Más Sal, por favor

A quick, but memorable, stop in Santiago with Luis introduced us to Chilean barbeque party (parilla), in fact the sceond barbeque of that evening. Starting at 10, the party went on until 4 and large quantities of beef were converted into some pretty good singing and crazy dancing. The catalyst for this recation was Piscola - a mixture of Coke and Pisco (spirit). We have to thank Luis for taking us to such a great event and putting up with our singing while several drunk chileans impressed us playing English songs on the guitar .

Luis, me and some Piscola

The party helped us to get some sleep on the 24 hour bus journey to San Pedro de Atacama the next day. We jhad been dreading this trip, but actually chilean busus are erxcellent and very comfortable. We woke up in the desert somewhere around Antofagasta, and still had a long way to go.

San Pedro is an oasis in the middle of the driest place on earth. There are vast numbers of tourists here, but most are Chilean. We took a trip out into the Salt Water Lagoons and Ojos de Salar (big holes in the floor of valley, into the salt lake below). I plucked up the courage to throw myself into an Ojo when I had seen the depth tested by a few Brazilians. Our new digital camera was not fast enough to catch me in flight, but did catch the large displacement of water, admired by witnesses of all nationalities present.

In the evening the trip crossed the dry Salt Lake (Sala de Atacama), and again we tried to follow the instrcutions of exactly where to walk to avoid falling through the crust. It was worth following some weighty people across the Sala just to be sure.

The mountains around San Pedro are also spectacular and some observatories are based there, as the sky is rarely troubled by clouds. Today we plan to go into the Valle de la Muerte, and hopefully come out again. In the main square is this Spanish mission, built in adobe like most other buildings here, and dating from the 16th Century. Presumably the Catholics came here to convert the local lizards, who probably weren't expecting the Spanish Inquistion.

Los Chilenos

Buenos de Chile. So far everything here has been pleasantly surprising, and Santiago was no exception. After managing to book into a nice hostal next to the Argentinian embassy, we settled into trying to interpret the local Spanish, primarily to get our hands on the best food possible. This involved several small errors and lots of Nescafe and Chips. The dictionary we have doesn´t seem to correspond to the local spanish.

Plaza de Armas, Santiago

Ignore the reasonable prices and friendliness, and Santiago could be Paris or Madrid. The metro seems to be better than anything in the UK and nightlife abounds (not so good after 10 hour time difference). Luis, a Chilean friend of Otso´s, invited us for lunch in the business quarter and I had a quick three courses for 2 quid. Digestion took place in the funicular and a cable car up onto the hills around town and we realised just how enormous Santiago is, sprawling outwards in a big valley.

Looking for quick trips away from Santiago before heading north, we went to the coast. Valparaíso is where the Chilean Navy is based and their HQ looks like a chateau dressed up as a wedding cake. It is an obviously colonial town. In fact, the area we´re staying in is the old Bristish quarter, and looks far more Bristish than most of even New Zealand and Australia. The local houses and church look like they´ve been transplanted from Bristol. There is also a lot of German influence here too, including a Lutheran Church. Looking around the town I realised how much the British helped to prize the Spanish out of Chile - Half the places around the town are named after Irish or Bristish independence heros. This might have had something to do with Chile´s mineral resources, rather than Bristish altruism. A relationship based on mutual backscrubbing still appears to exist - a look around the Navy museum found a letter from Margret Thatcher in pride of place, agreeing to help stop the Argentinians get hold of too many weapons. Speaking of the devil, also in a fairly proud postion was the edict declaring the reasons behind the 1973 military coup (Gen Pinochet et al.). I still think Chile is very divided over this, some being very proud of Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda, who both died shortly afterwards, and others backing Pinochet. I saw a soldier using his spare time to peal socialist propaganda from a wall in town. Anyhow, this is only my first nieve impression of history in Chile.

Cerro Allegre, Valparaíso

Pelicans, Viña del Mar (Valparaíso)

Puerto, Valparaíso

The next stop will be an oasis in the Atacama desert, without the aid of a camel.

The stinking, steaming heart of New Zealand

In a fit of sleeplessness due to travelling across the Pacific faster than the speed of light and thus arriving before I left - here are some pictures of the throbbing mass that is the centre of the north island. We visited briefly and looked down some smelly pits. This is in fact the main attraction of Rotorua. We managed to find a campsite with en-suite geyser and volcanic baths.

After this, it was with great sadness that we finally let our camper van go, and you can see how attached we had become to it below. This left us to look around Auckland.

We stopped in a hostal - with real beds! Above is the view of Auckland from Devonport, a ferry ride accross from the city centre. Incidentally, we did go up the tower pictured and watched as someone threw themselves off the top (using a rope and harness) - something people here are very into. We decided not to try this ourselves.

In fact, as a final demonstration of how sporting and optimistic New Zealand people are, here is a picture of a preist trying to convert an ostrich. I am told that this mural is based on a true story.

A fush - My Kingdom for a fush.

Here are some pictures from our arrival in the North Island, and trip up from Wellington to Napier on Hawke's Bay (the East Coast - Wine country). The wind farm we passed is the largest in the southern hemisphere just outside Palmerston.

Well, I finally caught a fish. The trick is to use lots of bait - preferably as smelly and rancid as possible. Here I found some defrosted prawns that were about to walk away from a riverbank near Napier. After the fish stealing the bait several times without getting caught I tried some smaller, nastier hooks and caught myself a pair of diminutive mackerel. Next time I will bring a barbeque. These were then used for bait, which were quickly stolen by some larger, cleverer fish. From the picture you can see how late it was by the time I caught these.


The toen of Napier was completely rebuilt around 1932, thanks to a sudden burst of zealous revolutionary art-deco creativity, prompted by a strong earthquake. It has two full streets of art-deco buildings and some great touches in the street furniture and parks. It reminded me of Miami beach, but thankfully the food here is a lot better and no-one has a complex about drinking alcohol. In fact the Hawke's Bay wine region surrounds Napier. So off we went wine and cheese tasting at a vinyard as close to a campsite as possible, . The photos of the wine tasting were too badly taken to be displayed, not sure why. We crawled out of the Clearview Estate at about 5pm.

Only a week or so of our trip to New Zealand left, and the Volcanic parts of the country are next, then up to Auckland.

Attack of the variable oystercatcher

Happy New Year from an unexpectedly sunny New Zealand. After being washed out of the Glacial West Coast by a large portion of the several meters of annual rainfall, we went north to Gentle Annie's point. Here we shared in the local hippie lifestyle and managed not to harm any fish in their estuary. However, we did get some very nice green mussels from the bay though whilst visting the blowholes at Pancake Rock. We chilled out, walked down the beach and watched the sunset over the Tasman Sea.

A quick ride over to the Able Tasman National Park and the next few days have been so hot I was cruelly tricked into snorkelling in the sea. Despite the local scenery being lush rainforested islands and green seas - looking much like Koh Kanta in Thailand - the sea currents between the two NZ islands are viciously cold, and I was frozen after just half an hour snorkelling around the musselly rocks. So drained in fact that I wandered into a nesting ground of orange beaked variable oystercatchers and now I understand that variable refers to their tempers, not their plumage.

A less cold and dangerous way to see the coast of Able Tasman is by Sea Kayak. Lou and I went on a guided trip across to fisherman's island and back along the rocky coast, which is covered with manuka and titrees. It has been so hot that we had to get indoors after the trip to miss the peak of the afternoon sun. After this we went down to see split apple rock, and watch some unattended dogs get in a pickle with the local mob of oystercatchers.

Shortly we will leave the south on a ferry over to Wellington in the North Island. Thankfully even the area around the ferry terminal is a beautiful national park with long coasts and remote campsites. Yesterday we camped in the Marlborough sounds and watched the sun go down whilst fishing in the bay.