Santa Claus arrived (from Spain)
Every country has their own Christmas traditions and Netherlands doesn’t disappoint in this field. We went to see (with other excited kids) him arriving to Amsterdam on a steamboat with all his little helpers that look more like jokers than elves.
And this Santa, or Saint Nicholas, resides in Spain the rest of the year. Who wouldn’t? Much nicer than Lapland, temperature wise. And not as many blood-thirsty mosquitos.
And if you read this far you are probably wondering “what’s up with that book?” and the answer is: Very much is up. 290 pages much.
!!!
Part two will be ready this week, then “just” (haha, “just”) need to add chapters to the first part and edit it to match the brilliance of part 2 (my writing has gotten a lot better on the way) and write the final chapters. Then edit edit edit edit edit for about hundred times and it’s done. Sounds easy but isn’t. So, back to work now!
I Don’t Want to Appoint More Women to Our Board Because I’m Afraid of Bob
You can find my newest piece on Belladonna Comedy!
“My other board colleagues wouldn’t want to appoint a woman on our board.”
What I really wanted to say is that I am very intimidated by all of the other board members, especially Bob. I have always wanted to be like Bob. He knows how to draw a Venn diagram. I tried once but I could never make the circles meet in the middle. How does he do that?!
How I Failed at Being A Gilmore Girl
I promise I tried really hard but I just couldn’t live up to their example.
5 Ways to Kill a Sim, Or Your Mother-in-Law Because She Called Your Food ‘Too Salty’
Who of us Sims-players can claim they never did this - or at least thought about it? Read my newest piece at Robot Butt!
5 Ways to Kill a Sim, Or Your Mother-in-Law Because She Called Your Food ‘Too Salty’.
Happy reading!
Perusing Peru
It’s time to wrap things up. I am writing this from cloudy and windy Dublin (thanks Ireland for delivering with the summer weather as usual <3), listening to The End by The Doors and the memories are getting hazy but it would not be fair to leave Peru out of this blog altogether.
Our days in Peru included the most touristy experience ever - The Floating Islands - and days wasted in Puno, a great week in Cusco, last hiking in Machu Picchu, a 14 hr bus turned into a 19 hr bus to an oasis in the middle of the desert, expensive sandboarding in Huacachina, three days in Amazonas, tan & chill in Mancora, and lastly couple rainy days in Lima.
One could also describe our time in Peru in terms of “skip that, we’re not hiking” which led to not going to Rainbow Mountain and Huarez at all. Just couldn’t be bothered any more. And I am pretty sure those colors of the Rainbow Mountain are photoshopped into the pictures afterwards anyway so I hope we didn’t miss that much.
The place worth of our last hiking efforts was Machu Picchu. You would think that after all the ruins we visited in Mexico, Belize and Guatemala nothing could impress us. This ancient Inka summer house proved us wrong. The views are just breathtaking and you can’t understand how all of this was built on top of a mountain. Now of course there is a bus to take all lazy (including us) tourists aaaalll the way to the top and back so that one wouldn’t need to bother with walking that much.
We wanted to get a true birds-eye view of the place and climbed the Mountain Machu Picchu where only 400 people are allowed in a day. Hell of a climb and not the safest either. Narrow, steep pathways where Richie opted for a child-like crawling style. This 2 hour climb paralyzed us for the next couple of days and we were barely able to come down stairs from our hostel.
Cusco is full of history and beautiful buildings and here I got to experience the “wtf”-face of the trip as I dragged Richie around the city searching for different points of interest. We went around and around a couple of times in this one neighbourhood and once we finally got to the place, you should have witnessed the reaction when I told him that “the place” was a 12 cornered stone. :D But when you think about it, it’s actually quite impressing. Inka’s building technique is renown for the fact that they fitted different shaped rocks together and this specific rock has 12 corners in it. He still wasn’t that happy.
From Cusco we finally started to go towards a warmer climate. Huacachina is an oasis in the middle of sand dunes in the coast of Peru. Normally you come here for a day to do buggy driving and sandboarding in the dunes. The cheap way is to get a “board” (really a slice of wood) which you lie on and speed down the dunes OR you can pay more and get an actual snowboard. As an ex-professional snowboarder I chose the latter and as a “man who thinks he can do anything” Richie did the same. He has tried snowboarding once before. Ten years ago.
And it wasn’t easy. Sandboarding is like snowboarding on a very heavy, slushy spring snow. The kind where you get stuck right away. First try was quite shit, second ok and the third one went well (apparently I made a nice little jump in the beginning that got the crowds gasping). For Richie first try was quite shit, second try was quite shit and third one not as shit. Fun times!
The Amazonas was a place that we were supposed to experience from Bolivia. But a combination of being very hungover + trying to use the shittest airline site ever resulted us saying “fuck that, we’ll go to the jungle in Peru”. Iquitos is in the upstream of Amazon-river and we ended up going even more upstream to the Pacaya Samiria National park where no-one is allowed to build lodges and you must sleep in local villages, tents, or if you are rich, in one of those fancy river boats.
Choosing a company to go with is super difficult unless you have a lot of $$$. We went for a bit more expensive operator with mostly good reviews and got a really good experience. Our guide spoke good English and with the boat-driver they were great company. Of course being in the jungle for a short time you can’t expect to see all the animals but I got a few good shots of birds, sloths, toads, and hopefully some good video material of pink dolphins.
The pink dolphins look actually quite freaky - not like dolphins at all. Locals are also afraid of them (because they believe they take people and that dead people turn into pink dolphins) and won’t swim in the rivers. We heard the dolphins swimming under our boat and banging against it and I was sure this was our time.
I don’t have that much photo material from our last stops. Mancora was a place to have breakfast, go to the beach, tan, read, have dinner, sleep and then repeat this for seven days. Richie also tried surfing and as a very wise man (as he likes to call himself) paid for all five days in advance. He caught waves maybe during two days. As I said, a wise man.
Everything must come to an end and while I bet some of you have felt like our wonders around the world would never end, for us it felt like a brief second. Now that I am lying in bed back in Dublin I can’t believe how many places we went to and how much we experienced. “Luckily” I have hundreds of minutes of video material to be edited into another ten-minute mini-documentary, maybe that will take us back to the road for another short moment.
The End - thanks for following along the journey!
That’s all folks for now - future posts will be about how to become a best-selling author (without actually being one yet so that should be entertaining!) and how to live in a cramped studio in Amsterdam without strangling each other so: Stay tuned.
Bolivia in a nutshell
When you travel for a long, long, long time, you can’t avoid of burning out. And unfortunately some countries that are in the beginning of your journey receive a lot of attention and enthusiasm, and some countries towards the end just won’t get all the love they deserve.
After getting f****d money-wise in Argentina and Chile, Bolivia was a welcomed change. Dinner for $2? A massive fruit salad with ice cream for $1? Softest jumpers in the world for $10? Yes thank you.
Our stops in Bolivia included the infamous silver-city Potosí where every step was a challenge due to the city being located in the altitude of 4,067m over sea level. This is also where I spent my birthday. Not drinking or eating cake but shivering on the very cold toilet floor, suffering from yet another Latin American food poisoning. Now I’ll at least remember forever the day I turned 32.
The most famous tourist activity in Potosí is the tour the “Mountain who eats men” that looms over the city, still ingesting thousands of workers every day looking for the last traces of copper, zink and lesser metals since silver has been long gone. I have lately developed a slight claustrophobia and since the tour happens in very small and narrow pathways far inside the mountain, wearing protective gear while being in a sauna-like environment, I didn’t think I was able to it without panicking. And since Richie can barely stand straight in normal houses, he wasn’t too keen on it either. Thus we did not get to witness the conditions the workers are forced to face every day. This mountain is one of the most prominent pieces of “evidence” of the exploitation and plundering the conquistadors and their followers brought upon Latin America.
City of Potosí and Cerro Rico
In Sucre we mostly slept. And slept some more. Walked around the beautiful, white city. Tried to go to the dinosaur park but of course everything was closed the first of May Thus we had some naps. Also for once our timing and decision to fly instead of a 12hrs bus was spot on: The day we left, people had started blocking the streets and the following days no-one could leave Sucre (nor come in). On our way to the airport we passed one blockade but luckily our taxi driver was able to drive pass it.
La Paz quickly became one of our favourite cities in Latin America. Reminds me of Medellín and that’s a very good thing. Our walking tour guide showed us the local markets the first day and thus begun our avocado sandwich & fruit juice diet for the next seven days.
We visited “the biggest market in South America” (a lot of the cities claim that but this was massive) where I found the perfect captain hat for Burning Man for $5 (eat it US online stores selling the same for $200) and discovered a stand selling classic 80’s and 90’s jumpers. Walking around for 2,5 hours was not enough to cover all and I can just imagine all the awesome stuff we missed out on..
La Paz is also famous for Cholita’s wrestling. Ladies in traditional wear showing of their WWF skills. Sounds strange and is even more strange live. It starts early, you can’t buy beer, and you sit in a gym hall with other 50 awkardly shuffling tourists waiting for the show to begin. Surprisingly it was highly entertaining and they had clearly practised their moves!
And then the main attraction of La Paz and its surroundings: Biking down the Death Road. I was vary about this first, thinking that I’d somehow tip myself over the narrow paths but oh buy am I glad I joined Richie for the full day trip. Because I beat him! (And did not fall off a cliff so I’d call this a great success.)
When the clouds parted for a second
First you get used to the bike riding down some paved roads for an hour but the fun only begins on the actual death road. It would have been even more fun in a smaller group where you don’t have to wait for everyone (there was a lot of waiting…) but even this way it was super fun! I think we’ll change our hiking boots to mountain bikes. Although we did not pick the best location to live in for this new hobby.. Netherlands will offer only flat grounds where you actually will have to pedal around :(
Too little time in Bolivia was finished at Lake Titicaca and Island of the Sun. I think the first time I have ever heard of Lake Titicaca was from Donald Duck magazines where Uncle Scrooge et al. were looking for El Dorado. And since then it has held a mystical image in my head.
Thank you Bolivia, the second-last country on our travels. The end is near..
"Have you licked the walls yet?"
One of the must-stops on a backpackers itinerary is a tour to the Salar de Uyuni - world's biggest salt flats. The popularity of this tour has not (weirdly) raised the standard of tour operators, it's almost the opposite. As everyone wants a piece of the lucrative business, there are a plethora of operators to choose from and you can get very lucky or very unlucky. Even the highest rated operators on Tripadvisor have the occasional hiccups - depending on the driver and your company - so it was quite the nightmare to try to pick which one we would go with.
Long story short - we got lucky in a sense that the driver was not drinking, drove well, accommodation was better than expected and the weather was awesome.
What really makes the experience are the views. During 1+ year traveling we've seen quite a bit but the scenery on these Bolivian highlands was something else entirely.
Enjoy a photo-diary of our three days adventure.
(And did you know that these salt flats hold majority of the world's lithium reserves? I bet Elon Musk is interested in this place!)
FIRST DAY - Laguna Blanca, Laguna Verde, Salvador Dali Desert, Thermal Springs, Sol de Mañana geothermal field (not geysirs, Wikipedia tells me), Laguna Colorada
SECOND DAY: Valle de Las Rocas (a lot of cool rocks)
Scene at the salt hotel:
One of our travel mates: "Have you licked the walls yet?"
Richie: "No mate, how was it?"
Him: "Salty!"
THIRD DAY: The unreal views of the salt flats and many unsuccessful perspective photos (should have done our research before the trip)
That's all folks!
"Hiking is like flogging yourself" - Stewie, 5.4.2018
It was time. Time to test everything we have learned during the past year of traveling and camping. And hiking.
This time we would not be bringing our newly acquired Target duvet or pillows to fight the cold. This time we would not be kneeling down to cook our morning oats.
Both of us would be wearing our matching (yes, matching, but only by accident) hiking pants that have seen it all from New Zealand to Guatemalan highlands and to Colombian mountain ranges. Richie’s walking sticks were up for a true test - would the other one finally break? Would he fall into mud in slow-motion when the sticks would fail him? (Almost but more of that later.)
Patagonia so far had been a beautiful, albeit a bit chilly, and a very, very expensive stint. Hiking to Mt. Fitzroy in El Chalten is by far the best and most beautiful hike we have ever done. It was going to be hard to top that one but Torres Del Paine national park in Chile would try its best.
Torres Del Paine is quite a popular place. By “quite” I mean thousands of tourists walking the trails every year and the park sure knows how to do business. You could pick your lodgings from sleeping in your own tent to a tent that is waiting for you there, or sleeping inside the refugios on a bed (bed $30 USD, if you want to add sheets it’s another $30 USD!) to luxury accommodations.
You can choose to do day-hikes, the W-Circuit (4-5 days) or the full O-circuit (7-8 days, although some moutain goat we met was doing it in 4). Luckily I wasn’t having one of my moments where I think we can do anything, I mean anything, and didn’t try to talk Richie into doing the O. The W-Circuit with 5 days would be quite enough for us.
Of course we’d be doing it the cheap way which means carrying your tent, food and cooking equipment. You want to know how much the cheapest way cost us?
$560 USD for five days.
As I said they know how to do business. Just pitching your tent on the first two camping sites cost $8 USD each and $16 USD each at the last two stops. Add renting the gear, getting to the park and back by bus and catching a 30 minute catamaran for $30 USD each. And buying a lot of nuts and stuff to make your own trailmix. We are still eating that trailmix a week after finishing the hike.
Most popular time to visit Torres Del Paine is during the summer months. April is definitely the shoulder season as it is getting colder. But also it means less people and awesome autumn colors! And a giant -15 degrees celcius sleeping bag you have to carry on your back for five days. The weather forecast really loomed over us, promising rain and/or snow for every day with lovely temperatures ranging from -7 to +4 celcius degrees. Can’t wait!
During the five days we visited countless lookout points, got seriously bored of eating nuts for lunch every day, got to experience the true Patagonian weather with horizontal rain that maked us soaking wet (but only on our left side), laughed, witnessed pro-hikers throw bad looks and pitiful comments to people who they think have never camped before, threw someone’s food away as it was hanging from a tree where we wanted to pitch our tent (amateur campers…), battled a challenging swamp that almost claimed Richie and half-claimed our friend Stewie, swore never ever to hike again, and made it to the Torres lookout just when the clouds went away for couple of seconds! You might think hiking is a solitary thing but it was actually quite the social experience since you see the same people every day and this ended up being one of the most fun things we have done thanks to the company.
We are not quite sure how much we walked at the end because apparently no-one at the parks deparment knows how to count. Each map displayed different distances and even the markers on the trail were telling vastly different stories on how long it would take to get somewhere. I counted 76km, maps.me says 96km. I’ll take the latter as we can round it up to hundred and that’s something!
We can sum up the experience with Stewie’s words from the fourth day: “Hiking is like flogging yourself.” It sucks but afterwards you feel kinda good. You’ll never do it again until you have forgotten the pain the last time caused you. It’s been a week now and I find myself thinking about the mountains in Peru. Maybe once more…
How much can you spend on chocolate?
Hikey days were ahead of us. Better to forget partying in Buenos Aires or playing the waiting game at Peninsula Valdes. Now it was time to get active again and for Richie to dust those (walking) hiking sticks as we started to wander deeper into the legendary outdoor opportunities of Patagonia.
If you have ever looked at Argentina on the map you probably know it is huge. I do not know what had happened to my geography knowledge when I uttered the words “it’s kinda like Finland”. Yeah, times four.
Thus we embarked to another 20 hour bus to get to the Switzerland of Argentina - Bariloche! We had been spoiled by our first longhaul bus from Iguazu Falls to Buenos Aires that included blanket, pillow, and a proper dinner with wine. The wine was quite shite as the Irish would put it but it was the type we like - free - so of course we finished the tiny bottles. The buses to Puerto Madryn and now to Bariloche were disappointments after that, you had to bring your sleeping bag inside to get some cover from the blasting AC and prepare your own foods in order to avoid starving.
Bariloche looks like a little mountain village in the Alps or at least tries hard. And as a good Switzerland- wannabe, they offer chocolate on each corner and each shop between the corners. Not thinking about the fact that we were already about $1,200 over budget, I happily spent exactly $52 USD on chocolate during seven days. Breaking my own chocolate eating records here.
Sad thing about recording every expense on Splitwise-app is that you can't escape the facts about your spending habits
Bariloche is about chocolate, microbreweries, hiking, snow activities and lakes. Exactly seven lakes. One of the most popular activities is to rent a car and drive the route of the seven lakes, stopping on each “mirador” (viewpoint) to look at these aformentioned lakes.
Can I tell a secret? They all look pretty much the same.
Also we discovered an Argentinian recipe for how to construct a mirador:
1) Find the spot for the most beautiful views towards the lake
2) Now move about 100m -200m to the left or same to the right and find a spot with tall trees and bushes
3) Voilá, you have a mirador!
Nice views right?
It was challenging to peek through the obstacles at some places to get a glimpse of that blue water reservoir but then we just ditched the car and walked to the better unmarked places.
The hiker-thief
All that driving for a full day made us (me) grave for a day out walking. Bariloche is not short of hikes and one could do amazing multi-day treks over the mountains. The refugio (hut) - network is good and it’s free to spend the night there. The only problem can be the fast-changing weather, all the walks in the National Park were closed on the day we arrived due to high winds and falling trees.
Out of the two hikes we did, Refugio Frey was a perfect one, not only because of the clear blue sky weather we got. There’s two ways to reach the hut; the adventurous way of scrambling on rocks and over mountain tops or through peaceful strolling in the woods with a moderate climb at the end. Adventorous one was the one I wanted to do but to begin it you need to take a skiing chairlift up (or add extra 4 hours of walking - no thanks). And guess what they charge for this chairlift?
$25 USD. One ticket. One person. One way.
No thanks.
Easy forest-route then.
At the top we encountered some seventy army men and we learned they were there for the yearly climbing training. Apparently the area around Refugio Frey is bursting with routes and during summer time you have a hundred people pitching their tent around the premises. I have to say I’ve become more and more happy about our timing in Patagonia. Even now when it’s the shoulder season (fall), there are a lot of people everywhere - in hostels, trails, viewpoints.. I can’t even think how crowded it is during summer time!
Look at that view!
I can think of only one more thing worth mentioning of; we ate spaghetti bolognese for dinner seven days in a row. Welcome to budget-traveling.
Animal adventures in Argentina: Puerto Madryn
Those who have been reading this blog since we started our travels (almost a year ago!) know we had some disappointments on the way concerning animal encounters.
- Arrived to a town in Tasmania called Penguin just after all the penguins had left.
- Drove to a small town in New Zealand just for penguins – who weren’t there.
- Paid $400 AUD each to snorkel with whale sharks in Coral Bay, Western Australia. You guessed right – they were nowhere to be seen. Or actually just couple hundred kilometres North in Exmouth where we were couple of days earlier. Duh.
On a positive note, on that snorkel trip we did see everything else from manta & sting rays to whales, dugongs, more whales and dolphins.
And the greatest comeback was me fixing Richie up to get picked “randomly” from the audience of over a hundred people to feed dolphins in Monkey Mia in Western Australia. You should have seen the looks on the faces of all the kids and their parents when an almost two-meter tall twenty-something gets chosen for this cute activity!
Thus the stakes were quite high for our next Argentina stop. Puerto Madryn was always looming on the planning list but as it added a diversion to our route to Patagonia, we almost considered dropping it until we found out it was ORCA SEASON!
And not just any orca season, ORCAS SNATCHING SEA LION BABIES FROM THE BEACH season. You just don’t see this shit anywhere else in the world.
Could we be so lucky? Could the stars be aligned to make all this happen? For once being at the right place at the right time?
Well, no.
But I’ll come back to that later.
Puerto Madryn is the “base camp” for wildlife exploration in this area. You can see penguins (second biggest colony in the world, maybe now third as they found a new one in Antarctica), elephant seals, sea lions, Southern Ballena-whales, black-and-white dolphins (that look like mini orcas), regular dolphins, orcas, armadillos, local camels as we still call them (official name is guanaco), local emus, rabbits, pumas.. you name it.
You’ll need to either join quite expensive tours totalling $75-$100 USD / day or rent a car and drive and drive and drive to reach the animal spots. As we wanted more opportunities to spot the orcas, we rented a car and stayed inside the Peninsula Valdes National Park area to avoid paying the park entrance fee every day. On the first day though we drove to the opposite direction to Punta Tomba to check out the penguins, finally! During the drive there we joked half-heartedly about the possibility of no penguins. We figured that’d be our luck. Second biggest penguin colony without penguins.
Luckily we were wrong! It’s not exactly the advertised 400,000-500,000 penguins but enough to make us very, very happy. Until you have seen a penguin swim and bathe (they were clearly washing themselves by doing barrel rolls) you haven’t really experienced joy!
This successful first encounter made us hopeful for what was to come. Checking the National Park and Punta Norte Orca Research- Facebook pages, confirming high tide times, estimating driving times… orcas we are coming for you!
There’s two places where orcas are normally seen. Punta Norte which houses a sea lion colony and Cadeta Valdes with elephant seals, sea lions & an “attack channel” where only professional photographers and film crews can go. You are most likely to see these glorious predators during high tides and those are 1,5 hrs apart on these two places. Thus depending on the day you might get two high tides = better chances.
We spent the first day driving around and sitting in Cadeta Valdes. Talking to people who were on their third day of orca search with no results. But we also got our hopes up as a group of 15 orcas had been seen – just not at the usual spots but in a place were they haven’t been spotted in two years. So they were definitely around..
Second day’s first high tide was at 7.30 am in Punta Norte. We had to start the drive at 6am to make it through the gravel roads with our white Ford Fiesta – not exactly the same as driving with our Toyota Landcruiser 4WD in Australia…
Then we waited. And waited. Watched sea lion pups play at the water. Thinking if it’s disturbed to hope a predator would come and eat them? And really hope for that?
No orcas.
It was time to switch location back to Cadeta Valdes to wait for the 17.45pm high tide. Only 8hrs to go. We are pretty good at the waiting game when Kindles are fully charged and you have a place in the shade. Eating self-made sausage sandwiches and yesterday’s pasta cold, buying hot water to make your own coffee (did I already tell you Argentina is expensive?), gazing at the sea, hoping to see a black fin or two emerge from the water.
Eight hours later, cold and wet from sitting in the rain for the last hour, it was time to admit defeat and head back to the base camp while there was still sunlight left.
No orcas.
When I am a famous writer I’ll come back for a month to live in a hut with views to the sea. Write and wait for the intelligent black and white friends to show up. Until then the Youtube clips and documentaries are all we have.
Buenos Aires aka. "trying to be 20 again."
The writing tips I have been reading recently say "Get straight to the point. Cut the first dreamy sentences. Hell, cut the first paragraph." So here we go.
Choose Buenos Aires if you want to party. Choose a party hostel, choose sleeping until 6pm, choose cheap bad-tasting beer. Choose hostel drinks, choose boozed-up-brits-abroad as company. Choose the toilet that hasn't been puked in by 9pm. Choose a club and music of any genre, choose dancing until sunrise. Choose repeating this seven days a week until you're broke - physically and economically.
OR
Choose to be over thirty, go to bed at ten, try to have a drink one night, fail and get an Uber home. Or even better, choose to have awesome local friends, have an asado, drink wine at Palermo, walk the pretty streets, buy tickets to see Queens of Stone Age and Foo Fighters and see only latter because of an astonishing queuing system (fill up a stadium from only one entrance surely gets everyone in on time!).
Awesome book store in an old theathre
Any thoughts on which route we took? Yeah. We stayed at the party hostel which was nice for socialising but oh boy I could not do the seven days a week partying any more. And I don't enjoy an everyday toilet lottery (I wonder what someone has left there this time?!).
Buenos Aires is by far the best choice for a city we could live in in Latin America. Big, clean, safe (as long as you don't wonder somewhere you shouldn't), food, culture, night life, beautiful parks.. not the cheapest though and after two weeks in Argentina we are hundreds of dollars over budget.
Oh well. Time to eat noodles.
(Can you guess what movies we have watched recently?)
Of course Buenos Aires has the fanciest cemetery of them all. La Recoleta Cemetery:
Goodbye Colombia, hello Argentina
After two months, our time in Colombia came to an end. In order to make it to the Southern Hemisphere and Patagonia we had to book flights to Argentina instead of going to Ecuador and continuing going down by looong bus rides.
First stop in Argentina/Brazil: Iguazu Falls. And thus my camera has hundreds of photos of roaring water.
One thing all the blogs tell you is that Argentinian side is better. We visited Brazil side first and thought that it can’t get better than that. It can. Argentina’s side rules.
You had to queue for the photo spots. What a pressure, didn't see any true bloggers trying to take hundred photos while others wait.
If that looks impressive (and I am not talking about a shirtless Richie), the Argentinian side takes it up a notch.
Train to take the tourists to the falls
Random Mexican place in Argentina
I feel like that is enough waterfall photos for a while.
In our first hostel we also got to witness our second bed bug occasion. After last one (where I spotted the bugs before they got anywhere luckily) I have become an inspection-expert. Going through our bed frames I found eggs and old shells and once I lifted the top mattress, I could see the full-grown bastards crawling from the seams. Obviously the whole mattress was infested!
I have learned to listen in awe at the hostels' explanations once you confront them.
"They are the bugs that come out when it rains!" And live in the mattress?
"Oh I thought we had cleaned." Yeah sure you get rid of them by regular cleaning. Not.
"They can't travel from bed to bed." How did they get here?
"Those are mosquito bites." One hostel told a girl whose arms and back were full of nasty marks after one night at the hostel bed.
We got a private room (full of old shells as well but nothing alive) but of course they sold our beds to other people the next day. Luckily the people in the dorm told the girls and they complained as well. And only then they took the mattresses out!
I did inspections for couple other people in the dorm, should really start charging for this...
With warm regards,
Bed bug free Heini & Richie
Torilla tavataan! (Let’s meet at the town square, preferably a Finnish one)
How to hike El Cocuy National Park in Colombia. Published February 2018.
It happened. I achieved something great. It wasn’t the Forbes “30 under 30” that I daydreamt about when I was a fresh graduate and still full of career related goals nor winning the world championship in snowboarding. “30 under 30”-list shows new irritatingly fresh faces every year and if I would have ever gotten more serious in snowboarding I would most likely have been badly hurt, multiple times, by now.
So I am happy with my current great feat.
If you have ever read any travel articles about Colombia, you’ll recognise the clichés “Colombia has it all”, “Many faces of Colombia” etc. what it is trying to tell you is that Colombia has a) beaches, b) cities and c) mountains.
After being on the gringo trail for a while and getting our adrenaline fix in San Gil (rafting was fun, paragliding was not! I am not a bird clearly), we headed to the snowy mountains of Sierra Nevada del Cocuy Chita. I used Pinterest for the first time for planning our travels in Colombia and photos of weird plants lured me to embark us for 15hrs+ bus rides to a less travelled corner of Colombia. And yes you read right, photos lured me, Richie usually does not have an idea where we are going before we are actually going there. And I think he would have used his veto rights if I would’ve revealed the reason for this trip to be weird mountain cactuses.
El Cocuy national park is a massive area covering valleys, glaciers and snowy mountain tops. The villages where you start your hike booking are located at over 2,500 meters above sea level, the accommodation in the start of the trails at 3,600 meters, and trails themselves can go up to 5,000 meters.
Back in the days – when even New York Times made an article about hiking in El Cocuy – one was able to go without a guide, do an epic 6-day trek, and walk on the snow.
Now however things are different. The park was closed for 1,5 years because of conflicts between the government and the indigenous people. Or something else, depends what sources you read or who you talk to. The park finally opened in 2017 and now one can choose from three different one-day hikes and has to hire a guide for 120,000 COP. “A guide” in this case means a local person going up with you, there’s really no guiding services in terms of history, geology etc. included. After hearing the background - about the park closing - and how it affected the income of local families we just said “fair enough” and paid happily the $40 USD.
Because of the closing and basically a pause in any tourism development, the process of getting to El Cocuy and booking the hikes is a bit of a messy affair but a great chance to practise ones Spanish. Since I am not writing a travel blog to provide guidance for others I will skip a lot of the practical matters but you get an idea how difficult it is to do a one day hike here:
1) First you need a guide name. You can pick one from a list in the park office and just call different ones, try to manage to understand their Spanish and if it’s a yes or no and hope for the best that you both got the day right. Other option is to call at the cabins that offer accommodation in the start of the trails and pick one of their guides. Easier this way.
2) You need to go buy insurance for your guide. Different office from the park office, of course.
3) Go back to the park office to register yourself and the hike(s) you are doing. Pay entrance fee.
4) Get yourself up to the cabins. Options: Milk truck (10,000 COP) or private transportations for 15,000-40,000 COP pp depending on your luck and how many other people are going. We took the milk truck and that was a fun experience albeit a cold one!
5) Have the park ranger check your permits and paper work
6) Hike!
7) Find your way back to the El Cocuy/Guican town. Again, an alternative option (cheap option) was to take the 5am school bus with the local kids.
8) End your journey with 3+ buses and 12+ hrs back to big cities.
Even though getting everything sorted and actually getting up to Hacienda Esperanza (our accommodation) did feel like a great achievement already, that’s not why I want to meet you at a Finnish square.
It’s because talking to the park ranger revealed me to be the First Finnish Person to Come to El Cocuy National Park! And yes this moment deserves capital letters.
Imagine being the first somewhere. In the age of traveling being easier than ever and more and more countries becoming safe to explore it’s a wonder to realise there is a place no-one from your country has been yet.
Of course there’s the possibility that the park ranger was full of shit and says that to everyone that is not German, French or Dutch, and in reality I will soon find full coverage in one of the Finnish newspapers by other brave explorers.
We did only one main hike because we weren’t sure about our ability to deal with the altitude and/or our general ability to hike at all. Long gone are the New Zealand hiking days and times of being in “glorious shape” as Richie would put it. As a warm-up on the day before we climbed up some fields, climbed & jumped over millions of fences, wire and electric, and (I) got (us) lost and did not find the lagoon we were looking for. But we had some great views so I’d call it a success.
The park is beautiful, the people are friendly, the history is touching, the food is good and the company at the cabin was amazing.
And the plants are called Frailejones, cousins to the sunflowers we all know.
Maybe you will have a chance to become the second Finn here?
* Torilla tavataan!- saying is a common way to connect with fellow Finns when someone from Finland has done something great. Most famous example: Finland winning ice-hockey world championship. Then everyone met at the square, including yours truly.
Is this one salsa?
Colombia! Here we are. Or to put it more precisely, have been for three weeks, doing next to nothing. We hit a major pause in our travels, just getting stuck places and seeing the bare minimum of our surroundings. And when you don’t do that much (read: be active and go see that church, that sunset, that night market) you get depressed and don’t want to do anything. A vicious circle has emerged.
Luckily we finally showed the circle our middle finger and have been like newborn backpackers going around with excitement and wonder in their eyes. Something that might have caused it is the city of Cartagena. Easily one of the most beautiful cities I have visited. You could spend countless evenings either in the Old Town (Walled City) or Getsemani eating street food, drinking corner store beers and follow different performances.
And since we were back in action doing stuff, we did all the stuff tourists do minus beaches. We are done with beaches.
Visiting the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas (on a day when we all melted in the heat) that overlooks the city, taking a free walking tour around the Walled City (free in a sense that you give a tip at the end), and the last day was spent mud-bathing with strangers and getting washed by middle aged Colombian ladies.
And of course on our last night in Cartagena, we went to a salsa club. Not the expensive Café Havana every article mentions but a cheaper, I’d assume more local one, just a couple of blocks away from the hostel.
I did say earlier that we took two salsa classes and became quite good quite quickly. Also it has been two months from those classes with zero practice. Thus our salsa relied mostly on the basic back-and-forth step and it gets boring after couple of songs.. I got lucky as the place was filled with older Colombian men showing off their skills and I got to dance with a gentleman who made me feel like I knew how to dance! He also did a moonwalk-type-of-a-thing but sideways, dressed in fine white shoes and airy white cotton pants, topped up with a vest and Cuban hat.
Little did the gentleman know that just moment ago downstairs I had to ask in the beginning of every song “Is this one salsa?” before I went to practice the same back-and-forth step. Maybe you understand this better if you know that my music teacher laughed out loud in a singing exam at the number of notes I could sing without going off tune (the number is two and I was in good terms with the teacher so laughing was fine). I’m not exactly the musical person of the family and thus I think I’ll be asking the salsa-question a few more times..
If you are still unsure about your next city/beach-destination, choose Cartagena!
Year 2017 in books
After couple of lazy reading years in 2016 I got back on track spending more time on books and less time on meaningless stuff. I have noticed the meaningless stuff sucking more and more minutes out of my days and we all know what we are doing - checking Facebook, Instagram, whatever other scrolling habit we have - and suddenly you've spent hours doing nothing when you could have been immersed in thousands of stories yet undiscovered.
Naturally 2017 I had to set my goals higher as I would remove one time-stealing element from my life, it being work, and I had a lot of research to do for my own book. Goodreads encourages people to take on a reading challenge and while it did get me to read more, it did also encourage unhealthy reading habits. One should not just aim for a number as this quickly translates into "short, easy books" when I should be reading complex, mind-boggling stories and non-fiction science books. I finished with 74 books out of 80, felt quite good about myself, and then met and started following people who read 100-200 books a year. Sigh.
For anyone interested, here are my top picks from what I read in 2017, hopefully some will provide as much joy in your life as they did in mine! In return I'd love some recommendations about great stories or intriguing non-fiction books.
1. John Baynes - The Heart's Invisible Furies
Last book of 2017 and by far the best one. As a lot of reviewers have said, this is a story at it's best. Characters are interesting, sympathetic, witty, sarcastic (it is about Irish people after all), the events are historical and fictional at the same time, and the story is an epic tale through the years of 1944-2015 ending in Ireland's same-sex marriage referendum.
"Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he?
Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from and over his many years will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more."
2. N.K. Jemisin - Broken Earth trilogy (The Fith Season, The Obelisk Gate, The Stone Sky)
I've had the discussion about "real books" vs. "book written for a movie adaptation in mind" couple of times now and it's a complicated topic. If easy, entertainment-type of books get people to read more it's clearly a good thing, but at the same time world is missing out of great story-tellers and/or not making them famous. N.K. Jemisin is a story-teller. I can't see how these books would be brought to screen in a way that would make them Harry Potter-famous but as fantasy books these are some of the best ones I have ever read. The depth of writing, characters, plot and emotions is something else and I can only wish to be able to write like her some day.
"THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS. AGAIN.
Three terrible things happen in a single day.
Essun, masquerading as an ordinary schoolteacher in a quiet small town, comes home to find that her husband has brutally murdered their son and kidnapped their daughter. Mighty Sanze, the empire whose innovations have been civilization's bedrock for a thousand years, collapses as its greatest city is destroyed by a madman's vengeance. And worst of all, across the heartland of the world's sole continent, a great red rift has been been torn which spews ash enough to darken the sky for years. Or centuries.
But this is the Stillness, a land long familiar with struggle, and where orogenes -- those who wield the power of the earth as a weapon -- are feared far more than the long cold night. Essun has remembered herself, and she will have her daughter back.
She does not care if the world falls apart around her. Essun will break it herself, if she must, to save her daughter."
3. Neil Gaiman - American Gods
Late to the game, I know. But then I feel like that has been the theme of this year since only now I first discovered The Dune, Philip K. Dick and 2001 - A Space Odyssey.
A problem for me as an aspiring author is to come up with an original idea. But when you read and read and read (and re-read His Dark Materials trilogy) you begin to understand there are very few original ideas. And even those original ideas are combining history, existing mythologies, fables, factoids but in an original way. Sometimes books are recycling popular stuff in a very obvious way but they can still be an entertaining and enjoyable read.
Gaiman did with American Gods these impossible - coming up with a stunningly original idea that I can just envy quietly. Who comes up with this stuff? And since it's all based in what we know of humans' and gods' histories it's even more fascinating and gripping.
Books like this inspire me to read more, to research more, to grow older before I try to tackle my first chapters as a storyteller. Experience breeds depth.
"Days before his release from prison, Shadow's wife, Laura, dies in a mysterious car crash. Numbly, he makes his way back home. On the plane, he encounters the enigmatic Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America.
Together they embark on a profoundly strange journey across the heart of the USA, whilst all around them a storm of preternatural and epic proportions threatens to break.
Scary, gripping and deeply unsettling, American Gods takes a long, hard look into the soul of America. You'll be surprised by what - and who - it finds there..."
Hah, and if there's one thing I found out in 2017, it's that anything related to quantum physics is quite used (almost over-used) theme in books. Yes people keep finding new angles to it but I did not realise how many stories are based on "spooky action at a distance". Even those Philip Pullman children's books (His Dark Materials) I read when I was very young, again as a young adult and third time now when I've acquired some theoretical knowledge about the topic play with the ideas from multiple aspects.
Time to get some new ideas then!
Photo diary - Costa Rica
December was a month of rushed through countries, experiencing cold and word expensive again, sliding through jungle in Costa Rica, hunting (not actual hunting...) sloths along the Caribbean coast-line and finally leaving Central America through San Blas paradise islands and arrive in Colombia which I already feel will be one of the best countries we will visit.
Here are memories from a quick visit in Costa Rica. Monteverde is the place everyone goes to and we are not that keen to be different and followed the crowds. Zip-lining, Tarzan swings, night tours in the jungle, day tours in the jungle bridges and a lot of home-cooked pasta (thanks Nadine for being the sauce-master!) because eating out was just out of the budget. It's called a cloud forest for a reason - you could just watch clouds rolling in and out in minutes. Wake up an you can see hundreds of meters away and ten minutes later the whole town of Santa Elena is covered in clouds.
We also did a quick pit-stop at the Capital San Jose and at this point I was getting a fever.. made the bus rides to Puerto Viejo so much more enjoyable! 4 days at Puerto Viejo were spent inside, sick, but luckily the weather was bad so we did not miss a lot.
Bridge walking in Monteverde, Costa Rica
Jungle layers
Monteverde, Costa Rica
And then we have Richie on a bridge
aaand Heini on a bridge (We held out a massive crowd of German tourists taking these "oh I'm so alone" photos. We were not alone.)
Casually walking in the jungle.
Richie and a ficus tree
Happy climber
As we just went through the second season of Stranger Things, this really reminded me of the Upside Down..
Hiking essentials: Kindle and Valium
Hello, it’s us, the hiking couple again. Only that from know we should come up with new attributes to define us because we are done with hiking. For a while. Or at least hiking volcanoes. “Temples in Asia”- limit has been reached and we need to look for new ways to spend our days.
The laziness (or total lack of) planning our steps further than next day has led to some inefficiencies during our travels. Now this meant four nights in León. León is a nice enough place but after you have toured all the cathedrals, done tens of takes on the popular blogger-pose known as “look what I dropped” and ate all the bagels at El Desayunazo- restaurant there is not that much to do. In order to kill a Sunday we opted in getting a hungover from Saturday’s drinking and watched way too many Game of Thrones-episodes.
Most people come to León for the volcano boarding adrenaline experience. Our minds still thought also that we love hiking and thus we signed up for an overnight trek to El Hoyo, “The Hole” which included the volcano boarding, climbing up another volcano and camping there and swimming in a crater lake. Sounds like a piece of cake after all the kilometers and climbing we have done so far, let’s go!
Volcano boarding was something I almost did not want to do with my injured shoulder. I’d rather not roll down a rocky volcano slope with a dislocated shoulder, it’s just not something I would call fun. But after talking to a lot of people it became obvious that you can come down really, really, really slow. If you want to (and sometimes even if you didn’t).
And now I can say it’s not scary or dangerous at all! Unless you clock 70km/h. When you get to the bottom of the slope, you just want to go again, and faster.
When all the other groups headed back to León to start drinking, we picked up our backbags carrying 10 litres of water and food (which included a massive pumpkin, damn that thing must have weighed tons!) and set off for our second volcano climb. Hiking in Nicaragua is quite different to Guatemala in one aspect – heat. When it’s at least 30 degrees it’s not that fun to climb up carrying all your water for the next days. Luckily I was the one carrying Day 1 lunch so I got rid of couple of kilos right away!
Best part about this hike was our camping location. Beautiful area with beautiful views. If you don’t mind couple of horses and cows who might come in to your tent or even being trampled by cows (as had happened to one British teens group earlier) it’s a perfect setting.
Our spot for the night
Sunrise at the top
Company at the top
Since we are already somewhat experienced trekkers and have accumulated some equipment in terms of boots, pants and poles, it’s time to move on to some expert recommendations on what to bring with you on a hike. For us the first tips are a Kindle and Valium if your body does not think waking up at 6am and hiking all day is enough reasons to go to sleep. Not in every man’s backpack you say? Well, there’s a lot of free time during these hikes, especially if you are fast and reach the campsites early. Instead of being social and getting to know your fellow hikers, a Kindle will always offer something to do. And help you (me) to reach your reading goal for the year. And where wouldn’t you bring Valium really? Just joking, maybe.
Dinner preparations
The next day we woke up to some delighting sounds of nature – 18-year-old British girls screaming “wake up, wake up” at 4am – and watched the sunrise over the Lake Xolotlán.
Not bad
Descent and walk to the crater lake for a swim wasn’t as easy as I thought and running into the lake was a welcomed break after 3 sweaty hours in the jungle and sun.
On our way down, lake waiting for us
Finally here!
In summary, this was a nice hike but nothing I would call a “must-do” and hiking in the heat is just not something I like very much. We have packed our hiking gear to the bottom or our bags and doubt it’ll be taken out in a while. Time to do what I do best which is:
A) Reading at the beach
B) Reading in a hammock
C) Reading at the pool side
D) Checking our budget (we are under budget, yay!)
Hiking saga continues
The hikey people are back! We were almost lost roaming empty Western Australia beaches and flat-bottomed gorges where hiking boots, not to mention hiking pants, became obsolete and turned into space-wasting items I did not wish to carry anymore.
After a devastating realisation (panting during salsa classes) of how out of shape we truly were the hiking adventures started to scare me. What if climbing Acatenango is a repeat try from 8 years ago in Bali where we set out to climb Gunung Agung during the rainy season and I was not exactly fit for it after weeks of partying in Kuta? Me and my friends still refer to this adventure with disgust and resentment because after climbing three hours in pitch black dark, heavy rain, holding onto a torch while trying to climb vertical rocks we had to turn back. Because it was dangerous. Because “we don’t really recommend doing this during the rainy season” (after they took our money). Screw you Agung.
Luckily Acatenango could not have been more different. Good paths, sunny weather and professional hiking gear got us to the base camp in about 4 hours. Steep climb and definitely not an easy one, not sure if the Bali-me would have made it so effortlessly.
Approaching our base camp
The only thing left to do at the base camp is to look at the Volcano Fuego and take photos. Sometimes I wish I’d have more patience to figure things out well before I have an actual need for it and this time it was my precious camera. I sat on our hostel googling “how to take volcano photos” and a staff member was happy to show me couple of things. And only this way, 7 months after buying the camera, did I found out that my camera actually has shutter speeds up to 60 seconds (I thought 1 second was the longest..). Now I mourn for all the amazing starry sky photos I could have taken in Western Australia!
So, considering I just learned this and never actually experimented with longer exposure times I’d say couple of these volcano photos turned up quite nicely. Of course I missed at least five massive eruptions that would have made even greater photos but then again I heard some people going up there multiple times and before getting the money-shot. I don’t think I have the patience to become an actual photographer, too much waiting around with your thumb on the launcher. Although this part got much comfier when I discovered I can actually use my phone to take the pics remotely. No more sitting on the ground finger placed on the shutter! Downside was that campfire chats distracted me from the volcano and thus I missed many of the opportunities Fuego offered us that night.
The moneyshot!
Second part of the Acatenango-trip is to wake up around 3.30am to hike to the top (3,973 m) to watch the sunrise. Climbing volcanic sand should be familiar to us after Mt. Doom excursion but doing it in the dark without snow adds some excitement to it.
We were able to see Lake Atitlan from the top (for 2 seconds before the clouds rolled in)
When you finally make it to the top, you freeze your balls of. I brought all the warm clothes I have with me and got a proper jacket from the hostel and I was still struggling at the top. Wind makes -2 C feel like – 15 and taking photos is another type of challenge when you don’t want to take your gloves off. The views are definitely worth all of the suffering and I am just glad we got to see so much as some groups only see clouds or even worse, they get rained on for two full days in addition to not seeing anything..
Walking cinnamon bun at the top wearing everything she owns
"The tower sits in the front"
Do you remember the times when Facebook would ask you to write a "status update"? Yes, so do I. But my technologically challenged companion did not know what a status update is. And how difficult it actually was to try describe to someone that has not spend the last 10 years of their life on Facebook..
I feel like this blog is more fitting for our status update. Since food poisonings in Isla Holbox we have been up to a lot. But at the same time not much. Mainly chilling and documenting less of our lives.
- We traveled the rest of Mexico.
A whole week in Tulum, visiting cenotes, hitch hiking (OMG how could we do that in Mexico?!), a lot of rum and cokes at our hostel
Blurry Garden of Eden- cenote
Went to Chichen Itza, more about this can be found on the Ruins-post.
- We did a quick pit stop at Belize.
Quick because it's expensive. Shame since this really limits the places people see. Most of the backpacker folks we met stopped only at Caye Caulker and blasted through the rest of the country straight to Guatemala.
We did the (rainy) Caye Caulker for three nights. Liked it more than Isla Holbox, maybe due to absence of blood-thirsty mosquitoes but would not spend more time there. We opted out from the snorkelling tour everyone did, mainly because it was a lot of dollars but also because every tour operator feeds the sharks, the fish, the sting rays... The time of this type of interfering tourism should come to an end.
Sand of Caye Caulker
Other town worth mentioning is San Ignacio that's famous for all the cave action. Only I did not get any as the first day the ATM caves were closed due to rain (surprise, surprise!) and the second day I was suffering from food poisoning. Yes, again. Richie did the Crystal Cave-tour as ATM was still closed an apparently it was epic, awesome, amazing - use any word Americans would use to describe a regular day at work. Very challenging and adventurous so not sure how I would have endured there..
Keeping rain at Xunantunich ruins
Highlight of Belize was our hostel (D's) and specifically the owner in San Ignacio. The friendliest, most helpful guy we have met. Drove us to the ruins, helped us when we were down with the food poisoning, helped Richie get a refund from the tour operator who tried to shaft me, bought lots of beers for him and Richie while I was in bed with food poisoning, drove Richie around looking for food (which he got food poisoning from) and gave us a lift to the Guatemalan border the next day, while we had food poisoning. The hostel/guesthouse was awesome quality for money, never seen a bathroom like that in a hostel..
- Next up was Guatemala and as of today, 3th of November, we are still here.
Tiny town of Flores in the middle of a lake, Star Wars- ruins (officially known as Tikal), looong bus rides to and from Lanquín, a cave tour I was able to attend, the blue pools of Semuc Champey, the cold town of Antigua, tiny turtles and a resident mini-pig called Potato at El Paredon and finally studying Spanish and living with a local family here at Quetzalenango (Xela) for the past week.
Pools of Semuc Champey
Hostel views at Lanquin
My favourite phrase came to life at the beach destination El Paredon. After spending three days mainly laying at the pool/beach/bed and drinking beer it was time to go home in a small shuttle. Our fellow ride companions asked if the front seat was free and the driver answered "The tower sits in the front". I think all of you know who the aforementioned tower is..
All the turtles in El Paredon!
Sunrise at El Paredon
Quetzaltenango (Xela) views (and the tower)
What's next?
We have wrapped up our Spanish studies and instead of returning to the warmth of beach destinations, we chose to embark on a 7-day trip over the mountain ranges to a small town called Todos Santos to celebrate Día de Los Muertos. And four of the seven days we were hiking.
We haven't really hiked since New Zealand and we were out of breath after salsa classes. In other words I think we are in a shit shape.
But now the hike is over so we did make it! Photos and stories to follow once all the laundry is sorted, boots cleared from mud and once we've had couple of nights with more than 5 hours of sleep...