Grumpy-land

...or Bolivia on it's more known name...
(I call it so because of the atitude of most of it's inhabitants towards tourists. I was allready used with a bit of condescendence, and feeling a bit silly when asking about directions, but in Bolivia you feel like you are disturbing, like people would rather give up the money you are willing to spend and be left alone. This, when they are not trying to scheeme you. But you won't even find the profit-oriented niceness of merchants... )

          As I was saying, at the end of the Chile post, my crossing to Bolivia didn't go quite so smooth and turned out quite expensive... and you'd think this would be the cheapest country on my trip...
         From the minibus that brought us from San Pedro we (me, Jose from Chile and a coreean girl who recomended herself as J - I suppose after many failed atempts to have her name pronounced correctly ) were transfered on a jeep that was making it's way back to Uyuni after compleeting a three days tour and discarding some of the travelers - the ones that crossed to Chile.
       The ones that were going back: some brazilians and a mexican girl, Selene (who was to befriend us soon) had the best seats. So I suffered a bit due to lack of leg-room in the back of the vehicle. But the landscape was magnificent... and there were some lamaaas...

I also had to chew some coca leaves as my sinuses started turning inside out when we aproached 6000m altitude. Must say, I was a bit circumspect, but nothing extraordinary happened. Luckily, I didn't feel any other kind of sickness, nor did anybody else.
      The ride was nice (more photos to come)and the driver pretty patient, and as he declared himself, quite a 'bandito', because he took a sidetrack in order to avoid us paying the reservation fee (about 20 USD). Me, Jose and Selene got into a big talk about what's wrong and so similar in our countries that kinda uncharmed the journey....
      We made it early in Uyuni, so after booking the Salar tour for the next day and checking in at our hostels we had time for beer and seeing Selene at the bus-station to catch her night-bus to La Paz. The same bus that me and Jose were to take the next day

Jose loves his fish-eye lens

      The one day trip to the Salar de Uyuni was great ! Even if I was in a very boring car, I kept meeting Jose at the different sights. like the Train Cementary:

... many photos to follow...

        The busride to LaPaz was painfull. The first part, up to Orouro is not even paved and, as we were seated at the back of the car, sometimes the bumps would lift us completely from the seats. And then there were parts in construction..., and then just before entering the city, there was a marketplace that took forever to pass

 we were not even sure were we were untill we actually reached the upper sides of La Paz

 ... in spite of all the half-done, ugly little houses, the view was impressive. And LaPaz is really fascinating. Ugly and poluted and crowded, but fascinating. It was the place I really felt like in a different world, I felt the sort of otherness, I expected to find in South America. I loved walking the narrow streets, even when beeing starred at. Most of the time, I felt like I was the only tourist (non south-american) in the capital of Bolivia who actually ventured outside the hostels.
       I'll leave this post now and will continue when I recover my photos. There's more about LaPaz and then Copacabana and La isla del Sol ;)

Intermezzo

       I am for the moment a bit outside my journey. I am in Coca/ Ecuador where I joined a film-crew in order to do two small animation sequences for a sort of docu-fiction on reproductive rights. Since it is going very slow and desorganized , I still haven`t had the chance to do any work. But the people are lovely: they bought me cake and wine for my birthday :) Meanwhile I also bought wine and chocolates... so we got a bit wasted last evening

      I know I still have to do the posts on Bolivia and Peru, but my head is full with other stuff. As I said at the beginning, this journey was planned a bit as a life quest... a way for me to put myself out of my comfort zone, to figure myself out, see if I am living my life right... and so on
      I started wrong, I started wanting to return as soon as possible to the man I'd recently fallen in love with. But one month after my departure, that man started to fade away and a week ago dissapeared completely and I had to realize he never existed to beginn with (yeah, I've been here before...). I did feel it coming, but still it hurt as hell, especially since I haven't been given a fighting chance, but a spear in the back. I am telling myself, I should be grateful it happened like this, that I had to do this trip alone, and that it could have been a much longer and more painful charade...
But WTF?!!!
I had to admit, I've fallen in my same old pattern, believing in words and not in deeds. I'm such a sucker for pretenders! and what I've realized alongside with that, is that I DO CHOOSE MEN RESEMBLING MY FATHER!!! Shocker! I thought I'd never, because I never had a phisically violent boyfriend, but actually the feature these men, actually boys, share with my father is a deeper character flaw... And I also had to admit that I really, really loved my father as a little girl and I tryied desperately to gain his affection...and this is what I still do! But there was none to give... and never will be.
          So what do I do with this naiive little girl? How do I make her dissapear?...
 ...this is what's eating me right now and keeps me from enjoying the view, or wait! maybe the problem is that there is no view !!! That's it, i'm off to Quito! ;)

Some of Chile

(one of my  SDcards caught a virus somewhere - I believe in the Loki hostel in Lima and now it cannot be read, so that's why I only have some of my photos from Chile.
...and none from Bolivia - oh, boy...next post will be difficult. There's a warning for you.)
    So, Chile:
Chile is grey.
this is at least my impression, not a very objective one, since I didn't see the great reservations in the chilean Patagonia... But Osorno , Santiago, La Serena and San Pedro de Atacama... kinda grey-ish

     I reached Osorno at noon and luckyly it stopped raining. It has been raining all the way from Bariloche and my luggage was soaked from being disembarked at the chilean border. Aparently Chile guards very strictly its biological purity so people were not alowed to bring in even the organic products they had in their lunch bags. God forbid an argentinian appleseed should fall on chilean soil!
So Osorno :

 not much really, just a tranzit town with cute wooden houses, cool street art and quite expensive coffee... I managed to see all the 'atractions' in about 4 hours before taking the night bus to Santiago
  Here I stayed with friends (thank you again Andra and David) and this is the view from their balcony:

I did go up the San Christobal, but I didn't take many pictures - the internet is full of them sort.

but I've discovered very surprising sides of the city, like this out of time street:

 some peculiar shops:

oversized and damn good street bands:

a muddy, tired and heartbreaking melancholic river

 melancholic streetart, on the river banks...

and some not-so-melancholic street art

I've first seen an learned how to do an Ecoladrillo : 

 all in all Santiago is a metropole ... with it's ups and downs

     I walked a lot , but also had time to rest and at the end of three days I took another night bus, to La Serena. This little town by the ocean was a bit of a surprise. The weather was kind of particular: cloudy till about 4PM then all of a sudden the skies turned clear and the sun shone bright. Every day the same, I was told from the hostel.
    So on the first day, as I arrived early, I dropped my luggage and took a minibus to the Elqui Valley, of which I've heard from a local I traveled with on the bus. Aparently the sun was to be found there.

         Here should come some pictures of the beach in La Serena,  and some pictures of Coquimbo... when I'll be able to access them.
The beach itself is sort of ok, the sand is rather grey, but the South Pacific water is terribly cold and there were dozens of dead gelly-fishes being washed ashore ... don't know why, but that definitely ruined swimming for me.
         I just thought of visiting Coquimbo, the adjoined little town, on the 3rd day, before taking the bus to San Pedro de Atacama and I was immediately sorry I didn't stay there instead of La Serena. It's a lot less touristy, and it doesn't have a beach, but a fishing harbor, but is a lot more picturesque...
        I made it to San Pedro de Atacama next day at about 11 am, after a 17h ride, instead of 14, with TurBus, which should have been direct, but we changed in Calama anyway because the car had a problem... For being the biggest and most expensive bus company in Chile, they were a total disappointment.
      San Pedro is lovely and there's a lot of things you can see and do around - it obviously lives of tourism, but here is where I first time had bad luck with the weather : it rained both days. I blame the British couple with whom I shared the hostel room. So the only thing I could visit was the Pukara Quitor - the pre-inca ruins, and that only after crossing bare-feet through a red-mud river that just appeared over night (Atacama is a desert)
       Actually it was kinda nice to just hang out with people in the hostel, thing that I usually don't get to do if I'm just touring and tracking and moving from one place to another...
I also managed to find direct transfer to Uyuni from San Pedro - contrary to what I read on the internet, that one has to go to Calama, spend a expensive night there and catch an early bus...
       Everything went smooth until the bolivian border, where I had to pay 55$ for the visa that I didn't know I need. Apparently Romania is still in another group than the rest of the UE countries. And that's just for Bolivia!

Patagonia

... oufff where to begin ?
On the 2nd of January in Buenos Aires  was pouring rain - it was starting to flood and I was afraid the plane won't depart. But it did.

 and 3 hours later I was 2000 km south in El Calafate

      I stayed in a sketchy hostel, which was not a hostel at all , but a camping with dorms, and I shared one of the dorms with some sketchy fellows... I guess they were good guys, but kinda smelly. So I was out and about as much as possible. It was funny how I had to explain to the lady at the reception what people expect from a hostel - like the use of an equipped kitchen - since they are listed as a hostel on hostelworld...
       I booked a guided trip to the Perito Moreno glacier for the next day and also booked my bus to El Chalten for the 4th and the bus from there to Bariloche on the 5th. And as everything turned out to be more expensive than I read on the internet, my argentinian pesos cash was running very low. It was clear that I will have to exchange more dollars, and the exchange house in El Calafate was operating the official rate (6 to 1)...
       But! on the Perito Moreno trip there was the boat or no boat option. I told my guide I had no pesos for the boat and asked if I could pay with a Visa card. She told me they would take dollars and give me the rest in pesos at a very good rate - 10 to one!!!  and so they did! My problem solved. By the end of my patagonian stay, I realized I had miscalculated with more than 100 dollars.
       So the glacier

That was pretty much what Calafate is all about. El Chalten on the other hand is a little jewel of a trekking resort, surrounded by mountains

        I arrived at about 11 AM , dropped my luggage at the hostel and up I went! In jeans and running shoes, with a 'purse' and a shopping bag - the ultimate gringa. Well - that is pretty much the outdoor gear that i have with me, since Patagonia was not in the plans for this trip. I was very amused to hear the comments of the 'hardcore' trekkers - with their Vibram soles and their windstoppers and their trekking sticks... as I was passing them.
The track I did, and I suppose all of them are really well layed-out and taken care of; secure, clean and constantly reminding the tourists to be respectful with the nature - I haven't seen a bottle cap on the ground.
It also had the aspect of a quest-game scenery with different realms or levels
- 'the call for adventure':

 - 'the point of no return':

-'the path in the unknown':

 - 'the lake of sorrows':

 -' the tree graveyard':

- 'the garden of lost memories':

 - 'the dragon's bridge'

-'the dwarf forest'

       If this would have been a real hero's journey, the goal would have been to climb the Fitz Roy. But as it is not, I am happy to have arrived at the 'Laguna de los Tres':

When I reached the peak a bunch of people went up cheering. Turned out they were looking for somebody to take a group photo of them. It was a pretty fun moment.Then I got my photo also

 ... and back again.
When I looked on the map to see where I´ve been, I realized I did 25 km in about 5 h. Go me! I knew my legs will be sore the next day, but there was nothing I had to do, except sit in a bus for two days on the way to Bariloche.
The 'legendary' Route 40 is a terrible bore... just pampa... for hours. A lama or a few were to be seen ever now and then - and everybody was getting excited.
Or even some horses - in a strange statuary group stillness...

 And after two days of this... Bariloche! The swiss town of Argentina

 Here I stayed in Couchsurfing with 'Peter Baggins' - not his real name, but so suited to the scenery... A lovely experience, I was really taken care of.

        On the first day I went to the Circuito Chico - the one you can do on foot, or better on a bike. It seemed again that I was running out of cash after buying my ticket to Chile, and as there was no paying with the card at the bike-rental, I meant to walk the circuit (after all there were only 28 km - piece of cake!) But there was Martin who came with the same bus from town who offered to pay for my rental :) In exchange for the same when he'd come to Berlin. So I had a bike and a partner for the day (not entirely, cause he gave up in the middle of the trail)

       A strange thing - it seems that I am extremely lucky with the weather... when I looked on the internet, there was fog and rain announced for Patagonia in the week I planned to spend there, and everybody told me the weather had been bad up to my arrival... Also as I left Bariloche it started to rain and it rained all the way to Osorno/ Chile. But as I walked  out the bus terminal - the sun came out!
I am very grateful, I hope I don't jinks it and it keeps up this way :)

Next - Chile!