Time to finish off the blog

We're back in Sweden and I have started work again. We have beautiful weather at the moment with snow and blue skies. I have moved in with Jenny in Stockholm and so far so good!

After our Galapagos trip, we did a short jungle tour and stayed with a shaman in the jungle in Ecuador. Quite fun except that we got bitten to death by some sort of insect that lived in our bed, there was hardly a mosquito to be seen but we still got loads of bites!

Then we left Ecuador and had a short trip in New York, where we went up the Empire State building during the evening and had a walk around 5th Avenue and Central Park. We had a bit of trouble with the flight home (again!) and got home a day later then we had planned. I don't think I can tell the whole story again, I've already told it to countless people so most of you must have heard about it.

So to finish, some winter pictures that Jenny took in Linköping. Enjoy and thanks for following our trip.

Galapagos

We are back from our Galapagos trip and have also done a jungle trek, the day after we returned from the Galapagos. More on the jungle trek later.

We had an early start and took a taxi at 5:30 to the airport, where we met some of our group for the first time. We had already met Mark from Austria in the bank a few days before. You have to pay with cash for your boat so we took out 1800 dollars each and got it in 20 dollar bills. It was a huge wad of money and quite scary to be carrying it around Quito. As we were struggling to cram it into our money belts, Mark asked if we were going to the Galapagos and then which boat. And by coincidence we were all travelling on the Samba!

After a fairly pleasant flight we arrived at Baltra, the only hitch being that we left our sandals on the plane. Juan our guide met us and we took a short bus ride to the harbour and that's where we saw our first sea lions.



We took the dinghy out to the Samba and then it was off to South Plaza island, a tiny island beside Santa Cruz. We landed with our dinghy in the midst of sea lion colony, our guide even had to shoo one out of the way so that we could get out of the dinghy.



Then it was down to Puerto Ayora, the biggest town in the Galapagos and located on the south side of Santa Cruz. I took this picture of two pelicans having an argument from the boat while in Puerto Ayora.



We had a day there, first going to the Darwin Centre and checking out Lonesome George and all the other tortoises. George is the last Pinta island tortoise and there is a $20000 reward if anyone finds a female Pinta tortoise for him. They also bring up tortoises from islands which are goat or rat infested; when they are small tortoises cannot compete against such predators so they live for a couple of years at the Darwin Centre until they are big enough.


Then in the afternoon we went took a bus to the highlands of Santa Cruz to look at tortoises in the wild. Quite amazingly we had just got out of the bus and we saw this rather unusual tortoise.



Later on we saw some other tortoises that were more along the lines of what we had expected.



On the third day, we travelled to the island of Espanola during the night, we had good weather and nobody onboard became seasick. We had our first wet landing (we had to take off our shoes and socks) and landed on a white coral strand filled with sealions. There were lots of sealion pups that came really close and sniffed at our legs. Then most of them decided to have a nibble at my shorts as well.









After the beach, we had our first snorkeling and we got to swim with 4 or 5 sealions. They were very playful and one of them had a little nibble on my flippers. We have some pictures but we took them with a disposable underwater camera so can't post them on the blog.

After snorkeling and lunch, we travelled to another site on Espanola to see the albatrosses. It was coming towards the end of their mating season and most had already left. But we did see an amazing courtship dance between a male and two females. It's a bit like fencing, first the male opens his beak and then the beak fight begins. It seems very formal, like it has lots of rules that have to be obeyed.







Jenny could sit this close to a boobie without disturbing it!


We also saw an extremely lazy iguana, looks like he was climbing up on the stone and decided to have a nap along the way.


And we saw our first pile of iguanas!


On the fourth day, we woke up in the morning to see Florean Island through our port hole. We could see beautiful blue water and sunny weather. The water was really clear and we could see brown puffer fish swimming around the boat. We had another wet landing on a brown sand beach and then we walked in the sweltering heat to the flamingo lake. We were able to see the trails they left while drudging through the mud at the bottom of the lake.



On the other side of the island, we arrived at the turtle nesting beach and although we saw a few turtles swimming just off the beach, none of them came in to nest. Nesting is usually carried out when it is dark. Both of us got sunburnt by the very strong sun despite our suncream.

Then it was time for our daily snorkel where we saw white-tipped sharks for the first time. They were resting in a cave which I was able to dive down to and peek in at them. They were quite large, from 1 to 2.5 metres but totally uninterested in the human snorkellers around them.

After another huge lunch, we landed at Post Office Bay. This bay was a form of postal service for the whalers during the 1700s and 1800s. If a boat was travelling back to England, they would collect all the post there before leaving. An American captain used it to track down and capture whaling ships during the American-England war, which was pretty smart of him. These days, tourists do the same thing by leaving post and hand-delivering any they find that are near to where they live. Jenny left a postcard for her parents and we took 3 to deliver in Stockholm.



So a bit red and sore, we went back to the boat and began our trip to Isabela the largest island in the Galapagos. We had a few hours relaxing on the boat getting even more sunburnt (although it wasn't too bad except for the tops of my feet that got scorched in the 15 minutes I was without suncream).


We saw a couple of dolphins leaping out of the water, but they never came anywhere near the boat.

The first thing I saw when getting up in the morning was a penguin swimming around the boat, the first I'd seen. Isabela has a very different landscape from the other older islands, its volcanic origins are much more evident. Take away the plants and it could be some sort of moonscape.



Then we saw some sharks that had been trapped in a pool by the receding tide, the same type that we had snorkeled with the previous day.





Following our usual schedule, after lunch we travelled to another site on Isabela and visited the mangrove swamps. On the way there we saw a couple of penguins and blue-footed boobies.



I got to do a bit of kayaking around the mangroves and could glide with the green turtles in the almost silent marine forest.


The day afterwards, we travelled to Fernandina, the youngest island in the Galapagos and with the most active volcano in the world. Here for the first time we saw active iguanas! Usually iguanas just lie around and sneeze, they don't even react if you nearly step them. But on Fernandina, they swam, fought and moved.



Jenny and Melissa check out a turtle here.


As you can see, a member of KISS has been reincarnated as an iguana.


Another iguana close-up, isn't he gorgeous.


Jenny fixing her hair while Juan, our guide, talks about Fernandina.


Flightless cormorants drying their wings.


The Crossing The Equator party, Bert goes mad!


A really cute baby sealion waiting for his mother and taking a training swim in a rock pool.


Group picture at Bartolome Island, the last full day.


Sunset over Santiago Island and on our Galapagos trip.

Radio Silence

Tomorrow we are off to the Galapagos Islands, so there will be no more updates under the next 8 days. But after that we are going on a jungle trip so we should have millions of photos to show and many stories to tell.

Not much to tell since our trip to the salt lake desert, Jenny has been sick for more than a week which has meant mostly staying in the hostel. She got sick in La Paz (for the second time!) so we didn't see much there. We flew to Lima and she got even worse, so didn't see much there either. Then we travelled by bus to Quito where Jenny finally seems to be getting better apart from a fever outbreak last night. She had a temperature of over 39 degrees, but the fever seems to gone today. So we are crossing fingers (Ireland) and holding our thumbs (Sweden) for luck and hoping she will be able to snorkell tomorrow. We will take it easy today and hopefully she will be fighting fit for the rest of the trip.

Salar de Uyuni

One of our major highlights that we had planned was the trip to the Salar in Bolivia. We arrived at the town of Uyuni on the bus from Potosi and only had one breakdown on the way! Uyuni looks like a town created either for tourism or salt mining. It doesn't really look like anyone actually lives there, it is just a collection of travel agencies and hotels. We had met a group of people in Potosi and met them again in Uyuni, so we formed our own group and off we went the next day.

After a quick stop at a salt mining village on the edge of the Salar, we came to the largest salt lake desert in the world. It looks like some weird mixture of desert and snow but it tastes like normal salt.

We had a really great group for the first three days, a real international group with three guys from Portugal, England and Italy as well as Michele from Switzerland (did you get your salt llama back?). Then they fecked off to Chile and Jenny and I returned to Uyuni and got thrown in with another group, who turned out to be very nice as well. So we had a lot of luck this time.

We saw lots of flamingos, some amazing coloured lakes but the best was the first day in the Salar. Lots and lots of salt!


Posing on piles of salt.


Trick photo, playing with perspective. That's Jenny that has been shrunk and is standing on Guy's and Michele's hands.


Salt hexagons formed when a layer of water on the surface begins to evapourate and leaves little hexagon shaped pools.


Me in a hot spring with my beautiful farmer's tan and the rest of the group. I was quickest off the draw but everyone except Jenny and Michele had a bathe. It was just the right temperature.


A flamingo!


More flamingos!


The rock tree.


Boiling geyser, our guide said they reach a temperature of 200 degrees. Jenny and I got splashed with mud but luckily it didn't hurt!


Perfect for ice skating!

Down in the mines of Cerro Rico

I think the tour which has had the biggest impact on me in South America, is the tour into the mine near Potosi in Bolivia. The mountain where the mine is, is called Cerro Rico, Rich Mountain in English, and was named by the Spanish due to the fact that they found veins of almost pure silver there. They exploited the mita system of the Incas (a system whereby every peasant had to give a few months of their life to help on some big project i.e. building roads) and worked thousands of indians to death in the mines and then sent all the silver back to Europe.

And it seems that 300 years later, not a lot has changed. These days most of the pure silver is gone and instead groups of miners (15 - 50 men and boys) mine with dynamite and sell ore which contains between 2 and 5 percent silver for 25 dollars per tonne. The rich Western mining companies buy this ore, process it, dump the cyanide in the river and sell the silver for lots of money. The miners are cooperatives that work for themselves and therefore do not invest in new equipment or health/safety measures as they cost too much money. The techniques they use are very similar to those of 300 years ago. For example, to make a hole in the rock for the dynamite stick it takes one person 3-6 hours to do it using a chisel and hammer. Insanity and mental health issues are very common among miners, not surprising when you have to tap a hole in a rock for 12 hours a day in total darkness and with limited air.

We did the tour with two ex-miners who were both totally mad. All the miners joke all the time, and it seems to be the only way if one wants to survive down there. They all have nicknames that are handed from father to son, our guide's nickname was llama face! And his brothers are all also called llama face, so oldest llama face, youngest llama face etc. We talked to our guide about why he became a miner and what it was like. The reasons for becoming a miner are there are no other jobs, it pays well (300$ a month before tax), because everyone in his family is a miner but mostly because everyone hopes to find a vein of pure silver. If a group finds a vein, it is like winning the lottery, they'll be able to retire and buy a couple of shops and restaurants, nice cars and support their whole family for the rest of their lives. It last happened 13 years ago, I think they might have a better chance with lottery tickets.

The actual tour took about 6 hours and it was like entering another world. This is isn't like any clean, modern, European mine. It is dark, dank, narrow and you have to walk bent in half most of the time as the ceiling is so low. Several times we have to resort to crawling on hands and knees. Their is no air and what air there is smells of dynamite fumes. We crawled down 3 levels and in the meantime lost two of our group due to claustrophobia. We then got to try shovelling some ore into buckets, I think I shovelled for maybe a minute or two and I have no idea how the miners manage to keep that up for a whole day (which can be anything from 8 hours to 24 hours depending on how much money they need, everyone will be working long shifts coming up to Christmas to be able to afford presents for their children). There is no air down there so it took about a whole minute to get my breath back after the shovelling. All I can think about is imagine how much easier this could be, one little drill and that guy wouldn't have to take 6 hours to make a hole, it would take just a few minutes. They might be earning more than average but they are also decreasing their lifespan, most won't make it past the age of 50. Lung cancer is the big killer due to all the unhealthy fumes in the mines (there is no ventilation).

The tour ended with a dynamite demostration and again the miners just joking and throwing the lit dynamite around. So I got to hold a lit stick of dynamite in my hand, although Jenny didn't get the picture. Afterwards, it was back to the hostal where it took a long shower to get all the dirt out. But we continued to talk about it for days afterwards, even if I knew Bolivia was really poor, it's not the same as actually seeing it.


The blasted, ruined mountain of Cerro Rico. It's like something out of The Lord of the Rings except for the blue sky...


Cyanide being used to separate the metals from the waste, the metals float to the top and the rest is thrown straight into the river.


Efra, our guide and us outside one of the mines of Cerro Rico.


Two miners pushing a one tonne wagon full of ore. All that effort is worth just 25 dollars. A group of 15 miners can cart out about thirty tonnes a day.



Making a hole for the dynamite, the metal of the chisel glowed after he struck it with the hammer. The miner had been chiselling for two hours and reckoned that he was half way done. He aimed to do two holes that day.


The only way the miners can keep going is through chewing coca leaves, otherwise it is not physically possible to work 24 hours in a row. The miner has several handfuls of coca leaves in his cheek to create a bulge like that.


Shovelling rock on one of the lower levels. Observe the amount of dust in the air and the miners never use masks to protect themselves.


That's me trying my hand at shovelling, and it was tough going let me tell you!