The World's Most Boring Blog

I have just arrived back in Spain after 5 months on the road, and what a ride it has been; certain people have followed by trip the entire way on my blog, and I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed writing it.

It’s very early to have a certain view on the trip in retrospect, I’m still bewildered from being back, but it’s a trip that has changed my life, and my view upon life, but then, all great changes in your life do exactly that.
Certain people on the trip have made a bigger impact than others, of the most important I can mention: Mike Gasson, Jimmy, Dave, Sarah, Carl, Miguel, Anne Dorte, Stephen, James, Johno, Karin, Flavio, Julian, Magte, Tono, Antonio, Heather, Lisa, Moni, Bob and the star of the show… Gilbert.

I have also had a lot of help from the homefront: Hanne (mother), Jesper (father), Anne Sophie (sister), Bo (stepfather) and Anette (friend). Especially without the help of these individuals, the trip never would have been or it would have failed while I was underway.

With a disregard to all that I have just written, I would like to extend a thank you, to everyone on this list:

Family, friends and everyone who has been reading the blog!

Uruguay: Those 5 Danes

Colonia Del Sacramento: The Brit and the Aussie

Puerto Madryn: Sarah and Kyle

Rio Gallegos: Timo, Jonah and Fred

Ushuaia: Andreas, Uri, Layden and the 4 Israeli girls

Punta Arenas: Carl, Tamar, Adina, Keenan, Irish couple, Jack, Roman, Mike and the two Aussie’s in their 50’s.

Puerto Natales: Bill, Kat, Bo, the guy from Punta Arenas, Monty (the cat), Britney, Jenny, German girl, Vicky and Sophia

Torres Del Paine: Urs, John, John, Susan, Katy, Rafael, Natasha, Albert, Nick, Whitney and the two Irish guys.

Calafate: Edward

Chalten: Mike

Futaleufú: Eyal, Rachel, Dave and Eddie

El Bolsón: Lucia

Bariloche: Patrick, Reut, the Israeli twins and Jimmy

Bariloche -> Valdivia: Lindsay

Pucón: Everyone at hostel Etnico, everyone who went up the volcano with me (in particular Yong)

Santiago: The staff at La Chimba hostel and Mike (of El Chalten fame)

Rapa Nui (Easter Island): Miguel, Chen, Kieran, Melissa, Larry, Jimmy (From Bariloche),John, Emma, Brian, John (Montana), Alejandra

Buenos Aires: Eddie (of Futaleufú fame), Anne Dorte, Jon, Karen, Elena, Jane, Becky, Eric, Madoka, James, Steve, Stefan, Darren, Deborah, Chris

Puerto Iguazu: Two German girls, Canadian girl and the two Danish girls

Ciudad Del Este: Dan and Rommi

Santa Cruz -> La Paz: Lorgio

La Paz: Patrick (from Bariloche) and Danny

La Paz -> Cuzco: Florian

Cuzco: Steve and James (from Buenos Aires), Karin, Anna, Heather, Ley, the 3 Norwegian girls, Ingrid, Johno, Maria, Charlotte, Mike Gasson (from El Chalten and Santiago) and the Kiwi girl.

Inca Trail: Flavio, Julian, the porters and the cook, Rob and Dee Ann

La Paz: Nadja, Yasmin, Heather, Uval, Maud, Jonathan, Ivan and Macro

Potosi: Cameron, Monica, Allan, William, Anaïs, Angela and Aaron

Uyuni: Angela (from Potosi), Declan and Judy

Sucre: Andrew, Tamsyn and Trevor

La Paz: Jimmy

Pampas: Jimmuy, Laia and Tono

Jungle: Jimmy, Antonio and Jesus

La Paz: Jimmy, Heather, Roly and Anita

Copacabana: Jimmy

Habana: Lisa, Amasa and Lily

Santiago de Cuba: Lisa (from above)

Comandancia La Plata: Moni

VIlla Santa Domingo -> Camaguey: Shane and Steve

Cuba: All the family’s I stayed with, ate with and talked with; you showed me the best side of Cuba.

Washington, D.C.: Hiro, Carlos, Rachel & Eyal (from Futaleufu and Bariloche), Bill Colburn, Jackie, Rick and Rav Shmuel.

New York: Tony, Anne Sophie (my sister), Peter & and his son Tony as well as

Chicago: Bob, Amanda and the people on the Wicker park tour

Boston: Amelia

I’m just gonna leave you with a feeling of my trip, I know with this massive list of people above, it doesn’t feel right, and I’m not saying it gives a sense of my entire trip, but you will also notice that few people are mentioned more than once (it won’t work if you are reading this in an email, you have to go to the website):

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So before I leave you… Beyond the sky and the earth, thank you.

Getting to Paraguay proved a lot harder, then I had initially thought. I had hoped to get the 9 o’clock bus to Ciudad Del Este, which would drive straight through Brazil, so that I wouldn’t have to get off and do the border formalities. However I woke up at 9.40, and thus was unable to make that bus, and wasn’t bothered to get the 10 o’clock bus, as I would have to hurry a lot. So I took it easy, ate the bread there was for breakfast at the hostel.

I checked out and went down to the Terminal to get my 11 o’clock bus, boarded it and paid my 3 pesos, and so it set off. I got stamped out of Argentina, went back on board the bus and got dumped off in Brazil? That wasn’t to plan, but there wasn’t much to do about it. The busdriver told us (I got off together with an English guy, German girl and an Argentinian girl) that another bus would be along in 20 minutes. So we all got our Brazilian entry stamps. Back at the bus stop, nothing happened. 20 minutes passed, then 30, 40, 50, 1 hour had gone by and still no bus. The German girl was getting extremely impatient and kept muttering to herself as she had wanted to catch a bus from Ciudad Del Este to Santa Cruz (Bolivia). So when a bus finally came, it wasn’t with out company, so we couldn’t get on it. The German girl just bought a new ticket from the bus driver and was off.

In hindsight, I would have gotten on the bus with her, but I had no idea that the bus would never come along… After a little while, the 2 Danish girls I had met the previous day came along, waited for their bus (they were only going to Foz de Iguacu (the Brazilian town) and left. They were followed by 2 Swedish girls who did the same. So eventually I got to know the people I were waiting with quite well. Daniel (Dan) from England and his girlfriend Rommi from Cordoba (Argentina, not Spain), who were out traveling until Dan had to go back to England again (a week later). We talked especially a lot about our bus, and whether or not it would actually come. So after 2 hours and 40 minutes, we had just had enough. We got very upset with out bus company NSA (Never Stops Anywhere) and took a taxi, it was 60 peso all the way to Ciudad Del Este, a lot more expensive than the bus, but then the bus never came.

Leaving Brazil was easy enough, there was no queue, we just got our stamps and drove across the international Friendship bridge, a bride you should never walk across, unless you don’t care about being mugged. On the other side we did our border formalities, got a very beautiful stamp in my passport and located our hotel, which our driver offered to take us to for free. The hotel was in the Lonely Planet guide listed as 13 dollars for a single room, but upon arrival it turned out to be a 35 dollar room. So Dan and Rommi offered to share a triple room with me, which brought the price down to a much more sensible. Had the final price been 35 dollars, I would have found another place. But 15 dollars was acceptable, especially since it was a nice hotel (Hotel Munich), and in Ciudad Del Este, you don’t want to scrimp. There are plenty of very cheap places, but there are even more dodgy places with absolutely no security.

Dan and Rommi had initially hoped to go to the Itaipu dam, but unfortunately it was too late for that trip, so we walked around Ciudad Del Este, an enormous cheap electronics market… My kind of place. For lunch Dan had read about a Lebanese place in the Lonely Planet guide, unfortunately it was nowhere to be found, so instead we went into a mini-market next to a mosque, and asked. The owner didn’t know of it, but he was Lebanese and his uncle owned a restaurant not far away, so he had his little brother take us there. Without him we would never have found it, in fact, without the little brother we would never have entered the building, found our way to the second floor and sat down there. The place (not the restaurant) looked extremely dodgy and ready to collapse, the restaurant itself was a kitchen with 1 table and 4 chairs, but the food… The food was fantastic; this was one of those places where locals come, and it stays local, because they don’t want to share the gorgeous food. I had a sort of roll with minced lamb and assorted vegetables in it, part of which tasted like some vegetarian meat replacement, which I had once tasted in Amsterdam at a shawarma place (not surprising).

We went back to the hotel and relaxed as there wasn’t much to do, the market was beginning to close, and that really is all there is. So we settled down, Dan and I talked while Rommi slept. Once it was late, Dan and I went out looking for dining places that weren’t too expensive. We eventually found a nice place, so we went back to the hostel, found that Rommi was awake and went out to eat dinner. I had a wonderful lasagna, Rommi the same an Dan had a really good looking Paraguayan fish.

29th of March:

Nothing major, ate my breakfast, tried to send some more DVD’s to my father, but the post office was closed (Saturday). I said goodbye to whoever was around (Karen and Ilene had left the previous day; James and Steve was nowhere to be found), such people as Danny and Anne Dorthe. I went to the bus terminal, waited for my bus and boarded my bus. I fell straight to sleep and woke up many hours later, read in my book and fell asleep again. The only thing I did today, was when I went to see the courthouse of Buenos Aires.

30th of March:

I arrived some hours late at 9 in the morning (who is counting in South America?), dumped my bags at my hostel, and went straight to the Iguazu Falls. There is no easy way to explain Iguazu; you first hear the falls some way off, then you can see it sometimes in between branches, and then suddenly it leaps out at you. The falls are massive, all over and you just can’t get enough.

I had booked a boat tour which goes under the second largest fall, and somewhat close to the largest fall. That’s right, you willingly get into a boat and sail under the fall… Simply put it is an amazing experience, you don’t feel like you are about to die (as one might have expected), although you do feel like you could be washed away. It sort of fills you with even more awe (if that’s possible), and once you leave all you want is more (which is why they turn around and do it a second time).

Out of the boat you walk up again, and head out onto the higher catwalks (you get to the boat by the lower ones), and from here you get a spectacular view of the eastern falls. Not to mention pretty rainbows, butterflies and a picture of me.

I then went to the top and caught the park train to the Devil’s Throat, by far the most impressive part of the falls, however some of my pictures, have got obvious amounts of water on the lens, but there was a constant and heavy rain due to the falls, so there was nothing I could do. However this part is truly amazing, a deafening roar, with a clear sight of Brazil and the abyss of water. I also managed to arrive so that I left, just in time for the Asian train (lots of Asian people) to arrive, and this is what that looks like.

Instead of going back to Puerto Iguazu, I went down a sidetrail, the trail was long and unrewarding, so at the bottom, I took a few pictures and turned around. Back at the entrance center, a lot of shops had been set up, selling woodwork and other handicraft. After a long wait I took the bus back to Puerto Iguazu and met two Danish girls from Esbjerg, talked with them while the bus was going back, and went back to my own hostel in Puerto Iguazu. Later in the evening I went out for dinner (I had a little bit or Argentine peso left, too little for a currency conversion) and back to the hostel afterwards, where by some extreme luck, American Dad was being shown on telly.

My last whole day in Buenos Aires;
Steve and James were suddenly wielding new English books, so I asked where they got them, and hastened to the shop. The shop is a second-hand bookstore (I’m not complaining, I’m cheering) where I bought, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and after lots of searching, Post-Captain by Patrick O’Brien; I had the read the first in the series some time ago, and absolutely loved it.

When I got back it was around 12 o’clock, and about 10 of us gathered to go play football, and as we were leaving the hostel, picked up 2 Israeli’s, making it a total of 12, 6 vs. 6.
The first two pitches we went to were in use, so we played in one of the parks, and it really was a lot of fun. I have always played defender, so I didn’t score any goals, but it was still great fun. I didn’t really know all who went for the game, but those I do know are Chris, Danny, Darren, Eddie and Steve. The rest were mainly people from other floors on the hostel, but that didn’t matter, they were all good fun.

For dinner I went to the supermarket and bought some pasta with carbonara sauce, but I didn’t have any milk for the sauce, so it was mainly just flavoured water which I poured over my pasta, just like in Punta Arenas (not sure I wrote about that incident, but I sure do remember it).

It was followed by 5 of us (Eddie, Jane, Becky, Eddie and me), who sat down out on the terrace and talked for a long while, and then we were joined by more and more people as time went, and by the time I went to bed around midnight, there was more than 20 people.

On this day it really felt like I didn’t see that much, but I did oh so much; of my 3 days in Buenos Aires, this was the second best (after the Recoleta day). That’s not to say that the first full day was bad, Buenos Aires is just so big and crazy.

I started the day out by going to the Recoleta cemetery, the cemetery where famous people from Argentina are buried. The day before I had agreed with Anne Dorthe to go the Recoleta cemetery, so the two of us went. We walked all the way there, and at the entrance donated some money to an organization dealing with the children whose parents are infected with HIV (suitable place, a graveyard). The graveyard is enormous and filled with impressive graves. But for me the real attraction of the place, was the grave of Eva Peron. For a long time I had been studying the Peron regime in history class at Aloha College, so actually being at the grave, sort of felt like the end of a pilgrimage.

Walking around the rest of the graveyard was quite stunning still, those graves always get bigger and bigger; well others are left to crumble or otherwise feel the ages. The one final grave I want to mention is that of Juan Manuel de Rosas, the guy who features on the Argentinian 20 peso note.

Afterwards we walked around Recoleta, the fanciest neighbourhood in Argentina, went down to the University and then came back up in the direction of the hostel, where we ate lunch and upon arriving at the hostel, discovered that on this night Boca (Argentina) was playing Colo Colo (Chile), that is the Argentinian top team vs. the Chilean top team, playing in their equivalent of the Champions League, in a game that both teams has to win, and Boca had to score at least 3 goals and win, so an aggressive game seemed sure. So both of us bought a ticket for 150 peso through the hostel, and cooked dinner before we left for the game around 6 o’clock.

At around 6:30 we left, and on the bus I met Stefan, a Swedish guy from Stockholm who sounds Norwegian to me (that statement would almost warrent a death sentence), whom I talked a good deal to. When entering the stadium, everybody gets searched twice, and in that process the second time I got searched, the guy doing it grabbed my ass, something I pointed out, but the only thing that was done about it was another guy who said “lucky boy”.

The game itself was crazy though; we were inside the stadium at 19:30 o’clock, and kickoff was at 21:10, so we had a long wait, but the atmosphere was amazing (almost explosive), and all the locals were ready for a big game. Boca had to win and score at least 3 goals, otherwise they would have no chance of progressing from the group play, in the Latin American version of Champions League.

The ball was kicked off, and within 4 seconds there was a freekick, and the Argentinians played an extremely offensive game, always pushing forward; however it didn’t take long before Colo Colo scored the first goal of the game (to an excessive amount of booing from around me), followed not long after by a penalty kick to Boca, which they somehow managed to miss (the player didn’t hit the bar, nor was the ball taken by the goalkeeper, he simply missed the goal), but about 90 seconds after that, an amazing goal was scored, where one player simply just took on 3 defensive players and the goalkeeper; really good playing.

The offensive playstyle continued, which ended in a red card to Boca, followed sharply by a 2-1 score to Cole Cole. But Boca came backafter the brek in the game and scored to 2-2, this surely was a lively game, with lots of corner kicks, shots on goals and everything you want. Boca kept on scoring the goals, first to 3-2 and then to 4-2, before the Chileans caught up and scored to 4-3, which was the ending score. Two South American teams, 7 goals, 1 red card, who knows how many yellow (the referee does), even more freekicks and corner kicks… Was this one the best games I could have possibly gone to? You bet!