Call of the Cenotes

May 3, 2021

So with my change of apartments I now get to go to beach everyday instead of the pool, which was pretty great, besides tracking sand everywhere I was also near two dive shops, so I’d hit them up to do some cenote diving. The absolute coolest thing about the Yucatan region is the cenotes. These are fresh water underground caverns that you can see on the surface as pools in the limestone. They’re fantastic for swimming, they’re fantastic for snorkeling to see the underwater rock formations, and some of them are best when explored far under the surface, ie Scuba diving! To really investigate them you’d need a cave diving certification, but what I was doing was called ‘cavern diving’ where you never got too far away from one of the entry/exit points. And to be honest, the parts of the cavern that are lit up by natural light are the coolest looking anyway, not the pitch black cave tunnels (although you always have a flashlight). Just the way the natural light would hit the fresh water and create these striking sparkling rays of light underwater was just spectacular. Magical. Fairy tale stuff!

So I was hooked. Fuck coral reefs! It’s all about the cenotes now! And Playa didn’t even really have any good reefs, you had to go over to Cozumel, and I was far too lazy for that. There were tons of these cenotes all over, and while some don’t look particularly interesting from the surface, underwater they open up into all sorts of cool caverns and passageways and rock formations, or sometimes just big grand massive chambers. Like an underwater Roman coliseum. There was one called Maravilla, that really opened up in the most spectacular way, with a massive beam of light shining right through the middle of it, going down 100+ feet, like the light of God. Or the beginning of Independence Day :p

The only problem I had was getting other people to join me on these cenote trips. Most people fall into two groups, a tourist, who will do 2-3 of the easiest, most popular cenotes, or the long termers, who have lots of cave experience and have their own gear, and don’t really pay to go with guides. So it was a sometimes a struggle being able to join an actual group of divers to do the cenotes. So I kept in contact with a couple different companies, to have them hit me up if they ever have people doing some of the cenotes I had on my bucket list.

Eventually I got a message from a Russian run shop, and they had a girl coming in from NYC to do a few days of cenotes, and these were most of the ones that I still hadn’t been to yet. So yes please! Rather than explain too much I’ll post the photos and you can check them out yourselves. A lot of the cenotes aren’t huge, like you probably couldn’t spend too much time on them, but some of them are just so damn unique!

And so the diving went great, it turned out she was also staying in all inclusive resort with a dive shop, over in Cozumel for the next few days, and I was able to join her there for a bit. I would have been happy to pay the joiner fee, but she insisted there was absolutely no reason to, I kinda felt like a sissy for even suggesting it! I enjoyed her no-nonsense, Eastern European anti-authority type attitude (she’s Ukrainian). And of course she was right, they didn’t even care about the wristbands at the resort, although I still felt more comfortable wearing a long sleeve shirt, just in case. And the diving in Cozumel is very pretty, pleasant, and relaxing of course. Excellent vacation diving!

So I thought about writing another blog post, but to wrap up Playa del Carmen, but I honestly didn’t have too many more interesting things to add! Our pickleball group grew bigger, and we had some drama with the court owner trying to jack our rates, but nothing we couldn’t work out. I kept up with the yoga, although I improved at a slower rate than I was hoping for. I think what I need to do is spend less time on actually yoga yoga and spend more time on some different positions of actual deep stretching, just so I can get to the point where I can do some more not-beginner yoga positions. I joined crossfit for a few weeks, which was rough because they just kinda toss you into the lions den (there’s no easing into it) and then I tweaked my shoulder pretty good with rope climbs somehow, and that was about it. I got the first stages of my dental implants where my back lower molars are, and all that went smoothly. I was still meeting with my small group of friends every week or two. And I made a enough money playing online poker to pay all the bills, but not much more than that unfortunately.

So I was leaving Playa much healthier, in much better shape (got the 6 pack back), and I curbed the drinking significantly. So on a health level, it was great. Monetarily… ehhh. Making enough money to get by. I was hoping maybe I could start coming up with a good plan for something else to do instead of poker, but unfortunately that didn’t really materialize. It never does. Actually the worst part was meeting some poker players, most of whom are HEAVILY invested in Bitcoin, and watching them make a fricking killing in the crypto heater, like net worths quadrupling in months, while I’m sitting there like a retard for not having my net worth invested in Bitcoin. Or DOGECOIN for that matter. God damn it. Life is not fair. Idiots from Tiktok were putting money in random pump and dump coins and killing it. Sigh. So the monetary end could have been better.

Socially, I was pretty active, made a few friends, met a couple of women, nothing crazy, there was a pandemic going on after all. So overall it was a pretty decent 3.5 months. Much better than being in Chicagoland, I’ll tell you that! But some of the snowbirds I was friends with were starting to leave to go back home, and I guess I was about ready to move on as well! Except I wasn’t ready to go home just yet, Mexico is a huge country and I’ve still seen very little of it, so I wanted to start changing that!

uh oh, Covid?

May 1, 2021

It had been a few weeks and I was feeling pretty happy with my days, I had a nice little routine going. M/W/F was pickleball in the morning, yoga in the late afternoon. Every remaining day was either running or doing my exercises in the beach or the park, or every once in a while use the expensive beach gym that was kinda far away. I’d try to get in a scuba dive each weekend. Lots of sunshine, cappuccinos and fresh fruit juice in the meantime. I was usually too lazy to head all the way out the beach during the day (lol) and I always worried about someone stealing my kindle if I went to take a dip in the ocean, so the pool rooftop was a good option. I was actually reading a classic (very weird for me), The Count of Montecristo and enjoying it a lot!

Unfortunately we had take a break from pickleball when the group founders came down with covid. Not exactly shocking as they were not shy about hitting up the popular restaurants. If you come to Playa del Carmen for any extended period of time and are actually going out, doing the nightlife stuff, you’re gonna get covid. It’s gonna happen. With so many tourists coming and going, covid is everywhere in Playa.

So wouldn’t ya know, just a few days after John and Kelly (pickleball founders) were diagnosed with covid, I started feeling a bit weird. I had a slight fever, but basically I was just feeling super lazy. Like the thought of getting up out of bed to go for a bike ride or run errands, sounded awful. I mean I certainly could have gotten up, I wasn’t dead, but I just REALLY did not want to do anything besides lay in bed. I told the pickleball group I too was feeling a bit strange, and we officially cancelled it for 2 weeks. The fever went away after the first day, but it was a solid three days of lethargy, just laying around like a slug. Very strange after being pretty ‘up and at ‘em’ the last few weeks. But no cough or respiratory symptoms, no body aches, just laziness! So I assume it was Covid and went into quarantine, but I never actually got tested, so I can’t say for sure. I do remember specifically helping John cram the net in the bag after pickleball was over, unmasked, with our heads right near each other’s, so that’s when I assume it happened.

It could have been worse obviously. I guess John was coughing real bad and ended with pneumonia. Plus he got a neurological condition where his right hand would shake when he was putting a spoon to his mouth. So even though he was in good shape, he still got hit pretty hard! And at least I can say in the few days from when I most likely got covid, to when I got symptoms, I could count on one hand the amount of people I’d been close to, unmasked.

So that was a boring two weeks obviously, but everything was right back where it started when quarantine was over. Although I did end up switching apartments to get closer to the beach, which is a double edged sword as it puts you right by 5th ave as well, which is annoying. Although it wasn’t near any nightclubs at least! It was kind of a strange place. A two apartment unit, with both apartments being raised so that a bunch of cars could park underneath them. It didn’t take long to notice that there were other people that had keys to front gate, and that there were always people coming and going to the furthest part of the garage, under my unit. What could it be, hmmm, what do they try and sell to the tourists on 5th avenue all the time?! Hmm. Drugs! I was a little sketched out at first, but then it wasn’t really a big deal.

There was a German and girlfriend who were staying in the other apartment unit, and some nights he would be drinking and invite everyone he had met up to his rooftop to pound some whisky and smoke some joints. He’s one of those very outgoing, non-stop talking, know-it-all types. Covid denier to boot, of course. So I did stop up there briefly one night and met some of the guys that were always hanging around. Most of them didn’t speak much English, but one of them lived in Chicago a bit, and of course he had whatever I needed, if I needed anything at all! But they seemed pretty harmless. I’m sure they had some sort of agreement with whoever owned these apartments, and not pissing off the tenants was presumably part of it. If anything, I was protected by the cartel, hahaha.

Activity time

April 30, 2021

Time to get active. The first that I joined was pickleball. The Canadian guy and his wife setting it up already had extra paddles and nets, so all I had to do was show up at 9am at the courts, located in the gated community of Playacar. If you’ve never seen pickleball before it’s played with plastic paddles (a bit smaller than a racquetball paddle) and a ball similar to a whiffleball. The courts are smaller than a tennis court and the net is a little shorter. It has an area next to the net that you aren’t allowed to step in, so it makes for some more interesting strategy placing little drop shots in this area. We were playing doubles, so it’s not really too much running. For that reason the older people seem to prefer it to tennis. But ball placement is key, so you definitely still have to be quick on your toes. To start there were five of us, but it would keep growing, as expected. They say pickleball is the fast growing sport in the US right now!

Staying out of the kitchen! The line that runs parallel to the net

Next up: Scuba diving with the sharkies! January to March is bull shark season in Playa and I certainly wasn’t going to miss out on it. We had a group of three, plus the instructor, all set to go. It wasn’t through an actual dive company, the instructor was a freelancer, and we got our gear through a small shop right on the beach. For most commercial dive shops the money mostly goes to the company and the local instructor makes just a small percentage, so this way was better for the local economy. The only downside was the equipment was a bit shoddy. There’s always a tradeoff. But anyway, we got geared up, hopped in a boat waiting for us at the shore and a few minutes later we were at the dropoff point and rolling backwards off the boat.

I assumed we’d have to go find the sharks, but literally as we were descending someone made the fin-on-forehead sign (universal signal for shark!) and pointed down behind me. A bull shark lurking down by the sandy bottom. By the time we were at the sand there were three of them circling, and a few more would show up as well. These are not friendly looking sharks! They have big ole jagged teeth sticking out and a general disposition that says ‘don’t mess with me’. Which is fair, as they are one of the more aggressive shark species. They are quite intimidating, and they are not afraid to get up close and personal. But they know the drill, they know they’ll get fed eventually, which is why they buzz around like vultures. And as far as I know there have never been any attacks on Scuba divers. Although I don’t know if I can say the same for snorkelers!

So we were down around 70 feet, 5 or 6 bull sharks just gently weaving in and out of our group. Sometimes they’d disappear out to the blue, but they’d always come back. For taking photos underwater it was pretty great with how close they’d get. I was using my underwater casing with the iphone 11 for the first time, and I was really impressed with how easy it was to use, and with how well the photos looked. Seriously the advances in cameraphone technology over the last few years have been very impressive! No need for a DSLR + big clunky underwater casing to take good Scuba dive photos anymore.

After 50 minutes or so we started our ascent, the sharks still following us. The boat captain tossed over some jumbo fish heads that the sharks eagerly gobbled up, and then they wandered off. We all got in the boat, everyone was super pumped about being so up close and personal with the feared bull sharks. Plus we still had one more reef dive to round out the morning, although Playa’s reefs are mediocre at best. But still, definitely a cool experience.

Next class: Yoga! This one yoga organization offered a bunch of classes up on a hotel rooftop, so I opted for the 4pm beginners class. Now when picturing a yoga class, I was imagining mostly women, mostly young fit women in form fitting attire. Well, you can imagine my surprise when I walked up and the whole class was men! One guy about my age, two guys in their 50’s and one guy in his 70’s. Okay then! Although the instructor did fit the stereotypical description I had in mind, a super bendy Russian girl, who also spoke pretty good English. But with an all male group and a hot young female instructor, it sort of made you go ‘hmmm.’

But anyways, the pace of the class was nice and slow, which of course I liked. And I thought for sure I would be the least flexible person in class, but that was not the case. The 70 year old guy could hardly even do most of the moves, what a loser! Ha, I’m kidding, it was admirable that he was now doing yoga 5 days a week. And most old people are just like this guy, literally zero flexibility. I was starting a bit late, but I wanted to be able to move my body in a couple different directions when I get older! And one of the dudes in his 50’s was like stretch armstrong, I was impressed.

So between pickleball, diving, and yoga, plus playing poker, cooking, going to the beach, kindle books, learning more Spanish, going for runs and doing body weight exercises, I had quite a few different things on my plate to keep me busy for a while. Without hardly any drinking and partying, I had enough time for all of them! Life was pretty good.

Settling in: Playa Del Carmen

April 30, 2021

I departed the Cozumel ferry and walked just a few blocks inland to find my apartment. To start off my stint in Playa, I booked an airbnb for a month. It was kind of an odd unit, it was located in an apartment complex, but whereas everyone else went through the main entrance, this was off to the side facing the street. I still had access to the rooftop and pool like everyone else, but I had my own separate door, which was nice because it gets awkward saying hello to the security guard every time you come and go. Plus I had a little foyer area right at the entrance before entering my unit.

The place itself was quite a bit smaller than it looked in photos, and I didn’t even realize that there was no kitchen table! I guess I just kind of assumed there was a place to eat food, like an idiot! Although there was a combined desk and dresser thingy that ran along the window facing the street next to the bed, so I was able to pull a chair up to that, and that was now my dinner table! Dinner with a view! But eh, it would be much more annoying if it was. couple trying to eat together. Overall it was a decent place, newly redone, nice wooden closet, cabinets, and finishings, cheap cutesy decorations that let you know the owner put at least some thought into the place, dark marble (fake marble?) kitchen countertops, a big comfy bed, and two layers of blinds – very important for my sleep schedule! Seriously more places need these double blinds.

rooftop pool, where I get my tan on. It’s an infinity pool no less!

I was about a 10 minute walk to the beach and 5th Avenue, the main tourist strip that runs parallel to beach for a few miles. The location was not really the heart of the touristy part of Playa, which was fine, and there were plenty of local places around. Within a few blocks I had a nice little veg market and fruteria, a tamale and elote stand, a panaderia, a paleta shop (Mexican popsicles) a McDonalds ice cream kiosk (50c cones!) a seafood restaurant, and numerous taco stands. I liked my spot. Although basically everything in Playa can be walkable, it’s spread out enough where having a bicycle would be nice. So I picked one up facebook marketplace for $40, and probably paid too much. It was just a basic beach cruiser, one gear, and foot brakes. Perfect.

called Mamey, soft and creamy, it has kind of a sweet, cinnamon, butternut squash taste to it. Good for pancakes

I just want to comment on the availability of the fresh juices is Playa, which is excellent. The fruteria pictured above makes fresh juice every morning in half liter or one liter portions. $1 or $2. You can choose between normal orange juice, mandarin orange juice, grapefruit juice, coconut water, green juice, orange juice and beets, orange juice and carrots, and sometimes mango or watermelon. This is fresh, on demand, every day! And then of course if you pay more you can get whatever combination of fruits that suits your fancy. And they’ve got some weirds ones too! I would say guanabana is an underrated one. Oh and the OJ+beets or the OJ+carrots sounds kinda weird, but they’re both delicious!

Ok, so basically settled in, now whatt? Well considering I knew nobody there, I guess it’s time to start making some friends. The thing that I really like about Playa and other expat hotspots, is it’s extremely easy to meet people on these facebook groups. For example: someone posted about wanting to get some people to go diving with the bull sharks – boom, I’m in. One couple was trying to get a pickleball group going, it sounded kinda fun, so sure why not? Someone posted about some covid friendly rooftop yoga classes, I could definitely use some flexibility, alrighty, I’ll try it out. Of course there’s also people looking to go out drinking, but in the pandemic, I was kinda staying away from that type of activity.

More of the beach. It was kind of cloudy and cold at first in January. Looking back, I miss that weather!

As for Covid rules in Playa, well every store you walk into requires mask, has sanitizer, and some will take your temperature, although a lot of it is covid kabuki theater. And then when you walk down 5th Avenue, well it’s quite a different story. Strolling past some of the bars around 9pm, you would definitely have no idea that Covid existed. Music pumping, people jammed close together, no masks whatsoever. It was pretty wild. I had no desire to part of that scene, but there were certainly a lot people who were escaping from lockdowns in the US and elsewhere and letting loose in Mexico. But considering how many of the locals depend on the tourism industry, most people were pretty okay with the completely open-for-business policy. The Spice must flow.

As for me, I was fine with any activities that were outdoors and could be spaced out a bit. Packed bars, and the type of people who inhabit them during a pandemic, nahhh. It didn’t need that, but really I was just thrilled to be able to get some sun and go to beach or the pool, explore a new city, go for runs or ride bike around aimlessly, stop for some fresh fruit juice or a cappucino, reading my book on a patio. I would not be surprised if I had some type of seasonal depression, that sunlight just rejuvenates me.

Apparently I only took photos of the cloudier days

Some simple healthy cooking, citrus pulled chicken and mango tacos. Just needs some hot sauce.

Viva la Mexico! Isla Holbox and Cozumel

April 30, 2021

As most of you know, I’m not a winter person. The thought of spending all winter in Chicago, staying with my parents, with things on lockdown was not great! Shockingly it’s not very life affirming when you’re 35, staggering downstairs in the same pair of sweatpants everyday, and getting greeted with ‘Good Afternoon’. Then drinking about 4 coffees out of sheer boredom. I had to get out. And of course there are not many countries open to travel during covid, but there is one little country south of the border that doesn’t have any restrictions, soooo Viva la Mexico!

I flew down after Christmas, a straight shot down to Cancun. The first thing I did down there however was getting an abdominal ultrasound, as I swear something is funky with my stomach. In the US I checked the prices for the Edward Group in Naperville, $1200 if I use my insurance (silly bc I have an $7,500 deductible and it’s the end of the year) or $600 out of pocket, and of course nothing available right away (in fact a 2 month wait for the Naperville location).

At the local clinic in Cancun, the price was $37. Thirty Seven Dollars. It’s not a complicated procedure. The price difference is just ridiculous, medical prices in the US are just so out of synch with the rest of the world. Some of you are probably thinking $600 for an ultrasound, that’s not bad at all! But that’s only because it’s all we know; nobody else in the world pays $600 for a routine ultrasound. And for all of you reading that have nice insurance with your employers, maybe you think the US healthcare system is perfectly fine, but understand for those of us who have to buy their own insurance, we pay thousands a year to not get covered for anything unless it’s cancer or whatever. The system is just straight up garbage. GARBAGE. I can buy round trip tickets to Cancun, stay a week and still come out ahead. That’s how silly the whole thing is.

Ok, rant over, we’re in Cancun but not staying long as there is nothing much downtown Cancun, (the ultrasound was normal btw) so off to Isla Holbox for New Years! Now I didn’t plan this very far in advance so almost everything was booked up except for a campground with fixed tents + a common area for eating/cooking etc. That’s fine, I’m not that picky. It was a two hour bus ride to the port, plus another 30 minute ferry and we were there! One of the draws of Holbox is there’s no cars, just golf carts and scooters. However the roads are a potholed, puddled mess. I found the campsite just fine and ‘checked into’ my tent, ha. It had big sleeping pad, clean sheets, electricity (a reading light, mini fan, and outlet to plug in stuff) and built in wooden cupboard/shelves. Not bad for a tent!

Walking around my part of the island you can see that it’s a pretty basic place, quiet, just some corner shops, and you might have to walk on some wooden planks every now and then to get past some muddy sections of road. Eventually you get to tourist plaza, with the restaurants, ice cream places, clothing shops, tour companies, etc. Of course the real action is at the beach. Holbox has some sparkly white sand beaches, so that’s where everyone spends their time of course. And because it was NYE, there was no shortage of people. Normally Holbox is known for being a very chilled out, relaxing place, but not on New Years Eve! The music was already pumpin.

After a good stroll down the beach (there’s a lot of it) I was back in the campsite to shower and relax. I met some of the people in the campsite, although it was mostly a Spanish speaking party crowd, so yeah, not my cup of tea. Even though Mexico doesn’t enforce any quarantine, I wanted to be especially careful in the first 10 days, so attending the Covid parties, and possibly being a super-spreader was not what I was going for. I was more than happy to spend my evening eating from the taco stand and reading a book down on a quiet section of beach, just taking in the tropical breeze. Happy New Years!

Awww yeah, gonna take me a long time to get tired of this!

The camp cleared out in the morning and the beaches were mostly empty when I went for a run. In the mornings Holbox has this great long sand bar that stretches for a mile or two. You have to wade waist deep to get out to it, so I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my shorts to get out there. I just held my shoes as I ran barefoot, it was a beautiful spot for a jog. Probably my most active New Years Day morning, well, ever!

Photo stolen off the internet to give you a good idea of how nice the sandbar is!

Eventually I would meet a couple people in the campsite and we rented some bikes and explored the island a bit. Well to be fair there isn’t that much to explore. One end kind of devolves into a mangrove forest and you can’t really go any further unless you have a boat, and the other end has beautiful houses that I’m sure make for expensive rentals, and that’s the end that you go for the sunset, which is really nice.

But on the whole, Holbox is one of those places that is a beach destination and basically only a beach destination. So for me, it got a little bit boring after a couple of days. I need other stuff to do, snorkeling, scuba diving, waterfalls, jungle, renting a scooter, anything! Four nights was definitely enough for me. I still had a few days before my Airbnb was starting in Playa del Carmen, so I took the bus back to Cancun, then onto PDC, and from there hopped on the ferry to Cozumel to get in a couple days of scuba diving!

Dark clouds and Christmas trees on the boardwalk

From Cancun it was an easy bus ride to Playa del Carmen, and then just a two blocks down 5th Avenue with all the vendors trying to get you to buy their shit, and then you’re at the ferry terminal. They go about every two hours this year, 35 minutes and you’re in Cozumel. I had booked a guesthouse a little outside the touristy part, but walking through the main strip you could tell that Cozumel was quite a bit more dead than Playa, the vendors more desperate to get your attention. It was kind of depressing. I guess Cozumel relies on lots of cruise boat traffic, and with none of those this year, it was hurting especially hard.

I dropped off my stuff and popped in one of the scuba dive offices I saw on the way, and I was already all set for diving the next day, easy. Two Brits and two Americans. We had to take a taxi up to the port and then from there another 30 minute boat ride to part of the island with the best diving, the Palancar reef. It’s really nice diving, lots of big bulbous structures to swim through, nooks, alleyways, natural arches, all that sort of stuff. The visibility was good, not much current, basically just very relaxed diving. We saw a lot of the usual critters, a few turtles, sting rays, one or two big eagle rays, moray eels, some squid, barracuda, some huge lobsters, etc. Just really pleasant diving. I did three days of it.

I broke the diving up one day by renting a scooter and cruising around the island, which is a great way to spend an afternoon. The far side of the island is rocky and windswept, some very scenic beaches, although a lot of them have red flags for no-swimming. The roads are also nice with hardly any people on them, especially this year. Although they have a couple restaurants out there that are tourist trap central, $12 for a cheeseburger, $15 for a jumbo margarita? GTFO. I wasn’t having any of those type places. Coming back inland they also have a Mayan ruin, which isn’t much too look at, but if you’re there, why not? So anyway, that was a worthwhile thing to do. And I basically love anything on scooters of course.

Abandoned bar on the far side of the island

So that was Cozumel. Overall it was a bit more of a boring place than I anticipated, with the downtown being pretty dead and all. I mean I liked it because of the diving, and there were some nice sunsets, but if you’re not a diver, I probably wouldn’t bother. Next up: hunkering down in Playa.

San Juan del Sur

April 19, 2021

So from Big Corn Island I flew to Managua and then it’s about a 2 hour taxi ride down south to San Juan del Sur (Saint John of the South). I remembered SJDS from the first time I was there about 5 year prior when I was doing my Central America trip, Costa Rica up to Cancun, and upon getting dropped off by the taxi in the middle of town (it’s a very small town) the layout and the landmarks started coming back to me. I walked towards the big party hostel, Casa Oro (obviously it’s not a party hostel right now) and kept going a street with a whole bunch of guesthouses in a row. I put my mask on and semi-randomly chose one that looked alright. These were family run places, with the family living downstairs and the upper floors having around 10 rooms plus a kitchen and small common area. I booked 3 nights and it looked like only one other person was currently staying there. I could get away with English on the Caribbean side, but it was mostly only Spanish over here.

The first thing I did was join the facebook group for San Juan del Sur and make a post inquiring about monthly rentals. As all the tourists had left due to Covid and the borders were basically closed, this post got me a lot of messages! I had choices from bungalows, a room in a boutique hotel with shared kitchen way up in the hills, a studio out near the surf beach, some local places that would cost hardly anything, etc. But after living in a very spartan set up for the last 2+ months, I kinda wanted something nice, and with good wifi. I checked out a couple places, and that studio out by the surfer beach was very tempting, but at the end of the day I decided to stay in town with the niceties like ice cream places, coffeeshops, smoothies, pizza stands, asian food, etc. Hell, even Nicaraguan cigars!

There was a British lady and her husband who had a great set up with a whole house that she would normally rent out for $200 a night, and she was offering it to me for $600 a month. We’re talking 3 bedrooms, a big ole modern kitchen, a small pool and lounge chairs out front, upstairs balcony, big TV with netflix, well decorated, lots of natural light, gated, etc. This was a pretty good offer! The crazy thing is, I could have probably haggled lower if I wanted to, because I mean there were basically no new people coming into town. She was kind of the OCD type, and had a list of rules like 20 miles long, but I agreed all the same. It was a very cushy set up!

San Juan del Sur, in better times, was one of the main party places in Central America, which means it also has a kind of seedy underbelly that goes along with the booze and drugs. Late night muggings were not uncommon. I remembered the golden rule when I first was there: “never walk on the beach at night” and I assumed it was still true. The good new was that I really had no intentions whatsoever of staying out late at night. I was hardly drinking, playing poker every night, plus the obvious fact that there was a pandemic going on. So I wasn’t very worried, although I had to imagine that the lack of tourists was hurting some of the locals really hard.

My favorite place in town, by far, was the coffeeshop. It was modern, well crafted, open air, and overlooking the bay. And the coffee was great of course. That was the place where I was able to meet some of the other gringos sticking around during the pandemic. And I must say, it was a pretty eclectic crowd. There is something about ex-pats that tends to also coincide with a mistrust of government, conspiracy theories, and just being anti-science in general. I suppose that’s why a lot of them left their home countries, because they wanted more ‘freedoms’ in Nicaragua. One of the first people I met was a guy who did a monthly newsletter on global conspiracies that had been covered up (obviously not well enough) and he had a hefty life insurance policy, in case one of the powers that be tried to silence him. Hmm. But there were also plenty of normal people too!

Another thing I really liked about SJDS was that there was a lot more room to roam. Staying too long on a little island can get you feeling a bit cooped up. I like having some new places to explore, so I had plenty of that in SJDS. There are lots of little roads that snake their way into the hills, some of them have nice houses and gated, but the guards usually let me run up and back. The benefits of being a gringo! But man it was not easy running. The summer months are basically 100% humidity, so throw in some hills on top of that, and ouch, not fun. And I did find some great look out points. Even the main section of beach was about 1.5 miles long, so that was a pretty solid run right there. If I ran anything more than 5 miles I’d be on the verge of overheating. But running on the beach as the sunset colors were coming out over the bay, mwah, chefs kiss!

There are also some even nicer beaches around that you’d want a scooter or motorcycle to get to. Preferably a motorcycle because some of the roads are very steep and rough. So occasionally I’d go rent a motorcycle and go off exploring outside of town. My favorite beach was called Playa Majigual (you can probably guess what that means) and besides being very isolated, it had this gorgeous rocky out cropping that you could rock-hop out to during low tide, watching the sun set as the waves crashed all around you on the rocks. Just a a fantastic spot. The Pacific side has a much more raw and rugged type of beauty than the Caribbean side. And so many of the great spots you get all to yourself. I was pretty content with my decision to stay in Nicaragua during Covid.

And at least by this point, things were cooling off a bit with the virus. At least in the US, the spring spike was over. Same with nearby Costa Rica. In Nicaragua, well who knows. The government was doing it’s best to pretend Covid did not exist. Things didn’t sound great in Managua, but in San Juan del Sur, life seemed reasonably ordinary. I assumed the very outdoor/open-air lifestyle helped. Of course the expat facebook groups were constantly at war with each other on all things Covid. It was insufferable. Another popular topic was the flight situation, as there were still no commercial flights running. All the airlines would post some date a month out as their next flight, it would get cancelled a few days before the flight date, and rescheduled a month later. And somehow people were continually shocked when their flight got cancelled again!

The options were pretty minimal at first, some people were chartering small planes to fly to Costa Rica or Mexico, but prices were running at $2,000+. Eventually some fulled sized plane charters (like a 737) started going to and from Miami at $1100, so that became a reasonably popular way to get out, if needed. Another similar option was a full sized charter to Mexico City, and from there you could fly commercial back to the States, as Mexico was pretty much fully open. This is what I would end up doing eventually! But of course there were plenty of complications with government and these flights would often get delayed for a days, or week or who knows.

But back to life in San Juan del Sur, everything was pretty decent for me. I mean nothing really exciting, but definitely peaceful. I had my routine of waking up and some Spanish stuff, going out by the pool, reading, and attempting to meditate, maybe a little jaunt into town, some afternoon poker sessions, either running or doing my body weight / elastic band exercises by the beach, come back for some covid doom scrolling online, make dinner, more poker, and some tv/movies if I had time. There are certainly worse ways to live!

So honestly I wish I could type up more interesting stories about living in SJDS, but I mean there wasn’t much! Oh, well I did go try to get a dental implant, but after the CT scan it was revealed that I had lost too much bone around the site, and the best course of action was to remove my other molar (where I had lots of good bone) and use some of that to bone graft where I had lost the bone. Of course my silly dentist on little corn island did not inform me that I might need a bone graft after the extraction, so thanks lady! So I had that done.

I spend about 2 months waiting to see if anything was going to change with commercial flights, but it didn’t look like it, so I booked the Managua-Mexico City charter flight for $700. And two days before that flight was set to go, they informed us it was delayed another week, so I opted to spend that week in the pleasant colonial town of Grenada, just outside of Managua. Which was great until the night before I left someone must have been able to fish out my camera using a hook, right off the kitchen table. So there goes my trusty Canon 5d mark2 that I’d had the last 8 years. Hmmph. Actually the electronics were going bad, so it wasn’t really the end of the world. Although it was a nice wide angle lens that was attached to the camera. So unfortunately that is why I have almost no photos to post. I do have some from my trip 5 years ago though. But anyway, I eventually managed to fly to Mexico City at the end of July, stop there a few days, and then fly direct to sweet home Chicago!

Life on Corn

April 8, 2021

It was a very relaxing lifestyle on Little Corn Island. I had my bungalow, my kitchen, my hammock, my books, my Spanish materials, and of course my own, almost private, section of beach! My only real human contact was Alberto and his girlfriend, who were always upstairs in Da Beeg Howse (as it’s pronounced) and I suppose whatever shopkeeper I bought some groceries from, that was it. So with Covid raging on, that was a perfectly agreeable to set up. Days just kind of blended into weeks.

Although eventually one afternoon my tranquility was interrupted when a very old couple showed up with a younger man, the couple looked late 70’s (maybe??) and the guy looked to be around 50. I assumed he was their son. They were French and OF COURSE they spoke no English, or pretended not to. They knew Spanish though. We had a friendly co-existence at first, but it started to fray as they continued to take over the kitchen, leaving messes around the sink, and using my sugar, coffee, and milk at their leisure. Meanwhile complaining to Alberto about me, because I was cooking with meat! Hahaha these people! I guess they were vegetarians. Shrug. I was actually eating mostly vegetarian, as getting and storing meat on the island isn’t the easiest (with the power going out every day from 6am-11am you really have to freeze it), but I’d still have fish or chicken or spam occasionally.

These fish are everywhere. Cost about a dollar!

So for the most part I ignored these new people. Apparently the younger guy was not their son, they were all just traveling together. What solo traveler pairs up with a super old couple?! Seemed really weird to me. But the old couple looked to be spry and in good health, and the man would carry around his wicker basket and go poking around in the jungle for random plants that were supposedly edible. Sometimes he’d show me some flowers and stalks and stuff that I should try. Ehhh, ok!

One morning I woke up to some screaming and yelling in French, but eventually went back to sleep. I found out from Alberto that the old man thought something happened with the younger guy and his wife and he was threatening him with his machete. Pretty wild! I mean the woman is in her 70’s! Anyway the younger guy packed up and disappeared that afternoon, and then a few days later the old couple left as well. Good riddance!

Not long after that, Chris, the Canadian guy who co-owned the property with his Nicaraguan wife came back. Which was good because even though I got along with Alberto, I’m pretty sure he stole some of my money. Plus we had more in common to talk about. I remember that first night well, because that’s when something happened with my molar, it was like a bomb went off in there. After ate dinner I was getting these shooting pangs of pure pain radiating throughout my whole mouth. I ended up having to wake him up at 11pm or so to see if he had any pain meds laying around, but no luck. I didn’t know what to do, so I walked into town. Everything was closed. I was very close to knocking on a random door! Two guys in their early 20’s walked by and asked if I needed anything (implying drugs) They ended up taking me down a new path to a hole in the wall local bar. The bar tender let me buy a bottle to go, it was like clear licorice flavored stuff, maybe 25% alcohol, pretty disgusting, but man was I glad to have it! I managed to get myself through the night and off to the ‘pharmacy’ the next morning.

The pharmacy on little corn island was a guesthouse that had a side room full of medicine. So I took the highest dosage of Ibuprofen I could get. The timing was also horrible, as it was Saturday of Easter weekend, so I’d have to wait for Monday to actually see a dentist. It was not a good weekend. Monday morning rolled around and I took the boat over to Big Corn and off to the dentist. He asked me which dentist and I didn’t know, so the taxi took me to someone’s house. David the Dentist was not home, but they pulled out a chair for me to wait until he got back.

Maybe 30 minutes later he arrived and showed me to a wooden sidehouse, with a musty smell and concrete floors, where an old brown dentist chair sat. This was not what I was expecting! I sat in the chair and he shot me up with the anesthetic. There was a machine next to the chair that he turned on that connected to his drill, it looked like it was from the 70’s and it vibrated violently, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Lovely stuff. The molar was one where I already had a cavity, so he took off the cap did some poking and drilling around and eventually filled it with a soft cap. And this was supposed to do the trick. Or not. The pain was back that night.

Two days later I went back to Big Corn to see the other dentist on the island. She was younger, kinda cute, and a much nicer office, you know: clean, white, professional looking. I felt much better here. She took a look at dentist Daniel’s work and she thought that he might have hit a nerve. Even though I had the anesthetic some spots she touched was just soul searing, unadulterated pain. She’s apologizing profusely. She said I would need a root canal, but wanted to put me on some antibiotics first. Ugh. Now I had to wait another week. Keep in mind I am just absolutely pounding these high strength Ibuprofens and Tylenols at this point. Like every few hours. And even then, they take a good 45 minutes to really kick in, so if I waited just a little too long I would be in excruciating pain for a good half hour.

After the week was up, it was back to the dentist. I don’t know what she was expecting the antibiotics to do, but they didn’t do NADA. She shoots me up with anesthetics and gets the drill going. I jerk back. I can still feel it. She shoots me again. Tries to drill. AGHGGHGH! Nope, still feel it. Shoots me up another time. Nothing is working. I thought this might happen. At this point all I want is for the pain to end, it’d been a week and a half of this BS. We agreed to pull the tooth. Apparently numbing the gum for extraction is much easier than numbing inside the tooth itself. She finagled around with her tooth pliers and soon the whole thing was wrestled out. Thank you Lord Jesus Christ Almighty! So that was the initial phase of the tooth saga! She told me it would be about two months to heal up completely before I could get a dental implant. Great!

Back on little corn, Chris had now brought his whole adoptive family, consisting of his wife, her teenagers, the stereotypical extra largie auntie, some brothers, more little kids. There were now at least ten people all hanging around the grounds. So on one hand they were friendly, but on the other hand it was kind of weird dynamic where they were family, doing family stuff, and I was kind of the outsider just kinda hanging around the edges. I never actually ate with them, but they’d sometimes offer leftovers or what have you, so that was okay!

A few more weeks had passed, same old same old. At this point, younger people were easing up on lockdowns, two of the local bars re-opened, and I did start to actually meet some more of the people who were hanging around closer to the central part of the island. I was apparently taking covid more seriously than most, ha. And covid cases were definitely here and there around the islands, mostly Big Corn though. There was an outbreak in Bluefields, where most of the islanders came from originally, coming over by ferry. There was also talk of stopping the flights, as cases were going up in Managua as well.

So with rainy season looming, and flights possibly in question, I decided to head over to the Pacific side of Nicaragua, where there’s more people around, better infrastructure, good wifi, and better dental clinics! Flying home commercially still wasn’t an option, so looks like even more time in beautiful Nicaragua!

Home and Away

April 6, 2021

Well, I made it safely back to Chicago! I had enough time to say see my brother and his wife, my parents, and a couple of friends, but the timing was a little weird, as COVID fears were increasing. People were starting to wear masks and the hand sanitizer was quickly being emptied from the shelves. Should I be seeing anyone at all because I had just been traveling - even if it was from a country with very few cases? It was a bit awkward.

So by now the Cambodia plans were definitely in the trashcan. It was now mid-march and Italy was getting ravaged by Covid, cases were everywhere, and it certainly looked like a lock-down would happen in sometime in the near future. Of course I had no place of my own, and if we went into lockdown, I’d most likely be stuck at my parents place, which is not something I really wanted. So where would I want to get locked down? Preferably someplace warm and tropical. Someplace a bit detached from most of civilization. An island perhaps. Somewhere quiet.

I remember a travel buddy telling me that he really liked an island called Little Corn Island when he was traveling in Central America. Super chill spot, no cars, not very built up for tourists, beautiful beaches, and away from it all! This sounded like an excellent option. It was off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, most people fly there from the capital city Managua. That gets you to Big Corn Island, and then it’s a 30 minute boat ride to Little Corn. Honestly this sounded perfect. I didn’t have much time, the covid cases were still pretty minimal in Chicagoland, but the writing was on the wall. I booked a flight for March 15, Spirit Airlines to Managua, 77 dollars! Then a flight to Big Corn.

The airport was a bit hectic, masks were required by now, some people were donning full face masks made of plastic. I had my bottle of hand sanitizer and tried my best to not touch anything I didn’t have to, as nobody really know how much it spread from droplets at this point. Fortunately the flight was only 1/3 of the way full. Once in Managua they took our temperatures and asked about symptoms, but nothing else. Upon landing on Big Corn they were more concerned about drugs than the virus, as dogs sniffed everyone’s luggage. From the airport it was a short taxi ride to boat launch, where I learned that there is an MLB player from Corn Island, pretty cool! We had to wait an hour and then we loaded up the panga (as the boat is called) and it was a slightly bumping 30 minutes to Little Corn Island. From the pier there was a small crowd waiting, hoping to get you to stay at their guesthouse.

I had already booked a bungalow, a little bit away from the main beach, up near the lighthouse. There seemed to be no fears about the virus on Little Corn, there were plenty of tourists around, certainly no masks, and it looked like life as usual. And I was in luck, the place I was staying was having their weekly Taco Tuesday. I was planning on limiting my exposure after traveling, but I did have to eat afterall. The general mood was pretty light, everyone was talking about covid, but it also seemed like a faraway problem from the small island. Nobody was altering their travel plans or anything. And I didn’t go to the bars, but I did take a walk down that way in the evening, and they were hopping!

Doing some walking around the island the next day, I found a few sets of beach bungalows around the island. The nicest beach was on the far north part of the island, maybe 30 minutes walking from town (remember theres no cars, no scooters) which was also where the only resort on the island was. But not far away from that was a set of bungalows, set off in the woods a bit, that shared that same, beautiful beach. This was where I would relocate to. The bungalows weren’t of the nicest craftmanship, but they were cheap, away from town, and there was nobody staying there at the moment! A day later I was settled in to my new home. Basically just a room with bed, mosquito net, a dresser, chair, some shelves, and the bathroom. Plus a hammock out front! What else do I need?

Red circle is where I stayed. Purple is the main part of town

It didn’t long for things to start changing very fast in Little Corn Island. The speed of exponential virus spread is frightening! At first my section of beach was still crowded with people, snorkel trips were running, etc. But soon countries began announcing that they would be closing to visitors and urging citizens to come home, NOW, before it’s too late. After a few more days it became a pretty stressful time, as lots of people were now scrambling to book (expensive) flights home, and the Nicaragua to Europe connection isn’t the most straightforward. I felt especially bad for the ones who were traveling long term and had just started their trips, dashing some big, grand travel plans. But there weren’t many options, it was either hunker down in Nicaragua, or whatever other country you could possibly get to, or go home. And for the vast majority of reasonable people, home was certainly the best option.

Everything was still kind of up in the air over the severity of this thing, there was certainly plenty of doomsday speculations: the food runs out, the banking systems collapses, the world goes to anarchy, etc. Or it’s just the flu, being blown way out of proportion by the media! So staying on a small island certainly carried some risk, if the food stores got low, and island would be the first place to run out… But I wasn’t overly worried, and had already decided that I would stick it out on Little Corn, for better or worse.

So now, a week after arriving, all the bars and restaurants had shut down, not long after lockdown took effect in Illinois. Although it was community imposed lockdown, not governmental. Next was the school, and then the only things open were the small grocery shops – and the church. It’s a small but very lively church, and no virus was going to stop a devoted islander from Sunday worship! The speed at which the tourists cleared out was almost impressive.

The palm trees reach all the way up to the water

Everything was very quiet up at my end of the island. The nice resort was still low-key open (which was nice because I liked going there to use the wifi, the bar/restaurant area is gorgeous). Besides the resort there were two or three local homes that had been built on the beach a while ago, a little beach restaurant (closed), a shack with snorkel gear to rent (closed) and that was all! Lots of palm trees! It’s too bad my place wasn’t right on the beach, but it was just a minute walk through the bush. It was a big cleared out area with 5 very basic bungalows, a communal kitchen, dining area, fire pit, laundry station, and the big house which was normally inhabited by a Canadian guy who lived with his Nica wife and family. It was him that built all the bungalows. Although when I got there the owners weren’t there and it was run by the wife’s brother and his girlfriend, who were not in the business of hospitality, ha. It’s not a good sign when your host is asking you to borrow money for cell phone data just a few days in! The wifi was also, but at least I had bought a Nicaraguan SIM card, and that worked fine on my phone.

living in nature! Coconuts, flowers, aaaand bugs

It only took a week and half since I had arrived for the island to be totally cleared out, with the exception of a few other stragglers. I could walk out to my section of beach, which is the nicest beach on the whole island and have it all to myself. Maaaaybe there would be a few other people hanging around, but for the most part it was just me. It was pretty surreal. An empty, gorgeous, secluded beach! I had chosen well! Eventually I would wish for a place with perhaps a few other things to do, and more food options, but at this moment in time, it was perfect! I had my 1100 page monster book that I had been wanting to read and putting off, so now was the time! I also had my Spanish audio lessons loaded onto my phone, and some guided meditation stuff, so I was ready for beach seclusion.

My daily routine was something like: make coffee + eggs or pancakes, do some Spanish lessons, head down to the beach for a couple hours or reading/sunbathing/swimming/audio lessons, make a late lunch of maybe fruit and a sandwich. Back to the beach in evening for a light workout, catch the sunset, some meditation, and then back to the bungalow. Then doomscroll on my phone for all the new covid related news, make dinner, play poker on my phone app, if I had time watch TV/movie I had previously downloaded on my computer, and then bed! Although the sleep from 6am to whenever I woke up was not always the most comfortable with no electricity, but I managed! Certainly much better than being in the States!

Bolivian Salt Flats

March 30, 2021

So this is just about it for the trip! Four days of cruising around the Bolivian altiplano region. The standard tour is 3D/2N if you finish up Uyuni, Bolivia, but I had to get back to San Pedro, so I had to tack on another day. And then I’d have one more day in San Pedro and then back home! Just over four months in South America. Not bad! but still plenty left! I’d especially like to do more of Bolivia, but with the coronavirus heating up worldwide, now seems like a good time. Plus, I was just flat out ready to be done! The fatigue had set in!

There’s lot of stuff in the Altiplano region besides the infamous salt lake

So on this trip it would be two jeeps in our group, eight people in total. A nice number! It was a slightly more expensive tour, with guides who spoke ‘some’ English, so it was aimed at the gringo traveler, which is what I wanted obviously. They picked us in a big van, nice and early. Immigration was a bit of a mess, but once on the Bolivian side we got shown to the jeeps and had time to meet everyone. It looked like a pretty diverse group: Israeli guy, Spanish guy, two South Korean guys, German girl, and a middle aged German couple. And me. So the guy:girl ratio could have been better I suppose…

So we got all our stuff packed up on top of the jeep and we were ready to roll! I was with the two South Koreans and the German girl. Departing from the border there weren’t any paved roads, just gravel tracks crisscrossing all over the place, going wherever. Pick your own adventure!

The itinerary for the first day was some geysers/mud pots, a thermal hot spring to swim, and a lagoon, and lots of driving in between! I was by far the biggest person in the jeep so I got to sit in the front, I’ll take it. I also spoke the most Spanish of our group (not a good sign!), so I was the official go-between between us and the driver, Ernesto.

We would drive for most of the afternoon and ended up at some little village somewhere in the middle of nowhere. I was curious as to how anyone made any money in a place like this because it just doesn’t seem like there is anything at all. Salt harvester?? There wasn’t anything to see in town, so I wandered into the brush a bit, found a decaying dog, and called it an evening! Who’s ready for dinner?! Writing this a year later I have no idea what we actually ate, some soup or something. Overall the group meshed pretty well! I stuck around after dinner for a couple beers and card games with the lads.

The next day we got to sleep in, just a tiny bit, before hitting the road. Before this trip obviously I knew about the salt flats, but I had no idea what other kind of stuff we’d be seeing, which was kinda nice to be surprised. I guess it’s mostly a lot of weird rock formations on this leg of trip. Sounds good to me!

So it was a nice day out on the road, this time we were staying in a fancier accommodation, called the Salt Hotel, where the bricks are supposedly made of salt. I guess there’s lots of so called ‘salt hotels’ in this area. But apparently business was going well in the salt-structure industry, and this place was nice and brand new! I had a room all to myself surprisingly. Glorious! Although again, it’s just kind of in the middle of nowhere. We eventually got the other driver to take us on a beer run to nearby dusty village. We returned triumphantly to a hearty meal of grilled chicken and fish, no complaints here! Then a very early start the next day to catch the sunrise over the salt flats!

It’s pretty surreal, a continuous flat white plane stretching to the horizon on all sides, as far as the eye can see. But up close, it’s far from being flat. It’s easy to see the crystalized structures that makes soft little hexagonal outlines. And very crunchy underfoot! There’s not much to do but relax and take in the otherworldly landscape. Although to be fair I was hoping we’d do sunrise over the part of the flats that is submerged underwater, which looks even cooler with the reflections. But these tours don’t acquiesce to the whims of the photography crowd. Hmmph.

Next spot: Cactus island. A weird place within the weird place. It’s basically a little rock mountain that you can walk up, which feels like an island in the middle of the salt flats. And tons of cacti grow there. Kinda neat! We walked around here for an hour and had breakfast. Off in the distance there was a huge bus hurtling its way down the salt flats, like a scene out of Mad Max. If I ever come back, I want to be on this bus!

Next we drove for a while and the flats started to get softer, slushier, and puddlier. I assume the drivers know where the spots are that are totally covered in water, but not too much water of course. This was the cool thing about going in February, we had the opportunity to see the never ending mirror effect. It only last a few months out of the year! Eventually the various puddles finally merged into one massive puddle and that’s where we stopped to take photos. I switched over to flip flops, as they say all the salt will ruin your shoes! We took some fun photos (which I currently do not have), and some of us took a shot of tequila using the salt to lick afterwards. Very touristy I know!

After milling around a bit more it was time to keep trucking. We stopped at another salt hotel that had hosted a bike race on the flats some years prior. And not longer after that we were back on the dry dusty dirt. And then pavement. Bummer! We had drinks at the tourist market, because you always have to stop at the market, and then finished up in a real, but not very visually appealing, city: Uyuni. We’d have lunch together and this is where we’d part ways. Most people would continue on into Bolivia, which i was a little jealous of, because Bolivia sounds great to me. But at the same time I needed to start making some money again! Those poker games in Cambodia were calling my name! At least I thought they were. But the COVID situation was changing fast, and even in the four days on this trip, the outlook had gotten considerably bleaker.

So for me, and two other strangers, they loaded us into a different jeep and we would make the trek back to the Chilean border, the quick way though, almost all on roads, well gravel roads. Unfortunately the place we stopped for the night was that same little crap town we had stayed on the first night. And then by the next morning we were back at Chilean immigration, scooped up by a van, and back in San Pedro de Atacama by noon. And back to the pool for me. That evening I went on a little excursion to the Valley of the Moon, and then the next morning it was the bus the airport, then a quick flight to Lima, and then a longer fight to Chicago. And the timing was fortuitous, because by this time (early March) Covid was really starting to really creep up, and it was becoming quite apparent that it was going to become a worldwide pandemic, as cases were starting to be detected in just about every country :0. My original plan of going over to Cambodia to play poker was now looking like it might not be happening!

But anyway, Chicago here I come!

San Pedro de Atacama

March 7, 2021

Back to Chile! This will be the 4th time on this trip I think?! And it won’t be the last because the plan is to do the Bolivian Salt Flats and then loop back to San Pedro de Atacama to fly home (San Pedro -> Lima -> Chicago). Good thing they let you come and go as you please on the 90 day visa!

So I arrived in the mid afternoon, and the first thing you realize is, it is hot hot hot! February is South American summertime! Fortunately my hostel was only a few blocks from the bus station, and it had a pool, so I knew what my plans were. Later that afternoon I headed down to main strip to ask about the Bolivia Salt Flat tours. And boy is it overwhelming! I don’t know how you’re supposed to decide which company to go with because there’s a million of them and they’re all seemingly the same. But the thing is, you don’t know who’s gonna be in your group, and there’s tons of hispanic tourists, so I had to do some research online to figure out which companies are more of the gringo-catering kind, because if I was alone on a tour with all Spanish speakers for four days straight, I just might snap! Or you know, sit there and sulk for four days.

All the shops are located on this one street

So I was able to find an English speaking tour that left in a couple of days, which gave me time to explore around San Pedro a bit. Like Salta, there’s nothing much in the city, everything is basically group tours and excursion to the different spots outside of town. MORE GROUP TOURS AGHGHG! I’m getting super jealous of the people with the decked out camper vans! But hey, there’s volcanos, hot springs, geysers, high altitude lakes, crazy rock formations, lots of stuff. All the tour companies want you to bundle up like 3 or 4 tours for a cheaper price or whatever. I ended up seeing a company that advertised this huge yellow badass looking truck/bus (like what I rode in Africa) with a huge breakfast spread of eggs, cheeses, meats, breads, fruit and avocado etc. Sign me up! 4:30 am pick up, wheee!

Being at a high altitude, it is freezing cold in the morning. Fortunately they give you blankets on the bus for some extra warmth. And once again, I’m the only gringo on the bus. Sigh. We drove for an hour and then they set up all the tables and chairs in front of this really pretty lagoon, it had bits of white stuck around the edges, calcium deposits maybe? Eventually they called us over for breakfast, I just grabbed a seat at the end of the table, a bit awkwardly. As I’ve said, my Spanish just isn’t good enough conversationally, especially in Chile/Argentina. Great food though! The rest of the morning was a few more lakes, and just very interesting looking landscapes all around. So it was nice, but I am so done with Spanish tours!

lunar landscapes. Some vicuñas in the foreground

If you have magnifying glass eyes, those are flamingos

So many different colors in these high altitude lakes

Back at the hostel I met a Dutch girl (again) at the pool and we hit it off pretty well, made dinner together, and she convinced me to go on the geyser tour with her the next morning. If I must! Another 5am start, ugh. They get you there 1.5 hours before sunrise to freeze your balls off before that sun finally creeps over the hills. I mean 30 minutes before sunrise would have sufficed, jeez! The geysers were pretty cool, although if you’ve been to Yellowstone, it is kinda child’s play. After breakfast there was also a hot spring to swim in, but the air is still cold as hell, so you gotta keep your whole body underwater, jostling for the warm vents with the other tourists. Anywho, I could have probably done without this tour. I was happy to spend the rest of the day at the pool. And sleep in the next morning. And go back to the pool! Laying on the couch at home is sounding better and better!

digging the light behind the water vapor

I did end up renting a mountain bike for a few hours in the late afternoon that following day, and that was the best thing I did in San Pedro! They have some very cool mountain bike trails just outside of town. Some parts were pretty advanced, so I had to pick up my bike and walk it occasionally, and one part where I had to scootch by butt down a hill dragging my bike, but i made it! Better than faceplanting on my bike! The sun was going down and the scenery was awesome. This was more of the adventure I was looking for, not these group tours where they drag your sorry ass around all day.

San Pedro de Atacama in the foreground here. It looks weird seeing snow covering a desert volcano, but you don’t realize how high up this is. I bet that volcano is 20,000+ feet!

you’ll see a few desert foxes hanging around

So that was about it for San Pedro de Atacama, the next morning I would be getting picked up super early once again, and heading in a jeep off for a 4D/3N excursion to the Bolivian Altiplano! Which looks a lot like the Chilean Altiplano!

The viewpoint on the Argentinian side looking at Brazil

Iguazu Falls and Salta

March 7, 2021

So as I mentioned before, I wasn’t done with Argentina just yet! I really wanted to see Iguazu falls, which is in the far northeast part of Argentina, where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet. It’s annoying because it’s in the middle of nowhere. From BA it’s an 18 hour bus ride or a 1.5 hour flight. I’m lazy, I splurged for the flight. Chile and Argentina are just too damn big and spread out!

All the red lines are flights I took. Wayyy more flying on this trip than usual

The flight to Puerto Iguazu was as smooth as can be, and it’s interesting to watch the landscape change from dry and arid to lush tropical jungle. It’s a small town with nothing around it but trees, and it feels like they purposely built the airport 20kms away for the sole benefit of the taxi drivers. I checked into my hostel that evening and would head off to the falls the next day. Being that Iguazu straddles Brazil and Argentina you can see it from both sides. On the Argentina side you get the best view from the top and the mouth of the falls looking down and on the Brazil side you get the better view looking up towards it, a little downriver from the falls. A few years ago it would have been very expensive for an American to do this, you’d need to pay a $160 for a visa for Argentina and $160 for a visa to Brazil, but now they’ve done away with those visas and it’s very easy to see both sides thankfully!

The few English speakers in my hostel had already seen the falls, so I would be on my own. But on the Argentina side it’s super easy to get there, there’s buses that leave every hour and drop you off out front. Obviously the most popular spot is the lookout from over the top of the falls, and to get there you have to take a short train ride, which is included in the price, but consists of you packing in very tightly with lots of other sweaty people. Deodorant seemed to be lacking. I was one of the last people on this train and they made a very overweight woman scootch over to accommodate me, which wasn’t exactly pleasant for me or her, but I didn’t want to wait for the next train! From there it’s another 20 minutes walking along platforms stretched out over small islands in the super wide river/mouth.

It’s shockingly calm on the river above the falls. It’s very spread out, shallow, and the water doesn’t appear to be moving that quickly. If you didn’t know it was one of the worlds biggest waterfalls ahead it would actually seem like a pretty good place to take a swim! The iron clad walkways stretching over the river are a bit narrow, so you’re always getting stuck behind slow walkers, families, strollers, fatties, or what have you. Finally you reach the overlook of the falls and as soon as you can wedge your way in between selfie sticks, it’s an amazing view! The main part of the falls is absolutely thunderous but there are also many other cataracts and smaller waterfalls that give the place a feel of epic proportions. It probably is the most impressive waterfall I’ve ever seen, although experiencing it through the throngs of tourists definitely takes away from it’s magnificence a little bit! Also the photos really don’t capture completely the volume and power of the water that you can feel dropping over the edge!

Above the thunder! It’s hard to capture the sense of scale and power

Fortunately there is a lot more to place than just this one viewpoint! After taking the body odor train back towards the main section of the park there are few kilometers more of walkways giving you more interesting views of the falls and all of it’s different cataracts. It’s hard to stress enough how huge this place is! It’s not just a waterfall, it’s like a whole network of rivers and sheer cliffs apart from the main falls that all make up Iguazu. Plus its a jungle, so there are also some massive spiders, tropical birds, monkeys, coatis (something like an anteater) and even a crocodile! The trick is really finding some of the viewpoints that you can have by yourself that aren’t inundated with the tourist horde so you can really appreciate the sheer magnitude of the waterfalls.

One of the massive spiders, having lunch apparently

In total I spent about four hours on the Argentinean side of the falls. When I got back I ended up doing dinner with a Dutch girl where we split a monster steak and salad. The only problem in Argentina (and Chile) is that their salads are crap. Like the normal dressings that we have in the US don’t exist here. The salads are normally served dry, with hardly any ingredients (maybe some onion/tomato) and you have to drizzle some olive oil on it. Balsamic vinagrette if you’re lucky! So bland! In Patagonia we ordered a carrot salad, which I just assumed was green salad with carrot varieties or something, but nope, just one huge bowl of uncooked shaved carrots. That’s it! Waaat. Anyway, the steaks make up for it! Sorry no pics!

The next day it was off to the Brazilian side of the falls, which requires a more expensive bus, a trip through immigration, and higher park fees. But I’m pretty sure this is the one time in my life I’ll be here, so why not? The views on the Brazilian side are very nice as well, and you get the best view of the mouth of the falls from down low, although there’s not so many paths and viewpoints so you really only need about an hour on this side! I ended up meeting a Swiss girl on my bus who was also somewhat cynical about this side of the waterfall and we got along well! That night we met up for… you guessed it… steak and malbec! This is nearing the end of my Argentina trip, so might as well get as much red meat as I can!

not bad! If it wasn’t for all those god damn tourists! :p

This one give you a better sense of scale

The next day I hopped on another flight to the far northwest part of the country, close to the border of Chile and Bolivia, a place called Salta. It’s a semi-arid wine region known for it’s colorful red rock formations. Something a bit like Southern Utah. It straddles the altiplano deserts to the west. It also has some interesting history. One of the main things to do in town is visit the museum of high altitude archaeology that is famous for it’s mummies of Llullaillaco, the best preserved Incan mummies ever found, and among the most well preserved of any mummies in the world. The mummies are children, drugged and sacrificed to the gods as part of an Incan ritual. The stratovolcano they were found on tops out at 22,000 feet, the dryness of the air up there helped greatly to preserve the remains. And it was only 20 years ago that they were found!

But most of the stuff to see around here isn’t in Salta, it’s all around Salta. You can do some really nice scenic loops around here with a car or motorcycle, so that’s what I was gonna do! EXCEPT, I didn’t do my research (shocking!) and it was another long holiday weekend for Argentines (shocking!) and every single rental car agency had nothing. Zip. Nada. So that was kind of a bummer. Of course there are group tours and stuff, but Salta is far from gringo-land so everyone is gonna be Chilean or Argentinean and it’s gonna be all incomprehensible fast talking Shh Spanish.

But still, I had to do at least one tour to see the countryside. And actually there was one other gringo on the bus! An older super grumpy British guy, possibly the biggest grouch I’ve met on the whole trip, bitching about the time, the stops, the AC, obviously didn’t speak a single word of Spanish. He wouldn’t even switch seats so a woman with young kids could have a spot with more room. So everyone hated this guy. With all the bus being Spanish speakers, this was the guy I’m naturally supposed to be buds with, wtf! Anyway, we made some nice photo stops on trip, went to a winery, had some time to explore this little touristy wine town, and then back to Salta. It was fine, but travel fatigue and lack of English fatigue is setting in and I was just about done with group tours! Normally I would have tried to do at least one more sightseeing trip, because there’s definitely more to check out, but ehh screw it, I took the bus over the border to Chile for the final time. Smack in the middle of the desert. San Pedro de Atacama, the Atacama desert. Here’s the view south of Salta:

Some gorgeous scenery a couple hours south of Salta, towards Cafayate (wine region).

gotta watch out for the jellyfish around here!

Poker Time: Punta del Este

March 6, 2021

West side of Punta. People definitely have some money in this town.

I was in the mood to play some poker with some real stakes, and apparently the place to do that was in Punta del Este, Uruguay. The quickest way to do it is taking a ferry, so the next day I took it from Buenas Aires across the bay to the port town of Colonia in Uruguay. From there is was a bus ride maybe 4 hours to the popular tourist town of Punta del Este. Uruguay is actually one of the wealthiest countries in South America, and walking around town looking at the chalkboards with dinner deals confirmed that! Lunch specials starting at $15, whaaat? Where am I?? I checked into my hostel and unfortunately shared a room with a whole group of traveling Israelis, literally a nightmare. Packs of young Israelis have to be some of the most uncourteous travelers on the planet, they literally chatted to each other, their friends, parents whoever, in the hostel room, at all times of day. Airbnb time…

As for the casino, I was happy to find out that they operated only using dollars! As for the games, these were the highest stakes I’d seen in South America by far: $2/5 blinds, maximum $600 buy in. Although the action was a bit underwhelming, only two tables and some pretty conservative play. But I started on a Tuesday night, so it’s hard to expect too much. I did win $1200 that night, so not bad. Plus they had some sort of tournament coming up that weekend, so I was optimistic about the games would improve. I booked an airbnb for a week, a studio right on the beach, on the east side (the quiet side). It was good to be able to stay in one place and relax for a while after my pretty travel intensive schedule in Patagonia. Plus the beaches in Punta Del Este are beautiful!

love the sand dunes, did not love the wind

You kinda had to rent a chair unless you wanted to be constantly sprayed with the windblown sand near the ground

The point, (punta in Spanish) is a narrow strip of land with beaches on both sides that are easily walkable. One is more of a protected bay with less wind and smaller waves, while the other side is a bit more raw with sand dunes, higher winds and more of an undertow; prettier but not as nice for just lying on the beach. My airbnb was on the latter side, which is also the cheaper side! Considering the prices of food, it was nice to have a place to cook as well. In the casino the cheapest thing on the menu was a basket of fries for $10, ouch! So for a week I spent my days making sandwiches for lunch, laying on the beach, reading in the afternoons, making dinner, and playing poker all night long. Not a bad lifestyle. Although a bit lonely as nobody speaks English around here, just Spanish all day everyday.

A little bit on an income disparity here

As for the poker, it did not go as well as expected! I was the table punching bag for a few nights, people would just call my reraises with any two crap cards trying to crack my good hands, and it was working! My AA and KK hands were getting smashed. But I made most of it back the last few nights, so I only lost triple digits. Meh. Still pretty disappointing. I could have stuck around a few more nights and probably finished in the black, but the following weekend in Montevideo (capital of Uruguay) they had their big Carnival parade and I wanted to be around for that. I could wait for the better poker games in the US and Cambodia.

I’m a fan of eclectic buildings, and Montevideo has a few

On to the capital, Montevideo! Parade time! It’s called the Parade de las Llamadas, it happens once a year and it’s much more for the locals, as compared to, let’s say Rio de Janeiro. It’s two nights, lasting from 8pm to 12am. I took the bus from Punta Del Este to Montevideo and met a German guy in the hostel to go see the parade with. We foolishly got there at 8pm (nothing in South America starts on time) but the real action and when all the locals streamed in was around 9:30. I think our biggest mistake was not spending $10 to get seats when we had the chance, before you knew it the crowds grew thick and pushy and it was a bit tricky to see everything that going on from a bit further back.

But it was still a lot of fun, bands full of drums, people waving flags everywhere, and of course the scantily clad women shaking what they got! Although that was less of a focal point than I had assumed based on photos that I’d seen of Carnival in Rio! So it was a fun night, good vibes, high energy! I’m pretty sure everyone in town was at the parade. But a few hours of the parade was plenty. I would think doing it for a week straight in Brazil or something would be a bit overkill!

So that was pretty unique, and I still had a bit more time to do some of my usual wandering around the capital! A lot of the city was a lot more dead than was expecting, lots of very empty streets and some pretty run down buildings. But some of the buildings looked cool in that zombie apocalypse scenario type of way. Some obvious drug users in the streets didn’t seem so cool though.

Always fun to see some random tango dancing in the streets!

Buenos Aires, Finally

March 6, 2021

Woof, haven’t blogged in forever. This is from February 2020

What a lovely city! Arriving in downtown Buenos Aires definitely does not feel like the usual South America anymore. The streets are lines with old European styled buildings with intricate patterns inlayed into the stone. Big trees drape over the boulevards giving shade to the passerbys. There is no shortage of parks and greenery. The whole place is remarkably clean. There’s a good reason it was nicknamed the Venice of South America.

To get into my hostel I had to buzz in and open up a colossal wooden and brass door, at least 10 feet tall. The space had been built out of one of the thousands of aforementioned neo-classical buildings from the late 1800’s/early 1900’s. The location was one block away from the famous Congress building, which was unfortunately mostly covered due to renovations. Although I didn’t have too much time to admire the charm of the city right away, as I had arrived on February 2, the day of the Super Bowl in the US, and I needed to figure out where to watch it!

Fortunately Buenos Aires has quite a few American Ex-pats who have opened bars with the usual burgers/nachos/wings type dishes. One of the places I had found that was having Superbowl festivities was called Chicken Bros, specializing in fried chicken sandwiches and wings. It was in the upscale Palermo neighbourhood, which is known for being the English speaking bubble of the city. As I’ve said before, the vast majority of Argentines don’t speak English, and even if they do, they hate it. But not so much in Palermo!

It was a few miles away from where I was at, but it was late afternoon and the weather was gorgeous, I was in a completely new city, so it was a perfect time to go for a little stroll. Now being that it was Sunday, the place felt a little bit strange, little traffic, eerily quiet. In South America everything shuts down on Sundays, apart from some small convenience shops. It’s strange to see places with some prime outdoor seating areas, coffeeshops and bar/restaurants that would be packed on a nice Sunday afternoon in Chicago, completely closed in Buenos Aires. But that was no worry to me.

I stopped in a park that was centered around a huge tree that spread its limbs mostly horizontally, giving plenty of shade. Under it were small groups of people lounging around drinking mate. Mate is the national drink of Argentina, kind of a caffeinated green tea, drank out of a special cup called a bombero, and special straw called a ‘I forgot’. Argentines are very particular about their mate and it’s very common to see people carrying thermos’s everywhere, as to always have a fresh cup of mate ready! I’m not a big tea drinker to begin with so, I wasn’t exactly as enthralled with the drink as most of the locals!

After wandering a bit more through the leafy boulevards I began to notice more and more restaurants with white tablecloths and fancy names, meaning I was probably in Palermo. I found my way to Chicken Bros, and was quite taken aback to see the crowd spilling out from the bar and onto the sidewalk. An impromptu table was set up outside selling beer to the people outside (that definitely would not fly in the US!) This looked like the place to be! I was mostly surprised because I had hardly met anyone in this part of the world who was even remotely interested in American football. I squeezed inside and saw they had a few projectors set up for the game. No seats of course!

Just a random photo of Chicken Bros when crowded

Outside I met a quite a few Americans who were either working or studying in BA. I don’t think I’d met a single American since Patagonia, but here they were everywhere! As for the game, we all crammed in at kickoff, leaving hardly anywhere to move or to breathe. I didn’t care who won, I was just hoping for a good game, and that’s what we got! This place also offered free shots of tequila after every touchdown (that kind of bar…) so it was getting a little sloppy towards the end of the game. The halftime show was also a big hit, as the Spanish speaking world loved seeing Shakira and JLo do their thing. Meanwhile traditional family values types are writing complaints to the FTC because of all that hip thrusting. Anyway, good for the Chiefs, they were the better team and deserved to win.

The next day I slept in and picked another part of the city to roam around in, the San Telmo neighborhood, which is among the oldest in the city. Narrow sidewalks, cobblestone streets, and little cafes with the classic Porteno style characterize the area. At some point I found a little square with tourist restaurants where Tango dancers performed for the handful of guests, which was fun to watch. I really enjoyed wandering around Buenos Aires! At some point I managed to find the casino, which is located on a pair of riverboats and has one of the most confusing layouts I’ve ever seen! Being that all the poker games are using the massively devalued Argentinean Peso, the stakes were pretty small, .75/$1.50 blinds, so nothing too interesting. I lost all my money to the same fish over and over and over. Total damage: - $200!

I also feel like I should at least note in this post that even though things are nice as a tourist, everything is not great right now for Argentineans, there seems to be lots of dysfunction and you can’t help but think their government has failed it’s people at some level (without knowing anything about Argentinean politics). You can notice this walking around, lines for the ATMs are insane. Lines for buses are down the streets. Same with crowds around any type of government building. Something is off.

Tango dances in the touristy Dorrego square

So I actually decided to go play poker in Uruguay for a bit and then returned to Buenos Aires. This time I stayed at one of the mega hostels where the setup is similar to an apartment (but dorms) but of course they nice social areas, a pool and bar, and organize group activities etc. And it’s mostly English speaking tourists, so it’s easy to meet people, something that I hadn’t been doing enough of in the preceding weeks. To be honest, I didn’t really a ton in the next few days, mostly just hanging out at the pool and venturing out for maybe a handful of hours in the late afternoon. I did go to the contemporary art museum one day, the famous Raccoleta cemetery another, and a few of us rented bikes and rode around the city one afternoon, which was definitely worth doing.

But really Buenos Aires is best for just walking around a bit and enjoying the architecture, parks and cafes. And of course eating steaks and drinking Malbec! My last night there I went out with two English guys at one of the better steakhouses in town. We got there right when it opened at 7, and almost nobody was there. If we had arrived at 9 the place would have been slammed and we would have had to wait an hour or more to get in! Oh and of course it’s amazing to get a huge, melt in your mouth ribeye for $15 and a whole bottle of decent wine for $7 or $8! Even if Argentina isn’t the best place in the world for an English speaker, the value here as a tourist really is amazing!

I wasn’t done with Argentina just yet though! I really wanted to see Iguazu falls, which is in the far north part of Argentina, where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet. It was an 18 hour bus ride or a 1.5 hour flight. I took the flight of course! Seriously some of the distances here in Argentina and Chile are just too much!

Some final Buenos Aires at night shots:

Bariloche

March 12, 2020

If I had to guess what the most popular place in Patagonia is, I would say Bariloche, nestled in Argentina’s lake district. Gone are the sheer cliff faces, freezing temperatures, glaciers and windswept terrain of the far south. In their place are large expanses of forest, rolling mountains, sunny weather, and tranquil blue lakes everywhere! The most popular season is actually the winter, as it’s South America’s premier ski resort, but the summer weather was downright perfect when I got there, upper 70’s in the afternoon and almost no clouds. There are a plethora of activities to do around town: hiking, climbing, boating, kayaking, cycling, you name it.

It took a bit over 2 hours to arrive from El Bolson and the bus station is annoyingly far outside of town. There’s a bus that takes you into town, but you need a special card to use it, which I didn’t have, so I walked the 2+ miles into town with all my stuff, which is approaching my limit as to how far I’ll lug all my crap around in one trip! Both hostel and the city itself were very pleasant, well kept and kind of kitschy. The streets are lined with an insane amount of ice cream and chocolate shops, which is always a good thing! I made dinner in the hostel and met a couple Germans and a Dutch girl; it was very very nice to be able to speak English again and meet people to do stuff with!

The next day I met a girl from the Netherlands (ive met so many dutch people on this trip!) and we decided to do the Refugio Frey hike, which is just a little lodge up in the mountains. Me and Jet (pronounced Yet) took the easy way, which was a cable car followed by a chairlift to get us nice and high in the mountains. From there we’d only have a little bit of elevation gain to the top of the pass. From where we started my expert navigation brought us scrambling up a bunch of rocks, which we soon realized could not possibly be the real trail, but we kept going regardless and after a few spots with some easy rock climbing moves we eventually made it to the top of this mountain/rock pile and were rewarded with 360 degree views over the whole area! Sometimes the best places are not on the trail at all. Then we figured out where the trail actually was and headed down in that direction.

it’s good thing there is no photo of me attempting to get up onto this rock!

From there it took us three hours alpine hiking and scrambling with very nice views to reach Refugio Grey. It’s set in a valley with a small lagoon and surrounded by rocks walls on almost every side. Lots of people like to spend the night here to truly soak in the scenery, but I was getting a bit tired of camping, so a daytrip was plenty for me. We ate lunch at the lagoon, which is a very popular spot for young Argentines to hang out, and then hiked another couple of hours downhill back to where we started.

We rewarded ourselves nicely with ice cream and then later a nice steak dinner. We showed up to a highly recommended place at 10pm and the restaurant was still packed even then, it wasn’t until 11 that we actually sat down. Argentines eat much later than we do in the US! Jet and I ordered two steaks to share, one strip steak and one ribeye, both jugoso (juicy) aka medium rare, as well as three sides, which we didn’t realize were all mountains of food unto themselves! No way we were going to finish it all, but oh well. Both steaks were very tasty, but the ribeye was definitely my favorite with a bright red throughout and beautiful crust on the outside. It cost each of us a little more than $20 including a bottle of wine, very reasonable. It’s crazy how cheap wine is here, even at restaurants you can get a decent red for $6 or $7 a bottle! It’s good living in Argentina at the moment.

The next day I ended up renting a bicycle to do a popular 20-mile circuit that winds along a few lakes, up hills and through forests. It’s a got some nice lookouts plus a few cafes and breweries perfectly positioned to take advantage of the best views overlooking the lakes. It was windy, and bit more exhausting than I expected, but still a great way to spend an afternoon! And that was about it for Bariloche. I hung out with our small English speaking crew at the hostel that evening, left the next morning with a pit stop for one night in La Villa de Angostura (similar to Bariloche but smaller and more expensive) and then went back to the town Puerto Montt in Chile where I’d fly way up north to the Atacama desert.

But that trip to the Atacama desert did not happen! Yet !
Disclaimer: Long boring travel mishap ahead!

So as for Puerto Montt, I arrived there in the evening and would be flying out late the next evening up to the Northern Chile, the Atacama desert. Apparently I had missed out on some protests when I arrived because the streets were clear but I walked into some lingering tear gas. For whatever reason the locals seemed to walk through it okay, but I was all choked up and my eyes were welling up like crazy! I was literally crying ordering a footlong from Subway. After that I checked into my little family hostel and then had all day the next day to kill walking around the city and going to the mall etc. It wasn’t very exciting.

I pulled up ‘puerto montt airport’ on google maps and it looked like the airport is right outside of town, it’s a pretty small city, so that seemed about right. My flight was at 11:30pm, so I waited until about 10pm to catch a taxi. This was much much more difficult than I was expecting as it started to rain; there were some taxis around, but every single one was full! When I finally found one, he quoted me a price much higher than I was expecting. He showed me on the map where the airport was, and it wayyyy outside of town! Hmm. Ok, well its still fine, domestic flight, small airport, late at night, no traffic, all good. Driving along the road, this taxi is going much slower than everyone else and on the uphill part this thing was really struggling. He switched gears and the car just came sputtering to a halt. Noooo!

He tells me it’s fine, he knows what’s wrong, it’ll just be a couple of minutes, blah blah. He pops open the hood and starts jimmying around in there. He even has a bottle of water in the trunk to throw on it. Five minutes turn into ten, then fifteen. I’m getting extremely impatient, he’s getting frustrated, the stupid thing won’t start. He finally gets it going but now we are REALLY cutting it close. We get to the airport in 10 minutes and even if I was tempted to argue about the fare with the break down and all, there was no time! I jogged to the desk, and the lights are off, just one blue collar guy milling around in the background, who I flagged down. Aghh. I guess it closes 30 minutes prior to the flight and I got there a few minutes too late. Shiiiiiit. I already had my boarding pass, so I probably would have made it if I didn’t have to check a bag. Damn. Time for a new plan…

On the plus side, there is still one more flight to Santiago, so I’ll take that one, and then get to the Atacama desert from there! Oh wait, there’s no booking office inside the airport to buy a ticket. I’ll have to book it online with the airport wifi. The wifi is so slow and horrible, I’d get halfway through the process and it would time out. Thirty minutes of this and I was just about out of time. The super nice ladies behind the desk at Latam actually put me on the phone with the Latam office, but they had to put me on hold, and by the time I was off hold it was too late to book the flight. Thwarted again!

I went back online to see what else was available the next day. Everything is EXPENSIVE. Booking last second in South America is awful. I found a flight with SKY Airlines (expensive, but marginally better than my other options) to Uruguay (via Santiago) the next morning. That’s IF I can book it… After a few tries it finally went through, thank god. I had planned to go to Uruguay anyway for poker, so this works out fine as well. I’d do the Atacama later. At this point my best bet is to just sleep at the airport. I’ve got my camping stuff, sleeping pad, sleeping bag, inflatable pillow, so sure why not. And they have rows of chairs without armrests in between them, jackpot! I pick a row chairs, set up my camp, and get a few hours of sleep in.

I feel a little weird around 7am as people start to flow in and I’m spread out on my row of chair/campsite, but whatever, I’m comfortable, screw it. At 9am I’m finally able to check in, it only takes two minutes to get through security. It’s cloudy and drizzling outside. Around 10:15am the winds and rain really pick up, it’s not looking promising. Frigging Patagonia. At 10:30, when we are supposed to begin boarding there is announcement that the plane we were waiting on had aborted two attempts to land and had to be diverted to another airport. New departure time is delayed by eight hours! AGHGH!!

Well the first missed flight has just led to exponential problems! SKY Airlines won’t tell us anything about what they’re going to do about missed connecting flights, but hey we get a $10 food voucher! Can’t be used for alcohol though, ha. I met a German girl and Spanish guy in the same boat as me to wait it out with in the one and only (and very low quality) restaurant. Eventually I found out that I even though we’d fly to Santiago that night, but we couldn’t get to Montevideo until very late the following day. I ended up cancelling the Santiago to Montevideo flight for a full refund (it was way too pricey) and rebooking to Buenos Aires the next morning. What a clusterfuck. Rebooking to Buenos Aires did save me a good chunk of cash though.

So we finally took off 8pm and got to Santiago around 10pm. I ended up spending the night downtown Santiago, enough time to see how badly the riots had affected the city. It was bad, so many buildings boarded up, graffiti everywhere. But I didn’t have much time spend there, I just needed a good nights sleep and then it was back to the airport the next morning to fly to Buenos Aires. Which I did and it went smoothly! Thank god. Fun times in South America! Sooo uhh Buenos Aires is up next!

Back to Argentina AGAIN: The Lake District

March 12, 2020

The Chile to Argentina border crossing was easy as usual, and I actually ran into Haviv, the guy I hike with in Torres Del Paine, although he was with an all Israeli mini bus now (shudders). We set up plans to meet in a few days in the town of Barriloche, but if it was going to me and only Israelis, ehh we’ll see. On the Argentina side I screwed up and didn’t have any Argentinean pesos to pay the bus driver on their side of the border, but fortunately I was able to swap $5 with a friendly French couple or else I would have been really screwed!

At the next town I was about to book what I was told was the last seat to my destination, El Bolson, but despite advertising the Visa logo, they only take cash, noooo! I ran to the ATM in the bus station, waited like 15 minutes in line (there’s always a line in Argentina!) and then the ATM kept saying it couldn’t dispense cash, despite the locals in front of me being able to get theirs! Arghghg. As a last ditch effort I was able exchange my Chilean Pesos at a putrid, god awful rate, but got enough Argentinean Pesos to book the last seat on the bus!

After a few hours waiting around the bus station and a few more on the bus I arrived in El Bolson around 6pm. I read that it was supposed to be (or used to be) a hippie-ish town, but I didn’t really see many hippies, just a boatload of tourists. Unlike the little villages along the Carretera Austral, El Bolson is a proper town. You can’t just arrive and walk around for 15 minutes, see the whole place and pick whatever guesthouse suits your fancy! So after getting off the bus I found a beer garden with a live band and wifi (perfect combination) and looked up hostels. Apparently El Bolson is hopping this time of year, as almost everywhere was fully booked and there was only one hostel on booking.com with open beds, but it was 2 miles outsides of town. Not ideal.

I settled for a campsite a half mile away from the center. Having a tent in Patagonia definitely has it’s advantages! I also spent a good half an hour walking around looking for a working ATM, Argentina’s money situation is seriously messed up. I could only withdraw the equivalent of $35 at this ATM and paid a $10 fee; and that was after waiting 20 minutes in line! Literally insane. Previous ATMs I was withdrawing 45 dollars and paying an $8 fee, which I THOUGHT couldn’t get any worse, but nooo. My biggest mistake of the trip was not bringing down some crisp $100 bills to change here. The ATM stuff is crazy, but if you have benjamins you are in great shape! The official exchange rate is $1 for 60 pesos, but businesses will give you 70 pesos for a dollar or even higher on the ‘black market ’ rate if you want to call it that. Seriously have USD for Argentina!

So with the ATM situation I basically only will frequent places that will let me use a card, which is most of them, but still, it’s super annoying! And of course places like my campsite, buses, tips, street food stands and the like all require cash money. On the other hand, Argentina is very affordable right now because the Argentinian Peso has been so devalued in the last year or two. You have to feel bad for the locals because for them now it’s very expensive to travel outside of their own country. Which I’m assuming is why these towns are so packed with domestic tourists.

My plan for El Bolson was to get in an overnight backcountry trip, as there are lots of nice trails in the mountains outside of town as well as plenty of refugios/campsites to choose from. I picked a route that is a popular, easy day of hiking up a canyon called Cajon Azul, due to it’s very blue water, and then camping at the refugio. The second day would be a tougher one, 18 miles, including a side hike up to see an icy lagoon, but the last 10 miles would be downhill getting back into town.

Before I could start the hike I had some things to, all of which seem to take longer in Argentina. There was a huge line at the grocery checkout, a long wait at the tourist info booth (just to ask where the bus pickup point is!), and finally another line to register my hike at the trailhead. Then I could finally begin!

It was nice 3 hour hike up the canyon, mostly in the woods, but with some nice views of the river and a few places to stop off and swim. Around the refugio the walls of the canyon steepen, but there’s a handful of inlets that form natural eddies where everyone tans on the rocks and goes for a dip. Pretty cool spot! Lots of cute girls. So many butts! It’s very apparent that Argentinean girls are not shy about showing a little cheek with their bathing suits. I’m certainly not complaining. Although it felt kinda awkward seeing families with teenage girls sporting these popular Brazilian style thongs, but I apparently that’s pretty normal here!

When I got to the campsite I filled my name in the guestbook, about 30 Argentinians on the page and now one American. Not good for me! I thought there would be more foreign tourists around! At night everyone sat around the fire having a grand ‘ole time, a cool vibe, lots of young people, drinking and singing. Argentina definitely feels the most similar to western culture compared to anywhere else in South America. I don’t think they’re really too hot on Americans though. But yeahhh nobody spoke English and it was tough for me to communicate much so I had to retreat back to my tent and read my book, meh.

I was up at 7am to start hiking the big uphill before the sun came out. After a few hours of some pleasant, but not particular scenic forest hiking, I stashed my bag and hiked/scrambled straight uphill for an hour to see the hielo (ice) lagoon nestled in the snowy peaks. It was pretty, but I was kinda spoiled from southern Patagonia! After I went down and retrieved my bag it was a steep descent back to El Bolson on my least favorite type of surface, hardpan covered in dust. So slippery!

Things like this look more impressive in person!

It’s not cardiovascularly exhausting, but it’s a knee killer! Seriously I don’t feel old, but on the steep downhill sections I certainly realize I’m not in my 20’s anymore. It’s about time for trekking poles I think. But at least the weather was fantastic the whole time. The only annoying part was crossing the cable ladder across the river – which was a bit sketchy I admit, and you could only do one at a time, but everyone was going soooo slow! This one older woman literally took 10 minutes to cross it, shuffling inch by inch, aghhgh. I practically ran across it when it got my turn, just to make a point, ha. Another two hours or so I was back in El Bolson, back to my campground where my all my other stuff was waiting for me.

I rushed over to the bus company office to get my ticket to Bariloche, as I’d seen what those bus lines were like! It felt like half of Argentina was in this town. After my turn in the queue the first bus I could book was at 4pm the next day. Later than I was hoping for, but yeah its peak season! It was a relaxing evening and then off to Bariloche the next afternoon.

Sorry for the lack of photos, while a nice place, I didn’t find El Bolson to be very awe inspiring : /

Carretera Austral

February 12, 2020

Carretera just means Highway, so the Austral Highway is a 1,000 km stretch (600mi) that connects the scarcely unpopulated southern part of Chile. The project wasn’t completed until 1988 and the last 60 miles weren’t finished till 2000, so it’s really not that old. Due to the geography of the area: thick forests, fjords, lakes, mountains, etc it was a massive undertaking! Even now many sections aren’t paved, just gravel. From El Chalten I had two options, take a bus-ferry-hike-ferry-bus combination to Villa O’higgens, the southern tip of the route, or bus further up north on the Argentinian side and connect at Chile Chico (lots of bus time!). Neither were good options, but the Villa O’higgens sounded like such a pain in the ass I went with option 2.

I took the red route to join up with the Carretera Austral from El Chalten

So a solid 17 hours after I had left El Chalten I had arrived in a tiny town called Rio Tranquilo in Chile. You can literally walk the whole town in 10 minutes! It’s mostly known to be the jumping off point for the marble caves, as well as a good place to do some glacier trekking – at a lower price point than some other places in the more touristy parts of Patagonia. So that’s what I was going to do! I checked into a hostel and then booked my glacier trekking and kayaking tour of the marble caves. Maybe less expensive than other parts of Patagonia, but definitely not cheap!

General Carrera Lake, the largest in Chile

I learned very quickly that in this part of Chile, as opposed to the vast majority of more touristy South America I’d visited, basically nobody spoke any English. Usually the hostel receptionist would speak decent English, or at the very least speak slowly in Spanish and annunciate their words cleanly to help you out. Not here though! It was very frustrating. Chilean and Argentinian Spanish is not like the rest of the Latin American Spanish and when they speak it quickly I was pretty hopeless. There were two German girls at the hostel, but they were living in Santiago now and seemed to have zero interest in speaking English. That night I was relegated to the couch while all the other hostel guests sat around the dining table and chatted, bummer.

I woke up at 6am the next morning to get ready the glacier tour. We met at 6:30 and drove 1.5 hours to get to the trailhead. Our tour the guides asked if everyone was fine with them speaking Spanish, I was only person in the whole group who wasn’t fluent/near fluent in Spanish! Of course I wasn’t going to have them speak in Spanish AND English solely on the account of me. But at this point I was questioning whether or not I made a poor decision to do the Carretera Austral.

As for the glacier, we hiked an hour and a half before it got too slippery and we had to put on our crampons. Despite doing lots of hiking in the mountains, I’d never actually hiked/climbed up a snow covered mountain or crossed any snow/icy passes that would require crampons. So this was my first time wearing these metal spikes that you attach to the bottom of your boots. You stick into the ice much better than I would have expected! Like you can literally walk up 50 degree ice faces without a problem. So it was a lot fun of to walk around on the ice with the crampons on. And it wasn’t just walking on top of the glacier, there were also a few ice caves that we were able to explore, which were stunningly blue and shiny. I just had no idea what the guides were saying. But overall it was definitely a worthwhile trip!

I borrowed some sunglasses for the glare ha

The next morning I did the kayaking tour of the marble caves, with surprisingly, two Americans. They were from Boston doing some traveling during gap year (what Europeans call the year in between HS and college). Apparently gap year is becoming more of a thing in the US! I mean its not for the overwhelming majority of college aged people, but these two girls were now the third and fourth Americans I’d met so far doing a gap year trip. When I was going to college I don’t think I knew a single person who took time off to travel in between high school and college. Good to hear!

We got set up in our kayaks and had about 20 minutes of paddling to get out to the caves. Gliding through the lake with the mountain scenery in the background was very tranquil. We reached the caves, even though ‘caves’ is a bit misleading, it’s three rock formations, two of them sitting like islands in the lake. Very cool looking! On their undersides you can see the colorful green and blue striations that have formed over thousands of years. The main formation, the Cathedral, you can actually kayak under, but ever since someone carved their name into the rock a couple years ago, they’ve made it illegal to go completely underneath, which was a shame. That’s the whole point of doing it in a kayak instead of a boat!

To be honest I thought the caves were somewhat underwhelming, as I was expecting some actual caves to paddle through and not just a handful of small structures that you can see within a matter of minutes! It’s one of those places where the photos look cooler than the experience itself, so very instagrammable! The girls used our guide as their professional photographer while I was happy to paddle around by myself. But still, it was a nice morning, better than freezing in Chicago!

It would have been cool to paddle underneath, but this was as close as they’d let you go

looks like it could topple over at any second

I was done by 11am, and the one bus to the next city on the Carretera had already left, so I decided to do a bit of hitchhiking. With hitchhiking there’s kind of an implicit agreement that if you get picked up you should be able to provide conversation/entertainment to whoever is driving, so I felt kind of bad I wouldn’t really be able to fulfil my end of the bargain. I bought a 4 pack of beer to help compensate. To my surprise there was already one couple on the road trying to get a ride, followed by another, and so I took my place in line a bit behind them.

Picking up a ride was certainly not as easy as I had read it to be online! The couple in front of me gave up after an hour, I called it quits after about 2.5 hours, and the one couple who was the first in line was out there for at least 4 hours. I saw them walking around in town later that evening, so looks like everybody got blanked. I’ve hitchhiked quite a bit in remote mountain areas where it’s pretty common, and judging by the amount of open seats in the cars of people driving by, picking up hitchhikers is just not a popular thing to do in Chile! Or maybe we just got unlucky that day, but it was not encouraging! I bought my bus ticket for the next morning.

Image borrowed from the internets, talesfromthehelens.com

Originally I had wanted to make a stop off the Carretera and do this hike to another scenic mountain lagoon, but IF I got off and did the hike I’d have to attempt more hitchhiking to get to the next town, which now I had decided was a bad idea. So it was off to Coyhaique, the largest town on the Carretera Austral, nestled nicely in the mountains. And as we passed Cerro Castillo (the place I’d wanted to stop off at) there were multiple groups of hitchhikers looking for rides. So I think I made the right decision. In high season there are just too many hitchhikers around and I think maybe that turns off potential picker-uppers, because I feel like some people are happy to pick up the one off person, or a couple, but when you have a whole group of them waiting, no thanks.

What I missed out on by not having my own transport :(

In Coyhaique the first two hostels I tried were full, so I found what they call a hospedaje, which basically means someone is renting out some of the rooms of their house, which was fine. The weather was clearing up, so it was a nice afternoon to sit outside and have a beer. But I literally hadn’t talked to anyone since being on the Carretera and it was getting a bit lonely.

The next morning I was a on bus to Puyuhuapi, which is a very small town, but it’s close to the hanging glacier, which is a popular stop on the Carretera. They had one public bus from town to the park, so I was able to get a ticket on that. It’s a 2 mile walk to get up to viewpoint where you can see a waterfall with the edge of a glacier sitting right on top of it. Very cool, although a shame you can’t get even closer. Besides that, there’s another viewpoint from the lake, and that’s basically all you can do in the whole park! I found a nice flat rock on the riverbank to catch some sun and wait for the bus to come back and pick us all up.

Back in Puyuhaupi that afternoon they had a little festival going on, a few live bands, all of which featured accordions! It was kind of fun, it was right on the lake, the weather was gorgeous, and people were dancing and having fun. With this type of music it sounded like we were in Swiss Alps or what I imagined the Swiss Alps to be like! I was kinda surprised a town this small could even host such a thing; I mean the town is absolutely tiny!

After the festivities that evening I went back to my guesthouse because they had Direct TV (thank god), to watch some NFL playoffs. I caught the end of the Chiefs game (boring), then panicked a bit because I couldn’t find the Packers anywhere on the TV guide, but eventually found it on FoxGo in Spanish! I was pretty pumped to be able to watch the game in such a small town, which going in, which I had highly doubted I’d be able to see. Of course my excitement did not last long. I turned it off at halftime. Such a pathetic game. Welp, back to traveling!

The next day was a thorough travel day, 3 hours to one city, wait a few hours for a bus, and then another couple hours to a small town called Futaleufu, which is named for the river that runs along it, one that is very well known in rafting and whitewater circles! I decided to stay at a campground, set up my tent, and went looking for rafting companies to book a trip for the next day. I did find a company that had an American guy on staff, which was nice because I was having trouble understanding exactly what they were saying in some of the other tour offices.

Although I didn’t get great news, the water is dam controlled, and this year for whatever reason the water was unseasonably high. Which meant that only small sections of the river could be safely run until the water went back down. So you could still do daytrips where you’d run the same section twice or others where you’d have to get out and portage around the biggest rapids. Hmm. I still booked a trip the next day, as I didn’t really feel like just waiting around in Futaleufu just praying that river controllers in Buenos Aires would pull their magic lever in the next few days.

We met the next morning, it was two South Africans, a few American NGO workers from in town, and two Chileans. We did the standard safety briefing, and I guess due to the continuous nature of the Futaleufu they’d have a guy on a mini catamaran thingy and a safety kayaker downriver of us at all times in case someone fell out. It sounds like in the rare case you go swimming in the Futa and don’t get picked up, you’re going to be swimming for a quite a while because the water is moving so damn fast. But there’s also very little that could potentially kill you, so that’s good!

We set off in the bright midday sun. The water quality is spectacular, a nice bluish turquoise hue, very clean and clear. You can, and SHOULD drink from it! It turns out the NGO girls were also experienced rafters/kayakers so our raft was moving like a well oiled machine. Basically the opposite of my raft in Colombia! The rapids were mostly 3’s and 4’s, very fun rafting with very little time in between them. I was in the front so I was getting blasted constantly with white walls of water, as it should be! Unfortunately some of the biggest rapids we had to take ‘chicken lines’ around, missing the meat of them, but we still hit some big waves.

The water is so fast that it only took us an hour to get to our pullout point, but it was a good time. We’d lose the three NGO girls and do the same trip in the late afternoon with just 5 of us. That actually ended up being more fun, I think because our paddling was weaker and we got knocked around by the rapids a bit more! So all in all a good day, although it’s hard to not to think about the huge sections of the river that we weren’t able to run with the really high water, sigh... But what can you do?

And after that it was back to the Argentinean side of Patagonia the next day, the side that I like better as it’s cheaper, has more interesting food options, and better beer. If only it weren’t so hard to get money out from the damn ATM’s. The city I was heading to was called El Bolson, which is supposed to be a laid back city with a lovely mountain backdrop and good hiking – like most places in Patagonia!

Perito Moreno Glacier, to the left is where all the ice was breaking loose

Perito Moreno Glacier and El Chalten

February 12, 2020

The next stop is on the Argentinean side of Patagonia, the Perito Moreno glacier. I booked a bus with Guy to El Calafate, about 6 hours away. The border crossing was very laid back. Fortunately Argentina stopped charging Americans the reciprocal $160 we charge them a few years ago, otherwise this would have been quite costly. In fact Argentina is a great deal right now, as their currency has been devalued greatly against the dollar. Due to the inflation there is actually a cash shortage currently, and what I didn’t know was that you can only take out $40 at a time from the ATM (in this city at least), plus a $6 fee. 15%!! If I had done my research properly I would have known to bring some nice crisp $100 bills and exchange them here, alas. The best thing to do is just pay everything by card.

The first thing I notice when walking in El Calafate was how chic and modernized the shops downtown were compared to other places in South America: stylish boutiques, fancy chocolate shops, high end outdoor apparel, etc. You just had to ignore some of the Argentinian dysfunctions like the long lines at the ATMs and gas stations. And there was a great beer scene as well! There were a bunch of burger and beer pubs with lots of varieties on tap. Artesanal is the Spanish word du jour, basically how we use the word ‘craft’ – artesanal beer, artesanal sandwiches, artisanal turds on a stick, whatever. I was very impressed with the happy hour specials, $1.50 for a pint of good draft beer – but only if you pay in cash. I liked the place immediately! Me and Guy ended up going out for dinner at a very highly rated place, I had huge skirt steak, well marinated and cooked to a perfect medium rare (something hard to find in other part of S. America!!), plus two glasses of wine, for well under $20. Excellent value!

The following morning we got picked up and headed to the Perito Moreno glacier, one of the many arms of the Southern Patagonian Icefield. It’s ice wall towers 200 feet above the sea level, continually breaking off giant chunks of ice (ie calving) as the glacier continually slides downward. In the park you walk along the boardwalk listening to cracks in the ice, hoping to catch a glimpse of part of it flaking off. You hear lots of guttural creaks and moans, but it’s tricky to see the ice calving. We got lucky and saw a big ‘ole piece fall off right in front of us, making a thunderous roar and huge splash when it hit the water! It was spectacular.

We also did a boat trip to get right up close and in person with the ominous wall of ice. In some spots it kind of looks like fingers, reaching up from the icy depths and frozen in place. The color is eerily blue. The ice isn’t blue of course, but it looks that way from the refraction of the sunlight or something. In the photos it’s tricky to get a good feel for how tall the thing is without a frame of reference!

We spent one more night in El Calafate drinking craft beers and then it was off to El Chalten, the most impressive spot in Patagonia on the Argentinean side. The town itself is small and super touristy, pricey, and jammed during high season, but I’m sucker for good beer bars overlooking the mountains, so all good. The hostel I had booked was actually overbooked, so they sent me a mile away, all the way at the far end of the main road to a different, much crappier hostel. But whatever, I had a bed and it was half the cost of what I would have paid. And it did have a bakery attached. The owner clearly paid much more attention to the bakery than the hostel itself!

So the most famous mountain in El Chalten is Mt. Fitzroy. It’s kind of cool because it dominates so much of the skyline and is easily visible from anywhere around it; unlike the Torres in Torres Del Paine, which are tucked away and have very few good viewing points. I decided to do a one night overnight hike where I would camp near the base of Fitzroy and then hike up to the lagoon to catch the first light hitting the mountain early the next morning. And then pumping out another 18 miles or so to make a complete loop.

When I started that afternoon the clouds had rolled in and the tops of the mountains were almost always shrouded, the peaks at least. Sometimes the sky would tease you, making it look like it was about to clear up, but nahhh. After 3 hours I set up camp and decided to go up to the lagoon that evening, hoping maybe it would clear up by the time I got up there. You could see almost all of the mountains, just not the tops, but I decided I would really be kicking myself if I waited till the next morning and it turned out to be really cloudy and you couldn’t see anything!

Damn it cloud, move!! I waited 30 minutes at the viewpoint and this was the clearest shot I had.

An hour later I was at Laguna Los Tres, and it was buenisimo! Probably one of the prettiest mountain lakes I have ever seen. I thought it was better than the vaunted Torres Del Paine! The mountain chain is just more in your face and imposing than TDP, even if you can’t really tell from the photos. They make you feel very small! And there were very few people around as it was getting pretty late into the evening. It was too bad the damn clouds seemed to cling to peaks like seran wrap! I did get some cool photos of the falcons hanging around up there though! The wind was really whipping, so I couldn’t stay for too long and headed back down to camp. When I got back down and looked up again the clouds had cleared completely, aghgh!

the view from near camp around dusk, clouds finally gone from Mt. Fitzroy

The next morning I woke up 4am and started the hike back up again. It was not looking good as all the mountaintops were covered in clouds, and something would have change drastically in the next hour to be able to see them for sunrise. In Patagonia you never know! It was clear in the opposite part of the sky where the sun was coming up, so we were able to see an extremely red/pink alpenglow on the lower parts of the mountain –it’s actually shocking how bright it was! – and you could only imagine how awesome it would have been if you could see all of Fitzroy and Co. unobstructed by clouds, but that was not the case this morning. Bummer. I hiked backed down, made breakfast and continued the rest of the hike, but it looks like the clouds weren’t going anywhere that day. I was glad I made the climb up the evening before!

Hello from the other side! The sun rising behind us.

Amazing Alpenglow. Really stunning stuff. Stupid clouds though.

The other lagoon on the hike, low clouds still looming

not bad! but you get spoiled after Fitzroy

Back in town that afternoon I took a nice nap and then was able to find the one bar in town that had NFL games! I saw the second half of the Chiefs game, and then I was able to watch the Packers hold on against the Seahawks to get into the NFC championship game. Excellent. The next day I was going to do a day hike, but clouds still hung over Fitzroy, so I was just bummed around all day and then took a night bus to get back over to the Chilean side of Patagonia again. The Carretera Austral. At this point the Argentinean side mostly just goes up through the desert for a long time, while the Chilean side has much better scenery. It’s supposedly remote though, much of this road is unpaved and what little of public transportation they have through this region can be often booked up in advance or unreliable. So I might have to do some hitchhiking! We’ll see! Carretera Austral is up next…

All The Way Down: Southern Patagonia

January 18, 2020

After Christmas it was back to Lima! I flew via Miami, my Latam connection flight was supposed to leave at 1am, it then got pushed to 3am, then 4, then 8, then finally left at 9am. Brutal. I tried as best as I could to sleep on the floor at the airport. They did give us a $100 cash or $200 Latam airlines voucher for the inconvenience, which I was not expecting. I had only one night in Lima – NYE – which I went out with some of the people from my hostel. But I was exhausted and had to crash shortly after midnight from the lack of sleep. The next day it was back to the airport where I flew to Santiago, Chile, and then all the way to the southern tip of Chile – Punta Arenas.

I got really lucky and had the window seat on the right side of the plane, which is perfect seeing the Patagonian landscape. Probably some the best views I have ever seen from a plane! There are whole swaths of mountainous terrain completely covered in ice and snow leading right up to the ocean. I’m not used to seeing places where the snowy peaks get so close to the ocean, even in the middle of summer! And then there’s the green fjordlands consisting of an impossible number of island chains. Just spectacular. As we reached Punta Arenas everything flattened out and the land was dotted by lakes and inlets. The sun was just starting to set and it was about 10pm!

I shared a taxi into town with a Spanish guy and found my hostel. The hostels here are a bit different than the ones in other parts of S. America. You’ve got main room and a kitchen, but it’s more like living in someone’s home than your normal tourist mega-hostel. No bar and no happy hour from 7-9! The main thing to do in Punta Arenas is to take a boat tour out to see the penguin colony, but it was really expensive and I’ve seen penguins before so I took a pass. The town of Punta Arenas isn’t anything special, it’s rather bleak looking. I couldn’t imagine living here in the winter with only a few hours of daylight! The first thing you notice, especially after traveling in Peru, is the prices! It’s more like traveling in the US than most of South America. I could get a burger on the street for $2-3 in Colombia, here it’s more like $10. I did know this ahead of time though, nobody said Patagonia was going to be cheap!

In my hostel I met a kind of strange Israeli guy, who when I told him my plans (hiking in Torres Del Paine), he said he was doing the same thing, and asked if he could go with me. So umm, sure? It was a little awkward having someone basically latch themselves on to me for a week within minutes of meeting, but hey you always meet some interesting characters traveling. This guy hadn’t been out of Israel much didn’t really know a lot about backcountry camping or anything like that, so I had to make sure that he would get all the right gear to rent. I kind felt like his Dad. Even in the kitchen he was blown away by the two-handled can opener, apparently they don’t have those in Israel!

Anyway, back to our plans in Torres Del Paine NP. We wanted to hike the W trek, which is probably now the most famous trek in South America. It’s route shaped like a W of course, and each prong takes you up into some beautiful valleys, with one of them being the lagoon where the park’s namesake (the towers) are located. A few years ago you used to be able to just show up and secure campsites, but in the last few years they all book up months in advance. Some might call it the instagram effect! But talk about a pain in the ass. For someone who likes last minute planning, this was not ideal. Me and Haviv didn’t have any campsites booked at all, so our plan was to stop in the offices that run the campgrounds in Puerto Natales and see what they say.

The W. The black squiggles is the part we weren’t able to do. Oh well.

The next day we took the bus to Puerto Natales, checked in our hostel and headed out to the camp offices. Although we forgot to plan for siesta business hours, they were all closed from 12:30 to 3:30. Annoying! The crazy thing about getting these campsites booked is that 3 separate companies operate camps throughout the park, not just one (like every other single national park in the world!). So for one section of the W you have to book with one company and for another you have to book with a different company. The first office we stopped into had no open campsites (which we expected), but we could stay in one of their tents for $55/night. Nahhhh. The other company we tried was able to give us two different campsites, one at the Grey Glacier, and one at Paine Grande. Excellent! I think we got lucky, but I’m not sure. $11/night.

Haviv had to rent gear, so we stopped in a bunch of rental places, a process that I would have preferred to have not been involved in! If you’ve traveled with Israelis you’ll know why. (Sorry for stereotyping!) After visiting every rental place in town we returned to the place that most acceptable prices to him (also the first place we went) and we were all set! We bought our food for the next few days at the grocery store and we caught the bus to the park the next morning. Although I really wish I would have brought freeze dried meals from the US, you can’t find them here, so pasta and ramen dinners here we come!

Had time for a small hike waiting for the next ferry. Paine Grande in the background

The jagged rocks in the background are called the Cuernos

To get to our started point we needed to take a bus which connects to a ferry. Our 6:40 am bus was supposed to link up with 9am ferry, but we stopped for 10 minutes to photograph pumas on the side of the road and missed the ferry! So we had to wait until the one at 11. The ferry took only 35 minutes (and cost $35!) and dropped us off at the Paine Grande refugio. These aren’t just normal campsites, there’s basically a small hotel with a restaurant (for the richers) and then another building to check into if you’re camping, a small store, and a kitchen for the campers – in addition to all the actual campsites. We weren’t staying there until the next night, instead continuing onwards towards the Grey Glacier, 8 miles away. Me, Haviv, and Peter – a German guy also in our hostel, started hiking there together.

The start of the hike. Sadly a forest fire killed off most of the trees around. It gives it kind of an ominous, creepy vibe though.

It was an informative hike, as I learned all about Kosher rules from Haviv, who was very strict about that kind of stuff (as opposed to most Israelis I’ve met). No pork obviously, nothing that has been cooked in a pot that has cooked pork, no cheese on top of meat, if you eat cheese before meat you must wait 30 minutes, if you eat meat before cheese you must wait 6 hours, some seafood is okay as long as it has gills and a fin, clams and mollusks are definitely not. The rules are complicated and endless! Anyway after a few hours of hiking we finally got our first view of the glacier, a massive ice wall a few miles away. It makes any glaciers I’ve seen in Glacier NP look like little babies!

Soon we checked in and set up our tents and then had a walk to the viewpoint, which features a bay full of little icebergs. Very cool! The glacier is part of the southern icefield, which stretches for hundreds of miles in this part of Patagonia. Excellent for photos!

Haviv and I made our pasta + tuna dinner, which was excellent. He’s not a person I would normally spend lots of time with, his knowledge of the world is minimal, he’s very right wing, very religious, believes 100% in Zionism and seems to have a bit of disdain for the liberal Jews living in Tel Aviv. So kind of like a Trumper from a small town traveling abroad. So good on him for getting out there! And he’s a happy go lucky guy, which is more than I can say for myself! But I wasn’t going to get deep into religion or politics with him, I’d like to think I know better by now. Although I think his brain broke a little bit when I said I wasn’t sure if I wanted kids lol. In his world you might as well just curl up and die without the blessing of children! Anyway, we met up with Peter for some overpriced drinks in the restaurant, it’s hard to say no to some brewskies after a hard day of hiking! We also picked up another Israeli guy to our crew, a guy name Guy, from Tel Aviv.

The next morning we hiked up to get a better view of the glacier and caught some strong winds and rain along the way. It’s Patagonia, you never know what kind of weather you’re gonna get! But it was an easy hiking day, as we only had to hike back down to Paine Grande. We took our time and got into camp around 4pm, setting up our tents in the whipping wind. As the name suggests, the campground is at the foot of the Paine Grande mountain, a scenic location, but little protection from the wind. We cooked our ramen for dinner and spent the night playing cards, a game I was just taught, called Cambio, which I really liked as it’s got a good amount of strategy involved.

Peter, Haviv, Me, and Guy. These pants make me look like the marshmallow man when the wind blows!

Paine Grande campsite. The yellow tents are the campsite owned ones - not cheap!

Unfortunately the next day Peter had to bail out as he hurt his foot and it was only getting worse, so he took the ferry out. To rub some salt in the wound he had $250 of refugio reservations the next two nights, which are completely non-refundable. So me, Guy, and Haviv went up into the next prong of the W, the Frances Valley. We didn’t have time to hike until the farthest viewpoint, which is supposed to be the best, but the scenery was still really nice. On the way down Guy and Haviv argued politics and I kept my distance. By the end of the hike they wanted nothing to do with each other, heh.

The Cuernos look a bit different from this angle

We could watch the mini avalanches from here

To link up this part of the W with the last part, you would need to get one of the most sought after campgrounds, which was just not possible. So we returned to Paine Grande and took the ferry back, then took a bus, and then a minibus to our next campsite, Torre Central. What people don’t tell you on the internet is that you don’t need a reservation to camp here! It’s huge and you can just rock up and they’ll let you pitch your tent for $20. Hell if you wanted to you could easily just pitch your tent anywhere and not pay, they don’t really check. Haviv was not happy that we paid $20 when we could have just camped for free! The next day we would do the last prong of the W, the most famous place in the park, the Torres Del Paine mirador!

Hiking into the valley, no sign whatsoever of the Torres

The viewpoint is located about 3.5 hours from Torre Central, and if we were motivated enough we could have woke up at 2am and tried to get there for sunrise. But we were not. According to the forecast, it was supposed to be cloudy until around noon and then clear up – if you can rely on weather forecasts in Patagonia! We reached the top at 11:45am, in a hailstorm. No visibility. Freezing cold. And then 10 minutes later the clouds parted and we had beautiful shining views of all of the towers! It was perfect. This was the first time since the first morning that we had any extended period of time of pure, unadulterated sunshine!

Excellent timing. These mountains/rock walls here in Patagonia are really something else. There’s not many places in the world where the rock faces are so sheer and jagged. We took photos and admired the view for an hour and then giddily made our way back down to camp, packed up and took the bus back to Puerto Natales. A successful trip of Torres Del Paine NP! We did about 80% of the W in total, without making any reservations in advance, not bad!

the traditional thatched boats used by the fishermen

The Long Road into Peru

January 18, 2020

So from Cuenca I booked a bus to a beach city in Northern Peru, Trujillo. We left at 9pm, went through immigration sometime in the middle of the night, and then spent most of the next day riding through the desert landscape of Northern Peru. There were a handful of other tourists making the same journey, so we got to know each other a bit in 20 hours of traveling together! We were all ready for the beach! This place is more known for surfing than actually having nice beaches, but whatever; a relaxation day was definitely needed. Once again the weather was kind of wishy washy and the sea was full of rocks making it tricky to actually wade out into the ocean, so it wasn’t exactly an inspiring experience, but we did have some tasty seafood right on the waterfront! A Swiss girl and I decided to head onwards after just a day, taking a night bus back into the Andes, a mountain town named Huaraz.

some buildings on the beach and then a whole lotta desert

Even though the weather was cloudy and misty, and the city wasn’t particularly beautiful, I actually enjoyed it a lot! It’s a very indigenous town and everyone is wearing colorful outfits and interesting hats. The streets were crowded with people selling their goods and gathering around the breakfast carts. A lot of hustle and bustle for 7am! I liked it. There were ladies sitting out in front of my hostel selling some kind of moss and I had to ask them to move to get into the door. I still have no clue what this moss is for, I don’t think I’ve ever seen people selling moss! I checked into the hostel and fortunately they had a bed available to sleep (SoI didn’t have to wait till check in at 1pm!) When I woke up it rained all afternoon, so that first day was a pretty chill. We did make to the small history museum - only in Spanish though. Me and the Swiss girl had a hike planned out for early the next morning, as you have to do because it’s basically guaranteed to rain every afternoon around 2:30!

If you can’t tell, I loved the moss ladies

Later that evening we made some dinner together, but the Swiss girl was feeling pretty lousy, but I was able to meet a fun Dutch girl to do the hike with instead. Perfect. We left around 7am and a cart that sold sandwiches of eggs, hot dogs, and avocado. I wish they sold these everywhere in South America! We then found the stop for the collective (minibus) and left with just a handful of passengers. A couple stops later our little bus that sat about 12 was loaded with 20+ people and few on the roof to boot! I had an old woman wedged about halfway onto my lap. It was kinda fun! Most people got off in the next village 20 minutes up the road, and then we were dropped off in 45 minutes at the Laguna Cherup trailhead.

The trail was basically straight upwards, and like most places in the Andes, it helps to be acclimatized! After my hikes in Ecuador I was in pretty good condition, but Chantalle had been at sea level in Lima previously, so it was a bit tougher for her. The hike was a more adventurous one, at certain parts you have to scramble up some wet rocks and they have these chains anchored into the rock to hold onto. It took us maybe 2.5 hours to finally reach the lagoon. It was mostly cloudy, but every once in a while the clouds would clear a bit and reveal some of the white capped mountains looming over the lake. It was a nice place. And we only got a a bit of drizzle, so a successful hike! We found another collectivo to get down and were done by 2pm, literally 5 minutes before the downpour came! Originally I had plans to do a big multiday hike here, but with all this rain I realized I had to scrap those plans. I’m a fair weather hiker!

The next day Chantalle and I signed up for a hike a called the Paramount, which is a hike along a particularly blue lagoon and supposedly you see the exact mountains which the Paramount Pictures logo features! Very exciting stuff. The only caveat is that it’s 3 hours there and 3 hours back. So we set off at 5am and since it was clear that morning I finally got a good view of the Cordillera Blanca mountain range unobstructed by clouds, which were spectacular. But I couldn’t take any photos from inside the bus. By 9am we were off hiking! The lake is a gorgeous teal color, similar to the ones I saw in Banff this summer. It started off nice and sunny, but by the time we reached the second lagoon the clouds had rolled in and we got some rain. It was a cold and wet lunch! Most of the mountains were blocked by clouds unfortunately. Then we walked back out the same way we came and the weather got nice again! Just three bumpy hours back to Huaraz, ugh.

The second laguna, a tiny glimpse of some mountains and blue skies!

Two days later we signed up for the Laguna 69 tour, which is the most famous of the Lagunas in the Cordillera Blancas. We shelled out for a more expensive guided hike which takes you on some of the trails and viewpoints around the lagoon, so a bit more involved than just going straight to the lagoon and back. Of course this was the day we got the worst weather, just clouds and mist and zero visibility the whole day. At one viewpoint our guide described how in the months during the high season you can see 7 different mountains from this spot. Must be nice! We were left with only our imaginations. After a few hours we got to the lagoon in a solid drizzle. It was a nice color of blue, but not like it would be if the sun was shining on it. And then you couldn’t see anything beyond that. It was another lunch in huddled under our ponchos. I was quite happy to go back down as soon as possible. A pretty disappointing day. But I still had a great time walking around the city and taking photos!

The way down, I didn’t even take a picture of the laguna 69, heh

The outfits, and hats especially are great

I was originally planning on going to Bolivia after Peru, but the thought of spending more time in rainy season sounded appalling, so I modified my plans to fly down to Patagonia, where it’s supposed to be prime hiking season! But first I had to get to Lima and then fly back home for Christmas! I didn’t really do anything in Lima besides walk around and eat a lot. Lima has an excellent food scene, so many restaurants with skilled chefs, interesting dishes, and meals of multiple courses for a fraction of what they would cost in Chicago. Some of the ceviches are absolutely terrific!

This guy drives up the mountain to deliver gas tanks to base camp

Cotopaxi to the Coast

January 15, 2020

Time for more volcano hiking! Next up I wanted to hike Illinza Norte topping out at 5,300 m. I booked a place in a little village near the trailhead, got a taxi to drive me up there and started hiking, but as I was hiking up to the refuge I was informed by the hikers coming down that the owner had locked everything up, sooooo uhh I ended up turning around and going back. It was raining pretty good so I wasn’t exactly horribly disappointed at the time. The next day I switched guesthouses and I was going to do another day hike, but the weather was terrible again so I ended up just staying in the lodge. I ended up meeting some people that night to visit the Cotopaxi base camp with.

The next morning the weather was of course awful, but as we drove our way up the volcano the summit of Cotopaxi actually began to appear above the clouds. A small miracle given the weather the last few days! Our taxi driver dropped us off at the parking lot and we walked uphill for about an hour until we reached the lodge. This is where the people hoping to climb the whole volcano will stay the night before making their summit attempts. From there we hiked another 45 minutes up until where the snow/ice starts before turning around. Unfortunately we couldn’t see any of the other volcanoes off in the distance, but we were still very happy with our weather. The volcano itself is a symmetrically shaped cone capped with ice, it’s very aesthetically pleasing! The way down you can mostly just run on the loose volcanic sand which is quick and fun. And then once we drove down the clouds overtook us and we were greeted with a nice hailstorm! You never really know with this weather.

all those little white specks on the ground are hail

At the guesthouse I inquired about getting to the top of Cotopaxi, but it sounded like they had a shortage of guides as there was a big independence day in Quito that weekend. Plus I’d have to rent a whole bunch of gear for climbing on ice/snow, combined with the recent weather and I decided to take a pass. After so many cloudy/rainy days I was really hoping to get some sun on the coast. The next day I took a 10 hour bus ride to get to a small town called Puerto Lopez. My travel buddy was staying there so I met up with him again. And of course the weather was cloudy. We thought maybe the weather would be better further south down the coast in Montanita, but nahh. Although Montanita is definitely a party town, so there was a lot of stuff going on at night. Two nights there was enough for me as the lack of sun was really bumming me out.

Next stop, back into the mountains, the third largest city in Ecuador: Cuenca. I think Cuenca was my favorite city in Ecuador. It’s not so large and spread out like Quito and Guayaquil and it’s got a really nice colonial downtown, cool architecture, it’s clean, relatively safe, and has a good food scene. It sounds like more and more expats are moving to this city.

The following day I decided to do some hiking in Cajas National Park, which is a high altitude, very green, scrub forest. It looks something like the Scottish highlands, dotted with lagoons everywhere. I took a bus to the park station and checked out my possible routes. On one side of the park was a few shorter but well marked trails while on the other side were some longer hikes with less maintained trails. I told the lady I wanted to hike 6 or 7 hours and she recommended a hike that she said would take about 7 hours. Sounds good to me!

I had to walk a kilometer down the highway and then I found my trail. It was a great start, I saw some wild alpacas just off the road and the sun was coming out for a bit, which is unusual in this place. Plus I had the whole place to myself. After a slight climb I could see endless lakes in the distance. The trail pretty much disappeared, but it doesn’t really matter because the low shrubs and grasses are easily navigable. It’s referred to as a paramo ecosystem, basically the catchall name for tropical mountain vegetation above the treeline. Fortunately the trail was marked on maps.me on my phone, so I just had to stay close to where it said the trail was. Easy enough!

feels like the Scottish highlands (or so I’d like to believe)

After about 4 hours of hiking I got to a large lake, and maps.me has two trails around the lake. I chose the wrong one. The trail vanished again and I was left bushwalking, climbing over rocks, fording rivers, and squeezing my way through overgrown branches in a small forest. I eventually scrambled my way around the lake and was able to rejoin the ‘main’ trail. But it was exhausting and probably cost me at least an hour. At this point the clouds had rolled in and the rain had started. I had lost the trail once again. Although I guess it’s hard to lose the trail if there really isn’t one! Note: from here on out it’s basically me complaining about how awful my day was, so read at your own peril! It’s a lot of whinging.

some very pleasant scenery and weather - at first!

I was basically descending down a small stream with lots of slippery rocks with sticks and branches sticking out everywhere to stab me or catch my poncho. I banged my knee pretty hard and was bleeding now. My shoe was ripped. I had completely given up on keeping anything dry at this point. After crossing a mini-marshland and down climbing a small rock face I was beginning to get a bit worried. Climbing down wet slippery rocks was not how I pictured this hike going! I had no idea where the trail was, but I found a spot where I could get a view, and sure enough I was surrounded on three sides by steep canyon walls and still no trail in sight. This might be the first time I’ve ever felt a bit of panic set in on a hike! I was already imagining having to stay the night on the mountain in a steady cold rain, which I didn’t have the proper gear for. Hypothermia here we come!

I tramped through the brush looking to find anything that looked like a trail. Still nothing. Eventually I found some rocks to scramble down. It was treacherous! It was so slippery I constantly had to slide on my butt whenever I could. This was type of ‘hiking’ that would be so easy to lose your footing and sprain or break your ankle. I was kind of angry that I would even be recommended to do this deathtrap hike! The rain was not going anywhere. I was soaked and cold. The going was extremely slow. But on the plus side I was back on track. After another hour or two it flattened out into the valley and I was able to make it to the ranger station a couple hours later. It was 5pm now and I finally made it to the park gate, it was locked! I was told it closed 4:30, so yeaa, about right.

Next challenge: hopping over the barbed wire fence! I was able to find a low point and scrambled over it, not without ripping my shirt though. And they had all these fuzzy little plants planted at the base which started to burn my skin when I touched them. I really should have worn pants! So now with my legs on fire I still had another 2 miles down the road to get to the highway. When I got there I tried to flag down buses going by, but no one was stopping! What the hell! Normally it’s very easy to flag down a bus and they almost always stop. But this was a 2 lane highway in the mountains with no shoulder, so there really isn’t anywhere to stop. Arghggh. Time to walk down the highway, in the rain, with all the cars wizzing just a few feet away from me. This day just won’t end.

I managed to talk to someone walking up the road and I was informed I’d have another few miles to walk into the nearest town, and from there I could catch a local bus into Cuenca. I’d been walking so long in such miserable conditions that I was basically inured to it at this point. What’s another few miles? Eventually I found the bus stop, waited 20 minutes, and finally was on my way back into civilization. Another kilometer from the bus stop and I was back at my hostel. I wanted nothing more than to take a hot shower and flop into bed. Although it was eerily dark and the bar/restaurant was closed when I arrived at 8pm. Very strange. At the reception they informed me they had some sort of gas problem so I’d have to pack up my stuff and find a new place to stay for the night! You have got to kidding me.

I haphazardly threw all my crap together and set out to find some new lodging. I ended up at the closest hotel for $35/night. It seemed like a nice place. But of course they didn’t have change for a $50 bill. Of course the credit card fee is 10%. Of course the room is up three flights of stairs. Of course there is no hot water! But eventually I crawled under the nice warm covers and that was the end of the very long, terrible, no good day.

Bonus pictures: The zoo in Cuenca. It was awesome btw!