Soccer Game

Last night we went to a soccer game in Santiago between two Chilean first division clubs. It was held in the 80,000 person national stadium, this place used to be a prison during the time Pinocea took control of Chile in the 70´s, there is barbed wire, and heavy metal gates everywhere, its also in the slum district so the place defintily has atmosphere.

Tickets were very resonable at about $6 dollars but they we´re general admission. We were happy about all the police on horses outside the stadium but we´re surprised that they didn´t sell beer at the stadium, we soon learned why.

The game was great in the first half and the home team was leading 1 nothing. The only weird thing was the riot police in full garb ringing the field in groups of 4. These weren´t your parents 60´s riot police either, they were equiped with full lucite shield, helmets, leg and arm protection and tear gas.

During half time the riots started. People started tearing the benches apart, they were wood, and throwing them at the riot police, then they broke through the fence to the field and ran onto it, at that point the riot police poured out of every entrance and chased the fans around. All the while the crowd cheered on the hooligans including the families with children.

Marla wanted to leave if any of the families around us started leaving as well. Thankfully the soccer game started up again and the crowd seemed to loose interest after the home team was scored on and they conceeded an own goal.

After the game, everyone left the stadium immediatly so we followed their lead. We´ve got some really cool video´s of the whole thing, complete with flares and paint bombs going off.

Good times!!!

Touring Santiago

Well we´ve been in Santiago for the last few days. It has been fun. Instead of going from small town to small town around Santiago we have been doing day trips to places and staying in Santiago at night.

Yesterday we went to the beach town of Vina del Mar. Its kind of like Grand Bend for Chileans, or Muskoka if your in Toronto. Evidently all the Chileans flood here in the summer, even the president has a beach house here, we know because we saw it.

We´re busy trying to book some winery tours but this is surprisingly hard for a place that produces so much wine, no one is getting back to us and they all want 2 days notice for a tour so we´re just going to start showing up at places and demanding to drink.

We´ll see what happens!!

Up-to-date Photo´s

Hotdog dinner, surprising popular in Chile

Sweet Comb-over

Marla riding a Chilean cannon

Marla partying with the locals

Photo Redux

Biking in Valle de la Luna, Chile

Laguna Colorado, Bolivia

Salt flat Shadows

Flying Flamingo´s, Bolivia

12 meter tall cactus

Finally Photos

Me wrestling a local

Funny Llama

Spending a night with a local family

Salt flats in the middle of nowhere

Island made of reeds, no dirt necessary

not so clear chile skys

We are back in good ol La Serena..

what a waste! we make reservations for the big observatory here, take a bus to this tiny town all to go to see the stars. Yesterday afternoon we went to the observatory office to make sure all was good for the night tour and they said yes no problem!!
So we go back at 10 pm (strom and richie can attest to this, as we had to sadly leave a messenger session where we were having a good time making fun of strom and loving amy´s harlequin covers). Richie, how is that for detail!

Anyhoo, we go back and they tell us that we were not going to the observatory. They may have given us a reason but as our spanish is very limited we do not know what it was. We figured it was either the sky was not clear enough, there were not enough people, or they did not want to waste time on english tourists.

So basically our trip to Vicuña was a big bust, and because of it we could not get a bus to Valpraiso tomorrow so we have to go to Santiago and backtrack. To make the bus trip tomorrow even more exciting, we got the last 2 seats again, yes, you guessed it right next to the toilets.. good times..

Partying with the locals

Last night we took a local bus from La Serena to Coquimba. Its one of Chile´s biggest parties, called La Pampilla. Its like woodstock or Glaustenberry. There are tents setup to sell everything from hardware to underwear to candy apples.

Evidently all the biggest south american bands come here to play but we didn´t recognize any of them, the bands we heard played almost exclusively local music.

Beers were only $1 a piece and the ticket to get in was $1.50 so it was pretty cheap. They also had almost any meat you´d want to eat there. We´ll post some pictures later of it.

It was fun!

Site seeing in La Serena

After a night bus where we sat beside the bathroom, not the best seats:), we arrived in La Serena Chile. It´s probably the nicest city we´ve been in since we started travelling, it may put some North American cities to shame.

Tonight there is a big tent party, beer tent, for the Independence week so we´ll hit that and then tomorrow we are off to the observatory for a night veiwing!

We were accosted by 2 gypsy girls in Antofagasta who wanted money to read Marla´s palm. But Marla thought they were too aggresive so we had to run from them, we´re OK, don´t worry!!

Waiting in Antofogasta

Well we are in Antofogasta. Its the Chilean Independence week celebration and evidently they travel during this week. Every bus was full and bus companies are scrambling to add new bus´s as fast as they can, oh and hotels and bus companies also raise their rates at this time so things are very expensive.

Originally we got in on Friday night and were told that we couldn´t get out until Monday night so we bought that ticket and prepared for 3 days in this city.

Luckly we met a couple from Chile/US that we befriended who told us to keep going back to the bus companies as they add new bus´s all the time. So we went back againa and again and got the last tickets on a bus to La Serena, half way to Santiago, for tonight at 10:30. We lost 15% of our allready purchased tickets but its better than staying here for 3 nights and paying almost $40 US per night.

Hopefully we can catch some of the independence day celebrations in La Serena!! Only 11 sleeps until we´re home!

We made it to Chile

Well we just completed a 3 day 4x4 trip through the salt flats and nothingness of Southern Bolivia. The scenery was amazing and we´ll post pictures as soon as we can!. We saw lots of salt flats, moutains, pink flamingos and hot springs. The entire trip was above 4000 meters so it was cold and we did our best to stay warm in the very rustic accomidations we stayed at.

We just got into Chile this morning. The small town we are staying at, San Pedro, is expensive but cute, best of all its warm!!! There are no bank machines here so we´re off to book a ticket to any place with money available before we run out of it:)

Time´s running out, only 2 weeks of travel left!!!

Who let the dog in???

SO we are back from Potosi, ironically enough the trip took one hour longer to get back to Uyuni than it took to get there with no flat tires this time:) go figure.

Potosi was a nice city, we visited the mint but not the mines. Potosi used to be the richest city in the world in its mining heyday.

We are back here in Uyuni, and something hilarious just happened..we were trying to get into a tour company's office and it was closed so we tried the door next to it, and it opened up to someones house and courtyard...and there was this stray dog standing there with chris..and chris let him into the house!!! and then we panicked so we closed the door and left the dog in!!! hehehehhehe

anyhoo, just had some great pizza here in the middle of nowhere bolivia and tomorrow we leave for our 3 day salt flat tour into chile!!!!

Some pictures from our bike ride

Us going down the road


Taking a break



Mountain Road


Going around a crazy corner

3 flat tires later

Well Thursday was a travel day, we took the bus from La Paz to Oruro and then boarded a train to go to Uyuni. The train had great scenary, at one point we were driving through a lake with pink flamingo´s.

We spent a night in Uyuni in the coldest room we´ve been in so far. I guess Uyuni has a reputation for being cold. We went to Uyuni as this is where we do our 4x4 trip from in order to cross into Chile, but since it´s not until Tuesday we decided to take a 2 day trip to Potosi.

The bus to Potosi was an adventure, we had 3 flat tires on the trip and we only we´re able to get enough tires to make those changes by removing one of the rear tires, the rear tires are dual, and swapping it for the front tire after it blew for the 3rd time.

Luckily for us we we´re off at Potosi, most of the bus continued onto another town from there on the same bus. We wished them well.

World´s most dangerous road bike tour

For our last day in La Paz we decided to bike( almost all downhill), the ¨world´s most dangerous road¨. Marla figured if Toni could do it then so could we, hehehehe. The road starts at 4600 meters elevation and drops to 1300 meters.

The first hour or so is paved and you can just bomb down this road, our guide figures you get up to around 60 and you could go faster if you didn´t have to stay in a group. After that you get to the dangerous portion, the single lane gravel road that used to be an Inca trail and was converted to a road in 1946 by Parugaian prisoners of war. Since it follows a mountain there are plenty of blind corners with straight down drops of 300 meters or more. One spot they used to use to throw criminals off the edge.

Since its gravel its also very dusty when vehicles drive by and we needed to wear dust masks for most of the gravel portion. We found out at the end that 2 bikers die each year and 100 motorists. The drive up is even worse as the road barely fits a bus at some portions.

Total time down, around 4 hours which included stops for several broken chains, including mine.

So once we got down we showered ate lunch and boarded a bus to get back up. Since some people we´re not going back up they took their time at lunch and we didn´t end up going back up until it started to get dark, it made the ride all that more exciting. My hand still hurts from Marla squeezing it:)

Last days in La Paz

Well with our last few days in La Paz and Marla feeling better we decided to venture outside of the city.

For our second last day we went to a day spa in a town called Urmiri. Marla was looking forward to this for a while but it wasn´t quite as described by their brochures. First of the road there gives the world´s most dangerous road a run for its money you are litterly on the side of a mountain on a single lane road driven by a man who looked about 80. Marla kept pestering me to talkt to the man so he wouldn´t fall asleep on us.

Once we got there we met a bolivian family who spoke great english as they lived in the US. Some of the spa´s pools were not really up to par with what you would expect, the one sauna was a rock with fungus growing on it, but the large hot spring feed pool and other sauna were great!

We figured out quickly that this was a Bolivian vacation spot not a tourist vacation spot:)

A couple of quick notes

First off congratulations to Shayne on her upcoming nuptials and more importantly, her stagette in New York.

And happy birthday to Heather, Jane and Shayne on Friday!

Off to the Spa

Well Marla is feeling well enough to do some day trips so we are going to a spa tomorrow, about 55 km´s outside of La Paz. If all goes well there we will bike the world´s most dangerous road the day after.

We have also book a ticket to go to Uyuni on Friday. From there we plan to goto Potosi, once the richest city in the world, for a couple of days before returning to Uyuni and then taking a 4x4 treck across the Bolivian salt flats to the Chilean border city of San Pedro.

Stuck in La Paz

Well it might have worked out for the best that we didn´t try to cross the strike lines and goto Copacabana. On our bus to La Paz was a Bolivian who also lives in Paris part time. His family also runs a travel agency in La Paz. He looked into getting us a private driver, no buses or taxis will go, to Copacabana but no one is wlling to go to the city.

Even if we had of got through the strike line we would be stuck there and since they don´t have bank´s or atm´s there we would be sitting there running out of money:)

On the good side we´ve met some really nice people from Paris, who introduced us to the Bolivian, and we all went out to a really nice restaurant last night for dinner. The restaurant was started by a chef from Paris and the food shows it. You could have everything from duck to frogs legs to llama steak. Our bill came to 120 Bolivians, or roughly 20 Canadian, or the price of cup of coffee in a good Paris diner as the french people commented.

Looks like we´ll be in La Paz for a bit, Marla´s stomach hasn´t been feeling so well for the last 3 days, but we´re hoping its well enough to bike ride the ¨world´s most dangerous road tomorrow¨.

If not we´ll just ride it out in La Paz, which is one of the nicest cities we´ve seen so far.

Hello from the worlds highest capital

Well we´re in La Paz, Bolivia. For those of you following along you are probably wondering why we aren´t in Copacabana. Well we mentioned the bus strike. Our company cancelled our bus as there is no way to get to Copacabana so we hopped on another bus that goes to La Paz.

We may try to back track to Copacabana later if the strike ends. So far the only company we´ve asked has said there are no buses going there so we may be out of luck.

Stay tuned to see where we end up next

Walking on water

Since we arrived in Puno, we have been busy. We just got back from a trip recommended to us by Andrea and Bruce. We took a boat out to lake titicaca where we spent a few hours on islands made entirely of reeds. Even the houses are made of reeds. Its kind of weird to walk on them.

After that we spent the night on an island at the home of a local. We do not speak much spanish and they do not speak any english. They cooked all our meals and smiled alot, the room was nice but very rustic.

Special Edit: I forgot to mention that the house we stayed at had 5´high door ways. I was playing soccer with one of the son´s of the family we stayed with while Marla went to get the camera. She turned around and hit her head so hard it knocked her flat on her bum. She claims to have had a concusion!!! So far she has no memory loss or slipped into a coma:)

The next moring we toured another island and made our way home to Puno.

We also met some very cool people on the trip including a couple from Whistler!!

Tomorrow we try to goto Bolivia, there are strikes at the border so they told us it might be tough to get to Copacabana and we should go direct to La Paz but we are determined to try our luck. Wish us well.