Down down down down (dooby-do) down down.

We flatten ourselves against the cliff to allow Inka-Kola laden mules past on the narrow track. Overhead, condors circle, and snakes rustle through the bushes that appear to be hanging onto the same cliff for dear life. It's over a kilometre straight down to where we will be spending the night, and it'll take us 8 hours of trekking to get there. Tomorrow - we've been told - it'll take only three and a half to trek back up to the top. But that's for worrying about in the morning. Right now the path down is steep, winding, beset by wildlife, and liberally sprinkled with small stones. The better to roll from under your foot as you try to keep up with the guide, Roy.

We are in the Colca Canyon, 4 hours from Arequipa, Peru's 2nd city. Roy is a local, hailing from the village at the top of the canyon, "the one that has road". Only narrow paths go into the canyon and all traffic is either pedestrian or mule. His village, Roy tells us, is pre-Incan. Is was conquered by nobody, not the Incas, not the Spanish. I want to ask why his village hasn't retained its independence, but there is no time. Roy has moved on. He speaks English with the speed of a native speaker, but neither the grammar nor the vocabulary. It generally takes a few seconds to decipher the words he has said and then process them into meaning. By which time he is two sentences ahead and you are already playing catch-up. He is a civil engineer, and guides people into (and - we hope - out of) the Colca Canyon once or twice a week. But his real passion is the flora of Peru. He pulls innocuous looking plants from the cliff-side, rubs them a certain way (or crashes them against another plant) and announces with no small degree of reverence: 'oregano of the Incas'; or 'mountain mint'; or 'cannabis'.

Last night, in Arequipa (the White City), knowing that the trekking bus was arriving at 3AM, we opted, naturally, for a night out. Arequipa is very beautiful, and nowhere near as dangerous as the Lonely Planet makes out. On the 'going-out' street with all the bars, opting for a quieter looking place, we encounter a barman whose general uselessness (and rudimentary grasp of communication) would mark him out for superstardom in any Melbourne pub. His boss - possibly by way of punishment, and despite the bar not having any Irish pretensions - has a Clannad cd on repeat. We pretend to be Belgian. A typical Peruvian dinner ensures, and involves many different types of potato, a large oven-roasted guinea pig, numerous photos and a chef with eyes permanently raised to heaven. I don't know what a guinea pig costs normally, but i am more than happy to pay the 30 Soles for the enjoyment i got out of eating one, and then playing with the head and paws.

'Pah', Roy says when I tell him this, 'you ripping off. In my village, 5 guinea pigs: 20 Soles'. I do manage to tell him that i don't think i would have been able to eat 5 guinea pigs in one sitting, but he smiles the smile of someone who has no understanding of what has been said and launches into a diatribe on the cost of avocados in the city. Roy, you see, is obsessed with the cost of everything. Cocaine, guinea pigs, avocados, pears, mules, beer, water. If is it bought or sold, Roy knows for how much, and where, and when. He inadvertently identifies half a dozen business opportunities every minute. But maybe he knows, and maybe he's happy doing what he does. Next month he goes to the Amazon with a friend to pick, dry and infuse a native leaf which apparently cures cancer. He's probably winning.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: a review

My name is Aron Something, and i like to do outdoorsy stuff. I am an American (Fuck Yeah!). I have written a book about my adventures in outdoorsy stuff, focusing primarily on one horrible outdoorsy misadventure where my hand gets trapped by a rock and i end up having to chop it off with a blunt imitation Leatherman. Hence the supremely cool (and totally ironical) name I've decided to give my book. You get it, right? Rock... hard place... Yeah?

My book alternates between chapters about my predicament and the slow descent into madness that this involves, and chapters about how i am so totally awesome at doing outdoorsy stuff. The story about how i am here, and what I'm doing, and more importantly, how I'm going to get out of this situation is gripping, even if i tell it like a five year old coughing up some school story for Grandma so she'll give me some sweets. Man i miss Grandma's sweets.

The rest of the chapters are liver-meltingly dull. Even more so because despite my proficiency in skiing, mountaineering, rock-climbing and trekking, instead of heading off to see the world, conquer the Andes or lose myself in the Himalayas, i devote myself to scaling a set of mid-sized mountains in winter, alone, in Colorado. Fucking Colorado. Seriously. Almost all of my stories have some near-miss scenario for me, or more often than not, for someone foolish enough to hang around with me. At the end of most of these i solemnly declare that i have learned a valuable lesson and will never again put myself, or others, in harm's way like that again. This is flagrant horseshit, as is obvious when - 2 chapters later - i am gleefully causing avalanches, or throwing a soon to be former friend into raging whitewater. The only conclusion anybody can reach after reading these chapters is that i had it - something - coming.

Thankfully, Danny Boyle (who is from like Europe which is not in America) has made my mess of a book into a riveting film, dispensing with all of the other rubbish apart from the central story, ensuring that i come across as only a mild twat, which non-Americans will probably just think is because I'm American. Which isn't necessarily true. If you read the book you'll see that I'm a twat and I'm an American.

Hear me moo.

San Pedro de Atacama, in the Atacama desert - the driest in the world - averages some 35mm of rain per year. They recommend you take showers of only 7 minutes. Melbourne - which is not in the driest desert in the world - recommends 4 minutes. It comes as something of a surprise then on our last day when the heavens open for almost 4 hours, a significant increase on the 30 minutes of rain we are told they've had (cumulatively) in the last 12 months. The locals are caught between taking photos of this shocking natural event, and frantically getting rain-unfriendly things like plasma TVs and stereos either covered or moved.

Before we can leave for Bolivia, we have 6 hours at Chilean immigration. 'There is too much snow on the road to the border, you can't pass' says one driver. There was no snow. 'There is a police checkpoint 5kms from the border and the Chilean police are not letting anyone through' swears another. There was no checkpoint. 'The Chileans don't want you to go to Bolivia spending your tourist dollars there, so they make it hard for you to leave' conspiracy-theory-ed another. Bizarrely, this worked and a number of people dropped out of the queue saying they would try again the next day. One Irish backpacker had been trying to get out for 3 days and had heard this excuse before, so was not buying it again. 'The Chileans don't like the Bolivians very much (because they won't sell them their natural gas (because the Chileans stole the Bolivian coastline)) so they pile everybody up at the Chilean immigration site (45 minutes drive from the Bolivian) and then let everyone shoot through when there is only an hour to the end of the Bolivian site working hours so the poor fools will have to work late' said our own driver. This is pretty close to what happened, though as dastardly schemes go, it's hardly world changing.

From here, it's 4 days to Copacabana, on the Bolivian shores of lake Titicaca. During that time, we see 2 significant jeep breakdowns, one at freezing, snow-blasted 4886 metres above sea-level, and one in unsheltered 36 degree heat on the edge of the stunning Uyuni salt flats. We also get one unscheduled bus stop where we had to wait "for the lake to go down to see if we can pass through it". This is the same lake that caused the bus to La Paz the previous night to be written off. 

We also have the joy of listening to an American woman wittering on and on and on and on and on about her like great kids where she like teaches at her like Innernashional School in like Cartagena where she like lives like right across form the beach like oh my god you wouldn't believe how close it's like todally awesome she goes there like everyday its like liderally thirdy seconds like seriously and she's like on expenses so she can go out and have like rilly nice dinners whenever like but  seriously though it's all about the kids, the kids are rilly rilly great, she rilly rilly loves them. I'm paraphrasing, she actually spoke non-stop for roughly 17 weeks. It's not that Americans are congenitally thick necessarily, it's just that they talk too much, reducing the amount they breathe, thereby starving their brains of oxygen, thereby making them thick. If they stopped talking, they might get smarter, but then it's probably the quiet ones that are the ones you have to watch. 

Them and thieving hippies.

The Correos strikes back.

I'm in the queue at the post office in Salta and it's 9:20am. This is my third attempt to post a parcel of cold-weather (and subsequently past their usefulness on this trip) clothes back to Australia. I tell the woman in the hostel what I'm doing and she tells me I'll need a box. 'I know' i tell her, does she maybe have one i can steal? 'They'll have plenty at the post office". Outside the post office there are upwards of 500 people queueing. This is not a good sign, although i realise relatively quickly that they are all queuing to collect their new digital set top TV boxes, presumably because the analog signal is about to be turned off, and also presumably because the easiest way the Argentine government thought to get set top boxes into every home was to make each and every Argentinian queue at the post office to get it. In 35 degree heat.

At the post office the helpful security guard at the door tells me that I'll need a box. Yes, but I'm informed that the place to get boxes for posting things, i tell him, is at the post office. 'Aha' he says, 'yes, go to the man at the Customs office and he will give you a box'. Having twice before been thwarted trying to post this self same parcel, i have some idea of the process involved. There is a Customs office, and an International Post desk. They are adjacent, but with autonomous queues. You take your box to the Customs office, where the (invariably) man inspects your goods, gets you to fill out a form, prints something out and then sends you, your form and your box to the International Post desk, where the (invariably) woman weighs your box, gets you to fill out two more forms, demands payment, stamps the form from Customs, takes your name and your box (for giving back to Customs behind the counter), and sends you out of the queue. Customs (man) will then - at some stage - call your name, inspect your box again, inspect the form to ensure you have paid the requisite fee, have one of his (female) assistants seal the box, and then send you on your merry way, happy in the knowledge that your box will likely never see light outside this particular post office ever again.

I go to the empty Customs office and after ten minutes of increasingly elaborate gesticulating the man can no longer ignore me, and he comes out. I tell him i need to post this parcel to Australia. 'You need a box', he says. I know, i tell him, but all intelligence in Salta has told me that he is the man to see about a box. He looks at me like i have belittled the entire footballing history of Argentina. Why would he have a box? Does he look like a box seller? I need to go and get a box somewhere and then come back. I come up somewhere between not speaking Spanish and outright refusal to go anywhere. He sighs and shouts over at the woman at the International Post desk. She has boxes apparently. I should queue there and get one from her and then come back to see him to start the process. So i queue, and check my watch, and it's 9:20. 

This is a problem. There are 20 people ahead of me in the queue for International Post, and the two women just in front are grumbling that the people at the very front have been there for fifteen minutes already. As it happens, they end up staying at the front until 9:55am, whereupon the woman (who i am quite sure is someones lovely granny), finally gets them organised. This is another problem, as the signs everywhere are telling me that as opposed to the normal onerous working hours of 8:30 to 12:00 worked by the Customs office, today, because it is during the holiday week between Christmas and New Year, they will close at 11. Granny, it seems, needs - for every customer - to stroll to the other side of the office to get any one of a set of forms which might be better situated within arms reach, given her reliance on them. She then, likely on account of her age, needs to wait for one of her colleagues to "do the computery bit". This means that every single person has to wait for someone else - who doesn't work at the International Post desk - to have a spare 2 minutes from shovelling set top boxes over the counter to anyone with a form and a smile.

At 10:45 there are still seven people in front of me in the queue. One of the people who had been at the head of the queue when i arrived has just now been called into Customs, fully one hour and thirty minutes after i first laid eyes on him, and fifteen minutes before the Customs office is due to close. As though this had just now dawned on the Customs people, they hastily call out a number of names and in a flurry of activity they dispense with a handful of people who are waiting. Then a Customs assistant announces (to nobody in particular, lest she get lynched) that the Customs office will close shortly, and that even those people that have already been processed by the International post desk will not be seen today, and will have to come back tomorrow. Between 8:30am and 11am, she finishes, failing to appreciate the irony that the current time (10:51 by my watch) appears to meet these criteria. 'Fuck' i decide, 'this', and I leave.

As i write this - 4 days later -  I remember that my brother told me once that in Argentina everything looks modern and new and shiny, but that nothing really works. I have just come from the Chilean Correos/Post Office in San Pedro de Atacama where two lovely women sorted the whole thing in less than 15 minutes. That included one of them having to duck out to the shops for packing tape, and the other doing everything one-handed while holding a 12-month old with an eye infection.

Hi Andy!

The whole bus sleeps through the first two hours of the trip. It's boring, merely driving from one city (Salta) to another (San Salvador de Jujuy). Also it started at 7am, so everyone has had at least a 6am start. The trip will take between ten and twelve hours (depending on the border, the ticket agent says). 

After San Salvador though… it starts. As we climb higher into the Andes, the road snakes and bends back above and round us. Sometimes you see a stretch of straight in the distance, maybe three or four kilometres away (and elevated), but it will take a long and winding hour to reach it. Scree flutes ascend sheer cliffs, delineated by rain channels, seemingly held together with nothing more than force of will. Hills roll into and out of each other in amazing colours. Bright, vivid, yellows, red, purples. Shining whites and greys, and very occasionally, an ominous black. Cacti dot the barren hills. This is pure Sergio Leone country, and a young, poncho-wearing Eastwood wouldn't be out of place on top of any of the ridges (except i don't remember any llamas in "The Good The Bad and the Ugly"). We are in the high Andean plains now, but there is no snow, on any of the peaks, near or visible in the distance.

The bus attendant tries to distract us from the stunning natural beauty we are 80kmph-ing through by serving us a truly horrific lunch. This is the worst bus-food we've had in Argentina (where normally bus-food is significantly superior to airplane food). The bus attendant then tries to distract us from the downright awfulness of this food by showing us a movie called The Contract. In it, veteran African American actor Nelson Mandela plays himself playing a veteran assassin who, after traipsing around the woods of Washington State for an hour or so, inexplicably doesn't kill John Cusack (possibly forgivable given his pedigree) and his son (whose untimely and bloody death eleven seconds into his first scene would have improved the whole venture immeasurably). 

On the Chilean side of the border (time spent waiting at: 97 minutes), everything changes. Hundreds of tall rock sentries keep watch, and while they can't be anything other than naturally formed, they are all man-chiseled flat surfaces and hard angles, like the corners of large brick houses left standing after some catastrophe. Suddenly everything is brown. There are subtle deviations into "golden" and "reddish", but the underlying base colour on everything is brown. The other difference is that - not that you need to be told it, what with the tingling lips and good sit down needed after climbing a single flight of stairs - we are seriously at altitude, and the peaks in the distance are snow-capped again, for the first time since Mendoza.

And on and on to dusty San Pedro de Atacama, less an oasis in the middle of the desert, more a very slightly less deserty bit of desert in the middle of the desert. This sleepy, backpckery town is home for New Years, where the tradition is to burn effigies of people in the streets, health and safety be damned. It is apparently a Northern Chilean tradition, where the burning of the figure - dressed in old clothes and usually holding last year's calendar - represents the casting out of any badness from last year. Apart from a few banger happy children (far too close to the flames for some social workers in the crowd), this is the most firework free New Years I've experienced as an adult.

9 hours on a rusty bike (Betty Swollocks)

While Patagonia was stunning and richly rewarding, i have been left a little cold by the rest of Argentina so far. Buenos Aires suffered - i suspect - from "we're coming here again in 10 months, so no need to everything now" syndrome. This quickly turned into doing pretty much nothing for far too many days in a row. The futbol season was over, so that couldn't even distract us. Although outside the Boca Stadium, a fat man with a moustache - bearing absolutely no resemblance to Maradona - selling "fotos con el Diez" did keep me amused for an hour or so. Cordoba was fine. "Nice" almost, but seemingly embarrassed by its history and looking to the future a little too vigorously. Every woman in the place seemed to be pregnant, as though some sort of coral spawning type event had taken place in the town some seven months previously, and every fertile female ended up with child.

Mendoza, however, is wonderful. Lazy if you want it, without being boring. Active, if you want it, without requiring you to scale mountains or white-water raft. And best of all, it is wine country. And Jesus do they know how to look after their tourists. In a village called Maipu (some 45 minutes out of town on the bus) they encourage you to get on two wheels (motorised or not, at your discretion) to spend a day winery hopping. This is exactly what we do, renting bikes from somebody called Mr. Hugo (who gives you a glass of wine while he completes the paperwork, no matter what time you arrive). He then points out on a map the closest five or six wineries (all within 2 kilometres of his shop). He gives you price for tastings (accompanied by a very honest assessment of the generosity of the winemaker), so you can calculate which ones will get you most drunk for your peso. He indicates the local "beer garden" (in case you get sick of wine), and finally tells you that the wineries all close at 6, and that from 6:30 until 9 there is free wine at his shop for everyone who rented a bike from him. The day has an unmatched ugliness potential.

To mitigate this, we devise a strategy to essentially do the opposite of what everybody else is likely to. We visit three wineries, our first - the furthest from the bike rental shop - we have to ourselves for an hour and a half, before slowly making our way back to base, encountering more and more tourists as we get closer. Drunk cycling (or mopeding if you so choose) might be an issue here you see, what with all the English and Irish backpackers lorrying free wine into themselves, but - in a stroke of policing genius - they have established a whole division of the local constabulary tasked with following cyclists around from winery to winery, making sure that, as they get more and more sozzled in the harsh Mendocino sun, they are kept safe. This involves, but is not limited to: stopping traffic to give cyclists right of way, even the wrong way on one-way streets; escorting weaving cyclists through potentially hazardous roundabouts; and best of all, providing a free taxi service if the cycling becomes too much after a long afternoon imbibing. This may be the greatest use of a Guard's time ever invented, and i think it should be looked at as an add-on for cycling pub crawls of Dublin.

Argentina: Vegan unfriendly.

Christmas Day, and in the hostel a succession of backpackers queue up to cook themselves dinner. Today the supermarkets are closed, so yesterday everybody went shopping. There is an easily discernible mood amongst the lethargic hordes waiting their turn at the cooker though. They all have steak. The last thing any of them want is steak. For, while Patagonia was all about the lamb, the rest of the country is All About The Steak. And most backpackers never make it to Patagonia anyway. The problem today is born of two disparate, yet complimentary factors.

First, there is the steak. It is exceptionally good. Even the rubbish they will flog to tourists in your local Pak'n'Save is spectacular. Add to that the fact that while the steak is amazing, not a whole lot else that the Argentinians do - food-wise - is up to it (again though, Patagonia, lamb etc.). So you're strolling around the supermarket, opposite a very well stocked food market, and you think, feck it, any old Argentinian can cook up a good steak and chips, I'll have a go myself. And anyway, it's Christmas, i couldn't afford to do this when i was in college, so i might as well spoil myself now. There are a number of issues which arise when people who have never bought or cooked steak before suddenly decide now is a good time to start, none of which I'll go into here.

The second factor is that yesterday - Christmas Eve - there was a barbecue in the hostel. It was tremendous fun, with 40 people eating and drinking all they could for a paltry fee. The starters were a couple of wonderful empanadas each, followed by a very juicy chorizo sausage. The main course was, inevitably, steak. 30kgs of it, according to the man in charge of the asador. This particular asador - built into the wall of the hostel, just beside the pool - catered comfortably with 30kgs. The 40 people tasked with eating it all: less so, although there was much mirth and merriment (free local wine all night), and a good fist of it was made by a handful of protein-addicted gym junkies. Afterwards we truck - slowly - to the rooftop terrace to let off fireworks (midnight on Christmas Eve is the height of the celebration here) and drink more until people peel off to local nightclubs or bed, depending on age and/or inclination.

Back to today… This is probably the most this kitchen has ever been used. But it is probably the most grudging succession of cooks i have ever seen. I didn't think one spurious steak purchase could do this, but as I discover quickly enough, they have made another crucial miscalculation, linked to the second factor above. When they were shopping for steak, they also bought wine, and right now wine is the last thing any of them wants to be drinking. There are a large number of one-glass-taken bottles strewn around the public areas of the hostel. They sell beer here, so most people have switched.

I have spent a good portion of the day making shepherd's pie (with ingredients sourced from 3 cities), and while there is beef (and wine) contained therein, it also contains vegetables, which (chips aside) are the first consumed in nearly a fortnight.