Chaplin the father

Chaplin - our bunny became the father of ten little bunnies. After two days though they all died though they seemed perfectly healthy. Chaplina did not feed them... We all felt she was kind of weird.


Chaplina must have liked it with us because when taken back to her home rejected all food...She lived with us for a week when Chaplin worked on the little bunnies...

Potosi

Potosi shocks - that is what Lonely Planet has to say about the town located at4100m above sea level. Well for me Bolivia is a shock. Starting from the beautiful salt desert which we crossed staying more or less at around 4000m above the sea level all the time ending on the desolate state of Uyuni and the non existing road to Potosi. Non-existing means that there is no road, not that there is some road in a very bad shape...Anyway we have arrived at 2am after this grueling experience on the bus and checked in to our hostel. By the way the nights in Potosi are freezing cold...The town as such resembles Cusco so in a way it is quite pleasant. As long as you can stand being at 4100meters. On our first day in town we have visited the beautiful Museo & Convento de Santa Teresa where still five nuns live and where there lots of things are just like they were 500 years ago...quite amazing and shocking in comparison to general Bolivian conditions we have seen so far. If you make it to Potosi you should not miss it cause the tours are great!!!

Geneally however, people come to Potosi to see the mines. Sounds innocent until you actually do the "tour". Rita was not so eager since it is generally advised that the ¨tour" is not for people having claustrophobia. She does not have it in a sense but she does not enjoy dark closed spaces. Anyway without much persuasion as soon as we got one of the travel agents offering the tours she signed up...so there we were - next day at 8.30am we should be at the travel agent to start the tour...

Next morning the tour started a bit late with the preparation for the visit to the mines. We got dressed in proper mining gear as you can see on our pictures. Right after that we were transported to the miners market where we were told about the history of the mines etc an we were to buy presents for the miners who we were to meet (we were to visit working mines). It was intriguing but still kind of what could be imagined as possible in the 21st century - meaning that our guide (to the left on the picture below chewing coca leaves) told us that he has been drinking till 5am last morning because on Sundays it is customary and that he offered us 95% sugar cane alcohol (holding it on the picture) to taste and see what the miners drink. Looking back perhaps it was a bad idea not to taste it. Check out the dynamite together with the detonators on the table to the left of our guide!




Anyway he said that buying this alcohol to the miners is a bad idea since most of them have alcohol problems - the same with the buying cigarettes. So we bought dynamite which you can buy just like you would buy potatoes, coca leaves and some soft drinks. It was like buying a Christmas present. We asked about the dynamite since it was kind of weird that anybody could by it together with the detonator just like that on the street. We were told that Bolivia is not like US and people do not blow themselves or others for the sake of it...Obviously Bolivians are different from human species... Then we went to the private processing plants where the first warning signals started reaching our brains...such appalling conditions and lack of safety etc. was not exactly what we expected. I think there is not to add about those pseudo enterprises except that for sure they would win any competition for inefficiency etc.

Anyway our bus took us to the mountain which looks more like a trash dump. We imagined that we will go through some gate or enter something what would at least resemble a mining enterprise. We were very wrong - the mines are private enterprises (locals call them cooperatives)...meaning it is just a hole in the mountain and anybody can wonder into it...There are probably zillions of such holes around the mountain.

Immediately upon seeing what is going on and the black hole in the mountain Rita panicked and proclaimed to me that she is not going in. In a way I was grateful that she did it before entering the mines... I was right about to tell the guide that she is not going in, when she changed her mind and entered the tunnel...The good thing was that our first stop was in a ¨museum¨ where we had some time to get used to the circumstances. The first photo of this post comes actually from this museum - it is the God Tio. In the museum it was kind of dark so we could not follow too much the text next to Tio nevertheless a couple of days after the visit to the mines we have seen an excellent documentary - The Devil´s Miner - where we learned that this ugly creature was created by the Spaniards and is until today worshiped along Jesus in a strange mix of blended Christian and ¨local¨traditions...the story goes like that: at some point when the locals had enough of being exploited by the Spaniards, they went on strike. The Spaniards knowing that locals fear all sorts of Gods created this ugly creature and told them that he will kill them if they do not go back to work...so they immediately did. Since in Quechua letter D does not exist they named the God Tio (meaning uncle in Spanish, instead of Spanish Dios). Nowadays the miners offer him cigarettes, alcohol and coca leaves...

From there on basically because the way was so tiresome it was difficult to panic...there was no time for it. So off we went often crawling through very narrow passages etc. There was so much dust and it was so hot that one did not know what is better - breath through the mask or try to inhale through it what made you feel like in a sauna...with the slight difference that instead of steam you inhaled dust...I have to emphasize again that because it was so tough to move there was no time to think about the dangers etc...


We have seen miners pulling 2 ton wagons, shuffling the stones on them and preparing detonations...we have survived though during the next three days we were not able to walk as our muscles hurt so much from walking two hours in a very awkward for us positions.

About the mines - workers start working there at very young age and die around 40. There is no security nor any kind of oversight over what is going on...It is just unimaginable though only a couple of years ago something like that was happening in Poland near Walbrzych (so called Biedaszyby for the ones knowing Polish) where mines were closed and consequently people illegally started to mine for themselves (there was also a movie made and some articles published in Germany - der Spiegel). The scale is though not comparable - moreover in Potosi this is legalized madness - actually an example of real free capitalism which definitely cannot be encountered anywhere in western world - extremely interesting considering that the country is ruled by Evo Morales who hates US, capitalism and tries to nationalize whatever is possible. Nobody knows how many people are in the mines at one time but definitely over ten thousand. No one seems to care for their well being - perhaps except Tio who they fear so much... I recommend everyone to watch the movie The Devil´s Miner to understand what I am talking about.

The Desert Trip

We arrived to Chile, San Pedro de Atacama after another never ending bus ride. Chile was a great surprise in the positive sense - things were working, on time, service was excellent and in general the feeling was very different from the other Spanish speaking countries we visited so far. Though we arrived to a village in the middle of the Atacama desert you could indulge in all the goodies one can dream of after a long bus ride: a hot shower, excellent restaurants, Internet and an extremely relaxing middle-of-nowhere feel. We did not plan to spend a long time there as the idea of going to the Atacama desert was mostly rooted in the idea of taking a 3 days 4 wheel drive jeep trip through the desert to Bolivia.

So we enrolled to one of the various gorgeous trips around San Pedro to see the moon-like landscape, the sunset and the rise of the full moon. Which was on the other hand preventing us to participate in the famous astrology expedition - as the Atacama desert being the driest place on Earth providing the clearest sky for astrological and astronomical studies. Check out the ALMA project, it makes me feel like starting to educate myself in astronomy and move there to participate in the research. Maybe we have a chance to hitchhike in the Galaxy some day and not rely only on our dearest friends, the dolphins :))) So the following morning we set on a trip for the coming 3 days during which we crossed the highlands of the Atacama desert, arriving to Uyuni in Bolivia.

So on the 16th of October 8am we were on front of the Bolivian travel agency waiting a good half an hour before anyone local arrived - so long Chile, welcome to Bolivia :) We departed finally around 9 am with a bus to the Bolivian border, where 2 jeeps were waiting for us - all together 12 people. The groups quickly developed into an Irish-English only group of 6 and into a more exciting cocktail of 2 Swiss, a Japanese, a Spanish, a Polish and of course one endangered specimen from Hungary. (South-America is also a place where the border guards are staring at my passport and looking for visa information for 10 minutes before admitting that I have the right to exist, moreover to enter their country without a visa.) During the first day we cruised through a volcanic landscape with lagoons colored by different minerals and beautiful pinkie flamingos. We also had the chance to submerge in a natural hot spring, strongly recommended by our guide as we could not hope for hot water for the rest of the trip... But I am not going to waste words on the first 2 days of the trip because I anyway could not describe them better than the photos.

BUT the third day! That was beyond my expectations; we woke up at 4 am to see the sun rising in the salt flat of Uyuni. Imagine 10 meters of pure salt with a surface resembling to a frozen lake except that it had huge cracks over its surface. And imagine that all you can see in 360 degree is the same whiteness with some volcanoes in the distance. And silence. So thick that you can touch it. And absolutely no life. I have never saw my shadow as long as 50 meters when the first rays of light made its way to the horizon! And when the sun finally raised it is so blinding, that you cannot keep your eyes open, it is as hot as in an oven and the sun roasts you despite of the 30 factor sunblock. Crazy. By 7 am we arrived to the Island of Fishermen, which is in the middle of the salt flat full of cactus of 10 meters high and hundreds of years old. We spent hours of staring into the whiteness, making crazy photos playing with the unusual visual effects the landscape offered. Finally we visited a former salt hostel on the edge of the flat which is effectively built of block of salt. To our amusement we came across 3 guys on bicycle crossing the desert and one of them was Polish!!! Yes, there are much more crazy people than we are...

Arriving in Uyuni after 5 days of Chilean and Bolivian deserts was a bullet in our heads and as a result all 6 of us shaken together in the jeep and sleeping in the same room throughout the entire trip decided not to split but collectively escape to Potosi. Only we were quite unprepared to take a bus ride without a road and to arrive to the city situated above 4000 meters, the highest city in the world :)

Argentinean Steak

I have been on the vegetarian diet for quiet some time - first in India and Asia because it was the safest bet to avoid food poisoning or basically nothing else was offered, then in Cusco because there was a general agreement that our cook should cook only vegetarian. All in all our cook did not too much enjoy the situation because she does not know how to cook veg food and I felt like being a rabbit...So the closer we were getting to Argentina the more I was convinced that we should be looking for the real Argentinian steak. For the time being even Rita converted to carnivorous practices.

We started already on the Brazilian side of the border of Iguazu falls where I proudly announced that this is already it - we have found the real steak. My bro and to my surprise Rita rejected my claims and said that this is still not it. I could understand Greg´s opinion but I felt kind of uneasy about my vegeterian wife´s claims about the steak. The blame went to the strawberry caipirinha which both of them were drinking while I was tasting the local beer. Perhaps something was wrong with it.

Further on my way to discover the real steak we moved to Argentina. After the Posadas (San Ignacio) where we did not find anything close to a steak we took another night this time across the northern Argentina to Salta - we ended up there on Sunday and Argentina is generally closed on Sundays. Except some restaurants it is hard to find anything open and the streets look like a giant vacuum cleaner from space sucked in all the people. Only stray dogs hang around.

Once we got there of course pretty quickly we got hungry - so in the evening we have found the most fancy restaurant from Lonely Planet. It took us quite some time to get there but the steak was FANTASTIC. I have never tasted something better. Around 6 cm high, and the size of almost three quarters of my head it tasted heavenly. Together with Argentinian wine and excellent service I did admit that the previous one was not so great. I have never eaten in my life such a big chunk of meat...I also finally learned how a real medium steak should look like...Everyone including Rita eat one of his own steaks...

The next day we went to a more local place again with great wines but our steaks did not match the ones from the previous day...feeling like pigs after almost a week of eating huge steaks at 11pm (since in Argentina the dinner is served starting at 10pm - before that most of the restaurants are not even open) we decided to move on.

This is more or less what we can say about Salta - the city as such is pretty lame but has very many beautiful places around it - we did not have that much time so we only know it from the stories of my brother. But all in all our one year trip is also a culinary trip - we have been eating everywhere whatever local thing there was to it (including marinated cows tongue in Buenos Aires) and sometimes it is better than travelling itself...especially that the food is really cheap in most of the places but still excellent.

So feeling like pigs we set off to Chile - into the middle of Atacama desert and Greg set off for excursions around Salta...this is where we split with him and Malgo...we are heading back to Cusco to our kids...

Iguazu Waterfalls

Having spent a couple of more days than we could actually afford in the mining hills of Brazil we decided to speed up our journey and sat on an overnight bus to Sao Paulo, from where we sat almost immediately on another night ride to the Argentine-Paraguay-Brazil border.

We arrived in the morning like papermashees to Foz do Iguazu, the Brazilian border town. After a warm welcome in our guesthouse by our host who seemed to step out from one of Pedro Almodovar's movies we headed to visit the Iguazu waterfalls. Luckily we passed by the bird park right next to the entrance of the national park and encountered the most lovely creatures of the sky we have ever imagined. There were parrots in all possible striking colors, some of which greeted us with a big 'hola' or 'ciao'. Than there were toucans, with their huge colorful beaks not at all afraid of humans, moreover sitting quite close to us every once in a while pinching us. And we saw butterflies from the jungle with hummingbirds flying around us, turtles chilling right next to crocodiles and other curious creatures of the Amazon.

But the real attraction were the continent's biggest waterfalls, which we approached both from the Brazilian side and from Argentina. On the Brazilian side we took an independent trip in the form of a lazy walk to the Garganta del Diablo, which is basically an iron catwalk from the shore over the river right to the edge where the water bed breaks and the water crashes down to the abyss. To be precise a multiple crashes, as the falls cover a vast area on both the Brazil and Argentina side. Besides the unbelievable energy with which the water explodes when landing in the deep you experience the most perfect permanent rainbows over the water clouds. The noise is so strong you have to shout on top of your voice to make yourself heard and of course you need not to hope to survive the experience without getting absolutely and totally wet just from the water in the air around the falls. We happened to see the falls at the nicest part of the day just before sunset and concluded the long day with an excellent dinner and a couple of cairpirinas, this time with strawberries, not lime, jummmm!

The next morning we decided to accept the lead of out host to the Argentinean side to see the falls from a different perspective, which for me was even more mesmerizing than the other side. We spent almost the whole day walking zig-zag in the park approaching the river from different points and visiting various individual falls and devil's throat from the other side.

We hardly finished the tour when we headed to our next destination with a 5 hour bus ride to cut our journey to Salta a bit shorter. So we arrived at 10 pm to San Ignacio, right next to Pousadas, which are famous of the biggest Jesuit-Guarani missionary 'reducciones' in South America.

Ouro Preto

It was lately hard to find a place to write a post. Somehow internet cafes are not everywhere... One way or the other we made it to Ouro Preto. A small beautifuly preserved colonial town around 10 hours east by bus from Rio de Janeiro. After walking for a bit we found what could be described as one of the loveliest accomodations in quite some time. It was bed and breakfast place run by a lady who served us great breakfast (small papayas that Rita loved) and made a very cosy place for her visitors...we stayed there for two days wandering around the place. Rita bought herself a very nice ring and we found great places to eat and enjoy the hilly scenery. Together with Malgo they have also spent times visiting lots of jewlerry stores and learning about local precious and semi-precious stones like topaz imperial (I am not sure about the spelling though).

We have also visited a gold mine some 40 minutes by bus from the town. It is not in operation anymore but we were told that all together during its years of operations over 30 tons of gold were brought to the surface - quite an amount. The scariest part of the visit was the ride down with a small train - it kind of felt like sitting on a train taking you right down to hell - and we were the only ones on the small wooden train car as right now is not exactly the high season for tourists in Brazil. On the way back we took a wrong bus so it took us two hours to get back to town - due to that we had very little time to see the Gems Museum...the girls were not happy with that...



We have also had a night out since some of the bars are just perfect for a great caipirinha. Rita found a very nice looking bar where we spent the night enjoying this Brazilian specialty. We ended up in some sort of local gay bar together with locals celebrating the local municipality elections which took place the same time. For us the highlight of the elections was the sky train between two buildings where the results were announced.

All in all the ride to Ouro Preto was our first night bus ride and right after it we have actually made 4 more such rides almost in a row. Thanks God that the buses are comfortable so it is not that bad as it sounds. Brazil is beautiful and great to explore this even this way but we already got committed to our next trip to Brazil - this time all over the country but on motorbikes. This is a perfect place for it with lots of small lovely places and extremly friendly people. Probably the most friendly we have ever met. Anyway we will try to get the motorbike driving license before although we were told that here it is not a must...

Rio de Janeiro

Jesus - was the word of the day - and we have seen the biggest in the word art deco monument of Jesus The Redeemer - a bit pricey as to the costs of getting up there but the view of Rio de Janeiro was spectacular. It is certainly true that city is located in one of the nicest settings in the world...

Our adventures started at the bus station where we arrived - I started by fighting with the taxi drivers who wanted to rip us off. Actually we almost missed the bus to Rio because at the last minute in Paraty we decided to rent bicycles and see waterfalls. Unfortuntaley the trip was very much uphill and on the way back we decided to stop at a great restaurant by the road and almost missed the bus to Rio...anyway we arrived in Rio, I had a fight with the taxi drivers and then we eneded up in the hostel in a 9 bed bedroom paying in total EUR 60 for this pleasure...as we have not eaten we decided to get to know the locals a bit more and ended up in surreal place selling hotdogs under the bridge near our hostel. It was purely for real locals but we were so amazed that actually we spend around one hour looking at the people dinning there... We were not brave enough to take out our camera to take some pictures. We were also sure that we will in the end poison us with those hotdogs but somehow it did not materialize.

We have been all around the city and found it beautiful from the point of architecture and little cafe´s - it is a heaven for Rita's constant desire for chocolate cakes. We spent quite some time in them. Of course we had to visit the famours Copacabana beach - and it lived up to its expectations for a beach in a huge city - it also made us understand why the Brazilians always win all world soccer and volleyball competitions. Basically the whole beach is lined up with fields where kids play and train those two sports. Actually what they can do with the ball is quite astounding. The last night Greg and Rita decided to have a coconut drink and both loved it - as you can see below...


As to Brazil - it is still quite a surprise as to how organized and developed this country is. For some reason we expected one more shanty country struggling to put toghether a couple of nice squares and we found something amazing though expensive. This is actually the only bad thing about Brazil - it is expensive to travel around and the places to stay though very nice are also way too expensive in comparison to many countries we have so far visited. It can though be also scary - last evening we took a city bus from Copacana to the bus station where we were to depart for Ouro Preto...the bus took us through neighbourhouds that made as speechless and we prayed that the bus driver does not kick us out...leaving the bus would mean quite interesting problems for us and somehow after all those posh districts we have visited we were not prepared for districts from "Mad Max" movie.

Once more BIG thank you for all donations. We have also created a blog for our BrucePeruCusco center - have a look here and read about our culinary event fundraising...