East Coast Style

I've been more than a little tardy with my blog posts, I'll admit. But we've finally made it to the BEACH, and its hard to pull yourself away from the beach to the computer...

After sky diving, we made our way down to Buenos Aires. Highlights of Buenos Aires were an all-you-can eat barbecued meat buffet and tango lessons. The buffet was ridiculous. I'd say between the 3 of us we probably cumulatively ate the equivalent of a quarter of a cow.

We then took a really fast ferry (it looked like a speeding bullet boat) across an expanse of water to Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay. Uruguaians pronounce it Your-oo-gashz. Montevideo, as seen in the above picture, had a beautiful central square and beautiful sunny weather. We went on a really nice bike ride along the water front to the local beach.

Finally, we took a bus to a beach called Punta del Este. Its like South American's version of Cancun. It was low season while we were there, so things weren't too crazy, but the beach was warm and body surfing was fun.

Tonight we should be making our way into the final country along our journey: Brazil. Hello paradise!

Sky Diving

Bolivia is now behind us, and we've arrived back in a much more modern (and expensive) country: Argentina. Famous for soccer, tango, and beef, I hope to experience it all. 

After a long day and half of busing we made a quick stop in central Argentina on our way to Buenos Aires. One thing that has been on my bucket list is sky diving, and if the price was right, we were hoping to try it out in South America.

The stars aligned, and before we knew what was happening, we were hopping in a cab to take us to the sky diving centre in Cordoba, Argentina.

With a (very) quick instruction session in Spanish, we were apparently ready to hit the skies and make our first jump. Jordan had the honours first, followed by James, and then me last.

When the guide opened the door of the plane and pushed me towards the edge, my heart was pounding through my chest. I really didn't have a chance to ponder NOT jumping, because before I knew what was happening the guide pushed me out the door and I was falling towards the earth.

It was REALLY fun, the feeling of floating in the air, but it was over way too fast. The free fall lasted 20 seconds and then once the parachute was pulled I floated for somewhere around 4 minutes down to the ground. Over all a super fun activity and I recommend it to everyone.

We've arrived in Buenos Aires 2 days ago, and we're planning to spend a few more days here before taking the ferry across the Rio Plata to Montevideo, Uruguay. Tonight we have tickets to a Premiership League soccer match, and then we're going to check out the legendary Buenos Aires night life. It's nice to be back in warmer weather and hopefully we'll get a chance to hit the beaches soon.

The Salt Flats

After the jungle trek, and a day of hard-core downhill mountain biking (which I'm not going to blog about because I don't have the pictures), we headed South towards Argentina. But before we hit the border, we stopped for a tour of Bolivia's huge Salt Flats and a 500 year old silver mine.

The Salt Flats are something like 16,000 square kilometres of pure salty ground. There's no plant or animal life, and only blinding white landscape as far as the eye can see. Its a pretty surreal landscape.

The tour also took us into some very high altitude mountains (12,000 feet) with a desert landscape,  evidence of volcanic activity, red lakes, fumerols, and flamingos. At night we stayed in hotels made out of salt. I was slightly worried a little rain could put a hole right through our salt shelters, but apparently it doesn't rain there too often.

We were also blessed with a fellow tourist who likes to play hearts (card game) which added some excitement to James' Jordans' and my almost daily game of cards.

Our last stop in Bolivia was in a Spanish-built colonial town called Potosi. It was quite a nice place (Unesco listed), with Spanish style buildings and churches and narrow cobblestone streets.

Our main reason for visiting Potosi was to see the silver mines that we heard have enslaved millions of Indigenous Bolivians for hundreds of years. Thankfully that has ended and the mines have run out of silver, but they are still used for mining zinc and other minerals. And the mines are still quite dangerous; around 15 people die working there every year.

 

The mines are really narrow, dusty, and are big. There are about 12 stories of tunnels stacked on top of each other that are connected by a few "elevator" shafts. We brought coca leaves, pop, and other gifts for the miners which they seemed quite appreciative of. The work conditions are challenging, but the miners are paid a high salary by Bolivian standards: about $10 Canadian per day.

At the end of the tour we made a stop at the miner's god, "El Diablo", who they honour with gifts to provide them with good luck and safety.

Currently we're in Argentina's second largest city, Cordoba, but tonight we're taking a bus to Buenos Aires. I'm hoping to take in a football match, and maybe rugby and polo as well.

Jungle Trek

 

Hola again amigos. Due to computer problems (aka my computer refused to boot up) I’ve been a little bit delayed posting. However, a hero and computer genius by the name of Victor saved the day and got my computer working again. So thanks to Victor here is another blog post, short and sweet.

After about 5 days of hanging around the hostel sick, I finally found out about some antibiotics you can buy over the counter and got healthy again for a jungle trek. I spent 6 days in the Bolivian jungle with a group of 5 other Israelis, which was interesting. The trip started out with a van ride down some of the worst roads I have ever seen, but with beautiful views.

Driving down the "World's Most Dangerous Road"

The first day we hiked up the side of a river to our first camp site. The jungle was hot, and the numerous creek crossings were appreciated to help cool our bodies down. The second day our guides led us up a smaller river into a canyon.  The water was really clean, the walls steep, and the forest untouched. 

In the pictures you can see I’m wearing a White dress shirt I bought from the tour guides for $1.50 to help protect against mosquitoes and sun; of which I saw very little of during the trek. It was mostly cloudy and it even rained the third day, making the trip cooler than I was expecting.

The third day our guides helped us blow up inner tubes, loaded all our belongings on to a home made raft, and we tubed down the Rio Verde for 2 hours or so to our next camp site. The tubing was quite fun with lots of obstacles and rapids to help make it exciting. The home made raft was later hi-jacked by some local pirates (below).

Our guides built a bigger home made raft for the fourth and fifth days, which all 8 of us rode on with all our belongings. To my  shock and amazement, the raft stayed together despite some extremely turbulent water!

After the first canyon, our group split into two for the other canyon excursions so that the more confident members of the group (including me) could do some more challenging canyons without being slowed down.

Essentially, we hiked, waded, and swam up fast flowing rivers inside canyons. There were even small waterfalls that needed to be scaled. At a few places in the canyons our Ironman-like guide named Limber had to scale a tricky section first, find a long vine or stick, and dangle it down the river to help pull us up. It was a ton of fun. There was only one time during the canyoning that I thought I was going to die. While climbing across a small waterfall, the current swept my feet from under me and I landed flat on the rocks. Luckily Limber and the other group members grabbed me and dragged me to safety before I got swept away.

However, there was another time that I thought Ironman Limber was going to surely fall. He was cruising up a waterfall, not missing a step despite the raging waters, when he got to an exceptionally smooth and steep section. His feet lost their grip, and he slid for about 15 feet before coming to an abrupt halt on the tiniest of ledges. If he had kept going down the rock face, it definitely would not have been pretty.

I didn’t see too many animals unfortunately, but we did glimpse one monkey way up in a tree, and there were plenty of huge blue butterflies wherever we camped.

Since the last post I’ve been up to a few activities, including an awesome day of downhill biking and a 3 day tour of the Salt Flats from Uyuni. I’m hoping the bike tour company will send me a few photos so I can write a post on that. Either way, a few posts should be coming soon assuming I have access to internet. 

Unfortunately Bolivia has not been very internet-friendly. Tomorrow James and Jordan and I are going on a tour of a working silver mine in a Bolivian town called Potosi. I’m looking forward to it because it is one of the most striking results of Spanish occupation in South America, and millions of indigenous worked at the mine while under slavery.