to be worth a Potosi

Potosi is the highest city in the world with one of the most tragic beginnings. Overlooking the city is the infamous Cerro Rico, or rich mountain - the source of the silver that funded the Spanish empire, and the sole reason Potosi exists. At one point the mine was producing silver ore at 95% purity. Some locals call it "the mountain that eats men" and deservedly so as the mountain has claimed 9 million indigenous lives since 1534 in the rush to mine silver and tin. After 500 years the mine is now collapsing, yet all the guidebooks say this is THE thing to do in Potosi.

Tours of the mine begin with a visit to the miners' market where you can buy cocoa leaves, dynamite, work gloves, etc. as "gifts" to the miners.  These gifts are essential as the conditions in the mine are hellish. The miners breathe in dust, airborne asbestos and explosive residue daily - many of the miners contract silicosis and have a life expectancy of around 40 years.  We decided to not visit the mines. Instead, we explored the city overrun by cars and children and dogs. 

In the center of the city is the Casa de Moneda. Because Potosi was so rich in silver, it minted the Spanish coin. Ironically, all Bolivian money is now outsourced from France, Canada, and Chile. We had a guided tour through the massive building which has 3 stories and 200 rooms.  Obviously we didn't see all of them and I'm not sure what they do with all the rooms we didn't see.  The ones we did see were filled with representations of how long and manual the minting process was. They also had a room of minerals (the miners' bank closed and donated their collection). 

A sight we missed was the Convento-Museo Santa Teresa due to opening hours and our need to get to lower altitude. The wealthy families from the mines would send their daughters to the convent at the age of 15, never to see the outside world again. The humble devotees to God would spend their lives making golden robes and gem-encrusted goblets.  

Tomorrow we're off to hike the "Bolivian" Inca trail and to see dinosaur footprints

-Priscilla and Peter

Salar de Uyuni and the Bolivian Altiplano

Southwest Bolivia is an area of preposterously desolate natural beauty. We took a three-day jeep tour from Chile into Bolivia through the Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa to the crown jewel of otherworldly landscapes: the salt flats of Salar de Uyuni.

Six of us piled into a 4x4 led by local guide/driver Ricardo, with all of our gear bundled up in a tarp on top along with enough fuel and water for three days. We'd drive for hours across the rugged landscape, to the tune of loud Spanish pop and Bolivian folk music, stopping to take in the sites: icy lakes tinged every color of the rainbow by mineral deposits, rocks sculpted by the wind, mud geysers, hot springs, volcanoes, and salt flats.

We saw a surprising number of animals despite the extreme altitude (>4,000 meters), icy temperatures, aridity, arsenic and sulfer-laced water, and sparse vegetation. Three species of flamingos, vicuñas and llamas, rheas (large flightless birds), and other birds.

As we got closer to Salar de Uyuni, we started passing small towns, and everything revolved around salt. Harvesting salt, taking tourists to see salt, selling salt to tourists, and even using blocks of salt as a building material- we stayed in a refugio made of salt (except for the bathrooms), with floors of loose salt and tables and chairs made of salt!

Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt lake: 10,000 square kilometers covered by a blindingly white crust of almost perfectly flat salt. The crust is meters thick and the best driving surface we've encountered. For a few months each (southern hemisphere) summer, seasonal rains cover the lake in a thin layer of water, which resurfaces the salt.

More facts! The lake is the remnant of a dried-up prehistoric sea, and is the outletless drainage basin for this area of the Altiplano. The lake is so large, flat and reflective that it's used to calibrate the instruments on satellites. The lake holds the majority of the world's known lithium reserves, which the Bolivian government is in the process of small-scale sustainable extraction.

We drove to the middle of the lake to the cactus-covered "island" Incahausi and climbed to the top for panoramic views of the salt flats ringed by mountains. Salar de Uyuni is hard to beat.

We've moved on quickly from Uyuni to Potosí and now to the lower altitude of Sucre, more posts incoming on Potosí.

-Peter

Star power of the Atacama desert

In the driest desert in the world sits the dusty town of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile: population 2000, 103 tour agencies (1 for every 20 locals!). We came here from Argentina by bus, but since 70km of the road was at 5000m (16,000ft) it should probably count as a flight. San Pedro looks like Tatooine if you replaced the exotic aliens with exotic backpackers and slapped signs offering tours everywhere:

OK, to be fair I'm an unreliable narrator; that's the meteorite museum. Everything here is dusty brown, the streets and unpaved, and volcanoes are always peeking over things in the background. This is more representative of the less touristy streets:

San Pedro is an adventure playground, and deservedly a major stop on the backpacker circuit because there is so much to do: desert tours, sand boarding, geysers, biking, salt pools, salt flats, stargazing, and more. We loved it so much we stayed 5 nights!

Haha no, I'm misleading you again, we got sick on the second day here and stayed until we felt up to tackling higher altitudes in Bolivia. Chile has some tough love for us, every time we come here we immediately get stomach problems.

Before we got benched though, we did have two formidably memorable excursions:

STARS

The Atacama desert is so dry, parts of it have never received rain in recorded history. The dry air, clear skies (5 cloudy nights per year!) and high elevation are perfect conditions for astronomy, and many of the world's most important observatories are in northern Chile (in the distance were able to see lights at the assembly area for the immense ALMA array of radio telescopes).

We went on a tour led by a Canadian astronomer away from the light pollution of San Pedro, and it was like a whole new world opened up above our heads. 4000 individual stars visible to the naked eye. The bright gauzy bands of the milky way, the fuzzy splotches of the Large and Small Magellanic clouds, the constellations of the zodiac. Our camera gear wasn't up to the task, but here's someone else's photo from the same site:

We also got to use 20-60cm telescopes to take a closer look at Jupiter (and four moons), Saturn (with rings and four moons), the Sombrero Galaxy, Eta Carinae, the Tarantula nebula, the Jewel Box cluster, and more. I am still humbled.

SALT

We also took a desert excursion to see lakes(!). The rain this area does get does crazy things, creating salt lakes and sinkholes. At Laguna Cejar we got to swim in supersaline water, 35% salt. It's so salty that you easily float (like more famously on the Dead Sea, sorry the good pictures are on the nice camera). We kept trying to stay under though: barely in line with the laws of science, the warm supersaline water was topped with a thin layer of cold, less-salty water.

We also saw stromatolites, the oldest form of life on earth: bacteria living in rock-like colonies.

So much around San Pedro we didn't get to, but that's OK because tomorrow we leave for Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, the largest salt flats in the world. If San Pedro is a 10 out of 10 for desert, Salar de Uyuni is supposed to be a 12. No internet access, so you'll hear from us again in a few days from Uyuni or Potosí.

-Peter

Salta: Pretty normal.

Be prepared to be dazzled by my travel writing!

Salta, in the very far north of Argentina, was a victim of second impressions. It's a fine city, but overshadowed by other places we've been first that do it better. Second city to Mendoza for wines, less Andean influence than Peru, and we've already seen deserts and mountains and colonial Spanish architecture.

So, without the stress of having to hit highlights, we got to take our time enjoying the "mediumlights" and recovering from our hectic travel schedule. Well, mostly.

The exception was a rushed packaged day trip to Cafayate, the heart of the torrontés vineyards, and it wasn't what we expected at all. 3-4 hours by bus through winding mountain roads each way, and the tour was Spanish-only, instead of the English and French our hostel had promised. We thought there were no domestic wine tourists, who knew! Also, the engine fell out of our bus, so we lost an hour waiting for a new bus.

The Torrontés white wine is great, starting sweet with a dry finish, but the winery we went to was underwhelming. We think we were supposed to see another but didn't because of the time we lost. Still not sure of a lot that was going on. We got to try wine ice cream, which unsurprisingly tastes like wine but unpleasantly alcoholic.

But that's all OK, because the scenery made up for it! The road wound through the Quebrada De Cafayate, a desolate gorge with a rainbow spectrum of colored rock formations. Black, white, red, brown, white, green, and everything in between, a Krazy Kat vision of the US southwest. A preview of what's in store for us in the Chilean Atacama and Bolivia. The pictures can't do it justice:

What Salta really brings is the warmth of its people. Gustavo, the hostel employee we spent an afternoon drinking maté with; Diego, energetic curator of the ethnic art museum; the musicians at the folk-music peña we went to (can you make up a name like Hermógenes Quipildor?); even the other Argentine tourists everywhere we went.

Some other notes:

1. We ate lots of delicious empanadas, more than making up for our bad experience in Arica
2. The Pajcha Ethnic Art museum had an amazing display of contemporary, colonial, and pre-contact artifacts showing the blending of the Spanish and indigenous cultures. We were told to report back on the "angels with guns", 17th century paintings of angels in Spanish dress wielding arquebuses.
3. Peñas are restaurants with live folk music and sometimes dancing. Think spanish guitars and ballads, not Peruvian flutes. We went on the night before local elections, so local edict said alcohol wasn't allowed to be served. Instead we had a very nice, um, red grape juice served in a coca cola bottle. Yes, red grape juice...

On another bus now (only 9 hours), briefly revisiting Chile to see San Pedro De Atacama before starting Bolivia!

-Peter

Mendoza, malbec, microbreweries

Mendoza is a great city, tied with Bariloche as our favorite city (not counting towns) so far. One of the great international wine cities, beautiful weather, enormous parks, not very touristy, and great food. Top-notch hostel (Lao Hostel) with 2 rescue dogs. All we did was eat, drink, and go to parks, and I wouldn't have done it any other way.

Highlight was a bike tour at wineries in the satellite town of Lujan, a less touristy alternative to Maipú. Sorry no pictures right now, they're all on the nice camera. Mendoza is famous for Malbecs, but they also grow a white varietal here (well, mostly in Salta in the north) called torrontés. We'd never heard of it before, and even though we normally prefer reds we really liked it. Will have to look for it in the states.

The winery staff in the smaller vineyards were extremely welcoming. The owner of Pulmary took us into the cellars and gave us a vertical tasting of the whole process. He explained that even though wine is so popular in Argentina, all the wine tourists are international. There's no domestic wine tour culture.

We made friends with Carla, our guide at Alta Vista, as well as the owner of Carmelo Patti, who let us in even though we'd been told the wrong opening hours and it was already closed. I wasn't going to buy any bottles because of limited suitcase space, but couldn't help splurging on two very nice bottles which aren't exported. If only shipping and customs weren't so expensive I would have done some major damage. Luckily most of these vineyards export to the US. Sorry Saul, we didn't make it to your recommendations because they were too far out!

We also spent 2 days exploring Parque General San Martin, an enormous park with 50,000 trees, a stadium, zoo, mirador, lakes, museums, regatta club, science center, amphitheater, pretty much everything you could want and full of exercising locals at all hours. Walk all day, then hit the microbreweries and restaurants at night. Top microbrewery of the trip so far is still Manush in Bariloche, but I'm diligently trying all the competition.

Now on a bus north to Salta!

-Peter

Cash money woes

The amusing anecdote is at the end, feel free to skip ahead!

We've traveled to a lot of countries, and normally the routine for money is pretty easy. Tell our bank we're traveling to X country for Y dates, arrive, use an ATM, use credit cards for big purchases, and have some dollars for backup. No big deal.

Argentina is complicated.

First off, there are two exchange rates. The official rate is a little less than 9 pesos to the dollar. However, US dollars are in extremely high demand. Argentina is having financial difficulties, and there's a controversial law limiting the amount of currency that Argentines can get to spend per day while abroad. So controversial that a candidate's platform in the upcoming election is "I will immediately repeal this law." The limit is far below what most Argentines want/need to spend while traveling, so there's a thriving unofficial, or 'blue' market.

The blue market rate is 11.5 or 12 pesos to the dollar if you have 50s or 100s, which is awesome! 20s aren't always accepted, or sometimes are at lower rates. Most businesses accept dollars for purchases at the blue market rate and give you your change in pesos. It's very easy and not like you need to find a guy in some alley somewhere.

So, if you bring dollars, everything is nice and easy. But you didn't bring enough dollars, did you? Argentina is not cheap, and you'll blow right through those dollars. What happens then?

1. Credit cards. Argentina is a prosperous, advanced country. Many places take credit cards, but a surprising number don't. If you plan on paying with credit card, you'd better check before you order anything. Some places have the stickers on their doors but won't take cards that day. Others only take Visa.

2. ATMs. Nice try! Yes they are here but not that common and don't always work/take foreign cards. I haven't been able to withdraw more than 1300 pesos at a time, and usually less, with a hefty 54 peso withdrawal fee. So, can't withdrawal much, and you'll need to all the time. Also, the largest bill is only 100 pesos, so if you somehow manage to get a lot of cash, your wallet will be very thick.

Storytime!

We've been in Villa La Angostura, a small but upscale town. This morning we checked out of our hostel but were short by 100 pesos. They don't accept US 20s and we're out of large bills, so I got to go on a money safari!

There are two ATMs here, both at banks. One didn't accept our cards, but we've been using the other. Today it's out of money though! Retry other bank, no luck. It's Sunday, so the money exchange is closed. Go to the tourist info booth and confirm that those are, indeed, all my options.

Solution? Find a stranger in the street to exchange? Go back to hostel defeated? No!

The artesianal chocolate store is always open! Bought a small bag of chocolate with a $20 and got enough pesos back in change to cover us. Now I have 7 pesos to my name!

Other unrelated notes:
-more bedbug troubles. Ugh.
-on a bus to Mendoza! Only 17 hours this time.

-Peter

Villa La Angostura, Parque Nacional los Arrayanes

What a great day! We're in Villa La Angostura, a small town an hour north Bariloche, in the lake district of Argentina along the Andes. All the buildings are styled like log cabins, and everything is covered with a fine layer of volcanic ash from the recent eruptions in Chile, but it's been rainy the whole time so it's just like a thin mud.

We did another bike adventure, this time into Parque Nacional Los Arrayanes. The park is a 12km long peninsula shaped like a teardrop, narrowly connected to the town. It's cold and rainy so we had the park all to ourselves except for a pair of joggers. We took a trail (Inca Trail guide Pedro would call it "undulating") the whole length of the park to Bosque de los Arrayanes, a grove of rare arrayán trees. The trees are striking: dense tangles of sandy brown trunks, small white flowers. Rainy but beautiful trail, minus the first 1km of "portaging" our bikes up stairs and steep trails.

-Peter

Bus. Bariloche. Bikes.

We survived our 27-hour bus ride! It was surprisingly easy, we slept most of the time and watched movies the rest. Our driver chose not-terrible movies that were mostly (3/5) subtitled in Spanish rather than dubbed. Bus was long in part because we had to go southeast to the coast, up, and over instead of a straight shot North. We had a surprise bus transfer, during which a dog peed on Priscilla's bag. I also spent a lot of time failing at not scratching my many bug bites. Pretty sure our El Chalten hostel had bedbugs, so my arms and legs are a mess. Priscilla is a day ahead of me healing, they went for her the first night and me the second.

Anyway, Bariloche! Argentina's biggest vacation spot, styled on a Swiss village. We're in the shoulder season between summer and skiing. I came in with low expectations (touristy, expensive) but it's been great! We're staying in a hostel which is a converted penthouse of a 10-floor apt building. Tonight we tried to walk the line of taps at a microbrewery ("cervezeria"), but we ate too much dinner to continue into the second half of drafts.

During the day we biked ~37km on the Circuito Chico, a loop of road winding through mountains past 7 lakes. We rented bikes and helmets and had a leisurely 4 hour ride plus 2 hour side-hike (in the blog post review process Priscilla is disapproving of my use of "leisurely"; it seems that steep hills and lots of pedaling are not the right conditions for using this word). A welcome change from hiking all day!

Now for some Bariloche trivia- the Huemul Project. In the early 50s, Péron sponsored a German scientist who convinced him he could make a viable fusion reactor. The scientist set up shop building a state-of-the-art facility on an island near Bariloche and spent the modern equivalent of $300 million before announcing successful fusion, but without providing any real proof. Visiting scientists and subsequent investigatory committees determined it was a fraud, and the temperatures achieved were orders of magnitude too low to achieve fusion. So, first big push for fusion power, and all the leftover equipment got put to good use by subsequent Argentine scientific efforts, so now there's a working fission reactor in Bariloche and Argentina exports nuclear power expertise! I looked in to visiting these locations but unfortunately no tours.

-Peter

El Chalten

We're leaving Patagonia now, about to board a 27-hour-long bus north to Bariloche, for yet more mountains and outdoor time. After Bariloche, most likely continuing north to Mendoza, Argentina's wine capital!

Patagonia is not a budget destination. Prices are similar to the US, but at least you get good quality for what you pay for. We've been struggling to stay in our daily budget, alternating self catering and steak (which as an Argentine staple is surprisingly affordable). Busses are pricey, as are the museums we've visited.

We just spent 2 nights in El Chalten, Argentina's self-proclaimed trekking capital. A tiny town on national park land, founded in 1985 in the shadow of Mt Fitz Roy. Pick any direction to walk out of town (which will only take a few minutes) and you'll find trailheads.

We spent 2 days hiking a combination of shorter hikes. Autumn is in full swing here, so the colors are vivid. There are Huemul, endangered miniature deer, which live in the park but are hard to see. I was excited that I kept finding hoof prints on the trails until I caught up with the source: cows.

-Peter

Food for Thought (in Argentina)

Argentina is a country that dinners late. By the time we're paying for our meal around 9:30, the locals are just arriving. 

Maté - tea made from Yerba mate leaves and traditionally drank through a metal straw in a gourd.  Even better with a teaspoon of sugar.

Wine - adult grape juice. See post on Malbecs and Torrontés. 

Cerveza artesenal - craft beer.  We haven't had much of this in other countries, so yeah, it's making the food blog. 

Bife de chorizo - sirloin steak. We probably have steak at least once a day and we would probably choose this cut every time. It's big and juicy with just the right amount of fat. 

Lomo - if we're not having bife de chorizo, it's tenderloin. 

Parrillada - all the grilled meats, including the organs. Perfect for us to share; Peter gets the outside and Priscilla gets the inside!

Tamal - a portable appetizer made of masa and wrapped in a leaf. Sometimes has things inside like meat. 

Locro - a hearty stew of potatoes, corn, another vegetable, and some kind of meat.

Empanadas - these should be homemade and have a good filling to dough ratio. The picture below was taken when we had 10 delicious empanadas which is an acceptable number of empanadas to have. 

Perito Moreno - Big Ice

Perito Moreno is a glacier in southern Patagonia near El Calafate, Argentina. It was named after Francisco P. Moreno. (I thought the "P" stood for Perito, which means expert in Spanish, but it does not. I just checked Wikipedia.) Perito Moreno is famous due to its spectacular scenary but also because it's one of the few glaciers in the world that is stable, meaning it's neither advancing nor retreating.

And we got to hike it!

Our trek started off on a 10 minute boat ride and an hour hike up the moraine to the glacier.  The guides fitted and laced up our crampons and gave us a brief demonstration on how to glacier trek. You pretty much keep your feet wide so you don't accidentally poke a hole through your own feet and you stomp around making sure your steps are flat.  We split into 3 groups and each group took a different path on the glacier so sometimes it felt like we were the only ones there. 

We got to explore all kinds of glacier landscapes from erratic rocks to deep blue lagoons to being in the middle of a giant glacier. By giant, I mean that Perito Moreno is part of the ice field that contains 1/3 of the world's fresh water. 

I don't have the words for how immensely beautiful it was so here are some pictures. 

After stomping around for 5 hours, the tour treated us to some whisky on glacier ice!  What a great way to end an exhausting hike. 

-Priscilla