Archive for the ‘RTW2009’ Category

Hasta luego, español

Monday, August 10th, 2009

And so we continue southward onto Portuguese-speaking Brazil. In summary, I think my Spanish skills have consolidated nicely on this trip, to the point where I could almost describe myself as bi-lingual. Almost.

At the end of our Argentine stint in 2007, I expressed disappointment that my skills hadn’t developed further, and I understood that this was due to a lack of immersion: i.e. When you surround yourself with English speaking foreigners (and girlfriend, for that matter) it’s very difficult to break through the fluency barrier.

So I wasn’t expecting much to change this time. And although not much has, another couple of months of activity and problem solving has substantially increased my confidence with the language. My vocabulary might only be fractionally larger, but my ability to pull out the right words at the right time – and comprehend in context – has really excelled.

My yardstick is that now, I never hesitate to approach strangers and ask questions to find answers and solve problems. I don’t have blank, silent moments – I can persist with the interrogation until I can understand the response and gain the necessary information.

That’s undoubtedly a hugely useful tool for traveling. The flip side is that I still cannot have more general, sociable conversation with native speakers. Those can still only skirt around the regular “where are you from”, “how do you like my city” topics.

Portuguese, well that’s another matter entirely. I’ve got the Lonely Planet phrase guide here, and it’s looking rather challenging. But those nasal vowels, phew, what a trip ;-) I think I might enjoy trying.

Baños

Friday, August 7th, 2009

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We had a thoroughly lovely time in Baños, which is a very picturesque town surrounded by volcanoes, lush green countryside and filled with hot srpings and Swiss expats.

Really. It’s funny how the Swiss love to move to other places that are kind of the same as their country side, but where lax smoking laws allow them to light up in restaurants and bars ;-) We even saw a Swiss registered camper-van, presumably on some sort of ambitious drive-around-the-world trip.

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One thing that we must admit about Baños is that it’s a “touristy” sort of place. That word has many connotations, and in our eyes mostly negative, but in this case is was a very welcome thing. Because it allowed us to spend a week sitting in jacuzzis and hot springs several times a day, eating great food in many and varied restaurants. All for prices that were, somehow, lower than the capital Quito.

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As our voyage across Latin America has progressed, we’ve really come to appreciate good tourist infrastructure, even that if results in a place becoming a bit “touristy”. It’s not Europe, though, believe me.

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A funny quirk was the prevalence of public toilets dotted around the (small) town. They were all labeled “S.S.H.H”, a name whose meaning is not easily imagined. Most toilets in Spanish-speaking countries are labeled “Baños”, and so of course we realized that the locals are a bit touchy about about so many toilets sharing the name of their town. For the record, SSHH stands for “servicios higienicios”.

Public toilets scattered all over town? Now that is tourist infrastructure!

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The Galápagos Islands

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

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Not sure why I’ve been procrastinating on this one – it ought to be the easiest blog post of them all, because the pictures will do the talking. There’s not a lot of words I can attach to these islands, other than to say the abundance and closeness of the wildlife is a slightly surreal experience that seemingly can’t be found anywhere else.

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I didn’t take any underwater photos, but suffice to say the snorkeling lived up to expectations with sea turtles, sea lions, sharks and innumerable varieties of fish in extraordinarily dense schools sharing the space with us, interacting to an extent we’ve not seen elsewhere.

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The luxury boat trip (4 days-ish) was definitely worth the extra cash, considering what a large proportion of the total expenses are fixed (flights and national park tax). We still felt quite seasick at times, of course, but the food was superb ;-)

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The major surprise for me was that this time of year the Galapagos Islands get decidedly cold, daytime in the mid 20s and nights probably in the mid to high teens. Bearing in mind that they straddle the equator, I found this odd. Odd also is that it’s currently high season despite cold sea temps, rough seas and poor visibility. Northern hemisphere holiday season, you see.

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The Three Equators – Real and Unreal

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Today we visited the equator. Well in fact we visited three “equators” – one legitimately incorrect, one deliberately fake, and the real thing which runs next to a major road and through a pile of dust, litter and rocks that happened to be vacant land for sale. For sale at a high price, I imagine, given the tourist dollars at stake.

The whole day was a slightly surreal experience for a geo-nerd like myself. What surprises me is just how few people have bothered to trot through there with a GPS and expose the Intiñan Solar Museum – claiming to straddle the true equator – for the fraud that it is.

Let’s start with the official monument. An impressive stone obelisk structure constructed around 27 years ago, housed in the middle of a very well serviced touristy fun park complete with multiple restaurants, museums and a planetarium.

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It’s common knowledge that this monument is located 240m south of the true equator, something which my GPS – showing 0.00216 degrees south – agreed with exactly:

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Given it’s 27 year age, dating back well before the commercial availability of GPS, they did a pretty good job in choosing its location. I can also forgive them for failing to mention anywhere that this isn’t the real thing, letting throngs of tourists happily think they’re jumping between the northern and southern hemispheres.

So we move onto the “real” equator, the Intiñan Solar Museum described by Lonely Planet as being next door, and “supposedly on the site of the real equator”.

They’re certainly not bashful with their claims, sporting multiple large signs assuring visitors that this is the “real equator as calculated with GPS”.

Being a natural skeptic, I knew something was amiss as soon as we walked up to the entrance. We were still a good 130m south of 00°00′00”. Suspicions were soon confirmed once I stood on their theatrically adorned equatorial line. No dice:

Intiñan Solar Museum: No this is not the equator

The tour guides here have indulged in range of “experiments” to demonstrate the mystical properties of the equatorial line, including the famous (and repeatedly debunked) anti/clockwise water draining one, as well some more patently ridiculous ones involving balancing eggs and humans becoming mysteriously weak when standing on the equator.

These became even more amusing once we let our guide know that we were onto their dirty little secret of being over 100m south of the real deal.

Our guides’ first line of defense was the recommendation that we “need to use code 69 for our GPS when in South America” for it to give a correct reading. A classic “baffle them with bullshit” approach. He then assured us that our commercial GPS was inaccurate and that their location had in fact been confirmed by the US Army with military grade GPS equipment.

US Army? Really?

Not only that, but the US Army had issued them with a certificate stating that they are indeed located on the true equator.

The US Army… verifying the location of a privately owned tourist trap, and then issuing them a certificate? This guy was an absolute classic, though I guess he was just following the script. I asked if we would get to see the certificate at the end of the tour, and he confirmed that yes, we would.

I really looked forward to snapping a photograph of this certificate!

Sadly, though, at the end of the tour, when I asked to see the certificate, he apologized and said “the certificate is in my bosses house, so I can’t get it because he’s not here”.

Nice. So we returned hit the road again for our final search. We’d been looking for the real equator for a few hours at this point, and I for one was quite excited at actually getting there.

The result was, though, sadly underwhelming:

Yep, this is the real equator. Dusty. Windy.

Turns out the real line runs through a vacant plot of land, out on a fairly inconvenient angle across the highway. The land is, of course, for sale.

Real Equator, with the monument in background

Interestingly the plot is adjacent to both the official monument (you can see it in the above photo), and another plot of land owned by the Intiñan charlatans, used for bus and car parking. I expect they’re both trying to get their hands on it so that maybe, just maybe, the truth can be revealed to the tourist masses. For a modest sum of course.

On The Real Equator

So far I’ve only managed to locate one other fellow geo-nerd who has been here and verified this. Our co-ordinates are in agreement, as is Google’s satellite imagery. This is the real equator.

Reflections at the 3-month mark

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

(Also see the backlog from Cartagena, Salento & the coffee region, Cali, and Popayán.)

It was time to move on from Colombia, and after 12 hours of buses and a night in the cold, depressing border town of Ipiales we entered Ecuador yesterday with a minimum of hassle – particularly compared with our last overland crossing into Panama.

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In the past week we’ve had a run of perfect days followed by hellish, “I’m sick of this shit” days. Generally it’s long bus trips surrounded by noisy Colombian people with crap action movies shown at top volume combined with suicidal drivers (honestly the worst I’ve ever seen) that put us in those moods. Then to arrive in a ho-hum sort of place does little to lift it.

I wonder if this is a window into the bi-polar experience; to experience great days at the hot springs (complete with the fastest, roughest water slide around, extending 52m down the hill) meeting great people, drinking great coffee and eating great steak.

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The next day arguing with indifferent, moronic ticket sellers at the bus terminal, coming down with a nasty cold, motion sickness passing the Andes at > 3000m, being too spaced out to enjoy the view, haggling with 3 taxi drivers in a day, arriving at what is supposed to be the city’s best hotel ($30) to find that the sauna, Turkish bath (what is that, anyway?) and WiFi are all broken. I’m the first to admit I have a short tether, but it really adds up to an anger management exercise.

Then to find some serenity away from the cities, not devastated by human traffic and human filth, does wonders, as it has done up here in the hills surrounding Otovalo, Ecuador at 2900m. Aside: I never imagined feeling so cold just 19 minutes north of the equator.

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To understand “human filth”, imagine traveling through the incredible Andean landscape, with bottles, bricks, paper, plastic, cardboard strewn in every direction, sitting behind locals (both indigenous and those of European descent) watching each one take their turn to open the bus window – or car door, or the front door of their house – and throw trash onto the street. Signs everywhere imploring citizens to keep the place clean seem destined to forever go unheeded. To me it’s civilization, or lack thereof, at its very worst.

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Places that are neat, tidy, and where most of the facilities are functional are almost invariably operated by foreigners. Throughout the trip we’ve had to accept that supporting local operators invariably means tolerating woeful inefficiency and stuff generally not working as expected / advertised. Is this a cause or a symptom of poor countries struggling to keep an upward trajectory to their development?

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Travel fatigue is definitely present. We’ve perhaps also made the mistake of looking forward to the next phase – Europe – a little too early. Talk of epic bike rides and French gastronomic adventures make it difficult to stay focused on extracting maximum value from the remainder of this continent. It’s easy to imagine Europe as being much less effort to traverse, although we need to remember that here we’ve had the luxury of passable Spanish ability. Local language skills are going to be decidedly absent for most of the rest of the trip.

Michael Jackson Graffiti Memorial in Cartagena