Caught in the tourist trap.

21st Feb,
I met up with Xavier from France who is in Rio at the moment.
We went to beach again and played a bit of Beach volly ball.
Beach life here is kind of cool. At each spot there will be a different sort of scene. From the people who play keep up with a football, the steriotype about all Brazillians being good at football is true, to the beach volly, or gay beach or kite surfing spot all human life is here, you just have to find you own preferred niche.

22nd feb
Started on Ipanima beach again and walked through Copacabanna to Botofogo,
Rio is big.
Copacabanna is a bit dirtyer then Ipanima but when you get to Botofogo it´s too poluted to go in the water which is a pity.
I discovered to my amazement what a coconut is really like.
It´s green and they cut it open for you to drink the milk.
Not like at home at all.
At the end you can ask them to open it so that you can eat the flesh.
Many Brazilians don´t bother.
This is a far cry from Peru where even at black tie events people share one dinner between two and bring the other one home in a plastic bag for later.
Nothing gets wasted there.

23rd of Feb
Here we are back in the first world with a bang.
The Brizilian currency is quite strong, since the guide book was printed last year the ¨Real¨ has gone from 3 to the dolar to 2 to the dolar. This makes all there pricing totlay inaccurate since it is given in dolars.
Today is the bigining of the complete rip off season where a hostal bed in a 15 bed back em in 3 high dorm goes from 25R to 100R.
I decided to move back with Mike in Barra.

I went to see the Christ statue today.
From there the views of the city are spectacular.
It´s amazing that anyone could conceve of building a city here where the hills come to meet the sea. It means that there is a big park in the middle because it is too high to build on, and this is where the christ statue is, dominating the city.
Rio is big though and it takes time to go and see the sights making it about one site a day, or just the beach depending or your mood and the heat.

Photos

With my new camera it´s a bit harder to upload photos,
but I have finally gotten round to uploading a few more.

Photos

Rolling Rio

18th feb
So I ended up staying with a really nice english guy called Mike who has been in Rio for the last 15 years. His house was in barra on a little residential island in a lagoon. We went with him and some of his friends to the Rolling stones concert in Copacabana. 1.2 million people or so attended and the atmosphere was good where i was, we had a great time. It´s so hot here it´s no problem going into the sea in all your clothes at night time to cool off from the concert. The people in Rio are really outgoing and friendly. It´s great to see that a city of this size people don´t stick to themselves. Everyone talks to everyone. It´s a really melting pot of a city with all colours of people so you don´t get stared at as much. It´s just a pity that my Portugues isn´t up to much. You can understand bits that are similar to Spanish and many people speak english or understand spanish.

19th feb
I moved to a hostel in Botofogo which is a bit closer the center.
I met lots of Brazilians and Chilians who were up for the concert.
Some were moving on to Sau Paulo to see the U2 concert.
They seem to be following me arround next they will be doing a gig in Santiago too.

20th feb
Needed a chance to relax for a bit we went to the beach in Ipanima.
Rio is almost like a collection of cities allong the coast.
It´s huge so you only get to know bits. There are stiking hills the stick up all over the place.

Santiago

13th and 14th of Feb
Santigo is the hotest place I've been to so far, after pretty much 3 months at altitude. Another bit of getting used to the heat is needed I think.
Santiago is really like a european city.
The people are all too cool,
If it isn't the trendyist shades and clothes, then you have to be some kind of alternative type, you know punk or goth or comunist or ...

15th of feb
I went to Valparaeso which is a port city not to far away.

16th
Back in Santigo,
The guys decided to spend the night putting up comunist propaganda posters in promenant locations all about town. I couldn't understand most of the slogans.

17th
Got a flight to Rio.
Got some nice but expensive accomadation,
The place is kind of booked up with a free Rolling Stones concert tommorrow and only a few days to the famous Carnival.

Uyuni tour

7th of feb
So most of the day was spent in a jeep driving though rough dirt tracks in the middle of some amazing scenery. Just below the snow line the sparce vegitation is grazed by Vicuna which are the rare wild cousin of the llama. It is smaller and looks a bit like a deer.
The landscape then turns to desert and the jeep motors along picking one of the many tracks.
We stopped at many lakes with andian flamingo.
We spent the night next to a red lake, coloured by microscopic algae. The lake had stange white borax deposits at the edge.

8th of feb
We went to see gysers in the morning. There were many different coloured bubling pools of mud, it was cool.
This was at the highest point on the tour at 4900 meters.
We then went to see a green lake and on to lunch at thermal springs.
We spent the night near the Chillian border.
All of the people who had come from the Chillian side were suffering from altitude sickness.

9th of feb
Today we drove back to Uyuni.
We stopped at a town which had been moved from a mountain so that they could mine the mountain it was on.
Then got a night bus to La Paz.

10th of feb
The roads in Bolivia are quite bad.
Unpaved and without bridges over the rivers.
We came accross a bus that was suck in the mud of a river so was couldn't cross for 14 hours. Finally when the morning came and the drivers of the waiting busses decided to attempt the crossing most of them got stuck for some time. At one stage there were five busses including ours stuck in the mud. The journey took arround 27 hours. We then went our for a final night out in Bolivia. Had a great night out.

The real 10th of feb
(The last few days are out by one)
I nearly slept in and missed my flight but made it in time a flew to Santigo Chile.

We went out in the evening and met some friendly Chilliens who invidted me to a Comunist bar where you had to knock on the door to get in.
It was kind of cool.

11th and 12th of feb
I went camping in moutains outside of Santiago with the friendly Chilleans. It was good fun. Chile is a bit of a culture shock landing back in the first world it's quite different to Bolivia. Much more similar to home.

Potosi to Uyuni

4th Feb
Today I went for a long walk to the edge of Potosi and then up a big hill that overlooks the city, tiring.

5th Feb
Today I got the bus to Uyuni.
This is a bit of a middle of nowhere place but is the starting point for tours of the local area. I booked on to a 4 day tour.

6th of feb.
After spending the morning running from tour group to tour group trying to make sure that I could go for 4 day instead of 3 which my agency tried to change me to I found a good group with space. There is me and 5 ausies and I am the one that speaks the best spanish, what a change.
So in the morning we went to the Salt flats.
At this time of year there is a thin layer of water covering this huge flat salt covered area, this makes for a spectacuraly reflected landscape and great photos.
In the afternoon we drove in a jeep to the south of the city.
We stayed the night in one of the really remote little towns.

Potosi

Potosi 2nd Feb
Today I went on a tour of the mines in Potosi.
These mines are the reason for Potosis existance and over the centuries millions have died working as slaves in them. They also allowed Potosi grow to be at one stage the bigest city in south america.
Today most of the silver has run out and they are mined as a co-operative. This means that every man is working for himself or in small teams. Since none of them can afford machinary the mining is done with hand tools and dinamite.
They also push out the one tone carts of ore by hand, tiring.
In the main tunnel there is compressed air pumped in but in the small tunnels it can be harder to breath than it normally is at over 4060 meters.

3rd Feb
I went to the mint museum today. This is where coins were minted for the spanish empire from colonial times. The mint was still in use up to the 1950s. They still had the original machines used to press the silver into sheets. There was also lots of interesting art to view there.

More Sucre

Sucre 31st of Jan
Today the students decided to block all the roads in the center of Sucre which made it a really plesent pedestrian city. I walked around looking at all the colonial churches from the 15 hundreds of which there are plenty.
The centre of Sucre is a Unesco heritige site because it is all cononial white buildings.

1st Jan
I got the bus to Potosi in the afternoon.
This is the highest city in the world over 4000 meters high.
It also has many pretty buildings.
I got stuck for a short time behind the same landslide which they were still working to clear properly.