The Big Surprise!

December 15, 2007

Many months ago, at the beginning of this year, we booked our ticket home to Australia. We would arrive on the 15th of December. But we thought we'd be cheeky and plan a great surprise for our parents. We told them that we couldn't make it home for Christmas because the flights were too expensive and instead we'd gone the cheaper option by getting a ticket on the 15th of January. They knew that Fi had a job teaching which would start at the end of January, so they knew we would have to be coming home, so we had to tell them a date. We just lied about it and got the month wrong! Hehe!

Over the months we had heaps of fun moulding our plan. The challenge was to try and arrive together and surprise everyone together as well. We told them that we'd found a wine tour in Mendoza that was offering a special Christmas package. We told them the winery "has a very cool, technologically advanced satellite connection which enabled us to appear on their computer screens in high definition and have a conversation at the same time. Kind of like skype but better!" We've never heard of anything like this, but luckily our parents' generation are slightly technologically gullible (is that worded politely?) Haha, sucked in!

Every time we got on a bus or had lots of thinking time, one of us would think of something else to perfect our plan. At one stage we were even planning to jump out of an old hollowed out TV. But we were also fairly concerned about causing heart attacks. We'd also considered alerting the local paramedics about our plan and put them on standby!

We needed a lift home from the airport so we got our brothers and sisters into the act. Thankfully, they were all well and truly up to the task of keeping the secret and helping to keep the plan intact.

When the moment came and we were driving up the road towards our house we'd fine tuned our plan. Davo's sister Janelle was driving us home and she drove us up to the back door. Both our mum's were waiting inside, multiple computers set up around the house with wireless aerials hanging from the pots and pans rack, USB cameras and skype headphones ready. Davo's mum almost had a heart attack when she saw Janelle's car because she wasn't expecting her to be coming home. We both jumped out of the car quickly and hid behind the doors while Janelle jumped out all smiles and went to the back door, making it obvious to our mum's that nothing was wrong.

We gave it about 30 seconds before jumping up ourselves and yelling "Surprise!" and "Merry Christmas!" As you can imagine, the faces were priceless (we have it all on video and we still have to convert the video to pics so we can post some pictures in the blog). They were hysterical and couldn't let us go for many minutes! Even now a week later they still have to touch us to make sure it's real!

We'd survived two possible heart attacks, but we still had our dad's to go. Dad Davis was playing cricket, so we drove into Tonny and managed to surprise him in the middle of the tea break. Unlike the mums who couldn't stop talking, both our dads were speachless. We got Dad Harwood the following day at a cafe in Shepp. He was expecting to see Fi's sister and her husband (Chrissie and Simon) sitting in the cafe with their laptop, ready for the "whiz bang satellite connection". When he walked in we think that's who he thought he saw. But then the cogs turned another notch and he realised he was looking at us instead! Speachless also!

News spread pretty quickly as text messages and emails were sent and anyone who called was immediately given the news... "Guess what! Brett and Fi are home!" Classic!

Now, after muddling up everyones Christmas plans, we are all heading to Fi's mum's house in Shepp for a big family bash together. It's going to be sensational!

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggidy Jig!

December 13-15, 2007 (minus a fair chunk of the 14th!)

We left Mendoza at 8.30am local time Thursday moring (10.30pm Thursday night AEST). We jumped on a bus to Santiago, Chile and cruised through some of the equally best mountain scenery we'd seen from inside a bus on our travels. We drove over, around and through the tallest part of the Andes in South America and past the tallest mountain in the world outside Asia. We experience another excruciating border crossing which delayed our bus by about 3 hours and Davo almost got us into a lot of trouble for trying to explain he had yerba mate (the herbal tea) in his bag. The customs officer (understandably) misinterpreted his exclamations of 'yo tengo yerba' - 'I have herb' accompanied by the action of sipping on a straw (looks nothing like pulling on a joint) as that we were druggos trying to smuggle marijuana!

About 9 or 10 hours and two small ham and cheese sandwiches each later, we were off the bus and carrying our ridiculously heavy bags one last time to the bus to the airport. After this point it was all on trolleys baby, yeehah! An all you can eat buffet cured our hunger at the airport and from then on we had no hitches, it was smooth sailing back home.

Goodbye South America; goodbye sleeping in cheap hostels in crappy dorms with abnoxious, filthy snorers; goodbye putting toilet paper in bins beside the toilet; goodbye meeting new and exciting people in new and exciting places; goodbye the best steaks in the world; goodbye travel and hello Australia!
We got off the plane at Melbourne airport at 11.00am Saturday morning AEST (1.00am Saturday morning Mendoza time) about 40 hours after our journey home began.

Steak and Wine

December 3-13, 2007

Unbeknown to our parents, our wild world wide whirl wind adventure was winding down. We told them we were arriving home on the 15 January when we actually had a ticket for 15 December. Hehe, we are cheeky!

We thought there would be no better way to spend our last week than by sitting around in Argentina drinking copious amounts of world class wine and eating as much of the best steak in the world as possible.

Arriving in Salta in the north of Argentina, from a brief stay in Chile and a longer stay in Bolivia, it was almost like we were arriving home. This was a good feeling. Some people say that when you arrive in Salta, you feel as if you could be in Paris or another big European city. We wouldn't go that far. It still felt very Argentinian, but there were some very stylish and grand, old buildings that would have blended into the Parisian landscape very easily.

We stayed in a quiet hostel and did very little while we were in Salta. A lot of our time was spent wandering the streets, dodging the frequent protests which were mostly pretty jovial, musical displays and made up of mostly young participants. We did a small bit of shopping to help fill the very small gaps in our two new bags. We also enjoyed some delicious restaurants getting into the Quilmes, the wine, empanadas, tamales and steak of course! Our most active expidition was up a hill on a chair lift which gives you a great view of Salta. And we spent an hour in a funky little history museum with some cool, old wagons and some guns!

We were pretty excited about our last long haul bus journey in Argentina from Salta to Mendoza. But it was a bit below the usual high standard that we'd grown accustomed to and a bit disappointing. But we did travel with some friends we'd met in La Paz and we went out for a nice dinner together on the day we arrived in Mendoza.

The Mendoza region is responsible for 70% of Argentina's wine and it has a well deserved world wide reputation. It is also situated at the base of South America's tallest peak, Aconcagua (6962m) and is popular for trekking, climbing rafting and the rest.

It didn't take us long to decide that Mendoza is a place where we could easily live if only our espanol was mejor! It feels a bit like a big country town, has a great vibe and plenty of good scenery. And it was a perfect place for us to chill for our last week overseas.

We stayed at a very nice hostel. We could've gone all out and got a swish hotel room but decided to save our splurging for the food and wine!

One day we woke up and one of us said to the other, "I don't feel like doing much today. Do you want to just go and find a nice place and sit and drink wine and eat good food all day?" Yep! To be honest, most of our days in Mendoza we did exactly this, plus maybe a small amount of shopping or walking around, checkin gout the park or whatever else looked good on the day.

We ran into Irish Mark one day and joined him and his Irish friend Keiran for a session of steak and wine. We were joined for dinner by a Canadian bloke one night who was at the opposite end of his travels to us. We also met a lovely couple from Sydney who sat next to us at lunch one day. We ended up joining tables and they shouted us a bottle of wine to help celebrate our last day in South America.

We found some new favourite meat restaurants. Sr Buque and Don Marios. Truth is that every traveller you meet has their own 'amazing' steak experience and thinks they've found 'the' best steak restaurant in Argentina. But it's so good everywhere! And so cheap everywhere!

Argentina is one of our favourite countries in the world. We love it! For something to do while we were drinking one day, we made a 'favourites' list of different things during our travels. Argentina made the top 3 for both of us in our favourite countries. Probably helped that we were sitting there in the beautiful, cloudless weather that Mendoza treated us with for a week and we were sipping on their wine and digesting their beautiful bife de chorizo.

Our one 'active' day in Mendoza was spent doing a wine tour on bikes. We caught a local bus about an hour out of town and hired a couple of bikes for pretty much nothing and rode around to a handful of different wineries. We were given a tour around one winery which has been converted into a national heritage site. It was built in 1869 and used bricks and materials imported from Europe (because they didn't exist in Argentina at the time) to build special earthquake proof fermentation vats. They use the vats these days to store bottles of wine during the aging process.

They're a bit different over here in that we had to pay at most places for our tastings but we were also given pretty decent amounts.

Did we mention the weather was beautiful? For this blog entry really we could've got away with saying good wine, brilliant steaks, heaps of fun. The end! That'll do!

Largest Salt Plains in the World

November 30 - December 3, 2007

We left our beloved La Paz on a crammed bus heading south to Oruro. We changed here to a train where we spend seven hours watching very nice scenery roll past our first class window. Don´t think we´ve every travelled first class before!

We arrived in Uyuni at about 10.30pm, found a place to sleep and joined a three day salt plains tour first thing in the morning. Good recommendations for tour groups were hard to find for the salt plains, but we managed to find two companies who had reasonable reviews. There are many reports of drunk drivers, guides stealing food and taking short cuts. We could only hope that we would be lucky.

We had two 4WDs in our group. In ours we had two Finns, two Americans, a local driver and another local English speaking guide. The other car contained two South Africans, one Belgian, one Dane and one Dutchy.

The salt plains were magnificent. One of the ´things to do´ is construct perspective photos. Since it´s white as far as the eye can see, you can create some pretty cool shots. We needed some creative input from our guide who´d been there and done that many times before, to help us come up with these beauties. We were actually hoping for rain on the flats because this creates a mirror affect which makes the photos even more spectacular.

The locals use the salt to build houses and we were lucky enough to stay in a salt hotel on our first night. Everything was salt, the walls, the carpet, the bed bases, tables, chairs - not the toilet (it was porcelain!) The roof obviously couldn´t be made of salt because otherwise the whole building would dissolve when it rained. The salt bricks are cut directly out of the ground and are stuck together with a slurry of salt and water. Very interesting.

Our second day was spent driving our 4WD. We passed numerous lakes, one red lake with lots of red algae, one green lake with copper sulphate settling on the bottom, most with plenty of flamingos. We were introduced to wild vicuñas, like guanacos or alpacas and many domestic llamas. We also found some crazy rabbits with long traits. There were a few birds, but there wasn´t a lot to eat apart from rocks so the wildlife was understandably scarce.

At times we felt we could have been driving across the surface of the moon. There was one smoking volcano (albeit covered by clouds) many bubbling geysers and all sorts of crazy rock formations in a variety of colours. At one point we climed to just below 5000m, our highest point for our world tour, yay! We also stopped for a swim in some thermal hot springs and got covered in minute red-coloured bugs. They were called something that when translated in the local Quechuan language became ´skin eaters´!

Our guide decided to crack the shits on the second night. He got drunk and became racist and abusive, most of which we just ignored. Otherwise our group was a lot of fun.

The tour finished in a small tourist town called San Pedro de Atacama across the border in Chile. We only stayed long enough to organise a very expensive bus across the other border into Argentina. We paid US$85 each for a mini bus and two 4WDs to take us to the border. They overbooked and could barely fit the luggage on the backs of the 4WDs. Luckily, Davo still had some Tonny bailing twine in his pack to help tie them down. At the border we changed to two minibuses, one which broke down ten minutes from our final destination where we arrived only three hours late!

But we were happy because we were ´home´ in Argentina! It felt more like home anyway.

Down The World´s Most Dangerous Road

November 25-27, 2007

Well, it was the world´s most dangerous road. That was before they built a new road which opened in November last year. Now barely any vehicles travel on the road which makes it much safer. There were still shear cliffs that dropped hundreds of metres away to our left hand side, but it was less likely that we would be run off the road by a truck.

The road is about 50km long and the descent is about 3500m. We went with a NZ run group called Gravity who have the undisputed best reputation for safety.

It was a very fun day, except for the small section of uphill riding at over 4500m altitude! We were maggotted! The clouds were thick which meant we couldn´t see much up the top. Including the bottoms of the valleys. We couldn´t decide if this was a good or a bad thing?

We all finished the day unscathed at an animal refuge of all places where we played with some friendly monkeys with great personalities. (Jacko, if you read this mate, they´re looking for a volunteer to help build a bear enclosure... can´t seem to get you on emial!)

We decided to stay a couple of nights in the town of Coroico at the bottom of the bike ride. It was a very chilled and relaxed little town and we were recommended a good hostel just out of town (more like a resort).

The following day was Davo`s birthday. We had pancakes for breaky, lay inthe hammocks all day, jumped in the outdoor spa overlooking the mountains and cloud forest at night, drank some rum and did nothing else. Mumma Davis gave us AU$100 to spend on the special day. She had no idea how far this would go in Bolivia! We paid for everything on the day, accommodation, breakfast, lunch, dinner, the hot spa, the rum. Then used some to pay for the expensive (in Bolivian standards) night out in La Paz watching the traditional dance and music show. We haven´t spent the other half yet!

La Paz

November 22-25 & 27-30, 2007

We were both really looking forward to our time in La Paz. It is another place where Davo was visiting for the second time and Fi for the first.

We broke up our time in La Paz by riding bikes down the worlds most dangerous road to Coroico where we stayed for a couple of nights (see the next blog).

The fact that we were spending time in La Paz toward the end of our trip was not a coincidence. It was planned because we knew we`d be spending a lot of time and money buying lots of souvenirs and Christmas pressies made of alpaca fleece. Everything in Bolivia is very cheap (as long as it´s not imported). It´s good not to be American at the moment and it´s even better to be spending pound rather than Australian dollars, but the pounds are running low :(

Without giving too much away about Christmas presents I´ll give you a bit of an idea of the things we bought. DVDs are hot property and for only 50p ($1.25) each they were hard to ignore. We came away with about seventy!

Big, warm, fleecy alpaca jumpers - for about 50Bs each. That´s just over 3 quid or $7. Beanies and gloves were 20Bs a pop, not much more than a pound! Of course we bargained for everything too which is expected by the locals. You walk into a store, hold up an item and ask ¨¿quanto cuesta?¨ (how much?) wait five seconds, ask again and the original price has been lowered to the ´actual´ price. We had some fun bargaining over 5Bs. It´s the principle!

Some friends at our hostel had just had some prescription glasses made very cheaply. We went investigating and came away with a new pair of specs and a pair of prescription sunnies for about AU$75! Quote me if we´re wrong but that probably would have cost somewhere over $3- or $400 at home?

Speaking of our hostel, it was a gem. It had recently opened about a month ago and the beds were incredible. Big, soft mattresses, warm, proper doonas, good pillows and spacious dorms. It also had proper hot showers. Because it had recently opened, they also had a deal going for a free night if you stayed long enough. It´s called Wild Rover Backpackers for anyone going to La Paz.

We ran into a good mate of Davo´s from high school, Johnno Doolan. We learnt that we were in La Paz together via facebook and then tried to arrange to meet up. Before we could organise anything, we ended up in the same dorm together! Classic!

We went out for some traditional food, dance and music one night which was nice. We all ate llama, Fi was pulled up on stage at every opportunity to dance because she is a hottie (and she was the only girl on our table), Dools tried to bring out the sprinkler dance move and we got a complimentary bottle of wine from a drunk Swedish bloke sitting on his own. Great night!

What is the capital city of Bolivia? Interesting question at the moment. Most people in the world would probably say La Paz, because that´s the city that has the big star on the map. It´s also where parliament sits. But the constitutional capital is actually Sucre and if you ask anyone who knows stuff, Sucre is the correct answer. But right now it is a hot topic in Bolivia. We met travellers who had fled Sucre because riots broke out between savilians and police. Tear gas was being used, the police station was burnt down, tyres were burning in the streets, riot police were everywhere.

Fortunately for us there were no such riots in La Paz during our time there. We did witness some peaceful demonstrations with strong police presence but only once felt threatened ourselves. When a band played the national anthem and we were walking down the street. A grumpy old man put his hand up signalling us to stop, with a nasty frown on his face. We looked around and everyone was still. We were the only people walking. So we stopped! Apparently that´s what you do when they play the national anthem in Bolivia! Many locals hope the dispute can be solved peacefully but some are already predicting a civil war is imminent within the next twelve months.

Persistent diarrhoea and intermittent stomach cramps are almost a given while visiting Bolivia. We´re doing our best to talk up this place! We love Bolivia, seriously! The stomach problems probably could have been avoided if we ate less salad and drunk less watered down orange juice. But hey, it´s all part of the experience! We avoided any serious problems due to altitude, but were still puffed after climbing into bed on the top bunk. The mate de coca probably helped (tea made from the leaf of the coca plant, same plant used to make cocaine). We didn´t get into chewing the coca leaves like all the locals though.

Speaking of coca, the coca museum was very informative. It´s aim is to educate in a safe and controlled way rather than having intrigued kids try and learn about coca by consuming it.

Other museums that got our attention were the ´hands on´ musical instrument museum (a new boy band was nearly formed featuring Davo, Johnno and Johnno´s friend Matt) and the national museum of art (crap except for a few items, in our opinion).

La Paz is a brilliant city and we´d be back to visit in a flash.