The Chilean Pipeline

While in Chile with Chris and Lacey, we decided some surfing was definately in order. We went to the only surfshop in Vina del Mar, and they didn't rent boards but suggested we call a dude named Pato who rents them and gives lessons. So we got all hooked up to do some surfing the next day. We were a little concerned about getting cold cause the ocean was FREEZING!!

So we all load into Pato's awesome surf van and drive for about an hour down the coast. We passed lots of beautiful beaches with pretty good waves, but kept driving. Then we entered an industrial park... we look at each other... Pato stops the van, everybody out. The beach from here is covered in litter and there looks like the remains of an old metal boat washed up in the shallows. Pato assures us that we're not surfing right here, we have to walk for a bit to get to his secret spot.

We walk down the beach towards a huge pipeline that was part of the industrial plant. This is the spot. "The Spot" was right next to a pier supporting the pipeline, which had huge tanker ships at the end of it! There was steam coming off of the water... it was like a bathtub! And although I should have been appalled by the probably toxic hot water, it was the first time surfing that I haven't been totally freezing! And the waves were amazing, we all agreed it was one of our best surf days ever!

Then we found this huge dead squid on the beach! Yummmm...

So, I'm back in Vancouver now... still pretty out of it with some jet lag and culture shock. Sorry if I haven't gotten in touch with you, don't have a phone at the moment. But I will write more about readjusting to North America momentarily... like once that occurs. If it ever occurs...

Chao!

Kate

let me reminisce once more...

Sorry, I really am obsessed with Patagonia! Here are a few more examples why!! By the way, I did write a real blog entry, see below.

This crazy looking formation is called the Shark Fin and apparently it´s one of the "easier" places to start climbing. Gulp!

The next supermodel for Black Diamond (climbing equipment company)?

Maybe I have already found my dream job!

the final countdown...

Wow... only 3 days left of my epic voyage! I´ve been meaning to write, but the last couple weeks have been pretty busy with surfing (hillarious surf saga including photos to come!), drinking lots of vino and cerveza, biking around in Mendoza winery land, eating steaks, wandering around Buenos Aires, and watching crazy thunderstorms in Uruguay! Unfortunately my camera broke, hence the recent lack of photos. I took these with a disposable camera but luckily they turned out alright! The super sweet photo above is me with Mt FitzRoy in Patagonia... if I ever go missing, this would probably be a good place to start looking for me!!I´ve been having a great time, especially hanging out with Chris and Lacey again, a good segway to returning back to real life in Vancouver. Speaking of which, anyone have any job ideas/ openings for me??!! It´s hard to believe I´ve been gone for almost 6 months... in some respects it feels like yesterday, but in others... ie I´m pretty ready to have more than 3 tshirts and not have to repack my backpack everyday! I feel like I should be writting some deep insights into life and globalness and all that sorta stuff. I´ll let you know once that inspiration comes!!

But anyways... check back soon for my awesome Chile surfing story! And rest assured that I will not return emaciated or with an iron deficiency... thank you Argentinian bovines!

Chao! Kate

Patagonia part II

So I guess I should tell a little bit about those photos I posted. Been in Patagonia for 3 weeks now and I LOVE it! I seriously want to live here! Spent a week backpacking in Torres del Paine NP in Chile (where those pics are from), then another week hiking around El Chalten. That´s where Cerro Torre and Cerro FitzRoy are... pictures hopefully to come soon! The craziest, scariest, and most beautiful mountains I´ve ever seen! It´s even more impressive, because the Patagonian landscape is really flat and boring and kind of depressing to be honest, and then there is this range of insane peaks!

Right now I´m in Bariloche, in the Argentinian Lake District. This place is pretty touristy so I decided to get out and do a few more days of backpacking. The trail I chose ended up being 1500m climbing up loose skree slope, 1500m sliding down loose skree slope, 1500m climbing back up... etc. So, I now have 2 enormous water blisters on the bottoms of both of my big toes, which makes me walk kind of like I imagine penguins walk.

Last night where I camped ended up being the stomping grounds for some pack horses. I could hear them all night and I was a little afraid they were going to trip and fall on my tent and kill me. Luckily they did not. In the morning there were tons of hoof prints everywhere! To reward myself for some hard days of hiking, I just went out and had a Lomito, a sandwich that included: steak, eggs, cheese, onions, lettuce, tomato, mayonaise, and bacon! They sure do know how to eat down here!

Then I walked around town a bit, everyone and their dog is out on the street for Good Friday. The highlight was a chainsaw wood carving show, apparently this is related to Easter? Jesus was a carpenter? Not sure of the connection there. One guy was carving a shepherd, nice and Easter-ish. I didn´t really get the platypus the other guy was making though. Well, it´s art.

Tommorow I´m off to Santiago Chile to meet up with my two awesome Vancouver girls, Chris and Lacey, for my last 2 weeks. Sure to be good times ahead!

Chao!
Kate

PATAGONIA!!!

"...the real Dread Pirate Roberts has been retired for years and living like a king in Patagonia!"

the city that never sleeps

(Here´s me really bored on a 20 hour bus ride!)
Buenos Aires is sooooo cool! And I´m not even a city person. Here´s why:

1. European flair

2. Delicious steaks that practically cut themselves (plus they´re cheap!)

3. You can drink the water and not die!

4. Beer is cheaper than (bottled) water. Plus they have real beer (Stella, Heineken) unlike every other country I´ve been in that has gross watery beer. $1us for 1L of beer!

5. Argentinians are really friendly. Friendliest people I´ve met since Colombia.

6. Half of the people walking down the street look like supermodels.

7. It seems there are 2 men for every woman (single ladies...?)

8. I haven´t been sick since I got here!!

9. They have really good ice cream. Plus these small cake things you can buy in convenience stores that are chocolate with caramel and marshmallow inside and then covered in chocolate. I think I may have found my vice!

Pretty much every night of the week people go out. The typical schedule is go out for dinner around midnight, go to a club at 3am, leave around 7am then go and have a coffee and go to work. Don´t know how people do it! I did, however, manage to go out one night... well I guess it was morning actually. Pretty weird to dance until the sun comes up!

Heading down to Patagonia in two days for some trekking and camping. Have a feeling that I will never want to leave this country...

Kate

Here´s some more pics from the mountains in Bolivia... rapelling down steep snow slopes!

Bolivia = Disease (Yay for the first world!!)

So I think it´s safe to say that pretty much the whole time I was in Bolivia I was sick. And also that everyone I met who was travelling there was also at some point sick. Hence the title. After LaPaz we headed down to do a tour of the Salaar de Uyuni, which is the largest salt flat in the world. It was pretty crazy standing on what seemed like an endless sea of white. The first night we stayed in a hotel that was made of salt, which was pretty posh. But the second night we were pretty much sleeping in a concentration camp! Our driver for the tour hated us, or so it seemed, when he made us get up earlier than all the other people, and refused to stop for us to take pictures. His wife, who happened to be the cook, had what sounded like a nasty case of bronchitis, which made us all feel pretty stoked to eat. There was also the incident of the bag of raw smelly chicken that was under my feet in the car. Yum!

My sickness after the mountain climb got worse and worse, to the point where i was pretty much constantly coughing. Also, I am amazed by the amount of snot that the human body can produce, but it just kept coming. Something from the food, maybe the salmonella chicken, also gave me an awesome case of diahrrea, so I pretty much felt like I was dying. One morning I had this intense pain in my side, I think from coughing so much, but I started worrying that maybe I had appendicitis and would have to have surgery in a sketchy Bolivian hospital, and would get an infection and die alone and dirty... then one of my friends gave me some Valium and I felt much better for the rest of the day!

The last day of the tour we went in these amazing hot springs in a lagoon in the middle of the desert, it was so beautiful. (Our driver, who hated us, wanted to just drive by them and not let us go swimming). We didn´t have bathing suits, so a couple friends and I thought it would be a good idea to go skinny dipping. We were some of the first people there, so it was no big deal. However, by the time we had to get out there were probably around 100 people either in or standing around the pool! So that was a little exciting trying to get out! My one friend very smoothly got a towel around herself only to trip and fall over as she was stepping out...

After the salaar tour, a couple of us went into Chile to a town called San Pedro de Atacama. If anyone ever asks you if you want to go there, say no! It was really hot and deserty and tourist central. In one day we spent on food what would have lasted for over a week in Bolivia! (Although this food was parasite-free, which was a bonus). So my friend Lindsey and I really wanted to get out of the desert and get over to Argentina where it´s green and friendly and we could actually afford to eat. But there are only 2 buses a week that go from San Pedro to Argentina, and, of course, it was sold out until Friday (which was 5 days later). We decided there was no way we could stay in San Pedro for 5 days, both in terms of money and sanity. So we had to look for other means of transportation...

Disclaimer: Mom and any other motherly type figures, if reading on from this point, please be aware that I am currently alive and in good health and do not plan on doing anything else dangerous ever again in my life!

We decided our only means of survival would be to hitch hike. Not many cars drive the desert road from San Pedro to Salta, and there aren´t really any towns in between. So we went to the parking lot where all of the international truckers have to stop to clear customs, and asked every trucker we saw if they were going to Argentina. Day one was unsuccessful, but the second day, the first trucker, Leo, who we talked to agreed to give us a ride. Then one of the border guards gave us a big bag of cookies. Things were looking good!

Leo was really nice, and he also liked to sing Chilean love songs while he was driving, so it was pretty cool. Although his truck had been having troubles and we were driving on average around 30km/h. All of the switches and buttons on his dash board were in English, so he was getting us to translate what they meant. My personal favorite was when he asked what the flashing red button that said "engine warning" meant. But for the most part keeping the speed low the truck seemed to be surviving.

Then we had to go through more customs and Leo had bad papers and couldn´t continue. We got a ride with one of his fellow truckers, but who we were pretty sure hated us because earlier he had asked Leo if one of us could ride with him to keep him awake but we said no. It got dark, and we had really no idea where we were (well, somewhere in Argentina) or where our driver was planning on going. At one point we were pretty much off-roading in his 18-wheeler on this really sketchy road under a bridge and we were afraid maybe he was going to drop us off there. Or sell us to his friends. But it all turned out okay... he dropped us off at a hotel in a town pretty close to our destination, and we felt pretty awesome cause we had just hitch hiked over 500km across two countries!

Now I´m in Salta Argentina, and though I´ve only been in this country for 24 hours I am already in love with the place. It´s clean, organized, parasite-free (so far) and the people are really friendly. I guess maybe spending 4 months in "dirty"(?) countries is making me really appreciate things here, welcome to the first world! I´m really excited to spend approximately the next month in this beautiful country! Heading to Buenos Aires in a couple of days, and then down to Patagonia!!!

Chao

Kate

Alpine Start!!

So, me and three of the boys I´ve been travelling with thought it would be a good idea to climb a mountain here in Bolivia. We set our sights on Huyana Potosi, 6088m (see pic above) and one of the easier peaks in the Cordillera Real, which surrounds LaPaz. The day before leaving, we biked the "world´s most dangerous road", a 60km stretch of highway on the side of a cliff that descends 3500m. The ride was great, but I inhaled a little too much cold air, and as a result had the great pleasure of starting a high altitude climb with a cold :(

We were representing Canada with our group of 3 Canadians and one honorary Canuck from Colorado. The area was soooooo gorgeous... I had a hard time deciding which pictures to put up. The first day our guides were to give us an overview of mountaineering technique. I was thinking self-arrests, how to walk in crampons, that sort of thing. No, actually we went ice climbing on a glacier! Little did I know that this was to prepare us for what was to come!!

The day of the climb we got up at 1am (my first true alpine start) and climbed for 6 hours to reach the summit. There were 3 sections of the route that felt like vertical climbing on snow (well, especially in the dark after 2 hours of sleep!) The final push was a 250m section of more than 50 degrees (see final picture) where the ice axe became essential! I was last so I got totally bombarded with big chunks of snow!

At the top we were rewarded with incredible views of LaPaz, Lake Titikaka, and the surrounding mountains. The air gets pretty thin up there! I was kind of doubting I would make it since I was pretty sick to begin with, even before we got high up. But I guess being stubborn pays off sometimes! Now however I´m sicker than ever with a really bad cold... looking forward to a few days of R&R!

Kate

Hooligans

The last week or so I have been hanging out with a group of about 10 Canucks and Americans, and we´ve been causing some trouble! I think we´re every restaurants´worst nightmare when we show up, and in return they decide to take 3 hours to make spaghetti for us! Peru and Bolivia actually are full of llamas, quite defiant and strange looking animals, as you can see! In LaPaz they sell dried furry llama embroys, which apparently are burned as a sacrifice to Mother Earth. (Sorry, decided not to disturb you all with a photo!) They also like to spit on gringos in the street, I think as a decoy so they can rob you. Little do they know of my spitting prowess!!

Once in Bolivia we all went over to Isla del Sol on Lake Titikaka, at 3800m the highest "navigable" lake in the world (whatever that means). With a name like Titikaka, we couldn´t resist going for a skinnydip! It may be the Island of the Sun, but that lake was COLD!!!