No posts in a while, will post more soon. I'm in Rio for Carnaval and am paying ridiculous amounts for internet. But I am alive and having a ton of fun. Supposedly biggest party in the world. Heres is the view from my window after the first day. More later. Anonymous 2010-02-15T02:36:19.599Z Three cheers Sam is alive and and well. Happy valentines day! alix 2010-02-15T22:04:57.
Alright. Finally have a good internet connection. Except for La Paz, everywhere I went in Bolivia had computers and internet that seemed to be from the early 90s. So slow that I would type a sentence and then have to stare at the screen waiting to see if it appear. Right now I am in Lima. Alf is speaking Spanish on TV. I got in the night before last. Alix gets in tonight.
For the record, I have made it safely into Bolivia. I´ve yet to find reliable wifi, so I haven´t been able to get a good blog post up. Right now I´m in La Paz. Yesterday I went on a popular tour, which is to ride mountainbikes down the ¨world´s most dangerous road.¨ It is 3600m of descent in three hours. I´ll have some pictures up when I get to a good connection.
Peter and I left Chiloe and went to Puerto Montt. Peter´s birthday is boxing day, the 26th of December. The only sit down restaurant we could find was a place in a mall food court that only served things on french fries. Chicken, chili, chicken and chili, cheese... We went back to the hotel and watched Waterworld on tv. He´s probably had better birthdays. The next day I flew back to Santiago, and then to Calama.
Happy holidays to everybody! I was going to go make some surprise phone calls, but of course I then realized everything is closed on Christmas day. I also should probably have at least mailed some postcards, but didn't think of that either. Fail. It is a rainy Christmas morning on Chiloe. So rainy, in fact, that I am doing nothing but lurking in the hostel and lurking my way around the internet.
Been quite a while since the last post, my apologies. I'm still alive, and things are going well. This is going to be a short post, because I'm a little short on time. When I was sill in Santiago the Australian couple put me in contact with an author they had met at one of their fancy parties. He was in Santiago but was going to be leaving for southern Chile to return a rental car, and, never having met me, offered me a spot so I could tag along.
I got into Santiago some days ago. The bus ride across the Andes was incredible, and often found us freakily close to the edge of sharp drops over cliffs. I think I posted at least one picture, but it's hard to convey the "oh my god he's not going to turn in time and they don't have guardrails why don't they have guardrails oh my god we're all going to die"
I brought only three pairs of boxers with me on my eight month venture. Every night, washing clothes in the sink. One pair is now officially MIA, lost in the hostel washing service. It was 20 pesos for that laundry service, too. My go-to pair of shorts was also temporarily unaccounted for, but I found them still hanging on the line outside, ignored but not forgotten. I didn't account for attrition in my packing.
I'm in a bus station in the town of Rio Gallegos on my way to El Calafate. Yesterday was an adventure. The national park outside of Ushuaia is a 15 minute drive, but you have to pay 50 pesos to get there via a bus service. The "bus" was in fact a van, and the 50 pesos included drop off at the park and pickup at set times throughout the day.
Ushuaia is awesome. It feels like Juneau. Yesterday I hiked through the town and into the forest towards a glacier with yet another friendly German, this one named Cedric. He had some great quotes, including "everywhere you go, you find a German guy." I agree with him. About the view, which pictures can't do justice, looking out over the Beagle Channel, he said what I've appropriated as the title of this post, as well as "