roganjosh

The cachaça festival in Parity was excellent entertainment but once the alcohol disappears hanging out on tropical beaches in the rain starts to get a bit depressing. To mix things up a bit I headed to the pantanal with travel buddy Liz in search of sunshine and wildlife, which we found in abundance. In Bonito we went snorkelling in the Rio Prata, swimming along with hundreds of fish, and a one point a caiman. Further into the pantanal we went fishing for piranhas, rode around on horses and even saw an armadillo – which made the whole trip worthwhile for me.

After all that countryside I decided to take a side trip to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil built from scratch in the 50´s. Some of the Oscar Neimeyer buildings are very cool, the future as seen from the past, but the city itself is a bit strange. Entirely designed for cars and buses it´s almost impossible for pedestrians to get anywhere easily. I hear it´s a nice place to live, but 24 hours and a city tour was enough for me to feel like I´d seen everything.

Having taken a 20 hour bus trip to get to Brasilia I was glad to find a cheap flight to Rio that cost about the same as the bus would have done. Rather than 17 hours watching some portuguese movies I had a two hour flight, with food, and the most amazing flyover of Rio as we arrived into the city´s domestic airport. As the sun was setting we flew in past Christ the redeemer, turned for a view of sugar loaf and then circled around the bay, feeling like we were skimming the water as the plane came in. An exciting way to arrive, and having been a little bit over travelling for the last couple of weeks I was suddenly really looking forward to exploring Rio. When the weather is nice it´s an amazingly beautiful place, a city with beaches and rainforest, and mountains keeping all the different neighbourhoods apart. I´ve been into a favela, visited Christ, hung out on the beach, watched the sun set over the mountains and then moonlight sparkling off the bay, drank caipirinhas, watched a local team play football in the Maracana stadium with samba drums pounding the game along. There´s been a couple of rainy days too when not much happens, and a couple of hungover days which are much the same, but for the most part Rio has been a really great place to end my trip. I´ve stayed in a nice hostel, met up with old travel buddies and met some great people to go out drinking with. I just about feel like I could carry on from here if I wanted to, go and explore the amazon maybe, or head back to Argentina to visit Patagonia, but all good things have to come to an end, and now it´s time to come home. Ah well, there´s always the next trip…

Apart from a few convenient flights and a solitary train trip the last couple of months have been bus journey after bus journey; from hours driving through the deserts of chile to breakdowns in Peru, bone jarring roads in Bolivia to the luxury of Argentinian coche cama and finally an uneventful tourist bus in Brazil that´s delivered me to the Atlantic beaches of Paraty. By far the best bus journey on my coast to coast adventure was the last one in Argentina, from Buenos Aires up to Puerto Iguazu. I had a seat that fully reclined, my own TV screen with a choice of 6 movies, steak, wine and champagne before bed! 16 hours flew by, and I was a little disappointed to finally have to get off. Puerto Iguazu and the Iguazu falls were even better than that bus journey though! The falls were just amazing and I had a beautiful sunny day to wander around the park surrounding them on the Argentinian side. I was prepared to be underwhelmed by a couple of waterfalls, but the Devil´s Throat is an enormous wall of energy in liquid form, being thrown down a cliff to instantly bounce back up as driving rain that drenches all onlookers. It was just stunning to watch it in action from above, and then stupidly fun to go on a speedboat tour that takes you into the spray from below!

As much fun as Puerto Iguazu was I woke up the next day to pouring rain and decided to make a break for sunny brazil – only it´s been non stop rain in Brazil since I arrived. I spent two days in Sao Paulo, which must be a city full of hidden gems, because I didn´t find any of them, before reaching Paraty where the drizzle is somewhat offset by the fact that there´s a rum festival going on here! Everyone is walking around with tiny little tankard shot glasses slung around their necks so that they can taste all the different types of cachaça on offer at the festival stalls. One shot costs 1 Reai, which is about 33p. I´ve yet to see a ´please drink responsibly´ sign at the festival.

The festival ends tomorrow and with no sign of any improvement in the weather forecast for the next week I´m not sure whether to stick to my original plan of travelling along the coast to Rio. Not long till I´m home now!

Getting out of Bolivia proved harder than I expected, either because of misunderstandings or unhelpful bus company representatives, depending on how good you think my Spanish is. I spent a cold day in the Bolivian border town of Villazon before I realised that the bus I needed to catch actually left from the Argentinian town of La Quiaca across the border. The bus to Buenos Aires leaves from Villazon, but I wasn´t going there, so maybe that´s why the girl assured me that I just needed to wait in the wrong country all day. Anyway, the next day I crossed the border on foot, found the right bus terminal and then promptly missed another bus while having breakfast because my guide book assured me there was no time difference between Bolivia and Argentina in July, when in fact there is. After all of these minor cock-ups, and another couple of hours trying to find a sunny spot to sit in out of the wind, I was hugely relieved to finally get on a bus bound for Salta. I didn´t even mind that the bus wasn´t heated, that the window rattled and they didn´t serve any food. Well, I didn´t mind much. I did think it was a bit odd that they showed a film about terrorists plotting to blow up 50 buses, but I´ve seen some very strange films travelling in South America.

Salta itself was civilisation! Streets filled with shops, and cafes – mostly shut on the Sunday I arrived, but it was still a nice town, and the main plaza was a good place to hang out. Best of all the restaurants served fantastic steak and wine! I fancied going on a couple of tours, but most of them sounded like things I´d already done in Chile and Bolivia. Having just reached a sensible altitude I wasn´t keen on going back up to 4000m and visiting a salt lake! I did take a tour down to Cafayate though, seeing some amazing red, rocky landscape on the way, and then tasting the local wines. I even had some cabernet ice cream, which tasted bizarre to start with, but had grown on me by the end. Back in Salta I also ran into Jeff who was on his way up through Argentina to Bolivia to meet back up with Steve in La Paz. I was tempted to join them, but Argentina was all new to me and I had to press on to Córdoba.

Córdoba was like a larger version of Salta, but without the cute plaza. I visited the childhood home of Ché Guevara, and it was nice to read about his backpacking adventures that led to him meeting Fidel Castro and finally being shot in Bolivia. I met some pretty cool people in Córdoba too, but none that inspired me towards revolution. It´s probably different if you´re travelling around on a motorbike.

After Córdoba I travelled by super-cama coach down to Buenos Aires and finally experienced the wonderful Argentinian buses that everyone had been talking about – The seats went completely flat and they served wine with the meal! I also unexpectedly bumped into the mexican brother and sister that were on the same trip to Machu Picchu as myself and Amy! There´s been a lot of bumping into people in South America… Anyway, we shared a cab to a hostel and that evening ended in some drunken karaoke before they flew off to Iguazu.

Buenos Aires is a big place, so I´ve spent the last two weeks checking out a couple of different areas. To start with I was staying in the centre of town, which has nice pedestrian shopping streets, fancy malls and plenty of coffee shops. Then I moved out to San Telmo which is a much artier part of town, with plenty of grafitti and art galleries. I stayed in the Art Factory which is a very funky hotel/hostel decorated by lots of different artists, and a good place to hang out, unless you happen to be in the lobby when kids rush in and rob everyone! Luckily I wasn´t; I was upstairs drinking and so missed the excitement, but everyone was a bit nervy after that. San Telmo certainly felt a bit dangerous at night, but during the day it was a great place to wander around, especially on a Sunday when the main street turns into a huge market and people are tango-ing in the main square. I also had some insane steaks in De Nivelli on Defensa – Ordering for four people you would get a 2 foot long slug of lomo steak, an entire tenderloin! Mmmm…

Fancying a slightly less ´exciting´ part of town to live in I headed to Palermo, which is far more refined than San Telmo. Palermo Soho in particular was great fun to walk around, again with loads of cool shops, but there are also dozens of parks in the area, and I enjoyed wandering around the Japanese gardens before wolfing down some sashimi – you can´t have steak all the time! Near Palermo is Recolleta, which has the famous cemetary where Eva Peron is buried. It seems a little strange to visit a cemetary, and even to enjoy it, but it was an amazing place to walk around. The mausoleums are immense, like miniature houses, or in some cases catherdrals, and you are essentially walking along streets lined with dead peoples´ homes. After spending nearly an hour in the quiet it was strange to walk outside and be faced with a McDonalds and a street full of bars.

Yesterday I moved hostel again, just to try out another place, and I´m back in the centre of town again. I spent today walking around the renovated dock area of Peurto Madero, where the old red brick wharf buildings have been tastefully turned into chains of Hooters and TGI Fridays. Tomorrow I might try and visit the La Boca neighbourhood in the morning, but in the evening I´m booked on another full cama bus to the Iguazu falls – my last stop in Argentina, and my crossing point into Brazil! Argentina has been great, but I´ve heard tell of Rum festivals and life drawing in Brazil, so I guess it´s time to move on!

After all the excitement of rushing through Peru I took some time to hang around in La Paz and recover for a week or so, which gave me plenty of time to realise that La Paz is a really odd place! For a start it´s the highest capital city in the world, but built in a valley, which I wasn´t expecting. It doesn´t really have much in the way of large shops, but it makes up for this by having everything for sale on the streets. I saw men hawking overcoats and parasols, merchandise slung over their shoulders. I saw a guy selling two sizes of hula hoop, just walking along the street looking for customers. You can even buy dried llama foetuses to bury under your house for good luck. The city is full of shoe shine boys who walk around hassling you if your shoes aren´t shiny enough, and they all wear balaclavas. Old Bolivian ladies in traditional dress push wheelbarrows full of enormous popped corn around the steep streets, selling it by the bag. People dressed as zebras patrol the traffic lights to help people across the street. Every bank has an armed guard, and I´m not talking about batons and hand guns – you have to walk past someone toting at least a shotgun before you can talk to your bank manager. clerical types set up desks on the street with typewriters and fill in official documents for people. And strange as all of these things are the thing I found most interesting was that they had absolutely nothing to do with tourists! This is just how life in Bolivia goes on. Sure there are loads of tourists in La Paz, but apart from the tour operators that line the streets in some areas the city seems oblivious to all the foreigners.

So I spent most of my time in La Paz just wandering around, drinking coffee, relaxing, but when I heard about Cholitas Luchadoras I had to check it out. A Cholita is the traditional Bolivian woman, dressed in petticoats and a bowler hat, normally seen carrying a huge pack on her back, or pushing a wheelbarrow full of popped corn. Luchadoras are fighters, or in this case, wrestlers, in the best pantomime, staged fights tradition. Put the two together and you get tiny Bolivian women getting into the wring with masked, male Bolivian wrestlers. The fights happen on a Sunday in El Alto, the city built above the valley that La Paz is in, and the crowd is a mix of curious tourists in the front row seats and locals, bringing their kids along to boo and hiss the rudos (bad guys), and cheer the tecnicos (good guys). Most of the fights were just between guys, which were entertaining enough, but not what we came to see. One of those fights did produce the spectacle of Spiderman being set on fire, and having to run out of the stadium (shed). When the first Cholita vs. guy fight happened the woman took a hell of a beating! At one point the wrestler took off his belt and started whipping her with it – but he got his comeupance when she started throwing him against the ropes, and even diving onto him once she´d thrown him out of the ring! The final bout was the showpiece, two teams of one boy and one girl each, in a no holds barred epic. The rudo Cholita was La Loca, who didn´t like it when you called her crazy! Thing was, she was pretty crazy. While attacking her Cholita opponent she picked up a huge bottle of coke from the crowd, sprayed it randomly at fighter and audience, before throwing the other woman into the shocked crowd, kicking in the security barriers and starting to hit her with a chair – everyone scrambling to get out of the way! The fight ended with La Loca turning on her partner for letting the other team win, and then storming out of the ring having thrown him to the ground. She was something of a crowd pleaser!

I did eventually make it out of La Paz, but it took running into my Easter Island travel buddy Sarah to do it. She and her sister turned up in La Paz, and just happened to book into the same hostel as me! We decided we´d all head south for a quick tour, so we visited Sucre, Potosi and Uyuni. Sucre was a nice little city, that dinosaurs left their footprints on, or at least nearby, a few million year ago. After taking a look at those, we moved onto Potosi where we bought dynamite and went into the silver mines. The dynamite was a gift for the miners who work there, so we didn´t get to set any off, but we were underground when someone else did in another part of the mountain – the most almighty booms! From Potosi we wrapped up warm and headed for the salt flats at Uyuni. The salt flats are huge, the size of a small country, but so may tourists head out to them now, and head to the same places on them, that it´s hard to find a spot where there isn´t a group of people trying to take trick photographs of each other. Driving back across the flats as the sun set was amazing though, the ground still bright white as the sky darkens above it.

After the tour of the salt flats the girls headed back up to La Paz to climb mountains and then cycle back down them, while I´ve headed further south to Tupiza, which puts me under 3000m for the first time in a while. Somewhere near here is where Butch and Sundance got shot down, and I´d probably head out on a tour, but it seems like a sandstorm has blown into town or something. It´s windy as hell, and the sky is a strange shade of orange! Think maybe I´ll just hang out watching cable TV for a while. Next stop, Argentina!

Peru was an amazing country, full to the brim with wildlife, inca ruins and political turmoil. I´d imagine that tourists in Peru normally only get to see the first two of those things, but towards the end of my time in the country the strikes and protests by the indigenous community became a bit hard to ignore, given that they effectively sealed off the city of Cusco for weeks at a time! Travelling up to Lima there was no hint of any trouble though. Arequipa was a good starting point, with the big tourist attraction (other than all the hiking and trekking that we ignored) being Juanita, the incan ice princess – the preserved remains of a 14 year old girl, sacrificed on the volcano next to the city to appease the gods. The city itself is pretty impressive, though a bit hard to get a handle on, since everything seems to happen in courtyards off the street. Unless you´re constantly peering into doorways you´d think there were no cafes or restaurants around. The convent of Santa Catalina takes up an entire city block, and made a nice break from the constant stream of taxis that fill the roads, and in the evening we checked out Arequipa´s famous nightlife, which seemed to consist of Peruvian guys drinking until they threw up, sometimes on the seat next to them, without being thrown out of the bar!

The next stop was Nazca, home of the famous Nazca lines. Hundreds of geometric and animal shapes drawn in the desert over a 500km square area. Since the big mystery is why the shapes were drawn so they could only really be appreciated from the air you really have to take a flight to see them at their best. Travelling with Steve and Jeff was a bonus here because three is the magic number for filling a small plane. A very small plane. The flight was pretty fun to start with, but after a couple of tight turns over the shapes – the pilot using the wing tip to point them out – I was starting to feel a bit green, and was glad that it was only a half hour long! The animal shapes are very cool though, particularly the monkey and the hummingbird, but the astronaut was probably the most surprising. A huge humanoid drawn on the side of a hill raising his hand to give you a wave. There´s something of the telly-tubby about him (although he´s probably a representation of a shaman, rather than a children´s TV character, or an alien).

I said goodbye to Jeff and Steve in Nazca and carried on up to Paracas, which has the tag of the poor man´s Galapagos because of it´s huge nature reserve. The Islas Balletas are home to the vast numbers of seabirds that keep the guana fertiliser business going. The islands are spectacular to visit by boat, and I was happily snapping away at the hundreds and thousands of storks, humbold penguins, peruvian boobies, cormorants and assorted other local gulls. There´s also a colony of sealions that like to hang out and have their picture taken while they laze in the sun, fight, or hop into the water. The guys working on the guana harvest seemed happy to see us too, but then we did deliver a 5L drum of Pisco for them to get through.

Next stop was Lima where I met up with my buddy Amy who was joining me for a two week holiday. On our first jaunt into the city we came across a parade of dozens of shrines being carried out of the cathedral and paraded around the square, accompanied by dancers, bands, llamas and groups of men wearing white balaclavas embroidered with moustaches and extravagant chins, who would take it in turns to whip each other. Fearing that Lima couldn´t top that we headed for the Amazon rain forest the next day, to Peurto Maldonaldo, where we had a two hour boat ride along the Tambopata river looking out for Cayman and Capybara. The next day we were looking forward to a hike out to see giant otters in a nearby lake but sadly our one full day in the jungle was a bit of a washout, and the trail to the otters would have been too difficult. Even so we managed a couple of jungle treks and saw howler monkeys, capachin monkeys, a tamarin monkey that came down and ate a banana right in front of us, and on the night trek a barred monkey frog, that everyone handled before being told it was slightly toxic, a tarantula, a wolf spider and as many crickets and grasshoppers than I could point my torch at. Personally I was quite pleased to spot a tapir track, because they´re pretty rare, but since someone else staying at the lodge saw some Jaguars I guess they win. We also saw plenty of mosquitos, or at least saw the evidence of them afterwards.

After the jungle we flew to Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incas and modern capital of the tourist, where we missed out on seeing Inti Raymi (A reenactment of an old incan festival) but we did get to meet up with Steve and Jeff again and give Michael Jackson a decent send off by dancing the night away in Africa Mama´s. Unfortunately myself and Amy had to get up first thing the next day for a bus journey over twisty turny mountain roads to reach Aqua Calientes, the very commercialised village at the foot of Machu Picchu.

It´s just as well that Machu Picchu is absolutely stunning, because the two hours it took me and Amy to walk up to it was horrific. We set off in the darkness at 4:30am and reached the first set of inca steps along with the other early hikers. By the second set of inca steps I was gasping for breath, and found it hard to believe that everyone else was going to spend another hour walking up them. Missing the start of the third steps Amy and myself decided we´d just walk up the road instead, which is less steep, but much, much further. The view of the surrounding mountains was beautiful as daylight started to break and clouds cleared from around the peaks. After another hour or so of walking, and as the bus loads of tourists coming up from the valley started to overtake us, we got our first view of Machu Picchu hanging across the top of a mountain ridge, underneath the peak of Waynu Picchu. The terraces grow out of the surrounding jungle, some of them still left uncleared, and as you get higher into the site you start to reach the houses, temples and schools that the Incans constructed. The stonework, particularly on the temples, is incredible, with giant blocks of stone cut and placed together with absolute precision. Wandering around the place, with llamas grazing the grass on the terraces and out of breath tourists rushing around to get their photos was loads of fun.

After all that excitement we went back to Cusco and discovered that the roadblocks that had been setup around the city and briefly lifted would be back in place just when we wanted to leave! It´s easy to be oblivious to local news about a place you´re travelling in, but the last couple of weeks in Peru have seen dozens of protesters and police killed, and the resignation of the Prime Minister! Most of this has taken place far away from the tourist destinations, but Cusco is the capital of the indigenous people, and there are a number of issues that they´re trying to battle the government over. Since Amy had a flight home to catch we decided that we´d fly out of Cusco to Juliaca and then get a taxi to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, but not before we took a paragliding trip over the sacred valley of the Incas! I really enjoyed it, but it might not have been the best way for Amy to try and cure her fear of heights.

The big draw in Puno is the floating islands of the Uros – artifical islands made from reeds where hundreds of indigenous people live. The boat trip we took out the them was pretty commercialised but the islands are still impressive. Much larger than I was expecting, and capable of supporting houses – even restaurants! As the sun went down it was bitterly cold out on the lake, and it´s hard to believe that people still choose to live out there in huts made from reeds. At least the extra tourist money has bought them solar chargers and televisions to pass the evenings though.

That was out last stop in Peru, and after a couple of evenings relaxing in Copacabana on the Bolivian side of the lake Amy and myself made for La Paz where she flew home in a roundabout fashion. I´m taking it easy in La Paz for a couple of days, but at this altitude rushing around isn´t really an option! Not sure where I´m going to head to next in Bolivia, but I´m tempted to try and follow Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid´s route – I figure those guys must have had some fun!

I´d heard so many stories about muggings, robberies and hijackings in South America that I arrived expecting to be scammed or robbed waiting for my bag to turn up at the airport. Instead Chile has been such a fantastically laid back introduction to South America that the only time I felt in any danger was when the riot police used tear gas to break up a teacher´s demonstration and I got caught down wind of it. Tears and choking aside Santiago was great, all beautiful sunshine and faded colonial buildings. Me and my Easter Island buddy Sarah decided to get acclimatised as soon as possible by joining in a wine tasting session at our hostel, which gave us an invaluable insight into how good very, very cheap wine can be! Red wine was a frequent feature of the trip from then on, along with pisco sours – pisco being another grape derived booze that originated in Chile (or Peru, depending on who you talk to). Myself, Sarah and Sanne (another Easter Island escapee) travelled up to Valparaiso after Santiago, where there were more teachers´demonstrations, and more piscos! Our host at the hostel, Pedro, introduced us to a drink called an earthquake – pisco, orange juice and icecream! pretty good, although judging by everyone else the next morning I´m glad I only had two of them…

Chile is such a thin country that the journey up to Peru is basically a straight line, so after Sarah had left on a 28 hour bus journey to Beunos Aires, the rest of us in the hostel that were going up became travel buddies for the next couple of days. Steve and Jeff joined myself and Sanne travelling up first to La Serena to see the Pisco Elqui valley and sample some piscos, and then up to the Atacama desert to enjoy some scorching hot days and freezing cold nights. We met a guy called Pablo walking along the tiny high street in San Pedro de Atacama, who directed us to our hostel and then became our tour guide for the next couple of days. We knew we´d made a good decision when he started into his first can of escudo at our first stop on the first day! Him and his driver Eduardo were our entertainment after that, but the desert was pretty cool too. Our tour largely consisted of driving somewhere very remote and then jumping into some body of water, be it a salt lagoon, a freezing cold pool (to wash off the salt) or a thermal pool during the cold of the early morning. For me driving around the mountains and canyons of the Atacama was a highlight. The whole place could be a backdrop for an old John Wayne movie, except for the occasional herds of llamas that you pass. After each day of touring we´d spend the nights huddled around the fire at our hostel drinking red wine, which also had to be warmed on the fire to keep it drinkably warm! Man it was cold!

Sanne left us in the desert for her 20 hour bus journey back to Santiago, and myself and the guys have been hopping buses for the last couple of days, from the desert to Iquique in northern Chile, and then on to Tacna in Peru via taxi before another long bus journey to Arequipa, where we´re trying to get our heads around Peru. So far it seems a bit more confusing than Chile, but I think we´ve gotten the hang of crossing the roads that are teeming with taxis now. Next stop, Nazca!

I knew when I booked my flight to Easter Island that May was meant to be the wettest month but I was still a bit surprised when my flight had to circle the runway waiting for a break in the heaviest of the rain for us to land. I even had a brief moment of worry that we might have to be diverted to the nearest other airport… three and a half thousand km away in Santiago! We landed safely in pouring rain though, to a landscape of rolling green hills, palm trees and megalithic statues. I headed out into the rain once I´d recovered from the flight to get my first proper glimpse of the statues in the only town there is, Hanga Roa. I´ve spent so much time in the past messing around with photos of the statues to make daft pictures that meeting them for the first time was like running into old friends. The statues are amazing, and once you start looking around the island you realise that they are everywhere. Most of them were toppled by the locals around about the time that Europeans first started visting the island, but quite a few of the major sites have been restored now. Walking towards the Moai from a distance it´s hard to get a sense of scale, and it´s only when you´re trying to take a photograph and someone wanders into your shot that you realise just how massive these things are! The tallest that ever stood was over 9m tall, and construction began on one that would have stood over 20m tall!

One of the best places to explore the statues is in the quarry of Rano Raraku where the statues were carved. Around the base of the volcanic crater the giant heads of the statues peer out of the ground, the pits they were standing in either filled in by landslide, or by people trying to protect them. Here the statues would have been completed, and you get to see the newest statues that were left unfinished when the production of Moai ended. That it was possible to move the statues around to carve them at all is mind boggling, but to then stare out across the hilly landscape and imagine the Moai being transported across paved roads is almost unbelievable. It´s also interesting that the newest statues are in the style that you normally think of when it comes to the Easter Island statues; elongated faces, chiselled chins and thoughtful expression, but there are huge differences between those and the earliest statues, which tended to be smaller and less extravagantly stylised, or quite squat and rounded. Some of the older statues have actually been found broken up inside the base of their replacements, so it´s hardly surprising that the more modern statues are the ones that people have seen.

The more you see of the civilisation that created and then abandoned the statues the more questions you have, but unfortunately it´s unlikely that any of those questions will ever really be answered. The population of Easter Island has variously been decimated by the collapse of their environment, by slave raids and then by the introduction of diseases when a handful of the slaves were returned to their home. That any of the legends survived at all is quite impressive! Statues aside the island itself is stunning. The green hills, and unpredictable weather start to fool you into thinking this is just like going on holiday in Ireland, until you drive around a corner and suddenly find a beautiful sandy beach surrounded by palm trees, or walk up a hill to come across the most amazing volcanic crater at Orongo, containing a lake covered in reeds so dense a horse can ride across them! Perhaps even more unexpected is that there are even two discos in the town, that don´t even start to get going till 3am on a Thursday! I had one too many piscolas that evening, but luckily the rain the next day gave me a reasonable excuse to lounge around at the hostel all day…

Before the visit I was so excited about going to the island that I tried to not get my hopes up too much in case I ended up disappointed, but in the end I loved it! The statues were everything I was expecting them to be, but the island itself was nothing like I imagined. That the little town of Hanga Roa is still recognisably a place that people live in, rather than just another stop on a tourist trail is incredible when you think that the 4,000 locals host 60,000 tourists every year! Even the weather was amazing. Sure it could rain for hours at a time, and it could even turn from bright sunshine to a downpour in the drop of hat, but I had more good days than bad, and some days were scorching! Maybe May isn´t the month when you´re supposed to visit either but I was lucky enough to catch the local school´s fundraising show, where the dance troups showed off their acts, and to visit the museum on the day when they opened up the basement storerooms and gave a tour (albeit, in Spanish) of the items you don´t normally get to see. I´d always thought that a visit to Easter Island would be a once in a lifetime thing, but man, I´d love to go back and spend a few more hours looking at a line of Moai as the sun sets behind them.

I’m in Tahiti, which is blue skies and busy roads! I arrived in Papeete on a Saturday night to find a hot, humid little town full of gangs of people milling about on the streets and a couple of bars. On Sunday morning the place looked a lot more attractive under the blue sky, but unfortunately the entire place was shut! The only place I could find to get breakfast was McDonalds, where they advertised their foreign-ness by offering une croque McDo. I got out of Papeete to stay in a little hostel on the coast near a beach, which has been nice, but is a bit out of the way. The beach isn’t much to blog home about either, but the water was warm and clear. I think the resorts where the honeymooners stay must have taken all the sandy beaches. I’ve not gotten up to much because travelling anywhere is a bit of a mare – there’s no timetable for the buses and cycling involves getting onto a very busy road that circles the whole island; not to mention the heat! I think this is very much an island where you’re expected to rent a car if you want to go exploring or, more likely, not leave the comfort of your five star resort at all!

So the first two weeks in Japan were all about the food, but the last week was much more about fancy hotels and onsens. The fanciest of the bunch was probably the hotel in the middle of Shikoku where you could take a cable car down to bottom of the Oboke gorge and soak in an open air bath by the river. My personal favourite though was the hotel on Shodoshima where the boys’ bath was in a speedboat and the girls’ was in a yacht – both of which were on the roof of the hotel! Aside from the hot baths there was also plenty more feasting (because all the fancy hotels serve you banquets too), plenty of temples and train journeys and fish kites flying for the boys festival. We even managed to visit an olive grove! My last full day in Japan we spent on Miyajima, another of the top three most scenic places in the country and managed to get sunburnt hiking up to the top of Mount Mizen to get a stunning view of the inland sea. As usual travelling through Japan the list of places that I need to come back and see more of just grew and grew.

All that travelling was quite exhausting though, and by comparison my time in Sydney has been sedate. It’s been nice to have a pit-stop in an English speaking country so that I can get a few of my chores done – I was due a haircut and my shoes have been leaking a bit, that kind of thing. I even took advantage of being in a big city to go and see the new Star Trek film in IMAX! Hardly the most exciting of travelling stories I know, but I’ve been to Sydney a couple of times now, and I can never get very excited about the place! Anyway, I’ve headed a few beaches north of the city now to Collaroy to enjoy some sun and sand and listen to my spanish tapes in preparation for when the serious travelling gets underway! Hasta luego!

So it’s been a pretty foody time in Japan for the last two weeks travelling around with Tony. There’s been okonomiyaki, tempura, yakitori, katsu, sashimi, sushi, mori soba, kushiage and even some Mos burger action along the way, but the two most extravant meals were the Kobe beef in Kobe, and the kaiseki banquet we had in Tokyo. The Kobe beef was superb, it just melts in your mouth – so good we even had it the next day for lunch! The kaiseki meal was fantastic. Several courses of small dishes, each of which was surprising in its own way, either in the presentation or the combination of tastes. My favourite part was a tiny little cube that seemed to contain an entire compressed roast dinner.

Apart from food we had a pretty good time travelling around too. We made it to Osaka (and partied all night), Kobe and Kyoto, and even up to Amanohashidate – a sand bridge between the sea and a lake where you can see the bridge to heaven if you put your head between your legs and look back at the view. It does sort of look like a bridge… I also fulfilled a long time goal in coming to Japan and finally getting my picture taken with Domo-kun! If that means nothing to you then just google it, I’m not sure I could explain.

I’m travelling around Shikoku at the minute, and there’s a lot to see, so I’ve got to rush off now for the next train. So long!

Every year the Japanese like to celebrate the arrival of the sakura (cherry blossoms) by sitting in parks admiring the flowers and drinking sake. Exactly when this happens depends entirely on the weather, and I was a bit worried I’d miss out on seeing this in Japan because the blossoms had come out quite early, and it had been pretty breezy. Luckily Japan is a big place so on arriving in Tokyo I jumped straight on a Shinkansen up to Sendai to meet my buddy Annette, and then on to Kitakame where the blossoms were still in full bloom! There was a long avenue of trees there and hundreds of people wandering up and down taking pictures, or sitting on little mats under the trees for a picnic, which myself and Annette felt compelled to do too, with our one cup sake from the convenience store. As well as the cherry blossoms there were also loads of fish kites strung across the river to celebrate boys festival. Girls just get to arrange dolls for their festival, so I think that the boys get the best festival of the two.

After that it was back down to Tokyo to meet up with Tony. We mainly wandered around during the day to work up an appetite for some exciting japanese meals in the evenings. The shabu shabu was maybe the most fun so far – the restaurant had been done up so that it felt like you were sitting in your own private shack in an outside courtyard where you got to boil some delicious meat and vegetables. We even managed to fit in a sashimi breakfast at the Tsukiji fish market before heading off to Osaka to find some excitement for the weekend. Osaka’s a bit impenetrable at the moment, but we’re hoping to find a laid back bar to get drunk in tonight, and maybe after that everything will start to make more sense.

For my last night in Korea I decided to give the bars a miss and head for a Jjimjilbang – a Korean sauna. It’s always a bit nerve wracking heading into the unknown in a foreign country, especially when you have to do it naked, but luckily I found one with lots of English signs up everywhere, and it’s been excellent! The building itself looks a bit like a 70s leisure centre, but the with far more hot baths. Some contain herbs, some mud, some salt, but they are all very, very hot, with the one exception being the very, very cold bath you throw yourself into at the end. There are a couple of things that set this sauna apart from the ones in other countries. The first would be that in the bath area you can get a korean guy to scrub you down with some abrasive looking sponges if you so desire. Being a filthy backpacker this probably would have been good for me, but I couldn’t work out if you had to pay for it, and I didn’t have my wallet on me at the time. The second thing is that you can spend the night here! Upstairs there’s a restaurant, a PC room, some karaoke rooms, an oxygen room and more importantly, a sleep room where you can crash out on a slim mattress with a blanket. Slept pretty well for about 12,000 won (6 pounds?) and now I’m a stone’s throw away from Seoul station, which is just as well because I have to rush off to get the train to the airport. Bye!

(It was this one, in case you’re ever dirty and sleepy in Seoul – http://www.silloamsauna.com/site_en/main/main.asp)