hour love hotel (…they only had a room free for us after 10pm). In the morning we moved across the road to a place that looked better from the outside at least, though the room was smaller, more expensive, and on top of the TV/wifi/shower being broken it was a bit of a party-hostel with someone practising the guitar (quite poorly) outside our room until 2am. And then of course the ants… We decided we might head for Taganga a bit sooner than planned!

After the volcano-dipping.

We did one daytrip from Cartagena before we couldn’t stick the hostel any more – to take a dip in a mud volcano 1-2 hours outside town. We booked through the hostel so went in a group with a handful of other tourists. The “volcano” is a 20 meter high mound, with bubbling lukewarm mud inside – some rickety mud-baked steps lead up to the top and then down into the mud pool. Very strange to slip down into – you float high, about shoulder-level, in the smooth sticky mud. One thing we found you need to look out for is that if you lean forward to much your legs will start floating up behind you, tipping your face further and further down – like falling forward in slow-motion. Someone else in the group slipped in and got a total dip. There was a lagoon nearby to wash off in afterwards, and it was a funny experience (apart perhaps from having to dodge all the people who look for a tip by trying to massage you, help you wash off, or take your picture).

Carnaval in Taganga.

With Jean in Taganga.

From Cartagena we got a bus to Taganga, a small village by the coast a couple kilometers from the town of Santa Marta. We planned to spend three nights in the village before setting off on a trek, and here we found a really nice hostel. The owner, Jean, is a French gentleman with 76 years of travel stories under his belt – living in Colombia during its most turbulent decades and growing up in China at the time of the Communist takeover, a linguist with eight languages he’d spent time living with a tribe in the Amazon, and as a brilliant jazz pianist he’d played in a jam session with the Buena Vista Social Club. After the first night we were the only people staying there, so we had most of our meals together with him, listening to stories of kidnappings (he’d been in three!) or of being at sea during a typhoon. In the evenings once the heat wore off we’d sit under the lime and mango trees in his garden, listening to crickets, geckos, and more amazing stories that start with “Well, back in 1947…”. Once, living in the US during the height of communist-paranoia he’d been questioned by the FBI for visiting a Russian bookshop (which they saw as unpatriotic enough) and then walking through the town, using his feet, for a full hour and a half (very suspicious)! One evening before we left he dusted off the piano and treated us to a beautiful April in Paris and other jazz classics. He’d worked as a photographer as well, and gave me a couple filters to play with during the trek after I set up the wifi for his hostel. We made plans to come back and stay a few more days after we returned from the six day Ciudad Perdida trek into the Colombian jungle.

Botero museum in La Candelaria.

North of the equator for the first time in over five months. I’ve always wanted to go to Colombia – or at least since the country stopped leading the worlds-highest-rate-of-kidnappings list! (..that title now belongs to Iraq). In Bogota we stayed in the La Candelaria old part of town, very charming with lots of old houses, wooden balconies, courtyards and narrow streets running up and down the hills. The area feels safe, and there’s military or police on every second street corner to make sure it stays that way – Colombia is working hard on improving it’s tourism image recently and by avoiding a few jungle/border areas the ad-slogan “the only risk is wanting to stay” could well be true.

El Dorado raft in the Bogota gold museum.

One of the main sights in Bogota is the Gold Museum – probably the biggest collection of conquistador-surviving artefacts anywhere. The museum is very modern and well put together, expert lightning and use of ambient music to build atmosphere. One room you enter completely in the dark before more and more ancient gold pieces are lit up all around you on the walls, and also below your feet in the floor together with water sounds to simulate El Dorado lake offerings. Afterwards we went to the Botero modern art museum which I must say impressed a bit less…Botero’s work is a fairly repetitive collection of paintings of the over-fed, all with expression-less faces. His horses are funny though! They also had some paintings by other artists including an incredibly disturbing early Picasso that was probably put there to make Botero look good.

The next day we went to the most dangerous place in Bogota – which is of course the science museum! In the Maloka museum they put us inside a big steel-cage and sent 600,000 volts through it! I missed most of the explanation (including the general point of the experiment) as it was in Spanish but it was anyway very important to hold your ears and to avoid touching the cage…which was difficult with way too many people inside. At one point everyone else in the cage laughed and looked at me – the “experiment supervisor” had just explained that in case anyone gets electrocuted it’s usually the tallest person! After surviving this they also put us through the standard charge-someone-until-the-hair-stands-on-end trick, and the hold-hands-in-a-big-circle-so-everyone-gets-an-electric-shock. To relax after this adventure we went to the omnimax movie theater…something about an alien invasion in an amusement park.

The Zipaquira salt cathedral.

The Zipaquira salt cathedral was our destination for the next day. In the village Zipaquira 50 kilometers north of Bogota salt has been mined since pre-Columbian days, and some of the old mining tunnels inside the mountain have been turned into a giant cathedral (two cathedrals actually – but the first one didn’t please the lord so he made the roof cave in, in his mercy). We got a local bus to Zipaquira then a taxi up to the salt mine – the taxi driver was very friendly and chatty and was driving around with his whole family in the front seats for the day. The cathedral is a strange place, long dark tunnels and big caverns, a bit of religious imagery over there, some tacky coloured lighting over there. They even had a 3D cinema fitted down there, showing the history of the mine. We had just been fitted out for the hardhat-and-headlamp part of the ticket when all the lights went out everywhere down in the mine – everyone had to be led out to the surface by one of the guides.

The last day in Bogota before moving on to Cartagena we took a cablecar up to the Cerro de Monserrate hill 500m above town, for panoramic views over a city of 8 million.

Oak barrels in a Maipu winery.

The city of Mendoza is Argentina’s wine growing capital, and we had made sure to meet up with a genuine Frenchman so that we wouldn’t look like complete amateurs when visiting the wineries. Matteo had arrived from New Zealand via Chile, and sported the same spectacular jetlag that we caught ourselves a few months back on the same long east-bound flight. Alcohol is one of the worst ways to try to cure a jetlag, but Matteo was brave and willing to try anyway. Apart from visiting an underwhelming modern art museum in the city center we accomplished little during our first few days in Mendoza. We moved hostel after three days as we are now stuck in high season and the room we were in was booked out – luckily we found another hotel closeby that had a room free. And no wonder…something was terribly wrong with this room – the place was a bit cheaper and had fan instead of a/c, but something else was heating the room up as a furnace… It kept least 10 degrees Celsius hotter than anywhere else in the hotel, clocking in at 32 degrees already at 7am in the morning! We checked the walls and floor but couldn’t figure out where all the heat was coming from… After two nights of awful sleep with the slow ceiling fan only gently stirring the air we found a third hotel to move to.

Bottles in a Maipu winery.

We went rafting one of the days – there’s a fast flowing brown river with lots of rapids an hour out of town. The water was higher than usual in the river and it was great fun. Between the rapids I asked the raft-leader if anyone ever fell off, “oh rarely, maybe three times in a season”, then ten seconds later someone fell off the raft just in front of us (the person was quickly recovered luckily). Matteo went paragliding the next day, then we organized to do the main thing people come to Mendoza for: bike around between the wineries for a day. Being good students we commenced the sampling already the evening before, so we got a bit of a late start and only made it to two different wineries during the day, plus a small olive farm. One of the wineries was very traditional, giant oak barrels, the second more modern with huge metal cylinders. It was nice to bike around in the sunshine, stop by the side of the road here and there for some bread, cheese and olives, then sample a few more wines…better the more kilometers you’ve biked. It was nearly too hot to drink wine though really…but it probably wouldn’t have been too good an idea to ask for a cold beer…

Matteo (and Lukas) and Edel in Valparaiso.

After eight nights in Mendoza – one of our longer stops for the whole trip – we had our final Argentinean steak and then the three of us got a long bus-ride across the Andes back to Santiago, then to Valparaiso, the cute rundown sea-port town me and Edel visited already once while making our way south in Chile three months ago. We were stressing a bit to make the bus…ending up with the only taxi driver in all of Latin America that stops for amber, and arrived at the station with just two minutes to spare – before having to wait an hour for the delayed bus. It got even more late during the border crossing 3,200 meters up in the mountains – standing still for hours in the queue. Once we got inside the checkpoint all counters except two were closed…long queues but the people behind all the other counters were busy playing patience on the computer or doing their facebook… The bus was meant to reach Santiago at 5pm but got there at 9pm..luckily we still found a bus to Valparaiso and the hostel there had kept the room we booked.

Epic looking feline in Valparaiso.

We spent two nights in Valparaiso, walking around town and looking at all the cool graffiti (some had been cleaned since out last visit – La Ganja es una Deidad no more unfortunately…) and riding the funky funicular lifts. Next we headed to Pichilemu – Chile’s surf capital – and signed up for some lessons at a surf lodge outside town. Matteo had already mastered the art in New Zealand, but me and Edel took a lesson with a real long-haired surfer-dude who thought everything was “epic”.

At least we look like surfers!

This beach was a bit less beginner-friendly than the one Matteo had surfed in New Zealand, but he still managed to stand up on the board unlike us. There were crazy waves running out from the beach to meet the real waves in a big splash, and currents dragging you along as you fight the waves trying to get back out. The hardest part was just getting far enough out to even get to try – my routine would be something like this: struggle for half an hour to paddle out, big waves beating me in the face, get tipped over and go under, swallow some water, get a bruise from someone else’s board, and find myself all the way back at the beach again without even having tried to catch a wave! Did get to catch a few waves eventually, body-boarding along the whole way to the shore with the wave breaking underneath me, but didn’t get as far as standing up on my feet. Just as often the wave would just pass by below without taking me along, completely ignoring all my frantic paddling.

Street in Valparaiso.

I had probably swallowed a gallon of sea water at the end, with another gallon lodged in my sinuses (exiting gracefully through the nose in large quantities whenever I’d tilt my head…). Still fun though, but awfully hard work. Like snowboarding if you had to climb the whole mountain between each run instead of taking the lift… We went back a second day, and I managed to surf standing on my knees at least. Then I paddled out a bit too far “too catch that perfect wave” and the current caught me and dragged me some kilometer down along the beach. I was paddling until I was blue in the face but couldn’t quite tell if I was getting closer to or further away from the beach… Once I finally got back we decided to call it for the day. Me and Edel would fly to Bogota after this, but I looked in no shape to cross borders…three day stubble I didn’t want to shave due to a bad sunburn, blood-shot eyes from the waves beating me in the face – looking in the mirror even I would think I was smuggling! Then again, who ever heard of anyone smuggling drugs in to Colombia?

Stayed out of the water and sun the last day, then went in to town for leaving drinks with Matteo. Slept most of the bus to Santiago the next day, as well as the flight to Buenos Aires, the nine hour airport stopover, and the flight to Bogota…

Bus to Calilegua.

In the morning we got the one daily bus to the national park, after having breakfast in the hotel while being interviewed by the fairly-drunken staff…“which part of America is Ireland in now again?”… The bus had a nice countryside feel to it, finally limping out of town an hour late packed with people and the aisle stacked high with sacks of potatoes. The road runs through the national park to a couple isolated villages on the other side – we got off at the second ranger station “Mesada de las Colmenas” somewhere in the middle of the park, planning to do a trek from there. The ranger station was unmanned, but a faded map outside suggested the trek should start nearby – we eventually found where it branched off from the road, unsigned except for a fallen-down rotting sign a hundred meters into the trek reminding you not to forget to register… It hadn’t been walked in a while it seemed – overgrown and lots of spiderwebs across the trail kept getting stuck in my face. It was boiling hot when we started the trek, even though we were 1200 meters up, and the trail was a steep downhill, through dense forest covered in epiphytes; bromeliads and even cactus growing up in the trees.

Natural shower in Calilegua.

At the end of the climb down we came to a small river and a waterfall. The water was cold and refreshing and we were hot and sweaty from the walk – we hadn’t brought any swim gear but luckily I’m Swedish and we seemed to be all alone in the park. We stayed a couple hours by the stream, lunching on tuna, bread and olives we’d packed, before starting the long climb back up (did meet someone on the way actually…). When we got back to the ranger station we started walking back along the road – nice views out over the forested hills in the park but it was boiling hot and now we had less shade…it was all downhill at least luckily. When we got a lift some 6-7 kilometers later we were almost completely out of water, and it was great to feel the breeze in our face sitting on the back of the pickup.

Back in the comfort of the hotel in Libertador I discovered there might be something to be said for not “going Swedish” in the national park – I counted a full 30 ticks sucking blood from my leg! Got a bus back to Salta the next day (…more ham and cheese sandwiches), then a long 20 hour bus took us (minus our contraband apples which were confiscated by an armed guard..) south to Mendoza. The city of Mendoza is a wine growing Mecca, and we had organized to bring with us a genuine Frenchman so we wouldn’t make complete fools of ourselves. Matteo had already arrived from Chile and was waiting in the hostel.

Forest in the Calilegua national park.

Iglesia San Francisco in Salta.

Salta is quite a nice city, lots of old colonial architecture, and still very hot even though it’s at 1200 meters altitude up in the mountains – not as humid as the area we left behind though. Teresa organized to finish her trip and go home, and me and Edel looked into visiting some of the cloud-forest reserves to the north. The El Rey park was difficult to get to this time of the year – one person we talked to explained that we’d need to rent our own 4×4 and then continued on to explain the safest way to cross a high river without getting the car swept away… Remembering something we had seen in Tibet Edel talked some sense into me and we aimed to get to the slightly more accessible Calilegua national park instead, after first heading to visit a couple villages up in the mountain desert.

Before leaving Salta we went to a museum set up to display the mummies of three children found on 6700 meters altitude on a mountain nearby, sacrificed by the Incas. Incredibly well preserved, as were the number of small offerings left with them, made of gold and colourful seashells and feathers from every corner of the Inca empire.

Pigeons at the Salta plaza.

We didn’t have much luck with food in Salta, while it is a big city the cuisine in parts of Argentina can get a bit repetitive…little but pizza and sandwiches on most menus. Ham and cheese is a particular obsession..you get ham and cheese sandwiches on every long bus you take and in restaurants ham and cheese gets put in absolutely everything..even a side of potatoes can arrive at the table covered in the stuff. A lasagna I had in Mendoza some week later in fact was nothing except ham and cheese..in layer after layer. Edel did manage to find one place in Salta prepared to cook seafood, though the pyromaniacs in the kitchen turned her squid into something reminding me of the Cape Horn sailing book I’m reading at the moment, where the starving sailors start eating old leather anti-chafing gear from the ship… The guidebook did list a couple alternative places, but the one lebanese and two vegetarian restaurants we tried to find had closed down (maybe burned down by the same pyromaniac?). Fruit is so hated that we even had an armed guard confiscate our peaches, apples and plums on the Mendoza bus a while later! (maybe something to do with Mendoza being an important wine-growing region?)

Cactus by the Pucara ruined fortress.

From Salta we headed for Tilcara, a cute little desert town of adobe houses at 2450 meters altitude. It is domestic tourism high-season now and many places were full when we got there. We walked off in a random direction from the bus station, and after checking a couple places a young boy spotted us on the street and led us to his mums house where we could rent the basement floor for three nights. Tilcara offered a nice break from the monotone food we’d been eating for a while recently, with some lovely restaurants serving creative quinoa dishes and even real vegetables!

Purmamarca town.

In Tilcara the first day we went to the Pucara ruins – a pre-Colombian fortress on a hill just outside town, overgrown by tall cactus. The ruins are dominated by a huge pyramid – built in the 1950′s as a monument by the early archeologists to celebrate themselves! The following day we hopped on a bus further north to another small town called Humahuaca at nearly 3000 meters – popping north of the Tropic of Capricorn on the way for the first time in three months. Humahuaca has a nice town square with an old church, and a gigantic modern independence monument up on a big hill. We picked up a couple things on the market in town, and had some good empanadas before heading back to Tilcara to catch a different bus south to a third town called Purmamarca.

Hilltop concert.

Purmamarca sits at the foot of “Cerro de los Siete Colores”, a series of multi-coloured hills behind town. We were on the way down after taking some photos from the hill when we were hijacked by a group of Argentinians who were doing an improvised concert up on the hilltop – they got more and more people to come up and join them and after a while there was a good crowd sitting up on the hill, playing guitar and drums and sharing paper carton wine, Argentinian songs and Manu Chao. We had thought they were a band at first but apparently they had just met earlier that day! Lovely spontaneity…

Cactus by Purmamarca.

Strangler fig on the Loreto ruins.

We explored the ruins in San Ignacio itself first, buildings made of red brick with some of the stone carvings and decorations still surviving. In the afternoon we got a taxi to take us to the nearby Loreta and Santa Ana ruins, joined by an Argentinian student with a talent for talking his way out of the entrance fee. These ruins were less restored, still overgrown and in places covered by strangler figs to remind a little of some of the Angkor ruins. Santa Ana had a graveyard which had been used again in the early 1900′s – bit of a spooky place with open and broken coffins lying around in crumbling cemetery ruins…big tree roots growing through the roofs. Thousands of big spiders and cicadas were filling the trees.

The Trinidad ruins in Paraguay.

The next day we headed for Paraguay, to visit the Trinidad ruins on that side of the border. It took quite a number of buses to get there – beginning with one back again to Posadas, then three buses first to the border, across a several kilometer long bridge to the second border, then to the town Encarnacion on the Paraguayan side, then finally a bus to Trinidad. We entered the country legally this time, getting our passport stamped (unlike on our 5-minute sightseeing trip from Iguazu). The bus was crowded, India-style nearly. Encarnacion looks quite chaotic, partly flooded by red muddy water the day we passed through. The Trinidad ruins an hour north are much better preserved/restored than the ones on the Argentinian side – covering a big field with well tended lawns and lots of intact decorations and sculptures. The heat and strong sun as we walked around the ruins was brutal. Unfortunately once we arrived we didn’t have enough Paraguayan money for the tickets (we hadn’t found a proper changing place so had changed on the street..only as much as we thought we needed) – luckily they let us pay with Argentinian pesos instead.

Edel and Teresa in the Trinidad ruins.

On the way back we flagged a bus to Encarnacion from the road, then got another border-crossing bus but this time we got stuck on the long bridge. Crossing into Argentina seems more popular… We were standing up in the crowded bus now slowly turning into a sauna without the wind as we were hardly moving. Only gained maybe ten meters every few minutes, and I could feel drops of sweat running down my arms and legs. We could hop off and walk of course, but it would have been about 40 minutes to walk in either direction from the middle of the bridge, and we had ran out of water…nearly 40 degrees in the shade, of which there was none. Luckily the driver too was getting restless and eventually he got fed up enough to drive in the oncoming lane against traffic across the rest of the bridge.

We had a 20 hour bus to Salta, 1200km to the west, booked for the next evening. Had planned to pop back in to the San Ignacio ruins during the way, but the ticket, though valid for 15 days, allowed only one entrance… Saw some spectacular lightning in the evening from the bus to Salta – I was watching it for 40 minutes before I fell asleep and the sky never stayed dark for more than a second.

Horse riding in the Ibera wetlands.

I love swamps. Edel, who might be the worlds most understanding wife, even let me drag her off to one during our honeymoon (you couldn’t go to Cuba and not visit the Zapata peninsula wetlands now could you?). The Ibera wetlands in Argentina are the worlds second biggest, after the Pantanal in Brazil-Bolivia (which we visited and nearly died from the heat in on the last trip). From Iguazu we’re approaching the Ibera in an awkward way, honing in slowly in a big counter-clockwise spiral…heading straight south from Posadas looks smarter on the map but we’ve been advised against it…

Mercedes town square.

After the ten hour bus from Iguazu we spent the first night on the way in Corrientes, which the Lonely Planet describes as “fuck Corrientes, it’s not that interesting anyway”, while pondering the lack of budget accommodation… I miss the Rough Guide – we usually travel by it always but couldn’t get hold of it for Argentina so now we’re stuck with the Lonely Planet and its descriptions of “super happening nightclubs”, and a “Drinking” section for every place even where they don’t bother with a map (incidentally their maps are awful, printed in six near-identical shades of grey and tiny font). We stayed in a hotel by the bus-station in Corrientes, to continue to Mercedes to the south a little closer to the Ibera next. While I wouldn’t quite be ready to hurl expletives on Corrientes, Mercedes definitely has more charm – a pleasant little town with lots of rusty old cars (there even seemed to be raggers – a large boat-shaped truck with lots of people on it played music while driving very slowly around the square…). We got our swamp excursion organized – two nights in Colonia Pellegrini which lies by the Ibera lake, bus there in the morning together with a nice German hippie girl who we teamed up with, and then 4×4 transport along the road we had been warned against back to Posadas.

Black Caiman in the Ibera wetlands.

The road to Pellegrini wasn’t in that great shape either, but the bus did get us there and we checked in to a hostel in the village that turned out to be just a few blocks big. We went horse riding for a few hours in the afternoon and saw lots of birds. I had a very lively horse that liked running fast and wasn’t a bit interested in what I had to say about that. Minor problems sitting on hard surfaces after.

The next morning before it got too hot we went out by boat on the wetlands, great way to see lots of animals. We spotted lots of capybaras (at up to 70 kilo the worlds biggest rodent), black caimans, and southern screamer, jacana and lots of other birds. The lakes in the wetland are full of big floating islands of vegetation – some even big enough to have trees! Walking back to the hostel after the boat dropped us it had gotten very hot, humid and burning sun, loud cicadas everywhere in the trees. Slept away the day’s hottest hours, then went for a walk in the evening where we saw lots of howler monkeys, and more capybaras grazing by the ranger station. We were completely eaten by mosquitoes on the walk, and saw a 20cm toad back at the hostel.

Capybara in the Ibera wetlands.

For the next morning we had a 4×4 transport organized to take us back to Posadas, to find out exactly why taking the direct road instead of the longer route via Corrientes-Mercedes is a terrible idea. It was raining very heavily this morning, with thunder and lots of wind. The road was indeed awful, the red dirt turning into clay and the pickup slipping and sliding in zigzag back and forth across the road. A non-4×4 car was stuck solid in the mud just a couple kilometers from the village, and power-lines had been torn down by the wind all along the road. The first hundred kilometers took us over five hours… We had left with two cars at the same time in case one would get stuck out in the middle of nowhere – the second car got a broken gearbox at some point so had to be towed..slowing us down from a speedy 30 kmph to 20. We did make it to Posadas in the end – eventually the dirt-road connected out to a better road and the rest was much faster. In Posadas we caught a short bus-ride north to San Ignacio, to stay a few days and visit the ruins of a number of old Jesuit missions.

Baby capybara with friend in the Ibera wetlands.

Howler monkey in the Ibera wetlands.

Edel, Teresa and Anne in Buenos Aires.

We flew in to Buenos Aires just around midnight on Christmas Eve – lots of fireworks all over the city which was fun and strange to look down on instead of up at! When we arrived at the hostel the place was loud, drunken and dancing…and that’s just the staff. We spent three days in Buenos Aires, mostly just walking around the city and the San Telmo market, then caught the 17 hour bus north to Puerto Iguazu. The bus company we picked this time spiced up the unavoidable ham&cheese sandwiches by serving us wine, rum and champagne one after the other. The rum was “Old Smuggler” and the wine a special bus-brand with a picture of a bus on the bottle…

Capuchin monkey at the Iguazu falls.

Tegus lizard at the Iguazu falls.

Coati at the Iguazu falls.

Me and Edel spent half a week around the Iguazu waterfalls at the beginning of our last trip, and it’s a nice place to come back to. Within a few minutes inside the national park that contains the falls we had seen capuchin monkeys, coatis, big tegus lizards and tons of different colourful butterflies. I think I took more photos of the animals than the falls this time. The falls are of course amazing though, long curtains of dozens and dozens of different waterfalls sending clouds of spray drifting in over the rainforest – and even more full of water this time of the year than the last time we were here. This also happened to be the time of year for coati-babies – coatis are cute brown long-snouted raccoon-like animals that are hanging out in hundreds of all over the park…watching them run around and raid bins, fight, play, and generally misbehave is another highlight to Iguazu. We walked the two lower paths on the Argentinian side the first day, saving Garganta del Diablo – the biggest – for day two. This fall is really amazing in high-water – like an enormous hole or drain in the middle of the big flood-plain as you walk closer and closer following the kilometer or so of boardwalks over the water to get there. The walk takes you right up to the edge! Flocks of swallows swirl in and out by the falls, and clouds of mist that can be seen from miles away hide and reveal the Brazilian side. Anne and Teresa did the boatride right under the falls after, and came back properly soaked.

The next day, the 31st, we spent in three different countries – viewing the Brazilian side of the falls plus a quick dash into Paraguay. We booked a taxi for the day through the hostel, first crossing in to Brazil which was the simplest border crossing ever – got a stamp in the passport without even leaving the car. First we went to see the Itapu dam, the worlds second biggest after Three Gorges in China. The tour at the dam took us to a viewpoint where we could see the overflow release sending water hundreds of meters high into the air, then a quick drive along the edge of the dam, and finally a 30min film about the history of the dam that sounded like a commercial and made you want to shout out “Ok, I’ll buy it already!” halfway through. The dam generates 20% of Brazil’s electricity and nearly all of Paraguay’s, but the film forgot to mention that the 1300 square kilometer dam flooded a waterfall even bigger and more impressive than the Iguazu…

Iguazu falls.

Iguazu falls.

Iguazu falls.

Iguazu falls.

Iguazu falls.

Next we did a five minute hop across the border into Paraguay, supposedly the most corrupt country outside Africa. I’ll have to change my mind about the border crossing – this is the simplest one we’ve ever done..nobody even stopped us or looked at our passports… You don’t build a reputation for contraband by inspecting passports! This particular corner of Paraguay looked messy enough to remind us of India, with the touts even taking a step further from trying to drag you from the street into their shops – here they hunt in the middle of the road trying to stop cars!

Toucan in Parque das Aves, Brazil.

To the Brazilian falls next, first visiting a nice little bird zoo breeding endangered parrots. Covered the walk by the falls in the next couple hours – there’s less to see on this side but you do get a better overview over all the falls, and one walkway leads right out into the middle below Garganta del Diablo, guaranteeing a soak. In the evening we went looking for restaurant for our New Years Eve dinner – most of the ones that were open were trying to pull off a 5$ buffet for about 60 euro (buffet’s are where you get sick..stuff lying around lukewarm for hours..) but after a bit of walking we found one lovely place that still went by a menu. We could hear Brazil enter 2010 at 11pm, and when it was Argentina’s turn an hour later a place nearby put on some great fireworks. Shared a couple bottles of red, leaving the next day for a lazy-day before waving goodbye to Anne who was going back to Buenos Aires, and the rest of us catching another bus to our next destination.

Coati with babies at the Iguazu falls.

Sealions in the Beagle Channel.

We spent a day around town, then the next day we went out on a cruise on the Beagle Channel (the strait mapped by the ship Darwin sailed on). The boat passed big colonies of sea-lions, cormorants, Magellanic and Gentoo penguins, and a very desolate looking lighthouse. We got to about 54.9 degrees south – the “southest” we’ve been (while in Ushuaia we looked a bit at Antarctica cruises to hop down the next 1000km south, but even last-minute deals were fairly expensive). Going 55 degrees north would only get you about as far as Belfast, but going south it’s the end of the world with only a handful of hardy species surviving on land. Going as far south as Umeå in Sweden (where my brothers are studying and where I went just before starting this trip) is to the north would actually land you on the Antarctic peninsula…

Lighthouse in the Beagle Channel.

Lighthouse in the Beagle Channel.

The cruise dropped us at Estancia Harberton ranch, to return by land. The ranch was set up in 1886 by a reverend Thomas Bridges who worked with the indigenous Yamana and Selk’nam of the area while they were dying out from introduced illnesses, getting hunted down and shot by sheep farmers, or starving after sealers killed off all the sea lions. Thomas seems to have been bright enough to realize that picking up a new religion probably wasn’t the highest priority for this people at the moment, considering their situation – he set up a safe place for them at his estancia and tried to preserve what he could of their culture, creating the first Yamana-English dictionary and writing down nearly everything that is known about these peoples today. Some of the earlier missionaries down here had been less in tune with the place, one of the least hospitable areas in the world – one group led by an Allen Gardiner sat and starved to death on a beach convinced until the end that god would provide for them if they just had enough faith. Clothes given to the Yamana by other missionaries “to protect their modesty” only helped them catch pneumonia and die..oddly enough covering yourself in sea-lion grease and walking naked like they had been doing for 7,000 years actually works better in this cold wet place where clothes never dry. Today there is only one native Yamana speaker left – two other tribes on Tierra del Fuego (which was named the land of fire from all the camp-fires seen on the coastline by early explorers) went extinct without a trace.

Unnamed nativo grave.

The estancia is still run by descendants of the Bridges family, and a young member guided us around the house, cemetery and a corner of protected Fuegian forest. A tree he pointed out in the forest had been made to grow in an arch by the Yamana long ago, to be useful for boat-building. Trees like this can apparently be found all over the area, but they grow so slow it would never have been useful for the person actually shaping it, or even his kids or grandkids…it would take 300-400 years to be ready! Imagine actually caring that much for your very very distant descendants… While we were walking around the estancia world leaders were gathering in Copenhagen to discuss climate change, and whether we should bother to leave any scraps at all of the biosphere intact for our grandkids… They came up with nothing but that’s ok, most people were too busy wondering how many people some famous golfer had slept with to even notice… Could it be that struggling with your day-to-day survival in a harsh environment like this keeps the brain functioning better than our modern lifestyle?

Skeletons and laundry by the Acatushun museum.

After walking around the estancia we went to a very impressive marine mammal museum next-doors. There’s a very long shallow peninsula a bit further north on the Tierra del Fuego coast where whales often get stranded, and the ones that can’t be rescued usually end up here. Overflowing around the museum building there was a fantastic amount of cetacean spare-parts lying around – the skeletons of some of the biggest animals that have ever lived, lying in the grass next to the laundry hanging out to dry! The exhibition inside was well laid out, the living animals painted on the walls behind the mounted skeletons, and there was another house with a second bone-yard a bit further down by the shore. Two volunteers were sitting outside (..in the fresh air) each cleaning a dolphin skull – inside the house a big wooden box contained dozens more still waiting to be cleaned..we nearly passed out from the stench when the lid was lifted!

Flag tree.

Bus back to Ushuaia with a couple more stops packed in along the way – twisted “flag-trees” on an exposed hill, bent over by the constant westerlies – another stop by a beaver dam (a Canadian species introduced for a failed fur-trade business, now busy eating its way through the slow-growing native forests) – and finally a stop by a husky-farm (wrong season for dog-sledding though with no snow around). One of the dogs there was a half-wolf breed, and the owner had taken part in the Alaskan Iditarod race.

We had planned to spend only a couple days in Ushuaia and the Tierra del Fuego national park, but it was getting quite close to Christmas and when we went to check about buses everything out from Tierra del Fuego was fully booked for well over a week. The bus north to Buenos Aires would have been about 52 hours long, and we weren’t particularly looking forward to it, but now there wasn’t actually any bus at all that could get us up there before the 25th. Flights were sold out also – except for one on Christmas Eve, landing at midnight, so we booked this for lack of other options (it was actually about the same price as the bus too).

In the Terra del Fuego national park.

Decided to make our Tierra del Fuego national park trip an overnight one now that we had the time – who doesn’t want to go camping at the end of the world? The park begins an hour west of town, where the road ends and we got an “end-of-the-world” stamp in our passport from a crazy pirate captain (seriously, he had the jolly roger hoisted!) who immediately gave us a couple bottles of stout upon learning that there were Irish among us! The trek from there followed the shore mostly, passing old Yamana settlements and making a dip in towards the mossy forests every now and then. In a few spots fallen trees were lying in big piles, tossed around like matches – they must get some serious storms here during the winter… (Cape Horn isn’t far off). In some areas many half-fallen trees were leaning on eachother, moving in the wind and we could hear loud creaking sounds from every direction around us – the singing forests of Tierra del Fuego!

Indian bread in Terra del Fuego national park.

The forest was full of an orange parasitic fungus growing on the trees, called Indian bread (edible apparently, though we didn’t risk it) and small white orchids growing by the thousand through the thick moss. It started raining a bit just as we got to the campsite – they didn’t have enough tents to rent us it turned out, but they did have sleeping-bags and there was a cabin that we could stay in (tents would probably have been very cold and soggy anyway…the campsite was partly flooded). We lit a cozy fire in the cabin stove, and drank our pirate stout! In the morning we woke from a huge bird of prey banging on our window (..I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just the stout) – the whole campsite was actually full of birds of prey, as well as some dare-devil rabbits who must have liked living on the edge.

Loosing the path..

After breakfast we started another trail along the lake shore – a bit overgrown and hard to follow but not to worry – I found a great shortcut (see photo). A side-trail up a 970m mountain called Cerro Guanaco had a sign saying it was closed off but we started it anyway to see how far we could get. Patching up a broken bridge across a stream on the way with a few more dead tree-stumps, we managed to get as far as the snow-line 600m up. Big views towards the lakes below and the Beagle Channel far away before we turned around to trek back down.

Mossy Fuegian forest.

We still had a few days to spend in Ushuaia before the flight out – used them to visit another couple museums to learn more about the Yamana and early Antarctic explorers. A display on the local fauna in one of the museums was sponsored by the Total oil company, which apparently without any irony lamented the 90% loss in some penguin species due to rising sea temperatures… The maritime museum was housed in the old prison – Tierra del Fuego (being a fairly miserable place to live during the winter) has of course been used as a penal colony. The prisoners among other things had to work hard in the snow to build a pointless little railroad that is now only used as a slower alternative for tourists to get the national park. One prisoner, featured as a life-size replica in his old cell, was a young psycho-killer with huge ears – learned men of the day were convinced that “his wickedness lies in his ears” so they were operated on. Surprisingly it didn’t work – he was still wicked, and legend has it the ears even grew back overnight! His prison mates eventually beat him to death when they got fed up with his “wickedness”.

Anne crossing a stream.

During the day on Christmas Eve, before catching the evening flight, we climbed up the mountains behind Ushuaia to see a small glacier. We got up to 750 meters altitude (cheating a little with a cable-car that gave us 200m in the middle) and it was really quite miserable up there. Snow, strong winds nearly pushing us off the trail and freezing cold – and this is practically midsummer here… How on earth did the naked canoe-nomads survive this place in the winter? At the Harberton estancia they mentioned a recent winter of 3 meter snow that had killed most of their sheep. We thawed on the way down from the mountain, the forest of the lower slopes giving us a bit more shelter.

The views when we flew out from Ushuaia were fantastic, still bright at half past nine in the evening. We spotted the Beagle Channel and Magellan Strait during the first few minutes in the air.

Leaving Ushuaia.

Magellanic penguin on Isla Magdalena.

From Puerto Natales we got another bus south to Punta Arenas – the last major place on mainland South America before Tierra del Fuego. We spent one day around town, visiting a huge cemetery full with the names of early settlers from all over Europe (even Klädesholmen in Sweden and Sligo in Ireland). Our major excursion from Punta Arenas was to the Isla Magdalena penguin colony, after two hours across the Magellan Strait by boat. We’ve been to penguin colonies in other places before (even snorkelled with the little torpedos in Galapagos) but I’ve never seen anything like this. The entire island was dug up – one hole in the ground for every meter, all the way up to the lighthouse at the top! Somewhere between 70,000 and 120,000 Magellanic penguins in total. Some of them were in the middle of performing mating dances, clicking the beaks together or skypointing with a strange song that sounds like a donkey braying. (video of penguin singing)

The Punta Arenas cemetery.

Magellanic penguins on Isla Magdalena.

Magellanic penguins on Isla Magdalena.

Magellanic penguins on Isla Magdalena.

The Última Esperanza Sound.

For a very relaxing day to rest our legs after five days of trekking in the Torres del Paine we booked a cruise up the Última Esperanza Sound to two glaciers, the Balmaceda and Serrano. The area looks quite far inland on the map, but is connected all the way out to the pacific by the fiords carved by enormous ice-age glaciers. The landscape reminds a little of Milford in New Zealand, with tall waterfalls crashing down the mountain-sides into the fiord. Snowcapped mountains, waterfalls, rainbows, glaciers – completely stunning! The boat passed sea-lion and cormorant colonies on the way, and gave us a final quick view of the Torres del Paine mountains 60 kilometers away, before arriving below the first glacier. The Balmaceda was running down a steep slope from mountain tops hidden in mist, a frozen river of blue ice that doesn’t quite reach the sea any more – it used to a couple decades ago… The Serrano still does, and we disembarked close to it later to do a short walk on the edge of the Bernhard O’Higgins national park (the biggest protected area in Chile which runs the whole way to the coast and covers some of the biggest ice-fields outside the poles). Walking up close to the glacier we played “which-animal?” games with the oddly shaped ice-blocks floating below – better than ink blots! On the way back to Puerto Natales the boat stopped for some good food by an estancia, a big farm accessible only from the water.

Rainbow over the Última Esperanza Sound.

View over the Última Esperanza Sound.

Waterfall in the Última Esperanza Sound.

Blue ice of the Balmaceda glacier.

Blue ice of the Balmaceda glacier.

The top of the Serrano glacier.

Definitely an elephant!

Cuernos del Paine seen from Lago Pehoe.

Torres del Paine in Chile is so fantastic that it is even mentioned in the Rough Guide to Argentina book as one of the highlights for that country…just for being close to it. The national park, which is also on the cover of the Rough Guide to Chile book we’ve been carrying the last couple months, is where we’re heading next. We bussed down from El Calafate in Argentina, crossing the border back into Chile and arriving in Puerto Natales, the closest town. Puerto Natales itself is a bit rundown looking but fairly nice, with some good cafes and restaurants. We spent a day stocking up on everything we’d need to go trekking in the park – renting tents and sleeping bags (there are some refugios in the park but they were booked out since ages..we’re getting dangerously close to high-season) and buying pasta, porrige, bread and lots of dried fruit and nuts. Unlike the 10-day trek we did in Nepal a while back there are no tea-houses, porters or people serving dal-bhat, so a lot more carrying to do. My 75-litre backpack was nearly full with just the two thick sleeping bags and the tent. Water is drinkable directly from the streams everywhere in the park though, so no need to bring, filter, treat or boil which is handy.

View to Lago Grey from our picnic spot.

We got a bus to the park in the morning, and crossed turquoise Lago Pehoe on a ferry to get to the trail-head for the five-day W trek. It is named W for the shape of the route – in and out of three separate valleys between the mountains. The ferry crossing served us some stunning views towards the granite Cuernos del Paine massif – 2000-3000 meter high peaks, strangely shaped and multi-coloured from different layers of rock, the harder layers on top shaping how the lower layers are eroded. A nice introduction to the scenery of the park – the five days would be nearly uninterrupted with one incredible view after another…probably the most sustained sensory overload of any place we’ve ever been.

View over Glacier Grey.

Dead tree in Torres del Paine.

The western of the three W legs leads to lake Grey and the glacier of the same name – up from lake Pehoe with views back towards its turquoise waters, crossing a wind-swept pass with lots of tilted bonsai-shaped Lenga and Antarctic beech trees fighting the elements. We had lunch looking down towards Lago Grey far below, watching little blue icebergs float around on the surface. A while later along the trail the first views towards the Grey glacier opened up, from a second windswept pass. There was quite a bit of climbing on the way with the tents and all the gear, but the views more than made up for it.

Edel, Teresa and Anne at the Lago Grey campsite.

The Grey campsite was right by the lake shore, on a sheltered beach close to the glacier but out of view. Bits of millenia-old ice were lying on the beach, with bigger icebergs further out – we’d hear the odd roar from the glacier letting another block loose while we rigged up our tents and started cooking. Great appetite from the trekking!

In the evening we walked a bit further, to a viewpoint closer to the glacier. With the evening light dancing across the cliffs, ice and water, and blue jagged mountains peaks towering behind the glacier…huge amazing ice sculptures floating on the lake just in front of us, this is one of the most stunning views I have ever laid my eyes on.

Icebergs in front of Glacier Grey.

Lago Grey ice sculptures.

The sun sets slowly down here at 51 degrees south – it was still light at 9pm, and the real sunset colours came out closer to 10pm. We watched some of the last rays filter through the blue ice floating on the lake, while sitting on the cliffs waiting for the final show of the day.

Sunset over Lago Grey.

View towards Lago Pehoé.

The second day we took another long look at the glacier before starting to backtrack to the turquoise Lago Pehoe where we had started. From there we continued east, following the dark blue Lago Skottsberg towards the central valley – Valle Frances. The campsite here was free and a little more basic – toilets but no showers or water, but there was a river nearby to fill up the bottles with fresh drinkable glacier water. This day was a bit of a hard slog – longer than the first and carrying the full gear the whole way. The next day would be easier – just a return trip up the valley with only the daypack to bring.

Cuernos del Paine and Chilean fire bush.

View in Valle Frances.

The third day we climbed up Valle Frances, as far as the snowline. The valley lies right in the center of the Torres del Paine mountains, the black-capped Cuernos massif on one side and the even higher Paine Grande standing guard on the other, steep and with glaciers that kept loosing big blocks in avalanches down the side throughout the day. The walk was stunning – Lenga forest at the base of the valley and more and more tormented looking trees the higher we climbed, views to the mountains above and turquoise lakes below. At 900 meters altitude the path ended by a large rock looking down over the green valley – perfect spot for lunch. When we got back we packed up the tents and moved camp to the next campsite two hours away to shorten the next day. The walk led down by another lake – turquoise like Pehoe – this one named Nordenskjöld (lots of Swedes here exploring back in the day) with a lovely black-and-white pebble beach.

Trail above Lago Nordenskjöld.

Day four the big bags were starting to get a little lighter with most of the food eaten. We continued along Lago Nordenskjöld before branching off towards the third valley – Torres – after passing a higher darker lake on a windswept plain. It was quite cloudy this day but that’s not a bad thing as the landscape was more open and barren here – your skin burns easy in the deep south, even with factor-50 sunscreen on…from the first time we broke the atmosphere (at least with the ozone-issue we banned the gases as soon as we found out…with the CO2 climate-issue we’ve barely gotten as far as talking of maybe cutting down..slowly).

Chloraea magellanica orchid.

We set up our tents in the Torres camp, from where it would be possible to climb up to a viewpoint of the famous granite towers the park is named after in the morning. The classic way to do it is to be up there for sunrise, red morning light hitting the rock, but it had been cloudy in the evening so we decided to sleep a bit more. Edel woke me at 5am (not an easy feat) when it was already light but it was raining a little so the girls decided to stay and sleep. I had a look at the day while rubbing the sleep from my eyes and decided to try – wasn’t sure the climb would be worth it with the clouds and rain but it was nice to be up at dawn when the forest was waking up. It stopped raining about an hour later, soon after I left the forest and started making my way the 900 meters up towards the towers. I met one or two people coming down from the sunrise climb – saying they had seen practically nothing, but once I got up it had cleared enough for the famous vertical rock pinnacles to jump in and out of the clouds and occasionally rays of sunlight to wander across the granite surface. It was crazy windy at the viewpoint, and I hid behind a big boulder, eating my sandwich and jumping out to snap another photo whenever the light was good.

The Torres del Paine towers in the early morning.

I was back down from the towers again at 9am, just as Edel was waking up, and we packed up to do the final slog up the hill to leave the valley, exit the park and find a bus back to Puerto Natales. Back in town a few hours later we handed in an enormous bag of laundry, had some well needed showers and went out for a great post-trek dinner. It is probably the only time ever that I’ll manage a full Argentinian-sized steak plus starter and dessert!

Megatherium ground-sloth.

From Puerto Ibañes in Chile we crossed the green water of Lago General Carrera to Chile Chico, then a short bus over to Los Antiguos on the Argentinean side. We had planned to catch the 18 hour bus south to El Calafate the same day, but it only ran every second day so we had to spend the night. Los Antiguos is quite flat and sprawling, and it took a bit of walking until we found a hostel. Climate is quite different on the Argentinean side, hotter and drier – strange to be back in T-shirt weather again. The most exciting event in Los Antiguos was Edel’s boots getting attacked during the night by the hostel owners dog. A fight to the death possibly – the boots had been left outdoors for a reason…

Blue ice of the Perito Moreno.

The bus south was long, across dry Patagonian steppe and landscapes reminding a little of Tibet with big skies. In El Calafate we met up with Anne – great to see another face from home. Anne’s joining us for a break from the Irish winter, and being too nice for her own good she didn’t protest when we plotted to use the month to drag her down to the southernmost bit of land outside Antarctica . Speaking of faces from home we also met up with Simona and Silvia who are also a few months into their round-the-world trip, for a nice evening sharing some wine and travel stories. In El Calafate we spent a day around town, checking out a museum which was quite modern and well laid out – with the full human history of Patagonia, including all the megafauna we made extinct as soon as we got here (it had a big skeleton of a Milodon ground-sloth), and photos from the days of sheep-farmers and missionaries helping the indigenous people become extinct. Afterwards we walked down to a small bird sanctuary by a lake just outside town, ducks, geese, flamingos, falcons, shore-birds, and two dogs on a killing spree trying to make all of them extinct.

Ice breaking off the Perito Moreno.

Next day we went for the star attraction around El Calafate – the Perito Moreno glacier 80km west of town. It is the most impressive glacier we’ve seen anywhere – a bright blue 60 meter high wall of ice five kilometers wide, ending in the water of Lago Argentino with lots of icebergs floating around. We went out on the water first – a big hundred-passenger boat which was dwarfed next to the ice-wall. They can’t go to close though – this is one of the most active glaciers in the world and building-sized blocks are falling off all the time.

Next we explored the board-walks on the peninsula that just happens to be perfectly positioned opposite the front of the glacier wall. Every now and then we would hear a cannon-ball bang when another large block fell off into the water below – the glacier is moving two meters per day so has a lot of ice to shed. We were listening to the creaking sounds from the ice, trying to predict and aim the cameras where the next collapse would come.

The Perito Moreno glacier.

Cat in Puyuhuapi.

The Aisén region in southern Chile is famous for a spectacular hanging glacier – the Ventisquero Colgante, in the Queulat national park. We could spot the strange mass of blue ice in the distance from the 18 hour ferry from Chiloe for a while before the boat dropped us off at a cute little village on the coast. Puerto Cisnes is too small to have a map in the guidebook, and we were wandering around a bit aimlessly looking for a bus-stop or station when a woman stopped us and told us she worked in the tourist office. There would be a bus in five minutes actually – the only one in two days – and she offered us a short lift in her car so we could make it on time! The place we were trying to get to is called Puyuhuapi, another small village at the top of a fiord a couple hours away by dirt road – closer to the glacier. The drive passed through some of the Queulat national park on the way, with stunning scenery and steep forested mountains, before finally dropping us off at Puyuhuapi greeted by a rainbow as we arrived. We found a place to stay, and walked around for a while until we found the one little restaurant that stayed open on a Sunday for a great salmon dinner. Ended the day with a walk down by the jetty, watching the sun setting over the fishing boats on the fiord.

Puyuhuapi pier at dusk.

Ice breaking off the glacier.

Early start the next morning to catch a minibus going south from the village, hopping off by the road closest to the national park. We entered the park before the checkpoint was manned in the morning, but there was a notice by the gate suggesting to just pay the fee on the way out, and to look out for pumas. The glacier is strange and spectacular – we could spot it high up between two mountain peaks before even entering the park – from below it looks like it practically hangs out over the vertical rock face where it is suspended. The first trail we walked in the park led up to the shore of a green lake below the glacier with great views towards the blue ice and the two 150 meter waterfalls crashing down from below it. Every now and then a large mass of ice would break off and shatter as it fell down the mountain side – the thunder-like roar taking several seconds to reach us. We had the place completely to ourselves, looking up at the cloud-covered densely forested mountains surrounding us. A longer and higher trail led to a viewpoint closer to the glacier, passing through deep moss-and-fern covered forest on the way.

Waterfalls below the Ventisquero Colgante hanging glacier.

Flower in the Queulat national park.

Relaxing in Puyuhuapi.

After getting our fill of solitude and marvellous vistas we started walking the 30 km back to Puyuhuapi, and got a lift pretty quickly – hopped off at the hotsprings a few kilometers outside the village. Very nice open-air termas – three hot pools and a bigger cold one, plus the freezing ocean ten meters away if you really needed to cool off. Which we did – one of the pools was nearly boiling… “quarenta-y-algo” when I asked – grabbed a small plastic thermometer from my bag to find out – it was 48 degrees! I tried and it was actually possible to sit in for a while as long as you did not move at all… Hopped in the ocean for a swim after – a refreshing 12 degrees . The other pools were a bit more normal and relaxing. We spent a few hours soaking, then happened to leave right on time to catch the only bus for the afternoon to get us the rest of the way back to Puyuhuapi, and the driver didn’t even want to charge us. We’d had a string of good luck with timing things recently, in this sparsely populated region with very irregular transport, and wondered how long it would hold. The next morning we got on the bus further south to Coyhaique – it had just enough seats left for the three of us! In Coyhaique we found the man who was running a minibus to Puerto Ibañes (from where we’d be able to get a ferry and bus to Argentina and meet up with Edel’s friend Anne who’d arrive in a couple days). We left our bags with the man for the day until his bus would leave in the evening – and set off to explore Coyhaique. It’s the biggest town in Aisén, home to half the regions population, but still a pretty small place. The museum is always a fun place to go in these little towns and this one didn’t disappoint – a completely random collection of rocks, old radios, mechanic typewriters and a stuffed condor! Spotted an antique scale from Jönköping 100km from where I grew up in Sweden. Like in Chonchi on Chiloe the museum first looked deserted, but eventually we found someone to let us in.

Our last sunset in Chile (..for a little while).

The man with our bags showed up right on time and the 2-3 hour drive south to Puerto Ibañes was stunning – Aisén is definitely a region I’d love to return to and explore deeper. The hostel where we hopped off in Ibañes was deserted, but after a bit of walking we found a different one that was open and then headed down to the shore of Lake General Carrera (the 2nd biggest lake in South America) to watch the sunset. Chanced on an open restaurant afterwards, a tiny place with a one-dish menu and a friendly waiter. The morning after when we were walking with our big backpacks towards the ferry outside town a Chilean couple in a pickup truck stopped to offer us a lift – they weren’t even going to the ferry themselves. It will be a bit hard to leave this lovely country.

Edel and Teresa near the finish line.

We woke up at 5:30am and were on the river about 6am, still a while before sunrise – set up with a two-way radio to the base. Kayaking up the valley was the easy direction, wind on our backs as we paddled through the bizarre landscape of dead tree-stumps while the sun slowly rose behind the clouds, birdsong breaking the early morning silence. Following the serpentine turns of the river the dead trees started changing into live ones above the level where the salt water could reach, and after seven kilometers we came to a labyrinthine mangrove at the upper end of the valley. Paddling back was harder – while it had been still in the early morning the wind a little later on had been strong enough that we could just hold up the paddle in the air as a sail – and now we had to work against it. It started raining almost as soon as we turned around also. With a couple stops on the riverbank for snacks and trying to wait out the worst of the rain it took us double the time, a full six hours, to work our way back – having to stop and hold on to the broken tree stumps after every burst of paddling against the strong wind. When we finally finished the workout session and got back to shore they had three hot bowls of soup waiting for us

Before dawn in the flooded forest.

Chepu Valley flooded forest.

Palafitos fishermen houses in Castro.

On to Castro in the center of the island next – it’s a cute fisherman village with that charming paint-falling-off feel, and we were staying in a house on stilts down by the water in the palafitos traditional part of town. We stayed four days, had some great seafood and some not-so-great – I got sick for the first time since India and spent a couple days in bed. Edel and Teresa visited a couple smaller towns, Achao and Dalcahue and tried the local speciality curanto at a market – a mix of beef, lamb, chicken, mussels and potato, which was traditionally cooked in a pit in the ground in the old days. When I felt better we moved south, visiting tiny Chonchi first with one of the peculiar Chiloe churches, and having a look in a museum in an old house in town…once we eventually found someone who could let us in. The museum had lots of photographs and displays on the timber baron who used to live in the house – “El Rey de Cipres” destroyed the forests of nearly the entire archipelago and married his first cousin, both surely well respected behaviours at the time.

Chiloe church in Chonchi.

Our next destination was Quellon on the south coast, to get a ferry into the sparsely populated Aisen region on the mainland. While most towns on Chiloe have that charming run-down feel, Quellon goes a step further and look like it fell off a truck and was left for dead. We arrived in the gushing rain with a few hours to spare before the ferry, and went looking for something to eat. Nothing much looked open, but we walked in to one fairly rough looking place in the harbour area that at least had a sign outside claiming it to be a restaurant – it was empty except for two very bored looking larger ladies drinking pints at a wooden table in the center. We sat down at a different table and they shouted for the owner…out walks the big brothel mama with enough makeup for ten people! Edel hesitated and then tried in Spanish “…do you serve coffee, or maybe tea?”. “No” she replied, “purely beer”, and gave us a look that said “…and you shouldn’t be in here should you?”. We decided it would be nice to wait in the ferry terminal instead – back out into the rain!

View towards Volcan Osorno from Puerto Varas.

More Villarrica fun – when we got back to eat after hiking in the national park I had what was probably the worst pizza of the trip since India – pre-baked bread and with a fist-full of green mint-flavoured cocktail-cherries on top of the half-kilo of molten cheese! Don’t ever try this at home…

We had better culinary luck in our next destination – Puerto Varas at the south end of the lake district which we used as a base for the next five days. The town sported some fantastic sea-food restaurants and I’m only glad I left before having too big an impact on the local centolla-crab population. Puerto Varas like Villarrica lies by the lake shore with nice views towards a big volcano.

Fern shoots in the Alerce Andino national park.

We went to the Vicente Perez Rosales national park for one day-trip – walking along the shores of Lago Todos los Santos with some nice volcanic black-sand beaches. The trail could have used a machete in parts though. Some of the landscape in the area was covered in ash and re-generating vegetation since the last major eruption of the volcano in the park. On the way back we hopped off the bus to go and see a nice waterfall, which was gushing its way through oddly shaped black lava rocks.

Mossy forest in the Alerce Andino national park.

The next day we went to the Alerce Andino national park, for some stunning Valdivian temperate rainforests. The park was set up to protect some of the last pockets of the gigantic Alerce trees that used to cover much of this coast – the tree can live 3000-4000 years (some of the oldest organisms on earth!), and is now an endangered species. There was no bus the whole way to the park, but we got one to Puerto Montt and then another to the turnoff 8km from the park. The driver of the second bus forgot to drop us off though, adding another bit – we had walked a full 12 km before we even got to the park and 30 km by the end of the days trekking. The forest in the park is really beautiful, everything covered in thick layers of dripping moss, fern and lichens with the gigantic Alerce trees towering above strands of bamboo below. We walked to a waterfall deep in the forest, then to mirror-blank lake Chaiquenes crossing a river where the bridge had collapsed on the way. Didn’t see a soul most of the day, but we met some people just on the way out of the park – lucky as it meant some chances for a lift. Two germans got us as far as the bigger road where we could find a bus back to Puerto Montt then to Puerto Varas.

Mossy forest in the Alerce Andino national park.

Mossy forest in the Alerce Andino national park.

We looked in to visiting a third national park of Valdivian forest – the Pumalin – but it turned out access was still difficult after a volcano eruption last year drowned the town of Chaiten in ash. Pumalin was set up as a private park by US environmentalist and businessman Douglas Tompkins who bought up large tracts of land to protect it, getting some people angry as the park spans from the Argentina border all the way to the coast “cutting Chile in two” at its narrowest point. There’s apparently some cap on how much land he’s allowed to buy each year now. Fantastic achievement anyway, and it has inspired more parks locally – Sebastian Piñera who’s running for president here at the moment created the Tantauco park on the island of Chiloe where we are heading next. Mr. Tompkins himself actually happened to walk in to the Pumalin office just as we walked out after asking about park access.

In the Huerquehue national park.

From Temuco we took another bus south to Villarrica, and checked in to a hostel with a breakfast Teresa dubbed “all you can eat, but nothing you want to eat”. Villarrica is close to Pucon which is the biggest tourist town in the lake district, but a little quieter. After a rest day we started at 7am the next morning, to find a bus first to Pucon then to the Huerquehue national park – unfortunately it was Sunday so once we got to Pucon there were no buses…after walking around in the cold for a while we found one place that was open for coffee in the early morning, then caught the first bus back to Villarrica again.

Bamboo in the Huerquehue national park.

Since we couldn’t get to the national park we decided to try and make our way to the Termas Geometricas – the nicest hotsprings in the whole region. First another bus to a small village called Coñaripe from where it would be another 17 kilometers, but there didn’t seem to be any buses at all on this stretch. We started walking and keeping an eye out for a lift together with a german backpacker who had similar plans. It started raining fairly soon, and there was hardly any traffic to try and hitchhike with on the small dirt road – we had walked close to an hour when a nice Chilean family picked us up and gave us a lift on the back of their pickup. They took us most of the way and dropped us at a turnoff with just a couple kilometers left, then 15 minutes later they showed up again and gave us a lift the final bit! Once we finally arrived at the hotsprings we were freezing, from walking in the rain and sitting on the back of the pickup – my fingers could barely close the padlock on the box in the small changing-room hut – but what better place….just sink down into the 38 degree water! The termas were really fabulous, 17 stone-slate pools spread out along a river running through a narrow canyon, with a wooden walkway leading between them and up to a natural waterfall at the top. Mist rising from the hotsprings and the canyon sides covered in ferns, trees and moss…cold water dripping down on your face from the vegetation above as you soak in the steaming water. The kind of place you’re happy to go to once before you die, and actually wouldn’t mind going to permanently after (…it even had that smell of sulphur believers have always promised me ). We spent 3-4 hours soaking in the warm water, occasionally trying a dip in the freezing river when getting too close to overheating – so relaxing I nearly fell asleep floating around. On the way back we had walked only a couple kilometers when we got a lift with a lovely Chilean couple that were down holidaying from Santiago – they gave us some good tips on other things to do in the area and offered to drive us further but there was a bus in Coñaripe to take us back to Villarrica. Chilean people are so nice.

Tinquilco lake in the Huerquehue national park.

The next day we decided to make another attempt on the national park. Another bus at 7am, and luckily the early morning paid off this time and we found a bus to Huerquehue. It was snowing when we got to the park entrance at 780 meters altitude, and the snow got deeper and deeper as we climbed up to 1300 meters through the forest to several stunning frozen lakes. On the higher slopes we again came across the ancient-looking Araucaria or Monkey-puzzle trees. Apart from a couple of waterfalls that were crashing down the mountainside the forest was completely quiet – no hint of wind, nothing moving, just nature frozen and still all around us. The sun broke through the clouds for just a short moment every now and then, but most of the time the sky stayed a solid grey leaving the landscape almost completely monochrome.

Frozen forest by a lake in the Huerquehue national park.

Frozen forest by a lake in the Huerquehue national park.

Frozen forest by a lake in the Huerquehue national park.

The bark of an old Araucaria tree.

Bamboo in the snow in the Huerquehue national park.

Bamboo in the rain.

While spring was making its way south in Chile we were doing the same. Somewhere along the way, in the Araucaria forests just north of the lake district, we overtook it and stepped back into winter.

From Curico we had made our way further south in Chile to Temuco, spending one rainy day in the small town of Talca on the way. Talca is the kind of place where you’ll find nothing open on a Sunday, particularly a rainy Sunday. Temuco is bigger, the biggest town in southern Chile, but mostly void of sights so we spent just one night before catching a small bus into the countryside towards the mountains in the east. Edel had found a nice Swiss farm-hostel (Suiz-Andina) on the internet, located just between the Malalcahuello-Nalcas and Conguillio national parks, and luckily they had space for us when we showed up at the door. Very cute little place, and with a great chef cooking three-course meals in the evenings – we stayed four days but could easily have made it longer…

Araucaria branch.

The day we arrived we did a short walk near the farm called “Hänsel and Gretel” (it came complete with a “Hexen-haus”), leading through fields of bamboo and trees covered in lichen. When we woke up the next morning it was snowing heavily – nice big fluffy Christmas-card flakes – and everything was covered in white. We had planned to set off on a longer trek into the national park this day, and while we got a bit of conflicting advice from the hostel (one person advising against it as we wouldn’t be able to see any trail-markers, someone else selling us a map) we decided to head off. The El Coloradito trail leads towards the foot of the Lonquimay volcano, the first little bit runs through farm-land before the path climbs up through ancient Araucaria forest towards the mountain. Araucaria is the strange Monkey-puzzle tree, very pre-historic looking and even more spectacular when the whole forest is covered in thick white snow. It kept snowing most of the day, and indeed we didn’t see a single one of the yellow trail-markers on the way – consulting the map and GPS occasionally when the trail was less visible…we lost it completely a couple times and ended up river-hopping or stuck in thick bamboo, but that’s all part of the fun. It took us less than half the amount of hours on the way back actually. Very beautiful forest, and strange to see bamboo in the snow – bent over in big arches over the trail from the weight of the snow.

Araucaria forest.

When we reached the tree-line we turned around – there was nothing but pure white above and the peak of the volcano was hidden in clouds. Lower down on the way back the snow had melted a bit, and we could start to see some of the trail-markers. Everything looked completely different – green and muddy instead of white and fluffy.

Enchanted forest in Malalcahuello.

Hexen haus!

The second morning we rented bikes to go and see a couple waterfalls back along the road to Temuco. There was a lot of downhill on the 13 kilometers to the falls, and we weren’t looking forward to the way back up. The falls, Salto del Indio and Salto de la Princesa, were very impressive with all the snow-melt at the moment. The next day when we woke up to pack our bags everything outside was covered in snow again – we did the short “Hänsel and Gretel” trail once more (which was all our legs were good for after all the uphill biking the day before) before flagging down the bus back to Temuco and keep working our way south.

Snowy branches in Malalcahuello.

Waterfall in the Radal Siete Tazas park.

In Curico we stayed in Hotel Prat – named after a local hero who during the war of the pacific bravely attacked a Peruvian ironclad gunship armed only with a sword, and got himself killed within seconds. Our logistics planning for getting to the national park proved nearly as effective actually… Information had been a bit sketchy – the guidebook saying there’s probably a bus a day this time of the year, and the hostel woman saying there should be one at 7am. Other people we asked in the morning helped point us to the right bus as well, first one to a village called Molina, then another one on from there. The driver said he was going to the park when we got on, but then an hour later he dropped us 30 kilometers away from it out by a field in the middle of nowhere. We had been the only people on the bus for quite a while at this stage and protested a bit when he explained he wasn’t going any further, but he pointed out that he’d said the bus was going “on the road to the park”, not “to the park”. We started walking. The driver also explained that while there is one bus a day that goes the whole way, it leaves at 5pm in the evening and returns at 7am – which is handy for people who want to look at waterfalls in the dark, or for people who want to spend three days visiting a two-hour sight. We tried our luck hitchhiking (Chile is very safe) and got a lift a couple kilometers with a road-worker, then walked for a long time, then got another lift with a nice old man with two dogs – Edel and Teresa in the car and me sitting on a big rock on the back of the pickup with the two dogs… Then more walking – the park seemed to get further away the more we walked. We had passed an 18km sign before the old man picked us up, now 12km later another sign said there was still 13km left! We eventually got a short lift with a bus full of Chilean tourists as far as the park entrance, but this bus wasn’t continuing on to the falls. At the park entrance we signed in with a ranger officer who when learning that Teresa didn’t have her passport with her gave us an incredibly long speech, which did involve Interpol, about park regulations and the importance of paperwork in general. It was probably the only thing he got to do all day, and he was nice in the end and did let us in.

The Radal Siete Tazas.

One more hour of walking, then a fourth lift with two locals which did see us at the falls 5-6 hours after we had set off from Curico in the morning. The falls were indeed very nice – several bright-blue drops in a row into big round pools sculpted out of the rock by the turbulent water. We met one other pair of tourists at the falls – a Dutch couple who had arrived with a guide from the bigger town of Talca…not a bad option all things considered…

On the way back we got another lift with a pickup truck halfway to the park entrance, then walked for a couple hours again before getting a lift with a nice builder in a mini-van. We were nearly ecstatic when he told us he was going the whole way to Molina – there were no seats in the back but we sat fine on an old tyre among all the tools. We must have looked pretty knackered after our roughly 30km of walking throughout the day because he even stopped to buy us soft-drinks on the way! In Molina we thanked the man again for saving us from sleeping under the stars, then got a bus back to Curico – our 9th vehicle for the day (tired feet excluded).

The Elqui valley.

After a couple weeks in the desert it was nice with a change of scenery. And less sand – we’d had it in our boots, our clothes, eyes, nose, ears…even the food had been crunchy at times. The bus south from San Pedro de Atacama took us to the town of La Serena, which isn’t exactly filled with sights but we stayed two nights to recover from the 17 hour bus-ride. The hostel we happened to pick was on a rather odour-intensive part of town, right next to a fish market. The town does have a fine museum though, with lots of Diagutia pottery painted with intricate geometric designs and psychedelic sticky-figure style animals and humans. The museum also sported a Moai statue from Easter Island, which the guidebook added had recently been standing in a park covered in graffiti and urinated on by drunks..

The craters of the moon.

From La Serena we wanted to head up the Elqui valley (renamed by Chile as an escalation of the war with Peru over “Pisco” – distilled wine alcohol – considered by both countries to be their own invention). But first we made a stop in Vicuña halfway up the valley for one night, to visit the Mamalluca observatory – one of the smaller space observatories here and one that is open for the public. We saw Jupiter and some of the same things as on the tour from Atacama, plus great view of the moon’s craters. The guide was a very enthusiastic space geek with the date and duration of every supernova in history memorized. We were a pretty big group crowding around the small telescope though, including some crying young children whose parents must have thought they wouldn’t find it a bit boring to wait around in the dark and cold for hours listening to talk of lightyears and redshift way past their bedtime.

The Pisco Elqui central square.

Pisco Elqui the next day – it’s a charming little village – part wine-growing horse-riding cowboy town, and part hippie new-age place with craft shops and meditation classes. There’s actually a true hippie community living a few kilometers up a tributary valley, founded in the 60′s on the belief that “the Age of Aquarius has shifted the Earth’s magnetic center from the Himalayas to the Elqui valley”… Remember, you read it here first! At least where there’s hippies there’s great food – Pisco Elqui sported some lovely restaurants. Back in Vicuña we’d suffered some fairly unpalatable fare – chicken and french fries with two fried eggs on top, all served with most of the grease they’d been cooked in.

Edel and Teresa horse riding in the Elqui valley.

We stayed three nights in Elqui – visiting a Pisco distillery one day and going horse riding another. The valley sides are pretty steep and we climbed up the desert hills by horse to look down at the green valley below, nearly all of it used for wine growing. Apart from Edel’s horse wanting to take a 65 degree shortcut down the hill it was a relaxing excursion.

After leaving the Elqui valley we headed for the charming and rundown town of Valparaiso.

Sand dune in Valle de la Luna.

I think I managed to sleep for 10 of the 11 hours of the bus to San Pedro de Atacama – probably a new record. Atacama is maybe the #1 tourist destination in Chile – the area has similar desert landscapes to east of Copiapo, but with a hundred times more visitors (we hardly saw a soul when we were out in the Nevado de Tres Cruces with Ovideo). San Pedro itself is quite a cute town – it has no reason for being other than tourism, but all buildings are low and blend in quite well with the desert. The driest desert on earth actually – some parts haven’t seen a single drop in the 400 years that we have bothered to keep a record. We took a rest day first (a bit more sleep couldn’t hurt) then got a tour to Valle de la Luna and Valle de la Muerte for the next evening – both very lunar or martian looking landscapes and completely dead. We did some barefoot sand-dune running, a walk through a salt-canyon and then sat down to watch the desert turn red at sundown with views towards the Licancabur volcano.

Tatio geysers.

The next night we went on a tour to a private space observatory run by an eccentric Frenchman – the skies here are some of the clearest on the planet and there are big international observatories competing with each other all along northern Chile, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) recently outdone by the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL) which on top of being bigger also has a more clever acronym! The Frenchman had a collection of different-sized telescopes where we got to look at Jupiter, distant galaxies (one 8 million light years away!), nebulas and other tiny shining dots that become incredibly impressive once you know what you’re looking at. The tour was quite informative, with a cool green laser-pen to point out various constellations, and a funny commentary focusing mostly on how to use astronomy to pick up girls!

Flamingo flying over Laguna Chaxa.

Next day we went to see another collection of salt flats and high-altitude lakes. Salar de Atacama is the worlds 3rd biggest salt lake, but it isn’t as dazzlingly white as the bigger Salar de Uyuni across the border in Bolivia – we saw lots and lots of flamingos though. The high-altitude lakes were Miscanti and Miñiques – strangely cobalt-blue in a landscape of soft reddish pastel-coloured hills. On the way back to San Pedro we stopped at another unexpected dash of colour – a lush green oasis, figs and flowering trees and a small stream of fresh water in the middle of the desert. In the Toconao village next to the oasis a small parade happened to be going on at the same time we were there – brass-band and bored looking school-kids in costumes…and someone at the very end in a thick fur-costume who must have been sweating litres in the desert heat.

One of the Tatio geysers.

Very early start the next day – pickup at 4am to take us to the Tatio geysers. It was very cold to wait around in the desert night for the bus, which then took 2-3 hours to climb up the thermal area at 4300 meters altitude where it was even colder. Until the sun finally rose some half-hour later it was actually very tempting to dip the hands into the 80 degree water the geysers spit out… The geysers actually keep going the whole day, but all the tour operators time it to be here at sunrise since when the air is cool the hot steam from the thermal features is the most spectacular. And spectacular it was – particularly with the early morning sun catching rainbows in some of the bigger geysers. Each geyser runs on a separate schedule – some going 10min then sleeping 40min, some going an hour then sleeping one – the highest was sending water and spray some 30 meters up in the air. Tatio is more active than other thermal areas we’ve been to in other countries, and you can walk around freely with no fences which is nice (this will probably change once one or two more tourists has to take that one extra step too far to get the perfect photo though…fortunately Edel was there to keep an eye on me ).

Vizcacha in the Atacama desert.

On the way back we visited another hotspring with a bit more comfortable temperature to soak in. I would probably have killed for a dip back when we were waiting around in the cold before sunrise, but now the desert heat had already set in and you would start to get dizzy after a couple minutes. Spotted lots of Vizcacha nearby – it’s a cute fluffy animal that looks like a rabbit-squirrel. One final stop on the way back in another oasis, this one full of giant cactus hundreds of years old along a ravine with a river and several waterfalls running through it. With the air many degrees cooler than in the desert outside, and with a bit of humidity and some oxygen from the plants it was as refreshing as, well, an oasis!

Vicuña in the Atacama desert.

Next we hopped on another monster-bus, 17 hours south, to La Serena – for the next post.

In the Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino.

Finally back in South America again. We had kept a fairly high phase travelling and crossing borders for a while, buzzing in and out between Hong Kong, China and Macau, then Japan, Australia, Vanuatu and New Zealand in a short space of time…getting a bit tired of taking flights and filling in customs forms. Now it’s time to slow down – no fixed dates on the itinerary for nearly six months until the end of March. The long sliver of land that makes up Chile will be our home for the next two months. We’re starting in the middle, somewhat awkwardly, as the country is as long as from Norway to Niger, but will make one return journey from Santiago to the deserts of the north first, waiting for spring to arrive before making our way through the forests and fjords of the south towards Tierra del Fuego and eventually crossing in to Argentina.

Abandoned car in the desert.

We landed in Santiago with the worst jetlag of our life after the 11 hour flight… I never used to get jetlag at all but travelling east is always worse as you loose hours. Also I think it might have something to do with the entertainment kits on the airplanes being too good now with a hundred movies to pick from so you don’t sleep.. We arrived in the morning, slept the whole day, most of the night, then until 5pm the next day again. During the 4 days we stayed in Santiago we managed to at least visit one museum though, a very nice one with pre-Columbian art. It had many artefacts from places we visited on the last trip like Chavin and Tiwanacu – including some of the few gold pieces that escaped the conquistadores. It’s great fun to be back in South America after so long in Asia, for example the different attitude towards public affection….we saw a spectacular makeout session in a cafe in Santiago during one of our first days, and even more funny they were actually part of the staff!

Laguna Verde at 4500m altitude.

From Santiago we got a 12 hour day-bus north, and just after dark we arrived in Copiapo which is the loudest place on earth (Chile had just won some sort of important football-thing..). Copiapo lies just at the southern edge of the big deserts – the Atacama stretch on for the next thousand kilometers north – and through the hostel we found a driver who could take us up towards the salt-flats and the altiplano the next day. Ovideo picked us up at 8am, and being a very competent desert driver he had already whisked us up to another four kilometers in altitude by an hour before noon. Between gasping for air we looked out at guanacos and vicuñas and reddish hills and mountains stained in a rainbow of colours from different minerals…browns, reds, green for copper, yellow, orange, and grey on the high Ojos de Salado volcano. On the lower hills before entering Parque Nacional Nevado de Tres Cruces we passed some abandoned settlements and several copper mines (Chile is the worlds biggest exporter). We stopped for lunch by a mirror-blank Laguna Santa Rosa, full of flamingoes, at one end of the much bigger Salar de Maricunga salt flat. Climbing on towards the Argentinian border later we reached an even more stunning lake – Laguna Verde at 4500 meters – with a radiant bright green-blue hue it’s the most spectacularly coloured high-altitude lake we’ve seen anywhere. It’s a real other-worldly place, the air thin and biting cold, the lake surrounded by bright white salt-crusts with an equally bright-white mummified cow completing the eerie scene.

Naturally mummified cow by Laguna Verde.

Cactus in the mist.

We decided to go on another trip with Ovideo the next day – to explore a national park on the coast instead. But first he took us to try out his new truck in the big sand dunes north of Copiapo. He knew all the tricks – emptying out most of the air from the tires first for better grip – then when we left the road again refilling them from a spare tire on the back he’d pumped to double pressure beforehand. Great fun going up and down the huge dunes, like an improvised roller coaster without a track! There was a bit of fog hanging over the desert landscape in the morning as well, so we could see even less where we were going. When we were done laughing we set off along the coast, towards the Parque Nacional Pan de Azucar. Ovideo stopped in a small fishing village on the way to buy himself a couple of the Conger Eels that you see on every menu in Chile – delivering us another round of laughter watching a big group of pelicans fight for the pieces as the fisherman skinned the fish. The man saved the best leftover cuts for his cat though.

Desert fox in the Pan de Azucar national park.

Into the park next – a strange landscape of yellow hills and cactus which seemed out of place covered in fog and being right on the coast. From a second viewpoint we were looking down from sea-cliffs 700 meters high but couldn’t even see the ocean below, with wave after wave of thick cloud sweeping in over the cliff to cover us in a fine mist. Cactus and fog makes a surreal combination. We stayed for a while, fighting the temptation to share our sandwiches with a cute desert fox, and watching the tall cactus around us appear and disappear into the fog.

Flowering desert.

On the way back to Copiapo we stopped in a place where the coastal desert had come alive with a thousand flowers in different colours. Desierto florido is a special phenomenon here, happening every 4-8 years, where the whole desert wakes up for a brief moment in spring – I’m not sure if this is a good year or not, but this particular spot at least was very nice.

From Copiapo we headed on deeper into the desert to San Pedro de Atacama, for the next post.

In the Caleta Pan de Azucar fishing village.

Dusky Dolphins outside Kaikoura.

New Zealand is one of our favourite places to travel, and the one place from the last trip we’re returning to this time. The last time we started on the North Island and worked our way south, feeling like we were running out of time for some of the things we wanted to see on the south end of the South Island – so this time we’ll go the other direction. After first spending a couple days in Auckland trying to convince Teresa to jump from the sky tower (there’s nothing high in New Zealand that someone hasn’t strung a bungee from) we flew down to Christchurch on the east coast of the South Island and picked up a rental car. Rental cars are, by some strange accident of economics, almost for free in New Zealand – we were surprised to get the same per-day price this time as we had on the last trip back in 2005 (that time for six weeks in mid-winter low-season, now for three weeks in spring). At 22 kiwi dollars per day it’s less than 4 euro per person splitting on three… Ended up with an automatic though, which I haven’t driven for a decade…worked it out except for the mysterious L mode (..turns out to be same as 1).

The odd Moeraki boulders south of Oamaru.

From Christchurch we headed up to Kaikoura to go whale watching the next morning. There’s a deep ocean trench called Hikurangi just off the coast by Kaikoura where the sea floor drops to a kilometer deep just the same distance out from the shore, and there’s sperm whales there year-round (and Humpback’s and Orca’s at different times a year). The crew on the boat used an underwater hydrophone to track a sperm whale as it was coming up to surface after a hunt, and we watched it at the surface for 5-10 minutes until it made a tail splash and dove down for more squid. After this we came across a large pond of Dusky dolphins which the boat continued to follow for a while (or was it the other way around?). It was nice to watch them from the boat this time – on the last trip we went out on a swim-with-dolphins tour in the depth of winter – we had booked it as a nice surprise for my brother Mikael who was joining us back then for a couple weeks..he’s as tall as me but 10 kilos lighter, and with no body fat whatsoever he actually sink by default in sea water, even with a full breath, and no full-body wet-suit could keep him warm…they had to put a hot-water hose inside the suit back on the boat to stop him from turning purple… It was pretty freezing, and all in all the dolphins are more peaceful to watch from the boat.

Rainbow at dusk south of Moeraki.

Too...much...chocolate...

From Kaikoura back to Christchurch via Hanmer springs for some nice soaking in the hotsprings, then on to Dunedin the next day – stopping in Oamaru to have a look at the colonies of blue penguins there (the worlds smallest). In Dunedin we did a tour of the Cadbury Chocolate Factory (complete with a “chocolate waterfall”!) and were showered with enough samples to keep us off healthier fruit and granola bars in the car for several days.. Dunedin to Invercargill the next day via the Southern Scenic Route, passing the Catlins coast with nice fern-filled forests and waterfalls. This is the south-east corner of the South Island, where like on much of the west coast you can drive for hours without seeing anyone (we’re still a few months away from high-season luckily).

From Invercargill we continued the Scenic Route until reaching Fiordland, with white-capped mountains starting to appear on the horizon, and spent a night in a countryside hostel by a deer farm. Next day we continued to Milford Sound, the one of the remote Fiordland fjords that is reachable by road, with plenty stunning short walks to do on the way – gorgeous mossy forests around lake Gunn, and a trek up the 950m Key Summit from the Divide pass for some fantastic 360 degree panoramas – we could spot the glacial lake Marian that we trekked to on the last trip in the distance. Many of the curious alpine Kea parrots were hanging around the stops along the way.

View from Barnyard Backpackers.

The Rainbow Reach mountains.

Sunset over Lake Manapouri.

Waterfall along the road to Milford Sound.

Kea alpine parrot in Milford Sound.

In Milford Sound we got ourselves on a cruise of the fiord for the morning; this is where the scenery really topples over to outdo itself…steep high peaks that run straight down into the water – what the Himalayas would look like with a 5000m higher sea-level – and tall waterfalls crashing straight down from the mountains into the fiord, the spray catching rainbows in the early morning sun… Really spectacular. A couple bottle-nose dolphins followed the boat as it set out into the fiord.

Milford Sound is one of the absolute rainiest places in the whole world – 8000mm per year – but it actually held up while we were out…however the captain did manoeuvre the ship right in underneath some of the waterfalls to compensate.

Mossy forest by Lake Gunn.

Mossy forest by Lake Gunn.

More nice stops on the way back from Milford, including the 200m Humboldt falls, then stayed in Te Anau which is the first town when driving back out from the fiord, and did a trip into a glow-worm cave in the morning. Glow-worms are insects that live in the cave ceiling and attract food to their sticky threads with a faint blue light, when the caves are really full of them like this one was it makes a pretty magical place – whole constellations and galaxies above as we moved around slowly in a small boat through the darkness and silence deep inside the cave. Before leaving Te Anau we also popped by a wildlife center, to see Takahe (flightless presumed-extinct-until-1950 bird) and more of the funny Kea and Kaka alpine parrots..spotted a spectacular mating dance in the Kea cage! (movie clip)

View over Milford Sound.

Waterfall in Milford Sound.

Waterfall in Milford Sound.

Fern in the forest below Lake Marian.

View between Te Anau and Queenstown.

Cascades in the forest below lake Marian.

Drove to Queenstown next – the NZ adrenaline capital – for some relaxing…the first time we spent two nights at the same place and it was nice with a break from driving. Did a jetboat tour on a river though, to do at least one of the adrenaline activities (it’s a special type of boat that can do 360′s and go on water just decimeters deep..going crazy fast right next to the canyon walls is a local speciality). The road there was nearly as adrenaline-inducing though actually…a broken old gold-digger gravel-road leading in to a deep canyon with big drops on the side…almost in a poor enough state at times to give us India flashbacks.

Sunset on the South Island.

Sunset on the South Island.

Sunset on the South Island.

Fern on the Kahikatea Swamp Forest walk.

On towards Fox Glacier next – more stunning scenery and waterfalls along the way out towards the coast, stopping by a long beach full of drift-wood and doing a walk through a swamp forest full of ancient podocarps. Got a motel in Fox for a night and went for a sky-dive in the morning. I’d done one with Mikael on the last trip (he’s a brave man..I’m surprised he was up for getting pushed out of a plane after we had just nearly tried to kill him with the icy dolphin swim the previous week..). Fox is an awesome spot for it, with stunning views over two long glaciers and towards New Zealand’s highest mountain Mt. Cook as you go up in the plane, but I still wasn’t completely sure I wanted to this time…while I’ve done bungee-jump/tandem skydives/hang gliding/paragliding as well as Indian public transport before, I do still have a dislike of heights. My brain was fumbling around for an excuse… “150 euros..imagine how much chocolate you could…” but didn’t come up with a good enough one so up we went me and Teresa, Edel stayed behind to watch the tiny plane take off into the sky with us packed like sardines inside. Once it climbed high enough – about level with the peak of Mt. Cook at 12,000 feet – the plane slowed down and the engine quietened…goggles and gloves on…heart-rate up! The door swung open and Teresa + tandem-buddy swung their legs out and dropped first, disappearing suddenly without a sound – then me and my co-faller Deano moved into position – concentrating on forcing a smile for the camera on the wing…did it take the photo yet?…and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Accelerating like a falling rock for a few seconds until the wind resistance match the gravity at around 200 km/h. Great buzz, and it amazed me how much control the jumpers can have even during the freefall – Deano made sure we rotated around slowly for a full 360 view before opening the parachute. Spotted the other pair in the air a little later, and both did a smooth landing..felt like jumping up and down afterwards with the adrenalin buzzing…and Edel had to put up with us harping on about how great it was for the next 24 hours.

Edel and Teresa by Cape Foulwind.

We drove up to Fox glacier next (passing the “glacier was here in 1850″ sign a few kilometers back…yes, we’re in trouble) and did a short walk, then headed on to Greymouth with another nice west-coast sunset on the drive north. Another long day of driving the next day – stopping by the odd pancake rocks by the coast on the way, and the Cape Foulwind seal colony (like Poverty Bay, Doubtful Harbour and Cape Kidnappers named on some of Captain Cook’s less fortunate days…). Took the ferry from Picton to Wellington on the north island the next day, and drove up to Turangi. Had planned to walk the Tongariro crossing trek the next day, but the weather was a bit unpredictable – heavy rain the whole day before with park access closed, and actually heavy enough snow just a day after we passed through that cars got stuck through the night on the road! It actually held up the day that we had in between though, but we settled for some shorter walks just in case. The Tongariro national park is quite barren, with a little bit Connemara-type landscapes.

Tongariro national park on the North Island.

Continued on to Rotorua for out last stop before Auckland. It’s one of those rare places that you can actually smell long before you see it…covered in sulphur smoke seeping out through the ground all over it’s a hotspring and geothermal adventure land. We stayed three nights in a motel in town, and it rained nearly non-stop. Went to a polynesian spa one evening, nice with the cool drops of rain on your face while you’re soaking in the hotsprings, and went zorbing another day for another activity where it doesn’t matter if you get wet. Zorbing is a typical New Zealand invention where you hop inside a big transparent plastic sphere suspended inside an even bigger transparent plastic sphere, then roll down a long hill. Comes with a bucket of hot water thrown in for good measure, and you usually laugh the whole way down as you tumble around inside like socks in a washing machine. Felt like a nice way to round up the New Zealand leg of the trip.

More New Zealand photos.

Sunset in Port Vila.

E&T at the Sydney aquarium.

On returning from Japan we had another day to spend in Hong Kong before the flight to Sydney – used it to go and see the giant Buddha statue on a separate island and made fun of how cumbersome it seemed to travel anywhere else after being in Japan. In Sydney the next day we met up with Teresa (Edel’s sister) who’s joining the trip. Edel had been counting down the days until she would arrive since roughly the 1960′s, and it was great to see another face from home. The one day we had in Sydney we checked the obligatory opera house off the list and went for a walk around the harbour and to the aquarium to see the two dugongs which is the latest addition there.

Next – time for another island paradise breakaway! Arrived in Port Vila on Vanuatu (halfway between Fiji and Australia) and found a backpackers in the outskirts of town. Vanuatu is really nice and friendly – people say hello to you on the street and everywhere is extremely safe – our room didn’t even have a lock etc. The language spoken here is Bislama – a fantastic mix of mostly English vocabulary with an Austronesian grammar, and a very phonetic spelling. A “No-smoking” sign we saw was written as “Yu no makem faea”! This small group of islands is occasionally voted the happiest place to live on the planet actually. And like Fiji it’s a great dive-spot – we signed up for some dives as soon as we could, and were out three of the eight days we spent in Vila before heading on to another island.

Tamtam in Port Vila musem.

It was about 24 degrees in the water – not quite as warm as when we were diving on Andaman last but still pretty nice. While Teresa was working on her open-water certificate me and Edel went out with the boat to the dive sites around the island. One of the nicest sites was called Cathedral – a long canyon which we swam into with the current working against us until it got dark all around, then turning around to let the current carry us out back out while looking into the bright blue opening full of the silhouettes of dozens of unicorn fish. We also did a couple wreck dives – the first one was called Kunanda and it was the first wreck we’ve dove where it was safe to enter parts of the wreck. We could swim through the captains bridge and other areas and look out the windows into all the blue and fish surrounding the wreck. Quite eerie and very atmospheric. To complete the picture there was a real sea-monster of a moray eel slithering around between the hidden areas inside the broken wreck.

Dove the Semle wreck on a different day – the deepest we’ve ever been. The ship had been sunk purposely to create a dive site, but then one of the frequent typhoons had dragged it out deeper in 1987 so it is now really on the limit for recreational diving. The divemaster took us probably a bit deeper than you’re really supposed – we spend one or two minutes at 45-46 meters depth swimming through the open hull of the wreck and felt nitrogen narcosis (Jacques Cousteau’s “rapture of the deep”) for the first time. It makes you feel a bit drunk & happy – Edel looked like she was laughing whenever I looked over at her… Luckily it wears off quickly as you go higher again – at 34 meters we swam in again through the captains bridge to look out through the windows..being careful to not stir up to much stilt to cloud the visibility of the way out. This wreck didn’t have as much coral and sponges growing on it being at this depth, but it was interesting and a bit spooky to be down so far – couldn’t even see the surface when looking up.

Edel and Teresa on the beach on Moso island.

Above land activities – one day we went to see a very nice waterfall higher up on Efate island. The colours were oddly bright blue from minerals dissolved in the water, and it was possible to swim in the pools below the waterfall – even swim in behind the fall into a small hidden cave. Also went snorkelling a couple times by the Hideaway and Iririki small resort islands next to Port Vila, and had some fantastic lobster pizza in the harbour. One evening Lorenzo – the charismatic owner of the backpackers where we stayed – took us to a nakamal or kava drinking place. Kava is a mild narcotic that is drunk all over the South Pacific, it’s made from a root and taste incredibly “earthy” or dirt-like. We had tasted a few coconut shells of it on Fiji on the last trip, but the Vanuatu variant is stronger. It makes you feel slightly drunk/stoned, and makes your mouth go numb. The nakamal (the word means “place for peace”) was really nice – perfectly quiet and located right by the water, very dimly lit so you could sit there and look up at the perfect star-filled sky (think I’ve only seen more stars out in the Bolivian desert). Lorenzo was telling us about his adventures, and about how to make a fortune collecting ambergris (something sperm whales puke out which, after floating around for years to degrade further, is used in the most expensive perfumes…) – he showed us lumps of it back at the hostel later!

Sunrise on Moso island.

Congoola beach on Moso island.

From Efate we headed for Moso island and the Tranquility dive resort there. Apart from a traditional village on the other corner of the island the dive resort is the only thing there – it felt very nice and undeveloped and the small collection of thatch-roof huts had been built without felling any trees so approaching the island from the water everything looks green and you can’t see the resort until you’re practically there. Peter, a nice Aussie with many stories of weathering cyclones welcomed us off the pier – we would be the only ones staying there at the moment (they mostly bring people on boat-daytrips from Port Vila), but a couple more people arrived some days later. The place sported superb snorkelling right off the beach and I wasted no time getting in the water. While I was out there looking at 10cm colourful fish I missed the big whale though…some of the other people on land saw one – swimming right past the island just about twice as far out as I was! I was completely oblivious.. Snorkelling there was great though, big fields of coral – an anemone full of clown fish just below the surface right on the jetty even. We were out for hours every day and I got in to practising free diving to try to get down to where the buoys were anchored – managed to reach 16-18 meter without fins after a couple days but decided to stop once it started giving me nose-bleeds… My favourite sight when snorkelling is when there is a school of tiny bright-blue fish hiding between the branches of a staghorn coral – they all move in quickly when they get frightened, then slowly move out to fill the water surrounding the coral when they think it’s safe – with all of them moving in perfect synchronisation it’s like a big sphere of fish morphing in size back and forth around the coral. Very trippy…

Sea shell in the surf on Fred's beach.

We spotted some pelagics as well, since the depth drops quickly to 140m just 50m or so out from the beach – schools of strange big fish swimming in circles (or even eight’s!) with their mouth open filtering the water. Didn’t see a single reef-shark though, on either any of our dives or when out snorkelling – neither here or on Andaman.. We saw tons of both white-tip and black-tip on the last trip, in Fiji, Indonesia, Thailand…they’re just gone everywhere now it seems ( – and we saw why in Hong Kong and Macau). We did three more dives on our second day on Moso – one of them had a bit of current and I used up my air very quickly (Edel always uses less than me) but it was an interesting site, with an underwater thermal vent. A big black/white lion fish was hiding in the hotspring when we got there. The last dive was a night dive – we’ve only done two before – like the last ones it was a bit disorienting and me and Edel held hands to keep track of eachother in the dark – we saw a big moray with a nice pattern, beautiful red/white shrimps and a fantastic spotted white and black Cowrie shell. It’s amazing how different the same site can look in the dark, most of the coral fish gone, the parrot fish sleeping in the strange cocoons they build at night, the usual reef-fish all replaced by red squirrel and bigeye fish and many more crustaceans are out.

Another Moso island sunrise.

One of the days we joined the daytrippers on the boat from Port Vila to the other side of the island, then hopped off on a deserted beach to walk back. The beach was really nice and there were some big caves to explore right nearby – by the time we were on our way back it was already getting dark and they had sent out one of the Vanuatuans as search party for us… Went sea kayaking one day as well, and stopped by a different beach to look for shells and compete who could find a piece of broken coral that looks the most like a Chinese pickled chicken foot. In the evenings we (or at least I) usually went on an expedition to look for big coconut crabs. It’s an endangered species that lives here – like a hermit crab but grows to weigh several kilos (at that stage they stop living in a shell for protection). Peter had showed us some juveniles the first day, and there was a really big one living somewhere in a cave up the rocky hill in the forest behind our huts…I’d do a walk after dark each night hoping to hear some rustling in the dry leaves somewhere but I never spotted it. They can drag a full coconut with husks along with them, and then crack it open with their big claw. Other odd animals – a 20cm stick insect fell on top of my head one evening when we were eating..also a juvenile – they can grow to a fore-arm length here apparently!

Releasing a hawksbill.

The dive resort runs a little hawksbill sea-turtle conservatory – raising them from hatchings until they’re about one year old and have a much better chance of survival. Like the other sea turtles the hawksbill is endangered because we like eating their eggs, making combs from their shell and throwing lots of plastic bags into the ocean which they mistake for jellyfish. The dive center had four tagged and ready for release at the moment so we sponsored one together and got to release it on the beach – when we went to the tank to pick one out there was one who seemed particularly eager for freedom, climbing on top of the others and trying to scale the walls so he pretty much picked himself, and was named Saoirse for freedom in Irish. Teresa let it go on the beach, and it first looked puzzled for a second about the size of its new tank…then made a run for it! We saw it come up twice for air before it disappeared out into the turquoise waves.

video of Teresa releasing the sea turtle

Early morning light over Chhomrong rice fields.

Nepal: Annapurna Trek

What better is there to spend your birthday than 10 days of profuse sweating in the Himalayas? The scenery was breathtaking, the villages were picturesque and our guides Shiva and Deepak were two great lads who showed us a few Nepali card games and picked us wild strawberries on route. What are the advantages of climbing 1500 meters every day for 10 days I hear you ask? Guilt fee Mars-bar rolls that’s what

Carvings at the Shiva temple in Kalpa.

India: Spiti Valley

Unpaved landslide covered roads, 1000 meter drops, sweaty palms, 2000 year old villages, chanting Buddhist monks who made us tea and adorable but hysterical kids stalking us in tiny remote mountain villages – this was Spiti Valley.

Edel on beach 7.

India: Andaman Islands

Even a heathen like David had to admit that diving with 5 meter Manta rays was a religious experience When we weren’t under the water we spent the days on Beach number 7 which is still rimmed by pristine rainforest, and eating out at the aptly named World Class restaurant where the woman of the house cooked for all of the foreigners on the island on one gas ring…

Tiger in Bandhavgarh national park.

India: Bandhavgarh National Park

We were rewarded for bearing the 50 degree heat and having to live in what can only be described as a bunker with close ups of wild tigers, which these days is a very rare experience.

Prayer flags at Everest basecamp.

Tibet: Everest Base Camp

With all the craziness and history that goes along with Everest you can’t help but be in awe when you do finally see the mountain.. Admittedly we arrived at EBC the lazy way – by jeep – but still to get there at all is an achievement, right? We spent the night in a tent at 5200 meters, David braved the yak butter tea and next day watched the sunrise over Everest. Good Times.

Prayer wheels in Dharamsala.

India: Dharamsala

After the initial slap in the face that was Delhi it was a great feeling to arrive in Dharamsala. Before I left for India I was a bit anxious about even bringing a mobile as the more stuff you generally bring the more stress you have trying to take care of it. I need not have worried, every single Buddhist monk we saw sipping cappuccino in Dharamshala had a newer phone that made mine look like a fossil. The village itself is a great mix of locals, Tibetan refugees and hippy dippy Westerners. A lot of people get so comfortable here that the end up spending 3 months and forgetting about the rest of India.. We got out after two weeks and luckily caught the man himself, the Dalai Lama at a public appearance before we left which was a great honour.

Bridge in Nikko.

Japan madness with Avril

We arrived, we covered her apartment in volcanic ash from Mount Fuji and she made us proper tea with milk in it. More Japan under “culinary highlights” below.

Yak by Namtso lake.

Tibet: Namtso Lake

Perched at 4720 meters Namtso is the highest salt-water lake in the world. It is also regarded as one of the most holy lakes in Tibet where many Buddhist pilgrims do a 16 day circuit of the lake prostrating every third step.. The lake itself has that straight-from-a-fairytale azure blue which along with the altitude left us breathless.

Terraced rice fields in Longji.

China: Longji Rice Terraces

Longji was a little gem of a village that we came across just before we left China. We spent 3 days here wandering through the amazingly complex rice terraces and seeing hardly any other people which is quite an amazing feat in China. Apart from the two old ladies from a neighbouring village who stalked us for a few hours and kept asking me if I was pregnant we were left in relative peace! This was the last stop we made in China so we were delighted to leave on such a high note.

Boating on the Ganges.

India: Varanasi

The word “confronting” is the best I can come up with to describe Varanasi. We arrived late at night in the middle of one of the frequent power cuts which made negotiating the maze of tiny little alley ways to our Hostel very interesting indeed. When we eventually did arrive at the hostel after doing battle with several territorial sacred cows we discovered that the last time that it was cleaned was probably when the city was founded as a Hindu pilgrimage site some 2000 years ago… We spent the next days wandering by the banks of the Ganges in the 40 degree heat watching Holy Men zipping up and down in speed boats, people washing clothes, fathers teaching their kids how to swim, people being cremated, pilgrims cleansing themselves and gurus performing religious “puja” ceremonies. We too spent time praying – praying that the electricity would come back for just 5 minutes so we could cool down in front of the fan..

Asia Lows

Amoebic and Bacterial Dysentery

It is all fun and games until someone loses 5 kilos in 7 days … Thank you India

China in the high season

According to the July 2009 population statistics there are approximately 1,338,612,968 living in China. All of whom visited the Forbidden City the same day as us

Asia Culinary Highlights

24 hour power!

Nepalese Dal Bhat

The “spuds and meat” of Nepal which basically consists of rice, lentil curry, vegetable curry and maybe some pickles on the side. Once you are finished the first portion the waiter will ask if you want more as is the custom which you will try to say no to but will give in in the end… Our guides on the Annapurna trek ate Dal Bhat twice a day every day and coined one of the best phrases we heard in Nepal “Dal Bhat – 24 hour power!”

Hotpot in Xian.

All Chinese Food

Despite claims in certain rural towns in the West of Ireland I can confirm the Chinese people do not add Pedigree Chump to their food In 2 months of eating out three times a day we had maybe two dodgy meals the rest were fresh and tasty (though quite possibly riddled in MSG). I would go back to China just for the food.

Macau

Asia is a bit slack on the old dessert options so we were delighted when we arrived in Macau and discovered that the Portuguese had left behind lots of tasty cakes especially the Pastel de Nata a little warm eggy/custardy tart.

Dining in Kyoto's Gion district.

Japan

We could probably have eaten supermarket sushi for the whole 10 days we were in Japan but thanks to Avril we discovered that there is more to Japanese cuisine We tried Okonomiyaki (a kind of pancake with a bit of everything in it), takoyaki (fried octopus dumplings), curry udon noodles, skewered chicken hearts, Daifuku (soft bean curd cake) and green tea ice cream. Delish

And what have we learned from all this?

All beautiful sites are located at the top of a difficult climb.

Once you arrived to said beautiful site someone will have hung a powerline right in front of it.

On our last trip the most memorable one we came across was an Indian restaurant in Vientiane, Laos, which promised “A forgettable taste of India”! I think this trip has been more fruitful though. Here’s our Top-Ten:

#10

Drunk by the beauty of nature at the Leshan Giant Buddha

“Some expert of heritage of leshan is as impressive as seeing many of the other great cultural stone monuments such as the shyphinx.”

And also…

“Looking away from the place, you would find that the tree E mountains are calm and peaceful, and wagching the river running out from behind the hotizon, you would be drunk by the beauty of nature.”

Sign by the Leshan Giant Buddha.

#9

Cool T-shirts at the Chengdu train-station

T-shirts with English writing on them are very cool at the moment in China – it doesn’t really matter if the owner doesn’t speak the language, or if what’s written on the shirt wouldn’t even make sense to someone who does. One of the best one’s we spotted was worn by a young girl at the Chengdu train-station and sported this cryptic statement:

Bike Loveing A.
[picture of bicycle]
To punish their onw!

#8

The CCP helping you find your aim in life on Mount Emei

Probably the one bit of communism that still survives in China today is the public information campaigns with very specific rules on how you should behave in various aspects of your life…there was a list of a full 20 Do’s and Don’t published everywhere on Mount Emei (“Don’t put disorderly” etc.) as well as Socialist Viewpoints about Honor & Disgrace (“Take hard work and struggle as an honor, regard extravagant and dissipated as a disgrace“ etc.)…and this helpful little gem in a public toilet (also on Mount Emei):

“It is so civilized to take one more step further close while urinating.”

#7

Warm Notice on Mount Emei

“Otherwise you’ll be seriously punished, which may give you an unpleasant tour.”

Warm Notice on Mount Emei

#6

Food flavoured biscuits!

…I had to buy a packet of course. Turns out they don’t taste like food at all – at least not any kind of food I know.. (..except perhaps fish food, mixed with lots of cardboard). I bought them in Lhasa in the “Family of supermarket common people“!

Nothing but lies...

#5

Menu’s in Tibetan restaurants

Found this gem in a restaurant by Namtso lake at 4700 meters altitude…

Pork missed with garlic sauce.

Saeef snshewnufs.

Dining at 4700 meters (cucumbers with garlic sauce sounds good...)

Dining at 4000 meters.

The same menu also had “Hot pot with pork’s guts”…

Here’s another one from a place we ate in two days later:

Shrellded Mest with Lattureroot

Fired Pork Srices with eggplant

#4

Something to do with sculptures on a Khajuraho temple signpost

“The temple stands on a modest. This is the only temple at Khajuraho which lacks erotic sculptures are three bands of sculptures around the walls and all the sculptures.”

…and just in case the 89-word sentence that follows this delightful short extract somehow still fails to give you a headache, the whole thing has been written in upper-case!

There will be a test at the end!

#3

May we remind you…

Quirky policeman on a sign-post outside the Temple of Heaven in Beijing thinks you’re definitely up to something…

“May we remind you: Please be self-restraint and be a good tourist to mold a well-mannered imagination!”

May we remind you...

#2

Eggplant With Corporal Punishment in Beijing

Beijing restaurant menu.

So many delightful delicacies to choose from on this menu!

Couple Lungs

Eggplant With Corporal Punishment

As well as a selection of various Entrails and Intestine -based dishes… Is the Eggplant With Corporal Punishment served separately or simultaneously me wonders?

Menu page2, page3.

#1

The careful roof falls the snow…

Poetic yet borderline informational at the same time, this Mt. Emei sign is our favourite so far

Be careful of slippery.
The careful roof falls the snow.

Signpost outside a temple on the Mount Emei summit

* Runner-ups…

At the Great Mosque in Xi'an's Muslim quarter.

Theretrdspectientower in Xi’an

The “Theretrdspectientower” can be found at the Great Mosque in Xi’an’s Muslim quarter.

Fire extinguisher

Granted, it is a difficult word to spell.. In fact every place that has one spells it in a different way. “Fire exting uis herbox” and “Fire Exting Atsher Box” are two fine examples.

Mount Emei version.

Xi'an version.

Xi'an restaurant menu.

More unexpected dishes in Xi’an

“Lettuces with Bacteria” – there is a picture even!

Learn English at the…

“Teaching Hotle” in Lhatse.

Teaching Hotle.

Unexpected levels of greatness at the Terracotta Warrior museum

“The museum devotes much attention to enhance cadres and staffs’ ideological level and professional quality, even makes great efforts on training a group of excellent personnel owning both ability and moral integrity, who have already accomplished different kinds of tasks outstandingly at their different working post.”

“All these brilliant achievements make museum progressive every year.”
(photo)

Stay safe (and inspired) on the mountain.

Nuts in Yangshuo

“Almonds. Please edible, avoid in change quality dampness.”
(photo)

Stay safe on Mt. Emei

“Being in wonderful famous mountain landscape under the sun .keeping the words of safe tour in mind.”

Tokyo subway/metro maze.

The flight from Macau landed in Tokyo late in the evening, and we got the subway in to town around 11pm just at the same time as the hard-working Japanese office workers were making their way home.. We checked in to a tiny room in the northern end of town with two mattresses on the floor and a shared bathroom for 50 euro/night – cheap for Tokyo. The hostel was a friendly enough place, and a nice introduction to some of the Japanese peculiarities such as the love for coin-operated things. The shower had a coin-slot, 100 yen for 5 minutes, as did the cooker, the washing machine and actually even the breakfast restaurant where you needed to first change your bills into 100-yen metal tokens (which weren’t coins but had the same size and value) in a machine and then pay with the tokens. We ended up in another coin operated restaurant in the city center an evening or two later – you’d order by a touch screen, put in the money and get a paper receipt to hand to the waitress who is standing waiting right next to the machine…

Tokyo night sky.

The first day we hopped around in town to see as much as possible in a day, a temple in Asakusa with Buddha’s five meter sandals, the Edo museum with lots of samurai-time history, the Imperial Gardens and in the evening the 46-floor metropolitan building for some night-time views over the city. The subway network is very fast and efficient, but the map looks a bit like a rainbow put through a blender. It’s actually not too difficult to figure out how to get from A to B, but buying the right ticket can be as there’s different companies operating different lines and getting from one place to another might cost different depending on how you happened to transfer along on the way.. Even when we (..thought we) picked the easy option and got a day-pass it only had a random selection of the lines included. Luckily the Japanese are incredibly helpful though, possibly more so than anywhere else we’ve been. You only need to stand around for a moment somewhere looking like you don’t know your soba from your udon and someone will come up and offer their help. Once in the evening when we got out the wrong exit at a subway station a woman walked us for ten minutes just to make sure she sent us on the right way. People also do an incredible amount of greeting, thanking and bowing whenever you interact with them, and things like queuing function in a very polite and orderly fashion. We found ourselves wondering a bit what it must be like for Japanese people to travel when they’re used to this, to, say, picking a place at random….India? How do they avoid feeling like they want to kill themselves? Actually, come to think of it some of the Japanese backpackers we met in Varanasi had been out swimming in the Ganges which considering the polluted state of the river might amount to a suicide attempt… Apparently several Japanese tourists have to be hospitalized every year after visiting Paris and having their romantic mental image of the city shattered by rude waiters…there’s even a special Japanese word for “Paris syndrome”! Anyhow, while the Japanese might be the most polite and helpful people on the planet there is one exception – Mount Fuji – I’ll get to this in a little bit…

Octopus at the Tsukiji market.

The second morning in Tokyo we started at 5am to visit the Tsukiji early morning Fish Market, the world biggest – it’s an amazing place to wander around and look at all the weird butchered sea monsters and big tentacles – I kept imagining that there must be something really strange I’d never seen before waiting just around the next corner – a Kraken or Loch Ness monster in pieces. I didn’t see anything I could immediately recognize as endangered at least – no shark fin (unlike in Hong Kong and Macau) and the big frozen tuna carcasses being worked on with band saw or special samurai-like swords seemed to be mostly yellow-fin and not the critically endangered blue-fin species the European fisheries seem determined to make extinct (the blue-fin belly fat is supposedly the best sashimi in the world and a single fish is worth tens of thousands of dollar – they’re using spotter planes to find and catch the very last few ones spawning in the Mediterranean at the moment). And thankfully no meat in sight from whales, dolphins or other animals with a brain bigger than a human’s.

Bulldog-ofant-osaurus?

After the fish market we caught a train to Nikko – a cute little town north of Tokyo surrounded by temples. Some of the statues and carvings of elephants in the temples are quite interesting – they’re famously made by someone who had never been anywhere close to one. Japanese temples are very atmospheric, with cute little mossy stone lanterns littered in between the trees around all the temple buildings. And very nice gardens – while European gardens can look a bit like military service for plants with everything in perfect straight lines the Japanese ones feel more natural, even though they’re every bit as manicured. Back in Tokyo in the evening we went to Shibuja, a busy area of the city which is full of neon and look like the hyper-modern Tokyo you expect before arriving. It’s where Tokyo people go to be trendy, and it’s full of young people with dyed hair and way too much makeup who are at least as brand-obsessed as the worst European teenagers.

Climbing Mount Fuji.

The third morning in Tokyo we headed for Kawaguchiko to climb Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest peak at 3770 meters, since we happened to be here during the July-August climbing season before it gets too cold. We started climbing from the 5th station at 2300 meters around 5pm, and planned to spend the night at the 8th station at 3300 meters to catch the sunrise from the top the next morning. Watching the sunrise from Mount Fuji even have a special word for it – “Goraiko” (the Japanese love to have a special word for things..there’s also special words for “looking at cherry-blossom trees” and “looking at cherry-blossom trees at night”..). We had emailed a few of the mountain huts at the 8th station in advance to try and book one of the 70 euro per person hard-mattress-on-the-floor they offer, but none of them had emailed back so we decided to chance it – surely in Japan of all places it wouldn’t be so disorganized that they allow more people to climb than there is space for and people end up sleeping outside… From the start at the 5th station you’re quickly above the tree line and the mountain is barren with ash and scree along the path – not much to see but the sunset on the way was very nice and the view afterward just the same – looking down on the city lights in the valleys below, even some fireworks far away and distant lightning! Climbing got very crowded as the path was narrowing higher up, and once it got dark it turned more into queuing than climbing – we were moving slow enough to get cold on the way wearing the one long-sleeve layer each we’d brought. Once we reached the 8th station around 9pm we discovered that not only was there no space to sleep in any of the huts, but also was this the one place in Japan where you can find rude people. The LP guidebook had said the huts usually let you sit around inside for a few hours at least as long as you order something, but that wasn’t the case – none of them would even let us in the door! One place with a restaurant even refused to sell us food unless we eat it outside in the cold sitting on the ground (..we decided to live off the dozen snickers bars we’d packed instead). Edel needed to take her lenses out from all the ash blowing in the wind, and while one place did let her inside for a minute it was only just inside the door and for as little time as possible. We ended up sitting outside one of the huts talking to a group of nice Filipino guys who were in the same situation – there was a small fire in a metal can that helped keeping us warm (it was used by someone in the hut who branded people’s walking sticks for three euro each). After an hour someone came out from the hut to push us away, but by now the fire had died anyway. One of the Filipino guys had the genius idea to ask the person inside the hut to brand all their walking sticks just as the fire was going out, to give us another hour of heat, but he refused. We did consider just going down instead of course, but didn’t want to climb down in the dark plus the down-route was elsewhere and there were still people coming uphill on the narrow up-route (some people climb all night timed for sunrise at the peak, presumably to avoid dealing with the hut-people..). And if we did climb down we’d just end up just as homeless but at 2300 meters instead. I wonder if there is a word for “Fuji-syndrome”?

Goraiko is pronounced brrrrrr...

We decided to climb the rest of the way to the top together with the Filipino guys, trying to make the climb last the whole night by going only a short stretch at the time to build up some warmth, then huddling from the wind wherever we found shelter for a few minutes before climbing another bit again. Reached the top at 1am – still many hours left until sunrise… There were a few building at the top, though none of them were open to take shelter in. Many other people were in the same situation up there, but me and Edel were probably among the least well dressed – no jackets and regrettably I had suggested to Edel before the climb to leave out her second long-sleeve as her bag was too full (..every single other climb we’ve ever done we brought too much clothes, though of course we never had to sleep outside on any of them..). We huddled between a couple of the buildings on the top in the howling winds for a couple hours together with our new friends, trying to sleep but not getting a minute in while the temperature touched 3 degrees C. Sometime in the night we decided to walk around a bit, and came across another big group of people standing around waiting outside one of the buildings – it eventually opened at 3am and we could get in and buy a bowl of noodles and wait inside at least for the next two hours. At 5am we had a quick look at the sunrise – cloudy – and headed down as quickly as we could. It was extremely busy with people on the way down, but we thawed as we walked lower and the sun rose higher. A while later I came across a Japanese saying “If you never climb Mount Fuji you are a fool – but if you climb it twice you are twice the fool!“.

Edel and Avril in Kyoto.

Back in “normal Japan” once more people were at once friendly and helpful again – someone at the train-station wrote down all the places we needed to change trains to get from the mountain to Osaka, and someone else onboard the first train helped us once it suddenly changed direction two stations from where we needed to go and I stood staring at the map with a puzzled (…and probably at this stage pretty tired) look. We arrived in Osaka in the evening after covering most of the distance on one of the hyper-modern 300 km/h Shinkhansen trains, and met up with Avril (Edel’s friend from school who teaches English in Osaka) who luckily recognized us despite us still being covered in ash from the mountain…and checked in to her apartment for the next five nights. Pure luxury (..particularly after the previous night) with proper Irish tea and everything! Nice to see a face from home after five months on the road. We went for okonomi-yaki in the evening, like a very thick pancake with squid, octopus and kimchi inside that you cook at the table – very nice and one of the places it would be very difficult to order without a Japanese-speaking Avril with you! The day after we spent around Osaka, visiting another temple and enjoying some sushi, then visiting a Japanese-style onsen bath-house in the evening. The onsen was a massive spa-complex, we spent some time first in the mixed clothed swimming area at the top floor with jacuzzi’s overlooking the neon city (and of course went in all the slides), then split up to go to the separate nude hotsprings. The hotspring baths were themed with all the great pre-medeival cultures; Rome of 2000 years ago, ancient Greece, Finland of today… With all the signs in Japanese I wasn’t 100% sure at first where to be naked and where not to, but once I figured it out my Swedish side was comfortable enough strolling around in the nip. Sat in a salt sauna until I had almost melted, then when I walked out and hopped into the nearest pool which I thought would be freezing it turned out to be 42 degrees.. Very relaxing once I found my way around the place in the end, and I went to all the features except the Finnish…

The Kiyomizu-Dera temple in Kyoto.

Kyoto the day after – went temple-spotting first and saw a handful out of the several thousand temples and shrines the town sports – the golden temple sitting by a lake fringed by bonsai-trees looks typical fantasy-image Japan. In the evening we went to the traditional wooden Gion district and tried sea-urchin and other oddities in a restaurant – and spotted a couple white-face-makeup geisha’s outside on the street!

Paper cranes at the Childrens Peace Memorial.

Next day to Hiroshima to learn about some of the maddest days of mankind. There’s one ruined building still standing from the day the city was flattened – now called the A-bomb dome – which remained standing by being almost exactly below the center of the blast. Next-door is the Peace Memorial Museum which is very good and refreshingly honest (doesn’t shy away from mentioning also Japan’s war crimes, and doesn’t seem to overly victimize) – some parts are wreckingly emotional though, particularly stories of children dying of leukemia for years and years after. There’s one special memorial outside the museum with tens of thousands of paper cranes for one particular girl – I remember being read her story back in primary school actually by our teacher who was very Japan-obsessed (..we were making origami all day long when we probably should have been learning math). Very moving anyhow, while the museum was crowded everyone walked around in nearly dead silence. We felt pretty drained when we finally walked out.

Edel and Avril in Himeji.

Himeji-jo castle.

More uplifting daytrips the next two days – first Himeji which has a very impressive castle high up on a hill and a nice Japanese garden called Koko-en. Then Nara – another town near Osaka with a collection of World Heritage buildings one of which – the Todai-ji temple – is the worlds biggest wooden building and houses a giant gold/bronze Buddha called Daibutsu. A little further out from town in the forest sits the Kasuga-Taisha temple, probably the most atmospheric temple we’ve been to in Japan. The forest and all the paths around are filled with mossy stone lantern shrines hidden below the trees – all of them are lit in the evening of one particular night every year which must be amazing. Back in Osaka for our last evening we went out for a drink and a walk around Osaka’s futuristic neon-landscape center full of big animatronic crabs climbing up the buildings (not joking!). Rounded off the evening with some tako-yaki octopus-balls which are a popular fast-food. Next morning we waved good-bye to our fabulous hostess who had made Japan a fantastic min-holiday from our rough backpacking days.

Forest lantern shrines by the Kasuga-Taisha temple.

For the second fit of poor planning on our part that I’d like to blame someone else for, the superb Japanese public transport system had spoiled us to the extent during the last two weeks that we figured 3 hours should be enough for the five hundred kilometer trip from Osaka to Tokyo airport… First it turned out we had to wait 40 minutes for the next 300 km/h train to Tokyo which we hadn’t quite calculated on, then 25 min wait for the next one-hour airport train…arrived at the gigantic Narita airport 55 minutes before takeoff but thanks to some swift running with the big backpacks on and more helpful Japanese people we arrived at the checkin counter with a full 8 min to spare before they closed..weren’t even the last people on the plane in the end. After the flight back from Tokyo to Macau we made our way to Vanuatu in the South Pacific via Hong-Kong and Sydney..four border crossings in five days but luckily Vanuatu is a good place to relax (the name of the capital, Port Vila, even means “rest” in Swedish).

Largo do Senado street in Macau.

Macau is a funny little place – one part Havana with old colonial buildings, one part Rio de Janeiro with black & white cobble-stone patterns a la Copacabana, and six parts Las Vegas with massive casinos housed in oddly shaped buildings, musical fountains playing “Luck be a Lady”, and neon, neon everywhere, blinking neon, pulsating neon. It was a Portuguese colony for hundreds of years even before Hong Kong became British, and once it had lost all trade to Hong Kong it reinvented itself as a casino heaven that now pulls in more money than Vegas. Portugal was actually trying to hand it back to China for decades but the Communist Party didn’t want the crazy mess of gambling and prostitution…until by the 90′s they had realized that money is more fun than socialist ideals! It became another “special economic zone” of China just after Hong Kong.

Macau casino quarter at night.

We spent 2 nights in Macau, walking around town, enjoying some great sea-food, and walked up to an old fort and museum on a hill overlooking town (good displays on the great ocean voyages and the silk road) but skipped out on the gambling which I hold to be a special tax for people who can’t do math – something I like pointing out to friends and family members who enjoy buying one or two lottery tickets a year… I can be a real pain sometimes . We did visit one casino/hotel complex one evening though, to catch a Cirque-du-Soleil show – very lucky with the seats and ended up on 2nd row even though we only bought mid-class tickets at about 50 euro each. The show, Zaia, was fantastic – it’s on a custom made stage for this show here (with one show every evening) with a big sphere rising from the floor and floating around the ceiling with different things projected on it, great acrobats bouncing around in amazing costumes looking like some sort of psychedelic wood-elf space-aliens.. While some acrobats are performing in the foreground there are usually lots of other things going on in the background, an astronaut on an antique high-wheel bicycle powered by fire-crackers flying through the air or a polar bear slowly floating by… Great show – like the visual equivalent of listening to Shpongle music..

More fun on Macau – when you arrive and the networks pick up your mobile phone all the big casinos bombard you with text message ads for hours to get you to go! There’s also direct casino ferries from Hong Kong and free casino buses everywhere to reel you in. And a final interesting note worth mentioning – we found an inventive fast-food place called “Ireland’s Potato” that served french fries with kiwi flavoured yogurt and sported the slogan: “Ireland’s proverb says: There are two things in the world that can’t be joked: 1 marriage, 2 potato“!

On the Li river.

On the Li river the next day – I hated myself a bit for booking an organized group tour, wearing a colourful panda sticker and following the guy with the panda flag, but there were no easy alternatives short of building our own boat.. When the guide went through all the cringy group-tour things..”Are you all having a good time?” (..crowd: “mumble…“, guide: “I can’t hear you!…“) and having everyone rehearse pronouncing his name I was gnawing at my wrists, but Edel stopped me just in time and I feel much better now.. Also on the negative side; the food on the boat was positively diabolical and not worth missing a second of the scenery for, but the less said about it the better. On the positive side; this is some of the most stunning limestone scenery we’ve ever seen anywhere – hundreds of craggy oddly shaped forested peaks jutting up from the flat flood-plains and rice fields, with tall strands of bamboo hanging out over the river-side. Many of the peaks are named after their shape in typical Chinese fashion with imaginative or poetic names like “Four dragons watching a kitten play under a banyan tree…” etc., but you’d need imagination beyond that of mortals to make it out. The river was busy – a long string of 100-passenger boats with observation decks spaced about 50 meters apart as well as many smaller bamboo rafts.

Sunrise view over the Yangshuo carst landscape.

In the village Yangshuo where the boats drop people we checked in to a cozy hotel in the quiet side of town where we stayed for five nights. The restaurants in Yangshuo had some of the most exotic items we’ve seen on a menu so far – one place we went back to a few times had dog, bamboo rat, pigeon and pig brain/stomach/feet/lung…though we only ventured as far as stuffed river snails and some small crunchy river prawns that are eaten with the shell. We took a cooking lesson one day and made beer fish and other local specialties though nothing too weird – they did take us to the market beforehand though where we saw dogs in cages waiting for the chop chop (..plus half a dog hanging from a hook) and piles of turtles and frogs in sacks. I didn’t see a pangolin or anything else that I could identify as endangered at least though.

Hot air balloons over Yangshuo at dawn.

One of the days in Yangshuo I went up in a hot air balloon for sunrise (Edel stayed behind as she’s slightly more afraid of heights than I am of early mornings). It was my first time in a balloon – it seems a great way to fly and takeoff is smooth and only takes a couple minutes, after which you spend hours trying to land somewhere depending on where the wind happened to blow you that particular day, while standing up with your head inches away from a three meter flame next to what looks like a very flammable material which is all that separates you from falling to your death half a kilometer below. Bit spooky at first as you’re very exposed in the little basket, but nice once getting used to it and the views were incredibly beautiful and unreal – more and more limestone peaks visible as we were rising higher, the serpentine turns of the river and the red sun rising through the thin rims of mist hanging over the peaks in the morning. I snapped a billion photos (..which also helped to avoid looking down). We were just under a kilometer up in the air at the highest, then for the landing… The driver (balloonist? ballooneur?) tried quite a number of times to nail a spot that wasn’t in the power-lines, on the road or in a flooded rice-field while the yellow-overall ground crew was racing around below on the ground. We eventually landed in a muddy rice field after a close shave with a roof-top.

Early morning light over Yangshuo.

Yangshuo dreamscape.

Other excursions around Yangshuo; we climbed a couple of the smaller peaks around town for the view, and went to watch cormorant fishing one evening. It’s a funny tradition – a fisherman goes out on a small bamboo raft after dark together with half a dozen birds – the birds have rings around their neck to stop them from swallowing the fish they catch, and once they’ve caught a few the fisherman picks them up and gets them to cough up the fish into a basket. Apparently they get to eat every 7th fish, or else they refuse to work! Very inventive, and it’s amazing to see what efficient fishing machines those things are. On the last day we went biking the countryside around Yangshuo, really cute with rice fields, little villages and more craggy limestone peaks everywhere. A nice villager couple out picking fruit gave us a bunch of a strange one we still haven’t found the name for. When we gave them a small bill to say thanks they first didn’t want to accept it, then gave us another really big pile – were eating them the whole rest of the day and gave some to other travellers we met as well. In one spot we hopped on a bamboo raft to go down one stretch of a smaller river – it turned out to be a real tourist-trap complete with people selling photos of you going down the tiny rapids. Two seconds into the trip the rafts-man (who spoke no English except “Hello”) pointed to his belly to indicate he was thirsty or hungry and ten seconds later the first out of an army of rafting drink-sellers wanted us to buy a beer for the captain when we ourselves didn’t want anything. I gave him some money and he bought himself a coke, finished it, burped loudly and threw the empty can straight in the river! I just don’t get it..some part of him must have figured out that he has a salary only because people come from all over to see this beautiful river so why turn it into a garbage heap… We didn’t share a language of course, but hopefully he’ll remember our looks of utter disgust long enough not to do it again for a while.

Longji terraced rice fields.

Next morning we headed north – bus back to Guilin, another bus to Longshang, and another bus again to a small village called Ping-An in the Longji area (the southern end of a mountainous ethnic autonomous region) which is famous for some of China’s finest terraced rice-field scenery. It felt like we were getting back to the type of traveling we enjoy best, being the only tourists on the local bus to get there. A woman on the bus who’s 14 month old baby waved at us for 20 kilometers straight started talking to us and she ran a small hostel where she invited us to stay. It was quite a walk uphill in the rain with the big bags once we got off the bus where the road ended, and when we finally did get there it turned out the room had been rented out while she was away. She was really apologetic about it the poor woman, but luckily her friend who also ran a family hostel had a room just another small bit up the hill. The owners there didn’t speak any English at all (though they did have something resembling it on their menu card) but we got on fine with sign language for the three nights we stayed there.

Girl in Longji village.

We spent our days in Ping-An doing short walks around the area. The area is stunning with the hills landscaped into perfect contour lines for terraced rice fields over many centuries – very green with some strands of bamboo here and there on the hill-sides. The villages are really charming with dark wooden houses and bright yellow corn cobs or red chillies lying out to dry everywhere. Ping-An has a bit of tourist development, and sees some day-trips from Guilin, but another village a little further (called Longji like the area) is completely traditional. As we walked through there we were met by some really cute kids who wanted to look at every single photo we had in our camera.

Corn cobs in Longji village.

From Longji we headed back to Guilin to catch a bus back to Hong Kong and spend a couple nights in Macau before flying to Japan. We spent a few hours idling in Guilin before the bus, walking around town and checking out the restaurants with live animals, bamboo rats and turtles, in cages waiting outside. The night-bus to Hong Kong was a new experience also – actually had real bunk beds inside it in three rows…though of course the beds were about 10cm shorter than I am..one of the few times Edel slept better than me on a bus.

Ducks in a Longji rice field.

Our tiny Hong Kong room.

From Beijing we took a train the whole way down to Hong Kong – our 60-day China visa was issued as a dual 30-day, meaning we needed to exit the country in the middle of our stay and come back. Hong Kong of course is technically the same country these days, but you still get your passport stamped and it allows you to start the 2nd part of the visa. We decided to stay for a few days and spent four nights on the Kowloon side in the smallest room we ever stayed – 1.45 meter wide including the bed and as long as the bed plus a small bit where the door opened – maybe 3 square meters excluding the bathroom and not much more including it. Showering had the option to lean over either the toilet or the wash-hand basin. Quite an experience and at 20 euro/night a total bargain for Hong Kong! Hong Kong in general is a funny place, smells of money more than anywhere we’ve been with tall skyscrapers and electronic stores everywhere selling the very latest gadgets. English is spoken everywhere which we’re not quite used to after China and the people are much more mixed – there are many Indian merchants on the street who, bringing the Delhi style of business with them a little too much, ask you if you need a suit or a tailor roughly every ten seconds. Luckily they don’t all work as tailors, and we had some great Indian food a couple evenings. Also found some very good sushi and dim-sum breakfasts. We caught an omnimax movie in a space museum one day, and went over to the main Hong Kong island to go to Victoria peak for the famous view over the skyscraper jungle one night, though they were in the process of closing off the viewpoint because of typhoon risk when we were there… We had seen “Typhoon signal 1 hoisted” signs the first day when we arrived, changing to signal 2 the day after and then 8 the day before we left. Never saw more of it than some rain and a restless wind changing direction all the time, think Taiwan got the worst of it.

Google Earth screenshot of the near-miss..

More fun on Hong Kong – they’re completely paranoid about germs! There’s messages in the subway warning about them, notes in the elevators that the floor buttons will be disinfected every two hours, and disinfection mats at the mall entrances where they ask you to rub your shoes. They also love air-condition here and blast the living daylight out of it where-ever it’s available – meaning that you spend a day in town constantly alternating between 15 degree C and 35 degree C…pretty taxing on the body and makes it easier to get sick, but of course lets blame the germs and be paranoid about them!

Night view over the Hong Kong cityscape from Victoria Peak.

One out of tens of thousands.

Xi’an is the home of the terracotta army. The city served as capital for 11 dynasties from 1000BC to 1000 AD, and became capital of all of China in 221BC when Qin Shi Huang became the first emperor to unite the country, presumably so that he would have enough people to build him the tens of thousands of life-size terracotta figures he’d always wanted. He also started the Great Wall project. His other hobbies included eating lots of mercury in various forms in order to prolong his life, a practice that eventually killed him while he was on an expedition to the east coast looking for the legendary “Island of Immortality”. The terracotta army is very impressive, housed in several airport-sized hangars and while only a fraction of the figures have been excavated so far (they were only discovered in 1974) there seems to be tens of thousands of them, each one different. Qin Shi Huang’s tomb is nearby as well, but apart from finding that it contains an incredible amount of mercury it hasn’t been excavated at all yet… Records has it he had 700,000 people work 36 years to create him a scale model of his whole empire underground in the grave, with rivers of mercury made to flow mechanically – and that many of the workers and hundreds of concubines were locked inside when the grave was sealed.

The Big Goose Pagoda.

Wile mercury has now gone out of fashion in the local cuisine we did find lots of other excellent food in Xi’an. The place we stayed in was close to a hotpot restaurant – less spicy than the Sichuan version and a bit less oily – we cooked muchrooms, corn, tofu, beef and various strange squid-like sea-foods which we’re still not quite sure what they were (flat sheets with a spiky texture on one side, grey or white, and squid-like in consistency and taste). Next-door was another good restaurant that featured “Lettuces with Bacteria” on the picture-menu, here we had great steamed dumpling-rolls and gong-bao chicken, plus half a roasted duck which probably was more work than it was worth to pick meat from, at least calorie-wise. It arrived with neck, head, beak and everything at the table and was pretty spicy..nice and crispy though.

Temple of Heaven in Beijing.

Apart from visiting the terracotta army and the Big Goose Pagoda (and lots of good food) in Xi’an we went to the traditional Muslim quarter in the center of the city – it’s the only part of town where the old buildings has survived..everywhere else Xi’an feels like it was built yesterday with wide boulevards, big squares and shopping malls – like Chengdu and Beijing as well once we got there a day later. Sometimes it’s hard to feel you’re really travelling and seeing any of the actual China..everything’s new and there’s the enormous crowds of domestic tourists and tour groups surrounding all the sights..it starts to feel more like an extended trip to a themepark at times. Beijing was no exception – we visited the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden City but I found it difficult to really make them come alive. The monuments certainly are very impressive, but even knowing the emperor would have stood at the same spot you’re standing now the big tour groups and signs pointing out bathrooms and no-smoking make it all feel very Disneyland, and the ancient buildings look way too new. Actually some of them are. The Temple of Heaven was entirely rebuilt by the last emperor after being destroyed by lightning just 100 years ago – this horrible omen and apparent punishment from the gods was explained as having happened because a sacrilegious caterpillar had climbed too close to the sacred golden roof of the building and this the gods just had to stop…the heads of 32 members of the court had to roll for allowing this to happen!

Socialism and surveillance at Tian'anmen Square.

Speaking of sensible mild-mannered rulers, you don’t see Mao’s face around that much in China any more, but there is one very big portrait hanging right above the entrance to the Forbidden City. And then of course, across the road in Tian’anmen Square you can go to the Chairman Memorial Hall and see the stiff frozen corpse of the old communist mass-murderer, if you’re into that sort of thing – it’s hauled out of the freezer every morning and hauled back in a couple hours later before he starts to thaw… (We got there too late in the day to enter and missed the spectacle..) Mao himself actually wanted to be cremated, but perhaps by this stage people around him had finally noticed that whenever he got his will millions of innocent starved. Like the Memorial the rest of Tian’anmen Square looks pretty unassuming, with some Soviet-style statues celebrating the revolution that gave everyone freedom, and piles of security-cameras, soldiers and civil-clothed policemen keeping an eye on everyone…

Barbarians to the right, civilized people to the left!

Our other item to check of the list in Beijing was the Great Wall – we picked a section between Jinshanling and Simatai which makes a few hours walk along the wall in a section that is slightly quieter than Badaling (where most of the domestic tourists who don’t want to do much walking go). Some parts along the way were still ruined while others had been reconstructed; quite a nice walk though it was crazy hot this day and the wall never fails to pick the most difficult route from hilltop to hilltop. This section is about 110km from Beijing, a distance that probably would have taken 3-4 hours by bus back in India on the terrible roads we saw there, but in modern Beijing with 6-lane highways and hundreds of flyovers it took…3-4 hours due to the typical terrible traffic. Development can be funny.

Next we hopped on a 23 hour train to Hong Kong before the first part of our dual-30 day visa would run out. On the train we had dinner with a Hong-Kong student who shared our compartment, and we tried frog in the restaurant half by mistake. Not sure still if we ordered this dish without knowing, or if our new friend did..there were some very funny moment anyway when he was trying to explain which animal the meat came from – we were sure he was saying “fox” instead of “frog“. “It is like fox, about this size, and green…“! Frog tastes a bit like chicken, though with extremely little meat on the bones and slightly slimy, unless my mind might have added on this extra detail. Will double-check next time, if I ever get the urge to try again.

One of nature's greatest spectacles!

After getting off the 47-hour Lhasa-Chengdu train we got a bus straight down to Emei Shan again, to try to be on the top of the mountain for the July 22 (..yes, I’m a bit behind on the blog) solar eclipse the next morning. Chengdu would have been in the path of a total eclipse as well (though not quite as centered as Emei) but we hadn’t really seen any blue skies there – there’s a constant haze in the air, apparently covering the whole province judging by the last few hours on the train back from Tibet. Then again, the last time we were on Emei a couple weeks back it was completely covered in fog the whole time, though we hoped that at 3100 meters above sea level at least the odds should be slightly better for cloud-free views. I’d been a bit afraid of huge crowds descending on the mountain for the day of the eclipse, but we did manage to get a room booked for the night at least. In the morning we got the bus up the mountain before sunrise – with the eclipse scheduled for 9am – and there wasn’t even that many people there for the bus. The bus was extremely slow though, overtaken by all other buses it seemed, and it was well past 8am when we finally got to the cable car stop at 2500m. It was also completely foggy – just like last time, and the queue for the cable car was enormous. I stayed for a couple minutes to judge the speed of the queue, then set off climbing. Edel stayed behind in the queue, and half an hour later when it got dark could witness a thousand people all say “aaaah” at the same time, then try to take photos using flash straight into the glass window of the darkness outside. I hurried on – if I got a few hundred meters higher in time maybe I’d be above the clouds. I met a few people going downhill which seemed a bit odd – come to think of it there were no signs of the eclipse yet..should have been slowly getting darker from about 8am as the disc of the moon moves in to cover more and more of the sun. Then of course, it was so foggy I couldn’t even tell which side of the sky the sun was.. A couple minutes past 9am when I was a hundred meters shy of the mountain top on a path through some forest it got dark, very suddenly, then light again 5-10 minutes later. One of natures greatest spectacles, a once in a lifetime experience, over. The next eclipse this long will be in June 2150.. Sweaty and exhausted I climbed on a bit slower – at least I hadn’t missed it because I didn’t make the top on time which would probably have been more annoying – the summit was covered in the same thick fog as the rest of the mountain, same as two weeks before. When Edel caught up after the cable car half an hour later we couldn’t even really see the big golden statue and temples at the top through the thick milky soup.

Incense burning on top on Emei Shan.

Determined to make the trip worth it we spent some interesting time at the top with first class people spotting – the crazy western pagan sun-worshippers sitting and chanting in one of the temples (blocking the way for the real Buddhists trying to make the clockwise circumnavigation), the disappointed-looking space enthusiasts who had flown in from all over the world with big expensive gyroscope-stabilized telescopes, and the even more disappointed-looking tour groups all wearing identical “Mount Emei Eclipse 2009″ T-shirts… All westerners – Chinese tourists didn’t actually seem to bother at all with the eclipse which surprised me. We shared a bus down with some of the tour group people – they didn’t say a word the whole way down..felt really sorry for them. At the lowest stop we hopped off the bus to walk some of the paths we had missed when we climbed the mountain two weeks earlier – some very nice bamboo forest on the lower slopes and many more little temples and monasteries hidden in the forest. Next morning we caught a bus for Chengdu and train for Xi’an, will cover this in the next post.

Prayer wheels by Namtso lake at 4700m.

We flew in to Lhasa in Tibet at 3700 meters, and spent the first day taking it easy to get used to the altitude. Lhasa today looks like any other modern booming Chinese city, and in most areas there’s little to remind you that you’re in Tibet at all if you’re not in view of the Potala palace. The exception is Barkhor, a Tibetan quarter where the old buildings have survived, and we checked in to a hostel nearby together with our two Austrian travel buddies for the next 8 days. Even nearly 60 years on the area still feels like occupied territory, soldiers in riot gear with automatic weapons on the street corners, roof-tops, and marching up and down the Tibetan quarter. We walked around the souvenir stalls and markets of Barkhor in the evening before starting proper sightseeing the next day. Outside the Jokhang temple in Barkhor pilgrims from all over Tibet were prostrating and praying, a few even prostrating themselves the whole length of the kora around town. Barkhor was fairly crowded with tourists (we had failed our usual policy of always timing off-season), probably 90-95% Chinese domestic tourists plus a few westerners – similar to what we saw in Leshan and Mount Emei and again same as there many of the Chinese tourists like travelling in big groups all following a person with a flag and megaphone.

In the Jokhang monastery in Lhasa.

We started the second day with visiting the Potala palace, former home of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government as well as monastery, now turned into a kind of museum with about 50 of the 1,000 rooms open to tourists. Visits by foreigners is one thing that’s gotten stricter since our guidebook was printed – you’re allocated a timeslot of 60 minutes to cover the inside together with your guide (entrance to any Lhasa monastery, or simply being anywhere outside Lhasa, requires an official guide since the Olympics), and there’s an airport-style checkin with bag x-rays and no water bottles allowed. The palace was built in the 1100′s, and unlike most of Tibets monuments survived the Cultural Revolution quite well – the Norbulingka summer palace for example was converted into an army store-house. The monuments and sculptures inside, in memory of various lamas or Indian scholars or the present or future Buddha, are amazingly impressive – some covered with several tonnes of leaf gold, but the place feels like an empty shell with big tour groups rushing through and the caretaker monks not allowed to wear their robes etc. I felt a pang of sadness when we passed by the Dalai Lamas small bed-and-study room, recalling his memoirs where he talked of being an undisciplined young student as a child, climbing around on his mentors telling them to recite instead. They’ll never allow him to return. Outside in the gardens surrounding Potala, as a final humiliation, they’re pumping out Chinese music on loudspeakers everywhere and you can rent a duck-shaped paddle-boat to go on the lake.. Many pilgrims still do come and complete a kora around the palace (and at least they don’t have to pay full entrance fee to go inside) – the walk in front of the palace passes by a big “People’s Park” concrete square built just across the road, with a monument celebrating the moment of Tibet’s “liberation”, when hundreds of thousands of Tibetans were liberated from their earthly existence.

Outside Drepung monastery.

After Potala we went to the Jokhang monastery in Barkhor. More atmospheric than Potala, with pilgrims (some looking like they travelled for weeks over the mountains to get there) scooping yak butter into the big butter lamps burning inside the monastery or leaving small bills of money by each statue. It still had the big noisy tour groups as well though. Next day – more monasteries! First the Drepung which sits on top a hill 8km from Lhasa, it was once the worlds largest monastery with 10,000 monks – a few hundred are allowed to study there today. Things have improved in general in Tibet starting in the 80′s with many monasteries now being restored or rebuilt after having been flattened during the Cultural Revolution, and are now allowed to take in a small percentage of the number of monks who used to live there – provided they denounce the Dalai Lama and devote part of their study time to political party propaganda.. From Drepung we walked down the hill to Nechung monastery. Visiting so many monasteries they do risk blending in to each other after a while, but this one does stick out. Spookily decorated with demons and horrors of another world, it was once home to Drakden the state oracle of Tibet.

Monks debating in the Sera monastery.

Next day: Sera monastery – here we saw monks debating in a courtyard in the special traditional style including a handclap to punch in each argument. It was a bit of a tourist spectacle as they were surrounded by people snapping away on their cameras, but of course I was one of them. Here’s a picture

Next day we took a short break from monasteries to go to Namtso lake 230 km from Lhasa – the lake lies at 4700m altitude and the highest pass on the way was 5150m – we did feel the altitude a bit on the way. The lake is absolutely stunning, incredibly blue as it reflects the bright Tibetan skies. We spent an hour or so taking photos and walking by the lake, and huffing and puffing our way up a hill filled with prayer flags nearby for even bigger views. Lunch by the lake was interesting, possibly the worst English we’ve seen on a menu so far, combined with some for us somewhat unusual ingredients..”Sliced Pork’s Guts“, “Cooled Pork’s Forgive“, “Roofs with vine gal sauce“, “Saeef snshewnufs” (maybe something with cashewnuts?). We went for the vegetarian option this time.. On the way back we got stuck in some road-works with a mile-long queue and our driver decided to test the off-road option with just one big river to cross – luckily a government vehicle had already “tested the waters” and gotten itself stuck about 2 meters after leaving the river bank. The water was up to the windshield and three people were stuck sitting on the roof – looked quite dangerous as the river was way too fast to swim even if they knew how to. A crowd had gathered on each side, with ropes and helpful ideas – we were on the opposite bank so could do nothing – our driver and guide sat down with some tea to watch! Eventually the three were rescued in the scoop of a big yellow digger, then they set out to rescue the car. This was done using of a method of lifting the car very high with the digger then dropping it front first into the river several times.. It didn’t look particularly effective, but did provide us with some entertainment for the hour or so we were waiting for the road to open. Once it finally did open the first vehicles to be let through were a hundred-long convoy of military trucks going the opposite direction..

Yak by Namtso lake.

At the top of the Gyantse Kumbum.

Next day we started early to begin making our way towards Everest base-camp over the next couple days, stocking up on snacks in the “Family of supermarket common people” store next-door before setting off in the jeep. We passed another big bright-blue high-altitude lake Yamdrok Tso at 4800m, before climbing through several 5000m passes. In general we were surprised how green it was this high up in Tibet – when we were up around 5000m in Bolivia and Peru on the last trip there was almost nothing but desert, but here there is grass, flowers, yaks and herds of sheep looked after by hardy nomads. We stopped in a town called Gyantse on the way, to look at another monastery and climb their gigantic Gyantse Kumbum stupa. There’s around 100 small chapels inside the stupa as you climb the many levels to the top, where you are level with the Buddha eyes looking out over the landscape. Gyantse also has a hill-top fort with an “Anti-British Imperialist Museum” from when they invaded in 1904 (46 years before China), but it was unfortunately closed. From Gyantse we continued on to Shigatse, making a short stop on the way at a water-powered mill making barley flower for the national dish tsampa. After a night in Shigatse we continued on to Everest Basecamp (EBC) the next day, passing several more high passes. One – Lhakpa La at 5270m – is the highest we’ve been anywhere to date. A later pass had good views towards Mount Everest and several more 8000 meter peaks – long serpentine roads after this point started to remind a little of Spiti valley in India three months ago, though the roads or the drops to the side were never as bad here. Actually all the roads until the turnoff to EBC from the “Nepal Friendship Highway” had surprisingly been paved. But while the roads are good what takes time are all the military checkpoints along the way…

Edel at 5000 meter.

We stopped in a tent camp four kilometers from EBC in the evening to spend the night – our first time sleeping above 5000m. I’d been slightly nervous about this – when we hit 4000m the first time on the last trip, in Potosi in Bolivia, we had a miserable first night..the slight feeling of suffocation just when falling asleep as there’s just not enough air in the air..but slept really great this night – must have been well acclimatized by now. The night was cold outside, and with a fantastic clear star-filled sky. We tried yak butter tea in the evening – very unlike anything else that bears the name tea.. It’s salty and so fatty that it feels like you just put on lip balm after a sip. One cup is quite enough, though it wasn’t as horrid as the guide-books had made it out to be. Gave tsampa a test also – it’s the national dish made from barley flour mixed with anything that’s wet..water, beer, or most often yak butter tea, then rolled into balls and eaten with the hands. Quite nice, a little bit peanutty in taste..

Cloudy view towards Everest from the base camp.

North face of Mount Everest.

Next morning we started before sunrise to walk the final stretch to the main basecamp – while the altitude gain is less than 200m it was quite a bit of work. Once there the view towards Everest clouded over immediately..though we waited around in the cold long enough for the clouds to part as the sun rose higher. Absolutely amazing views from a small hill filled with prayer flags by the basecamp, looking up on the worlds highest mountain with another 3-4 kilometers to go to the top. On the way back we stopped at Rongbuk monastery, also the worlds highest at 4980m, where the monks enjoy living with the view towards the north face of Everest towering in the south. Next: more monasteries. Back on the road returning to Shigatse we made a detour to the Sakya monastery. Originally the town held two monasteries, but the northern one which was founded in 1073 was completely destroyed during the Cultural Revolution..the ruins can still be seen across the river from the roof of the now restored southern monastery. This one is from the 1200′s, Mongolian in style so stick out from the other monasteries we’ve seen.

Monastery yak butter lamp.

In Shigatse in the evening after dinner (dahl baht – found a place with Nepali food!) our two travelling companions Sascha and Remy got stuck in a police raid in an internet cafe! The police took about half of the people in there with them.. Internet everywhere in China is filtered of course, blogspot and facebook etc. blocked always and BBC blocked depending on what news stories they’re running at the moment, and maybe access is extra sensitive in Tibet. The main monastery in Shigatse – the Tashilumpo – was to have a big ceremony with the Panchen Lama in two days..could be the reason security was extra tight? We definitely saw a lot of police and military on the streets anyway. The Panchen Lama line has had it difficult, with the 10th one in prison and tortured for over a decade in the 60-70′s after criticizing the conditions in Tibet, and when some years after he died in -89 the Dalai Lama identified his reincarnation this boy and his family immediately disappeared and he was replaced with a Chinese choice..he still hasn’t been seen and the boy is often called the worlds youngest political prisoner. The Panchen Lama that would be visiting the monastery the day after us was of course the Chinese choice, and he’s not generally seen as genuine by the Tibetan people – however the military will make sure at least some people go to see the ceremony… Apart from the tragic background the Tashilumpo monastery (our 9th in Tibet) was very impressive – one building housing a 26-meter golden statue of Maitreya, and atmospheric with monks tending yak butter lamps and pilgrims donating butter and small notes. It always kills it a little for me when I see the monks counting money though..carrying around big buckets of notes or sit around in the chapels counting them.

Once back in Lhasa we had time for a final stroll in Barkhor and a yak burger before leaving on the 47-hour train the next day. Had gotten pretty fond of yak meat at this stage, having tried it in almost every form; yak steak, yak burger, yak dumplings, yak sizzler and yak enchiladas (try to come up with a food-combination further-apart than Tibet-Mexico!). It’s good meat, tasty and without too much fat (..very much unlike the yak butter tea), but I always have to tell myself that the particular restaurant we’re eating in probably didn’t buy it from one of the open-air butchers we see on the street everywhere, sometimes with someone sitting there waving a stick+cloth to keep the flies away, sometimes not..

Dafo's ears are 7 meter long!

We organized a Tibet trip through the hostel as well, together with a couple Austrian travellers we met, and then had a week to spare while all the permits were getting sorted out. The first couple days of this we spent in Chengdu enjoying the good food and visiting some Zen temples Sichuan cooking is very heavy on chilli and oil, and another potent spice called a Sichuan pepper which numbs the whole mouth if used on it’s own but they usually just put in a lot more red chillies to “take the edge off”. We had hotpot one evening with meat, bamboo, mushrooms and vegetables to cook at the table – picking the least fiery option but the pot was still completely covered in red chillies. So nice it almost made me cry..

Qingyin Ge pavilion in the foothills of Mount Emei.

From Chengdu we headed down to Leshan and Mount Emei for a few days. Leshan is the home of Dafo, a 71 meter stone Buddha carved out from the riverside sandstone cliffs between 713-803AD. There is also a nice monastery overlooking the river, though with plenty more temples, monasteries and pagodas to see along the way when climbing nearby Mount Emei next we were perhaps starting to risk getting templed out (..not a good idea before going to Tibet!). Again we had trouble communicating with the cab drivers, and I was miming paddling a canoe to explain we wanted to go to the boats to go look at the giant Buddha. Emei Shan is a 3100 meter mountain covered in bamboo and forest, and possibly almost as many temples as there are trees – it’s been a Taoist and Buddhist pilgrimage site for two thousand years. We meant to climb it over 2 days, catching the bus in the morning to the starting point at 640m – you can actually take the same bus almost the whole way to the top though, and a cable car the rest of the way, but much of what is nice is the forest, monasteries and views as you climb up. Except it turned out we didn’t really have any views – the mountain was covered in thick white fog, thicker and thicker the higher we got. The first part of the trail, between the two lower bus stops, was pretty crowded and littered with souvenir stalls – most of the tourists Chinese and travelling in large tour groups each following a person with a flag and a megaphone.. Higher up past the Wannian Si monastery it was more peaceful and we had the path practically to ourselves.

Foggy forest on Emei Shan.

Stepping into the fog on Emei Shan.

The path the whole way up the mountain is laid out with stone stairs – seemingly endless particularly when the distant end of each flight disappears into the fog. We met the odd person on this section as well, and many of them started talking away to us in Chinese – it seems half assumed you must know at least a little bit, after all, it is the worlds biggest language! When buying lunch after Wannian Si in a tiny place with four plastic chairs I ordered by pointing at some ingredients and hoping from the best. In the evening when we got to the Xixiang Si monastery at 2070m where we planned to spend the night we could order from a menu though. Other facilities however were more basic..the toilets were very “social” – a long line of squat toilets with partitions only half a meter high, dropping straight to the mountain slope below. Showers were a bit social too – partitioned but not fully – when I looked up after rinsing the soap from my face an old Chinese man was standing there just looking at me..he started talking away in Chinese to me of course. Breakfast the next morning was also eventful – we were raided by a hoard of macaques! I heard two other western tourists screaming – the monkeys were attacking on two fronts through the doors and trying through the broken windows on the other side. One woman working in the kitchen was feeding them, while an older man was chasing them away with a slingshot….no wonder they’re messed up! On the way back to the room our path was blocked by one of them – I walked towards it and tried to frighten it off with a loud step, shout and hands in the air. He called my bluff. Making a fast mock attack running towards me with canine teeth bared..I retreated.

Macaque on breakfast hunt.

We weren’t bothered by them later on the path though, and they didn’t take any food from us, but we did see many signposts along the path warning about them. Other interesting signposts repeated everywhere along the path were “Socialist Viewpoints about Honor and Disgrace“, and a list of “Ten Do’s, Ten Don’ts” that included “Don’t operate illegally“, “Don’t discount illegally” and “Don’t put disorderely“. We didn’t see a single map over the network of trails on the mountain though…you might get horribly lost and wander the forest for days but at least you’ll know the socialist principle that “hard work and struggle is an honor“!

Edel finding a temple in the fog.

Our second day started just as foggy as the first – once we got to 2540m we decided to cheat and take the cable car the last bit of the way to the Golden Summit as there were few views anyway. In the delightful mix of broken English and nationalistic exaggerations that we were getting used to seeing everywhere by now the ticket promised it to be the “most greatest cable car in the world“. At the top the fog was so thick that we couldn’t even see the enormous golden statue of the Puxian Bodhisattva and his six-tusked elephants even while standing right at the very base of it. It was quite atmospheric in a way though, the golden and silver temples at the top revealing only their silhouette until you walked really close. When we eventually took the worlds most greatest cable car down again the fog actually cleared for a moment for the first time in two days, just as we left the summit!

Giant Panda eating bamboo.

Back in Chengdu with one day to spare before Tibet we visited a Giant Panda Breeding Research Base to see some cuddly teddies munching bamboo. There’s only just over 1,000 left in the wild, and this center has had some success in boosting numbers. Observing them at the center, clumsily nearly falling down from trees, and reading about them in the breeding programme being frightened of and attacking their newborn (which is almost as small and helpless as that of the marsupials) you kind of wonder how they survived at all..even before there were people around to cut down half their habitat in a couple decades they would have needed to survive things like tigers.. Fantastic they did make it this far though, as they’re just adorable. Other iconic Chinese animals haven’t been so lucky, the Chinese river dolphin or Baiji, the “drowned river princess” of countless ancient legends, went extinct last year as the waters of the Yangzi river stop being able to support life.

Pandas in the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base north of Chengdu.

A selection of all of these are true at any moment, and all have probably been true at some point. Rules get stricter any time there’s protests or around sensitive dates like anniversary of uprisings or the Dalai Lama’s birthday.. Any hope of independent travel is gone since the 2008 Olympics (..what a great idea that was). What is true at the moment seems to be that the Kathmandu embassy only issue 15 or 21 day special Tibet travel permits, and will indeed rip out any Chinese visa that you already have in your passport without giving you your money back. The Kathmandu travel agents we talked to confirmed this, but told us that you can travel on to China from Tibet on the permit, which seems to be true, and that you can get a new Chinese visa easily once there, which doesn’t seem to be true..searching on the internet it seems you get stranded without visa and need to quickly catch an expensive flight to Hong Kong and back to get one…

The other option would be to travel to China first, then get to Tibet from there – in this case we wouldn’t get the visa we spent 5 days in Delhi applying for destroyed (the visa we made sure not to mention Tibet on the “proposed itinerary” for; if you do you’re unlikely to get one). For going to Tibet from China as a foreigner you need a different Tibet travel permit, and also an “Alien travel permit”, and possibly a “Military permit” – the first one is valid for Lhasa only, the second for Everest Basecamp and the “Friendship Highway” to Nepal, and for visiting monasteries around Lhasa – the last is needed if going far west to Mount Kailash or other special areas – many areas are of course offlimit no matter the permit..and you need to have a fixed detailed itinerary outlined before applying for any of them..listing anywhere unusual means you’re less likely to get the permits. And you cannot apply for them yourself, it has to go through an official travel company that your booking the trip with, and once inside Tibet you need to have your guide with you always (apart from some areas inside Lhasa).

We calculated that even spending 800 euro on the flights from Kathmandu to Chengdu in China and then backtrack to Tibet would probably be better than organizing the trip from the Nepal side, loosing our visa and probably have to make a quick exit from China to Hong Kong to get a new one. Ironically the flight makes one technical stop – in Lhasa! We’re sitting on the tarmac for an hour in the place we’re trying to get to but aren’t allowed..before flying on to Chengdu and spending a week organizing permits to get back to where we just were!

Al least in the old days all you had to do to reach Tibet was several weeks of extremely hard trekking over the mountains…

Temple at the Taumadhi Tol square in Bhaktapur.

Our other hobbies in Kathmandu included enjoying the western comforts; pizza, cappuccino and ice cream, though the city isn’t as nice in general as Pokhara. Big and polluted – the deep valley makes the fumes from the traffic hang around for long, and gasoline and diesel is illegally “cut” with cheaper kerosene by the tanker trucks and pumping stations making exhaust fumes many times worse..it’s a while since the mountains around the valley could be seen with the eye. One day we hopped on the bus to go to the Bhaktapur traditional village in the Kathmandu outskirts. It’s a Unesco world heritage site with all the houses built in traditional pink brick and carved wood decorations. There’s enough temples, courtyards and palaces to spend a nice day strolling around, although being so close to the capital it’s heavily touristed and some children on the street actually greeted us with our full tourist names: “Hello Money“!

The views from the flight to Chengdu a couple days later were fantastic – Tibet from the air and when crossing the border we managed to spot Mount Everest sticking up from the clouds.

The Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu.

Chitwan national park was formerly called Royal Chitwan National Park until the Nepali crown prince massacred most of the royal family (himself included, though he spent 3 days as king while in coma) followed by which the Maoist Communists got the monarchy overthrown a few years later…Nepal can be a volatile country. The park is most famous as a stronghold for the Indian rhino – one of the success stories of conservation with numbers down to just 100 a century ago but now recovered to about 2500. 400 or so rhinos live in this park and it’s a major tourist attraction in Nepal, which has stationed a full army battalion there to protect them from poachers (who are after the horn for useless Chinese traditional medicine..even though it’s the same substance as toe-nail clippings). Some rhinos still get killed each year, but at least not as many as in years when all army resources are busy fighting the Maoists.. Other rhinos haven’t been this “lucky”..the Java one is down to a couple dozen, the Sumatra one a couple hundred, and the West African Black Rhino went extinct a year or two ago.

Edel and guide navigating the tall grass in Chitwan National Park.

We started the day with a short trip on the river in a dugout canoe, and saw yet another critically endangered species – the Gharial, a very strange fish-eating 5-6 meter crocodile with a long narrow snout. This one’s down to a few hundred pairs, and is dying out because of some of the same reasons that makes it a terribly bad idea to take a swim in the holy Ganges river.. After we got out of the boat the guide gave us a briefing before heading in on foot into rhino-country. He sounded a bit like a broken record, starting off with “Dear guests, I hope you will enjoy this jungle walk..” even though it was just me and Edel there. Next he gave us a list of tips for how not to get killed by a charging rhino – in descending order of preference based on tree availability: “1. Climb a tree, 2. Hide behind a tree, 3. Run fast in a zigzag pattern and hope for the best“. Usually these things are very exaggerated but the guidebook does point out this park can actually be a little dangerous, and that it can be difficult to find a guide with more than a couple years experience as “…anyone with a bit of sense gets out as soon as he can“. Our guide had been doing it for 20 years! He continued on with explaining that it was also important not to get killed by a tiger, wild elephant, or a sloth bear – though more difficult as these can all either climb trees or topple them over.

Rhino-less in the rain.

We didn’t see either of these animals on the walk, but did see droppings, diggings, paths and footprints from all of them. The most exciting moment was when a group of deer came crashing towards us in panic clearly frightened by something! We didn’t see what exactly, but it was in the middle of the day so nap-time for any big kittens. Other animals we saw were barking deer, hog deer, chital, macaques, wild boar, adjutant stork and monitor lizards. The forest was a real “jungle”, not like other lowland rainforests we’ve been to elsewhere where the canopy is so closed hardly any light filters down below and ground-level is pretty open – here it was near impenetrable on the ground with lianas and other vegetation. But it was actually even harder to walk on the grasslands – the grass here grows 4-5 meter high this time of the year so it’s not the best time to see animals (the rhino could be two meter away and you wouldn’t see it!). We were walking on a road through the grasslands, but it was so overgrown that we got our arms cut open making our way through the grass. Harder work than climbing mountains in Annapurna even though it was all flat – it was hot and extremely humid with thunder hanging in the air (this turned out to be the last day before the monsoon finally kicked in).

Rhinos in Chitwan national park.

We’ve been very lucky with the timing so far elsewhere, getting the good weather without the crowds in Andaman islands and most other places in India plus in Annapurna in Nepal – but now it seems the luck had finally run out. The pre-monsoon heat made the jungle-trek exhausting and it wasn’t the good time of the year to see animals, and the next day when we set off in the morning on elephant back to see the rhinos it was pouring rain. We sat in the gentle rolling high up on the back of the elephant in the rain for three hours, searching through a section of forest where they usually hang out, without seeing a single one. It’s virtually guaranteed to see one – everyone who goes to Chitwan does – and the elephant driver seemed as surprised as we and our cameras were wet.. We went back in again in the afternoon when the rains held up a little, and this time we saw seven rhinos in just one hour. Though one of the biggest rhino species they looked almost small from high up on the elephant, and mostly they took very little notice of us. I imagine it’s probably a very different experience to see one while you’re on foot.. We saw two by a water hole, four in an open grass area and another in a different water hole – all places we’d been a couple hours earlier without seeing a single one. Where do rhinos hide when it rains? Maybe they can climb trees after all… This time we had ended up with a big crowd of Indian tourists split on four elephants – we shared the tiny platform on top of our elephant with three of them. They all took several times more photos of us than they did of any of the rhinos..felt almost like being back in India again!

In the evening we went to spend the night in a watch tower in the jungle. We didn’t see many animals, and managed to miss the rhinos again as they were seen by the tower by two other tourists just while we were gone for a dusk walk, but the sounds of the jungle during the night were fantastic. The calls of frogs, crickets and many different birds. We fell asleep on the wooden platform outside of the room while watching hundreds of fireflies move between the trees close to the tower.

Elephant babies playing by Sauraha near Chitwan.

Big Hugs from us to Super Mammy June, Daddy Aidan and Big Bro James.

Daniel Matthew

Edel rowing on the Phewa Tal lake by Pokhara.

Pokhara in Nepal is described as a great place to relax after a long hard trek or any time spent in India, and it is. At 800 meters altitude it’s pleasantly cool, and it’s been on the backpacker trail so long there’s apple pie on every menu. It wasn’t too difficult to get here from Varanasi, one day in a jeep to leave India and one day on the bus to climb the Nepali hills. We’d bought a combined ticket for the whole way in Varanasi, which would include one nights accommodation in the little border town of Sunauli, but considering our success with tourist buses so far we only really expected the first leg of the journey to actually materialize – if we’d make it as far as the border we’d be happy. When they told us in the morning that the bus for the first day had been swapped for a jeep because there were only 14 tourists traveling that day Edel was placing all bets on them planning to cram all 14 of us into a standard 4-seater, but when the jeep arrived things looked slightly better. It could probably fit 11 people comfortably, 14 rather uncomfortably or about 60 Indian-style (14 people I’m sure we’ve seen emerge from a single tuktuk). 9 bouncy hard-seat hours later we were in Sunauli (the hostel was pretty dirty even by Indian standards but we did get our own room+bathroom), and in the morning after sorting our the border formalities we were landed on a public bus to Pokhara. I made a good friend on the bus, and older woman who was sitting next to us (an extra row of seats filled the aisle) kept talking to me even though we didn’t share a common language. We still managed to crack some jokes using mostly sign language, about our shared hope that the race-car driver wouldn’t send us crashing into the ravine, and about the drunk sleeping on my shoulder..

Like clockwork at the start of our third month traveling I got my third round of fever and dysentery. Since arriving in Pokhara a few days earlier I had put myself on a healthy diet of mostly chocolate brownies and ice-cream, so I suspect it must have been a good-bye present from India.. Once cured we lazed around a number of days in Pokhara, before organizing a 10-day trek in the Annapurna mountain range together with a guide and a porter found through the guesthouse where we were staying. One of the days before setting off the Maoists were demonstrating in Pokhara – they were marching on the street and had ordered every business in town closed. One restaurant that still kept open in secret would only let us in through the door after first looking both ways outside, then opening the door only slightly so we could just barely squeeze in. We asked different people later about the demonstration, but most of them seemed a little edgy talking about it.

Waterfall near Thikhedhunga.

The Annapurna Sanctuary trek starts at about 1050 meter and climbs up to the Annapurna Base Camp at 4150 meter – the base camp is located in a hidden valley surrounded on all sides by mountains 6000-8000 meter high. Two of the peaks visible from the basecamp are over 8000 meter; Annapurna I at 8091m and Dhaulagiri at 8167m, ranked the 10th and 7th highest in the world. Annapurna I was actually the first of the worlds 14 eight-thousanders to be climbed, in 1950, and is still the most deadly claiming more than every third climber. Basecamp is of course perfectly safe to get to though, and the trek is a “tea-house trek”, meaning there are villages or little guest-houses along the way where you can stay without having to camp out. We’re timing this perfect for the season to be over – June here brings the monsoon with rains and leeches, but also empty trails and guest-houses and lots of wild-flowers. The first day was easy, sleeping in the village Thikhedhunga at 1500m after a 4 hour trek passing terraced rice fields and cute little villages on the way. On the second day we climbed another 1300 meter to Ghorephani at 2800m, passing more picturesque villages, Ulleri, Banthati, Nagathati, on the way. The first half was pretty hard, stone stair-cases the whole way up the mountain between the villages and no flat sections – higher up the landscape changed to forest, it got cooler and the climbing was less steep. The forest was gorgeous with the trees covered in moss,  ferns and other epiphytes, and orchids in bloom on many of the branches.

Orchids in the Annapurna forest.

Wildflowers by Poon Hill.

Day three we started climbing at 4:30am, to get to the 3200 meter Poon Hill for sunrise (something that’s only 3200 meter high doesn’t get to be called a mountain in Nepal). There were about 12 other people hiking up the same morning, apparently it can be about 300 in high season..wouldn’t have wanted to climb the small viewing tower on top of the hill with a crowd that size. The sunrise was stunning, the rays of light slowly creeping over the 6993 meter Machhapuchhre (fish-tail) mountain in the distance. It sometimes gets clouded over in this season, so we felt very lucky to have perfect views. Down again to Ghorephani for breakfast, then up once more to 3200m in the other direction, then down to about 2500m before finally climbing up to the village Tadapani at 2700m. After the 2nd day we had felt great about the progress, having climbed 1.3 km up to 2800m there would only be another 1.3km climbing left to basecamp! But that’s not how trekking works around here – as the guides say “a little bit up, a little bit down” – during day 3 we had climbed over a kilometer but still ended up lower than when we started..and it wouldn’t be the last day like this as there were several deep river valleys to cross before we would get close to the hidden Annapurna Sanctuary valley and the basecamp. There were plenty of things along the way to make sure we enjoyed every step though – the walk across the hills to Tadapani had passed through some beautiful misty rhododendron forests.

Sunrise over Machhapuchhre (fishtail mountain) from Poon Hill.

View towards Dhaulagiri from Poon Hill.

Day four of the trek was Edel’s birthday – we celebrated with chocolate and by taking the afternoon off after climbing half a kilometer We crossed a river at 1800m and slept in Chhomrong at 2200m. As we are lower down again the landscape had shifted back into rice fields and villages – forests usually only remain above 2500m. The 5th day we crossed another river below 2000m, passed the Sinuwa and Bamboo teahouses before climbing up to Dovan at 2600m. Here we were starting to get a bit further from civilization – no more villages, just tea houses set up for the trekkers, and everything has to be carried on the back of a porter for days to get here. We saw porters carrying big metal kegs of gas on their back, or one skillfully navigating the narrow paths with a pack of 4 meter long planks. Food and everything else naturally cost more up here – a hot shower is extra and cost more than the accommodation (if the water is gas-heated, some places have solar-heated). A room is usually just 1-3 euro/night though, as long as you have all your meals in the same teahouse.

Rays of early morning light over the Chhomrong rice fields.

Edel crossing a bridge.

Day six we aimed to climb the final stretch up to the base camp, a 1.6km climb. We started at 6:30am with the first part of the walk passing through beautiful forests with views to the Annapurna and Machhapurchhe mountains in the distance as the valley closed in around us. On both sides were high steep forested mountain sides with waterfalls crashing down hundreds of meters. We had to cross a small glacier, and many tiny rickety looking bridges across little streams along the way. Past 3500m the landscape opened up completely, no more trees but plenty of wildflowers everywhere. We had lunch in the Machhapurchhe basecamp at 3700m before walking the final stretch to Annapurna basecamp – the landscape up here was even more barren..actually reminded a little of Connemara if it wasn’t for the 8000m mountains that jumped out of the clouds every now and then.

The Annapurna Sanctuary valley.

Wildflowers near basecamp.

We reached Annapurna basecamp after 8 hours of trekking – the last stretch felt quite long as we were tired and could see the camp in the distance but it never seemed to get closer. The final stretch crossed another glacier, quite flat and with lots of rocks and dirt on top so it wasn’t slippy, but we could hear the water gushing some meter below our feet and there were a few holes to watch out for. The basecamp sits right in the center of a circle of 6-8000 meter mountains, and the way we came in is the only route that doesn’t require climbing gear. The views are fantastic all around, mountains moving in and out of the clouds in the afternoon and evening and in the morning crystal clear views all around. We were up at sunrise to watch the views, after a night that wasn’t as cold as we’d feared at 4130m. Shower came in the form of a bucket of hot water for 2 dollars extra.

Cloudy evening view over the Annapurna range from basecamp.

Edel, Shiva and Deepak crossing a glacier.

Day seven we started the long walk down, reached the Bamboo teahouse after 8 hours just when the afternoon rains were starting. One of my knees were really killing me on the way down – down is much harder than up and takes a good toll on knees and feet. I adopted a walking stick for the first time, have always thought these are just an extra thing that you have to carry but this time I used one for support so much I got a blister in my hand. Edel was suffering a bit also, and we used our full supply of compeed to patch up her foot. When we were slow in the downhill sections our fantastic guide and porter, Shiva and Deepak, used the time to pick us fitsfulls of wild strawberries . At the Bamboo teahouse we got a small taste of what high-season must be like..in most of the places we stayed we were either alone or in nice company with just a couple other trekkers, but here a party of 12 arrived – mid-twenties teenagers who spent the whole night on drinking games, truth-or-dare, roaring, puking and throwing bottles around. Why bother going trekking if that’s all you want to do..instead of just going to sit on a nice beach in thailand where they could be with people who share their “interests”…? They’d arrived late in the afternoon, soaked in the rains that start every day around 2-4pm, probably after a late start due to hangovers from the day before…you create your own misery. I slept through most of it but they kept Edel and a nice Australian couple in the room next to us awake much of the night. We made sure not to be too quiet when we started before dawn the next day

View along the trek from Bamboo to Sinuwa.

Forest in the Annapurna Sanctuary.

From Bamboo we continued backtracking past Sinuwa and Chhomrong then turned off to a village called Jhinu near some hotsprings..good for trekking-tired legs. The long stone stairs climbing up to Chhomrong after crossing the river 500m below were pretty hard as it was nearing midday and quite hot. Oddly enough our legs were in better shape than the day before though – good to be climbing a bit again after all the downhill the day before. I went down to the hotsprings with Shiva in the afternoon after the rains – the leeches were out in force though and we had to stop and check our feet every two minutes but one or two still managed to get through. In the evening Edel and I tried the local trekker specialty in the restaurant; Mars-roll – deepfried in pastry like a spring-roll but with a Mars-bar inside! You only get away with this when you’re climbing a kilometer a day.. Eaten with custard. Otherwise we lived on more traditional Nepalese food during the trek, dahl-bhat which is a rice and dahl (lentils) with one or two small curried vegetable-dishes on the side. It’s also an all-you-can-eat so they come and top you up with whatever you need, great as you build up a good appetite walking and climbing all day. Shiva and Deepak had the dish twice a day and swear by “dahl bhat – 24 hour power!”, but we found it a bit too much for lunch if we’re continuing to trek in the afternoon. Another nice dish we found was Tibetan Gurung bread with honey for breakfast. And rösti with yak cheese in a nice Swiss-alps-meets-the-Himalaya combination.

Broken bridge near Landruk.

Plowing rice fields near Landruk.

Day 9 was eventful, we hiked down to cross a river at 1300m before climbing up towards the village Landruk – there were even more leeches here than on the way to the hotsprings. I counted 5 on my boot at the same time, all slowly making their way up. A few got through undetected, I found one mark uncomfortably high up on my leg when showering later in the evening.. And speaking of shower I got showered in mud when we passed a terraced rice field where some farmers we plowing with oxes – the beasts made a burst through the flooded field just as I passed on the field below and I got completely soaked. Pretty sure the farmers did it on purpose..anyhow they found it incredibly funny. When Edel passed by they threw mud into the water to try and splash her also..but they didn’t do anything when Shiva/Deepak passed. You don’t mess with the mountain man! Everyone else in the villages we passed before Landruk (where I could clean up a bit) also found it incredibly funny. I took some photos of the farmers when they were plowing after, figured they owed me that much..

Edel with some more friendly locals.

On the way up to Deorali at 2200m the landscape again changed to forest, and we got a proper soaking in the afternoon in the pre-monsoon rains. The monsoon is late this year, and we were probably lucky to have escaped the rains so far – only one morning left of the trek where we’d need to put the wet boots on. We trekked on to Pothana in the rain where we spent the last night and had our last mountain dahl bhat. Played cards with Shiva and Deepak in the evening celebrating our last day of the trek. We spent another three days back in Pokhara, enjoying the comforts of civilization again. It would have been too easy to stay longer at our cozy guesthouse, but as the resident western stoner (who otherwise seemed a nice person) explained us the beneficial medicinal properties of drinking cow urine as an ayurvedic treatment..we felt it was probably time to move and booked a bus to Chitwan national park.

[if anyone comes across this page googling for Nepal trekking here is the email address and website of a great guide in the Annapurna/Pokhara region: Shiva; sbishwokarma@gmail.com / http://www.shivatrekkingnepal.com/]

Before leaving Khajuraho for Varanasi I had to pop by the ATM, and I was stalked the whole way from the hotel there and back by one very persistent shop owner. We had seen him earlier in the day near the hotel, complaining to us that no-one wanted to look in his shop. I like shopping as much as the next guy at the best of times (it’s right between “being stuck in traffic” and “vomiting” on my list of favourite pastimes) but in India you get an offer for “you want see my shop” for every three steps that you take. And my interest in small tacky souvenirs has been on a downhill trend for years. Anyhow, he followed me the whole way there and back, at first trying to talk me into his shop and by the end he’d practically converted into being my private therapist, trying to cure me of my “denial” of wanting to buy hash from him. “I have 18 year experience in this, I can see on people what makes them happy, but I think you are hiding yourself…”. Usually it’s great to be everywhere in the off-season, though the touts-per-tourist ratio does of course go up when there are less tourists..

We left Khajuraho the next day, by jeep taxi to Satna to catch the Varanasi train. A nice Indian university professor we shared the train carriage with bought us chai in clay cups and gave us sandwiches. I was talking about what a great idea it was to use clay cups instead of the single-use plastic or paper cups that you see everyone throw out the windows on the trains here..until I realized that the clay cups are also only used once and people throw them out the window.

The Babua Pandey ghat in Varanasi.

Varanasi is the holiest of cities, one of the oldest living cities in the world and it’s been part of the Hindu religious tradition for 2500 years. It’s where people come to die, where people come to burn the dead – or if not burning them to tip them into the river. The holy Ganges floats here, and people come from all over to purify their body and soul by swimming in it…though the guidebook does warn that it’s neither the effluent, chemicals of body parts that will really get you if you do the same – it’s the heavy metals dumped by the factories upstream! Of course the first person you meet in the holiest of cities is going to be a bit of a douche – an aggressive tuktuk driver followed us the whole way from the train through all of the station and out on the streets – pausing a bit ahead of us and looking back waiting for another ambush every time we stopped or waited to watch a holy man get off the train and greet his followers. I believe it’s always better for you to find the taxi than the other way around (in Soviet Russia taxi takes you). We flagged a different tuktuk driver out on the street, but the stalker tout still tried to talk to him before we could set off – Edel cut that short. We had a hostel recommended by the guidebook picked out, “Vishnu Rest House”, though 4 copy-cats like “Vishnu Guest House”, “The Real Vishnu Rest House” etc. have popped up and pay commission for tuktuk drivers to bring people to them instead. This means you can’t actually tell the driver where you’re going..which complicates things. Edel had phoned the place in advance and they had recommended somewhere nearby we could ask to be dropped instead, without mentioning the name of the guesthouse and ending up at one of the fake ones… We did finally manage to get to the correct place, navigating the narrow labyrinthine alleys of Varanasi in the dark (power is cut more often than not here), walking the final stretch. The place turned out to be a bit rundown and dirty however, probably living off old glory, though the location was good overlooking the riverside ghats that Varanasi is famous for.

Narrow Varanasi alley.

We slept away most of the first day – it was too hot to do anything, though pretty miserable in the room also as the power to fire up the odd water/pump/hay/fan cooling contraption was missing for most of the day. I had a quick shower every 20 minutes just to keep from overheating. The second day we took a boat trip up and down the Ganges in the morning to see all the ghats – places along the river where people swim, pray, perform rituals, wash clothes, wash themselves, burn bodies. The boat driver, Lalo, was very nice and told us he was from the fisherman caste. There was no tourist-boat business back when the horrible discriminating caste system was designed, so the fisher-caste has now been expanded to include tourists. Apart from watching normal life go by (..and end) on the ghats we saw some of the reasons not to swim in the river float by; a goat’s head, another dead goat in a sack, a stray dog by the riverside eating a bloated cadaver of something (..hopefully not human). We went back once more on the river in the evening; Lalo took us to watch a puja, religious ceremony, performed on one of the ghats. Little children were running and jumping between all the boats, selling burning flower offerings for 10 rupees to give to the river.

Boat on the Ganges.

We stayed 4 nights in Varanasi, but only had one more adventure worth mention – the post office (I wanted to post backups of my photos and other things home). We had tried to find a small post office close to where we stayed first, but a shop owner had sent us in the wrong direction and refused to tell us the real location since we didn’t want to look in his shop.. We took a bicycle rickshaw to the GPO instead – I always feel a bit bad taking these as it’s usually a really old man sweating away at the pedals, but at the same time they’re some of the poorest people and do need the business. They’re also in general more honest than the motor tuktuk drivers and don’t quote five times the price or change the fare along the way. Out of guilt we usually pay double anyway though..the old man had to hop off and push the bike for some of the uphill parts in town. To post a parsel in the GPO you first need to go to a stall somewhere on the street outside of the post office, where someone will wrap it in an old cereal or similar cardboard box, then sew a cloth around it before finally sealing all the stitches with hot wax. A gentleman inside the office had guided us out on the street to find the right place and to find all the correct counters inside – turned out he wasn’t even actually working at the post office but was just helping us out (well, he did have a stall at a market nearby that he wanted us to look at, but we gave him a tip instead and he was happy). On the way back to the hostel with the bicycle rickshaw we saw a shop owner kicking a homeless cripple in the back on the road..looked like the poor man might had been trying to steal a packet of nuts.

Langur monkey by Umaria station

After all the fun with the bus to get to Agra (..see previous post) the train-journey onwards seemed almost dull it was so organized – our names were on the printed passenger list outside the carriage when it pulled in to the station, the train left on time and then arrived just the same in the tiny town Umaria 13 hours later. From here we hopped on a bus to even smaller Tala 30km away, closer to the Bandhavgarh national park that we wanted to get to. This bus got crazy packed along the way with people hanging out both doors and windows – Edel was sitting only some meter away from me but I couldn’t actually see her through the mass of people. I gave up my seat to an old man with a cane that was led to the bus, though spectacularly someone else tried to nick the seat in the seconds it took the old man to get there!

Male tiger in Bandhavgarh

In Tala we checked in to a pretty basic guesthouse (squat toilet and bucket shower), and slept past midday in the 40-45 degree heat. The room had an interesting cooling system – a big box with a large fan, water and a pump inside, and lots of hay on the sides – as the water is pumped around and evaporates it cools the air (guess all the hay is there to make a bigger surface area to evaporate from). Pretty efficient, though doesn’t quite cool as much as real air-condition, and makes quite a lot of noise. The electricity to actually fire it up came and went very often during the day also. In the afternoon when it was cool enough to function again we went with a jeep into the national park – and saw our first wild tiger! This is becoming an increasingly difficult thing to do – there’s only about 1,000 tigers left in the whole country, down 99% from a century ago (..one million people for each tiger) – they are completely gone from many national parks set up specifically as tiger reserves, and might realistically be extinct in the wild within a decade. In India, like most countries today, natures survives just as tiny pockets, isolated islands in a sea of developed land and people – most of the reserves are only big enough to support a couple dozen of the larger predators, sentencing the species to a few humiliating decades of inbreeding before it is finally gone. In Bandhavgarh the chances are still pretty good to see a tiger though, with about 50 animals it has the highest tiger density of any of the parks, and this is the hottest time of the year so they come out from the forest to the water holes, which is where we saw our first one. And so did plenty others – there were dozens of jeeps there with Indian and foreign tourists – some serious ones with meter-long camera lenses worth more than the jeep they were sitting in. Once the tiger showed up they set up a rotation with the jeeps so that everyone got a chance to see it. We saw plenty other animals as well; spotted deer, sambar deer, wild pigs, langurs, peacocks, eagles and king fishers but the jeep driver mostly just dashed quickly from tiger-spot to tiger-spot. We had a different driver and a more relaxing experience when we went back to the park at 5am the next morning – and this time we had a really good tiger encounter. A big male came walking out from the forest towards the dirt-road we were driving on – the animal ignored us completely and walked only some 20 meters from the jeep and the road for about 5 minutes. I got some very nice photos, but for some of the time I just had to put down the camera and watch – felt real emotional to have this big incredibly beautiful animal walking so close. (I guess I was still happy that it hadn’t appeared half an hour earlier when we had to leave the jeep to fix a flat tire though…)

Lianas in the jungle.

On the same trip we saw a second tiger, a female, sleeping in a cave, and we went back again twice more before leaving, both times seeing a different tiger couple. We had managed to arrive in Tala with almost no money, thinking it would have an ATM and be a bigger place than tiny Umaria, which was wrong by an order of magnitude. A nice english photographer named John who’d been traveling India for a year and had shared the jeep safaris with us gave me a lift on the back of his Enfield though, which saved us from having to wash dishes in Tala for a decade. From Tala we later got a jeep taxi to Khajuraho, which is famous for it’s fantastic temple ruins, and booked a bit nicer hotel to “splash out” after roughing it by the park. I also managed to poison myself with a pizza in the “Italian” restaurant across the road – it is never a good idea to order western dishes, anywhere, ever, they usually arrive looking like they’re been made by someone who’s only once seen a picture of the real thing. I shall stick more religiously to the rice and dahl or thalis from now on..

The temple ruins in Khajuraho are probably the finest we’ve seen anywhere, outside of Angkor. They date from between 1000-1200 AD, well preserved and restored, and are most famous for some spectacular erotic carvings. Some of the positions featured are actually so complicated they need two helper maidens just to support the couple! The British, of course, were extremely upset when they found them.. When discovering the ruins in the jungle in the 1800′s the explorer T.S.Burt complained in his report that “..the sculptor had at times allowed his subject to grow a little warmer than there was any absolute necessity for his doing“! I imagine a carving featuring a man with a horse was among the ones found most upsetting… Apart from the most explicit carvings the decorations do remind quite a bit of Angkor, with beautiful Apsara dancers in stone everywhere. How did the subcontinent go from this to a place where holding hands or showing any kind of affection in public is frowned upon and taboo and you have to wear a murdering amount of clothes in the 45 degree heat? The British, certainly.

Khajuraho carvings.

In the evening of the first day we went to see a “sound and light show” by the temples that told the story of their creation, both the mythological and the historical version, though the latter only slightly less made up as there were no slaves and everyone was delighted to work for the king on his glorious project. It was pretty good though, with some Indian classical music thrown in, and not quite as tacky as it sounds. Next day we went to see the western group of temples close to town, and in the evening got a tuktuk to the further away eastern and southern groups. Entrance to the far away ones is unfortunately free, which means many more people by the ruins hassling you to buy things or starting to explain the temples and show you around as your guide without you really having a choice…had run out of 10 rupee bills before we got to the last of the temples.. The tuktuk driver, Trilok, was very nice and invited us to his house afterwards for homemade crisps and chai with milk straight from the cow.

From Khajuraho we set course for the holy city of Varanasi before leaving India for Nepal.

The Paharganj street in Delhi.

After flying back from Port Blair on the Andaman islands we spent a few days in Delhi sorting out our Chinese visas, then set our course east to try and see wild tigers in the Bandhavgarh national park. On the way we wanted to tick Agra and the Taj Mahal off the list (you can’t really go to India without seeing it)..though preferably without having to spend too much time there as it’s tout/hassle/scam heaven – precisely because all tourists go there and no-one stays very long meaning they’re all “fresh”. We booked a nice aircon tourist bus to Agra that would apparently include the tour, so that we could catch the 13-hour train out to Umaria 4pm the same day and get out of Agra. We had wanted to get the train the whole way but the guy in the hotel where we bought the bus tickets said it was sold out for the first stretch. He seemed ok, and gave us good instructions for how to buy the onward train tickets at the railway station; “go to foreign tourist office on 2nd floor, and don’t trust anyone anywhere else who says they can help you“.. The Agra bus was meant to leave at 6am so we showed up at 5:45 as instructed – half an hour later a kid with almost no english shows up to lead us to the bus – he takes us on a long walk through narrow streets dodging stray dogs and cow dung on the way, then leaves us standing by a bigger road then disappears. When he comes back some 15 min later he and another Delhi business-man in his teens stick us on a bus without a single other person where we sit and wait roughly 45 minutes..before they come back and tell us “this bus cancel“. We’re moved to a different bus – neither of the two actually has aircon, unless if you count that the new one is missing the back part of the bus due to a crash. This bus is full and the driver, an angry man in his 40′s, wants us to share a single seat at the very back – the worst bumpiest place to sit. After I explain about six times that what he’s pointing at is not two seats he eventually shuffles people around a little but a short while into the trip we’re back to seven people on five seats. That would usually have been ok if we’d bought public bus tickets but here we’d probably paid for about 10 seats, not the 1.5.. I’ve actually fallen for the good old sell-luxury-ticket-dump-on-public-bus trick once before, in Thailand with my brother Mikael a few years back. That time I think I’d even paid twice the amount of the other scammed tourists onboard!

Bus to Agra.

There were no other tourists on this bus though. The crash-injured bus eventually limped out of Delhi around 8am and when nearing 2pm we still weren’t there. The trip was supposed to take 4-5 hours which with the 6am start would have given us time to see Taj Mahal before the 4pm train..now we were sitting in the bus and calculating the odds if we tried to pull off taking a tuktuk to the train station to store the bags in a locker, another tuktuk to Taj, running in to take two photos, catching another tuktuk back to the train station all within 2 hours…we were starting to give up. Then this guy hops on the bus and walks down to us saying he’s organizing the tour that we’d paid for and puzzled we explain our dilemma. He insists that “please, you are my guests now” and he has a tuktuk and driver waiting that can take us to Taj then drop us at the station in time for the train. He even has a hostel where we can store the backpacks, and everything is free of charge. This all seems a bit too good to be true..no-one else is getting off the bus here.. Edel asks which tour company he’s with and he says “same one” pointing at the bus that’s taking off “the..um..” – mumbles something that sounds like “Asia tours” – the one we booked with was Unlimited tours. What to do? We went along with it for the moment for lack of options, expecting alarm bells to ring at some point. The driver takes us to the hostel to drop the bags (we take down the name in case) then as close as he can to Taj Mahal (there’s a 500 meter exclusion zone as the thing is crumbling away in the smog). At the Taj Mahal there’s bag inspection and a completely random list of forbidden items such as: writing paper, playing cards, books (except guidebooks), mp3-player and other electronics (except camera). We leave one of our bags with all the forbidden items in the free (except backsheesh) locker outside. To get close to the monument itself you need to take your shoes off, and walking barefoot on the polished stone surfaces in the 40 something degree heat is the cruelest torture India has thrown our way yet. They did have a plastic mat put in for some parts of the walks, however for the mat they had chosen the colour black…

..hot..hot..hot..

The monument itself is I guess pretty nice, though we cover it as quickly as someone walking on burning coal. Outside the driver is waiting – he’d mentioned on the way that there was something else he was going to show us and now he explains – there’s a couple shops he needs to take us to or otherwise the bus company won’t let him work with them. He seems pretty apologetic about this and we don’t need to buy anything, just please spend 5-6 minutes looking in each one. For the third final shop he explains he gets 50 rupees just for bringing us there so please look for 10 minutes. We joke at how funny it is that he told us, and feel more relaxed now that we know why someone bothered to pick us off the bus and drive us around for the whole afternoon. After buying some Darjeeling tea in the shop the driver takes us to pick up our backpacks that are still safe and to have a quick lunch before dropping us at the correct train station (there are six of them in Agra). We give him a good tip for being honest with us about what’s going on, though I would have absolutely loved to have the complete details of this setup… Do these guys have any connection at all to the ones we booked with, or do they just pick tourists randomly off the buses? Does the tuktuk driver get paid, or does he actually have to pay the first guy to get the tourists and then make money only from the shop commissions? We wouldn’t have managed to see the Taj Mahal without them anyway! (..though I’m slightly less happy with the miserable wreck of a bus that we’d royally overpaid for to begin with).

Final note on the Taj Mahal; Said to be the ultimate monument to romantic love, built by Shah Jahan for his favourite wife in 1631 (..who’d just died giving birth to her 14th child) – the Shah is said to have lived out his final years inconsolable and ‘gazing wistfully at the Taj Mahal’. The Rough Guide, which I love for it’s detailed history sections, tells that in reality he partied on quite energetically with the rest of his harem and when he finally died at 74 it was from a massive overdose of opium and aphrodisiacs!

Nothing is ever what is seems in India…

Dive boat on Havelock.

We’re getting to the Andaman’s out of season as usual.. The month of May here brings with it the monsoon and the possibility of violent cyclones…but it’s also the best season to have a chance to see manta rays when scuba-diving which I think should be an easy trade-off for anyone in their right mind!

The Andaman Islands lie far from India, closer to Burma or Sumatra if close to anything at all. They also lie a bit out of time..still on the Indian time-zone but much further east so the sun rises at 4am and sets at 5pm. We spent one night first in Port Blair – despite having been used as a penal colony for 150 years it’s not too bad a place, nice waterfront one end of town, and it’s definitely the cleanest town we’ve been in in India.

North Sentinel - last place on earth.

Andaman islands is also famous for it’s indigenous population, closer to African bushmen than Asians or Aryans it’s still a bit of a mystery how they got here. Marco Polo, who’s most redeeming quality is that he brought us ice-cream, described them as “All the men of Angamanian have heads like dogs, they are the most cruel generation and eat everybody they catch“. Once the islands were colonized this “cruel generation” (who weren’t cannibals and had been getting on just fine) finally got some “help” and in exchange for the islands natural resources they were generously given the usual western blessings of disease, deforestation, alcohol-addiction and missionaries. Today they make up just 0.5% of the island’s population, some tribes went extinct altogether and some like the Jarawa still have their reserve sliced in half by a road the Indian Supreme Court ordered closed in 2002. Just one tribe – the Sentinelese – still manage to live in total isolation on the small North Sentinel island to the west – any attempts to visit are met by a hail of arrows. There’s one really iconic photo taken after the 2004 tsunami when the Indian government sent a helicopter to check up on them from the air – they came back with a photo of a single man on the beach aiming his bow and arrow at the helicopter.. “we’ll ride out any storm, just leave us alone”. The plane from Chennai that we came in with actually flies close enough to North Sentinel that it is possible to spot it in the distance, nice to just look down and know that below the canopy there lives perhaps the worlds most isolated people still undisturbed.

Havelock beach.

North Sentinel is of course closed to tourists, and so are quite a lot of the other islands – the Andaman permit we got on arrival lists the permitted ones. In Port Blair we got a rickshaw to the forestry department to find out about a special second permit we would have needed if we wanted to go to Interview island to the north, but it looked a bit complicated (they were surprised we wanted to go there when we didn’t have our own yacht..) – we would also probably have needed to take the infamous Andaman Trunk Road through the Jarawa reserve so we decided to head straight for Havelock island instead to dive. The final major event in Port Blair was I had something killed for my plate for the first time in well over a month! It’s very easy to be vegetarian in India; we hadn’t even really meant to try – half the places serve only veg.food and it might also be safer and less gone-off than meat so we had stuck with it most of the time. Anyhow, it was time! I wanted to make it special so I made it a lobster and named him; Hubert. After all that time Hubert was actually a bit of a disappointment though, and for all I know he might actually be the reason I went down with my second round of amoebic dysentery on Havelock a few days later…

Edel on Havelock.

On Havelock island we moved in to one of those postcards-from-paradise with white-sand beaches, palm trees and turquise water. We slept in a small bamboo hut where you can’t lock the door, and I didn’t wear shoes for 5 days. In the evenings we’d wade out into the warm shallow water to watch the sunset together. The huts are built a little in from the beach under the trees so the island still looks green and beautiful from the water. It really was this great, except of course the amoebas that struck me down with a fever on day 3. I had felt that I had had all the fun you can have with amoebas back in Manali, but there you go. We had stocked up on some extra medicine the last time luckily though so I recovered in a couple days.

Edel on beach #7.

The first dive on our second day was interesting – strongest current we ever dove in. As we descended down the anchor line it was stretched like a violin string or as Edel put it we were like prayer flags in the wind holding on to it. At the bottom we had to hold on to rocks and work our way around the fairly small dive site this way before finally letting go and flying back towards the anchor line making sure not to miss it. The second dive was more relaxing – still some current but a much bigger site so we could just drift-dive. If diving is being weight-less drift-diving is actually flying! We just hung in the water and watched the amazing fields of hard-coral and big table corals pass by just below. We saw many big Napoleon wrasse which is nice – they’re fished out completely from many places for the Hong-Kong market – I think only the lips are eaten as they’re supposed to be a delicacy.. This huge fish is also the only thing that eats COT-starfish, which can kill whole coral-reefs when there’s an outbreak of them. We didn’t see a single shark in our 12 dives though – they’ve collapsed by over 90% over the last couple decades for the horrible shark-fin fishing which again use just a tiny bit of the animal.. On the fourth day of diving we saw the mantas! The dive-site was called Dixons pinnacles – starting at 18-20m depth it consists of two peaks rising up the deeper bottom around, the bigger of the pinnacles with a flat top maybe 10m across and the two peaks separated just a little further than your eyes can see underwater. As we descended at first we saw a juvenile manta ray, 3-4 meter wingspan, just swimming away. I was so excited and busy signaling to Edel, who had already spotted it, that I only got about a second long look before it disappeared.. Luckily it came back, hovering and gently moving the huge wings just above the top of the pinnacle where dozens of small cleaner wrasse worked on it. We held on to the rock just a meter or two away and just watched. Then a second manta, an adult with around a 5 meter wing span, came gliding by above and then dove down and disappeared into the depth behind us. We spent most of the hour-long dive with the first manta, on pinnacle #1 where it circled around, then moved to pinnacle #2 and then back to #1 where it was joined again by the bigger manta. On some of the glide-by’s they came so close I could’ve touched..maybe 20cm away. We decided to do the second dive of the day at the same site hoping they’d still be there, and waited an hour and a half in the boat above for the safety surface interval. The pinnacles were empty when we went down again, but after 5 minutes the smaller manta came back and we spent most of the dive swimming with it. I hovered in the water to meet the big alien-looking fish come swimming towards me, and swam along with it underneath looking up as it passed by just above me. Swimming next to it on eye-level it curled up the one of the two horns on it’s head next to me..didn’t know they were so flexible..wonder if they use it to communicate? The second manta came back again just as we went up, and we waved good-bye to them from the 5m/3min safety stop. It felt incredibly lucky to spend almost a full two hours with these giants, so alien-looking and moving the big wings to gently flying slowly through the water. This was probably the best dives we’ve done anywhere, but we had one interesting wreck dive left the next day before we left. The wreck, almost two hours away in the dive boat, is from a 70m long Chinese ship that sank in 1956. The ship has plenty of “ghost-nets” lost by two generations of fishermen stuck high up in the wreck and moving in the current, looking like sails moving in the wind and giving it a great “Flying Dutchman” feel. It looked so broken and cursed I half expected Tom Waits music to be playing down there in the depth..

Sunset on beach #7.

View over Shimla.

After the luxury of Sunil looking after us in the jeep for 9 days the public bus to Shimla from Rampur was a bit of a shock – all the chai-wallahs, ice-cream-wallahs and give-me-money-wallahs shouting and getting on and off the bus. One child had a basket with a snake in it (live, but looked both shaken and stirred) – he shoved the thing right under my nose and I could see the tongue flickering in and out. Not sure if I was meant to buy it, eat it, or pay to photograph it but I opted for neither.. Sometimes I do wish I could photograph these weirdos (..don’t care about political correctness when it comes to animal abuse), but I don’t want to give money to encourage this “business”. We had seen a snake charmer with a live cobra in Manali also who wanted us to photograph him – usually the fangs of these snakes are ripped out or the mouth sewn shut – once the thing gets close to dying they toss it away to starve to death and just catch a new one.

The Viceroy's toy train.

Our backpacks that had been stored in a box at the back of the bus arrived in Shimla looking like if they had plowed a field with them. We carried the big lumps of dirt on our backs up the hill in Shimla to a hostel where we spent one night before catching a famous narrow-gauge railway down to the town of Kalka the next day. The railroad is a relic from the days of the British, who used the tiny hillstation of Shimla at 2160m to rule the whole sub-continent from for the part of the year when the Indian sun proved to much for the British skin, which was quite a big part. Before they had finally completed the railway in 1903, a handy stretch of 96 kilometers with 103 separate tunnels through the mountain, they used to haul their entire administration up and down a horse-and-cart trail twice a year for 40 years. The train moves at a very relaxing phase, taking 5-7 hours to complete the short trip to the lowlands, and there’s some sort of interesting system in place with drivers and platform staff exchanging brass discs and leather pouches along the way which somehow ensures you can’t meet a train heading the opposite direction. Fail-safe we’re told. The first bit from Shimla is very scenic (you’re probably supposed to take it the other direction so the view gets nicer and nicer..) but along the route, with plenty of stops to buy drinks and food and everyone throwing everything right out the window, it starts to look more and more dirty. I don’t quite follow the reasoning in paying extra for a scenic trip (the bus is much faster and cheaper) and then doing everything you can to make it uglier along the way! But I’ve only been in India for two months of course.. The town Kalka at the other end of the line, complete with shanty-towns on the outskirts, looks entirely indistinguishable from a large rubbish heap.

Not longing to linger in Kalka we already had a train booked onwards to Delhi. This turned out to be the way to travel in style in India – we didn’t even have 1st class but they still served hot food twice on the just over 4 hour trip. In Delhi we walked to a hotel close to the train station recommended by the nice Irish lady we’d shared a taxi to Amritsar with – we weren’t hassled quite as bad by the touts as when we arrived at the airport the first time a month earlier, at 2am culture-shocked and paranoid, but it was still nice to have a place picked out in advance. From Delhi we flew to Port Blair on the Andaman Islands, but that’s for the next post.

Dhankar monastery.

Dhankar is taken from a mystical fairytale..some flecks of white paint scattered to the Himalayan winds and landed on the most improbable location high on a quickly eroding hilltop (..moraine; not even a solid rock) where the white-washed buildings that make up Dhankar monastery have clung fast by sheer force of magic for over a thousand years. This place really moved us. The road from Tabo followed the riverbed for some hour until it started climbing the half kilometer vertically up to the Dhankar monastery at 3890m along a serpentine road – the location is just unreal, looking down on the confluence of the Pin and Spiti rivers deep deep in the valley below. We left the jeep, said goodbye to the women who had hitchhiked with us, and Sunil guided us into the gompa. As we climbed up the narrow stairs in the dark inside the monastery we could hear drums beating, and once we reached the top floor where the roof opened up to the sky we could hear the monks chanting. We waited outside in silence for the prayers to finish and I wondered how much of the scene around us might have looked the same a thousand years ago..the monastery with the prayer flags moving in the wind, the view over the barren landscape and snowcapped mountains in the distance, perhaps even the exact words of the monks sacred chant?

Edel at the top of Dhankar monastery.

When I asked Sunil how old the buildings were his reply “too much old” had a point – a poster pointed out Dhankar is in imminent danger of collapsing and is listed on a top-100 most endangered world monuments.

A monk eventually popped out and was surprised to see us – we were the first tourists to make it to Dhankar after the long winter. Once the prayer ceremony was finished three more monks showed up – it had sounded like many more back when they were in the prayer room – they gave us tea and showed us around to see all the paintings and ceremonial masks in the many rooms inside the monastery. One of them had very good english, and talking about where we were from Edel mentioned Sweden is very cold and I bragged we had -26 the other winter…he told us it sometimes gets down to -40 in this valley! Three of the monks got a lift with us the short way to Dhankar village, and we left them some of the bags of nuts we had brought for trekking (..can’t be easy to get supplies to a place like this).

Children in the Upper Gulling village.

From Dhankar we moved along the Pin river up the valley to Gulling village – Sunil sent us of on a short walk to Upper Gulling a little higher up the mountain and once we got there we were surrounded by little children who wanted their photo taken. Think we had chanced upon their small school actually – more and more children showed up, smiling and pushing each other for the top spots in front of the camera and laughing every time we showed them the photos afterwards. So much fun, and they would almost never let us leave. Wonder if they got any class at all done that day. Once we finally broke free and made our way back to Gulling we had some lunch in a 10 sq.m. restaurant and then made off again to the town of Kaza, once Sunil had found a way to break into the jeep as the keys had gotten locked inside! Luckily it didn’t take too long – the glacial meltwater passing the road on the way was much worse on the way back around lunch and might have made it impassable a few hours later (the whole Pin river had actually changed color from blue to brown since the morning).

Day six – Kibber and Ki

Kibber village.

We stayed in Kaza at 3700m and drove the short way to Kibber village at 4200m in the morning. We walked around Kibber for  an hour, it’s a very picturesque little village – apart from just one or two corrugated tin roofs and a few satellite dishes it looks fully traditional. We saw plenty of yaks between the houses, and Edel got stuck with an extremely clingy child that wanted to be carried everywhere. From Kibber we walked downhill to Ki monastery at 3950m. Ki is another hilltop monastery – the location is beautiful, though it’s closer to Kaza town and didn’t quite have the “fantasy” feeling of Dhankar.

Prayer flags on a hill near Kaza.

Day seven – return to Nako

Sunset view over Nako.

Starting the long way back now – passed Tabo and the terrible landslide area of Malling before spending the night in Nako. Did a nice walk up a hill above town to watch the sunset among the prayer flags in the evening. The guesthouse in Nako was a little dingy, and sported some frightening looking electrical cables by the shower. Food was great though, eaten by a kerosene light as power came and went a bit.

Day eight,nine – return to Kalpa, Rampur

Nice refreshing non-electrocuting showers in our favourite hotel in Kalpa in the evening after another long day on the road. We left Kalpa the next morning just as the sun rose over the Kinner Kailash mountains. It actually set again, to finally rise three quarters of an hour later, as we climbed the serpentine roads down from Kalpa which is about 900 meters above the river valley. The drive down is nice, bonsai-like pines growing out from between the rocks, but once we reached the valley and continued the road towards Rampur the scenery got pretty boring with dam and road construction going on everywhere. The valley used to be very beautiful before the power dams according to the guidebook, but perhaps in the end it’s better they sacrifice one scenic valley than sacrifice the entire natural world by continuing to burn coal…? One amusement along this stretch anyway was the funny roadsigns; some like “What is hurry?” cautioning to drive slower, some like “Sorry for the aah, ooh, auch – inconvenience regretted” apologizing for the state of the road and one “All we need is your smile and cooperation” that presumably has some sort of purpose also…

In Rampur we said goodbye to Sunil, really had a good time with him – playing cards in the evenings and he put us on the phone with his daughters to try their english. And he’d been a fantastically safe driver, something we really appreciated on these roads – most days we barely hit 50kmph. We got a bit of a shock to be back on the public bus to Shimla after the luxury of the jeep for 9 days, but I’ll save that for the next post.

Thanks for the comments everyone – as the roadsign said: All we need is your smile and cooperation to keep us going…

We’re doing this in the wrong direction and at the wrong time..as usual. The route to Spiti valley from Manali is normally done as a circular circuit, but two of the high mountain passes the road climbs through, Rohtang and Kunzum, haven’t cleared after the winter yet. And considering the name of the less challenging of the two, Rohtang, translates as “piles of dead bodies” it doesn’t seem to be the kind of situation where you should push your luck. So we’ll be driving in towards Spiti the long way instead, and then exiting using the same route. It’s nice to do the trip out-of-season though, less traffic on the roads (which we appreciated once we saw the state of them..) and we had the privilege to be some of the first tourists to reach many of the places this year.

On the road towards Jalori Pass.

In the morning of day one we met our driver Sunil, and settled into the jeep. The road climbed a full kilometer downhill from Manali’s 2000m, before climbing up again to Jalori Pass at 3200m. Apart from all the climbing the drive was pretty relaxing with the jeep occasionally getting stuck in a flock of goats or sheep or behind a mule train. Jalori pass is still well below the snow-line and we did a nice walk in the mixed forest close to the top. Sunil didn’t give us that much instructions before sending us off, but some nice Indian tourists with very little english that we met told us it was a circular walk, which it wasn’t, so we continued on expecting to eventually come back to where the jeep was parked again.. This might be a good moment to thank my dear colleagues back home again for the GPS unit, or we might still be hiking the woods of Jalori Pass!

Roof in Sarahan, near the Bhimakali temple.

We spent the night in the village of Sarahan, in a pretty basic hostel (hot water came in buckets left outside the room). In the morning we explored the Bhimakali temple, an elaborate wooden structure which is Sarahan’s no.1 attraction. It’s built mostly in the early 1900′s, but some stone sections are much older and used to be used for human sacrifice until the British came along and stopped all the fun in the 1800′s. One man per decade used to be sent off to the Bhima Kali Hindu deity here, though the goddess now has to make do with a water-buffalo calf, a sheep, a goat, a fish, a chicken, a crab and a spider instead in a complex ceremony held each October…

Day two – to Chitkul

Mule train near Chitkul.

Some of the roads on the way to Sarahan, and from Sarahan to Chitkul, took a bit of getting used to (see pics in the last post). Huge drops by the side, sometimes with a bit of broken railing but more often just with some small white-painted rocks along the side instead. We traveled plenty “relaxed safety” serpentine road back in South America on the last trip so this wasn’t all news, but I still think I maintained a healthy level of terrorizing fear for most of the first day or so.. The brain does funny things..like wanting you to close the car window and lock the door just so the “unpleasant-ness out there can’t get in”.. You get de-sensitized very quickly though – after a couple hours with half a kilometer drop outside the window you don’t react at all when the drop is “just” 50 meters no matter how close to it or how fast the car goes..even though the fall might hurt roughly the same. Sunil seemed a very safe driver though, and after a couple days there was just one spot that might still frighten me; Malling..I’ll get back to Malling later on.. I think the roads we had on the 9 days here were probably worse than the ones we saw in South America last time, though the driving here is better. South America has more of the macho driving style where everyone needs to overtake every other vehicle always and including on blind corners, and of course no-body will allow anyone else to overtake them without a fight as it would be a direct insult to the drivers manliness (..I remember even public buses racing eachother back there!). Indian driving seems slightly more relaxed, at least up in the mountains.

Apple orchard in Kalpa.

Chitkul was a cute little village at 3500m, just where the road up the Baspa river valley ends and the mule tracks take over. Up here the landscape was a bit more barren, and it was pretty cold – partly as the hotel we were staying in was still missing a few walls. It’s the usual method up here – build one or two floors and finish a couple rooms so that you can start to take in guests and make some money to finish the rest of the building! Half the places we stayed had concrete arming bars sticking up from an unfinished roof and lots of “natural light”. As we were among the first people to stay in the hotel in Chitkul the place was very clean anyway

Along the road down again from Chitkul the next day a Hindu holy man was handing out good luck charms and blessing drivers for the journey down for the small fee of 20 rupees, an absolute bargain I think considering the state of the road!

Day three – to Kalpa

View over Kalpa.

Before continuing to Kapla we stopped in the town Rekong Peo to sort out our Inner Line Permit – some of the areas we planned to visit are very close to the sensitive Tibet border and therefore need a special permit. The area was actually completely off limit to foreigners until 1992. While waiting for the permit for some hours we walked the town a bit and had a lime soda in a roadside restaurant where the menu said “Thanks for patronizing us” as well as promising to “serve you more and more better” if you visit again. Always eager to please Edel went back in with the drinks and asked them to please prepare them again without the extra hay and dirt. The drinks came back out with a lot less fizz so we stocked up on more amoeba medicine in the pharmacy across the street just in case they had used tap water.. We did have breakfast in an even dirtier place on the first day actually..it looked more like a building-site than a restaurant. I was picking hair from my toast+butter and they left a large big lump of dirt on the table that on closer inspection was revealed to contain a plastic bottle of tomato sauce. They also walked right past us down to the river with a couple buckets of plastic garbage and dumped them right in the river as we watched on.. Edel has a theory that any restaurant here with women working in it is a lot cleaner, and it seems to be true so far. There’s always an exception though – in the lovely place we stayed in Kalpa the old gentleman working the kitchen cooked up some fantastic food for us. Kalpa was a really nice spot, apple orchards in bloom and fantastic views towards the Kinner Kailash mountains across the river valley. Kalpa is at 2800m, a full 900 meter climb up serpentine roads from the main road tracing the river valley below.

Donkey near Nako village.

Day four – to Tabo

The landscape changed dramatically on the road north leaving the Kinnaur area and movin towards Tabo – the greenery and the trees gone completely as we neared the Spiti valley’s high-altitude desert. The highest points we passed were the tiny villages of Nako at 3600m, where we had a 20 rupee lunch in a roadside stall close to this donkey, and Malling at 3800m. Malling is probably the worst piece of road we have ever seen anywhere. It is in a notorious landslide area, when the guidebook was written they had already tried to make a permanent road there for some decade but at the time you could only scramble across and catch a different vehicle on the other side. Currently the higher of the roads was actually open while a lower road had recently been swallowed up by the mountain again. Sunil, though he had driven the area for 30 years, had to ask for directions along the way to find out which roads were passable as we were the first tour of the year. For a few hundred meters when passing Malling the broken asphalt gives way to loose scree and the road feels very freshly made..the drop on the side is pretty intimidating even after some days getting used to the area. I couldn’t take any photos on the way in as we were giving lift to a military officer at the time (photography inside the Inner Line isn’t officially allowed) but on the way back some days later (..as we had to exit the same route) I caught a couple movies with Edel’s camera.

Figure by the Buddhist stupa in Tabo village.

Once reaching Tabo at 3300m we checked in to the Gompa of the local monastery guest house – very basic and no hot water, but the restaurant served some fantastic Tibetan food; momos (dumplings) and thukpa soup. In the morning we explored the ancient Tabo monastery – parts of it are from AD996 and apparently houses some of the best Buddhist art in the Himalayas, though many of the buildings were still locked as the season hadn’t opened yet. It was still nice to explore the outside; ancient ruins and stupas, prayer stones and carvings.

House in upper Manali village.

The road got progresively worse as it started to climb up into the mountain towards Manali in the night, though I did manage to scrape out some sleep (I can sleep in even the most appaling conditions..something I still need to thank the Swedish army for). Once I woke up I realized I had been much better off sleeping – it was the kind of road that makes you quickly forget the “don’t hold hands in public”-rule, and not in a good way. It was dark, but we could see the lights from the villages hundreds of meters below us in the valley, the road a narrow strip between the vertical wall to the left and the sheer drop to the right. At least the road was unpaved and in pretty bad condition! (..meaning the driver had to go at least slightly slower than he otherwise would). Unfortunately he seemed to know the road well though, at least judging by the speed that was still about 20 times faster than I would have driven. At one point he actually left the bus and went running to chase away a Himalayan rabbit that had been stuck in the headlight for about half a kilometer (there was simply no left or right for it to run to). Great that he was getting some fresh air I thought…and also liked the fact that he showed some indication for wanting to preserve precious life, seeing that ours like that of the rabbit was firmly in his hands.. For the last couple hours there was hardly anyone else left on the bus at all, and at one point the driver stopped to snooze for half an hour.

We arrived to Manali in the rain and the dark (when it had started to rain the driver and the ticket-guy had spent several seconds trying to get the wipers working before giving up and continuing half-blind..) – it was 5am and the driver had shaved a good hour of the trip, even when counting his sleep-break.

As we didn’t fancy moving again for a while we decided to spend some time in Manali..

Forest park in Manali.

Manali

Manali at 2000 meters altitude is a charming little town, in an area the guidebook describes as based on apple and cannabis cultivation. Most of the tourists seem to be here to support the latter – in every restaurant people are sitting around smoking charas, chillumns and hookahs. It’s also a honey-moon spot for Indian tourists, as well as a center for trekking and rafting and other adventure sports. I however found a completely different activity altogether to keep me occupied for a few days…

Amoebic dysentery. I should probably have adopted the diet of most other foreign visitors here – “only that which can be inhaled”. I was in bed for a couple days but Edel got me some medicine in town that sorted me out fairly quickly. Think I was lucky to escape a full three weeks actually, since poor Edel had caught the bacterial version already once in the first week back in Dharamsala. Once I felt better we booked a jeep safari to the Spiti valley for 9 days, and then tickets to fly to Andaman after – now have plans for almost a month ahead!

Before leaving Manali we did some walks to the more traditional upper Manali village, and in a little forest reserve by lower Manali town. There we chanced upon a small animal sanctuary with some Himalayan pheasants and other birds. The owner came over to talk to us and walked us over to a small enclosure with an adorable Himalayan black bear that was busy trying to put it’s head inside an old torn-up basket ball. The bear was named Baloo and he had arrived very young after its mother had died – the owner told us that when it arrived first and was smaller it had used to follow him around freely in the park all the time..he seemed like such a sweet person – could really see him just stroll around in the park all day long with his Baloo bear. Baloo was bigger now so had to be in a cage, though the enclosure was designed for pheasants so he still escaped every now and then and went climbing the trees in the park.

Guard at the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

Amritsar, or indeed the whole Punjab state, has really just one major tourist attraction; the Golden Temple – the holiest site in the Sikh faith. Sikhism is young as religions go, started by a Guru Nanak about 500 years ago – it’s a bit of a Hinduism-Islam mix that is nice enough to drop the horrible caste system. The temple is open to everyone of all casts and all creeds – they even serve everyone who wants food there for free, some 10,000 portions a day! The majority of Punjab is Sikh, and most men sport a beard+turban combination..some also carry a dagger or large sabre on the side. The golden temple is actually covered with real gold – some 100kg of leaf gold. Inside the temple there is a continuous readings of the sacred Sikh texts along with shabad kirtan music, all of which is also relayed on loud-speakers all over town. We could hear it constantly from our hotel room..and just in case we couldn’t there’s also a live TV channel for backup!

Circling around the temple we made lots of friends, people who wanted to tell us about the Sihk faith and the temple, people who wanted to interview us on how much we knew about the Sihk faith and the temple (perhaps for a school project), and endless amounts of people who wanted to take a photo with us / of us / wanted us to take a photo of them with our camera. We were asked some interesting questions..did we have a love-marriage or an arranged marriage? One person asked if I was Edel’s brother or her boss..? I’m her boss of course! From Amritsar we wanted to continue on to Manali – I wanted to start by train but Edel wanted to take the bus the whole way so we went with the bus..

We stayed just one night in Amritsar – I went back to the temple again at sunrise for some more photos and on the way back I was questioned by the police for taking pictures of a cow on the street!

More photos.

View from Tushita

In McLeod Ganj we signed up for a 10-day silent meditation retreat at Tushita on a hill above town. The accommodation was pretty basic, dorm rooms and bucket showers, but the location stunning; overlooking a mixed forest of conifers and broadleaves on the hill-slope below, with rhododendron just starting to bloom under the trees. The first couple days the forest was covered in mist, later it cleared to show snowcapped mountains in the distance. Some days we could spot silver-coloured langur monkeys or flying squirrels in the treetops, and every day around lunch we could spot hordes of macaques trying to steal our food – they’d get away with at least one or two people’s sandwich or piece of fruit at every meal. The days started at 6am with mixed meditation sessions and Buddhism teachings the full day until about 9pm. Other rules included not killing any animals, including mosquito’s. However, throwing stones after the macaque monkeys so they wouldn’t steal food was Ok! – ..try to imagine ordained nuns in robes hurling rocks after the monkeys! (..will need to imagine as camera had to be handed in to the safe at checkin together with other distractions like mp3 player and non-dharma books.) The silent-rule wasn’t actually fully absolute either as there were discussion groups in the afternoon and questions during class etc. The teachers were good and did their best to fit the teachings to the pretty diverse group of students; some people would be in to every pyramid-energy crystal-healing tantric-kundalini-yoga new-age invention there is, and at the other end of the spectrum they’d have to put up with people like me who think that Richard Dawkins just might be a little too religious. The teachers explained at the beginning they weren’t out to “convert” anyone, that the course was like a smörgåsbord and everyone could just pick the pieces that make sense for them. I found the meditation very interesting anyhow, it’s something I’d never tried before, and quite a lot of the Buddhism teachings do seem to make sense to me without having to resort to faith..I’ll just have to leave the old Hinduism legacies with reincarnation and karma at the side. There must be something to it really – the old Buddhist monks in the pictures hanging on the walls here always feature a beaming smile on their face…they’ve seen their millenia-old culture destroyed bit by bit and still manage to feel compassion for the people causing this? I remember a National Geographic article where a number of Tibetan monks where fitted with electrodes and run through an MRI scanner..think it concluded they were actually the happiest people in the world..

My Guru.

We had one great meditation session with Mark, a friendly vegemite-obsessed Aussie with shaved head who led most of our meditation sessions; the ever-present macaque monkeys were fighting as we were trying to sit quietly and observe our mind..Mark speaking in his serene meditation voice guiding a mental-state check “…maybe you’re feeling tired…”, the monkeys start running and fighting on the roof, “…maybe you’re feeling distracted…”, more and heavier monkeys join in – it sounds like thunder above, “…maybe you’re wondering why they built a meditation hall with a tin roof?…” – everyone laughing loud!

Edel unfortunately got sick within 24 hours of observing silence. Sorry, that didn’t come out right at all! Edel unfortunately got food poisoning on the 2nd day, and missed a lot of the meditation sessions. We would probably have left both of us, but they convinced us to stay on and Edel took a trip down to the doctor together with an Israeli girl who needed some rabies shots after getting bitten by one of the monkeys..

Once the course was finished and Edel felt better we did a couple short walks around Dharamsala before deciding to head off to the city of Amritsar which we had missed on the way up from Delhi.

View from McLeod Ganj (Dharamsala upper town).

Dharamsala, or the upper town McLeod Ganj where we stayed, is a gorgeous little spot. In one direction lies the deep valley below (McLG is at 1750 m altitude) and in the other direction the impossibly high snow-capped mountains above. The town is home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile as well as a large population of Tibetan refugees – it looks and feels incredibly different with prayer wheels, prayer flags and Buddhist stupas everywhere. It is also firmly on the backpacker trail with plenty souvenir stalls and cafe’s serving banana pancakes, and many aging hippies.

The place we stayed in was nice and had a good vegetarian restaurant (most places are all-veg here) – hot water worked in the room as soon as we had figured out to flick the switch outside the door (..though I did manage to have one very refreshing shower before this). There was also a large toad sitting outside our door the whole day which I took to be an auspicious sign!

Second day we went for a walk to find the Dalai Lama’s residence and monastery, however we got a bit lost as the map was not to scale (..and clearly labeled “not to scale”). Ended up on a long path downhill with beautiful views to the mountains and prayer flags in the trees. Eventually we figured out that we had walked right past the palace and completed a “kora” – a circumnavigation path around the temple complex completed by devotees always in the clockwise direction. Everyone we met had been walking the opposite direction to us! I’m somewhat worried now that we might have acquired a negative one on some sort of karma score-card after doing it anti-clockwise. Also, the toad outside our door was gone when we came back!

Monks and prayer wheels in Dharamsala.

In the evening we got a tip from a Buddhist monk in the hostel that the Dalai Lama would be at the monastery the day after to meet with a number of Indian guru’s so we might have a chance to catch a glimpse of him. We got there early which was lucky as we were sent back to the hostel to leave camera and mobile – the security was pretty strict with metal detectors and bag inspection. A crowd of a few hundred, mostly Tibetans, had gathered sitting on the ground and we spotted the Dalai Lama and the Karmapa (a high Tibetan lama for a different Buddhism school) with a number of Indian guru-looking types walking up to the palace. When we came back after lunch some hour later the meeting had just finished and we spotted the Dalai Lama again on the way to a waiting car. We was waving and smiling at everyone and seemed to be in good form.

In the evening we popped by a Tibet museum near the palace. It had lots of photos and information about the devastation following the 1950 invasion, including pictures from many of the monasterys that were completely destroyed during the “cultural revolution”. About 6,000 monasterys were destroyed and 1.2 million people killed in total – many of the people designing the exhibitions had been in “re-education” camps and tortured before fleeing Tibet. The museum also had Tibet stamps, Tibet currency, a Tibet passport and pre-1950 National Geographic articles to refute any claims that Tibet “always was a part of China”.

After spending a few days around McLeod Ganj we signed up for a 10-day silent meditation retreat, though I’ll save that for the next post.

Mikael: "most of the snow has actually melted away already" ...

Before flying out to Delhi I stopped by home in Sweden, and visited my brothers who are studying far up north in Umeå..was thinking that wading around in a meter of snow one degree south of the arctic circle must be a great way to prepare for the Indian sun. The difficulty of getting there seemed a nice way to ease into Indian public transport anyway – had a convenient bus-plane-bus-train-train-bus combination booked all the way from Galway, but it turned into bus-plane-bus-train-train-bus-subway-train-bus and 22 hours in total thanks to the Swedish train service. That’ll teach me for ever complaining about the Irish public transport system!

Here’s a photo of Mikael dishing up a nice picnic by a road-side resting spot in the forest outside Umeå. Mikael makes great potato soup.

On April 1st I met up with Edel again in London to fly out to Delhi to start our trip. I usually sleep the whole way on every flight I take, which is pretty boring for Edel, but managed to stay awake on this. Landed around midnight with 28 degrees in the air. We had a hostel booked for the first couple nights, and an airport pickup booked which the guidebook strongly recommends in order to avoid all the touts and scammers hanging around the airport. Anyhow, the pickup wasn’t there. And not only were they not there, they were also completely uncontactable! ..the latter of course since both of us had forgotten to take down their address and phone number…you can’t think of everything! After wandering around in arrivals a short while, dodging the touts that traced our footsteps, we picked a new hostel in the guide and went to get a ticket for a prepaid taxi which seemed at least a slightly more reliable option. A couple touts are standing around by the queue, the shorter one with stoned-looking eyes takes a quick break from scratching his crotch and waves towards the ticket queue for us to re-inforce his official status. When it’s our turn he moves in next to us about 10 cm from the glass counter..I use the map in the guidebook to point so that he can’t hear where we’re going. The guy behind the counter gives us a ticket and tells us to go to #80 outside for the taxi. The crotch-scratcher indicates he’s our driver – Edel asks the guy behind the counter if this is true and he does a gesture meaning he couldn’t care less, while attempting to short-change me twice the amount I was paying. We go outside into the dark hot smog-filled chaos of people and cars. Most of the cars are using the horn at any one second, and most of the people are trying to get us into different taxi’s…let’s see..number #80. Once I stop being naive enough to think there’s a system we hop into what is hopefully an official taxi. The taxi stops a moment later behind the airport and another random guy jumps in next to the driver – he’s function seems to be casual small-talk “this your first time in Delhi?”. I think Edel was first to notice something wrong, I was generally feeling pretty good at this point – finally away from the airport and we never really had problems with this particular part of our travels (apart from that one time in Iquitos, Peru when we were in a car-chase with an over-eager convicted jungle-tour sales-man). Anyhow, after zig-zagging between the lorries into Delhi the taxi proceeded to drive to three different dead-ends/blocked roads claiming that all the roads leading to the hostel we had picked seemed to be blocked (one of the more common scams is pretending the place your going to is full/burned down/closed for a festival/etc., so they can drive you to somewhere bad they have a special deal with). He points to a statue (permanent and with no special decorations) by the roadside and explains the roads might be closed for festival. “Do you know this god?” ..have to admit i don’t – there’s roughly 20 million of them. After he turns onto a long dimly lit road with no other cars and Edel whispers “David, where the hell are we?” I actually loose my temper with him and demand they turn around and just drop us by any major landmark. This actually seems to have worked (apart from the turn-around bit, seeing how we were on a one-way street..) – two turns later we are somewhere we can actually recognize on the map and then a short while by the hostel. To give them the benefit of the doubt I apologize for bursting out and give them a hefty tip..possibly I needn’t have to though – checking the map in the more relaxed setting of the hotel room later on the one roadname we had managed to spot was some kilometers north-west of our destination while the airport we came from was to the south. The hotel in turn had just one room free, at 60 euro per night which seemed a lot for a YMCA in India – particularly as noon check-out was now less than 10 hours away. A cheaper room did materialize the second we considered checking elsewhere though..

Delhi bus station

We decided to head out from Delhi the next day, so tried to find a bus to Dharamsala. Once we found the correct tourist office (ignoring all the touts on the streets trying to direct us to their “tourist office”) it turned out there were no tourist-bus tickets left for Dharamsala this day. The other option is state-run buses, described in the guide-book as “ramshackle” – we know we’ll be on buses with live chicken and a wheel missing again eventually, had just hoped to save this pleasure a little longer. We made our way to the bus-station and got a ticket for the 12-hour over-night trip. The state-run buses came in two options, “luxury-class bus” and “Volvo”; luxury-class was also sold out. Their volvo-class was actually not too bad though (couldn’t complain about the Swedish stuff could I – it had a bit of airco and even a TV, though only the color green worked. I missed out on the green-tinted Bollywoods though as the gentleman in front of me sported a gigantic turban.

We arrived in Dharamsala early next morning – the driver had managed to shave an hour off the trip by aggressively overtaking any better looking buses along the road. It had also, somewhat worryingly, been the same driver the whole way.