these two gypsy hands

Buenos Aires; love and meat.

This place is delicious. At times it’s been so fast-paced and cosmopolitan I get New York dejavu; and then the subway stops unexpectedly so the driver can grab a sandwich, and I remember it’s South America and the people here run on their own time.

Our first look at Buenos Aires was from the bus window at 9am, where we witnessed groups of young hipsters staggering out of clubs and bars that were still pumping out music as if the night was still young. This made us feel very old and withered; I still get irrational and grumpy having to eat dinner after 9pm.

We spent the first week in San Telmo, a gorgeous barrio with colonial buildings and streets lined with quaint antique stores and vintage goodies. It took a lot of self control to leave behind the beautiful hat boxes, old cameras and in Jaime’s case - antique pistols. We did, however, spend days and days trawling the markets and stores, eating medialunas and watching the tango shows that spring up on every cobble-stoned corner. Without having been to Europe before, I’m sure San Telmo offers a little piece of the magic.

As always, food was a big part of BA for us. As expected, the steaks were bigger than our heads and the blood sausages were bleeding. We also sampled French food, handmade pastas, delicious gelato and enormous lomito’s (steak sandwich with ham, egg, cheese and salad). By far my favourite cafe was Amenabar in the swish barrio, Palermo. The walls are lined with old family photos, hats, dusty suitcases and other treasures. The smoked salmon bagel was also pretty amazing.

Steak head:

Amenabar Cafe:

We took a little break from the city and headed up north to the Brazilian border to see the Iguazu Falls. The amount of water that pours out of these things was breath-taking.

This past week back in BA has involved a whirlwind of sightseeing and shopping. We visited art galleries, parks and gardens; shopping malls and boutiques. My feet are almost as ruined as they were after Macchu Picchu from all the walking.

The best thing about BA is its’ energy. There’s always some amazing building that catches your eye, some crazy yelling Spanish at you, the tiniest pony you’ve ever seen on a street corner, a fruit shop owner who tells you his life story while he feeds you two types of melon, two men performing Shakespeare in Spanish on the subway and always, always, the smell of meat grilling in the air.

And it’s home time tomorrow! Sadness at leaving all that behind, and then heart-pounding excitement at seeing the loved ones again. It’s been a while.

feliz ano nuevo!

As soon as we crossed into Argentina, we could smell the money. One step over the border from Bolivia and even the homeless are dressed in better rags.

The differences between Bolivia and Argentina are enormous. The buses are luxurious, the roads are paved, the water drinkable and the meat fresh. Argentinians are a passionate and hot-blooded people. They start eating dinner at 10pm and go out at 3am. The famous asado is a feast of red meat that lasts for hours and often includes the entire cow - heart, stomach and all. Red wine is always on the table; the table talk is always loud and always fast. All of this has taken some getting used to after the slowness and challenges of Bolivian travel - but it has definitely been a welcome change.

We have spent the last two weeks in the North of Argentina; exploring even more cactii spotted deserts, hiking through gigantic multi-coloured gorges and cycling down leafy dappled streets (winery hopping along the way). That sentence makes us sound extremely active, however, I’ve almost felt guilty at times for how comfortable it is to travel in this country. For dinner we buy gigantic rump steaks for a few dollars and grill them on the rooftop bbq at the hostel, with a view of the quebrada as the sun sets. The bus journeys are an experience in themselves; hot food and wine served to you and even a game of bingo! We have also sampled some of the local specialities; amazing goat cheeses of a million flavours, baby goat stews that melt in your mouth, and once - red wine flavoured sorbet.

We were in Cordoba for new year; the second biggest city in Argentina. Unfortunately, we found ourselves at a hostel full of 35 Israeli youths fresh out of the army. It’s difficult to explain the horror of this situation without sounding awkwardly racist, but this group were particularly obnoxious. Without going into too much detail, they were loud (Hebrew isn’t the prettiest of languages), rude, exclusive and they stole our food out of the fridge (except the ham of course). So we left for another hostel on the eve of the new year and had a grand time with our two Danish friends setting fireworks off the roof. The Argentinians couldn’t believe that personal fireworks are illegal in Australia, but Jaime and I spent most of the night concerned someone was going to lose an eye. Those things are seriously dangerous; Constable Care would have a fit.

Tonight we journey to the belly of the beast, Buenos Aires. I’ve been looking forward to this city for the entire trip, and I’m so happy we have 2 weeks to explore. My only challenge is to convince Jaime to partake in tango lessons with me…

butch cassidy and the sundance kid

We went horseriding through butch cassidy and the sundance kid desert in Tupiza, Bolivia. We look like cowboys, but I almost died that day. Horses are still not for me.

feliz navidad!

It’s been a very different Christmas here in Salta, Argentina. It’s the first time Jaime and I have been away from our families and the first time there’s been no stocking at the end of the bed from Santa in the morning. It was a rude shock. Jokes aside, I was pretty miserable the day before Christmas, missing the fam and the local pub on Christmas eve. Christmas eve in Salta, however, turned out to be just as raucous as in Bunbury! The hostel Christmas party was a good time - with all you can drink beer, vodka and champagne and all you can eat meat. Pretty sure I ate my weight in cow that night.

I haven’t included many ‘crazy hostel stories’ in this blog as a lot of the time they aren’t very funny second hand. But this one is worth a mention. Before everyone was slurring their words we met an Irish couple who had recently been engaged. The girl was flashing her huge rock about and gushing over her matrimonial happiness. The lad was an absolute trollop; a brute of a man who had a tendency to make outlandish statements about Australian culture, such as AFL requires no skill and all people from Melbourne are homosexual. Insightful. To cut a long story short, the drinks continued to flow and by about 5am everyone was in the pool. I did not view the next scene with my own eyes, but word has it the Irish lass was discovered at one corner of the pool copulating with an Australian male (ironically from Melbourne). Mr Irish was alerted and paddled over in a flurry, and chased the Australian out of the pool before socking him square in the eye. The Melbournian then fled to another hostel down the road, right there and then in his wet boardshorts, and has been holed up in his room since for fear of another black eye. So the Irish engagement is off and the brute has left for Bolivia alone to put a whole lot of coke up his nose and forget about the incident. Misery Christmas.

Before we crossed into Argentina, we went on a three day tour of the salt flats in the very south of Bolivia. I am prepared to say it was one of the best things I have done on this trip so far. We got lucky with an awesome group (a Scottish couple and a Swiss couple), and the food cooked by our guide and his grumpy wife was some of the best we have had in Bolivia! At night we stayed in buildings made of salt, slept in beds also made of salt, and drank rum and played cards at tables and chairs…yes, made of salt. These are some of the amazing things we saw in the Bolivian desert:

Many cacti

I love cacti

Salt flats

Flamingoes (this was a baby that’s why he is white)

Salvador Dali’s desert

Red lake

The stinky geysers

One for the mum’s. Green lake filled with arsenic.

down the mine: potosi

DYNAMITE!

The Infamous Saur Tours: Sucrè

potosi

It took us a long time to decide whether to descend into the silver mines of Potosi. We had heard nightmarish stories from other travelers about crawling on all fours through cramped tunnels at 40 degrees and not being able to breathe. The guide book described the ‘attraction’ as physically and mentally draining and possibly a disturbing experience. One girl we talked to had a claustrophobic panic attack and had to exit the mine.

We still hadn’t decided whether we were actually going to do the tour even when we arrived in Potosi. The town itself looked very uninviting from the beginning; there are rows of houses all made of the same drab brown clay, and the red mountain that holds the mine looms over it all as an obvious reminder of the town’s existence. After the prettiness and warm weather of Sucre (‘the white city’), my spirits dropped getting off the buss to freezing cold winds, more stray dogs than people and dry dusty surroundings. All was not lost, however, as it seems the tourist industry has even found Potosi, and we taxi-d to the more presentable part of town, complete with plaza adorned with Christmas decorations.

Potosi being a mining town, there isn’t much to do as a tourist other than visit the mine. In the end, we swallowed our fears and signed up for a tour the following day. My logic in these situations is always that there is someone more retarded, scared and claustrophobic than me doing these things, so I should be ok. However, with the knowledge that 40 people die in this mine every year, I was still quite apprehensive as we entered the tunnel all decked out in our mining gear - gumboots, helmet and headtorch etc.

Our guide, Raynaldo, had worked in the mines for 3 years, but quit because he values his health over the money. The big deal with these mines is the conditions - every man works for himself (man being from age 11) trying to find his chunk of silver by blowing up corners of the tunnels with dynamite whilst constantly breathing in noxious gases in 40 degree heat. If you don’t die from a cave-in, a wagon collision on the primitive tracks, or a dynamite accident - you eventually will die from the black lung. The average life expectancy of a Potosi miner is around 40, and the average weekly takings is about AUD$45.

By the end of it, Jaime and I managed to make it to the lowest level of the mine without having a panic attack. One member of our group left pretty early on however. Well done us. The hardest part of the tour wasn’t crawling on hands and knees through tiny tunnels hundreds of metres underground (this was still quite a challenge), but the breathing difficulties. The sulphuric gas and the heat are absolutely suffocating, and trying to regulate your breathing when you know you can’t get enough air in is extremely stressful. The more you freak out the worse it gets. And then seeing these skinny little shirtless dudes sweating and coughing their guts up while they chip away at a wall is extraordinary and disturbing.

We were down the mine for 2 hours, and my lungs were still screaming that night - I just can’t imagine what it would be like 8 hours a day, 6 days a week. 

sucre

I know you’ve all been waiting in anticipation to find out whether Sucre really is the gastronomical capital of Bolivia… After much hands on research the results are inconclusive - we had our best and our worst meal of the trip so far.

To begin with, Sucre is famous for two glorious things - SAUSAGE and CHOCOLATE. The sausage is a special kind of chorizo that is boiled in meat juice and then eaten in a bun with onion, tomato, lettuce and lots of mostaza (mustard of course!). We sampled this at the local market across from our hostel. Watching the cholita (indiginous Bolivian lady) poke about in the lettuce with her grotty fingers left me quite paranoid about the sickness to come, but it was so damn tasty I couldn’t hold back.

The chocolate, I have to say, is no Cadbury’s.

The second exciting food item we have discovered is Bolivia’s national snack, the saltená. These little friends are sold all over the streets and will most probably make us very sick; but again they are very tasty. Kind of like a giant curry puff but with half a boiled egg inside:

I did not take that photo.

The worst meal doesn’t deserve many words. The restaurant was described in our guide book as ‘stylish, typical food, good value.’ Possibly only one of those adjectives was correct. When you go to the meat markets here in Bolivia, there is a particular smell that hits you from the get-go. It’s that metallic old meat smell. Basically my meal tasted like that - terribly whiffy and just bad news. Needless to say the inner tubes were hurting afterwards.

Our guide book also stated that the number one tourist attraction in Sucre is a dinosaur museum with REAL PRESERVED DINOSAUR TRACKS. I finally convinced Jaime that we should get involved, and yesterday afternoon we found ourselves sitting outside the main plaza, in a pick up truck with a gigantic paper maché dinosaur head attached to the hood. The truck was emblazoned with the words SAUR TOURS, and we proceeded to weave through the streets of Sucre excruciatingly slowly (twice around a roundabout). As you may have already guessed, the museum was less than ordinary. It consisted of multiple fibreglass dinosaur models with recorded growls and roars, and far away in the distance you could see (through binoculars) some holes in a wall of sand that were apparently made by the feet of T-Rex himself. Jaime was convinced a man in gumboots had been commissioned to make them. The whole event was very comical, and was made more so by the fact that we’d unknowingly bought a return ticket on the dino-truck.

Stay tuned for photos…

elections and missing things

It’s definitely starting to feel like I’ve been away along time now. My clothes are completely falling apart, I’ve accumulated scars on my legs from sandfly bites, I’m totally at ease with owning only 5 pairs of underwear, I have no idea what is going on in my own country and I’m even starting to dream in Spanish. The missing of people and things reached its pinnacle this weekend, as Jaime and I spent a terribly strange weekend in a remote Bolivian town during their national election.

Bolivians take their elections pretty seriously, and even though they are mostly peaceful affairs, previous years have seen rioting and violence in the streets. For tourists, the election means there is no transportation for the entire weekend, no alcohol, no restaurants or supermarkets open, and in the cities - no walking in groups of more than two without being dispersed by police. So in a town like Cochabamba, which is usually known for being lively, the streets were absolutely dead and our hostel was like a cemetery. Jaime was somewhat pleased with the quiet time, as he has recently purchased a traditional Bolivian mandolin-like instrument called a Charango, so the weekend gave him lots of time to practice, and lots of time for me to stare blankly into space.

Bolivia is pretty different to the other South American countries we’ve been to so far. The landscapes are crazy amazing, the people much poorer, the food way dodgier and the travel much less comfortable. I think the combination of these things has led me to sink into the homesickness a lot more of late. Some of the things I miss, in no particular order:

• Reliable water pressure
• Asian food, particularly Vietnamese and Japanese
• Being able to put your toilet paper into the toilet rather than into the grotty bin next to the toilet
• Clean toilets
• Embarrassingly, vegimite
• The fam x 1 million
• Regular exercise
• Not having to work out your sentences in Spanish before speaking every single time
• Granni’s pasta
• Red wine

Ok I must stop now. Poor Jaime has had to deal with this list growing day by day. But it’s nice to know there is a reason home is so damn good, even if a lot of it has to do with being able to eat a tomato without having to peel it first for fear of tapeworm.

We are off to Sucre tonight, the apparent ‘gastronomical capital of Bolivia.’ I am apprehensive, but will report soon.

Some Bolivia shots -

On the way to Cochabamba…

Election day in Cochabamba….

The big Jeebus in Cochabamba - 42m tall!

Creep mannequins in La Paz…

peru + macchu picchu