Valparaiso mural (photo by Joanne)

The bus journey to Valparaiso wasn't long, only about two hours, and we arrived at Hostel El Yoyo in the afternoon. Everyone at the hostel seemed to be recovering from a heavy night, so we took it easy as well. I blogged. And we bought oven empanadas from the supermarket. Joanne, especially, was really really sick of empanadas now.

Valparaiso

Valparaiso

Valparaiso

Restaurant we couldn't afford in Valparaiso

Pisco sours

Joanne's spinach fettucini

My grilled chicken, wild rice, and peanuts

Valparaiso

Joanne in Valparaiso

Lazy dogs at the top of the funicular

Valparaiso

Valparaiso decaying in style

Valparaiso prettily falling apart

Another restaurant we couldn't afford

Still a romantic place

Valparaiso

Funicular track

Valparaiso mural (photo by Joanne)

Mural in el Yoyo

Liam. He's Irish.

Tess and Max

Brad and erm...

I'm a bit tired I think

Definitely tired

written by  The Happy Couple on September 14, 2009 from Valparaiso, Chile
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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We all went out to get meat, which was pretty confusing considering none of the cuts are the same as those we're used to: no sirloin, fillet, rump, t-bone, etc – at least not with those names. I've since discovered that you can get t-bone and fillet, but they're not that common. Most of the cuts are just gigantic lumps of meat, with no so consistent thickness. After much dithering we all chose our various lumps and I also bought some traditional sausages, recommended by Max: Longanizas. He had also recommended the cut of meat called lomo vetado, but the supermarket didn't have it. He had impressed on me that the supermarket was the place we should buy meat because he didn't really trust the butchers, which he said were a bit dirty. Nonetheless, we had to go there for his lomo vetado. When we told Max where we had got it, he did not look happy at all, but he cooked it and ate it anyway.

Full disclosure: all these photos were taken by Joanne, not me.

Tess and the meat

Rare shot of Max with no hat (Brad & Adam behind)

Underbite dog in the background

It may not be responsible, but it is coordinated

A French girl on the prowl, but I'm married

.... French girl turns her attention to Max

It's just a perk of the job for Max

After the club closed we all headed back to the hostel, being tailed by one of the locals. The girls were a bit uneasy by this and let Max know they weren't happy. He said that we shouldn't worry, the guy wouldn't get in. Valparaiso seems to have a slightly dangerous reputation and we were still very wary of South America after months in relatively safe Asia. Max told us that he had once been mugged just as he got to the hostel and robbed of his watch (grandfather's), his wallet, and even his shoes and trousers. Luckily this guy just disappeared when Max told him that the hostel rules, actually it seems to be its only rule, is that guests are not allowed after 1pm, and it was well after.

Me and Adam

Brad and Liam

We stayed up all night and drank everything we had: the pisco we had bought in Santiago came out and was drunk; the extra beers we bought were drunk; all the wine was drunk. We were all drunk. There was dancing in the kitchen. I think we went to bed about 7:30am. Most hostels have rules about noise, but this one just seems to be a party hostel. The guy working on the desk is up drinking with all the guests. I feel really sorry for anyone trying to sleep at night in that hostel.

I'm so drunk a flying mouth is eating my head

Tess and Joanne

The next day, afternoon of course, we got up and discovered that Joanne's fleece was gone, as was Tess's cardigan, and a German guy's jacket. Each one might have thought they had drunkenly misplaced it, but all three together was more than a coincidence. A review of the previous night's photos (after all there was no memory to refer to) revealed that all of the clothing had made it back from the club to the hostel kitchen. It also revealed that some friends of another employee at the hostel were around quite late on, so late that nobody remembered them having been there. Max seemed suspicious.

Chief suspects in the case of the missing clothing

What we needed to deal with our hangovers, Max suggested, was some ceviche, Chile's national dish, except it's really Peruvian, maybe. He offered to make it, so we went out to buy all the ingredients:

Ceviche

Method
Juice the lemon and chop everything else up and mix it all together
Leave it for an hour or so
Eat with bread

At the supermarket my Spanish came up rubbish again when trying to deal with the fish counter. They had the fish we wanted, but it wasn't already filleted. I wouldn't have expected that to cause too many problems, but it took us ages. We finally made a decision and settled for the fillets from two whole fish when she started suggesting that we might want frozen fish as well. Frozen fish, raw? No thanks.

The ceviche

It was well worth it. He didn't actually use all the tomatoes or lemons (for juice), but Max's ceviche was absolutely fantastic and I fancy that it did alleviate my hangover substantially. Max joined us to eat, although he had to be persuaded, and told us about his job. He was waiting to be told about a job in Spain but, even if he didn't get it, there was no way he was working another summer at the hostel: it's just too much partying, he explained. After the independence day celebrations he was planning to go skiing near Santiago and told us he could get us free ski passes. Apparently he had another job on the slopes.

El Yoyo's guide to Chilean slang

El Yoyo's guide to Chilean slang

We hadn't really decided what we were doing after Valparaiso, and we didn't know where to be for Fiestas Patrias, the independence celebrations, though we considered Max's party proposals. I quite fancied going to Pucon in the Chilean lake district, then maybe crossing over to Argentina at that point, but it was going to be hard to fit in with out tight schedule and Fiestas Patrias. There was skiing down that way too, and the snow would be better. Tess and Liam were looking forward to a double party because the day after Fiestas Patrias finished it was Liam's 30th Birthday. Finally we decided we didn't really have enough time to go to Pucon, after all we wanted to go to Mendoza, which is just over the border from Santiago. So we decided we would go with Tess and Liam to Santiago for Fiestas Patrias, then celebrate his 30th birthday with them. After all we had celebrated a 21st in Thailand, so why not now a 30th?

written by  The Happy Couple on September 16, 2009 from Valparaiso, Chile
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Back in Santiago (for the third time), we checked into Casa Roja, the same hostel as Liam and Tess, who recommended it after their last stay in Santiago. Santiago is such a hub, everyone seems to pass through it several times. Chilean independence celebrations were already underway and there seemed to be quite a few hangovers around the hostel. Keen that we be prepared for similar circumstances we all went out to find a pharmacist and stock up ibuprofen, re-hydration salts, and Berocca. We struggled for a bit in Spanish (Tess's Spanish is better than mine, but she was still struggling to explain re-hydration salts and what Berocca are), before the pharmacist revealed that he could speak English. They were all in high spirits in the shop and the pharmacist offered us each a pisco sour; apparently they were all drinking on duty. What an excellent pharmacist, to dispense pisco sour free of charge to the customers!

Nice pharmacist serving us pisco sours

Us and the best pharmacist in Chile

Now fully prepared we bought food and booze from the supermarket, which we were told was going to close early and be closed for three days. Tess sent Liam out so she could sneakily buy him a birthday cake and we bought him a bottle of Havana Club rum as a present, and also, for us, a bottle of the Pisco Mistral we had the kids had let us taste on Easter Island. Of course we had wine and beer as well; we didn't want to run out. Back at the hostel Liam took charge of food and I was assigned the task of making a fine chop concasse, tomatoes with their seeds removed and chopped up into tiny bits. This was mixed through the rice along with some more Longaniza sausages and served with lemon chicken. Stomachs lined, we headed out for the start of our celebrations.

That night, most of the people at the hostel were going to see a band, called Banda Conmocion, playing at a venue very close to the hostel. The support bands were quite good, but the headliners were fantastic, combining several chaotic musical genres I like: ska, Balkan, gypsy-punk, and a hint of salsa. There were at least twenty band members, many of the dressed up in bizarre costumes (one was satan) and parading around the stage apparently oblivious to the rest of the band; however the cacophony all came together somehow and there was a lot of bouncing in the club. The previous bands had been far more salsa and some of the dancing then had been intimidatingly proficient, but this was far more my sort of thing: plenty of knees up, running on the spot, and straight-forward bouncing for the real climaxes, so I got stuck right into to the sweaty masses. At one point, during one of the earlier bouncy bits a girl tapped me heavily on the shoulder and, when I turned round, said Baila como la mierda, which I thought was a bit rude and it dented my confidence enough to make me retreat to the back and resume the indifferent shuffle. However from there I could see that she was the only person in the whole place still trying to salsa dance to crashing cymbals, booming bass drums, and parping trombones; everyone else was bouncing around, buffeting her, until eventually retreated looking disgusted with everybody. She was the one who had got it wrong, not me!

The next day the drinking just continued; this was the actual independence day of Fiestas Patrias, and we paid a visit to the bar where Tess and Liam had befriended the staff during their last stay at Casa Roja. The owner had incredibly cool long dreadlocks, of which I was very jealous, but he had been growing them for ten years. All of these friends of Tess and Liam were very patient with our Spanish, which was just as well because none of them really spoke any English. It's amazing how much easier it is to speak another language when you know English is not an option – and you've had a skinful!

The next day was Liam's 30th birthday, but also “Military Day”, the last day of Fiestas Patrias and we started it with a great hangover breakfast: leftover longanizas, fried together with leftover chicken in rolls, the finishing touch being the HP sauce and Coleman's English Mustard I had bought in New Zealand. A girl eating a vegetarian breakfast in the garden near where we set looked on at our massive meat sandwich breakfasts with a mixture of disgust and admiration, I thought. Maybe it was just disgust. Straight after breakfast (well it was already late afternoon) Liam started on the Havana Club, so we started on the Mistral. Rinse and repeat.

The next day I felt absolutely awful. I could barely speak to anyone, and a brief attempt I made to be sociable with all the people we had met in the hostel over the last few days, had to be abandoned in favour of a large take-away pizza for each of us. Liam was even worse that I was: he had drunk almost the whole bottle of rum himself in less than an hour, just to start the day off. He only managed to get out of bed long enough to eat half his pizza then disappeared again.

All I could think was, we can never drink like this again. We're too old to be celebrating 30th birthdays; I thought it would be OK because we had managed a 21st previously but, in retrospect, 21st birthdays are probably safer and tamer, because 21 year-olds have not yet had the time to develop fully-blown disgraceful behaviour, whereas 30 year-olds certainly have, and have not yet started the long decline where they can no longer maintain. Or maybe it's just chefs. Liam and Tess were planning taking a month of alcohol as well as quitting smoking the next day. At least we didn't have cigarettes to quit, but we couldn't stop drinking: our next destination was Mendoza and the only reason we were going there was wine.

We definitely needed some sort of rest though; apart from all the alcohol we had barely slept except through the drunkest of slumbers, because our dorm of eight beds was also the thoroughfare to the neighbouring dorm of another eight beds, and during the last few days people were keeping all hours, so it was never quiet. To help us recover, Joanne booked a double room in a hostel in Mendoza which was recommended for being quiet. That's what we needed after the last two party hostels we had stayed in.

It was another night of almost no sleep and the next morning I was still feeling terrible, so we had leftover pizza and a can of beer I found in my bag, hoping it would clear away the last vestiges of the binge before we properly began our better, cleaner lifestyle. Tess and Liam did not look like they were going to wake up, so we just left them, and headed of to the bus station to catch our bus to Argentina. It was a shame we didn't see more of Chile, but we did go to Easter Island, which was the main thing, and afterwards we joined in with the national celebrations, so we didn't do too badly on the right schedule we have to stick to for South America. I liked the people and the atmosphere in Santiago, but it would have been nice to make it further south to Pucon and the lake district, or even further to Patagonia. Oh well, there's always next time.

Breakfast

written by  The Happy Couple on September 21, 2009 from Santiago, Chile
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Joanne talked me through everything I had done since. Did I accidentally hand it over to the conductor when I paid for the tickets? Definitely not: I remembered counting through the money and would definitely have noticed my card there. Did I collect it from the ATM after drawing the money? I couldn't remember one way or another; normally it's so automatic I don't register doing it. Then I remembered that the stupid ATMs in Chile all ask you if you want another transaction (Y/N) after dispensing your cash. Then I realised: this is something I would have remembered because it always annoys me that they ask such a pointless and potentially hazardous question to the ownership of your card. I had hoped that my irritation would always remind me about this but, on this occasion, we had still been discussing which bus to get, and I think I must have just whipped the money out then continued the conversation. Could someone have been passing, just as it was beeping for a response and said Yes, I'd like to draw all the money available? I hoped it at least asked for this PIN again if you try to draw more money. This is why ATMs in the UK give you your card first, then give you your money; if you want another transaction after drawing money, you have to put your card and PIN in again. Stupid South American ATMs! Stupid rushing and harassing bus conductor! But above all, stupid me for walking away from the machine without my card!

I'm not certain that this is what happened, but it seems the most likely explanation. I suppose I may have dropped it on the way to the bus, or someone may have dipped into my pocket. Whatever had happened to it I had to stop the card immediately. So I sent a text to my trusty old friend, John, asking him to look up the card-stop numbers for me. Soon his (reliable as ever) text came back, but I discovered we couldn't make international calls on the Chilean SIM and I didn't want to call them, roaming from my UK SIM; someone might have been taking the daily maximum out of my account but that would surely be nothing compared to the bill racked up by waiting on hold from abroad. So I sent my dad a text and asked him to make the call for me. Even at 36, parents can come in really handy.

On the road there were hundreds of large lorries. It must be a major haulage route between the two countries. The scenery was stunning on the way up to the border, but most of the time quite well hidden by cloud. I can't remember what height the pass is, but it must be about 3000 metres, I think. We passed a few ski courses and continued upwards. All this climbing, of course, meant that it was absolutely freezing at the border, where we were obliged to hang around for more than half an hour, off the bus for some reason. We weren't dressed for it, in fact we didn't really have the clothes for it with us, but putting on our thermals before we got on the bus would have helped.

On the road to the Santiago-Mendoza border

Back on the bus, heading down the other side from the border, suddenly things seemed far more militarised: we passed several army units apparently out on exercise in the hills and there were quite military-looking police everywhere. Also, the railway line I thought I had caught glimpses of on the way up to the border was much more obvious on the other side, but now I could see it was disused. Clearly this railway line used to be the main freight route between the countries but now it's all hundreds of big lorries. What a waste! The line didn't even look like it had been out of use for all that long, no more than twenty years. All the tunnels were intact, as were the bridges, some of which didn't even look very rusty, in fact there were even metal signs along the tracks that were still legible. It was only the weeds and the uncleared earth, part burying the tracks in places, that gave away the redundancy of the line. We followed the railway route pretty much the whole way to Menddoza.

Maybe to prepare us for the country we had now entered, I pondered, on the bus stereo was now played a continuous string of the biggest cheese merchants that the music industry has ever been cruel enough to inflict on the world. Act after act of faux-sincere, over-emotional crooners wailing about un amor perdido or whatever. It was horrendous and just when we thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, they switched on the screen and there they were: strutting around the stage, mostly rather macho, complete with gleaming teeth, giant collars, white suit, bouffant hair, or tight purple jeans and a hairy medallioned chest, or whatever other awful combination their style-gurus must have told them would really sell. I understand that music in the UK used to be overrun with crooners before Elvis and pop music rendered them all obsolete, but this was no video nasty from the 50s or 60s, this was clearly quite recent and a few numbers even featured a nod to modern pop-py beats. What kind of country were we entering where this could be modern music? What was it - Cheesier than Cheddar vol.5? Now that's what I call Gorgonzola? We'll never know because, although disbelief really made me want to ask, I couldn't risk someone overhearing and thinking that I had liked it.

After a while the road levelled out and became very straight. The numbers of police on the road just rose and rose, until there seemed to be cars pulled over every few hundred yards. At first I thought they must be pulling people over looking for bribes, but then I noticed that around every intersection the speed limit was very low, and there were frequent little shrines dotted all along the road as well; so I suppose they probably have good reason to pull so many vehicles over. Whatever the reason is added more to the feeling that we were in a police state or military dictatorship, which I wasn't expecting given how long it has been since the last junta.

The walk to the hostel wasn't very nice and we were anxious to get there before it got too dark. On first impression, it was it far more run-down than Santiago or Valparaiso: there was graffiti everywhere, and not the nice murals of Valparaiso. The pavements were all cracked and loads of the paving stones were missing, as if they had been lifted and sold off. Everywhere there were real wrecks of cars on the road. I didn't really expect this much of an obvious change just coming across the border from Chile to Argentina, but it really seemed like we had arrived in a less prosperous country, full of vandals. The people even looked quite shady after Chile.

The hostel was very nice and it was quiet, which was what we needed after Santiago. The guy who was on the desk seemed very nice, but extremely serious, bordering on miserable. We got chatting to the only other people staying there: a girl from Irvine and her English fiancé. They took pity on us and our lost bank card, and invited us to join them in the dinner they had just made (a little too much of, they insisted).

written by  The Happy Couple on September 21, 2009 from Mendoza, Argentina
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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Santiago

What an excellent gig it was!

Banda Conmocion gig

Valparaiso

Not drunk, honest

Quite late on at the el Yoyo

Still sober, oh yes.

Amusing dog with "underbite"

Awwww. Tess and Joanne.

Finally we went out to look at the town. It was shut. I have plenty of memories of holidays in continental Europe, where hours were spent wandering around ghost towns just because they like a long lunch. It doesn't happen much in Europe any more, but the tradition seems alive and well in Argentina. Everywhere you could sit down there were people drinking mate from nice cups with bombillas jutting out of them. But everybody seemed to look very depressed; it was almost as bad as India, but when I considered how shabby the town looks, it didn't seem that odd after all. I felt like I was wandering around Clydebank. We were planning to buy some clothes as our clothes shopping was now well overdue, but the only shop we saw opening times for suggested that they were closed for four hours over lunch. We needed something to do in the meantime, because our hostel was a bit out of town and we didn't want to walk back and forth.

Beer

The only places still open were restaurants and bars, so we decided that lunch would do to fill the time. When we saw somewhere offering bife de chorizo for AR$23 we decided this was the place. It seemed a bit more than we should be spending and a bit more than we were expecting, since we had been told that Argentina is cheaper than Chile, but we had also been told that this cut is the best one in the country with the best steaks in the world, so we couldn't resist. Inside we discovered that it was actually a very good deal, because it normally costs AR$35. The meat was amazing: nice thick, juicy steaks. We washed it down with some Malbec wine, an Argentinian cultivar, and I had a local beer. Lunch cost our entire daily budget. Ooops - but it was worth it!

Bife de chorizo

By the time we were finished our lunch, we were so full and tired from the wine that we couldn't be bothered shopping and just returned to the hostel, pledging that the next day would be a full one. Again I was struck by how shabby the town is: the drains are all open, like the poorer parts of Asia, there are really worn-out cars everywhere, and there is no consideration at all given to pedestrians: no crossings, no pedestrian lights, no stopping to let you across. It really seems like they have the American love of the automobile (and truck), in fact most of the old cars are old American ones; it's a bit like Cuba, except the cars are from the 70s instead of the 50s. And they are in much worse condition that the Cuban equivalent.

Dodgy car and drain

I just couldn't get over how different it all was from Chile.

Next morning we arranged to go on a wine tour in the afternoon. The hostel could arrange two different tours: one was Mr Hugo's bicycle wine tour and the other one was in a minibus. The guy working in the hostel told us that the bicycle tours were dangerous, because of people looking for drunk tourists to rob, and Joanne had read somewhere that the vineyards on the cycling route tend not to be as good as on minibus tours. So we booked up for the minibus tour. There would only be two vineyards, which was a bit disappointing, but there was also an olive oil factory. Woo.

In the cellar

Waiting for our tasting...

The Andes in the distance

Another cellar

Yet another cellar!

An expensive wine they teased us with

More wines we weren't allowed to taste

The olive oil tour was actually the best part of the day but, when we decided to buy some unfiltered olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes, we discovered that they didn't take credit cards, which was all I had. We had been told by three different people that everywhere takes credit cards in Argentina, but here is a place on a tour, for goodness' sake – for tourists and they didn't take credit cards. The tour we had signed up for was a “bilingual tour”, but the English seemed to be forgotten about after the introduction. Utter rubbish! Then, just when we thought our day could get no worse, because we were on our way home, the tour guide picked up the microphone and announced that we'd be stopping off at a church. On a wine tour! She explained it was la virgen de vino, the patron saint of wine, but I couldn't have cared less by that point. I wanted my wine! When we got back, we went straight to the supermarket and bought an expensive bottle of wine to make up to ourselves what we had missed out on the tour. I bought myself a nice-looking beer just in case the wine didn't cheer me up.

La Virgen de Vino on the church

Something to do with the Virgen. Who cares?

The area around the wineries was quite pretty

Nice beer

We were tempted to stay an extra day and do a different wine tour, maybe the cycling one, but would it be any different? We decided against it and made our way slowly down to the bus station. Getting a bus in Argentina is not a simple matter: because of the stupid and wasteful freemarket system they have embraced, it is necessary to walk up and down dozens of different companies' desks, asking each how much?, when?, and so on; they don't have menus up telling you that information, and there is no central, impartial information point you can go to, much the same as Thailand. It would have been the same in Chile, but we had chosen the one company with a price up on the way to Valparaiso because it was less than we had expected, but there were only about five people on the bus, and buses leaving every five minutes; what a waste! Our guide book said there were buses every hour to Cordoba, so we hadn't bothered to book. What our guide book had not mentioned, and we learned when we arrived there, is that the buses are every hour, after 9pm, so we were stuck in Mendoza for an extra half day. If we had known we would have had time to do the wine tour before the bus, but now it was too late.

We heaved our bags back to the hostel and asked if the guy on duty minded if we left our stuff. He was very nice and said we could use the internet, shower, make food, or do whatever we wanted. So we went online to change the hostel bookings we had made in Cordoba and Buenos Aires, which now needed to be put back by one day. The hostel in Cordoba was full the day after we had booked, so we just had to drop the first night. We thought this would be OK, since we would probably be leaving there at night as well, so we would have two full days, even if it was only one night. My friend from Cape Town, Andre, had said he'd be able to meet up with us in Uruguay, but the ferry books up well ahead of time, so we booked that as well. This was the most organised we had been since New Zealand.

Taking advantage of our unexpected extra time, we headed out to buy clothes, but didn't find anything we liked. Instead, we ended up sitting down for lunch at a basic looking cafe. We expected food to cost less than we had paid for the bife de chorizo, so I thought we should experiment with how cheap it was safe to go. My lunch was a parilla, or grill, for AR$15, including a glass of wine and a salad. Sounds nice. Joanne went for three slices of pizza for AR$8, but she went for “juice” instead of wine. In Chile we had discovered that actual juice seems impossible to buy; everything they sell as if it is juice is actually nectar which is a disgustingly sweet mix of water, fruit juice, and sugar, but even that seems to be too healthy for most Chileans: probably the most popular drink we saw at breakfast was Coca Cola. In Argentina it was turning out much the same: fizzy drinks everywhere and fruit juice is impossible to buy. Lunch was really horrible. Clearly food wasn't supposed to be as cheap as that, but at least we knew that we had misjudged. Suddenly the bife de chorizo seemed like excellent value.

AR$15 worth of food (plus wine, not shown)

We picked up our bags from the hostel and went to the bus station. Amazingly Salli, the Aussie from the hostels in Valparaiso and Santiago, was getting the same bus as us. She was raving about the fantastic wine tour she and her friends had gone on, had we heard of Mr Hugo's bicycle tours? As much wine as you can drink back at Mr Hugo's house after visiting loads of vineyards. I was raging so much that I was very tempted to get off the bus and stay for an extra day, but we were already falling behind schedule and we didn't have much time in South America. I had to let it go.

More transport, more discomfort. The seats were made for midgets: the edges of the head rest poked into my shoulder blades when the chair was fully upright. Terrible crooning Argentinian music blasted out of speakers directly over our heads. They provide an on-off switch for everybody's lights; why don't they provide one for everybody's speaker? It's madness. Bife de chorizo aside (which is difficult to do because it was so good), Argentina had started off very disappointingly.

written by  The Happy Couple on September 24, 2009 from Mendoza, Argentina
from the travel blog: Michael's Round-the-World honeymoon
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