Buenos Aires, Finally

Woof, haven’t blogged in forever. This is from February 2020

What a lovely city! Arriving in downtown Buenos Aires definitely does not feel like the usual South America anymore. The streets are lines with old European styled buildings with intricate patterns inlayed into the stone. Big trees drape over the boulevards giving shade to the passerbys. There is no shortage of parks and greenery. The whole place is remarkably clean. There’s a good reason it was nicknamed the Venice of South America.

They have some huge trees

To get into my hostel I had to buzz in and open up a colossal wooden and brass door, at least 10 feet tall. The space had been built out of one of the thousands of aforementioned neo-classical buildings from the late 1800’s/early 1900’s. The location was one block away from the famous Congress building, which was unfortunately mostly covered due to renovations. Although I didn’t have too much time to admire the charm of the city right away, as I had arrived on February 2, the day of the Super Bowl in the US, and I needed to figure out where to watch it!

Fortunately Buenos Aires has quite a few American Ex-pats who have opened bars with the usual burgers/nachos/wings type dishes. One of the places I had found that was having Superbowl festivities was called Chicken Bros, specializing in fried chicken sandwiches and wings. It was in the upscale Palermo neighbourhood, which is known for being the English speaking bubble of the city. As I’ve said before, the vast majority of Argentines don’t speak English, and even if they do, they hate it. But not so much in Palermo!

It was a few miles away from where I was at, but it was late afternoon and the weather was gorgeous, I was in a completely new city, so it was a perfect time to go for a little stroll. Now being that it was Sunday, the place felt a little bit strange, little traffic, eerily quiet. In South America everything shuts down on Sundays, apart from some small convenience shops. It’s strange to see places with some prime outdoor seating areas, coffeeshops and bar/restaurants that would be packed on a nice Sunday afternoon in Chicago, completely closed in Buenos Aires. But that was no worry to me.

 I stopped in a park that was centered around a huge tree that spread its limbs mostly horizontally, giving plenty of shade. Under it were small groups of people lounging around drinking mate. Mate is the national drink of Argentina, kind of a caffeinated green tea, drank out of a special cup called a bombero, and special straw called a ‘I forgot’. Argentines are very particular about their mate and it’s very common to see people carrying thermos’s everywhere, as to always have a fresh cup of mate ready! I’m not a big tea drinker to begin with so, I wasn’t exactly as enthralled with the drink as most of the locals!

After wandering a bit more through the leafy boulevards I began to notice more and more restaurants with white tablecloths and fancy names, meaning I was probably in Palermo. I found my way to Chicken Bros, and was quite taken aback to see the crowd spilling out from the bar and onto the sidewalk. An impromptu table was set up outside selling beer to the people outside (that definitely would not fly in the US!) This looked like the place to be! I was mostly surprised because I had hardly met anyone in this part of the world who was even remotely interested in American football. I squeezed inside and saw they had a few projectors set up for the game. No seats of course!

Just a random photo of Chicken Bros when crowded

Outside I met a quite a few Americans who were either working or studying in BA. I don’t think I’d met a single American since Patagonia, but here they were everywhere! As for the game, we all crammed in at kickoff, leaving hardly anywhere to move or to breathe. I didn’t care who won, I was just hoping for a good game, and that’s what we got! This place also offered free shots of tequila after every touchdown (that kind of bar…) so it was getting a little sloppy towards the end of the game. The halftime show was also a big hit, as the Spanish speaking world loved seeing Shakira and JLo do their thing. Meanwhile traditional family values types are writing complaints to the FTC because of all that hip thrusting. Anyway, good for the Chiefs, they were the better team and deserved to win.

The next day I slept in and picked another part of the city to roam around in, the San Telmo neighborhood, which is among the oldest in the city. Narrow sidewalks, cobblestone streets, and little cafes with the classic Porteno style characterize the area. At some point I found a little square with tourist restaurants where Tango dancers performed for the handful of guests, which was fun to watch. I really enjoyed wandering around Buenos Aires! At some point I managed to find the casino, which is located on a pair of riverboats and has one of the most confusing layouts I’ve ever seen! Being that all the poker games are using the massively devalued Argentinean Peso, the stakes were pretty small, .75/$1.50 blinds, so nothing too interesting. I lost all my money to the same fish over and over and over. Total damage: - $200!

I also feel like I should at least note in this post that even though things are nice as a tourist, everything is not great right now for Argentineans, there seems to be lots of dysfunction and you can’t help but think their government has failed it’s people at some level (without knowing anything about Argentinean politics). You can notice this walking around, lines for the ATMs are insane. Lines for buses are down the streets. Same with crowds around any type of government building. Something is off.

lots of fun sculptures around

Tango dances in the touristy Dorrego square

cobblestone streets

little day market with various stalls

view from near the casino

So I actually decided to go play poker in Uruguay for a bit and then returned to Buenos Aires. This time I stayed at one of the mega hostels where the setup is similar to an apartment (but dorms) but of course they nice social areas, a pool and bar, and organize group activities etc. And it’s mostly English speaking tourists, so it’s easy to meet people, something that I hadn’t been doing enough of in the preceding weeks. To be honest, I didn’t really a ton in the next few days, mostly just hanging out at the pool and venturing out for maybe a handful of hours in the late afternoon. I did go to the contemporary art museum one day, the famous Raccoleta cemetery another, and a few of us rented bikes and rode around the city one afternoon, which was definitely worth doing.

Racoleta cemetery

But really Buenos Aires is best for just walking around a bit and enjoying the architecture, parks and cafes. And of course eating steaks and drinking Malbec! My last night there I went out with two English guys at one of the better steakhouses in town. We got there right when it opened at 7, and almost nobody was there. If we had arrived at 9 the place would have been slammed and we would have had to wait an hour or more to get in! Oh and of course it’s amazing to get a huge, melt in your mouth ribeye for $15 and a whole bottle of decent wine for $7 or $8! Even if Argentina isn’t the best place in the world for an English speaker, the value here as a tourist really is amazing!

Porteño style cafe

I wasn’t done with Argentina just yet though! I really wanted to see Iguazu falls, which is in the far north part of Argentina, where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet. It was an 18 hour bus ride or a 1.5 hour flight. I took the flight of course! Seriously some of the distances here in Argentina and Chile are just too much!

Some final Buenos Aires at night shots:

Bariloche

If I had to guess what the most popular place in Patagonia is, I would say Bariloche, nestled in Argentina’s lake district. Gone are the sheer cliff faces, freezing temperatures, glaciers and windswept terrain of the far south. In their place are large expanses of forest, rolling mountains, sunny weather, and tranquil blue lakes everywhere! The most popular season is actually the winter, as it’s South America’s premier ski resort, but the summer weather was downright perfect when I got there, upper 70’s in the afternoon and almost no clouds. There are a plethora of activities to do around town: hiking, climbing, boating, kayaking, cycling, you name it.

It took a bit over 2 hours to arrive from El Bolson and the bus station is annoyingly far outside of town. There’s a bus that takes you into town, but you need a special card to use it, which I didn’t have, so I walked the 2+ miles into town with all my stuff, which is approaching my limit as to how far I’ll lug all my crap around in one trip! Both hostel and the city itself were very pleasant, well kept and kind of kitschy. The streets are lined with an insane amount of ice cream and chocolate shops, which is always a good thing! I made dinner in the hostel and met a couple Germans and a Dutch girl; it was very very nice to be able to speak English again and meet people to do stuff with!

The next day I met a girl from the Netherlands (ive met so many dutch people on this trip!) and we decided to do the Refugio Frey hike, which is just a little lodge up in the mountains. Me and Jet (pronounced Yet) took the easy way, which was a cable car followed by a chairlift to get us nice and high in the mountains. From there we’d only have a little bit of elevation gain to the top of the pass. From where we started my expert navigation brought us scrambling up a bunch of rocks, which we soon realized could not possibly be the real trail, but we kept going regardless and after a few spots with some easy rock climbing moves we eventually made it to the top of this mountain/rock pile and were rewarded with 360 degree views over the whole area! Sometimes the best places are not on the trail at all. Then we figured out where the trail actually was and headed down in that direction.

it’s good thing there is no photo of me attempting to get up onto this rock!

the pass

From there it took us three hours alpine hiking and scrambling with very nice views to reach Refugio Grey. It’s set in a valley with a small lagoon and surrounded by rocks walls on almost every side. Lots of people like to spend the night here to truly soak in the scenery, but I was getting a bit tired of camping, so a daytrip was plenty for me. We ate lunch at the lagoon, which is a very popular spot for young Argentines to hang out, and then hiked another couple of hours downhill back to where we started.

We rewarded ourselves nicely with ice cream and then later a nice steak dinner. We showed up to a highly recommended place at 10pm and the restaurant was still packed even then, it wasn’t until 11 that we actually sat down. Argentines eat much later than we do in the US!  Jet and I ordered two steaks to share, one strip steak and one ribeye, both jugoso (juicy) aka medium rare, as well as three sides, which we didn’t realize were all mountains of food unto themselves! No way we were going to finish it all, but oh well. Both steaks were very tasty, but the ribeye was definitely my favorite with a bright red throughout and beautiful crust on the outside. It cost each of us a little more than $20 including a bottle of wine, very reasonable. It’s crazy how cheap wine is here, even at restaurants you can get a decent red for $6 or $7 a bottle! It’s good living in Argentina at the moment.

The next day I ended up renting a bicycle to do a popular 20-mile circuit that winds along a few lakes, up hills and through forests. It’s a got some nice lookouts plus a few cafes and breweries perfectly positioned to take advantage of the best views overlooking the lakes. It was windy, and bit more exhausting than I expected, but still a great way to spend an afternoon! And that was about it for Bariloche. I hung out with our small English speaking crew at the hostel that evening, left the next morning with a pit stop for one night in La Villa de Angostura (similar to Bariloche but smaller and more expensive) and then went back to the town Puerto Montt in Chile where I’d fly way up north to the Atacama desert.

But that trip to the Atacama desert did not happen! Yet !
Disclaimer: Long boring travel mishap ahead!

So as for Puerto Montt, I arrived there in the evening and would be flying out late the next evening up to the Northern Chile, the Atacama desert. Apparently I had missed out on some protests when I arrived because the streets were clear but I walked into some lingering tear gas. For whatever reason the locals seemed to walk through it okay, but I was all choked up and my eyes were welling up like crazy! I was literally crying ordering a footlong from Subway. After that I checked into my little family hostel and then had all day the next day to kill walking around the city and going to the mall etc. It wasn’t very exciting.

I pulled up ‘puerto montt airport’ on google maps and it looked like the airport is right outside of town, it’s a pretty small city, so that seemed about right. My flight was at 11:30pm, so I waited until about 10pm to catch a taxi. This was much much more difficult than I was expecting as it started to rain; there were some taxis around, but every single one was full! When I finally found one, he quoted me a price much higher than I was expecting. He showed me on the map where the airport was, and it wayyyy outside of town! Hmm. Ok, well its still fine, domestic flight, small airport, late at night, no traffic, all good. Driving along the road, this taxi is going much slower than everyone else and on the uphill part this thing was really struggling. He switched gears and the car just came sputtering to a halt. Noooo!

He tells me it’s fine, he knows what’s wrong, it’ll just be a couple of minutes, blah blah. He pops open the hood and starts jimmying around in there. He even has a bottle of water in the trunk to throw on it. Five minutes turn into ten, then fifteen. I’m getting extremely impatient, he’s getting frustrated, the stupid thing won’t start. He finally gets it going but now we are REALLY cutting it close. We get to the airport in 10 minutes and even if I was tempted to argue about the fare with the break down and all, there was no time! I jogged to the desk, and the lights are off, just one blue collar guy milling around in the background, who I flagged down. Aghh. I guess it closes 30 minutes prior to the flight and I got there a few minutes too late. Shiiiiiit. I already had my boarding pass, so I probably would have made it if I didn’t have to check a bag. Damn. Time for a new plan…

On the plus side, there is still one more flight to Santiago, so I’ll take that one, and then get to the Atacama desert from there! Oh wait, there’s no booking office inside the airport to buy a ticket. I’ll have to book it online with the airport wifi. The wifi is so slow and horrible, I’d get halfway through the process and it would time out. Thirty minutes of this and I was just about out of time. The super nice ladies behind the desk at Latam actually put me on the phone with the Latam office, but they had to put me on hold, and by the time I was off hold it was too late to book the flight. Thwarted again!

I went back online to see what else was available the next day. Everything is EXPENSIVE. Booking last second in South America is awful. I found a flight with SKY Airlines (expensive, but marginally better than my other options) to Uruguay (via Santiago) the next morning. That’s IF I can book it… After a few tries it finally went through, thank god. I had planned to go to Uruguay anyway for poker, so this works out fine as well. I’d do the Atacama later. At this point my best bet is to just sleep at the airport. I’ve got my camping stuff, sleeping pad, sleeping bag, inflatable pillow, so sure why not. And they have rows of chairs without armrests in between them, jackpot! I pick a row chairs, set up my camp, and get a few hours of sleep in.

 I feel a little weird around 7am as people start to flow in and I’m spread out on my row of chair/campsite, but whatever, I’m comfortable, screw it. At 9am I’m finally able to check in, it only takes two minutes to get through security. It’s cloudy and drizzling outside. Around 10:15am the winds and rain really pick up, it’s not looking promising. Frigging Patagonia. At 10:30, when we are supposed to begin boarding there is announcement that the plane we were waiting on had aborted two attempts to land and had to be diverted to another airport. New departure time is delayed by eight hours! AGHGH!!

Well the first missed flight has just led to exponential problems! SKY Airlines won’t tell us anything about what they’re going to do about missed connecting flights, but hey we get a $10 food voucher! Can’t be used for alcohol though, ha. I met a German girl and Spanish guy in the same boat as me to wait it out with in the one and only (and very low quality) restaurant. Eventually I found out that I even though we’d fly to Santiago that night, but we couldn’t get to Montevideo until very late the following day. I ended up cancelling the Santiago to Montevideo flight for a full refund (it was way too pricey) and rebooking to Buenos Aires the next morning. What a clusterfuck. Rebooking to Buenos Aires did save me a good chunk of cash though.

So we finally took off 8pm and got to Santiago around 10pm. I ended up spending the night downtown Santiago, enough time to see how badly the riots had affected the city. It was bad, so many buildings boarded up, graffiti everywhere. But I didn’t have much time spend there, I just needed a good nights sleep and then it was back to the airport the next morning to fly to Buenos Aires. Which I did and it went smoothly! Thank god. Fun times in South America! Sooo uhh Buenos Aires is up next!

Back to Argentina AGAIN: The Lake District

The Chile to Argentina border crossing was easy as usual, and I actually ran into Haviv, the guy I hike with in Torres Del Paine, although he was with an all Israeli mini bus now (shudders). We set up plans to meet in a few days in the town of Barriloche, but if it was going to me and only Israelis, ehh we’ll see. On the Argentina side I screwed up and didn’t have any Argentinean pesos to pay the bus driver on their side of the border, but fortunately I was able to swap $5 with a friendly French couple or else I would have been really screwed!

At the next town I was about to book what I was told was the last seat to my destination, El Bolson, but despite advertising the Visa logo, they only take cash, noooo! I ran to the ATM in the bus station, waited like 15 minutes in line (there’s always a line in Argentina!) and then the ATM kept saying it couldn’t dispense cash, despite the locals in front of me being able to get theirs! Arghghg. As a last ditch effort I was able exchange my Chilean Pesos at a putrid, god awful rate, but got enough Argentinean Pesos to book the last seat on the bus!

After a few hours waiting around the bus station and a few more on the bus I arrived in El Bolson around 6pm.  I read that it was supposed to be (or used to be) a hippie-ish town, but I didn’t really see many hippies, just a boatload of tourists. Unlike the little villages along the Carretera Austral, El Bolson is a proper town. You can’t just arrive and walk around for 15 minutes, see the whole place and pick whatever guesthouse suits your fancy! So after getting off the bus I found a beer garden with a live band and wifi (perfect combination) and looked up hostels. Apparently El Bolson is hopping this time of year, as almost everywhere was fully booked and there was only one hostel on booking.com with open beds, but it was 2 miles outsides of town. Not ideal.

I settled for a campsite a half mile away from the center. Having a tent in Patagonia definitely has it’s advantages! I also spent a good half an hour walking around looking for a working ATM, Argentina’s money situation is seriously messed up. I could only withdraw the equivalent of $35 at this ATM and paid a $10 fee; and that was after waiting 20 minutes in line! Literally insane. Previous ATMs I was withdrawing 45 dollars and paying an $8 fee, which I THOUGHT couldn’t get any worse, but nooo. My biggest mistake of the trip was not bringing down some crisp $100 bills to change here. The ATM stuff is crazy, but if you have benjamins you are in great shape! The official exchange rate is $1 for 60 pesos, but businesses will give you 70 pesos for a dollar or even higher on the ‘black market ’ rate if you want to call it that. Seriously have USD for Argentina!

So with the ATM situation I basically only will frequent places that will let me use a card, which is most of them, but still, it’s super annoying! And of course places like my campsite, buses, tips, street food stands and the like all require cash money. On the other hand, Argentina is very affordable right now because the Argentinian Peso has been so devalued in the last year or two.  You have to feel bad for the locals because for them now it’s very expensive to travel outside of their own country. Which I’m assuming is why these towns are so packed with domestic tourists.

My plan for El Bolson was to get in an overnight backcountry trip, as there are lots of nice trails in the mountains outside of town as well as plenty of refugios/campsites to choose from. I picked a route that is a popular, easy day of hiking up a canyon called Cajon Azul, due to it’s very blue water, and then camping at the refugio. The second day would be a tougher one, 18 miles, including a side hike up to see an icy lagoon, but the last 10 miles would be downhill getting back into town.

Before I could start the hike I had some things to, all of which seem to take longer in Argentina. There was a huge line at the grocery checkout, a long wait at the tourist info booth (just to ask where the bus pickup point is!), and finally another line to register my hike at the trailhead. Then I could finally begin!

It was nice 3 hour hike up the canyon, mostly in the woods, but with some nice views of the river and a few places to stop off and swim. Around the refugio the walls of the canyon steepen, but there’s a handful of inlets that form natural eddies where everyone tans on the rocks and goes for a dip. Pretty cool spot! Lots of cute girls. So many butts! It’s very apparent that Argentinean girls are not shy about showing a little cheek with their bathing suits. I’m certainly not complaining. Although it felt kinda awkward seeing families with teenage girls sporting these popular Brazilian style thongs, but I apparently that’s pretty normal here!

swimming holes everywhere

When I got to the campsite I filled my name in the guestbook, about 30 Argentinians on the page and now one American. Not good for me! I thought there would be more foreign tourists around! At night everyone sat around the fire having a grand ‘ole time, a cool vibe, lots of young people, drinking and singing. Argentina definitely feels the most similar to western culture compared to anywhere else in South America. I don’t think they’re really too hot on Americans though. But yeahhh nobody spoke English and it was tough for me to communicate much so I had to retreat back to my tent and read my book, meh.

I was up at 7am to start hiking the big uphill before the sun came out. After a few hours of some pleasant, but not particular scenic forest hiking, I stashed my bag and hiked/scrambled straight uphill for an hour to see the hielo (ice) lagoon nestled in the snowy peaks. It was pretty, but I was kinda spoiled from southern Patagonia! After I went down and retrieved my bag it was a steep descent back to El Bolson on my least favorite type of surface, hardpan covered in dust. So slippery!

really nice forest hiking

Things like this look more impressive in person!

It’s not cardiovascularly exhausting, but it’s a knee killer! Seriously I don’t feel old, but on the steep downhill sections I certainly realize I’m not in my 20’s anymore.  It’s about time for trekking poles I think. But at least the weather was fantastic the whole time. The only annoying part was crossing the cable ladder across the river – which was a bit sketchy I admit, and you could only do one at a time, but everyone was going soooo slow! This one older woman literally took 10 minutes to cross it, shuffling inch by inch, aghhgh. I practically ran across it when it got my turn, just to make a point, ha. Another two hours or so I was back in El Bolson, back to my campground where my all my other stuff was waiting for me.

I rushed over to the bus company office to get my ticket to Bariloche, as I’d seen what those bus lines were like! It felt like half of Argentina was in this town. After my turn in the queue the first bus I could book was at 4pm the next day. Later than I was hoping for, but yeah its peak season! It was a relaxing evening and then off to Bariloche the next afternoon.

 Sorry for the lack of photos, while a nice place, I didn’t find El Bolson to be very awe inspiring : /

Carretera Austral

Carretera just means Highway, so the Austral Highway is a 1,000 km stretch (600mi) that connects the scarcely unpopulated southern part of Chile. The project wasn’t completed until 1988 and the last 60 miles weren’t finished till 2000, so it’s really not that old. Due to the geography of the area: thick forests, fjords, lakes, mountains, etc it was a massive undertaking! Even now many sections aren’t paved, just gravel. From El Chalten I had two options, take a bus-ferry-hike-ferry-bus combination to Villa O’higgens, the southern tip of the route, or bus further up north on the Argentinian side and connect at Chile Chico (lots of bus time!). Neither were good options, but the Villa O’higgens sounded like such a pain in the ass I went with option 2.

I took the red route to join up with the Carretera Austral from El Chalten

So a solid 17 hours after I had left El Chalten I had arrived in a tiny town called Rio Tranquilo in Chile. You can literally walk the whole town in 10 minutes! It’s mostly known to be the jumping off point for the marble caves, as well as a good place to do some glacier trekking – at a lower price point than some other places in the more touristy parts of Patagonia. So that’s what I was going to do! I checked into a hostel and then booked my glacier trekking and kayaking tour of the marble caves. Maybe less expensive than other parts of Patagonia, but definitely not cheap!

General Carrera Lake, the largest in Chile

The gravel road winding along the lake

I learned very quickly that in this part of Chile, as opposed to the vast majority of more touristy South America I’d visited, basically nobody spoke any English. Usually the hostel receptionist would speak decent English, or at the very least speak slowly in Spanish and annunciate their words cleanly to help you out. Not here though! It was very frustrating. Chilean and Argentinian Spanish is not like the rest of the Latin American Spanish and when they speak it quickly I was pretty hopeless. There were two German girls at the hostel, but they were living in Santiago now and seemed to have zero interest in speaking English. That night I was relegated to the couch while all the other hostel guests sat around the dining table and chatted, bummer.

I woke up at 6am the next morning to get ready the glacier tour. We met at 6:30 and drove 1.5 hours to get to the trailhead. Our tour the guides asked if everyone was fine with them speaking Spanish, I was only person in the whole group who wasn’t fluent/near fluent in Spanish! Of course I wasn’t going to have them speak in Spanish AND English solely on the account of me. But at this point I was questioning whether or not I made a poor decision to do the Carretera Austral.

The glacier in the distance

It looks a bit different up close!

As for the glacier, we hiked an hour and a half before it got too slippery and we had to put on our crampons. Despite doing lots of hiking in the mountains, I’d never actually hiked/climbed up a snow covered mountain or crossed any snow/icy passes that would require crampons. So this was my first time wearing these metal spikes that you attach to the bottom of your boots. You stick into the ice much better than I would have expected! Like you can literally walk up 50 degree ice faces without a problem. So it was a lot fun of to walk around on the ice with the crampons on. And it wasn’t just walking on top of the glacier, there were also a few ice caves that we were able to explore, which were stunningly blue and shiny. I just had no idea what the guides were saying. But overall it was definitely a worthwhile trip!

Guides helping us put on the crampons

And off we go!

I borrowed some sunglasses for the glare ha

Exploring an ice tunnel

pretty damn cool

The next morning I did the kayaking tour of the marble caves, with surprisingly, two Americans. They were from Boston doing some traveling during gap year (what Europeans call the year in between HS and college). Apparently gap year is becoming more of a thing in the US! I mean its not for the overwhelming majority of college aged people, but these two girls were now the third and fourth Americans I’d met so far doing a gap year trip. When I was going to college I don’t think I knew a single person who took time off to travel in between high school and college. Good to hear!

We got set up in our kayaks and had about 20 minutes of paddling to get out to the caves. Gliding through the lake with the mountain scenery in the background was very tranquil. We reached the caves, even though ‘caves’ is a bit misleading, it’s three rock formations, two of them sitting like islands in the lake. Very cool looking! On their undersides you can see the colorful green and blue striations that have formed over thousands of years. The main formation, the Cathedral, you can actually kayak under, but ever since someone carved their name into the rock a couple years ago, they’ve made it illegal to go completely underneath, which was a shame. That’s the whole point of doing it in a kayak instead of a boat!

To be honest I thought the caves were somewhat underwhelming, as I was expecting some actual caves to paddle through and not just a handful of small structures that you can see within a matter of minutes! It’s one of those places where the photos look cooler than the experience itself, so very instagrammable! The girls used our guide as their professional photographer while I was happy to paddle around by myself. But still, it was a nice morning, better than freezing in Chicago!

one of the two formations

underneath!

It would have been cool to paddle underneath, but this was as close as they’d let you go

Not all of it had the lovely colors

looks like it could topple over at any second

I was done by 11am, and the one bus to the next city on the Carretera had already left, so I decided to do a bit of hitchhiking. With hitchhiking there’s kind of an implicit agreement that if you get picked up you should be able to provide conversation/entertainment to whoever is driving, so I felt kind of bad I wouldn’t really be able to fulfil my end of the bargain. I bought a 4 pack of beer to help compensate. To my surprise there was already one couple on the road trying to get a ride, followed by another, and so I took my place in line a bit behind them.

Picking up a ride was certainly not as easy as I had read it to be online! The couple in front of me gave up after an hour, I called it quits after about 2.5 hours, and the one couple who was the first in line was out there for at least 4 hours. I saw them walking around in town later that evening, so looks like everybody got blanked. I’ve hitchhiked quite a bit in remote mountain areas where it’s pretty common, and judging by the amount of open seats in the cars of people driving by, picking up hitchhikers is just not a popular thing to do in Chile! Or maybe we just got unlucky that day, but it was not encouraging! I bought my bus ticket for the next morning.

Image borrowed from the internets, talesfromthehelens.com

Originally I had wanted to make a stop off the Carretera and do this hike to another scenic mountain lagoon, but IF I got off and did the hike I’d have to attempt more hitchhiking to get to the next town, which now I had decided was a bad idea. So it was off to Coyhaique, the largest town on the Carretera Austral, nestled nicely in the mountains. And as we passed Cerro Castillo (the place I’d wanted to stop off at) there were multiple groups of hitchhikers looking for rides. So I think I made the right decision. In high season there are just too many hitchhikers around and I think maybe that turns off potential picker-uppers, because I feel like some people are happy to pick up the one off person, or a couple, but when you have a whole group of them waiting, no thanks.

What I missed out on by not having my own transport :(

In Coyhaique the first two hostels I tried were full, so I found what they call a hospedaje, which basically means someone is renting out some of the rooms of their house, which was fine. The weather was clearing up, so it was a nice afternoon to sit outside and have a beer. But I literally hadn’t talked to anyone since being on the Carretera and it was getting a bit lonely.

The next morning I was a on bus to Puyuhuapi, which is a very small town, but it’s close to the hanging glacier, which is a popular stop on the Carretera. They had one public bus from town to the park, so I was able to get a ticket on that. It’s a 2 mile walk to get up to viewpoint where you can see a waterfall with the edge of a glacier sitting right on top of it. Very cool, although a shame you can’t get even closer. Besides that, there’s another viewpoint from the lake, and that’s basically all you can do in the whole park! I found a nice flat rock on the riverbank to catch some sun and wait for the bus to come back and pick us all up.

Back in Puyuhaupi that afternoon they had a little festival going on, a few live bands, all of which featured accordions! It was kind of fun, it was right on the lake, the weather was gorgeous, and people were dancing and having fun. With this type of music it sounded like we were in Swiss Alps or what I imagined the Swiss Alps to be like! I was kinda surprised a town this small could even host such a thing; I mean the town is absolutely tiny!

festival in Puyuhuapi

After the festivities that evening I went back to my guesthouse because they had Direct TV (thank god), to watch some NFL playoffs. I caught the end of the Chiefs game (boring), then panicked a bit because I couldn’t find the Packers anywhere on the TV guide, but eventually found it on FoxGo in Spanish! I was pretty pumped to be able to watch the game in such a small town, which going in, which I had highly doubted I’d be able to see. Of course my excitement did not last long. I turned it off at halftime. Such a pathetic game. Welp, back to traveling!

The next day was a thorough travel day, 3 hours to one city, wait a few hours for a bus, and then another couple hours to a small town called Futaleufu, which is named for the river that runs along it, one that is very well known in rafting and whitewater circles! I decided to stay at a campground, set up my tent, and went looking for rafting companies to book a trip for the next day. I did find a company that had an American guy on staff, which was nice because I was having trouble understanding exactly what they were saying in some of the other tour offices.

Although I didn’t get great news, the water is dam controlled, and this year for whatever reason the water was unseasonably high. Which meant that only small sections of the river could be safely run until the water went back down. So you could still do daytrips where you’d run the same section twice or others where you’d have to get out and portage around the biggest rapids. Hmm. I still booked a trip the next day, as I didn’t really feel like just waiting around in Futaleufu just praying that river controllers in Buenos Aires would pull their magic lever in the next few days.

We met the next morning, it was two South Africans, a few American NGO workers from in town, and two Chileans. We did the standard safety briefing, and I guess due to the continuous nature of the Futaleufu they’d have a guy on a mini catamaran thingy and a safety kayaker downriver of us at all times in case someone fell out. It sounds like in the rare case you go swimming in the Futa and don’t get picked up, you’re going to be swimming for a quite a while because the water is moving so damn fast. But there’s also very little that could potentially kill you, so that’s good!

We set off in the bright midday sun. The water quality is spectacular, a nice bluish turquoise hue, very clean and clear. You can, and SHOULD drink from it! It turns out the NGO girls were also experienced rafters/kayakers so our raft was moving like a well oiled machine. Basically the opposite of my raft in Colombia! The rapids were mostly 3’s and 4’s, very fun rafting with very little time in between them. I was in the front so I was getting blasted constantly with white walls of water, as it should be! Unfortunately some of the biggest rapids we had to take ‘chicken lines’ around, missing the meat of them, but we still hit some big waves.

The water is so fast that it only took us an hour to get to our pullout point, but it was a good time. We’d lose the three NGO girls and do the same trip in the late afternoon with just 5 of us. That actually ended up being more fun, I think because our paddling was weaker and we got knocked around by the rapids a bit more! So all in all a good day, although it’s hard to not to think about the huge sections of the river that we weren’t able to run with the really high water, sigh... But what can you do?

And after that it was back to the Argentinean side of Patagonia the next day, the side that I like better as it’s cheaper, has more interesting food options, and better beer. If only it weren’t so hard to get money out from the damn ATM’s. The city I was heading to was called El Bolson, which is supposed to be a laid back city with a lovely mountain backdrop and good hiking – like most places in Patagonia!  

Perito Moreno Glacier and El Chalten

The next stop is on the Argentinean side of Patagonia, the Perito Moreno glacier. I booked a bus with Guy to El Calafate, about 6 hours away. The border crossing was very laid back. Fortunately Argentina stopped charging Americans the reciprocal $160 we charge them a few years ago, otherwise this would have been quite costly. In fact Argentina is a great deal right now, as their currency has been devalued greatly against the dollar. Due to the inflation there is actually a cash shortage currently, and what I didn’t know was that you can only take out $40 at a time from the ATM (in this city at least), plus a $6 fee. 15%!! If I had done my research properly I would have known to bring some nice crisp $100 bills and exchange them here, alas. The best thing to do is just pay everything by card.

The first thing I notice when walking in El Calafate was how chic and modernized the shops downtown were compared to other places in South America: stylish boutiques, fancy chocolate shops, high end outdoor apparel, etc. You just had to ignore some of the Argentinian dysfunctions like the long lines at the ATMs and gas stations. And there was a great beer scene as well! There were a bunch of burger and beer pubs with lots of varieties on tap. Artesanal is the Spanish word du jour, basically how we use the word ‘craft’ – artesanal beer, artesanal sandwiches, artisanal turds on a stick, whatever. I was very impressed with the happy hour specials, $1.50 for a pint of good draft beer – but only if you pay in cash. I liked the place immediately! Me and Guy ended up going out for dinner at a very highly rated place, I had huge skirt steak, well marinated and cooked to a perfect medium rare (something hard to find in other part of S. America!!), plus two glasses of wine, for well under $20. Excellent value!

The following morning we got picked up and headed to the Perito Moreno glacier, one of the many arms of the Southern Patagonian Icefield. It’s ice wall towers 200 feet above the sea level, continually breaking off giant chunks of ice (ie calving) as the glacier continually slides downward. In the park you walk along the boardwalk listening to cracks in the ice, hoping to catch a glimpse of part of it flaking off. You hear lots of guttural creaks and moans, but it’s tricky to see the ice calving. We got lucky and saw a big ‘ole piece fall off right in front of us, making a thunderous roar and huge splash when it hit the water! It was spectacular.

first glimpse

happy to have gotten it on camera!

whooosh

We also did a boat trip to get right up close and in person with the ominous wall of ice. In some spots it kind of looks like fingers, reaching up from the icy depths and frozen in place. The color is eerily blue. The ice isn’t blue of course, but it looks that way from the refraction of the sunlight or something. In the photos it’s tricky to get a good feel for how tall the thing is without a frame of reference!

the fingers

We spent one more night in El Calafate drinking craft beers and then it was off to El Chalten, the most impressive spot in Patagonia on the Argentinean side. The town itself is small and super touristy, pricey, and jammed during high season, but I’m sucker for good beer bars overlooking the mountains, so all good. The hostel I had booked was actually overbooked, so they sent me a mile away, all the way at the far end of the main road to a different, much crappier hostel. But whatever, I had a bed and it was half the cost of what I would have paid. And it did have a bakery attached. The owner clearly paid much more attention to the bakery than the hostel itself!

road to El Chalten

So the most famous mountain in El Chalten is Mt. Fitzroy. It’s kind of cool because it dominates so much of the skyline and is easily visible from anywhere around it; unlike the Torres in Torres Del Paine, which are tucked away and have very few good viewing points. I decided to do a one night overnight hike where I would camp near the base of Fitzroy and then hike up to the lagoon to catch the first light hitting the mountain early the next morning. And then pumping out another 18 miles or so to make a complete loop.

a cloudless morning

When I started that afternoon the clouds had rolled in and the tops of the mountains were almost always shrouded, the peaks at least. Sometimes the sky would tease you, making it look like it was about to clear up, but nahhh. After 3 hours I set up camp and decided to go up to the lagoon that evening, hoping maybe it would clear up by the time I got up there. You could see almost all of the mountains, just not the tops, but I decided I would really be kicking myself if I waited till the next morning and it turned out to be really cloudy and you couldn’t see anything!

Damn it cloud, move!! I waited 30 minutes at the viewpoint and this was the clearest shot I had.

Some cool trees

An hour later I was at Laguna Los Tres, and it was buenisimo! Probably one of the prettiest mountain lakes I have ever seen. I thought it was better than the vaunted Torres Del Paine! The mountain chain is just more in your face and imposing than TDP, even if you can’t really tell from the photos. They make you feel very small! And there were very few people around as it was getting pretty late into the evening. It was too bad the damn clouds seemed to cling to peaks like seran wrap! I did get some cool photos of the falcons hanging around up there though! The wind was really whipping, so I couldn’t stay for too long and headed back down to camp. When I got back down and looked up again the clouds had cleared completely, aghgh!

Laguna de los tres

lucky shot

the view from near camp around dusk, clouds finally gone from Mt. Fitzroy

The next morning I woke up 4am and started the hike back up again. It was not looking good as all the mountaintops were covered in clouds, and something would have change drastically in the next hour to be able to see them for sunrise. In Patagonia you never know! It was clear in the opposite part of the sky where the sun was coming up, so we were able to see an extremely red/pink alpenglow on the lower parts of the mountain –it’s actually shocking how bright it was! – and you could only imagine how awesome it would have been if you could see all of Fitzroy and Co. unobstructed by clouds, but that was not the case this morning. Bummer. I hiked backed down, made breakfast and continued the rest of the hike, but it looks like the clouds weren’t going anywhere that day. I was glad I made the climb up the evening before!

Hello from the other side! The sun rising behind us.

Amazing Alpenglow. Really stunning stuff. Stupid clouds though.

The other lagoon on the hike, low clouds still looming

not bad! but you get spoiled after Fitzroy

Back in town that afternoon I took a nice nap and then was able to find the one bar in town that had NFL games! I saw the second half of the Chiefs game, and then I was able to watch the Packers hold on against the Seahawks to get into the NFC championship game. Excellent. The next day I was going to do a day hike, but clouds still hung over Fitzroy, so I was just bummed around all day and then took a night bus to get back over to the Chilean side of Patagonia again. The Carretera Austral. At this point the Argentinean side mostly just goes up through the desert for a long time, while the Chilean side has much better scenery. It’s supposedly remote though, much of this road is unpaved and what little of public transportation they have through this region can be often booked up in advance or unreliable. So I might have to do some hitchhiking! We’ll see! Carretera Austral is up next…

Go Pack

All The Way Down: Southern Patagonia

After Christmas it was back to Lima! I flew via Miami, my Latam connection flight was supposed to leave at 1am, it then got pushed to 3am, then 4, then 8, then finally left at 9am. Brutal. I tried as best as I could to sleep on the floor at the airport. They did give us a $100 cash or $200 Latam airlines voucher for the inconvenience, which I was not expecting. I had only one night in Lima – NYE – which I went out with some of the people from my hostel. But I was exhausted and had to crash shortly after midnight from the lack of sleep. The next day it was back to the airport where I flew to Santiago, Chile, and then all the way to the southern tip of Chile – Punta Arenas.

I got really lucky and had the window seat on the right side of the plane, which is perfect seeing the Patagonian landscape. Probably some the best views I have ever seen from a plane! There are whole swaths of mountainous terrain completely covered in ice and snow leading right up to the ocean. I’m not used to seeing places where the snowy peaks get so close to the ocean, even in the middle of summer! And then there’s the green fjordlands consisting of an impossible number of island chains. Just spectacular. As we reached Punta Arenas everything flattened out and the land was dotted by lakes and inlets. The sun was just starting to set and it was about 10pm!

so much snow!

fjords

approaching Punta Arenas

I shared a taxi into town with a Spanish guy and found my hostel. The hostels here are a bit different than the ones in other parts of S. America. You’ve got main room and a kitchen, but it’s more like living in someone’s home than your normal tourist mega-hostel. No bar and no happy hour from 7-9! The main thing to do in Punta Arenas is to take a boat tour out to see the penguin colony, but it was really expensive and I’ve seen penguins before so I took a pass. The town of Punta Arenas isn’t anything special, it’s rather bleak looking. I couldn’t imagine living here in the winter with only a few hours of daylight! The first thing you notice, especially after traveling in Peru, is the prices! It’s more like traveling in the US than most of South America. I could get a burger on the street for $2-3 in Colombia, here it’s more like $10. I did know this ahead of time though, nobody said Patagonia was going to be cheap!  

In my hostel I met a kind of strange Israeli guy, who when I told him my plans (hiking in Torres Del Paine), he said he was doing the same thing, and asked if he could go with me. So umm, sure? It was a little awkward having someone basically latch themselves on to me for a week within minutes of meeting, but hey you always meet some interesting characters traveling. This guy hadn’t been out of Israel much didn’t really know a lot about backcountry camping or anything like that, so I had to make sure that he would get all the right gear to rent. I kind felt like his Dad. Even in the kitchen he was blown away by the two-handled can opener, apparently they don’t have those in Israel!  

Anyway, back to our plans in Torres Del Paine NP. We wanted to hike the W trek, which is probably now the most famous trek in South America. It’s route shaped like a W of course, and each prong takes you up into some beautiful valleys, with one of them being the lagoon where the park’s namesake (the towers) are located. A few years ago you used to be able to just show up and secure campsites, but in the last few years they all book up months in advance. Some might call it the instagram effect! But talk about a pain in the ass. For someone who likes last minute planning, this was not ideal. Me and Haviv didn’t have any campsites booked at all, so our plan was to stop in the offices that run the campgrounds in Puerto Natales and see what they say.

The W. The black squiggles is the part we weren’t able to do. Oh well.

The next day we took the bus to Puerto Natales, checked in our hostel and headed out to the camp offices. Although we forgot to plan for siesta business hours, they were all closed from 12:30 to 3:30. Annoying! The crazy thing about getting these campsites booked is that 3 separate companies operate camps throughout the park, not just one (like every other single national park in the world!). So for one section of the W you have to book with one company and for another you have to book with a different company. The first office we stopped into had no open campsites (which we expected), but we could stay in one of their tents for $55/night. Nahhhh. The other company we tried was able to give us two different campsites, one at the Grey Glacier, and one at Paine Grande. Excellent! I think we got lucky, but I’m not sure. $11/night.

Haviv had to rent gear, so we stopped in a bunch of rental places, a process that I would have preferred to have not been involved in! If you’ve traveled with Israelis you’ll know why. (Sorry for stereotyping!) After visiting every rental place in town we returned to the place that most acceptable prices to him (also the first place we went) and we were all set! We bought our food for the next few days at the grocery store and we caught the bus to the park the next morning. Although I really wish I would have brought freeze dried meals from the US, you can’t find them here, so pasta and ramen dinners here we come!

Had time for a small hike waiting for the next ferry. Paine Grande in the background

The jagged rocks in the background are called the Cuernos

the view from the ferry

To get to our started point we needed to take a bus which connects to a ferry. Our 6:40 am bus was supposed to link up with 9am ferry, but we stopped for 10 minutes to photograph pumas on the side of the road and missed the ferry! So we had to wait until the one at 11. The ferry took only 35 minutes (and cost $35!) and dropped us off at the Paine Grande refugio. These aren’t just normal campsites, there’s basically a small hotel with a restaurant (for the richers) and then another building to check into if you’re camping, a small store, and a kitchen for the campers – in addition to all the actual campsites. We weren’t staying there until the next night, instead continuing onwards towards the Grey Glacier, 8 miles away. Me, Haviv, and Peter – a German guy also in our hostel, started hiking there together.

The start of the hike. Sadly a forest fire killed off most of the trees around. It gives it kind of an ominous, creepy vibe though.

Paine Grande. Poor trees.

It was an informative hike, as I learned all about Kosher rules from Haviv, who was very strict about that kind of stuff (as opposed to most Israelis I’ve met). No pork obviously, nothing that has been cooked in a pot that has cooked pork, no cheese on top of meat, if you eat cheese before meat you must wait 30 minutes, if you eat meat before cheese you must wait 6 hours, some seafood is okay as long as it has gills and a fin, clams and mollusks are definitely not. The rules are complicated and endless! Anyway after a few hours of hiking we finally got our first view of the glacier, a massive ice wall a few miles away. It makes any glaciers I’ve seen in Glacier NP look like little babies!

Soon we checked in and set up our tents and then had a walk to the viewpoint, which features a bay full of little icebergs. Very cool! The glacier is part of the southern icefield, which stretches for hundreds of miles in this part of Patagonia. Excellent for photos!

First view of the Grey Glacier

Working on my Instagram poses

the iceberg bay

Haviv and I made our pasta + tuna dinner, which was excellent. He’s not a person I would normally spend lots of time with, his knowledge of the world is minimal, he’s very right wing, very religious, believes 100% in Zionism and seems to have a bit of disdain for the liberal Jews living in Tel Aviv. So kind of like a Trumper from a small town traveling abroad. So good on him for getting out there! And he’s a happy go lucky guy, which is more than I can say for myself! But I wasn’t going to get deep into religion or politics with him, I’d like to think I know better by now. Although I think his brain broke a little bit when I said I wasn’t sure if I wanted kids lol. In his world you might as well just curl up and die without the blessing of children! Anyway, we met up with Peter for some overpriced drinks in the restaurant, it’s hard to say no to some brewskies after a hard day of hiking! We also picked up another Israeli guy to our crew, a guy name Guy, from Tel Aviv.

The next morning we hiked up to get a better view of the glacier and caught some strong winds and rain along the way. It’s Patagonia, you never know what kind of weather you’re gonna get! But it was an easy hiking day, as we only had to hike back down to Paine Grande. We took our time and got into camp around 4pm, setting up our tents in the whipping wind. As the name suggests, the campground is at the foot of the Paine Grande mountain, a scenic location, but little protection from the wind. We cooked our ramen for dinner and spent the night playing cards, a game I was just taught, called Cambio, which I really liked as it’s got a good amount of strategy involved.

getting even closer to the glacier

wearing my fashionable hiking poncho

One last photo stop at Grey Glacier

Peter, Haviv, Me, and Guy. These pants make me look like the marshmallow man when the wind blows!

Paine Grande campsite. The yellow tents are the campsite owned ones - not cheap!

last light on Paine Grande

Some cool cloud formations that evening

Unfortunately the next day Peter had to bail out as he hurt his foot and it was only getting worse, so he took the ferry out. To rub some salt in the wound he had $250 of refugio reservations the next two nights, which are completely non-refundable. So me, Guy, and Haviv went up into the next prong of the W, the Frances Valley. We didn’t have time to hike until the farthest viewpoint, which is supposed to be the best, but the scenery was still really nice. On the way down Guy and Haviv argued politics and I kept my distance. By the end of the hike they wanted nothing to do with each other, heh.

heading into the Frances Valley

The Cuernos look a bit different from this angle

We could watch the mini avalanches from here

To link up this part of the W with the last part, you would need to get one of the most sought after campgrounds, which was just not possible. So we returned to Paine Grande and took the ferry back, then took a bus, and then a minibus to our next campsite, Torre Central. What people don’t tell you on the internet is that you don’t need a reservation to camp here! It’s huge and you can just rock up and they’ll let you pitch your tent for $20. Hell if you wanted to you could easily just pitch your tent anywhere and not pay, they don’t really check. Haviv was not happy that we paid $20 when we could have just camped for free! The next day we would do the last prong of the W, the most famous place in the park, the Torres Del Paine mirador!

Hiking into the valley, no sign whatsoever of the Torres

The viewpoint is located about 3.5 hours from Torre Central, and if we were motivated enough we could have woke up at 2am and tried to get there for sunrise. But we were not. According to the forecast, it was supposed to be cloudy until around noon and then clear up – if you can rely on weather forecasts in Patagonia! We reached the top at 11:45am, in a hailstorm. No visibility. Freezing cold. And then 10 minutes later the clouds parted and we had beautiful shining views of all of the towers! It was perfect. This was the first time since the first morning that we had any extended period of time of pure, unadulterated sunshine!

Excellent timing. These mountains/rock walls here in Patagonia are really something else. There’s not many places in the world where the rock faces are so sheer and jagged. We took photos and admired the view for an hour and then giddily made our way back down to camp, packed up and took the bus back to Puerto Natales. A successful trip of Torres Del Paine NP! We did about 80% of the W in total, without making any reservations in advance, not bad!

The clouds parted and this was the view

The sun!

The grande finale of the hike, wooo

The Long Road into Peru

So from Cuenca I booked a bus to a beach city in Northern Peru, Trujillo. We left at 9pm, went through immigration sometime in the middle of the night, and then spent most of the next day riding through the desert landscape of Northern Peru. There were a handful of other tourists making the same journey, so we got to know each other a bit in 20 hours of traveling together! We were all ready for the beach! This place is more known for surfing than actually having nice beaches, but whatever; a relaxation day was definitely needed. Once again the weather was kind of wishy washy and the sea was full of rocks making it tricky to actually wade out into the ocean, so it wasn’t exactly an inspiring experience, but we did have some tasty seafood right on the waterfront! A Swiss girl and I decided to head onwards after just a day, taking a night bus back into the Andes, a mountain town named Huaraz.

some buildings on the beach and then a whole lotta desert

Even though the weather was cloudy and misty, and the city wasn’t particularly beautiful, I actually enjoyed it a lot! It’s a very indigenous town and everyone is wearing colorful outfits and interesting hats. The streets were crowded with people selling their goods and gathering around the breakfast carts. A lot of hustle and bustle for 7am! I liked it. There were ladies sitting out in front of my hostel selling some kind of moss and I had to ask them to move to get into the door. I still have no clue what this moss is for, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people selling moss! I checked into the hostel and fortunately they had a bed available to sleep (SoI didn’t have to wait till check in at 1pm!) When I woke up it rained all afternoon, so that first day was a pretty chill. We did make to the small history museum - only in Spanish though. Me and the Swiss girl had a hike planned out for early the next morning, as you have to do because it’s basically guaranteed to rain every afternoon around 2:30!

the entrance to my hostel haha

If you can’t tell, I loved the moss ladies

some sculptures at the museum

Later that evening we made some dinner together, but the Swiss girl was feeling pretty lousy, but I was able to meet a fun Dutch girl to do the hike with instead. Perfect. We left around 7am and a cart that sold sandwiches of eggs, hot dogs, and avocado. I wish they sold these everywhere in South America! We then found the stop for the collective (minibus) and left with just a handful of passengers. A couple stops later our little bus that sat about 12 was loaded with 20+ people and few on the roof to boot! I had an old woman wedged about halfway onto my lap. It was kinda fun! Most people got off in the next village 20 minutes up the road, and then we were dropped off in 45 minutes at the Laguna Cherup trailhead.

The trail was basically straight upwards, and like most places in the Andes, it helps to be acclimatized! After my hikes in Ecuador I was in pretty good condition, but Chantalle had been at sea level in Lima previously, so it was a bit tougher for her. The hike was a more adventurous one, at certain parts you have to scramble up some wet rocks and they have these chains anchored into the rock to hold onto. It took us maybe 2.5 hours to finally reach the lagoon. It was mostly cloudy, but every once in a while the clouds would clear a bit and reveal some of the white capped mountains looming over the lake. It was a nice place. And we only got a a bit of drizzle, so a successful hike! We found another collectivo to get down and were done by 2pm, literally 5 minutes before the downpour came! Originally I had plans to do a big multiday hike here, but with all this rain I realized I had to scrap those plans. I’m a fair weather hiker!

The next day Chantalle and I signed up for a hike a called the Paramount, which is a hike along a particularly blue lagoon and supposedly you see the exact mountains which the Paramount Pictures logo features! Very exciting stuff. The only caveat is that it’s 3 hours there and 3 hours back. So we set off at 5am and since it was clear that morning I finally got a good view of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range unobstructed by clouds, which were spectacular. But I couldn’t take any photos from inside the bus. By 9am we were off hiking! The lake is a gorgeous teal color, similar to the ones I saw in Banff this summer. It started off nice and sunny, but by the time we reached the second lagoon the clouds had rolled in and we got some rain. It was a cold and wet lunch! Most of the mountains were blocked by clouds unfortunately. Then we walked back out the same way we came and the weather got nice again! Just three bumpy hours back to Huaraz, ugh.

The second laguna, a tiny glimpse of some mountains and blue skies!

Two days later we signed up for the Laguna 69 tour, which is the most famous of the Lagunas in the Cordillera Blancas. We shelled out for a more expensive guided hike which takes you on some of the trails and viewpoints around the lagoon, so a bit more involved than just going straight to the lagoon and back. Of course this was the day we got the worst weather, just clouds and mist and zero visibility the whole day. At one viewpoint our guide described how in the months during the high season you can see 7 different mountains from this spot. Must be nice! We were left with only our imaginations. After a few hours we got to the lagoon in a solid drizzle. It was a nice color of blue, but not like it would be if the sun was shining on it. And then you couldn’t see anything beyond that. It was another lunch in huddled under our ponchos. I was quite happy to go back down as soon as possible. A pretty disappointing day. But I still had a great time walking around the city and taking photos!

The way down, I didn’t even take a picture of the laguna 69, heh

The outfits, and hats especially are great

I was originally planning on going to Bolivia after Peru, but the thought of spending more time in rainy season sounded appalling, so I modified my plans to fly down to Patagonia, where it’s supposed to be prime hiking season! But first I had to get to Lima and then fly back home for Christmas! I didn’t really do anything in Lima besides walk around and eat a lot. Lima has an excellent food scene, so many restaurants with skilled chefs, interesting dishes, and meals of multiple courses for a fraction of what they would cost in Chicago. Some of the ceviches are absolutely terrific!

Cotopaxi to the Coast

Time for more volcano hiking! Next up I wanted to hike Illinza Norte topping out at 5,300 m. I booked a place in a little village near the trailhead, got a taxi to drive me up there and started hiking, but as I was hiking up to the refuge I was informed by the hikers coming down that the owner had locked everything up, sooooo uhh I ended up turning around and going back. It was raining pretty good so I wasn’t exactly horribly disappointed at the time. The next day I switched guesthouses and I was going to do another day hike, but the weather was terrible again so I ended up just staying in the lodge. I ended up meeting some people that night to visit the Cotopaxi base camp with.

The next morning the weather was of course awful, but as we drove our way up the volcano the summit of Cotopaxi actually began to appear above the clouds. A small miracle given the weather the last few days! Our taxi driver dropped us off at the parking lot and we walked uphill for about an hour until we reached the lodge. This is where the people hoping to climb the whole volcano will stay the night before making their summit attempts. From there we hiked another 45 minutes up until where the snow/ice starts before turning around. Unfortunately we couldn’t see any of the other volcanoes off in the distance, but we were still very happy with our weather. The volcano itself is a symmetrically shaped cone capped with ice, it’s very aesthetically pleasing! The way down you can mostly just run on the loose volcanic sand which is quick and fun. And then once we drove down the clouds overtook us and we were greeted with a nice hailstorm! You never really know with this weather.

our crew

all those little white specks on the ground are hail

At the guesthouse I inquired about getting to the top of Cotopaxi, but it sounded like they had a shortage of guides as there was a big independence day in Quito that weekend. Plus I’d have to rent a whole bunch of gear for climbing on ice/snow, combined with the recent weather and I decided to take a pass. After so many cloudy/rainy days I was really hoping to get some sun on the coast. The next day I took a 10 hour bus ride to get to a small town called Puerto Lopez. My travel buddy was staying there so I met up with him again. And of course the weather was cloudy. We thought maybe the weather would be better further south down the coast in Montanita, but nahh. Although Montanita is definitely a party town, so there was a lot of stuff going on at night. Two nights there was enough for me as the lack of sun was really bumming me out.

loading the daily catch

Montanita low tide

The boardwalk in Montanita

Next stop, back into the mountains, the third largest city in Ecuador: Cuenca. I think Cuenca was my favorite city in Ecuador. It’s not so large and spread out like Quito and Guayaquil and it’s got a really nice colonial downtown, cool architecture, it’s clean, relatively safe, and has a good food scene. It sounds like more and more expats are moving to this city.

 The following day I decided to do some hiking in Cajas National Park, which is a high altitude, very green, scrub forest. It looks something like the Scottish highlands, dotted with lagoons everywhere. I took a bus to the park station and checked out my possible routes. On one side of the park was a few shorter but well marked trails while on the other side were some longer hikes with less maintained trails. I told the lady I wanted to hike 6 or 7 hours and she recommended a hike that she said would take about 7 hours. Sounds good to me!

posing for me!

I had to walk a kilometer down the highway and then I found my trail. It was a great start, I saw some wild alpacas just off the road and the sun was coming out for a bit, which is unusual in this place. Plus I had the whole place to myself. After a slight climb I could see endless lakes in the distance. The trail pretty much disappeared, but it doesn’t really matter because the low shrubs and grasses are easily navigable. It’s referred to as a paramo ecosystem, basically the catchall name for tropical mountain vegetation above the treeline. Fortunately the trail was marked on maps.me on my phone, so I just had to stay close to where it said the trail was. Easy enough!

feels like the Scottish highlands (or so I’d like to believe)

After about 4 hours of hiking I got to a large lake, and maps.me has two trails around the lake. I chose the wrong one. The trail vanished again and I was left bushwalking, climbing over rocks, fording rivers, and squeezing my way through overgrown branches in a small forest. I eventually scrambled my way around the lake and was able to rejoin the ‘main’ trail. But it was exhausting and probably cost me at least an hour. At this point the clouds had rolled in and the rain had started. I had lost the trail once again. Although I guess it’s hard to lose the trail if there really isn’t one! Note: from here on out it’s basically me complaining about how awful my day was, so read at your own peril! It’s a lot of whinging.

some very pleasant scenery and weather - at first!

I was basically descending down a small stream with lots of slippery rocks with sticks and branches sticking out everywhere to stab me or catch my poncho. I banged my knee pretty hard and was bleeding now. My shoe was ripped. I had completely given up on keeping anything dry at this point. After crossing a mini-marshland and down climbing a small rock face I was beginning to get a bit worried. Climbing down wet slippery rocks was not how I pictured this hike going! I had no idea where the trail was, but I found a spot where I could get a view, and sure enough I was surrounded on three sides by steep canyon walls and still no trail in sight. This might be the first time I’ve ever felt a bit of panic set in on a hike! I was already imagining having to stay the night on the mountain in a steady cold rain, which I didn’t have the proper gear for. Hypothermia here we come!


I tramped through the brush looking to find anything that looked like a trail. Still nothing. Eventually I found some rocks to scramble down. It was treacherous! It was so slippery I constantly had to slide on my butt whenever I could. This was type of ‘hiking’ that would be so easy to lose your footing and sprain or break your ankle. I was kind of angry that I would even be recommended to do this deathtrap hike! The rain was not going anywhere. I was soaked and cold. The going was extremely slow. But on the plus side I was back on track. After another hour or two it flattened out into the valley and I was able to make it to the ranger station a couple hours later. It was 5pm now and I finally made it to the park gate, it was locked! I was told it closed 4:30, so yeaa, about right.

Next challenge: hopping over the barbed wire fence! I was able to find a low point and scrambled over it, not without ripping my shirt though. And they had all these fuzzy little plants planted at the base which started to burn my skin when I touched them. I really should have worn pants! So now with my legs on fire I still had another 2 miles down the road to get to the highway. When I got there I tried to flag down buses going by, but no one was stopping! What the hell! Normally it’s very easy to flag down a bus and they almost always stop. But this was a 2 lane highway in the mountains with no shoulder, so there really isn’t anywhere to stop. Arghggh. Time to walk down the highway, in the rain, with all the cars wizzing just a few feet away from me. This day just won’t end.

I managed to talk to someone walking up the road and I was informed I’d have another few miles to walk into the nearest town, and from there I could catch a local bus into Cuenca. I’d been walking so long in such miserable conditions that I was basically inured to it at this point. What’s another few miles? Eventually I  found the bus stop, waited 20 minutes, and finally was on my way back into civilization. Another kilometer from the bus stop and I was back at my hostel. I wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower and flop into bed. Although it was eerily dark and the bar/restaurant was closed when I arrived at 8pm. Very strange. At the reception they informed me they had some sort of gas problem so I’d have to pack up my stuff and find a new place to stay for the night! You have got to kidding me.

I haphazardly threw all my crap together and set out to find some new lodging. I ended up at the closest hotel for $35/night. It seemed like a nice place. But of course they didn’t have change for a $50 bill. Of course the credit card fee is 10%. Of course the room is up three flights of stairs. Of course there is no hot water! But eventually I crawled under the nice warm covers and that was the end of the very long, terrible, no good day.

Bonus pictures: The zoo in Cuenca. It was awesome btw!

cougars

Capybara does not look like happy with his meal

Andean black bear

hanging out

racoon?

They had these wire cages for animals to climb throughout the park

show some love for the axolotl

loved the ocelots here

the baby tapir is so much cuter than the adult one!

Jaguar!

and lions too! An excellent zoo, probably the best one i’ve ever been to!

Banos

This little town in Ecuador is known as Ecuador’s adventure sports hotspot, with mountain biking, bungee jumping, rapelling, white water rafting, and lots of good hiking abound. After taking forever to get out of Quito due to the traffic I arrived in Banos in a light drizzle. The biggest attraction around town is the Pailon de Diablo, which means the Devil’s Cauldron, a huge waterfall about 10 miles outside of town. I paid 50c and hopped on the local bus heading that way. There’s actually two entrances, one that takes you on the low side of the falls where you can actually walk under the falls a bit, and one that takes you over the upper section, looking down on the gushing water.

I started on the bottom part, which is the wetter one, but that didn’t really matter much because it was raining already! There’s a rope bridge that crosses the river, giving you a great view of the falls. Then for the high side the weather started to clear up and you take a perfect photo of the water plunging down into the cauldron, as you can see!

The town is named Banos de Agua Santa – holy water baths – because of the thermal springs provided from the nearby volcano, Tungurahua. So of course that was next on my list of things to do in town. There’s a few fancier spas outside of town, but I was fine with just going to the local one in town, which costs $2. You’ve got your picks of four pool, freezing cold, cold, hot, and piping hot. The temperature ranges are a bit drastic, so the vast majority of people tend to hang out in the hot pool, which can get a bit claustrophobic. But still not a bad way to spend an hour or so.

I went to the grocery and loaded up on snacks and dinner supplies for the next night, where I would be spending it at the refuge up on the slopes of the volcano, Tungurahua. The usual way to climb it is taking a taxi up to this small village, hiking up 4,000 feet (1250m) to the refuge, spending the night, and then hiking up another 4,000 feet to get to the summit the next morning. The refuge contains sleeping pads, a stove with gas, and fresh water. There’s a guy that runs it, but he wasn’t there, so I had to the whole place to myself. I was glad I remembered my book, because there isn’t a whole lot to do up there. It started to pour as soon as I got into the refuge, so at least the timing was good! I made my ramen and tuna for dinner, read a bit, and then hit the hay early in anticipation of a 4am start!

summit logbooks

After a night of very poor sleep I was already up at 3:30 and ready to go. From the refuge you had clear views of the lights below in the valley, which was cool, but unfortunately a thick blanket of clouds up overhead. After about an hour of hiking in the dark the views of the city lights disappeared and I was enveloped by the white mist. The hike was a very steep uphill and some point the hardpan and gravel turned into fine volcanic sand, which was extremely difficult going, sliding backwards all the time! All this time the wind was whipping and I had no views of anything. There was even some hail at one point, so really fun stuff! After 4 hours I made it to the crater rim, where you can warm up your hands over the some the heat vents. The way to the summit another 50m over a huge snow drift and up an icy, rocky slope. I opted not to do this last part, being alone and without crampons, but it probably would have been doable. Well I definitely would have attempted it if the weather was nice, but my views certainly weren’t going to change at the summit!

So then it was back down, which was a lot fun sliding down the volcanic sand! That is until the hardpan + gravel part, which was really delicate hiking and really tough on the knees! I packed up the rest of my stuff at the refuge and headed down the other 1300m to get into the village. It was very muddy, so that was also tricky hiking and my knees felt absolutely shredded by the end. There seemed to be no cars at all going by, so I was able to call my hostel and fortunately they were able to send a taxi up to get me! I could have walked all the way down into Banos of course, but that would really not agree with my knees. So all in all, an interesting hike, but the weather was definitely disappointing. I met some people later who also did the hike, but had a clear morning, and their views from the summit with all the other volcano tops visible looked amazing.

My Huawei phone does not take very good photos!

lovely view on the way up

lot of snow at the top!

So back in Banos I met back up with Simon and Michael, the Dutch and Austrian guys I had been traveling with, and we hit the town that night, being it was Friday. Banos actually has a surprisingly good nightlife for a small town!

The next day there was a parade in town, so that was a good way to recover from the night before! It’s actually amazing how many dance troupes they have around Banos! There was everything from traditional Ecuadorian dancing, to swing dancing, to hip hop. After that I headed up to the famous rope swing in town, which gives some cool views overlooking Mt. Tungurahua (on a clear day!). There was a famous photo that won a nat’l geo photo competition of a guy on the swing just as Tungurahua was erupting. They had to evacuation right after that, as the dust cloud was heading right towards the swing. Fortunately the weather was nice and I got some pretty cool photos of the swings.

I’d head out the next morning to do some hikes around another volcano, the most well known one in Ecuador, Cotopaxi!

Quito

The volcano Cayambe looming in the distance

The three of us booked a kind of party-type hostel for two nights, which had a rooftop balcony that overlooked the whole city. We dropped off our stuff and had a walk around the downtown area and the main square, snacking on some sort of white bean dish, topped with onions and tomatoes, chicharones, cheese and dried corn, really good stuff! This would be my 2nd time in Quito, the first time visiting my sister who studied abroad there over 10 years ago now! I didn’t remember the city all that well, but I did definitely remember the famous church, Basilica del Voto, where you can climb these somewhat intimidating iron ladders to access the churches towers, something that probably wouldn’t fly back home in the US. The guys I was with were a bit more weary of these than I was, so I got to rub it in their noses a bit for wussing out!

shoe polishers in the main square

no shortage of churches in Quito!

We made it back in time for happy hour at the hostel to watch the sunset over the hills. They do a community dinner, which was chicken burritos, not very Ecuadorian, but very tasty! It’s the type of place that also does half off shots for an hour and beer pong tournaments, that kinda stuff. We met some girls (Canadian, Swiss, and French) who would join us hiking the next day, six different nationalities represented!

The hike we would do was called Ruca Pinchincha, 4,700m high, but you get to cheat a bit by taking the cable car up to 4,000m. From there its another 2-3 hours to the top. You also get some great views over the city and we could see one volcano in the distance, Cayambe. The girls were happy to only hike halfway up, but us men were not stopping until the top! It gets a little difficult at the end when you have to do some scrambling, but all in all a very nice hike! There were about eight of us who summited all around the same time.

weird birds waiting at the summit

clouds lift for a few seconds!

Success! Although starting to get a bit chilly up there

After the hike we treated ourselves to dinner at Bandito brewing, to get some fancy beers and burgers, and then we called it an early night. The two guys would head to Mindo for a night a or two and meet me again in Banos, which is where I was headed.

Colombia rages and I move onto Ecuador

So after Salento, I’d felt like I had just about enough of the coffee triangle, which I guess is what they call the area – even though it’s actually too high in elevation to produce to commercial coffee! It’s a nice area, but some of these little towns are all pretty similar. Being that I’d already spent a little bit more time in Colombia than I had planned I decided to start heading down to the border. What I didn’t realize was that things were getting pretty heated politically in Colombia. There was a protest against the president/government planned on November 22nd that was originally designed to be a student protest, but it eventually evolved into a nationwide movement with people from all economic sectors getting involved. Even the air traffic controllers would strike for a few hours. Uh oh.

So being that the whole country would basically be shut down on the 22nd I decided that it would be more interesting to be in a big city to witness what was going on. So Cali it is! (It’s the 3rd largest city I believe). I booked two nights at a popular hostel with a pool, that also specializes in salsa lessons – as that’s what Cali is known for. And it’s not known for much else! It’s a bit of grimy town with not a whole lot of interesting things for tourists. It was a bit of a strange first night because a lot of places were shutting down early in anticipation of the protests the next day.

Originally I was going to check out the protests for myself, which were focused in the downtown, probably about 20 minutes walking, but the hostel staff talked me out of it. So it was a pool day. It was definitely a ghost town walking around outside the hostel with almost all the businesses shuttered up for the day, but nothing really going on apart from the odd helicopter flying overhead. In the late afternoon I guess some of the protests got violent and Cali decided to put in place a 7pm curfew until 6am. Around dusk (6pm) you could see groups of protesters walking the streets in our neighborhood and shortly after that some armored vehicles and military in riot gear came down the main road and were tear gassing anyone that decided to stay on it. Then it calmed down for a bit and people in the hostel hung around outside entrance.

the main road

pockets of protestors on the side streets

Up on the overpass about a block away there was a whole bunch of policemen gathered, so I walked in that general direction to see what was going on. There were about 20 twenty protestors yelling at the policemen, and then the policemen started throwing rocks at the protestors, who ran down in my direction. Then blocking the exit some more policemen appeared, trapped the protestors and started beating them with their clubs. One policeman I saw was running towards the scene with his knife drawn, yikes. I was able to slide by with my hands in the air playing the gringo card! And that was enough excitement for me, back to the hostel! It still wasn’t even 7pm yet! The hostel would be on lockdown for the rest of the night. Fortunately everyone was prepared with plenty of booze.

rerouting traffic

the police gathered up on the overpass

The next morning everything seemed relatively normal, businesses were open, lots of traffic on the streets, the buses were running like usual. I was able to book a 9:30am bus to the border, which was supposed to take 12 hours and ended up taking almost 15! Ugh. Normally buses that long I’d opt for a night bus, but I was worried the night buses might be a little more dangerous than usual given the recent unrest. So I got dumped off at the bus station a the border town, Ipiales, just after midnight and stayed at the closest hotel.

Normally border towns have absolutely nothing going for them, and this town was no exception, but 15 minutes outside of town they have a beautiful church built straddling a river in the middle of a canyon, called Las Lajas Sanctuary. So that’s the one thing everyone does before crossing the border, seeing this church. It’s quite the sight! It seems like such an off the beaten path location for such a grand structure.

Las Lajas Sanctuary

After spending an hour looking around I checked out of the hotel and took a taxi to the border, got stamped out of Colombia and stamped into Ecuador. No lines on either side, no questions asked! Definitely one of the easiest border crossings I’ve done! You take a 10 minute taxi on the Ecuador side to nearest town and then they ship you off on a big bus going south, either to Otavalo, or the capital Quito. Since it was Saturday I went to Otavalo as they are famous for their Saturday market, so I’d have enough time to get there for the end of it!

The northern part of Ecuador is mostly indigenous, so the way people look and dress was quite the stark contrast compared to most of Colombia. I always love places where they don’t dress in the usual western style! For me the market itself wasn’t that interesting, as most stalls seem to sell the exact same stuff as everybody else, but it was more of people that caught my eye. The women would usually wear a white blouse with a black skirt and flats, the fringes of the skirts and blouses normally embroidered with some brightly colored lace. The men wore a bit more modern garb, but with lots of ponchos and cowboy hats. It was getting cold towards the end so I picked up a sweater that I don’t have much room for!

In my hostel I met a Dutch and German guy who I’d travel with for the next few days as well as a midwife from Chile, learning midwife techniques from midwives in the Ecuadorian countryside – not your usual hostel tourist! So we had fun drinking and playing cards as Otavalo isn’t the most exciting place, and then me and the Dutch guy did a nice hike the next morning, a mountain called Fuya Fuya which overlooks a really pretty lagoon. And it was a good idea to start to acclimatize to the higher elevations in the Ecuadorian Andes. The first hour I was really huffing, but then it got slowly easier. We made it up to 4,300m or 13,000ft, not bad! Our timing was perfect because as soon as we finished the rains came. Next up, the capital, Quito!

overlooking Mojando Laguna

lunch afterwards

Jardin and Salento

The town of Jardin lies up in the mountains a few hours south of Medellin. I’d read about it in some blogs and it sounded like a pretty nice, mostly non-touristy little town with some fun stuff to do around. The night before I got on the bus I went to some techno club with a Dutch guy who was into that scene (not really my thing, but once again amazing girls) so I was really hoping to get some sleep on this bus. Not happening! 3.5 hours of winding roads and potholes, ugh. I got checked into my hostel and had a walk around town, which you can do in twenty minutes! This whole area is known for it’s trout farms, so I walked just outside of town to have lunch in one. To my dismay the whole thing was deep fried, and served with patacones – fried plantains, so fried food paired with fried food. Very Colombian! It was decent, but I’d much rather have a properly grilled trout with rice and veggies please!

There is also also a cable car that goes up into the foothills, which is kind of neat. It used to be for locals getting up into the coffee plantations, but nowadays they’ve built roads, so it’s mostly just a tourist attraction. I had heard from someone else that it rains every single evening, so I made sure to get back to the hostel when the dark clouds started gathering, and true to form as soon as it got dark the skies opened up. It poured for hours, fortunately some Italians were making pasta (shocking I know) in the hostel and invited me to join in, so I didn’t have to venture out into the storm.

The next day was Jardin’s prime adventure attraction, a waterfall that falls through a hole in a cave, aptly named la cueva del esplendor. You can take a jeep/tuk tuk mostly up to the top and hike the last bit, but I thought hiking all the way up would be more fun. Unwisely I forgot to download the offline map of the area on maps.me, an app that is much much better locating small roads and hiking paths than google maps. So instead I had to trust google maps walking directions. I was heading along a river valley trail when google maps had me veer off it, but there was nothing to veer off to, so I kept going.

leaving town

getting higher up

some houses in the countryside

Eventually I ran into a young Colombian guy on his bike who wanted to walk with me and practice his English, so ok sure. This guy was definitely the weirdest person I’d met on the trip so far, he basically talked non-stop about weirdly deep topics, death, Freudian psychology, atheism, Gertrude Stein quotes, god knows what else. He knew lots of big words, but also his English wasn’t good enough to connect them coherently. I hardly even said anything. He was definitely creeping me out, but I wasn’t sure if I could tell him to get lost without him hacking me to pieces. At some point the trail just ended and the only way left was to go straight up the mountain on some very steep cow grazing land. I powered uphill as fast as I could with him continually asking to wait up, Not happening! Plus he was still carrying his stupid bike. So finally I lost him! whew!

Only problem now was that I was basically lost! Well not totally, I had a vague idea of where I was at on the google maps GPS, and I was on farmland, so I was still close to civilization. I meandered my way up this hill/mountain for about 1.5 hours along muddy cow paths, opening gates lined with barbed wire fencing, just waiting to see what it would look like at the top. It finally flattened out and there was a small ranch where I could ask for directions. There was a guy busy pounding on some horseshoes, and he didn’t seem exactly pleased that I was bothering him, but he told me the path was around to the left somewhere, so that was good enough for me! I ran into one gate that I couldn’t open, but it wasn’t lined with straight wire (not barbed) so I figured I’d hop it. At first I thought it was static electricity as my leg scraped over the top, but no no no! I yelled at in shock (literally  in shock) as this was a god damn electric fence! Fun times!

I did manage to get over it without touching the wire and continued on! Finally I found an actual trail that eventually had a signpost towards la cueva! Another 45 minutes later and I was finally there, over 4 hours of hiking when I expected 2, haha. Unfortunately you can’t go straight to the waterfall by yourself, you’ve got to wait until a park ranger takes you with a small group, but the walk down to it straight through the jungle, and it is a pretty amazing sight. The water literally falls through a hole in the roof of the cavern. The sunlight hits the rising mist and creates a cool rainbow effect as well! And because I walked so much faster than the rest of our group I had a few minutes to enjoy it all to myself and take a few photos before the selfies en masse. You an also swim in the pool, but it’s in the shade and the water is freezing! I was one of two people that took the plunge, but I did not last long! We stayed and admired the place for about 45 minutes and then headed back up.

pretty damn cool spot!

This time I took the path that actually leads to a real road along with a Mexican guy that I had met earlier. Supposedly you could take a tuk tuk once your reach the next small village a few miles away (which I was eagerly hoping for!!) but no such luck. We’d have another 5 or 6 miles walking back into town – all downhill though. This almost screwed up my plans, as I wanted to get to the bird park before dusk to see a very rare Colombian bird, the Gallito de Roca. I did make it back into town just in time though and found my way to the entrance with 20 minutes to spare! I still don’t really know anything about these birds, but they are pretty damn cool looking! The placement of their eyes makes it look they have enormous brains. The top, bright red half of their bodies made me think of that red monster thing in Looney Tunes, Gossamer (the google search ‘all red monster thing’ worked fantastically!)

Then I had some time to relax in the square where all the locals hang out and try some more exotic fruit juices from the myriad of food/drink tents they have set up. I met up with Diego, the guy I hiked down with, and we sampled some grilled meats, arepas, and even the Colombian version of a burrito. I will say, one of my complaints about the meat here is often they aren’t shy about overcooking it! The seasoning is good though and my large cut of pork costs $3, so I can’t complain too much. And then of course the rains came and it was back to the hostel.

Cowboy town

I was off the next morning, although I didn’t fully realize what kind of travel day I was in for! The 8am bus wasn’t your traditional bus, the entire thing (besides the cab) was open air, consisting of wooden benches to sit on, and raised really high off the ground because of the ginormous tires. It did have a tarp over to go over the top and sides in case it rained, as it was that very morning. The tarp is completely black, making the seating section very dark and claustrophobic. And the scenery outside is supposed to be gorgeous, we just couldn’t see any of it. I actually moved to very back row so I could roll up the tarp a bit and look out. Of course you need a truck like this because the road conditions are not ideal, so sitting in the very back row to catch a glimpse of the scenery had it’s downsides. It was bumpy as hell obviously.

our truck

foggy day up in the mountains

At some point a few hours in some locals in cowboy hats hopped on, sporting a half empty bottle of Aguadiente, the most popular liquor in Colombia. They were in a rowdy mood for 10:30am and were attempting to get anyone around them to drink it with them. I politely declined, but I was surprised to see they got the two Colombian girls next to them to have a few sips. Then they put the pressure back on me, basically saying these girls are drinking…. Where are your balls? So I did cave and had a few swigs, haha. It’s got a liquorice taste, which I don’t really care for, especially before noon on a bumpy bus, but it was kind of fun. The guys were trying to play matchmaker with me and one of the Colombian girls, who was actually pretty attractive. This is why I really need to speak much better Spanish!

After 3.5 hours we finally made it to Riosucio (a town named dirty river, ha) and then from there we had to catch a 3 hour bus to city called Perreira, and then from there another hour long bus ride to the touristy town of Salento, our final destination. So it was three different buses and 9 hours of travel to a place that really isn’t that far away distance-wise! That’s Colombia for ya.

Salento is also another nice highland town, nestled in the foothills. It’s similar to Jardin, but a little bigger and more touristy. It’s main attractions are it’s coffee plantations and the Cocora Valley a bit outside of town that host the worlds biggest wax palm trees! Pretty interesting to see palm trees in this part of the world! They’re so tall and skinny they look like they can barely support themselves. Do to a bit of snoring in my dorm room I was up awake nice and early - and the first jeep to get you to the valley leaves at 6:30am, so why not? And it rains in the afternoons, so the earlier the better! There’s a nice loop that takes a couple hours to do.

Some fun rope bridges to cross

I ended up hiking with an Aussie and Canadian girl and we finished up the hike before noon and then it was back to Salento for lunch and a much needed nap! I went out for dinner and beers that night and did a coffee tour the next morning (which was cool to learn the whole process!) and that was it for my short stay in Salento. At this point I felt like I had seen enough Columbian hillside towns, and I was getting a bit tired of all the afternoon/evening rains, so it was time to keep heading south towards Ecuador, but with a couple pit stops along the way!

Bogota and Medellin

Time to get back into city living! From Gaudalupe it was 1 hour by 4x4 to get back to the highway and then another 5 or 6 hours into Bogota. Seriously, it takes a long time to get from A to B in Colombia when you’re up in the mountains. Every single road is 2 lanes and there’s million slow moving trucks backing up the traffic constantly. Of course it could be worse for me, I’d heard some traveler horror stories of semi-trucks flipping on the highway or landslides and creating delays for absurd amounts of time, like 10-15 hours. So fortunately I have not had that experience yet!

I got into Bogota around 9pm and grabbed a taxi to my hostel in La Candeleria, which is the historic downtown section of Bogota. I’ve heard this area can be a bit sketchy at night, so I figured I’d test that out for myself, with very few valuables of course. And like most places it seemed fine, if you stay on the main, well-lit streets there’s enough people around where it’s hard to imagine getting into any trouble. Quite a few bums and vagrants around though. Although some of the small side streets with no one around definitely had me on edge a little bit. But nothing to report there. I called it an early night.

The next day was touristy stuff day. I had a walk around Bolivar Square, which is arguably the most famous part of the city. If there are any big demonstrations in the city, this is where they’ll be. It’s filled with pigeons, street vendors, and tourists! The focal point is the church (like every square in Colombia) built a few hundred years ago. From there I walked up towards the hills, which is a little rough around the edges, but you can tell the city had been working to improve the area, with lots of fresh paint and street art, as well as a veritable police presence! It had some nice, cheap coffee shops and budget hostels.

walking around La Candelaria

The view back down from the hills in La Candelaria

Eventually I made it to the Museo Del Oro, the Gold Museum, which has a great collection of artifacts from every period in Colombia’s history. A pretty cool place. And I’m a big fan of museums that have high quality audio guides, which this one had! After that I was all geared up to hike Montserrat hill ( I really need to lose this stomach pudge) which is the big hill/mountain with sweeping views over the whole city. I feel like the word hill is too understated, but the word mountain is too much, there needs to be a better word to describe these hills! Although when I got there at 2pm they said the hiking trail was closed (it closed at 1pm) because later in the afternoon they were concerned about robberies on the hike up. Weak! Although you could still take the cable car up, which I did, but was not happy about it. I mean the view at the top was pretty cool though. The city is so huge and expansive, especially compared to the one little neighborhood that I’d walked through.

Next up, poker time. I went back to the hostel, grabbed my cash and took a taxi to the Parque 93 area, the most hip, modern part of the city, which also has the best poker action. And when I walked in I was impressed to see a bunch of tables running, although for NL hold’em action the highest game was 2,500/5,000 pesos, which is the USD equivalent of a .75/$1.50 game. So pretty small, but the action was good, tons of terrible players, I ran my $200 buy-in up to over $1,000 at one point, but then lost some back at the end, due to some overly reckless, possibly alcohol induced play.

It’s hard not to bluff a lot in these games when the value of $100 or $200 is so much more to most of the Colombians playing than myself.  They did catch onto that eventually. But I had a great time screwing around at these stakes and won enough to pay for about 1/3rd of the trip in one night. Although I paid for it 20 minutes later when my iphone must have slipped out of my pocket in the cab getting home, sigh. Now I’m operating a $100 Huawei smartphone, which on the plus side I don’t care what happens to it! I really don’t like traveling with anything that’s overly important to me. Even my camera equipment is so old now that I wouldn’t be exactly be crushed if something happened to it. Laptop also. But losing that iphone definitely stung a little bit.

Cable car heading up the hills in Medellin. Not my photo though, credit Lonely Planet.

The next day was a bus to Medellin. I really didn’t get a chance to explore too much of Bogota, but basically every single traveler I’d met had said they liked Medellin better, so that’s enough anecdotal evidence for me. Plus Bogota weather is crap, it’s up in the mountains and the usual forecast is cloudy, rainy and a bit chilly. Medellin isn’t that far away as the crow flies, but winding through the mountains it’s a solid 9 or 10 hour trip. I got in pretty late, and was happy to hit the hay at 11pm or so when I got checked into my hostel. The dudes sharing my room popped in at one point to do some blow before heading out the bars, and were nice enough to offer me some, but I had to decline. The legacy of the cocaine cartels is apparently alive and well!

Having spent a good amount of time on the road and staying in hostels I was about ready for some R&R time, so I had a pretty nice airbnb booked for the next few days. It’s pretty great when you can book a very nice studio in the heart of the most expensive part of town for <$50/night. So honestly, I did very little in Medellin. At the same time there’s not like a ton of touristy stuff to do around town. But I had some photos to catch up on, work on my blog, research to do for the rest of the trip, buying a new phone, getting my laptop fixed etc.

I did make it to Botero square in the El Centro, which hosts a very cool looking museum dedicated to the artwork of Fernando Botero, as well as many interesting characters in the square itself. I met some middle aged Americans who stayed around there (for a very specific reason that definitely wasn’t the works of Botero) who warned me it was probably a good idea to get out before nightfall. The one guy was telling me a story about getting jumped by some teens a week ago and fighting them off with his very sturdy umbrella. It made me chuckle thinking of the movie the Kingsman. But El Centro is definitely a bit shady.

Statues by Botero

I also made it to the huge market, which has a fruit section where you can find basically every fruit they grow in Colombia. There are still so many ones I’ve never seen before and don’t know the name of! I picked up a few to sample at home. Lulo, tomate de arbole, granadilla were some of the names I remembered. Some were pretty good, but some were seriously tart and not the best to be eaten by themselves!

A very small sampling of the fruits available

the downstairs meat section was also incredibly largeda

And I’m not sure what these were, some sort of hanging plants? aromatics? This guy had to walk up a two different ladders to reach these!

The location of my airbnb was pretty cool, it’s the most upscale part of town and has the majority of the nightlife. Just next to my airbnb was a really nice Italian restaurant, a beautifully designed vegan restaurant, an artisanal bakery and sandwich shop, a great ice cream shop, and one the fanciest restaurants in town – something like the Alinea of Medellin. I really thought about going there by myself (would have cost $80 for 13 courses instead of the $300+ at Alinea) but couldn’t pull the trigger! But I think that gives you a good idea of the neighborhood, it’s probably not what you’d expect from Colombia.

Vegan tacos

Ajiaco, a tasty colombian chicken stew

And just blocks away is Parque de Illerias, which is where all of the nightlife is based around. The first night I was in the airbnb was Saturday, so I went back to the hostel bar to meet some people and had a fun night barhopping some of the clubs. It’s a very lively area, and definitely more dancing going on than in American nightclubs. Colombians are born and raised dancing, so it’s weird for them to not like dancing. And I must say, Medellin has some extremely attractive women! And it’s not like they’re overly dressed up or made up, they’re just very good looking. It’s unfortunate the quality of my Spanish…

After a few days of laying low I decided I should kick back into travel mode and go for a daytrip to a nearby town called Guatape. It’s two hours away and features a landscape full of fingerling lakes, a rock huge that you can walk to the top of, and a colorful little touristy town. It was definitely a worthwhile trip! In fact most of the photos I took in/around Medellin were from Guatape, so here they are!

La Piedra (the rock) in Guatape

The church in in the main plaza

even the alleyways are colorful

coffee guy

oozing with color

the view of the rock from the city

A fun little town: Gaudalupe

I’d been reading some blog posts about Colombia, and I must say that the best way to get good, up to date info when traveling is to read these travel blogs! One of them happened to mention this village that isn’t too far from San Gil, the caveat being you have to take a 4X4 to get there, but it sounded like a place I’d like. Guadalupe is known for it’s wide shallow stream a bit outside of town that has all these swimming holes carved into the bedrock of the river. The photos looked really cool. It’s called Las Gachas, which translated into English is ‘the porridge’ which makes no sense, but apparently it’s an indigenous word. It’s also the type of place where people from outside of town will ride a horse into town as opposed to a car/moto. Like an old country western.

my stopover in Soccoro,if you have one arm, driving a motorcycle doesn’t seem like the best idea…

From San Gil I took a 30 minute mini bus to a town called Soccoro, and then booked a 4x4 to Guadalupe from there. It’s basically pickup truck with the back converted into seats. The roads were half rock half concrete tracks winding through the hills passing cute little farms and houses on the way. Besides the rough road it was easy to tell this was not on the usual gringo tourist trail just by some of the looks I was getting. After 1.5 hours we finally pulled up to the town square which dropped me off right in front of the only hostel in town. I was the only one staying there!

I dropped off my stuff and started the 45 minute hike to Las Gachas, which is actually a beautiful walk, skirting the edge of some steep hills and giving you great views across a tremendous valley. The countryside in this part of Colombia is very pleasing to the eye.

I ended up being followed by some kids walking in the same direction as me on their way home from school, which allowed me to have some fun practicing my poor spanish, much to their amusement. And they did point me in the right direction to Las Gachas when I got close. Like I said before, it’s basically a shallow river with a bunch of holes in it. Although I did screw up a little bit, this was the one time I hiked not wearing socks with my shoes, and apparently the riverbed is so slippery that you’re supposed to wear socks to get a better grip so you don’t slip and fall! Oops. I managed alright though. It’s definitely a fun place! At certain points you can basically do a slip n slide on the slick bedrock into the little pools. And it wasn’t crowded at all, a handful of locals and two other gringos.

I ended up talking to the two other tourists, both of them were expats in Medellin (one Canadian, one American) and doing a little roadtrip, as one them owned a car - which is a luxury in Colombia because they’re very expensive here! They had actually contracted the guy who owned my hostel to show them around the area as a guide. They were a little older, but fun guys, they definitely liked to drink. The Canadian guy was showing me racy photos of his 30 yr girlfriend in Medellin, before and after the boob job that he paid for, ha. They invited me to go on a little excursion the next morning to some lookout point and little known waterfalls, so sure! Why not? We’d be getting off the beaten track, from off the beaten track. Sounded fun. Here’s some photos of the walk home as the sun was starting to go down, only iphone photos though :(

The next morning I met up with the guys and Jose, the hostel owner/guide, to do our little excursion. We drove about 30 minutes outside of town and parked at a non-descript spot on the side of the road. From there Jose opened a gate and about 20 minutes later we had a great panoramic view over the canyon. Then we meandered through some more farmland and through another gate or two (it’s all private property but Jose says he knows all the owners) and down a steep trail with a large rockwall on our right, with water dripping down over the edge, creating a rainbow effect in some places where the sunlight shone through. Eventually we got down to the bottom where the views open up to this gorgeous waterfall, that hardly anybody every visits! It was pretty special. Although Jose wouldn’t let me swim because he thought the undercurrent was too strong, which I was pretty incredulous, but whatever. In small towns Colombians are very protective of the tourists. In fact, when we were in town we got asked by the police to take a photo with them to demonstrate how well they were looking after the gringos! Colombians in general are very aware of how their country’s dangerous past looks to outsiders and are very eager to shed that reputation.

Into the mountains: San Gil

Well I’m not sure if you’d call them mountains, but definitely big rolling hills with deep valleys is how I’d best describe this part of Colombia. This was my view just outside of San Gil, Colombia’s adventure sports capital. From where I was staying on the Caribbean coast it was a ten hour night bus followed by another three hour ride to get here. I must say, I did not properly dress for the night bus, it was absolutely freezing in there. You’d think we were in the Arctic with everyone bundled up in coats and blankets, not the tropics. You couldn’t even see out the windows because they were so fogged up! Foolishly, all I had was a long sleeve shirt and a rain poncho to wrap myself in. Why they make it this cold I have no idea, but I learned my lesson the hard way!

The town of San Gil is pleasant, nothing too special about it, a pretty normal, seemingly well kept Colombian town. But within and hour or two in almost any direction there are tons of canyons, caves and waterfalls with opportunities for white water rafting, kayaking, paragliding, rappelling, bungee jumping, mountain biking, etc. So it’s definitely a tourist hotspot. The first day was definitely pool and nap day. Although I did have to wait an hour to check in, so I headed to the nice coffee shop in the mall that the guy at the front desk recommended. When I was in the mall I was busy looking at my phone trying to find the exact location of this coffee shop and I managed to walk into the fountain! The pool of water starts right at floor height, so you can literally just walk right into it! It was only a foot or two deep, but still, pretty embarrassing! Fortunately only one two people actually saw it I think (I hope).

Yup, this is the fountain

It was funny, during the course of that afternoon I saw a girl dressed in a wonderwoman outfit and someone had randomly gave me some candy out of his bag of treats, which seemed odd, and I still didn’t put the puzzle pieces together that it was Halloween! Unlike Asia, I guess Halloween is a thing here in South America! So it was kind of fun to see all the kids walking around in their costumes later that evening. Everyone was out in the central square having a good time.

the bridge over the river in San Gil

View from my hostel dorm window

a very hilly city

I was trying to photograph the race that was going on, but I’m not sure if that is the focal point of this photo :p

 Back at the hostel I met a few people and some were going white water rafting the next day, so I signed on to that as well. The river was a supposed to have some class IV rapids and two class V’s, very solid! After the bus ride and what was possibly the longest safety briefing I have ever witnessed (seriously it’s Colombia, just chuck us in the raft and send us off!) we were finally ready to hit the whitewater – although it was definitely more like murky brown water. The water was running pretty high, so there was some good action in the rapids. I will say, our paddling was pretty sloppy and about half the time our guide would just yell “everybody down” where we’d all fall into the raft. And then he’d have us paddle from inside the raft, which is something I’d never done before. As you might have guessed, it’s not very effective! Some of the rapids were pretty gnarly though, so I think they were just being very careful to make sure nobody fell out.

So we didn’t lose anybody, however the other raft dumped four people in one of the rapids! There were two rescue kayakers along to help collect the swimmers. Three out of the four swimmers laughed about it afterwards, but one Colombian girl was definitely shooken up by the whole thing. It turns out the water was moving so quick that the trip only took a little more than an hour, but at least it was an action packed hour with very little time in between rapids – bang, bang, bang. And then we had a nice meal afterwards with roasted chicken, bread, cheese, fruit, and beer. So all in all it was a fun trip, although the ratio of time driving/preparing to actually rafting was about 4:1, so not ideal. Ehh it’s Colombia.

picture stolen from the internet

The next day was mostly a chill day, with a little side trip to a waterfall nearby, which was worthwhile. The following day, a guy I met rafting and we decided to do some paragliding over the Chichamocha Canyon, which is apparently one the deepest canyons in the world (according to who, I don’t know, but it did not seem like one of the deepest canyons in the world!) My friend had never done paragliding before, although I’d done it a couple times now. But I’d never been to a place where you finish at the same place you started which seemed cool. I guess the thermals in this canyon are THAT good!

Now starting and finishing at the same spot originally seems like a pretty good thing, but in actuality, for the jumpers it kind of sucks. Normally when you go paragliding it’s one guide per one client, you do your two minute safety briefing and then you run off the edge, fly, and get picked up at the bottom – there’s very little downtime. But here, because you can start and finish at the same spot, a company can bring up a ton of clients and just have them cycle in between a few guides, meaning there’s a ton of downtime waiting and waiting and waiting. I was one of the last one to go, and I was bored out of my mind by the time I finally jumped, having waited almost three hours. And it was nice of course, just floating around in the sky above the canyon, very relaxing. But I think that will be my one time paragliding for this trip…

easy rider

The Teleferico crossing the canyon. Without it, it’s a loooong drive if you want to get to the other side

Next our plan was not to go back with the rest of the group, but to take the cable car across the canyon and hike our way back towards San Gil, through the canyon. This was my idea, and Raul the Salvidorean American guy I met rafting, decided he’d like to do it as well. Plus It’s always nice to have a fluent Spanish speaker around! Originally we’d hoped to hike a couple hours down into the canyon that first afternoon, so when we’d hike out the following day it would be during the early morning hours, but the paragliding took so damn long that we didn’t have time. So we stayed on top of the canyon in a little town called Los Santos and started to hike down early the next morning. Our trail was called the Camino Real, which back in the day before the highway was a much used horse and donkey track. Nowadays, not so much. At the bottom of the canyon we found the town of Jordan, which is mostly a ghost town.

Hiking down

The trail was a little bit more than a dirt track!

Looking down on the tiny town of Jordan

crossing the bridge into Jordan

Very few people remain in town

After Jordan and spending some time hiking at the bottom of the canyon it was time to ascend. It was now 10:00am and the sun was absolutely scorching and the trail was very exposed. Now Raul is a bit out of shape (Sorry Raul if you read this!), but I figured since he used to be in the army, he’d be okay. But apparently Raul hasn’t hiked more than a few miles at one time since his army days, and was struggling mightily going steep uphill in the blazing sun, he looked like heatstroke waiting to happen. I told him we should just go back to Jordan and catch a lift out, which he readily agreed, although he wanted me to keep going (which is what I wanted too!) so we parted ways. I’m a bad friend.

I was feeling surprisingly great despite the heat, and I was actually really enjoying powering through the straight uphill in the midday heat. Something about being alone in the canyon, with the sweeping views, exotic looking plants and some beautiful colorful birds had me energized and ready to pump out a nice sweat. It took me another couple of hours to get out of the canyon, and it was definitely a bitch! Thankfully the sign near the top said cold drinks and ice cream at the store on the top – but of course it was closed! Arghgh. I did find a tiny shop to get water shortly after that though. Then it was another 2.5 hours of hiking through the farmlands (which was very pleasant) to get into the nearest town. So a strenuous, but ultimately satisfying day of hiking, 13 miles in all. I was originally going to stop by a scenic colonial town nearby, but screw it, I wanted to get back to my hostel in San Gil and hop in the pool! And that’s about all I’ve got for San Gil! That was my last day there and I headed out early the next the morning to a very small village called Guadalupe.

Getting near the top of the canyon!

The dusty roads and farmlands getting back into town

Up the Caribbean Coast

After three nights in Cartagena I took a bus to a town called Santa Marta, a few hours away. The bus ride was a little interesting, as some villagers had set up a roadblock on the highway, not allowing anyone to pass. Most cars seeing this just simply turned around to go back another way. Our driver wanted to do the same, but the guy we had picked up very recently, who presumably lives nearby, argued very passionately against turning around, so we waited. After 20 minutes a police car showed up, and after another 30 minutes they finally opened up the road. I have no idea what the issue was about, or why the police didn’t just make them remove the roadblock immediately, but that’s Columbia for ya. Onwards!

going uphill on a bicycle: no problem, hitch a ride!

When we got to Santa Marta the bus didn’t even go into the city the center for some reason and I had to catch a taxi from the outskirts of town to a beach village called Taganga, where I’d stay and do some scuba diving. I booked a hostel this time, one that had a pool, but I was slightly dismayed to find that the hostel was basically all Israeli guys. I have nothing against Israelis individually, but as a group they are just so cliquey – and it’s not for lack of English either!  Anywho, I had enough time to walk around the small town, set up some diving the next morning, and get a couple of photos before the sun went down. You can get around the whole place in half an hour! The town itself was a bit shabby, most of the side roads were a jumble of stones, dirt, and broken concrete, although some very nice houses sat on the fringes, perched up in the hills overlooking the bay. And the bay was very picturesque, with sun setting right down the middle of it over the ocean.

Looking down on Taganga.

boats in the bay

el gato

The next morning was Scuba time! I hadn’t dived in almost a year, so it was nice to get back under water. It’s low season, so most small outfitters only have a handful of clients, so we’d all take the same boat out together. The diving is in a natural park called Tayrona, which you need a permit to dive in, but the one island off the coast is permit-free, so that’s where we headed. The water was so warm that no wetsuit would be needed! The diving was pretty good, better than I expected. The visibility wasn’t great, but there was lots of sea life, tons of moray eels, shrimp, sea spiders, sea caterpillars, lobsters, pufferfish, trumpetfish, stonefish, etc. So it was well worth the $50 for two dives!

navigating some little caverns

lobster party

Spotted moray out of its hiding spot

Can you see it? A stonefish

Besides the diving, there really isn’t a whole lot to do in town. The beach isn’t the nicest, but it’s somewhat interesting watching the fishermen come in with their daily catch. And I did like all the juice stands around, where there are lots of fruits I have never even heard of! Fruits named zapote, lulo, borajo, tomate de arbol, guanabana, etc. So it’s kind of fun to be able to try all these fruits for the first time! Columbia is blessed with tons of biodiversity, and this is only scratching the surface of what’s available throughout the country.

daily catch

I still don’t know what half of these are

One odd thing about this little town, it’s got some great restaurants! You would expect a little town like this to have mostly basic, no frills Columbian fare, but they have some amazing places to eat! I had a 3 course meal at one place – beef carpaccio, thai yellow curry w/seafood, and a berry marmalade topped with cookie crumbs and ice cream – for $13! And then at a different restaurant had an appetizer of melon wrapped in prosciutto and a medium rare steak served with ratatouille, potatoes au gratin, and a piece of bread topped with a pumpkin whip. This was $12! Awesome. And then fish, veggies, and couscous in white wine sauce, which was probably the least exciting of the three, but the only one I took a photo of.

I also took a trip out the beaches at Tayrona national park. You can either take a bus to entrance and hike two hours in, our take the speed boat. I opted for the speed boat. The main beach, Cabo San Juan, is actually two beaches with a thatched viewing tower built in between them. It’s got hammocks and tents to sleep in, and a restaurant. The rest of the park is pretty much untouched, with beaches you have to hike to through the jungle. It’s a very scenic place! The main beach gets a little bit crowded, but you can walk thirty minutes and find a new beach that will have very little people. You just have to be careful to make sure that swimming is allowed, because some of the beaches aren’t protected and have strong currents!

evening drizzle made a nice rainbow

the dual beach view from the tower, before the rain rolled in

dawn light

sky getting lighter

and there’s the sun

 Now unfortunately I had bought Colombian sunscreen, (Seriously I can’t stand paying like $13 for a bottle of American sunscreen!) which I soon realized on the boat over, did not work too well. SPF 50, yeah right. So I was content to lay in the shade of the trees, only hopping in for a quick dip with my SPF Zero sunscreen. What I did not realize was the shade, was not full shade! So I ended up frying pretty good in the ‘shade’. I was considering staying more than one night, but opted out after lobsterfying myself. I always have to have one good sunburn each trip, sigh. Also it’s kind of boring laying on the beach ALL day. But the scenery was indeed fantastic and I got some nice dawn and dusk photos. Back to Taganga for one more day of diving in the morning and football in the afternoon!

They loaded the boat on the way back

One more thing that’s nice about Taganga, it’s got NFL games! The bar that I went to on Sunday to watch the games even had NFL Redzone, which is a first! And I got to watch the Bears choke and the Pack beat the Chiefs. Plus the World Series game 5. Good stuff. After this I’ll spend one night in the hilltops and then start working my way towards the adventure capital of Colombia, San Gil.

I don’t have much time to write about the two nights I spent in the hilltop/coffee plantation region near Santa Marta called Minca, but here’s some photos.

the viewpoint at my guesthouse

doesn’t look sketchy at all…

one of the many mini waterfalls and swimming holes around

The town of Santa Marta and the ocean in the distance

had to stop at this hostel that is famous for it’s hammocks overlooking the valley

not a bad view from the shitter

South America: Starting in Cartagena, Colombia

The view of Bocagrande at Night

It’s been over a decade now that I’ve been to South America, and something had to be done about that! I picked Colombia because I’d heard some good things from fellow travelers and the flights from Chicago were pretty cheap! As usual I kept my research fairly minimal so I didn’t really know what I expected Cartagena to look like going in, I guess my expectations were a bit influenced spending so much time in SouthEast Asia, but they were quickly altered as our plane soared past all the high rises that jutted out on this long narrow peninsula from the mainland. Definitely more like Miami than let’s say Phuket! I was impressed. A white wall of buildings. After flying past that small section of the city, the rest looked far different, which was mostly pretty flat and sprawling – ie poor. I’d seen on the map that the old town, the walled city, was just next to where all the high-rises are, which is where most of the tourists hang out.

Bocagrande and Castillogrande from the plane. Hopefully not victims of climate change in the coming decades!

Photo of Castilogrande, the part that juts out from the rest in the above photo

After the game I had a chance to walk around the city. Cartagena has a pretty interesting history, it started as a Spanish colony in the 1500’s with only two hundred people. But they got off to a great start when they found that the indigenous people buried riches with dead, so after lots of tomb raiding they had a good amount of wealth on their hands. In the next 50 years news of their wealth had spread and the French and English attacked the city multiple times with no success. Spain spent a boatload of money into fortifying the city and it became the largest port in South America as well. It was where the Spanish would funnel out their vast sums of money from the rest of the continent. The city also became a hub for the slave trade, making people’s mansions even larger. They were able to stave off a massive attack by the English in 1741, called the battle of Cartagena, and they were the first to declare independence from Spain in 1811. I won’t get into the modern history but they had civil wars and drug  trade problems in the last 70 years, but things look to be steadying out for Colombia!

Taken from the fort walls with Bocagrande in the background

So back to Cartagena, it’s very colorful! Narrow cobbled streets painted in all shade of yellow, with doors, window sills and balconies painted in other bright hues. The very center of the city is the clocktower, El Reloj, where horse drawn carriages share the roads with cars and guys pushing fruit carts. Women in traditional outfits try to get you to pose with them and vendors sell everything from water and sunglasses to coke and weed, under their breath. It would be interesting to see how hectic this place gets in January, which is the peak season. Despite being a little chaotic, it’s got a nice charm to it. It feels fun and lively. The streets are clean, buildings look old but not run down, it feels safe. They’ve done a good job. And if you get too hot you can stop and pay .50c to the juice vendors or $1 to the ice cream guys to cool off a bit.

horse drawn carriages cruising around looking for passengers

so many colors!

El Reloj, the clocktower

Fruit vendor

the architecture

women in some traditional garb

Just next to the walled city is another cool neighborhood called Getsemani, which reminded me of what Logan Square was a couple years ago. It’s more residential, rough around the edges but some cool bars and restaurants popping up. Some of the bars were fashioned from what were old abandoned concrete buildings. It’s also the place to go for street art, with murals on just about every street.

Some interesting stuff in Getsemani

The fruit is so fresh and cheap!

Cartagena also has beaches! In Bocagrande (where I was staying) the beach is just across the street! The sand isn’t particularly nice, but you can pay a buck or two and get a lounge chair from the guys that rent them out. Vendors walk around with carts of drinks and seafood, all very reasonably priced. It’s a decent way to spend an afternoon as long as you don’t mind swatting off some of the sunglass guys and massage ladies. Apparently the nicest beach around is an hour away, but I really didn’t feel like heading out that far, especially knowing I’d be going to the beach in a few days anyway.

The real colors came out on the other side of the sky

Cartagena is also known for it’s nightlife, but it wasn’t as exciting as I was expecting. I guess in this season the big parties are really only from Thursday to Saturday, and I was there Sun-Wed! There were lots of party buses cruising around outside the city though! And definitely no shortage of places to drink. The food was also delicious! I hardly ever eat ceviche in the US, but I had it everyday in Cartagena. Just so many good seafood dishes in general. The next photo is from a nice place that was mostly columbians (so you know it’s good) and only a handful of tourists - the perfect mix! But the fish is topped with this coconut milk sauce and then had squid, shrimp and mussels on top. My favorite meal so far.

So I thought Cartagena was a pretty cool city, certainly worth visiting! Next time I’d take a cooking class! I also would probably rather stay in a hostel in the center than my more sterile, kind of boring apartment. Nicer hotels and airbnbs are more for when I’ve been on the road for a while roughing it and I need a clean, quiet place to get a good sleep and recharge, not when I just arrived somewhere new, feeling fresh! Next up I’ll be heading to the beaches further up the Caribbean coast. Here’s a couple more photos of Cartagena:

Recap: Summer in N. America pt 2

Next poker destination: Boston. So Boston had just finished up building it’s first casino in the city, The Encore Boston Harbor, exact same building as the Encore in Las Vegas. Originally it was going to be the Wynn, but after some sexual assault allegations I guess they didn’t want to attach the Steve Wynn name to it. Fair enough! So usually when they have new big poker rooms open up in cities that didn’t have any before, the games tend to be quite good (at least at the beginning!) So I was hoping to capitalize on that. I got an airbnb basically right across the street from the casino, which was sweet. ($350/night to stay at Encore) It was the type of place where you get your own room and everything else is communal. It wasn’t the nicest place, but whatever, Boston is expensive! Just one huge problem: no locks on the doors! I’m sure as hell not going to be leaving thousands of dollars unlocked in my room with random people coming and going! So I ended up carrying silly amounts of money on me for this whole trip, so annoying. I’ve really never seen a communal airbnb with doors that don’t lock!

But anyway the casino is really nice! Just like it’s counterpart in Vegas, everything from carpets to the details on the walls, to the flowing designs of the chandeliers is gorgeous. There’s a bunch of restaurants inside, but man are they pricey. In the poker room you get comped $1/hr for food (not much given the prices). You’d have to play 20 hours to pay for your cobb salad! But they do give you free drinks including alcohol, so that’s fine. The games here were also pretty soft, much better than in Chicago. I lost a few thousand the first night and was worried I didn’t bring enough cash, but I turned it around and finished up a very healthy amount on the trip. Although I did have to lose a few thousand right at the end - I just cannot for the life of me finish on a high note on any of these trips! A little bittersweet.

I also had some time to wander around Boston, which is a very walkable. Around Bunker Hill, the shipyards, North End, the Financial District, Back Bay, all very cool neighborhoods to take a stroll. Boston has plenty of landmarks and monuments from the Revolutionary War era and you can even visit Paul Revere’s house. They were doing renovations on it, so I didn’t take any photos of it though. And I did catch a game at Fenway, a 1:00pm game where I scalped some tix at gametime for super cheap (Red Sox being out of the playoffs and all). Although to be honest, I’m just not big enough of a baseball fan to really care about two teams that aren’t the White Sox, especially sitting alone, so I left after 6 innings or so, Boston having a 5-1 lead.

Photos in order: North End, Bunker Hill area, Back Bay, Financial District

So that was a solid two week trip. Then it was back to Chicago land to hang out with my parents and onto my brother’s wedding! Which I’ll get to shortly…

Recap: Summer in N. America

So the reason I came home was mostly for my brother’s bachelor party in NYC, which being the best man, I was in charge of planning. We rented a huge airbnb for 13 guys in Brooklyn and it turned out well. We did some axe throwing, rooftop bar, the iconic Peter Luger steakhouse, wandered around Manhattan, hit the clubs, had the fire department called, and needed an emergency plunger the morning we checked out. So all in all a great time!

Next I went to Vegas for a month during the World Series of Poker to play some tournaments and grind the cash games. I honestly played an ungodly amount of poker in that stretch. Tournaments usually started at noon and after I’d bust I had all night to play in the cash games. I played mostly 2/5 and 5/10, favoring the Wynn where 2/5 is a deep $1500 buy in and the 5/10 is $5,000 max. I ended up winning about $12,000 in the cash games (was up 20 at one point though), buuuuut I did terrible in the tournaments and lost like $10,000 in entries. Then factor in the cost of living, hotels/food/ubers, all added up to a lot of money, so I finished down a few thousand (net) for the trip. Pretty disappointing. I’d like to get out of poker pretty soon, and the best way to do it would definitely be to hit a nice tourney score, but sadly tournaments are not my specialty and I keep throwing away too much money in them. Sigh. There’s always next year! I was such a poker degen that I didn’t really go out and take many photos unfortunately. Just food and chip stacks!

sloppy stack

I love pork belly buns

the World Series of Poker at the Rio

tacos el gordo, best tacos in Vegas

So after playing poker all the time, not working out, and eating too much, it was time for a little break. I’d be meeting my family in Washington for a little family vacation. We did the Hanover site in Eastern Washington, spent a few days in Hells Canyon which borders Oregon and Idaho, rafted the Salmon river, and then headed NE to Glacier national park for another few days. It was cool to have the family altogether for the first part of the trip at least. And it was good to take a break from poker and get some sun and exercise!

Now after the rest of my family went home, I wasn’t done yet and did a 4d/3n backcountry hike in Glacier, then rented a truck and drove up into Canada, stopping in Calgary, Edmonton, Jasper, and Banff National Parks. The poker scene was not as good as I hoped in Calgary and Edmonton - all the good games are PLO- but the hiking was fantastic, especially in Jasper. The Banff part was a bit cloudy and rainy unfortunately.

Lots of farmland with mountains off in the distance in Alberta

Calgary skyline

I liked this bridge

Calgary Tower, closed for renovations

walking street, downtown

the bridge in to Edmonton

Edmonton legislative building

my truck in Jasper

Caribou (I think) on the side of the road

looking out over Maligne Lake

from the boathouse

boathouse in the morning

baby

Mt. Edith Cavell

About halfway in between Jasper and Banff

Columbia Icefield

Peyto Lake, impossibly blue

Lake Louise

Moraine lake, in the fog that wouldn’t clear

lots of this, clouds and drizzles

Whitefish lake in MT

And I wasn’t done with Canada just yet, I returned my truck and flew off to Montreal to pay some more poker. They were having an a World Poker Tour event there for two weeks and I wanted to check out the scene at the Playground Card Club, which is where all the tournies would be held. I got an airbnb sharing a room with a fellow hustler, a young entrepreneur (getting good Ray Ban fakes from China and reselling at full retail). It was nice location because I could just hop on the bus to the card club. Although I’d have to take taxis home, which was expensive and they didn’t allow ubers to pick-up there since it’s an Indian reservation.

The old port area

Anyway the poker there was good! I started out white hot in the cash games, winning basically every session the first week. The Playground is nice because they basically give you free food, you get comped $2/hr and they have a reduced rate menu for players, so as long as you’re playing for a while you won’t have to pay for any food. And their food is delicious! Of course I wouldn’t run hot forever, I dropped 2,000 CAD on tournaments, and went on a $5,000 CAD downswing in the last couple days (of course) but still finished up maybe $16000 CAD (12,000 USD). It’s also kind of annoying how weak the CAD is to the USD, so winning $1,000 in Canada feels like winning $1,000 in the US! but its only 75% of that. Oh well. But Montreal was very picturesque city with lots of parks, interesting architecture, a fun downtown, and a very French vibe. The main language is French of course, but almost everyone is bilingual. It’s weird hearing French speakers speak such perfect English! Everything is great besides the construction and traffic, which is just insanely confusing and frustrating at times! Oh and I forgot some excellent food: poutine and smoked meat sandwiches, mmm.

stacking chips

montreal smoked meat sandwich, melts in your mouth

would I like poutine instead of fries, yes please!

And that’s all for Montreal, next up Boston

Recap: Winter in Cambodia

So I haven’t written in this blog in a long time, but it’s time to fire it up again now that I’m back on the road. I spent my winter in Cambodia (again) to play poker. Unfortunately this year was not as successful as last year as more pros came in from China and the rake had increased (surprised thats even possible) and the cost of living went up as well due to a housing shortage. And I just ran worse against the whales in big pots in general. The town of Sihanoukville has been turned into a giant trash heap with all the construction, litter, dust, broken roads, sewage, etc. It really is a shame what’s been done to it. Maybe it can recover in a few years after the construction boom is over, I doubt it, but we’ll see.

Don’t get a hotel without seeing what’s around it!

massive trucks everywhere, wreaking havoc on the roads

Giant puddles everywhere, even when it hasn’t rained in days

Hard to avoid the potholes when you can’t see them!

just off the main beach, gross

So as you can see, the city is undergoing some, uhh, changes. Of course it’s not all bad, I bought a motorcycle and learned how to ride it (really just learning how to use the clutch) which was fun. I was hoping to find an open paved space somewhere in the city to practice, but those really don’t exist in Sihanoukville! So the first day or two I had some fairly nerve wracking experiences stalling out in traffic. But there’s always something getting in the way of traffic in cambodia and people are very used to it! A car turns out in front of you, making you slam on the brakes? A truck forces you off into the shoulder? A cow runs into the road? A delivery truck blocks the entire road? These are just all everyday occurrences on Cambodian roads, so people really aren’t bothered by a stalled bike for a couple of seconds, ha!

All black beauty, 223 horsepower

The main part of the city is mostly terrible, but of course you can still get out a little bit and find some decent places that haven’t been totally ruined! A few kilometers outside of town is Otres beach, which is lots of little guesthouses and bungalows with cheap beer and lounge chairs on the beach, and that’s still okay. It will probably all be knocked down in a year or two, so I’ll enjoy it while I can. The road getting out there is hell though. There’s also Independence beach which has a really nice tourist pier and is great for watching sunsets. Plus the pool at my gym is pretty great and I can do steam/sauna/massage for like $12 so I can’t complain about that!

next to the fancy new seaside restaurant at Independence Beach

The pier

Mango seller

Different pier where the locals live

fish fry

Can’t throw a stone without hitting a casino

the new Xifu resort and it’s spectacular surroundings

My pool

no guns at the pier anymore, so sad

Chinese clubbin

cool roads

So that’s what Sihanoukville looks like nowadays. I of course had to leave before rainy season hit, as it rains all day and everything floods. This year was apparently much worse for flooding, as whatever green spaces that were left to soak up rainwater have all been covered in concrete. It was also a terrible year for dengue fever which is caused by mosquitos, and when there’s lots of stagnant water… you know what happens. So that was my last memory of Sihanoukville, going on a massive downswing and then getting Dengue fever. It was strange I had a fever one night, some pain behind my eyeballs, and some red bumps on my arms. That didn’t last long though, the main thing was just complete exhaustion.

I literally laid in bed in for a week+ like half asleep, hardly any appetite, and every once in a while willing myself out of bed to get groceries or a smoothie. I eventually went to the doctor and after a blood test, results were in: the Dengue. He gave me some pain pills and electrolytes and sent me on my way. It’s a virus, so not much you can really do besides ride it out. After that I went to Phnom Penh for a few days to recover a bit more, then flew home, limping my way out of Cambodia with a lighter wallet and struggling health. I ended up flying to Vegas for a few days before getting home home!