Monday 28th September 2009

…never existed. Hurrah for crossing the International Date Line and pretty damn on midnight!

Saf - Auckland, New Zealand

Big Heads!

Phew, but isn’t Rapa Nui (Easter Island) expensive? You’d almost think they had to fly all their food and beer in from thousands of kilometres away, the prices they charge! Still, worth it for the heads.

You know Rapa Nui is the place with all the heads, right? Well, if you didn’t upon arrival there is no way you can avoid this fact for long. Up until six months ago there were just over 850 heads on the island, but then BBC London arrived and found another 200 the locals had overlooked. Good old BBC. Granted, you can’t see them all (some are just lumps of stone now that are a bit of a funny shape) and some are more impressive than others, but get yourself ready for a head-tastic time!*

There are heads around the harbour, a line of heads by the museum, a weathered head Greg got very close to, enormous heads in the quarry (they’re the iconic ones), heads on the beach, heads on plinths, heads knocked over in the grass, heads still being carved out of bedrock, heads with hats and heads with painted eyes. There are even heads underwater, on the coral reef, to surprise divers every now and then. Heads! Here’s one of the iconic heads for you. **

Naturally, this iconic image is a repulsive misrepresentation of most of the heads. You see, they all come with bodies. What you can’t see in that picture s that, like an iceberg, the majority of Moai 676 is under the ground, out of sight. Those iconic heads are the ones which aren’t done yet, put into pits to make engraving the backs easier and covered over to protect them. They’re not the ones you’re meant to see! The real ones, the statues lining the coast and staring unerringly at their villagers, are much more imposing. But you know where the ‘Photos’ tab is by now, right?

And, of course, how can any artefact be complete without that unfailing symbol; the erect phallus. Only they’ve weathered off you see. But they were there. Honestly. All the archaeologists say. ‘Cause they’re statues, right. That’s just what cultural statues have.

Saf - Rapa Nui, Chile

* _{Well actually I think you’ll find that they’re called ‘moai’, but let’s not split hairs.}

** _{From this point on I apologise for the poor quality of my photographs; the camera got overexcited in my bag, turned itself on and scratched its lens right across the centre. So no, those strange blurs you see in the centre of every shot are not ‘orbs’, but just ming. I hope you enjoy a growing series of photographs in which the subject is far to one side or the other.}

Chile - not much happened

We went to Chile, and spent six days on the mainland. For most of that, Mummy was ill with vomitting and fever disease, or drinking large amounts. They came in that order. The drink helped the disease. Neither helped the writing of WiG posts.

Chile was alright, but people speak far too fast and with made-up words. Might give it a miss if I were you.

Greg - Santiago de Chile

A Little Surprise

Time to move on, again and again. We’re pretty used to long bus journeys now, and to paying the shockingly large costs of getting them in Argentina. Normally, it’s safe to assume a reasonable cost is $(USD)1 per hour of a journey. Here, we’re up to $5.

So we didn’t bat our eyelids too much to be told we had to pay £90 for our next journey, to Mendoza. What we hadn’t clocked for a while was the arrival time. We leave at 18h30, and arrive at 11h45.

Two days later.

That’s 41 hours on one bus. The longest bus journey of my life.

It makes the 5 hour journey we make to get the connection for Uber-Bus look like a couple of stops out of the city centre. It’s not even worth getting my book out for that length of time!

You can hear them coming to get you

Just a little more snowbound fun before we head north. We went to watch the Morreno Glaciar (not named after the man who found it, but someone who got 25km away before giving up) come to smash us into little bits.

The glaciar moves forward at a rate of 2metres a day, and as a result bits of it drop off on the front face into the lake. But the whole time the enormous expanse of ice is groaning and shreiking and banging like a ghoul in a biscuit tin, until CRACK! A bit at the front sheers off.

It’s like watching a cooling tower fall (an experience I presume was shared by everyone in their childhoods); the bottom seems to stay still as the top crashes straight down into and around itself, making a huge cloud of ice. And a hell of a noise. A hell of a long noise too.

The ice hits the water where is boils and foams and sheers off against itself for literally minutes after the fall, and eventually spreads out in circles.

I would show you a photo of one of them happening (there are a lot) but I was too busy watching in awe to want to follow the event through a viewfinder. You’ve seen the Palin programmes about it, anyway. Have a picture of the ice being more still:

Saf - El Calafate, Argentina

And Now…

As some light relief from all those long words Mummy has been putting up, have a picture of a Siberian huskie:

Greg - Ushuaia, Argentina

The Most Superlative Post in the World

We’ve been to a lot of superlative places. South America’s full of them. In La Paz, we went to the highest curry house in the world (llama tikka masala), the highest Irish pub in the world (deep-fried Mars bar), the highest fountain in the world, the highest burger joint in the world… There were plenty of high things in La Paz.

And now, in Ushuaia, we’ve been seeing a lot of the most southerly places in the world. Ushuaia itself is the most southerly town in the world, at 64 degrees 15 minutes. We’re not very far away from the Antarctic here; 90% of people and boats which go there leave from the port. It’s $3000 dollars to go there though, so this will be pretty much as far south as I’ll be going.

So far, I’ve been to the most southerly lighthouse in the world (Faro Fin del Mundo, although not the one in Jules Verne wrote about; that’s further north of here), the most southerly chocolate shop in the world, the most southerly Irish pub in the world, the most southerly dive shop in the world, the most southerly gift shop in the world. Here’s a picture of the most southerly Saf in the world:

Sadly, though, we can’t visit the most southerly bar in the world. The bloody Ukrainians have got one on the Antarctic research base. Cabrones.

Saf - Ushuaia, The South

A Little Too Far

So, to get to Ushuaia, in Argentina, from Rio Gallegos, also in Argentina, you need to go through Chile. Great, thinks I, some more pretty stamps in my passport (to go alongside the special stamp the lady at Tourist Info in Ushuaia will give to you for getting this far)! Well, yes, but also a hell of a lot of faff.

I can understand that Chile don’t want foreign food/crop/animal diseases brought in to finish everything off. And okay, it’s good to be careful. But I somehow get the feeling that with the six hours we spend in Chile, on the bus, between the two places that they get a little bit overzealous.

No fresh fruit, fine, we’re used to that. But taken a step further, they also ban cheese and bread and any sort of food whatsoever. What about our sandwiches for the bus, eh? Nope, gone in the bin. They’re not big on biological material.

But wooden ornaments? How the hell can you ban wooden ornaments? Surely every traveller crossing the border has a bit of defaced wood in their bag somewhere, not to mention little bits of pottery which probably aren’t meant to leave the country, oh and those seashells, and that rock that was taken from such-and-beach with barnacles on it. Wooden ornaments?

They x-ray your bags, you know, to check you’re not carrying anything illegal. I think I did a great job of looking surprised when they frowned at the screen and beckoned me over to explain what was the thing that looked like… hang on. That’s not my little wooden heads, or my bits of archaeology, or my shells or my salt or my cooking oil or my wine… That looks like a garroting wire.

I still have no idea what it was. I told them it was part of a belt, and they let me through without searching the bag. I’m pretty sure I don’t have any belts lined with wires but still - got through. It’ll be good fun on the way back though!

Saf - Ushuaia, Argentina

Ushuaia

So here we are; the End of the World. Ushuaia is a bitterly cold but beautiful place, and easily ranks among one of the best towns I have visited so far. In the morning the sea is grey and the sky is grey and snow sprinkles down and whirls around you in the wind. In the evening, after the few brief hours of Sun, the sky and the sea turn a deep, unbelievable blue so the whole place looks like it’s been submerged in a lagoon. Oh, and it still snows.

It’s a lovely place; almost European in feel. The streets are lined with fine chocolate shops offering all manner of delicacies, and there is a large range of Real Ale, made by a variety of microbreweries in the area. Although we have to cope with the grid system of street formation, the snow-covered slopes and the dirty slush make the place feel a little like a ski town. It gets dark ridiculously early, and the whole town glows yellow into the blue darkness and invites you in from the cold.

It’s a bugger to get to, but quite nice really. As always, there are photos in the normal place. I might even put up with the cold to enjoy this one.

Saf - Ushuaia, Argentina (Fin del Mundo)

The Logical Conclusion

Anyone who’s been following this for a while should have seen the warning signs and be able to guess what’s coming next. Seaside, water, exciting things to see, clearly suboptimal temperatures, photographs already posted detailing it… Yep, time to go diving again!

Despite having all my diving qualifications nicked in Buenos Aires, the dive centre accepted on faith that I am qualified and agreed to drop me into the sea. Hurrah! But what is there to see? You’re not allowed to play with the whales as they are too dangerous, but Puerto Madryn has what they claim to be a unique experience in the world; diving with sealions!

Now, apart from the rather abortive, disease-riddden attempt to swim with pink dolphins in the Amazon Basin, I haven’t really done “swimming with” things before. In Mexico you could go to a park where they made dolphins do tricks with you, but somehow I wasn’t keen. The sealions, though, are something else entirely. Not only are they wild, but they actually cannot leave you alone once you hit the water.

So, with just a snorkel (the diving comes later) you get dropped off a boat and they start to advance on you to play. And they’ve got a good range of games too! We played “Headbutt the Tourist”, where a sealion will pop up in front of you and smack you on the mask with its nose, so you topple backwards into the water. Not to lose their plaything, some other will push you back up (you do float anyway, as yo’re iin a wetsuit) just in time for another to smack you in the face. It’s great! They have bristly faces.

The next game is to climb on top of you from behind, so you pitch forwards, and sit on top of you in the water so can’t roll over. And, of course, the old favourite “Stealing the Fins” game, where they grab your flippers and tear them off, so you have to chase them through the water incompetently to get them back.

And there’s one, just one, that plays the “Biting Very Hard” Game, where is grabs you as hard as possible until you hit it on the head, shouting in agony. I’m less of a fan of that game. Here’s me playing the Headbutt one, anyway:

Then came the wreck dive, which was just a little abortive. The new divers went to a reef first, so there was lots of bobbing about on the boat. We went to Wreck One, but were told that the conditions were too bad to see anything there. So, on to Wreck Two! Only… Where is Wreck Two? “Ah”, says the captain. “That’s the sixth time this year that the whales have stolen the marker buoy!” So, no idea where that wreck happens to be. Back to the reef! Oh no, hang on, someone else has rung up and said the conditions at Wreck One really aren’t that bad at all… and back we go. It was bloody cold, but very exciting. More diving in the UK may well be a good idea.

Saf - Puerto Madryn, Argentina