To get to Mcleod Ganj we had to take multiple buses from Manali, which, in total took an absolutely grueling 10 hours. Needless to say, spinal realignments will be in order when we get to Australia. We were fortunate to have had a well deserved break in a bus station. Here is what a normal day in an Indian bus station looks like. After arriving in Dharmasala we had to take a 3rd bus up a steep winding road to McLeod Ganj, home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government in exile. We walked around found a hotel and settled in for 4 nights. One day we ventured out to the Dalai Lama's residence. On another day we hiked up to Triund, a 14km hike through two small villages, past a few chai stands, and around a few farms. The views were incredible all the way up and breathtaking once we got to the top! Along the way we stopped and had masala chai at one of the stands. At the top we made some Indian Mr. Noodles, watched some paragliders come out of the high Himalayas and enjoyed the company of a few Hindu mountain dogs. After our four night stay in McLeod Ganj we jumped on yet another seemingly endless bus ride to Amritsar, to visit the Golden Temple! Stay tuned!
2 Comments
ShimlaFrom Delhi we had planned to head north to the Himalayan Mountains to do some trekking and site seeing. We spent half a day arranging a night train to take us to Kalka where we would catch a toy train that would take us the rest of the way up the steep slopes of the Himalayan foothills to Shimla. We were told that Shimla was a big Honeymoon destination for Indians and when we arrived we felt like the only foreign tourists around. Shimla was absolutely swamped with Indian tourists but it had quite a nice charm to it. The views from the main town were really nice and people weren’t constantly approaching us trying to sell us stuff unlike what we experienced in Delhi. Instead we had a lot of the Indian tourists approaching us to have their photos taken with us! It was a concept that seemed really odd at first but we quickly got used to it and started to have some good fun with it! We didn’t do much in Shimla, but what we did do turned out to be a lot of fun! We had planned to send a few parcels home and to Australia so we went to a local tailor (yes that’s correct, a tailor) to have our items to send sewn into cloth packages, which were then sealed at the seams using hot wax! It was a lot of fun to watch the tailor and his assistant whip up the packages! While looking for lunch one day we were stopped by and older gentleman in the main square, he wanted to know if we needed help finding something. At first we were really apprehensive and assumed he was up to something but as we continued to chat with him we learned that he was only a retired college professor looking for a good conversation. He introduced himself as Madan and he recommended a few different restaurants for us to eat at and then politely mentioned that we were more than welcome to join him for tea at a restaurant in the main square. So we took him up on his offer and accompanied him for tea in the main square. Our conversations went from understanding the meaning of love to scientific explanations of existence to poetry! Let’s be honest the only poetry we know is the stuff we learned on Sesame Street years ago! It was a lot of fun and it turned out that Madan was written a book entitled ‘Endearing Approach’ and it’s kind of hard to describe but we understand it as a collection of poems that attempt to shed some light on our purpose of existence…we think. Anyway he used poetry throughout his entire career to aid in teaching mathematics to high school and college students. In the end we felt privileged to have met him and we are trying to find his book to buy online. He says that the publisher produces very few copies so they are quickly sold through Amazon, but he also said that the Royal British Library has a copy of it. Maybe one day we’ll get a chance to read it. ManaliFrom Shimla we took a bone-rattling 10 hour bus ride to Manali where we had planned to do a little hiking. Unfortunately Manali was even higher in elevation than Shimla and so it got quite cold at night! We stayed up in Old Manali where most of the foreigners stay. We’ve been lugging all of our camping gear around with us and we wanted to use it one last time before we sent it Australia to lighten our traveling loads. We had heard of and read a few stories of hikers who went missing near Manali. We guessed that the majority of disappearances were drug related, with Manali being the weed capital so we got some info from the Mountaineering Institute and planned to hike up to the source of the Beas Kund, the huge river that flows right through Manali. All of the people we talked to said that the hike was safe, well-marked and easily doable without taking a local guide. We are really comfortable planning and going on our own overnight trips so we went for it. To get out of Manali we took a local bus headed north and hopped off in a small village. Everything was uphill from there! We walked up to a small local ski resort where you could go paragliding for less than $10. We passed on that because believe it or not we still value our lives and continued up towards Beas Kund. We had read that the beginning of the trail was a 4x4 only jeep track; well that was written back in 2009 and now there is basically a 2 lane highway where the jeep track used to be. Luckily the highway is closed to general traffic and open only to authorized construction vehicles so as we walked up the hill dump trucks would pass us on either on their way to pick up gravel or drop some off. We walked up for about two and a half hours and finally we reached a huge construction site. We felt defeated. Even though everyone kept telling us to continue up the road to find the Beas Kund trail we stood there at this huge construction site feeling like we should turn back. They were building a tunnel, someone told us, and when we asked them to point out the trail to Beas Kund or to the Dhundi campground everyone pointed in a different direction and no one spoke more than a few words of English. We stood there, right in the middle of a massive construction zone, debating our next move when a young Indian (he looked to be in his 20’s) appeared from the forest on a hillside about 300 meters up from the construction zone. At first we didn’t think much of it; he was probably just a local farmer coming down into town or something like that. As he approached us he said, “Oh, I thought you were part of my group.” He went on to explain that he was guiding a group of Indians up to Beas Kund and that he could help us find Dhundi camp, where his group was set up. He spoke fluent English and made certain we knew that he was a real guide; probably because he knew that there might be some apprehension on our side. He introduced himself as Mowgli and took us up to the camp. Later on we were invited over for dinner by Mowgli, Raghav and Prem; three of the guides who run an adventure company called January the 14th and who were organizing this trip up to Beas Kund. We were warmly welcomed by all the Indians in the group and we enjoyed an amazing dinner and some really groovy campfire song and dance! That night as we tried to sleep the temperatures dropped… and dropped some more! We were freezing and we tried everything to stay warm in the tent. We zipped our sleeping bags together to share body heat, we put on all of our clothes and we even used our sleeping bag liners for more insulation but nothing really worked. Feeling sick and groggy we decided that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to continue up towards Beas Kund where the elevation only got higher and the temperatures cooler. When we woke up and were having breakfast in the morning (all stuffed up and soar-throated) Mowgli and Rhagav came up to check on us and bring us a packed lunch for the day! Unfortunately we decided to turn back despite them offering us an extra sleeping bag and liner! We thought we would walk up a little ways to get some more views in another valley and then turn around for the day. When we were tried enough to call it a day we headed back towards the road we climbed up and hitch-hiked with a construction vehicle heading back down the mountain towards Manali. The next couple of days in Manali we tried to relax and enjoy a few of the sites around town before another perilous 10 hour bus journey to Mcleod Ganj, home of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Government in exile!
We arrived in Coffee Bay at the end of our 5 day hike on the Wild Coast Trail. Coffee Bay is a small town located right on the Indian Ocean. We rocked up to the Coffee Shack, a good sized backpackers where we planned to camp for the next 3 days. The atmosphere at Coffee Shack was great and we met a lot of people that told us that the place is addictive and that we would end up staying longer than we planned. They were right. We planned to stay 3 days and ended up staying 6. In that time we enjoyed some great parties, some high stakes card games and of course the waves! The first or second night we were in Coffee Bay our hostel had a full moon party and to kick-off the night we headed up to the bluffs overlooking the Indian Ocean to have oysters and drinks! And it was free, all of it! Jeffrey's BayAfter our 6 days at the Coffee Shack we had to move on before we moved in so we headed further south down the coast to Jeffrey's Bay. J-Bay is a famous little surfers town known for the supertubes, a large clean wave that forms a tube perfect for surf competitions. J-Bay is also a good place for us beginners to improve our skills. We stayed in a great backpackers (Island Vibe) in an awesome private cabin with an amazing view! and yes we stayed longer than planned... again :) The photo sequence below shows Andrew tackling a wave that was a bit too big for his long board experience!
We aren’t huge fans of cities but we really liked Santiago. We felt safe and comfortable walking around at all hours of the day/night and found some of the areas of the city to be very modern and quite charming. The city is quite beautiful as it’s mostly surrounded by the massive peaks of the Andes but it’s also well laid out and fully accessible by public transit. The only drawback was that the city’s location in a valley caused quite the smog problem. We didn’t have any problems with it, but when we walked to a few lookouts we could see the orange and yellow glow of the pollution hanging low over the city. We were told that the city regulates automobile traffic to decrease the emissions on a day to day basis but it will probably take more than that to correct the smog issue. With a population of over 6 million people, a solution isn’t going to come easy. We arrived by bus from Pucon and hopped on the Metro to head into downtown Santiago to search for a hostel. Our bus arrived during rush hour so we had to wait for about 7 subway trains to pass before we were able to squeeze on with our giant travel packs. The people were very courteous on the subway and made a little room for us to get on and helped us get out when we needed to get off. We chanced upon a cool little hostel while searching for one that someone recommended. It was called Don Santiago and we spotted it because it had hostelworld stickers plastered on its door. We would definitely recommend this place to anyone looking for a chill and cozy place to stay. The owner is really young and the staff was super friendly and really helpful. We hadn’t really planned on doing too much in Santiago except meeting up with a friend (who lives in Santiago) we had met while trekking in Torres del Paine and meeting up with a an Aussie couple that we met in Ushuaia (we just knew that they were dying to see us, right Kai and Sarah!). We also had a bit of shopping we needed to do so we ventured out to a giant mall on our first day to get Courtney some new hiking boots as her old ones had started to disintegrate and were slowly destroying her feet one toe at a time. We found that prices for things in Santiago were actually quite similar to what we would pay for the same stuff in Canada! Neato! On our second day we got word that there was going to be a pretty large storm hitting the city on the weekend. We also found out that when it rains in Santiago it snows like crazy in the mountains to the east and so the border crossing to Argentina would likely be closed during the storm. In the following days as the rains rolled in we continued to explore a few different parts of the city; check out the pics below. Our friend Marcelo, who is from the South of Chile but now living in Santiago took us out for some drinks in the trendy neighborhood Bellavista. We had a great time and learned quite a lot about Santiago and Chile in general. Thanks for a great time Marcelo! We spent a day walking around Cerro San Cristobal, the second largest hill in Santiago and home to the city's zoo and some really amazing views...when its not cloudy and raining. It was pretty cool. We took a really old trolly/elevator/train (I'm not really sure how to describe it) up the hill to the zoo and then to the top. The zoo was actually quite entertaining. It had a pretty huge selection of animals and some interesting info about each one. Courtney enjoyed reading about the life spans and gestation periods of the various zoo dwellers. After the zoo we were starving so we made our way back down to Bellavista to find some grub at a local bar. This is where I stumbled upon Chorillanas. Marcelo had explained what a Chorillana was to me but I couldn't believe it until I saw it. French fries, sauted onions, fried hotdogs, fried beef and to top it off two fried eggs. I'm pretty sure these things are illegal in most countries. We had arranged to volunteer near Mendoza, Argentina for about a month but we were delayed leaving Santiago with the poor weather in the mountains. When we finally did leave it was the first day that the border between Chile and Argentina had been reopened and it was utter chaos. A drive that normally takes about 7 hours including the time to cross the border took us about 14 hours! Luckily food stands near the border were selling lomitos, hotdogs and milanesas to keep our hunger at bay. We arrived at about 12:30am into Mendoza and left early the next day to San Carlos where we are volunteering at an animal rescue shelter!
On our way to the catch the bus from Bariloche at 6:30am we saw a guy on his motorcycle - who was obviously wasted from the night before - try to overtake a taxi, swerve and crashed right into the back of the taxi... hard. The bike toppled on him and the seat was ripped off the bike in the process. Luckily we were right downtown where other people could assist him and soon after a police truck down the road spotted the guy lying on the road and went to help. We had an interesting day yet again on a bus! We went from Bariloche, Argentina to Osorno, Chile (very strict border control with dogs checking for fruits and vegetables) then had a 2 hour wait for our bus to Valdivia, Chile. After arriving in Valdivia we walked around to find a hostel; all the ones we checked were either way too expensive or really dingy. We were sort of tired and frustrated so we went to McDonald's for the WiFi and fries and found a bus to Pucon. After walking around Valdivia for a few hours with all our crap we decided that we'd get on our third bus in one day and head to Pucon. We were greeted at the bus station by a really nice hostel owner and were shown to his Hospedaje (Hostel Wohlenburg http://www.wohlenberghostel.cl/ ) We decided to visit Parque Nacional Huerquehue for a bit of day hiking and we had some pretty decent weather. A girl from Finland who was staying at our hostel came along with us for the day. The National Park was really beautiful like all of the Patagonian areas we've visited but this was a little different than what we had seen already. The park resembled a rainforest than a forest you would find in the mountains of Patagonia. There were huge trees, very lush green undergrowth and stands of bamboo growing all over the place. As we ascended higher into the alpine more snow was sticking to the ground and it was very weird seeing bamboo covered in snow. But the mix of white, freshly fallen snow sitting on lush green vegetation with the sun pouring through the trees made portions of our hike appear as if our surroundings were painted on canvas. It was really cool. After our day in the National Park we hung around Pucon and killed some time enjoying the sunny weather for one more day. To learn more about Pucon check out its Wikipedia page.
After a 22 hr bus ride that went 3 hrs South from El Chalten to El Calafate then another 4 hrs Southeast to Rio Gallegos, then a 4 hour layover and another 17 hr ride North to Puerto Madryn we finally arrived! Courtney wasn't feeling well so we took a couple of days resting and researching the next few months of the trip. With the decent internet and calm atmosphere we got a lot accomplished. Puerto Madryn is a beautiful city on the East shore of Argentina. It is a popular beach town and whale watching destination in the summer. Unfortunately we were not there during peak wildlife watching season so we didn't have our hopes high to see anything. On our first day we took a stroll down to the pier and lucked out by seeing a bunch of penguins fishing and then a large sea lion chasing a duck. We watched them for awhile and continued down the large pretty beach. It was neat to see the difference in water level between low and high tide. During low tide the beach goes out for half a km but during high tide it is only a couple of meters wide. Our second day we headed out in the evening and were accompanied by three street dogs. We were surprised that they were following us as we weren't initially encouraging them. We thought it was humorous because whenever we went inside a store they were there lying at the door step waiting for us. They followed us around for several hours "protecting" us from any other dogs! Our third day the weather was very windy and cloudy so we decided to not rent bikes but to walk along the coast to the Ecocentro (a local museum and cultural heritage center) to view a National Geographic Photo Gallery. The winds were so strong that in some areas we could lean back and let the gusts support our weight! When we rounded the last bend before the centre we saw the same three dogs tear-assing towards us. They were so happy to see us and greeted us with huge smiles. We were happy to be reunited with our little friends once again! The centre was closed for their Siesta so we went for lunch at a restaurant on the beach and ate Menu del Dia which ended with delicious Dulce de Leche crepes YUM!. Of course our friends waited patiently for us until we were finished. The third day in Puerto Madryn Andrew went on a day bike trip with two English guys we had met at the hostel. Courtney stayed at the hostel to rest as she still wasn’t feeling well. Andrew, Joe, and Max rode to El Doradillo (pronounced el door-a-dee-show), a popular place to see whales in high season. The bike ride to El Doradillo was long and dusty but the beach was beautiful. We sat around and had a giant beer each and waited for any marine animals to pass by. We lucked out as a couple of southern right whales swam past us about 200m away from shore but they weren't interested in sticking around or entertaining us with jumps or flips. In fact we were so excited to see them that we didn't bother trying to take pictures. The whales were also far enough away that our pictures would have looked like black blobs floating out at sea. A bit later we noticed that as the tide lowered some cool caves along the point at the far side of the beach were revealed so we head over to do a little exploring. On our last day we decided we’d walked to the beach and play Frisbee. We started heading down the block when we saw our three street friends waiting outside our hostel. They accompanied us to the bus station to buy tickets, then to the beach. It was hilarious as they had no idea how to play fetch let alone frisbee and never once became interested in it. Two of them fell dead asleep as the third ate sea shells while we played. When we left the beach, to get food, the shaggy one stayed sleeping. We felt bad for leaving him behind but he looked like he needed some rest. After 40 minutes or so just when we were wondering if they would find each other again we saw him crossing the road towards us! The two other ladies became really excited that they were all reunited and started rubbing and jumping on one another. After their little reunion party stopped we all continued to the grocery store. They laid down outside the store as they knew they were not welcome inside. When we were finished in the store we were sad to see they had left (probably found other tourists more willing to feed them). We spoiled them with love and affection but did not give them anything to eat the whole three days. We understand street dogs can be a nuisance to locals because they chase cars, can become territorial or dangerous and spread disease; however, we really enjoyed their company! In June we have decided to volunteer at an animal rescue in Mendoza, Argentina. We found the placement on workaway.org. We think it will be a great experience and know we will love working with the animals!
|
Get updates by email!
Archives
January 2014
Categories
All
|