Cavalier psychadelia

SAN PEDRO DE ATACAMA, REGION II, CHILE - 28th March 2010

The LPG's tiny section on SPA does the place scant justice, but that didn't stop it being (as always) the starting point following our arrival from the visual spectacular that is the Jujuy-SPA bus route. We decided to stay at Residencial Vilacoyo, which was (like basically every building in the village) adobe constructed and thus amazingly cool (in the thermal sense, for once) inside despite the pelting desert heat outdoors (see right).  With a courtyard strewn with hammocks - the best things ever, as far as I'm concerned - it was a pretty good haunt.

As with pretty much every step of our travels, we don't really have any idea how long we were going to stay, but took on day one in typically cavalier attitude with plans to check out the "psychedelic" landscape around the village and generally scout some sights.  Being the adventurous young firebrands that we apparently are, we're reluctant to just hop on a tour in order to see things... but with so much to see this provides an alternative counter-problem: deciding on what to do - especially given the time constraints - proves rather challenging.

Recommended by the LPG, and by the parts of our bodies craving exercise, we decided to rent a couple of mountain bikes for the afternoon, setting ourselves the aim of checking out the Pukará de Quitor en route to Quebrada del Diablo, before bossing about 15km back down the same gravel road in the opposite direction, past (which is basically the same as through when you're talking about SPA) the town, and down the highway to catch sunset in Valle de la Luna (Lunar Valley; named for good reason).

The pukará itself (right) was similar in many ways to the one Tom and I tore up back in Chilcara, although getting to the top involved a much bigger climb and lacked the hundreds of here's-where-someone-had-a-dump-400-years-ago memorial cacti.  However, what made this place poles apart was the view. The mesmerising mixture of colours, their shades and their depth, added what can only be described as a surreal hue to a scene that would blow off your socks in black and white alone. As illustrated:

 

Armed with a map that we later discovered had north pointing south-west (and thus explained why the old sense of direction was going haywire everywhere we went), we headed onward down the dirt track a further 3km from the pukará, through a colourful floodplain flanked by rugged red hills (right) en route to Quebrada del Diablo (the "Devil's Gorge").  Obstacles along the way, aside from the dodgy map, included the bludgeoning early afternoon heat, and a fairly significant river that we had to cross to continue down the path.  I'm all for maintaining the cavalier attitude when it comes to these sort of things, but as it rather wetly transpired, you couldn't simply "power through".

Into the quebrada itself, however, and you soon forget where you've just been.  As if carved by a rather skilled labyrinth-architect, the gorge traverses a seemingly never-ended serpentine path through the middle of the towering rock that borders the valley - each corner you round producing ever more spectacular sights.  The geographers in our Juddian crew back home would (presumably) have gone to town over the geological formations on display, but the real story was how bloody awesome a bike track this place was - a true challenge at high speed, weaving left-right-left-right through blind corners on a surface that varied from dirt to thick sand.  And wasn't half bad to look at either:

We eventually decided we had no idea how long and deep into the rocks the path would go - it didn't seem to ever end - and wanted to crack on into order to get to the Lunar Valley, on the other side of SPA, in time for sunset.  I think it basically came down to needed to cover 20km in an hour; a feat much easier said than done on mountain bikes and dirt tracks in desert heat; but off we went anyway, past the pukará, in and out of the edge of SPA, and off on a big, bad, tarmac highway towards a direction that our map would suggest was south-east, but conventional bearings would better describe as due west.

It doesn't take a genius to explain the name - the barren expanse of land in the Valle de la Luna resembles that of the Moon.  Sadly, the best example of this is a further 7km from the entrance to the national park grounds - a distance we were never going to cover in the 15-20mins till sunset, and barely had the energy to do anyway.  So we did the clever thing and cut our losses, chillaxed with some soft drinks, and used our shit hot cameras to gets some cool photography.  And then cycled all the way back to SPA in the cold and dark with hunger welling up in inside of me like magma inside Vesuvius circa AD79.   Your standard day of travels, basically.

The Longest Day - Part IV

COLONIA DEL SACRAMENTO, URUGUAY - 1st February 2010

continued from Parts I, II and III...

If you, like me, have long got tired of hearing the cliché that goes something along the lines of "things rarely turn out accordingly to plan, however good the plan might be", you can probably appreciate that it is even more annoying to have it practically demonstrated in front of your eyes for the umpteenth time.

Earlier today in Buenos Aires, I was happily reporting a successful purchase of afternoon ferry tickets over to Uruguay - something that was looking somewhat dubious even earlier in the day on the other side of the Pacific. With hours to spend, I dropped my bags off at the ferry terminal's luggage room and took on the staggering heat and humidity of what the LPG sees as "still the coolest place in South America". The LPG also informed my first destination - the number one priority was, surprise, surprise, getting some grub - and it wasn't much more than a 5 minute walk to a cool little place called "Filo" located down a bit of a side street from the bustling Avenue Córdoba. Vaulted ceilings with contemporary decor, seats on the bar and an art gallery downstairs were the order of the day, alongside an excellent serving on empanadas and an ice cold beer. At under the equivalent of US$10, it was an excellent gastronomic introduction to the continent.

Avenue Florida is BA's shopping street - pedestrianised and rammed with shops, stalls and thousands of shoppers, traders and tourists looking like rabbits in headlights (or, walking mugging targets, depending on your spin on things). Not emanating the "gringo" vibe in quite the same way as your average British tourist, I blended in and around the crowds and made my way to Galerías Pacifico - a shopping centre whose interior design immediately reminded me of the Queen Victoria Building mall in Sydney - simply stunning, from towering waterfall to vaulted glass ceiling and Roman architecture.

It wasn't long, however, before I was back in the ferry terminal, recovered my bags and attempting to check in - the full (and recommended) hour before the 16.15 scheduled departure. I reach the front of the queue, hand over the ticket printout that I'd been given at the ferry company's desk on the other side of the forecourt, and was promptly imformed that my ticket was for tomorrow - the guy pointing out the "02/01/10" date in the corner of the piece of paper. Once again - and I've lost track of the number of times I've found myself typing these words on the this blog - I was far from impressed. This was only heightened when he tells me that he's changed the ticket for today, but I have to go to another desk, pay the 18 peso (about £3) difference in price, pick up a new printed ticket, and then rejoin the queue to check in. Helpfully, he added that I "probably don't have enough time to do it before the boat is supposed to leave". Great.

Details are fairly irrelevant, suffice to say I rushed around and muttered a lot of abuse under my breath, eventually got checked in and passed through immigration with a few minutes in hand. And then sat on the boat where, while admittedly drifting in and out of conscious, I sat and waited for the next 45 minutes before we actually left. Turned out there were so many people waiting to be checked in after me that they just had to delay it... and that this was pretty much standard practice. There was little care from me though - by that stage the fatigue of being about 32 hours into a day that still had 8 hours remaining had well and truly kicked in, and my cares were entirely based on sleep.

After a little trek into town, I was checked in at El Viajero Hostel and, after sorting myself out with fluids, lockers and general loose ends it was off into the time encapsulated cobbled streets of the old Colonia town - an area designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Area in 1995. A few artistic clouds dotted an otherwise perfectly clear sky, leaving the buildings glowing in amber twillight as I wandered down to the riverside, and sitting on the rocks by the small harbour area I passed half an hour watching the sun perform nature's nightly show that will never cease to get me clicking photo after photo.









With the sun down and a cooler breeze wafting in from the river, I sat down at the fanciest place in town (feeling the justified need to splash out) - the seafood-speciality Yacht Club restaurant by the harbour - and enjoyed a long, drawn out dinner of fresh gambas prawns washed down with crisp local beer. 2 hours later, I sauntered back to the free computers here at El Viajero and, with minutes ticking on to midnight, draw to a close the most epic day of my life.

The Great Ocean Road, Part 3

PORT CAMPBELL, THE GREAT OCEAN ROAD, VICTORIA - 22nd December 2009

Continued from Days 1 and 2...

DAY 3

With a fair whack of distance to travel today, I was up and out of my hostel in Lorne by about 9.15 and off south-eastward down the GOR. The first port of call wasn't far, however, as I'd decided I was not going to have peace until I saw a koala in the wild. Kennett River, between Lorne and Apollo Bay, has a "Koala Forest Trail" walk that seemed to offer as good an opportunity as any, so I stopped off there and began the hour-long ascent up from the seaside into the shaded abyss of the forest of gum trees. Trying to spot little furry animals in massive trees is not the easiest of tasks, and I had little success on my own. Thankfully, a few other groups of people were driving the path (lazy gits) and had an incredibly sharp eye for the creatures, so I just went to wherever I saw them stopping. Sure enough, between about 3 cars of people we came across about 7 or 8 koalas sitting, dozing in the gums, but the last one we saw was wide awake on a branch above the trail path, munching away on the eucalyptus leaves and generally posing for the cameras.


As a bit of an educational aside, koala bears are not actually bears in any shape or form - like kangaroos and lots of other indigenous Australian creatures, they are marsupials - their closest relatives are wombats. As a general rule, marsupials are incredibly energy-efficient creatures, needing just 20% of the food intake of an equivalent-sized placental mammal to survive (spanning everything in size from rats to whales). The need for this energy efficiency is obvious in Australia's dry, largely barren and desolate landscape. The koala, however, has taken this efficiency to an extreme, with the latest biological insight concluding that the reason it, unlike any other living creature, has a brain smaller than its skull ("a walnut of a brain rattling around in a fluid-filled cranium"), is that that its brain has been sacrificed in the name of energy efficiency. Brains need a lot of power - our human brain uses 20% of our energy, despite being only 2% of our mass - and koalas don't have energy to spare thanks to a diet solely consisting of gum tree (eucalyptus) leaves - a leaf so toxic that 20% of their energy is spent just detoxifying it (leave alone digesting it). As the LPG correctly notes, "there is no doubt that the koala is not the Einstein of the animal world". However, living up in the treetops with no predators of note, they can happily doze their time away, spending 75% of their day asleep.

Happy as Larry with a camera full of awesome wild koala snaps, I was soon back on the GOR, passing through Apollo Bay again before the road heads inland around the coastal peninsula of the Otway National Park. Without any CDs or an iTrip for the iPod, I was forced to use that ancient medium of radio to entertain my ears - and was pleasantly surprised by what was on offer. Having enjoyed the rock'n'roll of Vega 91.5 through Melbourne and the cheesy classics of Bay FM round the Bellarine Peninsula, this particular stretch of journey had 95.9 Mixx FM as its soundtrack - principally because the towering Mountain Ash trees lining the road prevented any reception from anywhere further afield than Apollo Bay!

About 30km further inland from the GOR is the Otway Fly - a massive system of raised walkways running through one of the few remaining preserves of Victoria's natural rainforest. The fly system is one of only 3 in the world - all of which are in Australia - and rises 25 metres (85 feet) off the forest floor allowing you to walk through the different layers of canopy for its 600 metre length. In the middle, rising up alongside the towering Mountain Ash eucalypts, is the 45 metre (150 feet) high viewing tower which takes you up to the top of the canopy by a spiral staircase (see right), and gently sways in the breeze as a result of its central pillar support structure. The trees are magnificent - it is hard to comprehend just how big they are when you look at them because it is equally hard to comprehend just how high you are off the ground, and for the same reason photographs, like the one below, simply cannot do justice to what you're actually experiencing. For all the uniqueness of the Fly, however, I wasn't massively impressed by the $22 entry fee - it was cool, but not that cool...


Out the other side of Otway National Park, the GOR once again meets up with the coastline, although now west of Cape Otway we were running along the factually accurate, if a shade melodramatic, "Shipwreck Coast" (in contrast to the touristy clichéd "Surf Coast" to the north-east of the Cape). The stretch of the coast contains the most photographed section of the GOR - either side of Port Campbell lie a series of spectacular rock formations including "the Twelve Apostles", "The Arch" and "London Bridge" - all formed as a result of the gradual erosion of the limestone sedimentary rock of the cliff face. The area is like coastal geography in action - I'm fairly sure it'd be like Christmas-coming-early for Miss Kateley or Larkin or the rest of the "geoggers" crowd - there are stacks and gorges and islets and all the other buzzwords, and over 10 years you can see the photographic change. The catalyst is the relentless force of the sea water coming up against limestone cliffs, which are eroded away over time leaving a protruding cliff with harder rock as the headland. The weaker rock around the edges will continue to be eroded behind the headland, forming caves on either side that are eventually eroded through to form an arch. Eventually, as the width of the arch is forced to increase, it will collapse, leaving behind an isolated "stack", which itself will gradually disappear or collapse. The Twelve Apostles, below, are such stacks, and now number just 6 (or 7, depending how you count them), after a 50m stack collapsed in 2005. It is unlikely that 12 were ever visible from any one point, put the name was catchier than the "Sow and Piglets" name that it succeeded...


Still within the broader Port Campbell National Park, but the other side of the Port Campbell township, "The Arch" is a natural archway carved out of the rock in the manner described above and, although resplendent now, will eventually collapse in on itself and leave behind an isolated stack like the Apostles further up the coast.


This, in fact, is exactly what happened in 1990 over at the equally impressive London Bridge - the photo below shows the gaping hole between the main headland and what is now an isolated arch, after the adjoining part of the "Bridge" collapsed. Apparently a couple of tourists ended up trapped on the newly isolated stack when the middle caved in, and needed to be rescued by helicopter... according to Wikipedia.


As you continue to head westward away from Port Campbell, you eventually reach the tiny village of Peterborough (population: 178), which has the dubious claim of being the centrepoint for shipwrecks on the Shipwreck Coast. With rocky outcrops all over the place and infamously choppy seas on the Bass Strait, not to mention a total lack of lighthouses back in the mid-nineteenth century, a good half a dozen vessels came to ground within a mile or so of Peterborough, including the Falls of Halladale, which sat aground off the Peterborough coast for months as a tourist attraction before eventually succombing to the might of the waves, and the SS Schomberg, which was designed with the sole purpose of eclipsing the record for the fastest journey from Liverpool to Melbourne, but came to a sticky end just a day's sail from its destination. A look across the water from the village tells a story - in among the expanse of water are a collection of random outcrops of rock - barely a few feet higher than the water level and almost certainly invisible in bad light.

En route through Port Campbell I'd stopped off for a bite, a swim in the sea, and to book some accommodation for the night, and so it was back to Port Campbell in the evening after seeing everything there was to see further up the road. My hostel sits on the best piece of real estate in the town - the front verandah sits right on the beach which is enclosed by large headlands on either side of it. While swimming at lunchtime, I'd noticed a path running up the side of the eastern headland from the edge of the beach, so I decided to build up an appetite for dinner by taking a stroll on what turned out to be called the "Port Campbell Experience Trail". Up on the trail, I got talking the a young family who were out for a post-dinner stroll - a couple with 4-year-old and 2-year-old boys. Turned out the Dad was the local police officer for the town, and the couple had moved to Port Campbell from Melbourne a couple of years back and loved it. As happens, we ended up having a long, winding chat about everything from my travel plans to the state of the world economy and the weakness of Pound Sterling, but they also pointed out some spectacular views looking eastward back up the GOR - from the end of the Port Campbell headland you can see right back up to the 12 Apostles - the stacks visible on the right hand side of the photo below. All the while, the sun was gradually working its way down to sea level, and the evening afterglow produced a stunning orange hue in the limestone cliffs, beautifully contrasting with the aquamarine blue of the ocean and the wild green of the shrubbery around us. It was one of those moments where you just wanted to keep looking, keep absorbing the image, capture the moment in time and never leave it. Instead, I have to make do with the photo!



The clouds in the sky were absolutely perfect, producing the most idyllic backdrop as we got back to Port Campbell's inlet beach, with the sun setting over another amazing day down the Great Ocean Road: