The Gappies

So, that´s the end of our year around the world. By way of celebration, please don your black tie / party dress for the announcement of the Gap Year Awards “Gappies”.

Best Outdoor Activity

In 3rd place:  Tubing in Vang Vieng, Laos

In 2nd place:  White water rafting in Buller Gorge, New Zealand

And the Gappy goes to…kayaking in the Abel Tasman Sea, New Zealand

Best Hike

In 3rd place: The Pinnacles in Mulu National Park, Malaysia was technically the toughest hike.  So steep, that you have to climb virtually vertically

In 2nd place: The Inca Trail

and the Gappy goes to… The Narrows in Zion National Park, Utah.

Best Educational Activity

In 3rd place: Cooking class in Hoi An, Vietnam

In 2nd place: Batik class in Chiang Mai, Thailand

And the Gappy goes to…Star-gazing in New Zealand

Best Cultural Event

In 3rd place: Chinese New Year, Malaysia

In 2nd place: El Gran Poder Festival, La Paz, Bolivia

And the Gappy goes to…O-bon Festival in Nara, Japan

Best Historical Monument

In 3rd place: The Great Wall

In 2nd place: Machu Picchu

And the Gappy goes to… Angkor Wat

Best Beach

In 3rd place: Hot Water Beach, New Zealand

In 2nd place: Varkala Beach, Kerala

And the Gappy goes to… Nam Cat Island, Ha Long Bay

Best Hostel

In 3rd place: Giggling Tree, Yangshuo, China

In 2nd place: Treetop Lodge, Ban Lung, Cambodia

And the Gappy goes to …El Tesoro, Elqui, Chile

Best Mode of Transport

In 3rd place: Sea Plane, Taupo, New Zealand

In 2nd place: Bamboo boat, Li River, China

And the Gappy goes to…Bamboo train, Battambang, Cambodia

Best Food

In 3rd place: Shaved ice with adzuki beans, Japan

In 2nd place: Tim tams, Australia

And the Gappy goes to…Pho, Vietnam

Best Museum

In 3rd place: Natural History Museum in New York

In 2nd place: Buddha Park, Laos

And the Gappy goes to…Pinang Peranakan House, Penang, Malaysia

Best Animal Encounter

In 3rd place: In a strong category, third place goes to Madidi National Park in the Amazon.  As we were fishing for piranha, we turned around to see a mother and baby tapir (usually nocturnal) crossing the river.  Our guide was even more excited than we were.

In 2nd place: A dusk hike in the Malaysian island of Langkawi.  Langkawi is more of a beach resort / duty free haven so expectations for wildlife spotting were low.  We got about two feet away from a buzzard pinning a lizard to the ground.  Then we saw flying lemurs (with tiny babies clinging to their bellies), flying squirrels and flying lizards.  All either inside or about ten minutes walk from a big hotel complex – unbelievable.

And the Gappy goes to…snorkelling in the Celebes Sea off Mabul Island, Borneo.

Best City

In 3rd Place: Singapore. Many people find Singapore too sterile, too controlled, too boring. It probably wouldn´t have made my top three if it had been the first place we went to, but it makes the list for two reasons: (1) after a month in India, sterility, order and a bit of luxury really hits the spot and (2) it had Elephant Parade! Plus it has great museums, a nice waterfront and all the home comforts you could want.

2nd Place: Hoi An – beach, mini Angkor Wat, amazing food and everyone there tells you that you’re beautiful.

And the Gappy goes to…Tokyo, big, full, colourful, insane.

Best Country

In 3rd place: Bolivia, salt flats, street parties, amazing wildlife in the Amazon and the picture-perfect Isla del Sol.

In 2nd Place: Japan the craziest place in the world.

And the Gappy goes to… Malaysia, which takes the crown because whereas we only spent two weeks in Japan and Bolivia, Malaysia kept us entertained for six whole weeks and was fabulous throughout. Apart from the time we nearly died on Mt Kinabalu. And the mosquitos in Kinabatangan. And Kuala Lumpur’s town planning department. But apart from that, amazing.

So that’s it from my fantastic year off. Back home now, job-hunting and and that. All subscribers to this blog please feel free to unsubscribe now, because it’s going to get a lot duller from now on.

Chilean Food

Chilean food consists of:

Breakfast – bread

Lunch – meat and potatoes with more bread on the side

Onces – “afternoon tea” consisting of something savoury like a hot dog, or some cake (aka kuchen from the German immigrants)

Dinner – we never made it this far – always too full after lunch and onces.

Lomo a lo pobre – Mr Beet’s favourite dish: steak, chips and fried eggs.

The guide book kept banging on about delicious “arrollado” so I order some.  It’s pork wrapped in pork fat.  I’m not a fan.

Mr Beet celebrates eating five steaks in five days.

Churrasco palta – steak and avocado sandwich

Hot dog “completa” – tastes of nothing.

Apple strudel for onces.  Was actually quite nice despite my expression.

An empanada.  That which we call a pasty by any other name would taste as sweet  (except they hide an olive in there to keep you on our toes)

You always get bread and a spicy dip on the side of your lunch.  Often this is the nicest bit of the meal.

Swordfish at a restaurant that was rather too fancy for us.

Alfajor – a shortbread-type biscuit with dulce de leche sandwiched in the middle.

The most typical Chilean dish you could get.  Meat and potatoes, and the meat was marinaded in pisco.

Huesillos pudding of fruit and barley in alcoholic syrup of some kind.

The biggest empanada in the world?

Beet’s Improbably-Named Brightly-Coloured Soft Drinks Chronicles

An occasional series, inspired by the fantastically-named Pap.

Bilz

Kem

And Sprim (please bear in mind I had just woken up on the night bus).

Mr Beet’s Beer Chronicles – Chile

There was a good selection of beers to be tried and tested in Chile.

Kunstmann – try pronouncing that after you’ve had a few.

Escudo

Kross

Volcanes

Barro Alegre

Guayacan

Capital

Cristal

Not a beer, but he had to try a Pisco Sour at the distillery in Pisco Elqui.

And the winner is…Cristal (even though, or maybe because, the bottle was nearly as big as Mr Beet).

San Pedro de Atacama

Elqui Valley is pretty dry and dusty, but seemed damper than a UK bank holiday weekend in comparison to our next destination.  San Pedro is slap-bang in the middle of the Atacama Desert (the driest place on Earth) and the Atacama salt-flats.  At first glance, it appears to be a rustic, wild-west type of place.  But then you notice all the tourist agencies, internet cafes and the fact that the town plaza is a wi-fi hotspot.  It´s quite the bustling tourist hub, but has retained it´s frontier town charm.

San Pedro is near the Bolivian border, and will be our base for organising our tour of the Bolivian salt-flats.  We have heard various horror stories regarding these trips: bad food, extreme cold, altitude sickness, drunk drivers etc.  So we do some research by looking at the hilarious complaints book at the tourist information office.  One person complains that the driver left them behind at some geysers.  With five other tourists in the 4×4, I can´t help feeling that the driver might not be entirely to blame, and maybe this guy was just unpopular.

We have banded together with a German couple and a Kiwi couple to form a full 4×4.  We speak to a couple of agencies and it turns out that I am the only Spanish-speaker (using the term in the loosest possible sense) so I will be responsible for translating while we negotiate a deal and when we are on the tour.  What´s the Spanish for “uh-oh“?  Mr Beet keeps saying that my Spanish is really good, but since his grasp of the language consists entirely of a few foodstuffs, I´m not sure how he has reached this conclusion.

Anyway, once we´re all booked in for our Bolivian tour, we set about making the most of our final few days in Chile.  We enjoyed our star-gazing trip in New Zealand so much that we have another go in San Pedro.  They are building the world´s biggest set of telescopes nearby, but we are content to just look through some outdoor telescopes.  Plus, all the stuff we learned in New Zealand is still fresh in our minds so we can answer the guide´s questions and look really clever! Cleverer at least than the woman who pointed excitedly at the sky and shrieked “Oh my God, what’s that?” at a plane.

Our final day in Chile is spent visiting the Salar de Tara, a little salt-flat that is tiny compared to the Bolivian ones we will see in a few days, but still very pretty and worth a visit.  We get picked up early in the morning in San Pedro (2,400m above sea-level) and within an hour we are at 4,800m.  It is cold, but since we don´t have much to do except stroll around taking a few pictures, we don´t feel the effects of the altitude too badly.

We see some volcanoes, vicunas (wild llamas), frozen lakes, big rock formations, the salt flat and some cute little marmot-like animals that our guide said were called “chululu” or something like that.

More pictures from San Pedro on Mr Beet’s flickr page.

parkrun on tour – 12 May 2012

A parkrun along the beach in La Serena, Chile.

He´s been through the desert on a horse with no name…

Mr Beet has anyway.  My horse was called “Suspiro”.  More of that later.  It has indeed been good to get out of the rain of Southern Chile and into the Desert North.

First stop is La Serena, a nice seaside town that boasts a nice stretch of beach and a museum with a genuine Easter Island moai.

After a day in La Serena, we go further inland to the Elqui Valley. This is a sliver of lush green vineyards at the bottom of a mountain valley.

We stay in the town of Pisco Elqui (named after the brandy, not vice versa). Our lovely hostel has a beautiful garden full of hummingbirds.

Pisco Elqui was exactly how you imagine a small South American town should look; single-storey adobe houses, dusty streets, hoards of stray (but friendly) dogs and dry, red mountains in the background.

We visited the pisco distillery to to sample a pisco sour. It´s meant to be the best pisco in Chile and it certainly packed a punch.

Then, as previously hinted at, we did some exploration of the countryside on horseback.

Mr Beet´s poor horse was not only nameless, but probably very confused. Our guide kept trying to gee him along to go faster, and Mr Beet kept pulling on the reins to make him slow down again. Mr Beet was not really happy with anything more than a walk, but since he was somewhat emotionally scarred by his last attempt to ride a horse aged ten, I think he was quite brave to give it a try.  And I think he managed to overcome some of his fears and he was quite enjoying it by the end of the day.

The Elqui Valley has some of the clearest night skies in the world, which makes it home to a lot of observatories.  Apparently there is also a lot of magnetism or ley-lines or something that also makes it the UFO / hippy / mystical healing capital of South America. Mr Beet asks me to ask our horse-riding guide whether he has ever seen a UFO. My Spanish is not up to translating “UFO”, so I ask him whether he has ever seen “strange things in the sky”. He is very matter-of-fact and says that he´s seen them quite a few times, that everyone who lives in Elqui has. But while we were there, we saw only some spectacularly starry skies.

On our last day, we went to visit some natural hot springs near the Argentine border. So near the border, in fact, that we had to leave our passports at the last checkpoint on the Chilean side and go into the “no man´s land” between the two countries. The land here is very mineral-rich, which makes it lots of different colours in a quite spectacular way that I have completely failed to capture in my photographs. Plus there are 6,000m high snowy peaks in the background.

After a couple of hours walk (at 3,300m – good altitude training for Bolivia) we reach the hot springs, where we soak for an hour and contemplate the scenery.

More pictures of La Serena and the Elqui Valley on Mr Beet´s flickr page.

Valparaiso

From Valdivia it´s an overnight bus journey to Valparaiso, a seaside town North of Santiago. And the sun is shining – hooray! Valparaiso is famous for its murals / graffiti, so I´ll let the photos speak for themselves.

More photos on Mr Beet´s flickr page.

McDonalds on Tour – Chile

I didn´t go to McDonalds in Santiago and I was a bit worried that I might have missed my chance, but then in Valdivia I saw the welcoming glow of the golden arches and got myself a McNifico (just a plain burger as far as I could tell, no distinguishing features).  Another continent ticked off!

Chiloe and Valdivia

Still South of Santiago, we are still encountering more bad weather and doing very little as a result.  We go to the island of Chiloe, which is famous for its stilt houses over the water and its churches.

Then we went to Valdivia – heading North so the weather improves slightly.  The highlight of Valdivia is the fish market.  This is right by the river and the fishmongers throw the fish heads over their shoulders, where they are wolfed up by a host of cormorants, pelicans and sealions.  When the sealions have had their fill, they swim upstream to a sunbathing platform where they compete noisily for the prime spots.

More photos of Chiloe and Valdivia on Mr Beet´s flickr page.