Nature calls

Or not, there are a few reasons why this title is or is not appropriate.

Reason 1) My phone; a poor pun at best, but i´ve lost it, well i say lost, i KNOW where it is, but from here it would require 1 hour on the bus + a boat ride + 3 hours on the bus + another 18 hours on the bus down a road where 5 days ago i helped drag a dead man up a cliff. A surreal experience. Even after that i would need another 3 hours on a tail bone hating jeep and a further 3 hours on a boat down an amazonian tributary, i figured its not worth the journey... Although the initial trip leads me to reason 2..

Reason 2) The Amazon; and this time i answered in the most naturistic way (excluding the lack of clothing) and it was fantastic, anywhere in the cash machine lacking town i am currently in has a place to develop cameras then i hope i will at least be able to show you some of the best section of the holiday (for me) so far, including holding annacondas, cobras (which i have a more than entertaining video of our guide, choco, risking his life for our entertainment), monkey, crocs and unfortunately (although being the closest) being a foot away form touching a pink dolphin. A truely fantastic 3 days, if i am to puch the mosquito bites and how the Reading travel clinic ripped me off with unneccessary malaria pills to the back of my mind.

Reason 3) Peptol Bismal is a powerful thing. End of.

Reason 3 has been about the climax of illness´ for me so far, which is lucky. Despite us both currently evading the hyprocondriacs favourite "Gripe A" Ben "stomach of stone" Mottram has got the closest sounding thing which we are terming as "Mine flu". A cough which acts a constant radar system to me, even tonight, in the middle of a busy bar Ben went to sit down and without seeing him the sound similar to the old steam engine of Thomas the Tank Engine lets me know his location.

So now, no longer Internetless, but still cash machinesless, we are in Cococabana (which i´m sure is spelt wrong) and we´re off to explore the islands of Lago Ticcicata (wrong again) tomorrow before heading off to Cusco, our party city. Then the moment i´ve been endlessly waiting for Macchu Picchu...But that is a while away, and although we have now hit the middle point of our holiday we still have SO much planned, whether is all comes to plan, like planning to sleep on an overnight and instead spending the time worrying if you will meet the same fate as the lorry which you helped retrieve it´s passengers from the bottom of the hill...


N.B. This was really difficult to pick the best picture - so here´s loads:

Dots on the hilltops

Is all i could see as i sat out over the mountains near La Paz, after completing Death Road. This, for those that didn´t know is a 63Km bike ride descending 3550 metres, over a shear cliff face. And as a person who is scared to ride a bike through Altrincham in the middle of the day, this was a challenge. YET it was Ben and his lack of a scared gene that caused the only minor accident of the day by bombing past everyone on a sheer cliff face and veering off into (fortunately) a ditch on the other side of the road. Ben will obviously tell you otherwise...

This hotel is idealic, a treat in a budget month and a half, it makes me understand how Brandon Boyd wrote this lyrics "Wish you were here" (despite him writing it about the image of someone and not someone specific)

La Paz is awesome, in unexplainable ways via a blog, but tomorrow we´re off to the jungle. To meet alligators, snakes, piranhas and all the kind of animals you´d like to keep a safe distance from instead of wading through their natural homes. I´m sure the Steve Irwin in me will get me through, if not, Who needs a left leg anyway?

Change of the blog name? Well, the whole "where the hell is Matt?"esq with juggling balls never happened, but i have something new, and much much better:

Under pressure

Or not. I don´t fully understand how this high altitude works as we are in Potosi, the worlds highest city. Already, well from the second the border of Argentina was crossed at 8 O´clock on a freezing Sunday morning, the look of Bolivia is significantly different. Yet in its odd little way - including waiters being an average age of 7 and people standing in the middle of the desert (literally miles from anywhere) to get picked up by our bus - i like it. Today we will be braving our insurance claims again going down the silver mines and throwing dynamite down them (i hope in that order).

I can´t really understand how to use the cd/dvd player to put up a photo (again) but i am hopefully that you´ll get more than the one on the first night in this entire six weeks, but no promises. There is always the endless albums on facebook preceeding an adventure like this, with my trigger happy cameraness i think i may eventually exceed 2000 photos...

The people we have met so far have been amazed by our attempt to fit in all we have planned in 6 weeks, and now i´m starting to see why. Lack of sufficient blog time alone shows how busy we have been, but i don´t think there are two other people that need to be constantly entertained as much as Ben and I, so it works well.

After the last post we coincidentally had LOTS of time to kill as we re-arranged to get a night bus up to the border, but i couldn´t do a more satisfactory blog due to a man we simply knew as "Internet" because he spent the entire time on the one computer the hostel had. This makes me feel better about lack of blogging as it doesn´t keep me addicted to the Internet. I´ve had this time as i´ve sent Ben off to get some breakfast which, like all food in Bolivia, scares me.

He´s here, and what we´ve termed as "Gringofied" our breakfast, (Americanised) so that we can be confident of eating safe so that we aren´t ill when we go kill ourselves down a mine.

Hasta Luego x


This is us playing with live dynomite:

Update

Literally no time.

Salta was cool - now we´re off to Bolivia, i can´t wait :)

Lost

So Ben reminded me this morning that i haven´t updated since he has arrived and of course i haven´t let the world know of his great start... After e-mailing back and forth to confirm where we going to meet i told him a very specific bus to get on as it had its own depot. I get a call after he was meant to be there explaining he is on some different bus and then he got bored and got off. I check the abundance of maps i had (3 local ones and 3 from the guide book) to find he is on the very end of the Barrios de Buenos Aires and no other map. A further 3 trains and us both waiting at two different train stations. But somehow we got it to work.

Yesterday we went climbing just outside of Cordoba in a standard that was at least above me, nevertheless it was fun.












We are now in Cordoba as i write, yet we are leaving to Capel Del Monte (i think), a place with ´Lost´like qualities, a funny energy that makes it a draw for hippies and other like minded people, and here we come.

Drumroll please

Likely to be the last morning in the hostel and still pesimistic about how easily Internet will be accessible in the other cities i am writing again. Our day trip to Collonia yesterday (Uruguay)was definately enjoyable, if not a touch short, but time was short to make sure we could get back for the much hyped "Bombarderas". After queueing in a very long queue, twice, we got in and got a bit of a dance on while the drums were conducted (which i didn´t know was possible). A really enjoyable show and i hope this picture does it justice. I have to meet Ben now...i mean i want too...

p.s. Photo didn´t upload, but i will get it up a.s.a.p.

...days later... here is the photo that has taken me ages to upload

TWO

This´ll be short, as depsite it being almost midnight i am still hungover. Me, TWO people i met in the hostel and a bunch of crazy Chileans on a stag party went to a club of monumental size - it was like a castle - last night and where the spirit is about a 4 to 1 ratio of mixer and only a few drinks will quickly have you dancing inside of a glass cage with a discoball. Today we went to see Boca vs Argentinos where Argentinos got TWO in the first half for Boca to come back to make it TWO all, with all the goals being infront of us and not the other end of the stadium where the Boca fans powered by passion stronger than Duracell dancing, sang and generally went crazy for the entire 90 minutes and more. TWO nights have passed and TWO nights till Ben arrives and we leave Buenos Aires (Although it looks like i´m going Uraguay for the day tomorrow by boat) which´ll be sad as i´m getting quite into this city. I don´t have my lead so i can´t upload a picture and i know if i get back into my room then my head will hit the bed like Wild-E-Cayote having on of his trademark ACME anvils dropped on his head, but i have got some good ones.