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.
Good day all. When you last left your hero, he had just arrived in Puerto Plata and was looking forward to a week of food, drink, sun and fun. Sadly, your hero has just realized he’s getting waaay behind in his blog posts, and may have to shorten a few posts in order to play catch-up! After all, we’ve got the Dominican to write about, a winter poker night in Calabogie, not to mention a crazy weekend of double races! Whew. Given that on average it takes me an hour just to write one posts, well, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out I’ve got to speed things up. I wonder how much it would cost me to get a ghost writer to do my posts for me? After all, my plan is that once I’m older, I’ll just dump all my blog posts to a ghost writer who’ll then write my best-selling autobiography 😉 Of course, I’ll have to do a few more interesting things first, but I’m working on it! Anyway, back to the beautiful Blue Bay Getaway in Puerto Plata (Playa Dorado to be exact). Let’s see just what I did to pass those lonely days.
14/02/08
Wow, look at that kids, it’s St. Valentine’s Day! Well, I can’t say I’m doing anything romantic at all to mark the day, but rather, chose to hurtle myself over a canyon and fly through the same said canyon in a jet boat. Later on tonight, I believe my hosts and I will be doing somewhat of a pub crawl around Queenstown. Lucky for me, they don’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day, so I’m not really intruding. Otherwise, I would’ve just found my own entertainment for the night elsewhere. Today is another pseudo-rest day, with the most I’m doing physically is walking to town and back to get shuttle buses. The legs are recovering nicely, and I think I’ll be back on track with another day like this. Lucky for me, that’s exactly how I planned it out! Hee hee. Anyway, for today, I put together a map showing where I did things, but they are not my typical biking maps. Read on, and check out the pics too.
31/01/08
Hi gang! Well, it’s hard to believe, but yet again I find myself a day late in my blog postings. Sorry folks. The main reason for this is that I’m still not feeling 100% at the moment, but more accurately, it’s because I’ve been a bit lazy. Basically, once I get done with titling all the pictures, and creating the custom map, I sort of run out of steam. However, I’ll do my best now to fill you in on yesterday and today’s details. I started the day yesterday in the little town of Westport, and made my way out to the true West Coast, and down along to a village called Punakaiki, home of the world famous Pancake Rocks and the Blowholes. Upon arrival here, I decided that this was basically paradise for me, as I’m right on the beach, surrounded by great limestone cliffs, and have some great walking tracks. As a result, within 5 minutes of getting here, I trudged back to the office and plopped down a second night’s payment. I’ve decided that rather than stop in Greymouth, I’ll just blow past it and head straight to Hokitika, another 40km down the road. Capital idea I figure. Anyway, read on for more about the ride, and don’t forget to check out the map.
Click here for pictures from Salta. Howdy folks, well, I´ve got a rare bit of free time to write up a post in the sort-of middle of the day. It´s just around 4:30, and I just got back from my lunch, and have free time till 8pm, so let´s just pick it up where we left off and talk about yesterdays journey. I talked about getting on the train to the clouds, and then subsequently finding out it would be a mini-bus to the clouds. I´ll have to be honest though, sometimes, these little changes are just what you need. This tripped proved to be well worth it. Although by the end of the trip, we all agreeed that these particular clouds weren´t very soft and fluffy, and could use a spot of pavement 🙂 As it turns out, the road we travelled was pretty bumpy, and filled with lots of cargo trucks laden with lithium brine and borax. These are some of the things that get mined from the salt flats that exist in the altiplano at high altitudes between here and Bolivia. We got an early start to our day, boarding the bus at 8am. The trip was to last for about 12 hours, and we had a great guide named Pablo to fill us in on all the gory details of the areas we´d be seeing. read on…
