Monthly Archives: April 2013

Last days in Chile, border problems and creating a bond with Bolivian customs

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After having said goodbye to Ross, the kiwi owner of the Sunny Days hostel in Arica, we were on our way to ‘base camp’. Our base camp (or place for acclimatisation) for three days was going to be Putre, a small indigenous village close to the border of Bolivia. The 125 km was relentlessly uphill, going from sea level to an altitude of 3500 meters. The scenery was changing all the time, we drove up mountains that looked like sand dunes and roads carved into the sides. There hardly seemed to be any other cars around, just large amounts of Bolivian trucks going up and down.

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The Best of Northern Argentina and Chile

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When thinking about places to visit in Chile or Argentina, people often mention places in the south or the north.  I think it’s fair to say that if you’re strapped for time and want to visit Chile and Argentina it’s best to focus your time in either the south or the north. Our time in the south of both countries was scenically quite rewarding.  For extremely beautiful nature, stunning vistas, and great hiking you can’t go wrong with a visit to the south of Argentina and Chile.  However, the north is quite different. The north has colonial cities, deserts, interesting rock formations, fossils, indigenous culture, vineyards, geysers, volcanoes.  The list is exhaustive and the differences between the two are huge!

Here are our highlights from northern Chile and Argentina, including our favourite accommodation and dining experiences.   Continue reading →

Postcard Perfect Days – Amazing Sights in the Atacama Desert

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Salta, nicknamed ‘Salta the beautiful’ is an old colonial city in the north west of Argentina. The guide book says the city has a population of 535,303, smaller than Mendoza, but still a decent sized city.  We had looked forward to visiting it for a long time, having read about the city when we were still researching destinations to visit while still living in Wellington.  Driving into the city first impressions weren’t great.  Narrow busy streets, chaotic traffic with lots of pedestrians doing random stuff.  The municipal campground 6km from the centre was where we’d planned to stay but it gave us bad vibes so we decided to move on.  We were lucky to find space at a Posada very close to the city thanks to the help of the tourism office.  It was also insanely cheap, only 170 Pesos. Unfortunately Semana Santa (Easter) was starting the next day, and most people have five days of vacation as a result, Thursday through to Monday. It felt like all of Argentina descended on Salta and the north west of Argentina.  For the next five days we were constantly battling crowds and having difficulties with finding accommodation (even campsites). In the end Semana Santa won, and instead of taking our time to see Salta and the Jujuy provinces we ended up spending one day sight seeing in Salta and then camping in San Lorenzo, a village 12kms outside of the city.  However a whole group of dogs were at the campsite as well and they barked all night long, and even fought with each other.  Not a wink of sleep was had, and while we thought we’d stay a couple of days extra in the village we ended up packing up mid afternoon and driving four hours north to the village of Purmamarca where we camped the night before crossing back into Chile via the infamous Paso de Jama.  The one good thing about this rushed finish to our time in Argentina  was that we came in on budget, and spent the very last of our Pesos buying expensive fuel in Susques, a small village just a couple of hours before the border crossing into Chile. Continue reading →

Cycling, Wine Tasting and Desert Driving Days

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We were nervous about entering Mendoza, population 935,000 as our experience of big city driving in Santiago was terrifying and with our GPS doing weird stuff (read: not working) during our time in Argentina we thought it might be difficult to get in and around the city.  With a bit of luck we discovered that the GPS worked if you programmed in a specific address, so we did that and entering the city and navigating to our hotel turned out to be a piece of cake!   In Mendoza we enjoyed simply walking the wide-footpaths on lovely tree-lined streets, visiting beautiful plazas, eating Subway (two times!) and running in the beautiful Parque General San Martin five minutes away from our hotel. After a few days in Mendoza we moved to a hostel in Maipu, a town 20 minutes outside of Mendoza that has a lot of vineyards around it.  The thing to do there is to rent a bike and cycle from vineyard to vineyard tasting the various wines.  It turned out that the vineyards are actually 12kms from Maipu, in a different area, so we ended up catching our first public bus of this trip to the area, rented a couple of bikes and cycled to the first vineyard, one of the oldest in the area.  Cycling in Argentina was an experience, and more terrifying than cycling in Wellington.  I cycled like I was in a spin class, doing a sprint run, as I just wanted to get off the narrow road where crazy Argentinean over-taking was happening at high speeds and at close quarters to the bikes.  Poor Richard was wondering what was going on as I cycled frantically away leaving him behind!  When we got to the first vineyard we had some lunch, did a tasting of the wines, and then joined a tour of the vineyard.  The wines were harsh and dry, and the bodega was more for show as they didn’t do any of the processing at the vineyard, only used it to sell their wine.  On to another vineyard, which we’d heard specialised in deep flavourful reds.  There we met friendly Australian couple, Amy and Brad, and joined them while we worked on our three different varieties of reds: syrah, malbec, and cabernet sauvignon.  Being conscious of how crazy the traffic was on the road I was also working my way through a couple of 1.5L bottles of water! Continue reading →