Bored. Snapped a few pics in the airport. 3 hour layovers in terminal 1 are toooo looong. Happily the Red Rocket supplies us with beer. 2 pints of Rickards – an outlandish $19 after tax and hefty tip (hey, I’m on vacation and happy). Looking forward to $3 bottles of Argentine Red!! Next up, the hung for Chester Cheetah’s Cheese Corn! Rumour has it that Nacho Libre is slotted for the next flight. THe Notebook is also on tap, but luckily, it’s later on so I won’t have to stay up.
Hey folks. Nothing much to report for this blog post. I decided to spend an extra day in Paihia, as I wanted to visit Russell, which has some significant history attached to it. What’s the point of touring and biking all the time if you can’t take a day off for yourself every now and again, right? Well, that was what I did for myself. There was only one hitch with my day off. It rained. Scratch that, it poured! When I awoke, it was actually not too bad out, so I got my things together and headed down to the town. I hit an Internet Cafe for an hour and a half, putting up a couple posts and some maps, but of course you already knew that, didn’t you? So what else is new this day? Tune in.
07/02/08
Hey gang! Your humble narrator checking in once again. Another day has passed, and what a doozy it was for me. As you will note by the map that goes with this post, I’ve put another 121km on me, my bike, and the little trailer that could. Yup, it was my longest day yet, but it seemed like the thing to do, as there was virtually NOTHING between Fox Glacier and here, Haast. There was one cafe at a Salmon Farm early on, but that was it. It was all biking, all the time, with only the briefest of pauses to have some PB sandwiches for lunch. I thought there might be somewhere to get more water, but nope. For the whole day, I only had about 1.8L of fluids. Yikes. Good thing it was mostly overcast. Oh, BTW, I forgot to mention it, but I’m now well over 2500km into my trip on the bike! Cool eh? Read on for a little more about this challenging day, and don’t forget to look at the map 🙂
Howdy all!
Well, hard to believe, but we´ve now got less than a week of this great trip left. I guess all things must come to an end. On the plus side, the time really hasn´t seemed to fly, meaning we´ve really been enjoying the trip, and it truly has felt like a proper getaway!
We´re back from the Inca trail, and no worse for wear. If you´ve ever contemplated heading south and seeing this area, I would definitely recommend getting back to nature and doing some proper hiking. Our 4 day journey wasn´t exceptionally difficult, but it had it´s ups and downs (literally). One of the downs would probably be the fact that on the day we started, Apu the sun God decided that it was time for rainy season to start. For most of the trail, the mountains were shrouded in clouds, and yes, we did experience both hail and heavy rains at various points. That being said, it certainly didn´t dampen (get it, dampen?) our spirits or reduce the experience in any way.
My personal favourite part of the journey wasn´t the trail, or even Macchu Picchu itself, but the hike we did on the site of the ruins, which was to climb up Wayna Picchu, (Young Mountain), the bigger peak behind the ruins. It is an uphill trail that is incredibly steep in parts, and culminates in a peak of a few really big boulders that you´re free to scramble around (1000s of feet above the valley below). We took some great shots from there, and both remarked that ´liability insurance´ obviously isn´t something required in South America. But obviously since I´m writing this, we both made it down in one piece. The rain even let up while we were up there.
Howdy all, Steve here, reporting from the Hostel Estoril in Buenos Aires. I’ve made an executive decision as to how I’ll keep you posted while we’re over here. Flash blogs. Meaning, just short little posts filling you in on the basics, and some of my thoughts. Hope you’ll understand my brevity. There are better things to do than write on a machine. But thankfully, for the time being, the hostel has hooked me up with free access to updated the blog. The posts will be pretty much straight translations from my notebook, where I’m organizing my thoughts. When I get back, I’ll update these with pictures too hopefully. On we go…
