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.