Chilenos The Buffet Slayers (Depression for Dummies)

Bolivian Curtains

We’ve eventually left Chile, the most expensive and most westernised country in South America. It was an interesting exercise in cultural comparison between two adjacent countries. Argentineans and Chilenos generally hate each other. Chilenos have the better economy but are considered rude. Argentines have class but are self obsessed. Or that’s the way the stereotypes fall out in the heated comparisons you hear when any reference to Argentina comes up in Chilean company or vice versa. Chileans also have a reputation for being mean spirited, rude and landgrabbing, military obsessed souls. We witnessed several very bizarre impromptu military parades, one through a traffic jam in Santiago, another around the car park of a huge shopping mall in Calama. No one seems to pay much attention to the regular public preening of this very proud army banging out jazz standards, people for the most part treating the parades as an inconvenient incursion into their daily lives.

How could you miss?

Chile’s over ambitious desire, bordering on greed, for territory is the reason why poor Bolivia is now landlocked. Despite what the ever optimistic Bolivians see as this temporary situation, this unfortunate country, landlocked by Chile’s greed, still retains a (semi functional) Navy. The Argentines are pissed because the Chileans on several occasions have very cheekily used Argentina’s difficulty as Chile’s opportunity to grab more land – particularly in the south of the continent towards southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Argentina would find themselves at war with some random neighbouring country and Chile would hurry down to some remote Argentine outpost and stick their flag in a piece of dirt and that’d be that. Which goes a ways to explaining the ridiculous multiple border crossings we endured in Tierra del Fuego. We did get some very interesting insights into Chileans from a couple of American Santiago residents we spoke to and from one very entertaining English speaking Chileno called Rodruigo. In most developed countries appearances are important. In Chile appearances are everything. There’s a complex and multi levelled materialistic stratification of society and people will go to bizarre extremes to jump up a level.

We heard stories of Chileans getting pulled over by traffic cops for using a mobile phone whilst driving – not particularly unusual. But when the mobile phone in question turns out to be fake it gets interesting. Young Chileans have also been known to wander around bopping to headphones with nothing at the end of them – the definitive silent disco. Santiago in particular was incredibly American feeling with the way the city was laid out, its suburbs with strip malls and supersized ultra modern gas stations etc. We talked to a couple of Santiagoans who said that the Chilean’s obsession with the American way of life has gotten completely out of hand with people following their North American cousins’ lead into severe credit card debt to finance their glitzy and expensive lifestyle. Shiny new apartment blocks are shooting up around the city and look completely out of place in some of the older suburbs. Being a techie the best touchstone for me for the level of consumerism or affluence in an economy is to take a wander into any large electronics store and check how big the widescreen televisions are and whether or not there’s one of those home entertainment rooms where you go to be blasted with sub bass from JT’s latest pop opus. There were several such well equipped electronics stores in Santiago and even a couple in Calama, a rural mining town in Northern Chile.


One of the stores used a very interesting technique to sell fridges. They stacked hundreds of pallets of 3 litre bottles of Coca Cola all around the fridge display area, in the fridges and on the fridges themselves. Chilenos love the Coca Cola so it was like reverse sales psychology - here’s a clever way of keeping your Coke cool! In Calama also, the moneyed men from the mining companies came all decked out in the unofficial uniform of the Ralph Lauren Polo shirts – the bigger the logo the better, Timberland shoes and Docker chinos. Interestingly the mall had 3 men’s shops, a Ralph Lauren store, a Timberland shop and a Dockers franchise. Any potential embarrassment about looking like an identikit of the fella beside you was offset by that warm feeling of looking the part. A typically Chilean scenario. We’ll discuss the Chilean ladies distinct lack of fashion sensibility in a minute.

Gareth O'Mannequin, the world's first depressed dummy (La Paz)

Sitting watching the coverage of the Virginia shooting in one of these malls was an interesting experience. These people absolutely aspire to and completely buy into the American Dream. These shooting massacres, a seemingly unavoidable by-product of a dream with the right to bear arms, were treated like an unwanted wake up call from the extant reverie of a population still avidly pursuing the neon supersize dream, eyes closed as tightly as they can for the maximum experience. People sat guzzying buckets of KFC, devouring the contents of towers of Pizza Hut boxes, queuing for 20 minutes for a McDonalds steadfastly ignoring the craziness being beamed into their “Foodhall”. Speaking of the American Dream/Nightmare, Chileans have definitely bought into the North American obesity problem aswell.

Dinner in Calama

We took another overnight bus from Santiago to Calama in northern Chile with the intention of hitting the altiplano and the Atacama desert. We misunderstood the lady who sold us the ticket and thought that the journey would take 9 hours. 24 hours later, eyes facing different directions and digestive systems in revolt from 24 hours of prepacked zero roughage meals, we breezed into dusty Calama. Calama is a desert town, the kind of town that appears like 1 forlorn, frayed at the edges patch on a windswept and dull patchwork of desert landscape. It’s some kind of mining outpost – the largest copper mine (and the ensuing officially largest hole in the ground on the planet) is about 20km out of town so there’s money in Calama, a lot of it North American I believe. A lot of the civic buildings are huge, architecturally designed curved concrete affairs. There’s even a sprawling North American style mall with a food court where we sat on a couple of evenings (the only place where you could get non deep fried food which wasn’t chicken), eyes boggling at the Chileans wanton and unabashed buffet abuse. In Argentina there may be a lot of food available at restaurant buffets or barbeques. Foreigners make the mistake of feeling that because you’re entitled to as much meat as you can stomach with the cover charge, they must put away 3 or 4 plates of steak in one sitting. You’ll find that the abstemious Argentines generally only partially fill their plates, take an inordinate amount of time over their meal and even then leave at least half of it for Mr Manners, or Mr Sixpack, or Miss Tightbutt. Chileans, on the other hand are worse than the Irish. The buffet place in Calama has resorted to downsizing their plates so that the hungry Chilenos can only physically fit a limited amount of food on their plates, the restaurant desperately trying to break even on their buffet enterprise by presumably trying to embarrass their clients out of several return visits to the buffet well. It don’t seem to work. We witnessed 3 stumpy gentleman, probably in their mid 50s, lunching at the buffet. They were all unhealthily huge with stretchy jumpers struggling to cover the dull orbs of their bellies. You got the impression straight away that each of these guys got up in the morning dreaming about their coming lunchtime’s buffet adventures. Each of them while filling their tiny plates made no effort to disguise the fact that they were also sampling, using their fingers, every piece of meat, every piece of cheese, olives, dressing, potato chips, every variety of vegetable, every condiment - every everything that was laid out on the table as they mooched around deciding what to actually put on their plate. They’d had a 3 course lunch in snacks even before they’d sat down to eat! One old guy made 3 return visits for dessert alone, each time returning victorious to his table with the heads of 4 different desserts. I watched a schoolgirl take 15 hits from the Mayonnaise fountain for just one plate of chips. Every course is accompanied by a fresh hit from the Soda Fountain or, more commonly, a three litre bottle of coke is purchased to be shared between friends and imbibed liberally throughout the meal. The avarice and eating without consequence was worse than I’ve seen anywhere in North America and that includes me being let loose on the 5 dollar buffet in Reno. You have to remember the Chilenos are small squat people by design anyway. There’s a massive obesity crisis sweeping the nation due apparently to Chileans lack of awareness of the ramifications of such a diet long term. One night in Santiago we were heading out pretty late and hadn’t had dinner. So the only vaguely palatable quick fix option for 2 hungry veggies was a pizza and the only pizza place we could find was an upscale Dominos (it had seats). Our pizza order took about 25 minutes and in that time we witnessed terrifying abominations of over indulgence.


For a start the smallest pizza Dominos Chile offer is a 2-3 person pizza, about 12”. They don’t sell water or cans or small bottles of soft drinks. They only sell 2.5 litre bottles of Coke or Sprite. Our single pizza order came with one of these bottles of Coke plus 2 portions of garlic bread thrown in, free gratis, for nothing under the terms of a Get Fat On Us offer which they hadn’t even bothered to advertise or tell us about. One family, a mother and a father, a teenage kid and a kid around 10, picked up 3 of these 12” pizzas and the ensuing bounty of free beverages and side dishes. It would appear they did this every night. Their clothes were in a state of Polyester Panic with the stretchy pants in danger of walking right off the job due to the stressful conditions and the imminent late night salted carbs and sugar feast. The dad looked like a the quintessential lost soul in the throes of advanced addiction – in this case a junk food junky. Unshaved, unwashed, the sauce from last nights pizza feast still embedded in his whiskers his eyes glazed over as he, the hunter gatherer possessively grabbed the pizza boxes, shoved them under his arm and wandered back to his lair to nourish his family. There was 3 of us to the one pizza we’d bought and we couldn’t even finish it it was so doughy and laden with stodgy cheese. We seem to have spent an inordinate amount of time observing Chilenos eating unhealthily. The irony is not lost on me or my new upsized stretchy pants. We knew before we arrived that Chilean cuisine was exceptionally bland at best, without even the chance of the Italian influence to spice things up and provide you with good pizza or pasta. But it really is horrific. Even if you wanted to eat healthily, there’s zero options for you. We had very little choice in the crud we shoved down our throats and maybe if we had to live in a place with such limited healthy options and over abundance of exceptionally cheap unhealthy options, we’d be fat as snails aswell.

Filling out the paperwork at the Bolivian border

Calama was a strange town. Just walking down the streets left you both bemused and alarmed. Rural Calama featured many instances of overweight lowride ladies in polyester pants with reinforced seams strutting purposefully, always purposefully, tapping out their intentions, letting people know they're going places at an impressive one and a half steps per second with their high heels click clacking on the tiled pavements. The all pervasive smell of cigarette smoke and cheap perfume fills the air and jars in your nostrils. Another Argentine / Chilean stereotype is that the Argentines are a far more elegant and beautiful race. I have to say that on recent experience alone, I concur. The ladies apply their perfume in Calama as if it were an insecticide. Your lungs are in some distress from the altitude anyways, so when you get a blast from the downwind of these noxious nymphs you're left wheezing in their wake, crouched on the roadside to allow them walk far enough ahead so you don’t have to inhale within their lingering 40ft aura. I reckon that the perfume is a ploy to make up for their complete lack of attractiveness. Instead of the men going “Wahey look at that!” like in Argentina, they tend to go “Woohooo!! What the fuck is that smell!? – have I been tear gassed? Awwww Nuts….Not another coup!?”. They look up, confused and disoriented to spy this vision of permed, plump, perfumed, polyester womanhood batting her eyelids in a disinterested way suggesting that there's a random task to be urgently completed before siesta. I'm not sure where these ladies pick up their clothes but they're very very odd. Simultaneously oversized and figure hugging, high heels will always feature - knee high boots are very popular also. Spanglish slogans writ large across their chests in the largest possible font, generally in gold or silver; "c'mon to the rock n roll woman" “peace and spirit baby, you know i want to” "i know boyology" “sixpensive” "mince 50 pesos per pound" (I made the last one up).

Man in motion

And it’s not just the odd mad woman either. Watery-Eyed-Bling is the gold standard for the fashion conscious Calama woman. It’s surprising how when some bizarre fashion trend takes hold, even in a small town like Calama, everyone, to sate the irrational urge to fit in, dons the most hideous of outfits. M felt pretty uncomfortable for most of the time we spent in Calama. Always on the street, if I was a few steps ahead or behind her and she appeared unaccompanied, she would get lashings of unwanted attention from the beauty starved local men. They’d whisper all kinds of lewdness and wink their eyes and lick their lips and whistle…. But never if I (1.5 times them – in height anyways) was around, charming courageous little maneens that they were.

Maneen in motion

Anyways, enough Chileno bashing. The reason we were in Calama was to get out of there as quickly as possible to the wilds of the Atacama desert. Unfortunately the only way to do this was to jump on an overpriced guided tour of unguaranteed quality, or hire a jeep and do it yourself. Seems logical enough. I’ll always choose the DIY option when it comes to discovery. However, when I went to enquire about renting a 4x4, I was told that 1 jeep for 1 day would cost me USD$200. Holy Jesus. You can buy a restaurant in Argentina for that! Apparently, because there’s so much American money in the town with the booming mining industry, renting a vehicle is extremely expensive no matter what rental company you use. I couldn’t hire a car – there were none available. But the car hire lots were full to overflowing with every make model and type of 4x4 imaginable. The mining companies (everything in this town kowtows to mining money) are obviously their sole customers and pay the inflated prices to ensure constant availability – at that price no one else could afford the luxury. We totally prefer backpacking in countries with collapsed economies.

The courtyard of our gorgeous colonial hotel in Calama

Depressed beyond tablets and carrying all our luggage having checked out of our accommodation we scuttled back to the hotel in the intense heat and promptly checked back in again to examine our consciences. It would appear that San Pedro de Atacama would have to wait. Travel is funny. Apparent setbacks can result in interesting previously unconsidered alternatives and so it proved in Calama.

The Tren De Los Nubes train trip which I’d so been looking forward to turns out to be on a typically South American unexplained hiatus for the near future. We knew that there was a train which left Calama bound for Uyuni (You-You-nee) in Bolivia on a Wednesday evening at midnight. Beyond that we had very little knowledge of the train journey other than it was very very cold and notoriously no frills with apparently no glass in the windows, wooden seats, no lighting or heating, no toilets and no dining car.

Complimentary Goods - the toilet on the train

Enquiries at the train station would be necessary. Trip 1 : to the station involved a quick meet and greet with the skeleton staff. “Hi, I don’t speaka the Spanich but I would like to know all you can tell me about the Slow Train to Uyuni”. The Chileans pronounce it Ooo-Jooonee so after some confusion we eventually got to the buying tickets bit. “Tickets?”….(Finger slitting throat action). In South America this ominous gesture can mean anything from “closed”, “on the fritz”, “fucked”, “dead 10 years”, “killed by communists”, “liable to give you a terminal disease”, “swallowed whole by Pacha Mama”, “on a cocoa break” or, if used in reference to a toilet – “hold your water and move on kid, no gringo will recover from seeing what’s behind that shithouse door”. In this situation I took it to mean the ticket office was closed. When would it be open? Manana I was told . In Spanish this means tomorrow. In South America however it can mean anything from simply tomorrow to “I don’t know”, “please gringo - I am sleeping – return with your silly questions at a more convenient time”, or even “ a straight answer will require monetary intervention”. When I asked what time I was told 0830-1200, 1500-1800, 2100-0000 – typically bizarre and irregular hours designed to confuse and disorient the over eager gringo. Apparently the ticket office for the train we wanted to take was only open on a Wednesday and during the hours outlined above.

M tracks down my dislocated Zen

So Trip2 : I returned the following morning – Wednesday - to find the shutter still down on the ticket office. I wandered around the station for 10 minutes before I encountered a staff member. She was sitting in an empty room the size of a tennis court, behind a desk with one lonely antique phone perched on one corner of the desk and an electric fan blowing her face in and out of shape. She appeared to be concentrating very hard on the facial sensations the fan was causing. Perhaps she was moonlighting as a fan tester, or maybe she was testing how windproof her makeup was - selling tickets at this station only took up 1 hour of her valuable time a week. “What’s the story with the boleteria there love?” I said in my most flowery noun-only charades-for-verbs Spanish. She appeared startled and asked me was I sure today was Wednesday. Tuesday + 1 = Wednesday I replied with diagram, desperately trying to remain calm and counter the semi chaotic inertia with hard logic. She appeared flustered and eventually decided that I’d need to come back in the afternoon. It seemed like they really didn’t want to do business with me. Trip 3 : I was starting to get very pissed off. We couldn’t make any decision on our next step until we figured out what the ticket situation was with the train. I needed to get some kind of answer from the railway staff. After another inexplicable 20 minute wait in a completely deserted train station, the shutter grinded begrudgingly open and I eventually got to purchase 2 handwritten tickets for a trip that night on the Slow Train to Uyuni for the princely sum of $12. This was by far the cheapest we’d ever been charged for a journey to another country. We eventually discovered that the passenger train service is run by the British owned Ferocarril Antofagasta-Bolivia which loses money on the line but is required by an 1888 mineral transport treaty to keep the passenger service running indefinitely. This might explain some of the inertia of the staff, no targets to reach, no company statement of excellence, dismal wages, hours alone with an electric fan in an empty room – how could you be motivated? But anyways, back to the train trip. It’s apparently one of the more scenic train trips in South America. We would be travelling across vast and unending saltplains, through deserts and volcanic mountainscapes, ascending through the Andes to an eventual elevation of some 3700m. We could also look forward to spotting flamingos and dust devils and willy-willys.

Flamingos

The majority of the old railways on the continent are out of commission due to the improvement of the road infrastructure or because they have basically long since become unviable due to the relative inexpensiveness and proliferation of buses and the anywhere to anywhere ubiquity of the spaghetti bus routes. So its only in anomalous situations where an old law dictates that a stretch of railway must remain open or that a government decides to keep a subsection of a famous railway line open for tourist trips that you can still experience train travel in South America. The demographic of the travellers on our train would seem to back that up. The motley human freight consisted primarily of locals or Bolivian émigrés who couldn’t afford the more expensive, faster and more comfortable bus journey along the same route, with a healthy dose of stinking backpackers, mostly European with a couple of notable Chilean punker exceptions, hungry for adventure and a break from the all pervasive overnight bus journeys which are the trademark of travel in South America.

Our carriage gets abandoned again

We got to the train station around 10 abandoning Chile and the city of Calama which was in the throes of an Argentina versus Chile football match. We had some reorganising of luggage to do and we both had to layer up for the trip. Due to the lack of bathrooms (or what turned out to be the absence of the bathroom keyholder who was hiding somewhere feeling particularly unmotivated) poor M had to don her long johns behind a door in the waiting area as a particularly slow Bolivian gentleman passenger proactively monitored her progress. He was similar in dimensions to a jockey, with perfect black hair and dark features and eyes which seemed to lock involuntarily on random objects for minutes on end like a baby experiencing something for the first time. He was dressed completely in brand new no-brand denim and sported homemade woollen insoles in his tiny leather boots. His name was Edwin and he was most definitely on the highway to heaven. He would stare at you for minutes at a time and then follow your eyes to stare at whatever you happened to be looking at. He held in his hands the equivalent of an Argos catalogue which he appeared to be engrossed in but if you watched him you could see his eyes dart all over the room from under his fringe, desperate to take in every detail of every movement in his environment. We spent a very disconcerting couple of hours in the waiting room being minutely observed by this stranger who you didn’t know whether to pity or be wary of. As the evening progressed and the departure time drew nearer more fodder for his compulsive observation trickled in.

I give Calama a bad name

Anything goes on the railways it would appear. People were arriving with second hand mattresses, stinky fridges, greasy cookers, crates of Coca Cola and bedsheets fashioned into carry-alls, cornerfull of the most random collection of solids, liquids, gases, fruits, vegetables, animals, fabrics and other summary indiscernibles. All of this crap needed to be stored in the overhead lockers or under your feet so space for passengers was at an absolute premium.


By the time we boarded the train at midnight the waiting area was packed to capacity with chattering travellers and their luggage mountains. We boarded, found our seat and were a little bit freaked out to find the bould Edwin sitting awaiting our arrival in the seat directly facing ours. We were to be studied for a further few hours it would appear. We stashed our luggage where we could trying to leave some legroom for the 20 hour journey. The old Bolivian women, obviously having completed this journey many times before, fashioned beds out of the facing seats by placing boxes and bags of the random crap they were carrying in the gaps between the seats where normally your legs would go and lying across the gap. They had blankets and shawls and funky indigenous leg warmers and woolly Spin-Doctor hats and other than their cargo of oddities which they were importing to sell, they travelled very very lightly indeed. They seemed to be as intrigued by our luggage as I was by theirs. You could see them eyeing up our padded rucksacks and backpacks wondering what useless commodities they contained and whether the contents could even be sold for a profit at a streetside stall. Otherwise what in Gods name were we lugging them around for? Every time we opened a backpack to trawl out a creature comfort or a snack you’d spot them leaning forward to steal a furtive look into the depths to see could the riddle of the bulky backpackers be solved.

Trains through deserts cause uncontrollable pensiveness

The train, as it was, consisted of just two carriages which over the course of the journey seemed to be abandoned in random fashion at deserted, unpronounceable destinations only to be claimed by another engine a couple of hours later and transported another couple of hundred miles…. to be abandoned and randomly claimed again and dragged a few stops closer to its final destination. You’d be sitting reading or even sleeping in the carriage and suddenly you’d hear a thunderous terrifying clang of metal on metal as the engine forcefully attached itself to the carriages by the power of diesel and physics. Getting mounted completely by surprise by a diesel engine out of nowhere is what I imagine it must be like to be a streetdog in any of the towns we’ve visited. Progress was slow throughout the night with inexplicable stops in the middle of nowhere a common occurrence. We had one big bad Bolivian woman who got into the pioneering railway spirit of things by snoring like a freight train and farting like a foghorn at an edgy veggie convention. But other than that the night passed uneventfully with the assistance of an ipod and a sleeping bag pulled over our heads.

Semi-Cama(tose)

There’s something about the movement of a train over tracks which sends me to sleep anyways. While it did get pretty cold during the night it never got anywhere close to the -10C that we’d read about and the seats, while neither wooden or barbarically uncomfortable, did make for pretty uncomfortable sleeping positions. We were woken by the sun the following morning and had our first real chance to check out the scenery while eating our banana sandwich breakfast. Miles of white sand and rocky outcrops, everything scorched beyond recognition by the sun, mountains and smoking volcanoes on the horizon for backup. The train stopped at the Bolivian border for a couple of hours allowing us to get off the train, stretch our legs, smoke ‘em if you have ‘em etc. There’s a much more sociable aspect to train travel with the stand up, walk around spaciousness of the train carriage providing a far more interactive experience than travelling on a bus.

Subbing In Bolivia

At each of the stops some local kids would board the train and basically run amok, trying on gringo’s headgear or sleepingbags, rooting in their luggage for objects of interest, posing for photos and generally trying to fit a lifetime deprived of social interaction into an hour long train stop with random bemused travellers. We moved on and travelled 6 hours into Bolivia supping red wine from our plastic bottles and chatting with the other passengers to pass the time. Towards the end of the journey I slept uncontrollably, waking up to give out and go straight back to sleep again. I didn’t know it at the time but the onset of severe altitude sickness was upon me.


We rolled into Uyuni around 6pm the following day. Here’s a telling guidebook quote regarding Bolivia which leaves an interesting first impression : “Bolivia has some of the best mountaineering opportunities in the world but infrastructure is not well developed so don’t expect to be rescued if you get into trouble”. My first experience of Bolivia was basically “Oh my God, what have we done?”. It was that bad. As I ran around the town trying to scrape up some accommodation my nostrils and lungs were assaulted with the worst smells imaginable. Uyuni is very much a market town with anything you need to buy available from hundreds of adhoc streetside stalls. There aren’t many shops per se, everything except the pharmacy is open air. Arriving into a new town just before dark is always a bad idea as it gives you a very skewed and unflattering impression of a town – especially after a long journey – remember Valparaiso? Every street corner in Uyuni had open air steel framed stalls belching out rancid roasting or deep fried meat odours. Llama meat is particularly popular and relatively affordable in the area and unfortunately for me its also a very, very strong smelling meat as it cooks. Here’s another interesting quote from our guidebook : “Llama meat contains parasites similar to those in pork. So make sure it has been cooked for a long time and is hot when you eat it”. Abject poverty is absolutely endemic in Bolivia so bona fide llama meat is a treat whereas the bits that get left over - offal basically – is what made up the bulk of the streetside barbeque fodder. My stomach was doing handstands as I desperately tried not to inhale the acrid smoke – even the air seemed deep fried. But because of the altitude, if I stopped inhaling for even the 5 seconds it would take me to pass one of these stalls, my heart would nearly burst and my lungs would scream blue murder until I inhaled the fetid air again. The air at this altitude is very thin and your lungs find it a lot more difficulty to extract oxygen. Running around holding your breath in smoke filled air is a recipe for near collapse and when I eventually found a habitable hotel (after 4 attempts – dirty buckets in bedrooms and bedsheets on the floor mopping up water were some of the reasons for declining certain establishments) I literally collapsed on the bed and didn’t rise for a couple of days as my body desperately tried to adjust to the new altitude.

Somewhere in Bolivia

I got hit pretty hard with the thoroughly incapacitating altitude sickness and I puked the first night, had an incredible headache, constant shortness of breath – even walking to the bathroom necessitated a rest stop – insomnia and a hunk of burning lethargy. The effects of altitude on the human body are random but total. Any niggling ailment you may be carrying is magnified tenfold. Your digestion is effected, you wake up in the morning with a urgent need to blow your nose and when you do, you produce a Jackson Pollock painting in your handkerchief. Every morning. M felt it aswell but held it together a little better than me.

Olivia from Bolivia (taken through a dirty bus window)

I generally take buckets of photos. In Uyuni I think I took 10 in 4 days, 5 of which were of the inside of the hotel room. That was how crap and unmotivated and lousy I felt. M used this time very productively and managed to do some wheeling and dealing and organise us a 3 day tour of the Salar de Uyuni (the main reason we were in Uyuni) – a tour of the desert and salt flats of Bolivia.

Sunrise, minus hundreds of degrees, 2 geysers

You’ve all heard of Adventure Tourism and Eco Tourism. Well the Bolivians have invented Torture Tourism. Our 3 day desert adventure involved jumping into the back of a Land Cruiser jeep with 4 other tourists, the driver and a cook and following a 1000km route around the desert to view the salt flats, some active and inactive volcanoes, some wildlife, and a lot of lakes – basically giving you a chance to experience the strangeness and vastness of the landscape here first hand. Think of it as Wanderly Wagon meets Paris-Dakar.

Meet The Lamberts

We were sharing our tour with 2 Danish brothers and their American/Phillipino and Croatian partners. Rune, the older brother is living in La Paz and working for a Danish NGO and was full of fascinating history and insights into Bolivian life and culture. Sven the younger brother was on a flying visit to South America to see his brother and to propose to Maria on Maccu Piccu. Our first port of call was the Salar de Uyuni – the worlds largest (and highest) salt flats (everything in Bolivia is generally the highest). This was one of the most surreal landscapes I’ve ever seen. You have vast, seemingly endless plains of ultra bright white salt flats shimmering horizon to horizon in the intense heat under a perfectly blue sky. Your brain has difficulty trying to figure out where the earth ends and the sky begins. You look at objects in the distance and they seem to be literally floating in space.

Our jeep, guide and travelling companions - Salar de Uyuni

This was definitely the highlight of the trip for me and such a pity it was on the first day. Salt, Halite and Gypsum are still extracted from the flats by hand by the industrious locals and mini piles of salt dot the landscape like abandoned works in progress. Then after the first of many stern shouts of Vamos!! from the driver we all loaded up and it was off to Isla Pescado a cactus covered island in what used to be the lake. We had lunch of hairy avocado and vittles, supplemented by our own bread and bananas and off we went again to San Juan where we overnighted in what amounted to a shed with beds.

Isla Pescado

We went for a wander in the town and I ended up ill advisedly challenging a young fella to a game of soccer played with a semi deflated volleyball covered in llama shit. I’m not the man I used to be, even less so at 4000m, and after retrieving the ball (which I’d bogtoed exuberantly) from over a very high wall I proceeded to fall face first into the dirt trying to execute a complicated step over manoeuvre. Embarrassed, wheezing and bleeding we headed back to our lowly cattleshed.

Laguna Verde

There was only electricity between the hours of 6pm and 8pm. The cook prepared our vegetarian meal of deep fried inedible somethings (the others had deep fried chicken and chips) in the most spartan of kitchens and off we went to bed by candlelight. The following day we hit Laguna Canapa and saw some flamingos. Its quite a suprise to see these odd birds in such an unforgiving landscape. We plundered photos like the scavenging tourists we were and headed on again for more lakes eventually pulling into a refugio on the shores of Lago Colorada for dinner and sleep. We all shared a room that night and Rune produced an interesting trick for heating the room – a tin pan filled with pure alcohol and set alight to burn and heat the room.

Sven and Rune - Hunting High and Low

Temperatures can reach well into the minus numbers here at night due to the altitude. Altitude again makes even the weather more extreme. You’re closer to the sun so you get burned during the day and you freeze during the night. But you’re also closer to the stars and out here you get treated to the most spectacular astronomy show. I have never ever seen a night sky quite like what we saw in Lago Colorada. It was the first time I’ve experienced that domed effect where the stars seem to wrap around the earth like a pin-pricked, dusty black blanket over a classroom globe. Absolutely amazing. We arose at 5am the following morning to witness the sunrise over the geysers. Even though I’d layered up to the max, the time I spent outside the jeep taking photos as the sun rose was still the coldest half hour of my life. My thumb basically froze into position and my fingertips were tingling for a good hour afterwards. I’m surprised the camera itself didn’t stop functioning. We were driven to many more remote lakes and then we hightailed it the 600km back to Uyuni for a victory dinner in the outstandingly delicious Minuteman Pizza.

Bolivia has the worst mannequin rights record in the world

I’m way behind in detailing our escapades but internet (along with electricity, water, and women with teeth) is precious in Bolivia so please be patient. We’re planning more days off in Copacabana, a little village on the shores of Lake Titicaca, so I’ll play catch-up then. Maybe if I laid off the disparaging social commentary y’all might get a better insight into what we’ve been up to. But that’d be no fun at all.

Join us next time for some....



Til next time…… Keep It Landlocked.

Thanks for the photo Sven

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Radharc


La Chascona discovers treasure on Easter Island

Just back from Isla de Pascua / Easter Island (or Easter Iceland as the air hostess pronounced it) – one of the most isolated islands on earth. It’s the furthest either of us has been from home – almost exactly half way round the world. A 30 minute trip to the airport turned into an 11 minute Dodi and Diana style race through the streets of Santiago at dawn. As I’m writing this from our room in Bellavista hostel at around midnight I’m hearing faint horns from the jazz club down the street floating through the window mixed with the sound of an elephant at the San Cristobel zoo up the road blowing his own trumpet. Anyone remember Hamilton that crazy cartoon elephant who would break into a jazz trumpet solo at the drop of a hat? From what I’m hearing at the moment, it sounds like elephants do actually like jazz – or at least have an adverse reaction to it. So we checked in over 3 hours early because we’d heard that LAN airlines regularly overbooks these twice weekly flights to Easter Island. Turns out the flight was delayed which meant we were sitting around in departures for close on 5 hours.

Baby Airport on Easter Island

I had bought some much coveted and hard to find magazines in English and M had her portfolio of paperbacks amassed from some canny trading at the bookswaps in the various hostels we’ve been staying in, so there was no real stress. We were convinced that our empty gas canisters and sealed bottle of gas for our stove had been discovered in our rucksacks and that the “technical problems” mentioned as the reason for the delay in the updates over the PA was in reality a bomb scare where mugshots of our heavily pregnant rucksacks would feature prominently. Only when our bags came trundling towards us up the conveyor belt in Rapa Nui did we know we were safe. The five and a half hour flight over was fine – we both slept a lot after a late night and a very early morning to catch the flight. It’s funny how a flight to a tiny island 4000km off the coast of a country and halfway to Tahiti is still classified as an internal flight.

Santiago street entertainer and some guy on stilts

The landing was pretty interesting. We descended out of zero visibility cloud and when we eventually cleared the fog all I could see out the window was the choppy surface of the sea. But the landing gear was down, the plane was angled to land, the engines were making thoughtful landing noises and the cabin crew were all perched in their landing positions – but where was the land? Suddenly, you could see some rocks jutting up out of the sea followed almost immediately, as if by magic, by a tarmac runway. We were literally landing on a cliff top. For some reason, which neither of us can explain, we both thought that Easter Island was going to be cold. We had heard about the constant rain and seen weather forecasts for thunderstorms and given the fact that we were going to be camping I think we over compensated by packing only warm and waterproof clothes. How wrong we were. We got off the plane dressed in windstoppers and raincoats and were hit with 25 degree heat and stifling humidity. Neither of us had brought shorts or swimming gear. We improvised out of neccessity with those dodgy trousers that you can turn into unflattering short shorts using only the power of zippers. By the time we’d rescued our luggage and picked up our little jeep, I was in desperate need of a towel and some air conditioning. Our little jeep provided neither. We checked in to our campsite which was like a seafront version of one of the Byrne’s houses in Clongorey, a rambling one storey house of mixed heritage with several haphazard extensions peeping out from under its skirts sitting on an acre of a front garden full of weeds, horses, car parts ……and tents. But the important bit is seafront – when we arrived the waves crashing onto the rocky shore 40 feet from where we pitched our tent were HUGE, Hawaii Huge and it made for a dramatic introduction to island life.


We had the tent pitched in minutes and were back in the jeep eager to spot our first moai. The island forms a pretty small triangular shape, something like 25km long by 20km wide, interestingly with an extinct volcano in each corner. We had thought about walking the island and had even picked up a trekking map to guide us. But seeing as we only had 3 full days we decided to hire the jeep to make sure that we got the most out of our once in a lifetime island adventure.

Breakfast on Easter Sunday morning (with luggage friendly eggs)

We had done a load of research before we came over and were absolutely intrigued by the mysterious history not to mention the archaeology – patchy and all as it is- of the place. We were particularly fascinated as most people are by the enigmatic and stern volcanic stone statues (the moai) which have made this tiny island world famous. There are over 600 moai on the island, some upto 9 metres in height.

M finally gets to meet one of her heroes

It is believed that the island was first inhabited between 1200 and 1600 years ago by the same crazy Polynesians who first inhabited Hawaii and New Zealand – which makes absolute sense when you see their tribal tattoos, hear their language being spoken (their words have a vowel to consonant ratio of 100:1) and witness the physical resemblance to the New Zealand Maori and native Hawaiians. These incredibly ambitious settlers, from their base in Tonga and Samoa, spread themselves over thousands of miles onto some of the most widely distributed rocky island outposts on the planet, travelling only in double hulled canoes laden down with human cargo, animals and plants. Their adventures make our relocation to Vancouver seem like a move to the next parish on the back of a Honda 50.

Hello Boss!

Due to the climate and soil conditions on this volcanic island, the range of crops which would grow sustainably was very limited. So their diet would have been pretty monotonous. The side effect of lack of effort required to grow food was that they had a huge amount of time to devote to creating and developing their ceremonial activities – an integral component of Polynesian life. I came to a similar conclusion wandering the island. These people were basically in the back of beyond with nothing to do – essentially unemployed. So these carved stone monolithic wonders are the fruit of their labours on the Polynesian equivalent of a Fás course (I think it was called Anco back then). What other reason could there possibly be for this steady production line of back breakingly huge stone monuments, painstakingly hacked from mountains? It wasn’t for fun they were doing it. So it must have been to get them out of the scratcher in the mornings. I wonder will the rockeries, ornate archways to nowhere and mini monuments completed on Fás courses around Newbridge still be around and revered by academics and tourists alike in a couple of millennia. One doubts it. But back to reality….

M's unconvincing moai impression (and Zipper technology demo)

There is much mystery surrounding the moai. Why were they made? What do they represent? How exactly were they transported from the quarry where they were sculpted and how were they erected? What’s the significance of the minor differences in markings and size of features? Minimal information survives about this tragic civilisation which was all but decimated following the island’s “discovery” by Europeans on Easter Sunday 1722. Slave traders from Peru raided the island in 1805 and made several plundering expeditions thereafter capturing upto 3000 of the natives to bring to work as slaves on plantations around their colonies and mines. Most of the islanders died under the appalling work conditions. Of those who survived, most were too weak to survive the voyage back home when they were ordered to be repatriated by the Bishop of Tahiti of all people. Those that did survive, in a tragic twist, ended up infecting the remaining islanders with smallpox and TB. After all this the population on the island had plummeted from a mid 1500AD high of approximately 8000 healthy inhabitants to less than 100. The traditions and history of the islanders were wiped out along with its people, some of whom were high chiefs who alone had access to specialist knowledge about the culture and their traditions.

Tomás Mac Rapa Nui? Anseo!

Later, missionaries determined to bring faith to these forlorn souls actively destroyed their old wooden sculptures, religious artefacts and most importantly the Rongo-Rongo tablets (which surpisingly isn't a euphemism for disco biscuits) which were the only surviving record of the native language of the Rapa Nui, thereby debatably doing more damage than the slave traders. In addition to the destructive outside influences, there is evidence to suggest that the culture went through a period of very destructive infighting between the local clans. The most damaging effect of these battles was the toppling of the moai, each clan upending the handiwork of the other, and desecrating the statues further by smashing the ornate coral eyes. No surviving moai has its eyes intact although samples of fragmented eyes exist in the museum on the island. An expedition to Easter Island in the late 19th century reported that there were no moai left standing anywhere on the island. Hundreds of these tall, proud sculptures, some of them broken in two, lay toppled face down across the landscape like warrior casualties of some great stoneage battle. Over the past half century or so, several have been resurrected by multi national archaeological teams. Interestingly this tiny culture’s bizarre obsession with sculpting these huge statues eventually directly resulted in the irreversible deforestation of the island as massive tracts of delicate local forests were felled to provide the trees used to transport these stone behemoths to their final locations around the coast. This turned the island into a wasteland with the erosion of the exposed soil making the growing of crops far more difficult and depriving the islanders of the raw materials required to construct shelter or build the fishing or sailing boats they so badly required to support their lifestyle. So, it would appear that by hook or by crook, whether it be at the hands of slave traders, missionaries or as the result of self inflicted ecological damage to their environment, this tiny civilisation, rich with knowledge, ceremony and ritual, and responsible for creating some of the most intriguing historical artefacts ever discovered, were doomed by fate to an ignominious demise.


Our first visit in beepbeep (nannad’s jeep) was to Rano Raraku, the quarry where the moai were carved in-situ from the mountainside and where the most photographed moai reside. There’s still a lot of moai sitting half carved in the mountainside or completed and deposited upright in pits at the base of the quarry awaiting transportation to their final resting place. Obviously, for whatever reason (some were simply too large to move, some say that the money the chiefs were paying the labourers and craftsmen simply ran out – the other likely possibility being that the breakdown of society following the slave traders’ visits depleted the workforce to such an extent that the work simply stopped) they never made it.




Getting a feel for the sheer size of these things was interesting. These Rapa Nui stoneworkers were master craftsmen, using the resources which the quarry provided to their maximum. Some of the half carved moai are carved perpendicular to the ground, some parallel – depending on the quality of the rock and the presence or absence of faults in the soft volcanic raw material.

Moai in progress

The standing moai were the most impressive though as it was our first sighting of these mesmerising anthropomorphic rock sculptures in the flesh…. so to speak. We were both very surprised to discover that the majority of these heads were also carved with tiny little hands joined over their bellies. Some even had tattoos carved into their asses. It sounds strange to say but all of the moai seemed to have their own personality. Subtle differences in features, a larger nose, a stronger chin, the shape of the mouth made each one look a little different, some in better mood than others. One in particular looked a lot like Guy Smiley from Sesame Street, others had carvings on them very reminiscent of Elmo from Sesame Street causing us to wonder at Jim Henson’s inspiration Whether or not the moai had long ears or short ears is seen as very significant as it indicated which clan or tribe commissioned that particular statue. We both had our favourites and I totally would have brought one home with me but for the fact that we’re extremely overweight with our luggage already and adding an extra 30 tonnes would have just been stupid.

A horse doing a convincing watercolour impression

Next stop was Orongo. Orongo is a village ruins at the rim of the crater at Rano Kau high above the island. Apparently the village was only used once a year (at the September equinox) by the high priests and chiefs of the island for a strange ritual indeed, the Birdman Ritual. This involved a competition between the chiefs of the island to find the first egg of the sooty tern on a small islet just off the coast of Easter Island.

Ranu Kao

The competitors had to first descend the steep cliff face from Orongo down into the crashing waves of the shark infested ocean hundreds of feet below and then swim the 2km across to the island, have a root around for the elusive sooty tern’s egg and transport the egg back intact to the high priests. It could take anything up to 2 weeks for the lucky contestant to return with the egg. In the meantime the priests would hang out in Orongo performing ritual dances and prayers. The victorious chief now became the birdman for the next year. This dubious honour comes with the requirement that your head and eyebrows be shaved. The birdman is then taken to a secluded location at the base of the volcano where he was to remain in strict solitary confinement for his full year of office. The real benefits accrued to his kinsmen who became the bona fide governors of the island for the year. Then they’d start all over again the following year. It’s a pretty spectacular way to relieve boredom. You really have got to admire their imagination. The Birdman Cult as it’s called eventually overtook the statue cult as the predominant religion on the island. There’s also further evidence of them using more macabre methods to relieve the boredom in their diet. Cannibalism was not uncommon on the island – humans being the only potential meal-mammals available to the islanders. There’s disagreement over whether or not the cannibalism stemmed from the requirement for human sacrifice in some of their rituals or whether it was just a case of fancying a bit of meat for a change.

We visited Anakena beach the apparent original landing spot of the original islanders and thus a very sacred spot. We eventually found another really secluded beach Ovahe beach and had a lovely picnic there one of the days in complete isolation.


So all in all it was a pretty magical experience. Even without knowing a thing about the history of the place and its people the island has an incredible eerie charm which stays with you for your entire visit. We were blessed with several of the sites in that we had them completely to ourselves. Tourbuses full of happy snappers would sometimes descend en masse turning the sites into raving anthills of appropriately dressed westerners just after we left. Tourbuses take a north-south route and by taking a south-north route you can time your visits to avoid bumping into the crowds. Post-Post Edit: great article here.

Mareike and M

We bumped into a nice Belgian girl at our campsite aswell. Marieke was on the final leg of a round the world journey and she accompanied us on a hike up one of the volcanoes and on a couple of days touring the island. We rescued her the first day from a gruelling uphill she was having trouble negotiating on her crappy hired bike. We spent the evenings chatting over wine and massive packets of crisps (while a group of Japanese prepared 13 course banquets using both kitchens) about each of our adventures and plans for future travel. We’ve told her we’ll move into her house in Belgium no strings attached. She said she’d get back to us.

The contents of my handbag

We returned to Santiago back to the excellent Bellavista hostel. This place is absolutely amazing, far and away the best and most well kitted out hostel we’ve stayed in yet. It’s jam packed full of those creature comforts required for the addled backpacker to unwind after long nights drinking or mornings bullshitting about their adventures real or imagined (cue heavy Glasgow accent….. "we’re going to Bolivia to live with pumas for a month" - true story. )

Over smoggy Santiago

We’ve had the most fun we’ve had in months on the hostel’s Fussball table. I was winning every single game until M figured out I was upending her goalie before every kickoff so that he'd just watch the ball go under his legs every time I directed anything vaguely goalwards. There’s also a massive widescreen plasma TV, a gorgeous blue pool table, loads of free internet and wifi and all in a couple of adjacent old buildings 10 minutes walk from downtown Santiago. We had our incredibly spacious double room in a gorgeous old house and basically we’ve been holed up here for close to a week living in a place that's as close to a home as we've had for a while.

Home sweet shelfspace

We hadn’t planned on staying quite this long in Santiago as we’d heard it can be a pretty dull town in a constant state of smog smotherment. But it has been very good to us. We hooked up with Riva Hazelkorn the Princeton Architect we met on the W (she lives in Santiago teaching English) and went for Japanese food and Jazz one of the nights and to a party at a gay dancer’s house / dance studio the next night It was actually a lot more fun than it sounds – there was a OAP couple entertaining the revellers with pretty arthritic Tango displays until 5 in the morning. M even got up to dance with the old guy for a set of hilarious utter Tango chaos. At home the rowdy senior couple would have been carted out in an ambulance at midnight.

The photo they didnt want you to see : Santiago Shoeshop

On the other hand, there’s very little worse than bad jazz. Santiago has a reputation for being a bit of a jazz hotspot. Personally I don’t think the Latin Americans are laid back enough to pull it off and Friday nights display of overweight Latinos with beer bellies and prescription sunglasses competitively blowing animal noises out of their instruments seemed to confirm it. But it was a good night of mojitos, liver with raspberry sauce finger food, unflattering cross cultural observations and a discussion on Reva’s thesis on Toilet Architecture which was pretty interesting. We also spent a bit of time thinking about our next move. Coming back from Easter Island was a complete anti climax. We’ve been looking forward to that trip forever and to suddenly be the other side of it left us a little bit uninterested in having to experience anything else for a while. So we’ve been taking it pretty handy enjoying our own space for a while. We did go and visit another Neruda house, La Chascona – which means "wild haired woman" - his Santiago residence. Same story designed over 30 years rather haphazardly but very beautifully. It’s probably our favourite Neruda house even if the views are a little less impressive. We learned also that he was beginning an impressive fourth! free form design project when he died. We also learned he had a completely unexpected affair with the niece of his third wife sometime in his late 60s. Poets is crazy men.

One of the bars at La Chascona

Good luck to Jesper who enters his monkery this week. He has climbed the highest mountains and he has run through the fields, so hopefully the monkery has a lost and found department. Keep us posted on how you’re getting on Jesper (or do these guys even believe in the Internet?) and the best of luck again. And a massive thanks to Marco van Basten for sorting us out with Electric Picnic tickets. That was one of the best surprises we’ve gotten in a long time and having seen the lineup we can’t fricken wait. Thanks to all for the kind and complimentary words of encouragement aswell. You know who you are. It means a lot when you’re over the hills and far away to know that there’s someone somewhere missing you as much as you’re missing them.

We're off to San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile tonight. Its very close to the Atacama desert and we'll have an opportunity to explore the much talked about Altiplano aswell. After that, who knows? The slow train to Uyuni in Bolivia is one option I'm looking forward to but I wont be holding my breath based on my disappointment on hearing that the Tren de los Nubes (Train to the Clouds) is offline for a while. Anyways, chao chao for now.