Currently
sitting in Hostel Linda in Salta with obligatory Australians and Israelis. I’ve been in Argentina just over 24 hours and
have already had epic steak, seen Tango, seen loads of beautiful women, seen
rugby highlighted- and I also saw a sign at the border saying, inaccurately,
that the Falkland Islands (or whatever they call them) are Argentinian. Pretty much all preconceptions have been met.
After
watching the Wales Argentina game, and England Fiji game in my hotel room in
Lima a couple of weeks ago, I checked out of my hotel in the Mira Flores
district and went about booking a bus to Cusco.
In the travel agent the Senora told me it would actually be the same
price to fly to Cusco- except an hour rather than 24 hrs on the bus… Decisions, decisions. After booking the flight for the next day,
and paying, she then said it was actually at 6AM, and I needed to be at Lima
airport at 4AM. Read the small print and
weep.
While contemplating
my next move, I found myself in ‘Ye Olde English Pub’, looking for lunch, and
finding a diverse crowd of characters.
This included a load of old boys, both American and Aussie, who were
Vietnam veterans, and were not only interested in hearing about Afghanistan,
but also about my visit to ‘Nam at the beginning of last year, as none of them
had been back. There was also a 22 yr
old ex-British soldier, who had come back from Afghan in March, various
American and Canadian ex-pat, business types as well as a particularly bitter,
old Irishman who was emphatically not British- and who took an immediate shine
to my sense of humour “Don’t worry mate, you can have some of my potatoes…”
Somehow or
other, I made it from the pub to the airport for 4AM, with all my kit, and got
the flight to Cusco. Cusco is the old
Inca capital, where the invading Spanish graciously smashed up all the Inca
temples and built churches on the same sites.
Today Cusco is a tourist trap, which reminded me of Hoi An in Vietnam
because it is clearly aimed less at the scruffy, ‘wife-beater’ wearing
Australian/ ‘Gap-Yah’ back-packer and more at older, rich American tourists. It is also extremely high up- although I don’t
think my initial feeling of nausea when I arrived there was entirely due to the
altitude…
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Main Square in Cusco.
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| More Cusco |
The reason
why everybody goes to Cusco is that it is the gateway to the ‘Lost City’ of Machu
Picchu, and there are various ways of getting there- the most famous, which
people book months in advance, is the 4 day ‘Inca Trail’ march through the
jungle. This is not only quite
expensive, but potentially quite a ‘rooting’ (as the Aussies would say) and not
in keeping with my policy of not exerting myself when not being paid to. However, I did need to go and see the Lost
City, and couldn’t quite bring myself to get a bus to the top, so I booked
myself on the 2 day variant, which involved a 6AM start on the Tuesday. The sensible thing to do would have been to
have had a quiet night on the Monday night… so obviously I went out to the
Irish bar (highest in the world, to be sure) then ‘Mama Africa’s’ Club, before
going back to the hotel I was staying in, packing my kit and heading to get the
bus. Drinking all night, followed by a
6-7 hour bus ride along extremely narrow, winding mountain roads is not exactly
the most, possible fun to be had in life.
We were in a tiny minibus, with as many ‘gringo’s’ as possible rammed
in, but there was no way, at all to make yourself comfortable, and my head,
knees, elbows were getting bashed with every turn, while I just felt like death
warmed up. At one point we were stopped
at a Peruvian Police Vehicle Check Point and all had to get out and line up as
the vehicle was searched. One of the
Americans laughed that this was where we would all get shot- “I certainly hope
so!”
Once we
eventually got to our ‘Drop Off Point’ we were told that it was just a walk
straight down the railway track to ‘Agua Calientes’ (Hot water), where we would
spend the night in the hostel- and that “You can’t miss it…”. I found myself teamed up with a Dutch couple
from Utrecht (my current favourite European city) and a German couple, and it
was quite a pleasant stroll through the jungle. We also had to jump out of the
way of the train as it came up behind us, all good fun. As with all these things, I couldn’t help
thinking about whoever it was who had to hack their way through the jungle
initially to build the train line- rather them than me!
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| Stroll through the jungle. |
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| More 'J'... |
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| Mind the train! |
After a
couple of hours, and a couple of ‘Sickener’, false horizons, in the dark and
the rain, we eventually got to Agua Calientes, located our guide in the main
square and were taken to our hostel. The
form was we’d sort ourselves out, go to dinner at some restaurant that was part
of the same tour company/ racket, and then get a brief on the next day’s
activities.
At 4AM the
following morning, after a couple of hours sleep, as I was standing in the
rain, in the dark, making sure everybody was OK, and had got the right kit etc,
it did occur to me that I’m supposed to be on holiday! We then wandered the 20 minutes or so to the
gate by the bridge for the start of the climb, as instructed, and were then
told we had to wait until 5AM as it didn’t open until then- so far so standard,
“If you can’t take a joke, don’t join… etc”.
We were told it would take about
an hour and a half/ 2 hours to climb the thousands of steps up to the main
entrance to Machu Picchu, and the German couple swiftly dropped back feeling
their chain smoking, while the Dutch couple who were clearly the active, sporty
type, decided to ‘beast it’ up the hill.
Sadly, I couldn’t help keeping up with them as I was remembering
previous jokes about Dutch people and hills, and nothing in life is about
turning up and taking part! After 45
mins, I could hear a bus going past on the road, that criss-crosses the
steps all the way up, a few meters ahead of me, and I was cursing myself for
not getting the bus. However as we got
up to where the sound of the bus was, we discovered it was actually the main
entrance, and the end of the ‘hike’- thank f*ck!
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| Tourists waiting to get into 'Lost City' at 6AM. |
Once inside
Machu Picchu itself, it was obviously quite a spectacular scene, and definitely
worth getting up there earlier than the main crowds. The exact original purpose of Machu Picchu is
unclear, although there are various theories, so it is a bit like Stonehenge
(which I’ve seen once, from the back of a 4 Tonne lorry) in that an awful lot
of effort was clearly put into building it- but God knows why. The other thing that struck me was the fact
that when construction of it began in the Mid 15th Century, those
building it were obviously oblivious that a couple of decades later Christopher
Columbus and co would be getting ‘Navigationally Embarrassed’ on their way to
India/ China, and finding America by mistake.
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| Looking down at Machu Picchu |
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| More Machu Picchu |
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| And some more. |
After a half
day or so of wandering around the Lost City (which had only been found by an
American ‘Indiana Jones’ type in the Twenties), it was back to Cusco for a
couple of days.
The plan was
to go from there to La Paz, the Bolivian capital by bus. However, once again, we discovered that it
was as cheap to fly- and there was a small matter of a rugby match to watch
with some Aussie boys I’d originally met in Colombia, who turned up at Machu
Picchu, so we stayed until after the rugby.
(Needless to say if any Aussie asks, I have no interest in rugby, and
never have had…) Sadly the airline
decided to ground the flight that day, so we didn’t leave Cusco until the
Monday- 8 days after I’d arrived.
On the
flight to La Paz we flew over Lake Titicaca, one of the things to see in South
America, 20 minutes after Take Off- rather than 12 hours after the bus would
have rolled off. Been there, done that!
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| Lake Titicaca, on Peru, Bolivia border. |
My plan in
La Paz, which I had no particular interest in seeing, was to spend a night
there and then head off to Argentina, which like Colombia I really do want to
see. Sadly, Wednesday was the day of the
10 yearly national census in Bolivia so nobody could go anywhere from the
Tuesday, and nobody could go outside the hostel at all on the Wednesday on
threat of US$1,000 fine or 8 days in jail.
For me, this meant I spent a few hours on Tuesday walking around the
city embracing the high altitude- and feeling like an asthmatic, chain-smoker
doing the London Marathon. We then just
had to stay in the hostel with everyone that was there, drinking Cervazas and
Jaeger bombs all day and night on the Wednesday, which pretty much wrote off
Thursday for everyone.
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| La Paz |
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La Paz- this particular 'plaza' reminded me of Ramallah, in the West Bank.
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| "Strewth!" Skippy getting a 'pick-me-up' during the census. |
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La Paz
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| Enduring the Bolivian census in the hostel... |
As my Aussie
friends’ plans of going to the jungle had been written off by the census we all
just decided to fly down to Uyuni in the South of Bolivia to have a look at the
Salt Plains there, on the way to Argentina.
Interestingly we discovered that the Bolivian Air Force Logistics Arm
was used as a tourist, budget airline!
After
getting up at 4AM on the Friday we headed to the Bolivian Air Force base in La
Paz to get our flight to Uyuni, I was looking out on the tarmac at a load of
C130 Hercules transport aircraft there, and I laughed at the possibility that
all the tourists were going to be introduced to that particular joy. However, as it got lighter I realised that
those particular aircraft were actually wrecks, rotting on the flight line- a
typical 3rd world use of, no-doubt, American aid for some ungrateful
regime or other. There was, however,
another, newer, C130 in full Coca Cola livery, which I still am at a loss to
work out what its story was!!
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| Genuinely, WTF??? |
At about 8AM
we arrived at Uyuni, which truly is a sh*t hole and reminded me in terms of
both wealth and architecture of Southern Iraq, and we set about heading out to see
the Salt Plains. We then discovered it
would be much easier to get the train that night (unfortunately 10PM, rather
than ‘Midnight train’) to the Argie border, so we booked the train then headed
out to the desert/ Salt Plains, via some railway graveyard, in a 7 seat Land
Cruiser, with a Bolivian guide and 4 Argentinians, none of whom could speak
English. There is much fun to be head with photography in the featureless salt Plains...
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The majestic beauty of Uyuni...
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| Had to be done! |
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Train graveyard at Uyuni
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Local wildlife on Salt Plains... Perspective is a wonderful thing!
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| And some more... |
After a spot
of dinner (authentic pizza…) we then got on the train, which was actually like
the yank AmTrak trains, built for big Americans, rather than tiny
Bolivians. Once at the border town of
Villazon, where we arrived about 8AM, we were pleased to discover that our bags
were still there, and we then got a cab to the border and strolled into
Argentina. Once inside I was the last of
our crowd of Brits and Aussies to go through Argentinian border control, and
for some reason the chap looking at my passport, which has no indication of how
I earn a living, decided to call his boss over, and the others wondered if I’d
been ‘pinged’. However they eventually
gave it back without comment, and off we went.
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| Border crossing- last photo before Argies told me to put camera away. |
I was
thinking that the Argentinian paramilitary ‘Gendarmes’ running the border did
remind of pictures I’ve seen of Argentinians surrendering by the thousand at
Goose Green, Port Stanley etc, and sure enough we were greeted by the below
sign:
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| Welcome to our British guests... |
Regardless
of anything else, they lost the Falklands War spectacularly, they achieved
nothing except getting 700 odd of their own soldiers killed, and they will
never get them back as long as the Falkland Islanders themselves, who despise
the Argies due to the way they were treated during the invasion, continue to wish to remain
British. The latest opinion poll of the
Falkland Islanders when asked about the choice of British or Argentinian
nationality stated 98% wanted to remain British- probably somewhat higher than
if the same question was asked in the United Kingdom! If Mrs Kirchner wants to pick a fight, she’d
be better off invading Bolivia- they need it more.
Anyway, from
the border town of we got the 8 hr bus to the city of Salta. On the bus you can see the transition from the
indigenous poverty of Bolivia to the ‘Western European’ Argentina as we got
closer to Salta.
We then dumped
our kit in the hostel, had a few beers and headed out to see what goes on in
Salta- and were pleased that our pre-conceptions were proven correct. Going out to get an awesome steak dinner at
midnight is a bonus anywhere, and will no doubt be being done again tonight…
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