South America - What to Expect?
Trip Start
Dec 31, 2007
1
26
Trip End
Apr 24, 2008
Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil
Friday, May 2, 2008
From the snow capped mountains to the Chilean desert coast; from the vast forest of the Amazon to the Salt Lakes of Bolivia and from the tropical beaches on both sides of the great continent to the rugged coast of Cape Horn. Everywhere you stop and look is always different to the extreme.
As you travel you will pass from beautiful, small agricultural fields to the miles and miles of sugar cane cultivation or even the wet lands of the Pantanal. There are the big cities like Brasilia, where everything is new, spacious and beautiful. Other towns, like La Paz or Rio, where the poor live in favellas and ramshackle slums. Along the coast you can travel between pretty unspoilt fishing villages and the bigger towns where new tower block buildings seem to rise daily in a futile challenge to the Manhattan skyline. You can move from the sophisticated, rich, European influenced culture to the poverty of a Bolivian tribe scraping their living from the thin soil of the mountainside.
Luxury and poverty live side-by-side anywhere in South America. The rich walking their over-dressed pet poodles nonchalantly step over, or perhaps walk around the ill dressed prone figure laying asleep on the pavement, often you see them carefully avoid the beggars outstretched hand.
Where you stay on your travels may be a hostel or five star hotel, the cost can be similar but the asking price so different. You are pretty sure of some things that will be consistent in your room no matter where you stay; they will have poor plumbing, undrinkable water, a toilet seat that slips side ways or pinches the backs of your legs, stupidly thin toilet paper that must not be flushed down the loo and a shower that either floods on the floor or trickles cold (or sometimes scalding) water. In the hostels that range from the scruffy cells to luxurious huge rooms there will inevitably be nowhere to hang your clothes, (it is a student's paradise), quite often there is little point in unpacking unless you choose to put your gear on the bed and sleep on the floor. Breakfast in the hostels and hotels can vary from the wonderful where choice of selection positively makes you feel guilty or the places where they consider a cup of rather dubious instant coffee together with a sad looking bread roll is sufficient for your needs.
Dining out at night can be fun particularly if you don't have much language, a stab at the menu can produce very interesting results, I confirm that guinea pigs tend to be rather chewy while steaks can vary from delicious to inedible, (and you can never be sure just what steak may be placed in front of you). One of the eating places that really suited me were the "per kilo" places, there I could see what to put onto my plate, reject the things that I knew I wouldn't like and fill my plate with the amount of food I felt I could manage. Sometimes there were surprises there too, A fritter looks good but you never know what may be inside it, the contents can range from beef to banana or mushroom to mango or even pineapple. Such variants keep you taste buds alive!
When 'on the road' the views will be from the breathtaking instances of wonderful beauty to the totally boring flat lands that seem to stretch for miles where nothing changes or appears to even move for hours on end. The High-Andean lakes where the air is thin reflect the sky in such a manner that you doubt your eyes, the shades of the strata on mountainsides place dark reds, greens and even orange side by side, in many places the blue sky sits on the horizon of snow capped mountains beneath which the varied colours of the fields and rocks lead down to a lake that reflects everything.
Everywhere you choose to go in South America there are sights and things that are way beyond your expectations and it was silly of me to title this blog "what to expect". You will discover things that I haven't seen, my travels have covered nine months and I have not yet reached the northern Andes, the real Amazon or the south with it's lakes and glaciers. There is so much that nine years would not be sufficient for my needs and then there is the rest of the world to tackle!
Thanks for following my journeys if you have been AND take care of yourself what-ever you choose to do.
Peter Tyler
