Santiago

People seem to have a dim view of Santiago of being `just another big city', but its really nice, it`s really really nice, I knew it would be. Its probably one of the nicest cities I have visited anywhere, the Andes are surprisingly close with the city being butted right up to the foothills. On my first walk into town from the very nice district of Providencia, I rounded a corner onto the main convergence of roads near the river where the city opens up allowing views of the Andes towering over the city, and almost jumped at the proximity them. My camera didn't really do them justice, but do a quick image search for Santiago Chile and you'll see what I  mean.

 Its a very green city, with avenues of trees everywhere, lots of Universities and a modern subway system. The central shopping area reminded me of central London, and a great vista of the whole city can be had from the top of San Christobal hill next to Bellavista restaurant  tourist district. I walked up the hill with a new friend from my hostel, Sam, who had the same MacPac bag, there was also plenty of mountain bikers enjoying the tracks around the hill and if ones feeling lazy there are taxis and a funicular that go to the top as well. There's also a zoo. We felt very safe walking about the city, even at night, I was in the mood for a cinema movie, so we found a Hoyts cinema and saw the latest Bourne film then walked back to hostel after dark, it`s great to feel safe again.

Anyway the point being Santiago is a very nice place and one I`d like to come back to, furthermore Chile is a nice place and defiantly warrants further investigation, there's also Argentina and Patagonia region, but that will have wait for some other time. For now I`ve reached the end of my trip, its been a long trip, not always easy but always challenging and have met some wonderful people and experienced some of the most wonderful places, some of which I will defiantly return to.

In the next post will be a list of highlights, a condensed version of the trip with my favourite places and experiences.
Thanks for reading, hope you found it informative/ interesting/ amusing/ will throw away your guide books because this is so much better. Thanks for all the support along the way from comments on here or via Facebook and words of support in response to my occasional crazed emails to folk when I was fed-up and wanted to go home, they kept me going. A big thanks to everyone who gave my a place to stay along the way not only saving me money, but providing company and a sense of belonging, I won`t forget your generosity and kindness, and not least thanks to those who don`t mind homing me temporarily when I return, it`s a big weight of my mind.
This is Claire Over There`s America`s reconnaissance mission, concluded.

Atacama, La Serena and Valparisio

San Pedro De Atacama is a nice place, a welcome change from the general mess and disorganisation of the previous countries. After eating at the most expensive place in town (not by choice I might add, but by generally blundering about trying to find somewhere quiet in the shade) I bumped into Jade and Luke who I'd first met in Nasca, and again in Aquas Calientes, and then in Bolivia on the Salar de Uyuni tour several times. Meeting them made me feel like there was some sort of order in the world and discovered their hostel was not only much cheaper but much nicer, so I moved to their place.

The guide book says its 17km to Valley De Luna, local operators say its 14km, its actually only 6km to the control point where you buy the ticket, and the area then continues for another 10km ish to the end where you turn around and come back. So facts and figures are some what misleading. Myself and Jade hired some bikes from the internet cafe on the main street for 3500 CLPs for 6 hours, where we were given a badly drawn map with some vague indication of the locality. The area features an exciting cave system, requiring a torch.

Antafagasta

Antafagasta on the coast is 5 hours away, its a big rather dull town on a grid pattern with roads sloping up a hillside. The waterfront area is quite nice and has a massive shopping mall surrounded by a promenade, the Bond film A Quantum of Solace used the town as a base for some filming around the area, including some scenes in hotels, Observatories and scenes in the Atacama. I was pleased to get back to sea level and the sea as the altitude was playing havoc with my sinuses.

La Serena

Further south after one final overnight bus* we arrived at La Serena, a lovely place. A perfect place to relax, most of the time was spent discussing dinner, making food, eating food and drinking coffee. Plus I finally managed to catch up with the remained of series 2 of A Game of Thrones.

Vina Del Mar

Valparaiso

Vina Del Mar and Valparaiso are nice places to wind up the trip, (more dinner planning, preparing and eating and even a game of scrabble, we are getting civilised now) Jade and Luke were heading over to Mendosa in Argentina and for me Santiago's the end of the line.

Notes:

*The bus showed 2 films, both American films but dubbed in Spanish, this is normal, but then at about 10.30pm on came Bobos Fantasy. At first I was quite annoyed by this as the volume was cranked up but ended up watching the whole thing.

• Hostel Florida in San Pedro, El Arbol in La Serena and Jacaranda in Valparaiso were really nice hostels, homely, welcoming and just perfect.

Into Chile

An overnight bus from La Paz later and I´d arrived in Uyuni and straight away booked a tour leaving a few hours later to take me over the Salar de Uyuni salt flats accross 4x4 territory into Chile, where I would transfer at the Bolivian border to San Pedro De Atacama in north Eastern Chile.

The whole town of Uyuni only seem to exisit to sell Salar De Uyuni tours to tourists, and there are a lot of horror stories about various companies and peoples experiences on the internet, and the companies that were most recommended in my guide book had the worst reviews on trip advisor. It was also more expensive to book from La Paz, so I decided just to turn up and campare tours in Uyuni itself. In reality it dosn´t really matter which company you use, as they all seem to run exactly to same tour, with the same menu, staying at similiar places, using the same type of vehicles (mostly Toyota Landcrusiers). One shouldn´t need to pay more than 750 Bovilianos.

In the event my tour was great, I went with Lapiz Tours who were helpful in the office and the driver was great. He did keep opening the door and looking at the front tyres as if they were about to fall off or something, which they didn´t, apart from that the tour exceeded my expectations. Excluding the driver there were 6 of us, a family of 4 from Belgium, a Scottish chap and myself. The tour start of driving over the bright white salt flats West of Uyuni, if you Google map the bottom west of Bolivia, you´ll see them as a big white blob. The first night we stayed in a hostel made of salt, on the edge of the salt flats, lunch was great and invloved some very nice meat, the Dutch didn´t eat any so myself and Michael finished the whole lot of between us. Dinner was a nice soup and a baked chicken dish, yum.

The next day we were up early to make the majority of the distance down to the Chilian border. The roads were sandy gravel tracks accross the mountains, and a lot of it hard going. We stopped at lagoon full of flamingos, cactus oasises, lagoons red with algea and green lagoons, the second night was spent at 4300 meters and aparently reached -10, we finished the tour visiting some amazing geysers with bubbling mud being chucked about and atmospheric mists lit up with the early morning sun, and then a much needed bath at the long awaited hot springs before transfering onto another bus for the short trip into San Pedro De Atacama, a little desert oasis, and a completely different feel from the last few countries and my last country of this trip.

Notes:

• It really dosn't matter what tour company you take for Salar De Uyuni, most of the reviews on the net as usually from people with bad experiences or expecting too much which makes it hard to make a decision. Just arrive at Uyuni and ask around when you get there. We had 6 people not including the driver in our car and it was fine, if people have very long legs they probably won't want to sit in the very back seats though.

The Worlds Most Dangerous Road

Otherwise known as The North Yungas Road, or Corico Road, or the Death Road, its 64km of narrow gravel road snaking down from 4,650 meters to 1,200 meters cut into the side of steep lush mountains. There are a few points where the drop over the side of the road is a sheer drop, and this is what everyone takes their photos of, but otherwise its not as steep like that all the way.

The route starts on a big paved road that descends for about 15km high up in the mountains where it starts very cold and gets warmer and warmer through the descent. Most of the traffic on the Death Road gravel section is one way traffic these days and the majority of that are tourists on bikes tours, but it is still an open public road.

I took a tour with Gravity, they were the first to pioneer the road as a tourist attraction and have the best safety record, they also give you a free T Shirt. Apart from their use of BMX helmets instead of proper mountain bike helmets, the equipment was very good, and being run by people who were not South Americans it mean they actually cared about the quality of their tours and the people on it. The tour lasted a full day with regular stops for people to regroup and for the guide to explain the next section, plenty of snacks and drinks were provided and the tour ended in a nice slightly hippyish nature reserve full of  parrots and monkeys, here we had a very nice buffet lunch and showers. Most of the group survived intact, one guy seemed OK in the morning and on the gravel road for the first few sections but seemed to come down all of a sudden with some kind of fever. He had been in Africa before Bolivia and it was feared he may have a tropical disease. Another girl took a fall early on, on the gravel and was a little concussed for a bit and had cut up her arm and hand, so they spent the rest of the trip in the support van.
On return to La Paz, the guy was taken to a doctors as he didn't seem to be getting any better.

The scenery was wonderful, the mountains could be appreciated more on the way back and some areas on the paved road section back to La Paz reminded me of Scottish hills but with tufts of tall grasses instead of heather's  For me it was a really fun day and so nice to have some self powered adventure again, which apart from Machu Picchu had been missing since Colombia. It was also nice to see some greenery, as a lot of the Altiplano and lower areas of Peru and Bolivia are dry with yellow sparse grasses.

La Paz itself is far more modern than I imagined, I found plenty of Western style clothes shops as well as all the usual quaint cobbled tourist streets with every shop selling exactly the same things, a great tradition of South American school of economics. There's a bunch of nicely carved churches and the main avenue into town has a central pedestrian walkway with nice flower beds and statues. There's even a chain of Western style coffee shops called Alexander Coffee, where you can buy an overpriced latte that's almost good. It even has a newspaper rack so you can pretend to be an important city person having their coffee in the big city.

My room in La Paz

Notes:

A tour with Gravity cost $107 USD, its about a third more than other operators but from talking to other travelers who did similar tours, the food quality is better with Gravity, they have better instruction during the ride and they have the nicest ending point.

Into Bolivia and a sad day

I took a really cheap and local bus to Puno because it was the only going at the time I got to the bus station. It took 8 hours not 6, and I don´t think the bus had been cleaned since it was first built. Puno has dump like qualities, but I did have a nice tour to the floating islands in the morning on Lake Titicaca which was really nice and was able to escape the same day on bus accross the border to Bolivia and made a horrible discovery. I had left my priceless towel and much treasured Indian scarf that was a present, the scarf was one of those really useful items, a towel, a sarong, a hat, a dust mask, an eye mask, sun protection, cold protection, a pillow case and a bit of history. My towel had travelled around the world with with me several times, and accompanied me on my first big trip. It´s not like me to lose things and it was like loosing some old friends. And as Ford Prefect said "If you want to survive out here, you've got to know where your towel is". Travelling has become a chore rather than a joy through since leaving Colombia, I think its time to go home.

Cusco and Machu Picchu

From Nasca I took an overnight bus to Cusco where most of the interesting things are, I was relieved to see it wasn´t a dump, although beyond the old town touristy nice bits it quickly becomes dump like again. The touristy historic area is very nice, with big plazas and everything is cobbled, the only cars that are good enough to put up with the punishment of Cusco´s roads are 1997 Toyota Corollas, the best cheap car in the world.
I was staying in San Blas area, just up from the main plaza and even nicer with the best food so far in South America, my favourite restaurant was Sumaq II which did a very reasonable set menu for 15 soles that included an aperitif, tea, bread and dips, a soup, a main and a dessert.
Cusco is pretty high up, at 3400m and the historic center of the Inca empire, Machu Picchu is actually lower by about 1000m. I didn´t do the Inca trail as that requires booking months in advance but I did visit Machu Picchu, which isn´t cheap and as a foreigner you have the pleasure of paying the super inflated tourist price for everything. Connecting Cusco to Machu Picchu is an area called the Sacred Valley full of Inca temples, the last section to the town of Aguas Calientes/ Machu Picchu is only possible by train, which is expensive but a nice journey, and makes a change from buses. To reach the site itself requires another insultingly expensive bus, but there is a path so I took the bus up and walked down, which I really recommend as by the time I was leaving there was hundreds of people queuing for either the bus or the toilet, plus its a lovely path and there´s no one on it.

Machu Picchu is really big, and it was a hot day when I visited, you see the same old view of Machu Picchu is every postcard and advert so you don´really appreciate the scale of it until you see it for yourself, plus there are a number of detours and walks you can do to occupy most of a day. I didn´t take a guide as 1, its another expense, and 2, I don´t like being guided and having to move at some one else's pace whose seen it a thousand times and just wants to rush you through and get their money and 3, information overload which I´ll forget most of, I can Wikipedia it later and find out just the things I want to know. Plus I had my trusty Kindle so if I wanted information I just looked it up on that, and there were so many guided tours about I just stood next to one speaking English and then moved on when I´d heard enough or got bored. I was more interested in the construction of the stone walls which to me was the real wonder in the precision of craftsmanship in the stone cutting and shaping that really defined the Inca style. These people must of had a lot of time of their hands. After about 5 hours I´d really had enough, its an amazing place but busy and the sun was strong, to use the loo you have to go back to the entrance, I found an enormous queue and thought not to bother, so instead ran most of the way down the steps back to the base which was really fun and reminded me of the last part of Half Dome when after so much hiking it was easier to run. From the base it was another 30 min walk back to town.

Aguas Calientes is a nice little place, very touristy with the main drag filled with a hundred restaurants all offering the same thing. The most relaxing place I found was a French Boulangerie by the side of the river/ stream that runs through town with proper bakery products and nice cookies and real coffees and run by an actual French person. The day I went to Machu Picchu the kind owner lent me 20 Soles for the bus as the unhelpful bus ticket lady wouldn´t accept bigger bills only exact change, and sometimes the ATM's only give out 100 notes.

I took the train back as far as Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley as there was only availability to there, had a look around the Inca site there, and after being much templed got the bus back to Cusco for one final night until moving onto to Puno.

Notes:

Go to La Boulangerie de Paris in Aquas Calientes for a relaxing drink and pastry.

Into Peru

After our delightful stay at the Colours Hostel in Cali (not), we took the bus in the morning to Darien, the town next to Calima Lake where we were to have our Kite Surfing lessons. The accommodation we were staying in is a house owned by the Kite Surfing school and within a private section of the town accessed through security gates and is home to some of the nicest places in the town. Our room was spacious and to my delight had a very friendly cat on one of the beds. We had 4 days in Darien/Calima, my first lesson involved flying a training kite on land, I´d never been interested in flying kites before and then progressing to some body drag, whereby you fly the kite in the water without a board and let it drag you about. It was OK except I find when you´re learning something new and some one is shouting instructions and corrections constantly after a while I switch off. It was also very windy, I know you need a lot of wind for this sport but even experienced kiter's said it was a hard place to learn. Anyway Sarah loved it, on the last day we had a free horse ride in the hills next to the lake, courtesy of the kiting school, now this was much better, one of our instructors Mary came too and it was good to see her out of her comfort zone!

After Calima Sarah had come to the end of her trip and was flying back home and I was flying to Lima. My flight eventually left hours after the advertised time, the staff never communicated anything. I did find two other Europeans and an ex-pat Colombian who now lives in Switzerland and said how utterly disorganised Colombia was. I finally go to my hostel in Lima at 2am.
The next day I met Laura at breakfast and she said she was going on a walking tour organised by the hostel, so I went too along with more foreigners than I´d seen in the whole of Colombia. Lima is big and dull, it has some nice big buildings in the center, and we visited some fun catacombs tunnels and the Spanish Inquisition. The tour lasted all day and in the evening a smaller group of us from the tour went to the district of Barranco and tried some Pisco Sours in a fancy modern bar, we then had some more cheap versions in a locals pub down the road and found behind the bar a band playing and enjoyed the evening until one of the group, Tim from the states had to get a flight, in all a great first day in Peru.
The next day was not so great, Pisco Sours are very strong, even the ´Simple´(one shot) ones I´d had. When I came downstairs in the morning I found 3 police officers interviewing and filming the staff member on reception, afterwards they covered the front doors of the hostel with massive stickers that said something negative about the hostel. Apparently some old biddy who lives nearby had complained about some noise, it was actually a very quiet hostel, so she must be a curtain twitcher who hears the drop of a pin.

I booked 2 nights at a surf camp on the coast in a town called Punta Hermosa, in brief it was a total dump, the ´surf camp´did not have my booking and the owner was apparently out dirt biking with his friends, another guest showed me to a free room, which had not been cleaned and there was no bedding on the bed, the view was of a builders yard, which summarised the aesthetic of most of the town. I went out to have lunch and found another hotel next to the beach so I moved there to a nice room overlooking the beach with a restaurant underneath. I had planned on some surf lessons but the place didn´t look particularly nice or safe for learning, so the next day I left for Nasca.
The bus only went as far as Ica, 2.5 hours short of Nasca, it was dark so I stopped there for the night and went to the nearby village of Huachchina. I had no reservations and the hostel said they didn´t give beds to people without reservations, I asked where else can I go and strangely they found a bed, what a surprise, in a dorm, ugh, it was only for one night so it would serve. Thankfully it was quiet and the next morning I found a place inside a storybook. A real desert oasis, the tiny village surrounded a small lagoon, and encompassed by massive sand dunes, I hiked up one to take in the views. This place is depicted on the 50 sole note, I walked around trying to find the same view point.

Back to Ica and continued my journey to Nasca, a pretty town and feels very safe, my hostel lovely and quiet. I took a flight over the lines the next day, I didn´t see the lines except the first two because I had my eyes shut the whole time just trying to survive till the blasted thing landed. On a scale of discomfort out of 10, it was 10. It was worst than the worst migraine I´d ever had and it was all I could do to avoid a full migraine and explaining I was temporarily blind and deaf was beyond my Spanish  instead I had a sensation of paralysis and felt wiped out for the rest of the day. I don´t recommend flying over the Nasca lines, except if you charter a private plane and fly it yourself.
Besides crop circles are much better and far more ingenious.

Notes:

Crop circles are way better than Nasca lines.