Number games

No, I'm not talking about Sudoku, although I can highly recommend Sudoku as a way of passing the time on long flights, but about the many statistics of our trip:

No. of flights: 23
(CT-Jhb-Sao Paolo....Rio-Brasilia-Manaus...Belem-Recife-Natal-Salvador-Brasilia...Cusco-Puerto Maldonado-Cusco...Bariloche-Buenos Aires...Sao Paolo-Houston-San Francisco-Vancouver-Seattle-Honolulu-Kona-Honolulu-Tokyo-Kuala Lumpur...Pangkor-Kuala Lumpur-Jhb-CT)

No. of hours on aeroplanes: +/- 80
(That's 960 Easy, 320 Medium, 160 Hard or 0 Challenger Sudoku puzzles)


No. of airlines: 13
(Kulula, SAA, Varig, LAM, TAN, Aerolineas Argentinas, Continental, Alaskan, Horizon, North-West, Aloha, Malaysian, Berjaya)
Best airline: Malaysian
Worst airline: Continental

No. of countries: 9
(Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina, USA, Canada, Japan, Malaysia)
Favourite country: Bolivia, Malaysia
Least favourite: Hmmmm....they were all good but Peru ripped us off the most!

Total distance travelled (as the crow flies): 72 815 km
(only 1/5 of the distance to the moon!)

Distance by plane: 55 218
Distance by boat: 1 436
Distance by bus: 10 051
Distance by train: 782
Distance by bicycle: 110
Distance by car: 5 143

Most southerly point: Puerto Varas, Chile: 41.32° S

Most northerly point: Whistler, Canada: 50.10° N

Coldest place: Altiplano, Bolivia with wind chill to below -10°C

Hottest place: Manaus, Amazon basin, Brazil with temperatures approaching 40°C and extremely high humidity

Longest non-stop trip: 22 hours
(Bus trip from Chile-Peru border to La Serena Chile)

No. of photographs: 3412 (mas o menos)

Number of different beds: 64
Best bed: Isla del Sol, Lake Titicaca, Bolivia (with a stunning view of the lake)
Worst bed: Samaipata, Bolivia (the floor was more comfortable)

Mass of luggage at the beginning of trip: 40 kg
Mass of luggage at end of trip: 60 kg

Number of our friends/family who fell pregnant or had a baby while we were away: 8!

Worst experiences: Finding out our luggage had caught a bus that we had missed!
All that rain!

Best experiences: Finding our luggage!
The Bolivian altiplano - what a place!
Birdwatching in the Amazon and the Pantanal
Machu Picchu!
Eating chocolate in Bariloche
Driving the backroads of Texas
Snowboarding!
Watching lava flows (and Toby poking lava with his shoe!)
Flying from San Francisco to Vancouver on a clear day

The numbers are a bit mind boggling, but don't be daunted - you too can take on an epic trip like this! Trust us, it's worth it. And gauranteed, we'll be adding up the km's again one day - it's addictive!

West meets east

Geography can be a funny thing - when you go far enough west, suddenly you're in the east. And, as both Phineas Fogg and ourselves discovered to our detriment, time travel is possible. As the international date line is crossed you travel 1 day ahead in time, essentially losing a day. So our planned 3 day stay in Japan was first shortened by a day due to an airline blaps, and then one of the remaining days vanished into thin air, leaving us with 1 day in Tokyo! True to form, the heavens were hurling down the rain when we landed at Narita late in the evening, and we were soaked by the time we reached our hostel. Fortunately for once the rain gods were on our side and we woke to bright sunshine the next day, and began exploring the immense city of Tokyo.

One of the first things that comes to mind when thinking of Japan is the country's technosavvy, so we were pleasantly surprised by the many temples we saw. We spent the day walking from temple to high-tech showroom to the lovely Emperors Palace gardens to malls displaying the height of fashion. The day ended in the only way it could, with sushi and saki!

Next stop Malaysia. When we were harassed at the airport by many taxi drivers we had visions of India all over again. But nothing could be further from the truth - except for those taxi drivers, the Malaysians were the friendliest, most helpful and most sincere people we have met on all our travels. Except for an unfortunate incident with bedbugs, we had a fantastic time there and will definitely be going back. We started in Kuala Lumpur, admiring the shining Petronas Towers, and viewing the city from the worlds 3rd tallest communications tower. Then we bussed to the coast, to the remote Firefly Resort. Thousands of fireflies congregate in trees on the banks of the river and start flashing in unison, resulting in the most impressive natural Christmas trees I've ever seen. From there we headed to the island of Pangkor, one of the less well known beach resort type islands, and therefore much quieter. There we chilled on the beach, snorkelling and kayaking for the last few days of our holiday. Unfortunately all good things must come to an end!

Volcano

From Vancouver we flew to Hawaii. The American airlines are all battling bankruptcy, and are cutting costs at every possible corner. So we endured a 6 hour flight on North West airlines with no food! Fortunately we had suspected this would be the case and had eaten well (well, as well as you can at an airport without going bankrupt yourself!) before hand.

We spent just one night in Honolulu on the island of Oahu before flying to Kona on the island of Hawaii, the southermost of the Hawaiian islands, affectionately known as Big Island. Our goal was to find some lava, and volcanoes are only actively erupting on the southern end of Big Island.

The Hawaiian islands were formed one after the other by the movement of the crustal plates over a hot spot in the earths mantle. Magma from the hotspot erupts at the surface, slowly building an island. In another few thousand years a new island will appear south of Big Island, called Loihi. The type of eruptions that occur on Hawaii are not generally violent, and years of research allows pretty accurate prediction of new events on the currently erupting volcano, Kilauea, so volcano tourism is actually encouraged. It costs just $10 for a 7-day entry to the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, and camping is free!

Although the weather had looked promising on the day we arrived in Kona, a weather system moved in the next day (from Vancouver I bet!) and it started to rain. We had been told that the weather down at the coast was better, so we headed down there to view the huge steam and hydrochloric acid plume generated by the reaction of hot lava flowing into cold seawater. The road ends in a most dramatic way - in 2003 a lava flow cut right across it. From the end of the road it's a short walk across recent lava flows to the viewing point. Walking across a lava flow is something else - there is no vegetation, and the rock textures are still fresh and beautiful. The going is also quite rough and the new rock unbelievably sharp, so you really have to watch your step. The lava crunches underfoot and occasionally you drop a few cm as your foot breaks through a lithified bubble. While standing at the end of the marked path, a large group of hikers, sheparded by guides, passed us. It took a little convincing by Toby but eventually we decided to follow them because we were sure they were off to find some freshly flowing lava.

After two hours of hard walking we arrived at a skylight - a hole in the top of a lava tube. The hole was about 2 m in diameter, and about 2 m down into it we could see lava flowing rapidly towards the sea. The radiant heat coming off the lava was intense, such that you couldn't look at it for more than a few seconds. What a sight! While we were admiring the skylight, one of the groups guides told us that if we carried on for another 15 minutes, we would find a surface lava flow. Along with another intrepid couple we headed on, looking for heat shimmers on the horizon. The ground was feeling steadily hotter, and when the rain started we could hear the drops sizzling as they hit the ground! When we found the lava flow it wasn't what we expected - it was barely distinguishable from the solidified lava around it except that the moving edges glowed red, and the heat radiated from it. It moved rather sedately and we stood directly downstream of it watching it slowly approach us.

The guys took great pleasure in pushing sticks into the viscous surface and watching them catch alight. It was amazing watching the pahoehoe textures form. We arrived back at our car exhausted after our short 30 minute walk had turned into an epic 6 hour slog. As it started getting dark we could look back and see the glow of the lava on the horizon. Then the rain arrived.....

Camping when it's raining is not fun at any time. Camping when you get a 24 hour downpour of more than 200 mm of rain is really trying! Once again we were thankful for having invested in really good equipment, because somehow, through all that rain, our tent stayed dry. When we woke to gloomy skies the next day we decided to skip any hiking we had planned and go coffee tasting. Kona coffee is famous, really good and really expensive, but most coffee estates offer tours and tasting. When it was still raining the next day we decided to cut our losses, pack up our tent, do a quick combi geology exploration of the rest of the national park, and head to the north of the island where the weather was better. So we traded in volcanoes for a welcome bit of sunshine before heading back to Honolulu.

One of the more famous craters on Oahu is Diamond Head Park, a lovely walk giving a good view over Honolulu and the southern edge of Oahu Island. And then there's Hanauma Bay, a crater that is breached on one side allowing the sea to flow in to form a lovely warm, shallow bay that is extremely popular with tropical fish. It was a bit like swimming in an aquarium, with brilliantly coloured parrot fish, angel fish, trigger fish and many others in clear blue waters. A truly special spot.

Unfortunately there is only so much you can see in a week and our time was up without having got to see the famous north shore waves. Next time....

Now we head west until we're east, for the final leg of our travels.

The adventures resume.....

We're coming to the end of our 5 week stay in Vancouver. It has been interesting and wet! After leaving behind wildfires in Texas and floods in California, we knew we were likely to cause some major weather occurrence here in Vancouver. And sure enough, we almost broke a 50 year old weather record. In 1950 something, Vancouver recorded 28 consecutive days of rainfall. On the 17th of December it began to rain, and it just didn't stop! Come the 14th of January, and it was still raining! We were just one day shy of equalling the record. But it was not to be, and not a drop of rain was felt on the 15th. Vancouverites heaved a collective groan of dismay after putting up with 27 consecutive days of rain and only coming in second place!

For Christmas we made the most of the cheap electronic goods in Canada, and bought ourselves a nice new Christmas present - a Canon Digital Rebel XT (8 MegaPixel SLR camera), which was used to take all of the pictures in this blog entry.

Fortunately we were able to use the wet time well, doing some work for Toby's company - turning Mike & Victoria's dining room into our make-shift office. We also took advantage of the fact that it was snowing in the mountains while it was raining on the city, and took some snowboarding lessons. The snow wasn't great at first, but it was enough, and we started getting the hang of snowboarding after a few lessons.

We spent a day out at the world famous Whistler-Blackcomb resort with Mike Baumgartner and Mark & Nikki, which was incredible (if a little cold at -7°C!). We began to understand why the Eskimos have so many different words for snow, as we saw powder, fluff, slush, ice, beautiful star-shaped snowflakes and little 'polystyrene' balls. The whole experience was capped by an awesome day of snowboarding on half a metre of fresh powder under clear skies yesterday - apparently it was the best day of the season so far and lots of people seemed to skip work to be on the mountains.

We spent a few days visiting Meris' aunt and uncle, Margaret and Tom and their dog Katie, out in the Okanagan valley, about 5 hours drive from Vancouver. It snowed continuously on the drive out there, and we had beautiful fresh dry powder to go snowshoeing and snowboarding in. The snowy landscapes are unbelievably beautiful and peaceful.
Although the snow has been fun we've missed the sun, so on Monday we fly to Hawaii to catch up on our tans. Can't believe we only have 3 weeks of holiday left!

Dreaming of a white Christmas

So we travelled all the way to Vancouver, almost as far from South Africa as it is possible to be (without swimming!), to experience the wonders of a Northern hemisphere Christmas. It was really cold and frosty when we arrived, but it's now 10°C and it has been raining for the last week. What snow there was on the mountains when we arrived has now melted! Weather predictions are however starting to improve, and we may even get a chance to go snowboarding in the local mountains (15 min. drive) before new year!
Vancouver is a beautiful city, certainly ranking up there with the likes of Cape Town. The city has a very relaxed atmosphere, situated on the mouth of the Fraser river, with the huge Vancouver Island providing protection from the sea, and mountains (supposed to be snow-capped) border the city to the north. We are staying in North Vancouver, the rainiest part of town apparently, in Mike and Victoria's house. As luck would have it, they're in South Africa at the moment and they needed some housesitters - we weren't about to turn down the offer of free accommodation!

One of the favourite pastimes of the locals is to decorate the outsides of their houses with strings of colourful lights and other kitch Christmas paraphenalia. Tours to the best houses in town are offered and it seems we have one of those just a couple of houses away, which receives many visitors, some even in limousines.

Because of the weather, and the price of entertainment, we haven't been up to much since our last blog entry. For cheap thrills we've gone cycling in Stanley Park, and have even started running again to take advantage of the beautiful (but wet!) trail runs in the area. We splashed out on a visit to the Beluga Whales at the Vancouver aquarium, which was pretty cool. Today we're going to take a drive out to Squamish, where apparently 1000's of Bald Eagles spend the winter.

Toby & Meris not in South America anymore

Last known location: 49°19'29" N 123°03'59" W

Yes, it's true, we've left the southern hemisphere for the icy winter weather of the northern hemisphere - what were we thinking!?

Of course, the journey was not uneventful and started with an interesting bus trip from Foz do Iguacu in Brazil to Sao Paolo. Foz do Iguacu is right on the border of Paraguay, and the closest Paraguayan city to the border, Ciudad del Este, is a bit of a shopping mecca for the Brazilians, resembling Hong Kong in its bright lights and sale of electronic goods. Well, it turned out that our fellow bus passengers were importing electronic goods from Paraguay, and from the amount of money they kept paying to the bus driver to keep going, everything wasn't quite above board. For us innocent bystanders it was a frustrating and at times scary trip with heated confrontations between passengers and bus driver, and lots of unscheduled stops when the bus driver refused to go on without further "pay". We finally arrived in Sao Paolo 18 hours later, about 2 hours behind schedule, tired but thankful to be off the bus!

From Sao Paolo we flew to Houston and picked up a rental car, then drove west towards New Mexico. They say that everything is bigger in Texas. I think they're right. People (some so large they need motorised shopping carts just to get around the supermarkets), vehicles (Hummers are dwarfed), hats, boots, belt buckles, guns, friendliness, coffee, burgers and colddrinks. After the first time we ordered two small sodas, we learnt our lesson and from then on only ordered one to share! We drove through the back roads of Texas and found that it was prime hunting season. We saw loads of people wearing camo, buying deer corn, and buying guns in Walmart. We drove along close to the Mexican border, and the scenery was similar to the Karoo. There was no snow this far south and it was warm enough the first night that we camped, feeling a little dwarfed by the massive RV's surrounding our two man tent. No kidding, some of the RV's are as big as public buses, and then they still tow a truck behind that.


Our destination was Las Cruces in New Mexico, where we visited Meris' brother Jeremy and his girlfriend Dong Hui, who looked after us really well. We tried to toboggan down the local equivalent to snow - gypsum dunes. It's not very slippery. We spent some time walking in the mountains, we glutted on excellent cheap Mexican food, and drank great micro-brewery beer. Soon our visit was over and we started the long drive back to Houston, via the Carlsbad Caverns, which were huge and full of stalactites and stalagmites - quite impressive. The weather had cooled down somewhat since we arrived in Texas and we decided not to camp, a decision we were very glad of when the thermometer on our car told us it was 18°F, about -7°C next morning! The temperature didn't get above 0 celsius all day, and when it started raining the rain froze to the car. We had to stop and chip ice off the windscreen wipers - a new experience for us uneducated South Africans!



From Houston we flew to San Francisco, crossing the snowcapped Sierra Nevada on our approach. After the iciness of the previous few days in Texas, San Francisco felt positively balmy! We did a walking tour of the city, checking out the worlds curviest street. After all the action movies we've seen we were surprised by how flat the city is! On our second day we picked up a rental car and Toby's friend Vince and his sister Tamlin before driving up to Oregon. We spent a long weekend with Jeremy and Marg, friends of Vince who live in Medford. What an awesome weekend it was!

We drove up to Crater Lake, one of the snowiest places in the states (they can get up to 21 feet of snow, although there were only 6 feet at the time), and were lucky enough to get a clear sunny day, really unusual in this part of the world at this time of year. Give four South Africans that much snow and some sun and you have some happy South Africans! We had a ball, and only regretted our inappropriate clothing when we started getting wet and cold.



Oregon also has a wine-making industry, and our host, Jeremy, took us on a tour of local wine farms - not great wine but in that cold weather does it matter? He also took us to a local brewery, run out of the garage of a local Aussie, Ross, who let us sample copious quantities of the excellent brew.

Back in San Francisco we decided to splurge on the Cirque du Soleil, something I've always loved watching on TV. WOW!!!! It was SOO much better live, and held us enthralled for 2 hours of incredible acrobatics, music and clowning. If you ever get a chance to see this, go!

Now we're in Vancouver, where we have our longest stopover of the trip, probably into the New Year. We'll be spending Christmas with Meris' family, and hopefully be getting onto the slopes for some snowboarding.

Argentina

Following a few relaxing days in Puerto Varas, Southern Chile with Mike & Heather, we caught a bus through the Andes, and across the border into Argentina. The area, known as the Lake District, was stunning, with glacial lakes and snow-capped mountains all around. We arrived in Bariloche, famous for both its skiing and its chocolate. Unfortunately at this time of year the snow is not sufficient for skiing, so we made up for it by (over)indulging in the chocolates! We also spent a day travelling into the mountains to see a black glacier (very cool). The weather was pretty crappy, but we did get to see a small avalanche, happily from a safe distance!

Running very short on time now we decided to fly the next two legs, Bariloche - Buenos Aires, and Buenos Aires - Puerto Iguazu. We nearly didn´t make our flight to BA because of a taxi strike in Bariloche, but luckily the owners of our hostel gave us a ride to the airport.

Arriving in Buenos Aires from Bariloche was like arriving in Maputo in mid summer from London in winter! The heat and humidity took it out of us, and we spent a couple of days just taking it very easy, seeing the sights of BA. It´s a beautiful city, but the traffic is just mindblowing - a one-way street with 6 lanes is not out of the ordinary, and the main thoroughfare through the city has 9 lanes in each direction!!!

While in BA we went to watch the famous Boca Juniors (Diego Maradona´s club) play at home to a Chilean side in the South American Cup semifinals. The game was great fun, but the atmosphere in the crowd was incredible. The non-stop singing and cheering was enough to get even the most soccer-illiterate (us) excited, and when the home team scored it was just madness!

We did a couple of day trips out of BA, to Tigre, a quiet town on the delta, where the principle means of transport is boating about the small rivers and canals, as well as to San Antonio, a farming centre, and authentic Gaucho town!

Eventually it was time to leave BA, and fly to Iguazu, the massive waterfalls at the triple junction of the Argentinian, Brazilian and Paraguayan borders. Unfortunately we were unaware of a strike at the airline that left almost all of its planes, including ours, grounded. We arrived at the airport to see huge queues of people waiting to organise refunds for their tickets. D'Oh! So we joined the queue, organised our refund, slogged back to the main bus terminal to see if we could get on the 17 hour long overnight bus to Iguazu. Luckily we did find a bus, and we only had to wait 5 hours in the bus terminal. While waiting, one of our small daypacks was stolen! Luckily there were not many items of monetary value in the bag, but our treasured diaries, recording our thoughts and experiences for the past months, were in the bag. This was NOT a good day :(

Happily the bus trip was fine, and we splashed out on the luxury bus, which included champagne! We arrived in Iguazu, and spent today at the falls. Wow. And wow again. Millions and millions of litres of water cascading 70 m over a width of about 2 km, all surrounded by green green jungle. On top of all the water, there is an abundance of butterflies around the falls, and sometimes you feel under attack! Tomorrow we repeat the experience, but from the Brazilian side, and then it´s onto another neverending bus ride back to Sao Paolo to catch our flight to the States on the 1st. We´re rather sad to be leaving the vibrancy and beauty of South America, particularly now that we´ve got to a point where we can actually communicate a little! It has been an excellent 3 1/2 months, and we´ll definitely be back!

A very long country

Last known location: 41°19'14.3"S 72°57'00.2"W

It's been quite a while since our last update. Mostly because we became becalmed in Arequipa in Southern Peru for a week when Toby picked up some nasty travellers tummy and became too ill to move, but also because we have been covering vast distances and not seeing a whole lot.

Fortunately we managed to see the condors before Toby became ill. We took a 5 hour bus trip out to a place called Cabonaconde, and arrived so late we had to find someone to open the hotel! Next morning we were up early to catch the extremely crowded 7 AM bus to Cruz del Condor, a viewsite overlooking the deep Colca Canyon (the second deepest canyon in the world) over which condors regularly cruise. We saw our first condor far below us, cruising along the edge of the canyon. As the morning wore on they gradually came closer but it was only once most of the tourists had left that one of the juveniles made a flyby close enough for us to hear the wind whistling through his feathers. Wow! This was definitely the furthest we've every travelled to see a single bird, but it was wonderfully rewarding.

Unfortuately we had to catch a bus back to Arequipa soon thereafter, and that was when Toby started feeling unwell. It took a week for him to recover sufficiently for us to continue travelling, and the long delay meant we had to significantly change our travel plans. So instead of trying to race down to Puerto Montt in Chile to catch the ferry to the far south, we decided to skip the ferry (a very hard decision as the scenery involves fjords, volcanoes and glaciers) and take a bit more time through Chile. Even so our first stop of any duration was in the town of La Serena, about 1/3 of the way down Chile, and 22 hours by bus from the border!

In Chile the effects of latitude on climate are incredibly clear - in Arequipa it had been dry but there had been vegetation, but as we headed south we entered the Atacama Desert, a land of sand and rock and not a plant in site! Occasional rivers flow down from the Andes and create lush fertile oases in the desert. As we neared La Serena we began to see scrub again, and then a profusion of cacti. La Serena is on one of the rivers (the Elqui River) that brings water from snow melting high up in the Andes, and the Elqui valley produces pawpaws, and more to our taste, grapes for the local form of brandy called Pisco. It's a bit bizarre seeing grapes growing right next to cacti.

The area inland from La Serena is also famous for having some of the clearest skies in the world, and many world famous observatories are found there. We managed to visit a really small one run by volunteers, called Mammalluca, but as luck would have it, we experienced one of the 20 out of 365 days of cloud! Fortunately it burned off and we had good views of the moon, Venus, Mars, and a number of binary systems and clusters. I have to say that our experiences at the observatory in the Cedarberg were more impressive, but that probably had a lot to do with the lack of moon.

After ensuring that the Pisco produced in the Elqui valley is of good quality, we headed south to Santiago, entering another climatic zone that reminded us very much of the acacia savannah of the Northern Province. Chile is quite similar to South Africa in many ways, but one thing that is completely different are the hours of business. We are still not quite sure what they are, but guaranteed you won't find anything open before 10 AM, especially not a coffee shop or a place selling breakfast, and then everything closes down again from about 12 to 2, staying open again until about 8. To make matters worse, we arrived in Santiago for the weekend, and everything seemed to be closed! Food was really hard to find. Apart from that we really enjoyed laid back Santiago, with it's huge urban parks, concerts and buskers in the square. The good weather and abundant suppy of icecream contributed to Meris' enjoyment of her birthday here!

From Santiago we headed south again on an overnight bus and woke to a verdantly green pastoral landscape reminiscent of the UK. This is big berry country, and flavour of the season are cherries and strawberries, which are being sold incredibly cheaply. YUM! At the end of the road, about 2/3 of the way down Chile, is Puerto Montt, and south of here travel by vehicle becomes pretty much impossible because of glaciers and fords. We're currently enjoying the hospitality of Michael and Heather Graz, who have a lovely house here just a few hundred metres from one of the lakes in the lake district. They tell us that there are volcanoes in the vicinity, but so far al we've seen is cloud,and we're beinning to doubt them! We've spent some relaxing days here, walking and mountain biking around the lake.

From here we will cross into Argentina, and then make our way to Sao Paolo for the 1st of December, from where we fly to Houston and start the second leg of our journey.