Amiable Arica

Aríca nestles in the crotch of sandy mountains sloping down to the Pacific.

It's really weird to lay on the beach, cerveza in hand, and look to the left or right and see mountains touching the ocean.

But, as with Iquique, Aríca spreads out along the Pacific, with the Andes surrounding the city.

The Andes dips a big toe into the Pacific.

The big piece of rock pictured was the site of many a historic battle in Chile. The top hosts a museum and several pieces of ancient military hardware. Good viewpoint, but the path to the top is almost straight up.

With it being got as hell here, getting up there was too easy. It's not too bad in the shade, where the temperature is around 74 degrees. But the sun is unbearable. And the path to the top, and everything up there, is lies naked under the sun.

In the city, everyone walks in the shade -- one side of the street is empty, one side is full -- the side with the shade.

The biggest part of Aríca lies north of the big rock. To the south lies this small resort area, which is a little more relaxed.

Stayed in a hostale, somewhere in between a hotel and a hostel (which is more like a dorm party place for young backpackers), run by old French folks. Kind of weird talking in Spanish to someone with a French accent. Especially troubling was when they threw an English word into the middle of a sentence.

The first night, I was talking to the owner. He was saying my Spanish was very good, as a courteous and overly generous business would say to a tourist. A little chit-chat ensued, and I asked why he thought my Spanish was good, as I had only just arrived. He was talking about my e-mail to him requesting a reservation. I was following him pretty well -- and then bam -- he dropped a word that stopped the conversation. I didn´t understand and he couldn´t get around it, so we moved on. I got my key and went to my room.

About 15 minutes later, it hit me. He was saying, as he was speaking Spanish in a French accent, e-Ma-el. I was searching for something in Spanish similar to it, but couldn´t find it. The problem is, they pronounce all the vowels down here. He wasn´t saying e-Ma-el, he was saying e-ma-il, only the i sounds more like an e in Spanish.

It's happened a few times -- English words said with a Spanish accent thrown into the middle of a Spanish sentence knocked me for a loop every time.

On Sunday, the only commerce taking place during the day was the obligatory outdoor market.

Just like Iquique, most of Aríca takes Sunday off. A couple of Internet places are open, a couple little shops and the gas stations. Otherwise, everything else is closed until the restaurants begin to open in the late afternoon.

Unlike Iquique, Aríca has a market about a half-mile long. Nothing but these little tented joints selling all kinds of cheap stuff.

Pretty much spent my time here lying on the beach drinking a cerveza, eating, lying on the beach, touring the market, lying on the beach. It was tough.

Chillin' in Chile

Ahh, this is the life. Lying on the beach, cerveza in hand and the Pacific at one's feet.

After hours of sand and rock, the bus descends rapidly down to Iquique, on the northern Chilean coast. A most welcome sight -- a city and surf.

Five-star hotels litter the center of Playa Cavancha, Iquique also boasts a gigantic duty-free port center, and most everything is insanely cheap.

Have no idea what they are, except that they´re carrion fowl -- and they dig chilling on the coast.

Stayed at the Hotel del Profesor, a dingy little joint costing $15 a day set up by the University of Chile for its professors who travel. Didn´t see any.

Did find the pub across the street, serving lomo saltado sandwiches. Some kind of sliced pork on a giant bun -- $2.50. Cerveza? Pint drafts of Cristal, a giant South American brewery, went for 75 cents.

Tsunami warning posters hang inside many places in Iquique, and street signs point the way to safety -- most point up hill.

Met three Chilean kids, somewhere around 20, as we were all leaving the same beer store with more or less the same purchases. Same on benches in a plaza, replete with fiesta of some sort and required too-loud music, a couple blocks from the hotel.

Iquique apparently gets a lot of Bolivian tourists, a few Peruanos and a bunch of Chileans, but few Americans or Europeans. The kids were fascinated that an old gringo could talk a little Spanish, drink a lot of beer -- and would talk to three kids.

This is the plaza I drank with the kids at, the next day.

The youths fiercely disputed my claim that Paraguayan women were, on the whole, better looking than Chilean women. They didn´t dispute the claim in relation to the other countries I mentioned.

Sunday was amazing. EVERYTHING was shut down until almost 3 p.m. A few tiny convenience stores started opening, and a couple of Internet cafes. A bunch of restaurants opened about 5. Otherwise, everything else remained closed. Chileans put the chill in chillin´ out.

Just deserts

The road from Paraguay to Chile runs through the pampas of Argentina and up the Andes into Chile.

Who knew? Not me, sure as hell.

There´s a gigantic stretch of desert that runs through most of northern Chile into southern Peru.

This desert spans much of the Andes, and the altiplano, or mountain plains, from Bolivia and Argentina west to the sea.

Sand and heat. More sand and heat. And the sun is strongest down here in the late afternoon.

Actually, Wiki says it´s two deserts -- the Sechura desert in Peru and the Atacama desert in Chile. According to NASA, National Geographic and other sources, Wiki says, the Atacama is the driest desert in the world.

I had the obviously enviable please of riding a bus from Salta, Argentina, to Calama, Chile. The run crosses the pampas of Argentina until it begins climbing the Andes.

Rocks! After hours of sand, rocks were a welcome sight.

It was actually pretty awesome. Hours and hours of sand, sand dunes, sand mountains. Then some rocks.

Occasionally, dusty little towns pop up -- and when the bus stops, three or four people pile in selling drinks, empanadas, ice cream and fruit.

The view screamed photos, but they´re tough to take from a bus.

After passing all this, I got to Calama, a small town with a plaza and cheap beer and food. Otherwise, there´s not much to mention about it -- except that it´s the launching pad for the ride to Iquique, and the beach.

¿Paraguay? ¿Por que?

A mom and her fam hang out at the Plaza Independencia in Asunción.

OK, the play on words doesn´t snap, crackle or pop -- it would have been better could one say, para que, or for what? -- but it gets the message across. There is absolutely no reason to go to Paraguay.

Yes, the women here are on the whole the best looking women amongst those in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Peru. But that´s about it.

Took this pic of a shanty town and its football field about 40 yards from the Palacio Legislativo, the Congress -- the actual building, not the grounds.

Poverty is apparent everywhere here, and to the worst degree I saw among the aforementioned countries.

There were small tent cities on the outskirts of small towns on the bus ride from Brazil to Asunción. Many of the tents were made of black plastic bags.

Vendors popped on and off a 30-minute city bus ride. The kid in the front is selling tickets to a concert and the guy behind him, in blue, is selling packs of sewing needles.

People jumped on the bus and sold pineapples, other fruit, drinks, juice, gum and phone chargers for cars.

Things are dirt cheap here. So they make up for it by using Guaranies. 100,000 guaranies are worth $20. A pack of smokes goes for 4,000 guaranies. About 90 cents. The half hour city bus ride from my hotel to the bus terminal was 2,300 guaranies -- 47 cents.

Of course, they had the obligatory protest march over something or other.

The protests here are a little weird. Numerous small groups hold their own rallies in various spots, and each march independently to a central location.

Once all together, there are angry speeches and a bizarrely high number of vendors selling food, drinks and whatnot. But they seem to enjoy having their say and I have yet to see any violence.

In any case, there certainly is no there there in Paraguay.

Boa Brazil

Jungle boy takes a break during our 8-day thrashing of Brazil.

Brazil may never be the same.

Eoin flew in Saturday to Sao Paulo and we spent most of the next 8 days touring southern Brazil in a rented car. And drinking beer in little towns. And doing our share of chowing down on local fare.

All done in Portugese, which is not understandable at all, a touch of Spanish and much sign language.

Eoin grabs an empanada, kind of a cross between a taco and a meat knish, in some hellhole in southern Brazil.

The prices of stuff and the size of the towns make Sao Paulo and the rest of the southern nation seem like two different countries.

In Sao Paulo, more than 12 million people, we ate two steaks and drank about 10 beers each ~~ for 145 reais -- or about $65. A decent hotel near the city center was 99 reais -- about $45.

In Cantagalo, a tiny town halfway from Sao Paulo to Iguazu Falls, we stayed in a hotel for 40 reais ~~ or maybe $18. We ate a bunch of shish kabob some guy cooked on a little wood-burning grill outside his tiny store, and drank a shitload of beers -- for 23 reais -- maybe $10 or $11 total.

In Assai, we suffered our worst breakdown in communication of the whole trip. Basically, it seemed they were giving us two menu choices. We picked the second, with a liter of local beer. They brought a buffet to our table, with the beer.

Flank steaks, curried chicken, rice, pasta, pepper rings (like onion rings, only with red papper), salad, chorizo sausage, and some other stuff.

The final bill? 23 reais -- maybe $11.

El gringo loco´s usual smart dress contrasts vividly with the red dirt of a farm, cut through here for the highway.

And they have red dirt here. The dirt roads, the fields, every -- the dirt is very, very red. Sweet as hell.

In the middle of nowhere stands this Eiffel Tower, with some Portguese signs for context.

Halfway back, going from Guariá to Paranepenema, we passed this one-twelfth scale Eiffel Tower. On this highway with nothing for 50 miles. Someome at some time planned to build some kind of resort and only got as far as the tower and a nice wall out front. Weirdest thing ever.

Iguazu Falls

 

Iguazu Falls, on the border of Brazil and Argentina, is sweet as hell. There´s at lest a half a mile of falls.

 

Eoin came over for a week, mostly to drink beer and lie on the beach.

 

 

Macchu Picchu

The mountain at the rear edge of the village, Wayna Picchu, looks like the head of Pacha Papa, or Father Earth, lying down and looking up at the sky. The right end is the forehead; the middle is the nose; the left is the chin.

Macchu Picchu, The Lost City of the Incas. Some pretty amazing stuff here, especially given that it was built about the time Columbus was sailing for America and was only used for 100 years.

Not especially high up by Incan terms, 7,875 ft. above sea level, Macchu Picchu was built by people who didn´t use the wheel. At all. Seriously. Don´t know if they didn´t know about it, but everyone says they didn´t use it. Hauled all that stone everywhere up there without the use of the wheel.

Everything was built on levels, with the most religiously important higher up and the less important people living lower down.

Most of the stone walls are built without cement, or mortar. They just cut the stone so well and the stones fit together so well they didn´t need mortar. And these walls, now mostly 600 years old, have withstood numerous earthquakes.

When the Spanish came, and were trying to wipe out the Incas, they couldn´t find this place. The sites they did find, they destroyed. Even some of the paths between sites were destroyed. So Peru´s pretty lucky to have this intact.

In their building, the Incas incorporated the stone around them into everything -- or sometimes just yielded to the Earth -- and went around a stone outcropping.

Tourism today threatens Macchu Picchu more than the Spanish did back in the day. They´re pretty touchy about where people walk, and freak a little if someone steps on a wall. Understandable.

They also restrict how many people can walk up Wayna Picchu everyday to 400 -- 200 at 8 a.m. and 200 at 10. People race to get up there early -- 6 a.m. -- and many walk up, leaving at 4:30 a.m. We took a bus, got there at 7 a.m. and got tickets for the 10 a.m. -- but it rained like hell about 15 minutes before and washed the walk out.

Upcoming

Lake Titicaca, from Puno in Peru and Copacabana in Bolivia.

Snow-capped mountains overshadow any smaltzy roadblock on the way to La Paz.

Rallies are a dime a dozen in La Paz, but boy, these guys don´t like Americans.

That Irish passport sure comes in handy sometimes.

The Inca Jungle Trek

Here´s the gang -- from the left, Jans and Claudia from Germany, Daniel from Switzerland, Miranda the Brit, Melissa the Canadian, Geert and Kornelius from Holland.

The Inca Jungle Trek sounded appealing because it starts with a four-hour mountain bike ride from Alfamayo, somewhere in the mid-3,000 meters elevation range, down about 1,500 meters elevation over 80 kilometers to Santa Maria, a small town in what they call the high jungle.

This trek also appealed because we stayed in hostels three nights and the price was half what others pay to sleep in tents.

Our guide Leo goes ahead to check with men working on the mountain path wheter it´s OK to pass. It was.

The second day was up and down hill and dale, and mountain and higher mountain, on tiny little paths perched on the closest thing to a cliff there is. Long day of walking past fruit trees -- banana, mango, papaya, aloe vera plants and all kinds of birds and lizards.

The jungle in a jungle home converted to tour rest spot was amazing. These folks know how to cook -- but I didn´t want to know what was in it.

El viejo rides the trolley car across a river on the second day of the trek.

We had the option of walking a short distance over a bridge, or taking this manually powered trolley across the river. The kids voted for the latter, of course.

There´s a rope attached from the bank on either side to the cart. Leo went first. We pushed him out as far as we could, then he pulled himself over the rest of the way. He pushed the cart back, and we reeled it in. We did that a few times, and a guy who lives nearby pushed the last cartload, and we reeled em in, and off we went.

The third day, we climbed ladders more than 100 meters long made of tree branches.

The third day was bizarre. Four hours of walking in the morning rain along railroad tracks. Rocks and wood. Four hours in the rain. Yuk.

After lunch, we climbed Mount Putucusi -- a tad higher than Macchu Picchu and directly across from the Incan landmark -- for a sunset view from above. This was no easy task -- check out the enlarged view from above -- you can´t see the top of that damn ladder. There were only four of them, but they were steep and slippery.

And of course, the ladders being slippery, someone had to fall. Luckily, someone else had my camera.

That is, of course, a setup pic. We stood on a rock on top of Putucusi and jumped up -- silly, but it looks cool.

Sunset pics from a mountain also sounds cool -- till you have to descend in the fleeting light.

 

Putucusi from Macchu Picchu. Check out the town, Aquas Calientes, at the bottom right.

I thought I got more than my $225 worth just from the first three days of the trek. Then, the fourth day was Macchu Piccu. More later.

Paucartambo

Paucartambo, a small river town on the eastern edge of the Peruano Andes.

Spent a weekend in Paucartambo, a five-hour bus ride on rocky dirt roads through the mountains. Not much to the town, except for a festival in the summer when the people all wear crazy costumes and celebrate some Incan thing. The rest of the year, life seems to revolve around the river.

 

The bus ride to Paucartambo had too many sheer-drop cliffs to worry about after a while.

As with the rest of Peru, Paucartambo folk live behind big gates.

Unlike Cuzco and the other towns I{ve seen, many gates and courtyard doors were left open in Paucartambo, and you could catch a glimpse of the inside. Sometimes, some things are better left behind closed doors.

Dirt courtyards were the center of the housing complexes, many with goats or chickens. People cooked in big pots on wood fires in the courtyards, and hung meat out to dry on clotheslines. They said that after five days, the meat would keep for a month.

The people were very friendly, and while used to seeing muchos gringos in the summer for the festival, it was obvious they didn´t see too many the rest of the year.

One old boy, very drunk with a mouthful of coca leaves -- which they use to stave off hunger pains more than anything else -- serenaded me through town in Quechan, a very old, indigenous language, to many a laugh from the locals. The more they laughed, the more excited he got.

Finally, on the bridge in the middle of town, I turned around and said, "No mas, Waiky" -- and his eyes bulged and he coughed out a wad of gooey coca. No mas, of course, means no more in Español, and waiky is Quechan for brother. He must have thought for a moment that I understood more, and I took the opportunity to move on down the road.

Old-school laundry in Paucartambo.

As for the food? Didn´t eat much. Not only did people up the length of the town wash their clothes in the river, as above, but I saw at least 50 people carrying five gallon buckets of water from the river to their home -- and a couple of small restaurants.

Most houses are not on any kind of sewer system, and the people use the water straight from the river. Que sera, sera.

Holey mackeral

This manhole cover was missing on the busy Avenida del Sol for five days.

One of the more bizarre aspects of life in Cuzco is the number of holes in the street and in sidewalks.

They are everywhere. One needs to watch one´s step, or you´ll go down in a hurry.

Sometimes, the hole is the result of collapsed cement.

Some of the holes in the sidewalks are only a few inches deep. Others are a foot or more. Enough to lose a shoe, or break a leg.

There´s no telling whether this piece was taken, or if it broke.

None of the locals seem to notice the holes. They walk or work right past them, without batting an eye.

Half of the holes in the sidewalks are missing utility box covers. I think they´re mostly water control access boxes.

This manhole cover near my host family´s house has been missing more than a week.

Theft must rank as a top probability for the missing manhole covers. It might be the same gang that was robbing the lids in Elgin.

Some thoughtful soul placed a large rock in this hole.

Someone eventually puts a rock into a hole, which cuts the chances of serious injury. Sometimes, it´s a piece of wood over the hole.

The top manhole had some kind of construction material stuck in it for a few days, an apparent attempt to help motorists. The bottom manhole had four sizable rocks around it for three days.

Strike 2!

Every cause holds a parade, usually passing the Cathedral on the Plaza de Armas.

A rolling series of strikes stopped work in Cuzco again Tuesday, with the General Confederation of Workers of Peru calling it a National Day of Protest.

I don´t know if anyone knows exactly what these strikes are aiming to achieve. The strikers parade in droves, with different causes as their objective. All want jobs, but some dislike food additives, some dislike imports, some dislike government rules.

Most of the unionists looked pretty hard core, which is an international phenomenon.

Every street corner had delegations of workers by type of job, the market, candy vendors, newspapers, construction workers, political parties, traders, transporters, university students and more.

The union claimed that that 90% of workers joined the action, and I find that highly suspect. There simply weren´t that many people out anywhere.

Cops were ready, carrying shotguns, tear gas launchers, shields and more.

There wasn´t any trouble reported anywhere, except for a couple of burning tires left in intersections.

Once again, traffic was extremely light, as commerce was discouraged in general. But most restaurants were open, and tourists don´t need much else.