Catch-up post

Well, didn't manage to get online long enough to write an entry since the beginning of our time in Salta, so have quite a lot to catch up on... I started doing one with photos but it was taking waaay too long to upload the pictures, so have given up on that and will try to just quickly bullet-point some highlights before I forget...

• Our four day excursion around the Salta/Jujuy region was awesome, we pretty much saw all the scenery we wanted to see including the 'Las Flechas' rock formations, the coloured mountains - coloured because of the different minerals in the soil, red for iron, green for copper, etc, the cactus national park, and the salt plains. I was probably as impressed as when we went to the grand canyon.
• A non-highlight of the trip was getting altitude sickness when we arrived at the famous bridge/viaduct thing of the 'train to the clouds'. After a few painful hours in the car we stopped in a lovely little town, and I left some literal altitude sickness behind in a gutter outside a really nice church built in the 1600s. Yum. At least I felt better afterwards!
• Saw quite a few animals on our trip as well, including vicuñas, guanacos, and of course llamas. Also visited a goat dairy farm where they make goat cheese, which wasn't too bad! Unfortunately a bit difficult to transport back to NZ so we didn't buy anything in the shop.
• Speaking of our trip, our driver/guide was a guy called - believe it or not - Billy Smith. Apparently his parents were English even though he grew up in Argentina, and his English wasn't too bad at all. For some reason when we booked the trip I thought he might be a young guy around our age, but turned out he was more of a retiree-grandfather. It was amazing, all the details and numbers he knew about all the places we were seeing etc.
• By now we've found that pretty much every restaurant in Argentina has the same menu... grilled meat, bad pasta, bad pizza, and some sides (salad with tomato and lettuce, or limp fries). Of course when we landed in Buenos Aires we didn't really appreciate this, the parilla (grilled meat) was still novel and overall pretty good, but after two weeks it gets a bit old... As James said, he could walk into most restaurants and pretty much name every item there'll be on the menu by now. We've had some great meals, sure - the grilled goat I had in Cachi was really nice, and even the grilled river fish I had for dinner in San Ignacio last night was perfectly cooked, but they really don't seem that keen on variety in flavour or type of meal here.
• The most interesting habits of the locals, particularly around San Ignacio, is drinking yerba mate (pronounced mah-TAY), a herbal tea. The interesting part is that it seemed that every second person we saw in that town had a cup in their hand, and a thermos of water to refill their cup when required. I guess it's a bit like guys who go on the road with a big thermos of pre-made coffee and keep drinking it - but not something we do with cups of tea or cappucino-type coffee in NZ...
• San Ignacio in general was really nice, the main attraction were some really well-preserved Jesuit ruins, but overall the thing we liked was the fact that everyone was so friendly and it just felt so much more safe, most of the houses didn't have big gates and bars on all the windows for a change, and the guy whose hostel we stayed in was super friendly and helpful, despite the fact it was actually the cheapest place in the whole trip!
• The bus ride from Salta to San Ignacio was pretty comfortable, they seemed to have a weird-movie theme (Shutter Island, The Box) which morphed into a Cameron Diaz theme (What Happens In Vegas). After breakfast they started a movie I hadn't even ever heard of before called 'The Circuit'. Michelle Trachtenberg was the only person I recognised in it - not a good sign... Fortunately we left the bus before it had gotten too far into it. 

Anyway, have to head off to dinner now, tomorrow we're off to see the Argentine side of Iguazu Falls, then will cross over to the Brazilian side, stay the night, see that, and then fly to Rio! Can't believe we're almost finished with the trip...

18 hour bus trip... yay?

Just two more hours before our 18 hour bus trip up to Salta,  thankfully James is feeling a bit better now so hopefully he'll survive the journey... anyway, off to get some breakfast now - if only they had proper bread and a toaster, that always seems to be an issue in non-English speaking countries...

Crossing the Andes to Mendoza

The bus trip from Santiago to Mendoza probably had the most spectacular scenery we'd ever seen by bus, really glad we managed to do that - on top of that, we got to watch Man of the House, Daddy Daycare, and The Italian Job dubbed in Spanish, awesome!

After we arrived in Mendoza we found our way to the hostel pretty easily, and went out to a cheap, and as it turned out, dodgy pasta place for dinner... James and Mark had lasagne, which apparently tasted fine but James' in particular wasn't really that heated-through, while Bruce had ravioli and I had a paella. More on the dodginess later...

The next day James and I joined a winery tour from our hostel while Mark and Bruce explored the city. We visited three places with a five-course lunch at the second one, reeeally nice. Our favourite was probably the first, as the winery guide was really knowledgeable, and we ended up buying two bottles to take with us.

The view from Pulenta winery

We had the five-course lunch at Ruca Malen winery, then the last tasting was at a small boutique winery run by a French couple. This is where it all went pear-shaped for James as he started to succumb to what turned out to probably be food poisoning, probably from the ill-prepared dinner the night before. We've thought it through and I can't think of anything else it could have been... 

So at the moment things are still not that great, hopefully he recovers enough by 11am tomorrow when we have to start our 18 hour bus journey to Salta... =(

New York, New York

It's great to finally be in NYC! I say 'finally' even though I've only really been here for three days, but we've been planning this for ages after all.

We took the Lucky Star Bus (a shame they don't have 'gold' in their name) from Boston to NY Chinatown, it was super convenient and very cheap (only $15 per person). Am also very proud that we managed to get from Chinatown to our hotel using the subway, bags and all - apparently they haven't heard of lifts in these stations, or wide turnstiles for wheelchairs & people with baggage. I do miss HK in that respect... but I guess this system is a lot older than that!

I know I showed some people this hotel which we had originally booked, and it was going to be a spacious room with a fantastic view of Manhattan, etc. However, after looking at it on Google Maps and reconsidering the inconvenience of basically being ten blocks away from the closest subway station, I decided to change to this one instead, ended up being cheaper and much more conveniently located - only two blocks from the subway.

However. I guess there's a reason it's this cheap, as we ended up with a teensy-tiny room with a bona-fide anti-view... I gathered that the hotel is completely chocka-full at the moment, but am hoping that during the weekdays they might be able to move us somewhere else...

Still! It's definitely exciting to finally be here, we'll head out and grab our NY Pass now, and also some dinner, and get our teeth into the proper sightseeing tomorrow.

Back to the Future

Here we are at KLIA, where there's free wifi, beef noodles, clean toilets, people who all understand English properly and don't do a useless head-wobble as an answer, no cows wandering around the terminal, no stench of poo and rubbish everywhere, no beggars, no hawkers, etc, etc... Wow!

Our last experience with the Indian public transport system didn't exactly leave a glowing impression, either. Basically a bus journey from Mamallapuram to Chennai Airport which should've taken two hours ended up taking three and a bit, there was some horrendous traffic jam and for a while we thought we might even miss the plane, but fortunately it didn't come to that.

Okay, we may have been a bit harsh on India, but it is what it is - a developing country, and we've still really enjoyed our trip in its entirety, but we're definitely glad to be back in civilisation! Now we have another ten hours to wait in this airport before our connecting flight to Auckland, fortunately we have internet and power so we should be set! There are still tons of things I want to write about the trip, which I'll probably continue to on this blog even after we get back to NZ. 

Cheap != Best

Sea Shore Restaurant, Mamallapuram (a.k.a. Mahabalipuram)

Here we are at the beach again, kind of reminiscent of Goa, except with slightly less polluted skies (thanks to the recent rains) and maybe a bit more amenities such as shops, restaurants and guest houses more conveniently located in a cluster.

It poured with rain basically the entire time we were in Pondicherry (cleared up the day we left) but it didn't really dampen our spirits much, since there wasn't much to see there anyway. Much of the time was spent hanging around in Coffee.com, and talking to Davide, our new Italian friend. Other highlights included seeing giant sewer rats, one dead, and later another live one which had a body about a foot long. When we saw it, Davide exclaimed 'Incredible India!', lol.

Yesterday at the Pondicherry bus station we encountered a bunch of unhelpful people in the effort to get to Mamallapuram, and also a fragrant drunk who had puke all down his arm. A security guard squirted a whole bottle of water at him, after which he stumbled away, barfing periodically on the ground. Classy.

When we got to the guest house I'd booked over the phone, I immediately got a sinking feeling when I saw the sign outside that said 'cheap and best', because that usually translates to 'crap hole', and we were proven right once again. All the dogs barking, people chipping away at rocks, the nearby mosque with its prayer calls and some idiots yelling at each other throughout the night didn't really help either. In the morning a monkey nonchalantly wandered onto the landing outside our room and started tipping over bins to look for food. Fortunately we've found a much nicer place now closer to the beach, hopefully it should be a bit quieter as well...

Today we visited the main two tourist attractions in Mamallapuram, the Shore Temple and Five Rathas, which were very underwhelming. It also didn't help that every time you got close to either of them you had to pass through a gauntlet of hawkers, beggars, and people offering to be your guide. I totally don't care about being rude anymore though, any semblance of politeness is only used by those people as an opening for pushing you even harder for their own purposes, so it's better to just ignore them completely, which we're very skilled at doing now.

Will We Ever Learn?

Rama Guest House, Hampi

Long (and potentially tedious) story short, we got very sunburnt after our first day on Benaulim Beach, and lied to/ripped off by a travel agency in Hampi. I was going to explain it all in all the gory details, but James said everyone reading this blog must be getting pretty sick of all my whining by now, so instead I'll try to focus on the positives...

It was nice being at a beach where the water was warm enough to comfortably swim in, unlike New Zealand! However, NZ wins in terms of having blue skies, and no hawkers harrassing you the entire time. Well, and the beaches themselves are just much nicer in general. Being in Goa actually made me want to go to the Pacific Islands, because there the water's warm and the sky's not full of pollution. It was nice just to relax for a bit, we got a lot of reading done, though I had to abandon this book on Goa I'd been trying to read due to it being a complete snorefest. On the train from Margao to Hospet I started on Papillon by Henri Charrière, which I'm really enjoying. Basically it's the autobiography of this guy who got falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to life in a penal colony in French Guiana. He repeatedly escapes and gets recaptured, and has tons of adventures on the way. It actually kind of makes me want to watch Prison Break again, though this guy had it a lot tougher than Michael Schofield! I highly recommend this book, might write more of a review later on when I'm done.

Today we explored the Hampi ruins, first by a walking tour and then a bicycle tour, found out more wacky things about Hinduism from our very informative guide, and took a lot of photos (as usual!). We came across this restaurant across the road from our guest house which actually serves Vegemite and Marmite toast!! Wow. James was set. Well, except they didn't actually have any Vegemite, but Marmite was good enough, compared with our usual choice of parantha or jam toast. Actually they made a pretty good pizza too, my fettucine alfredo turned out to be completely sauceless, but otherwise tasted alright. They don't seem to have any good cheeses here though, just this very mild/near-tasteless stuff which is usually serve grated.

As the high-season approaches we're coming across more and more tourists as well, at the Margao train station we even came across the first other Kiwi we've seen in our entire trip! Naturally she asked where in NZ we were from, I said Auckland, and then she, again, quite naturally, asked where in Auckland? I had to pause, and then blurted out 'Ellerslie', because we were both too ashamed to admit that we technically lived in Remmers... After that she said she was from Papatoetoe, so I was quite glad I did that temporary disowning. I dunno, I just imagine that most people have automatic preconceptions of what Remuera people are like, and I don't want them to think I'm some sort of snob, even if I went to Dio... Ah well, I guess that girl will never know the ugly truth!

Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but for the Indian tourists, foreigners seem to be part of the attraction of going to touristy places - numerous times we've had random people go up to us to shake our hand or take photos or videos with/of us. When we were on the beach in Goa, this group of guys came up to ask if they could take a photo with us, we said 'okay', and then they all came up to us and bunched around, the friend who was holding the camera - well, turns out it was actually a camcorder... I assumed it had some sort of still image function and we both waited for some sort of clicking motion, but it never came, so we were just cheesily posing in front of a video... nice! After a while they finally stopped, though they kept shaking our hands, even after one person had shook our hand, they would go away, and then come back for a second helping. Right... At least they're not as bad as people wanting to sell you stuff or beg from you! Actually, you know how I mentioned that in some tourist attractions there's random people asking if you want to take a photo of them, and then if you do, you have to pay? Well, this Italian guy we met on the train said that after this bunch of Indian people took a photo with him, he jokingly said 'that'll be 50Rs', and then the Indian tourists actually gave him the money! LOL. We should try that next time...