beaches and beer

I don't really know what happened to our blog.....we kinda got behind a few weeks.....then a few months.....is it too late to backtrack??probably cos its a bit irrelevant now but thought we would try....
Think the last time we wrote we were in Ecuador. Ecuador was the last stop on our Oasis tour so we had to say goodbye to everybody and set off out on our own again. But we did have a fun last night out together in the captial, Quito. We kind of did a club crawl as there were more clubs than bars, my favourite club was the one where they served your vodka lemonades with 80% vodka in a glass and then a glass of lemonade seperate. I only need one and I was drunk!!It was a very fun night though which made it all the more hard to say goodbye the next day.......but we did.... and we were off!!
We flew into New Zealand, into Auckland. We got a nasty shock as it was FREEZING there, I lived in my anorak as it was my only jacket...I even wore it when going out.....geek !!I had no choice though!!We hired a car there and drove around explore the North and South Islands.New Zealand was like our liver detox stop as we just couldn't afford to drink as much as we were doing in South America, though we met up with a couple of the guys from our tour and then things were a bit messy.....
Also we were doing lots of outdoorsy things like going on boats,visiting volcanic pools, making us feel very spruce and healthy! One of our favourite things we did was zorbing. You get in a big inflatable ball filled with warm water and just roll down a hill like a hamster. It was so much fun!!
I'm trying to be brief here so I don't go on and on (and you all fall asleep) so I'll move onto Australia, our next stop.
We flew into Melbourne where we stayed for a few days. We really liked Melbourne prob more than Sydney. Here we did something I had always wanted to do....the Neighbours tour!!!We went to see the actual street,which was so tiny and some of the outdoor sets like the garage. Then they took us to meet a "suprise" cast memeber. Ï was hoping it was Karl.....but then this guy jumps on the bus and shouts "suprise, hey guys!" and no one says anything cos we don't know who he is!! So then he says " I played Connor in Neighbours a few years back" and we were all like "ohh thats who he is". I think it was a bit embarrassing for him having to explain who he was!! I was a little disappointed but he was a really friendly and funny guy and he drew me a picture of the tin whistle he used to play so that was good!!
Well I'm running out of room here so we have to finsih Oz on the next blog.......
Hope you are all well,Sal and Sixxxxxxx

As usual we have got very behind on our blog so trying to be good now and catch up. Its Sal writing now, think Si left off when we were in Arequipa,Peru. Think he said most of what we got up to there apart from we had a girls & boys night out there. All the girls on the truck went out together and the boys had their night out at the same time.It was all taken very seriously with boys\girls saying what patch of town was theirs and out of bounds to the others and so on. Even when we bumped into some of the boys, some of the girls pretended even not to see them to keep up the divide!!Typically the boys ended up in the strip club where the girls apparently 'werent that great'...........Anyway the girls had by far a better night and managed to stay out longer than most of the boys which is always good!
Should mention here that just before this, in La PAZ we had five new people join the truck; two couples (one english, one from new zealand) and an Aussie girl. They slipped into life on the truck very quickly and me and si had a lot of fun with them.

After Arequipa we headed to Nazca. Nazca is famous becuase it has these famous strange pictures and markings in its crops and feilds, a bit like crop circles and no one can explain how they got there....apparently! You can only see the designs by air so off we went and booked a tiny four seater plane to fly us over the Nazca Lines!It didnt help that our flight was at 6.20 am but I (and Si too) have never felt so so sick on an airplane before!!The guy wanted to get as close as he could to the ground for a close up view so he would just circle and swoop side to side really quickly which took a lot to keep looking out the window!!But we did see some cool designs, there was a monkey, a giant hand , a dinosaur and others, some were really good and some a bit crap!
That night we took part in earth hour...did you lot do it back home? suddenly at the campsite all the lights were turned off...wasnt great timing as we were still eating dinner outside but you cant be too fussy bout these things I suppose!!

We left Nazca and the next day got ready to spend a night sleeping on the sand dunes. The plan was to drive all around the sand dunes on sand buggys then try sand boarding before sleeping under the stars at a campfire in the middle of the sandunes. We were all put in sand buggys with a driver and off we went and oh my god we went fast.....it was really fun going up these big sand hills then zooming down them bumping around everywhere!
We then had a go at sandboarding. It was like body boarding, but on sand. You go to the top of a sand hill and lie flat on your board, face first. You then get pushed off and go whizzing down the hill! I managed to crash into someone elses board (they were not on it) on my first go though and smash my hip (which hurt a lot!!) so was a bit put off the next few go's. still really good fun though. At the campfire at night, the sand dune tour leaders plied us with pisco cola, which was very strong and got quite a few of us very drunk!!they also treated us to some songs on the guitar......just what we love!!when people were too drunk to stay up we just laid our sleeping bags on the sand to sleep. One guy who was pretty smashed got buried in the sand by two other guys off our tour while he had passed out and he woke up pretty freaked out!Was weird to wake up in the sand with nothing for miles around.

Next stop was the capital of Peru, Lima.It was a big city which we really didnt like!!It was full of smog and rubbish shops,but that is just our oponion!Also Si got food poisonig while we were there!Some dodgy restaurant.....
We had a few good nights out there though and sadly this was where three peole left the tour to fly home (you can get on and off at different stages of the tour). Though it was good having a few spare seats on the truck if you wanted to lie down!!
The next few days were drive days and bushcamps, the day after we left Lima we bushcamped at the beach, actually sleeping on the decking of somones pub!After we had drunk there,they let us!That night I found out Wendy and Conor had got engaged so had few drinks and celebrated!!
Our last few days in Peru we were staying on a beach in a place called Punta Sal.We put up our tents on the sand and had really good three days sunbathing, drinking and swimming.Perfect!!We also had a go at fishing and boy that was a bit of a disappointment!!We were out for three hours and all of us (apart from one guy who caught eels and some real edible fish)failed miserably to catch a thing!!
After that it was bye bye to Peru and off to Ecuador....................
love Sal and Si xxxxxx

After La Paz we went to Puno to visit Lake Titicaca....the lake is shared by Bolivia and Peru but we were on the Peruvian side. Having spent the now customary journey getting smashed we arrived in Puno and went out for dinner and a few more drinks and generally chilled out preparing for the next days "homestay" on an island in the middle of the lake. Early the next morning a tuc tuc took us down to the port where a boat took us to a reed island. It was amazing what they made out of reeds which were tied together. People have been living there for hundreds of years but they have to rebuild their islands every 40 years as they rot and sink. After a couple of hours we headed on to the main island and met our family. They were quite an old couple with 5 children although 4 of them had moved out to the mainland to earn more money. The house had electricity from a solar panel although they cooked with a wood stove in a smokey kitchen. We ate the same thing for lunch and dinner with soup, potatoes and rice but it did the job. We also played football against the locals and some other travellers which was tiring given we were still at altitude but we won 3 out of 4 games which was good. In the evening we got dressed up in traditional costumes and looking very stupid went to a local dance. The mamas showed us how to dance titicaca style but we weren´t very good although Sal still managed to just shake her arse in her usual fashion!

From Puno we headed for Cusco and the dreaded Inca trail. Everyone we met told us how hard it was so we weren´t particularly looking forward to it although we were looking forward to seeing Machu Pichu. We did have a couple of days before the trail started however and with one of them being St Patricks, we headed off to the Irish pub. Despite Guiness being more expensive than in England we had a couple to celebrate and partied the night away.

Day 1 of the Inca trail was far easier than expected. We can only have walked for about 3 hours when we arrived at our camp. Someone´s garden effectively but the porters had already put our tents up and a huge dining room and kitchen tent so it looked good and the next 3 days looked promising. We were promptly told it was happy hour which meant cookies, popcorn and hot chocolate...happy days indeed! As we were so early and there wasn´t anything else to do, everyone cracked open a few beers and the evening raced by with an excellent 3 course meal prepared by the porters. This had given us false hope as to how easy it would be and the next day was hell...6 hours of walking predominantly uphill through a pass at c4000 metres in almost constant rain was enough to put anyone off hiking, let alone the already anti-hiking Sally. We stuck to our group of 6 people and made it eventually however and were grateful for the warmth and food when we arrived at camp...unsurprisingly it was a more sober affair and after losing some money to the porters playing frog (a random game of throwing coins towards holes and squares marked out on the floor) we went to bed early. The next day was pretty uneventful and a lot easier before finally reaching Machu Pichu on the 4th day although why we had to get up at 4.30am is beyond me. Although the weather was terrible to start with it brightened up and it was pretty impressive although why they insist on rebuilding everything in sth america is anyone´s guess....it is like putting stonehenge back together but anyway it was good nonetheless and Sal even volunteered to walk up another mountain to get a bird´s eye view...astonishing indeed!

After another night in Cusco in the Irish pub eating proper English pub grub we went to Arequipa. This is one of my favourite places with a good vibe. We ate well, drank plenty and found time to visit a frozen ice maiden (she was sacrificed at the top of a mountain and frozen for hundreds of years before being found when the ice melted after a volcano erupted) and the huge monastery which covered a huge part of town where nuns lived without being visited for years.

Hello again its back to me writing the blog as Si and I are taking turns so be prepared for waffle!Hope everyone is well.
Anyway best get on. After Argentina we headed up into Bolivia which really is quite a crazy place and makes you feel like you are a long way from home with their strange customs and traditional clothes they wear.Also they have no proper roads so travelling through was pretty rough being bumped and thrown around the truck all day!
First stop was Uyuni where we had come to see the salt flats. Its like this huge sea but it is all made out of salt that goes on forever, as far as you can see. Cos everything is so flat and there is nothing on the salt, it messes up your perspective of how big things are and how near or far things are. Cos of this you can take cool phots looking like your in the clouds or that your a giant and stuff like that. We tried to do some of this ( as you can see on our photo page) but I was pretty rubbish at it, you have got to have a good eye and you all know how bad my eyes are!
Next we headed to Potosi which was where all the mines were. We were very high up at this point and quite a few of the group got sick from altitude, I just felt very wobbly, like I was going to fall over all the time. It was weird, like being drunk but without any of the highlights of being drunk!We decided to go down one of the mines as it was an optional activity of the tour and sound bit different but quite scary!The conditions in which the miners work has not changed for 40 years, so they are pretty bad, working in extreme temperatures using really basic tools and with no safety gear and no protection from all the fumes. The fumes cut miners life expectancies very short and people die from accidents in the mine all the time. So not really sure why we wanted to go down one really........!!
We climbed through some very small tunnels and at some points had to crawl on our hands and knees to get through. They also made us go up and down these really old rickety ladders where it was very easy just to fall into a huge void at any point!At this stage I wasnt really enjoying myself! We then got to a place where miners were at work, pushing and pulling trolleys full of rock, the miners covered in sweat from the weight of the huge trolleys. We had been told to bring presents for the miners so we gave them some coca cola and some coca leaves to chew as that was what they basically lived off while they worked as coca leaves are meant to give you energy and keep hunger at bay. Once we were out of the mine our guide asked us if we wanted to set off some dynamite. The thing about any guided tour you go on in S.A is that they dont seem to have any rules on safety and let tourists do all this crazy stuff you would never be allowed to do back home, which the boys on our tour love! We had three dynamites to set off so we went out onto the hills to set them off. The guide lighted one and told us it takes three minutes before it explodes. So then he passed round the lit dynamite for us to all hold and take photgraphs while it is burning down. Well I was nowhere in sight at this point! I was standing well back just using the zoom button on the camera!Eventually the guide ran off to put it somewhere far enough away so it didnt kill us when it went off but he was really in no rush to get rid of it!It was an eventful day!
Next stop in Bolivia was La Paz which is the captial of Bolivia. It was so busy here, there was a market outside our hotel that opened at 5am and people would just shout what they were selling non stop for hours. There was also a witches market here which was really creepy. It is a tradition that if you place a lama foetus at your door of your houses it wards off evil spirits so at this market thay just had these foetuses hanging up on hooks for sell!pretty gross.
It was a good place to go out tho, with loads of clubs that stayed open till 8am, a bit of a party city.
The main highlight of La Paz tho was going to San Pedro prison, one of the weirdiest experinces ever. It is a very large prison which is more like a village cos there are shops and stalls and most of the prisoners are free to wander around. It is also strange as you can invite your family to come and live with you in your cell. So it is an all male prsion but when you are there you see lots of women and children who live with thier husbands but can go in and out. The other thing is you buy your cell, so if you have no money, life is pretty rough, with really basic living conditons and working hard for your food. But if you have money you can buy a large room or one guy had a mini house with a room upstairs and they said some people have even nicer rooms if they are rich. And people have parties in their cells at night with loads of booze!The place is also comptely full of drugs,its pretty much run off them.We did a tour of the prison in a large group and you are shown around by the prisoners themselves. There were also a few prisoners who walk with you as 'guards' to protect you from the other prisoners. The ironic thing is our 'guards' who were meant to be protecting us were in the prison for murder!We walked round some of the living areas and then were taken into a cafe where we all had a beer with the prisoners!It felt very odd to be sitting in prison having a beer!Our tour guide even gave us the option of staying the night in the prison to party with them.........!!!!!Was a real eye opener!

After a couple of weeks in the cold we were pleased to arrive in Santiago where the sun was shining and to my disgust there were proper shops....so naturally we spent the 1st day checking out almost all of these as it had been weeks since Buenos Aires. Looking forward to our tour we were speculating at every European looking person as to whether they were going to be on our bus and Sal worried as to whether they were all going to be pensioners! We didn´t see any of them as it turned out most of them didn´t leave the hostel as they were just getting drunk the whole time by the pool and fortunately they were not all old and sal gets great pleasure from me being the second oldest! We didn´t find much other than a great outdoor pool at the top of a hill/mountain in Santiago to do so having started the tour settled in with everyone else by the hostel pool and started to get to know them....there were only 6 new joiners with the other 14 having done a similar route to us but on the truck from Rio

The next day we got on our new home the big yellow oasis truck and went to Mendoza and all I can say is don´t go there....having spent a day on the truck driving we stopped outside Walmart to shop for food as we were camping for a couple of days...leaving the truck within sight of the car park security guard we returned 25 minutes later to discover that 8 people´s small rucksacks had been stolen including mine...luckily we just lost a washbag and a few bits and bobs whereas others were less fortunate with 4 people losing their passports and a combined 1000 dollars....before the cost of having to fly to BA and back for a new passport...Anyway, spending the next 6 hours outside the police station in the ghetto whilst statements, finger prints from the truck etc are done was not a good start to the tour although as the photos show, Sal found time to go car surfing in between the whole group being threatened by a mad woman with a knife and this was on the steps of the police station!?!?!

At this point we were wondering why on earth we joined the tour having travelled very happily on our own although things have improved considerably since...there is a good crowd of people (who like a drink) so this keeps truck days interesting although this tests my bladder as there isn´t a toilet on the truck but Sal is loving the drinking games!

Leaving Mendoza we went to Cafayate which is another wine region...sal didn´t really appreciate the tour at 10am after a big night on caipivodkas but it was good to be away from Mendoza and getting to know everyone. The next day we drove to Salta where we had signed up to go rafting and zip lining...despite being eaten alive by sand flies rafting was good but we were both wondering why we´d signed up to go zip lining when we walked 150 metres up a cliff and saw a wire held in the ground by what looked like a large rusty nail going 600metres across a valley...not good for our vertigo but having watched the other 40 people go, Sal went at which point I couldn´t be the only person not to do it and did it myself! After the 1st 2 seconds it was amazing and the other 5 lines were easy after that....we´re even considering a bungy or sky dive in NZ but don´t hold ur breath!

Anyway, got to dash so will write another update soon as we´re still well behind time...

Hope you´re all well, lots of love from Sal & Si xxxxxxxxx