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Travels
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In
all our travels we had never actually been round the world.
In
2009 we got the opportunity to do that. The excuse was nephew
Mark's wedding in Tasmania in January, coming home the long way round.
We
skipped Asia (that will be another trip), and concentrated on parts of
Australia, New Zealand and South America we had not seen before, and in
between we wanted to see Easter Island (memories of Thor
Heyerdahl's books). So we flew more or less direct to
Tasmania,
spent 2 weeks on the island, then flew to Melbourne to see the coast of
Victoria. We drove to Sydney, then flew to Auckland.
We
spent 10 days in the far north of New Zealand, which we did not visit
on our 2006 trip.
Then we
flew to Tahiti, spent 3 days there between planes, and took the plane
to Easter Island. We spent 6 days on the island (there is a
lot
to see), before flying to Santiago. In Chile we took a day
trip
to Valparaiso, then flew south to Osorno. We travelled round
Patagonia by bus and then rental car. We ended up on a bus to
Buenos Aires, took a side trip to Uruguay, then flew up to Salta in the
north of Argentina. From there we bussed over the Andes to
the
Atacama desert, the north Chilean coast and on to Bolivia.
From La Paz we flew to Florida and then home. We were away
about
3 months.
If you click on "Photos" on the right, you can
see some of our pictures of each section of the trip. Click
on the thumbnails to enlarge the pictures.
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For a relatively small island
Tasmania packs in a lot
of scenery. We visited Cradle Mountain in the north, then
spent
some time on the wild west coast (the Edge of the World, the sign said,
and it felt like it, with the waves rolling in from 10,000 miles of
ocean). We worked our way over to the east coast, where we
hiked in the Freycinet National Park. In the south we visited
Bruny Island, again following the steps of Susan's favourite
Yorkshireman, Captain Cook, and Port Arthur, the 19th century convict
station.
Tasmania has fascinating wildlife. The Tasmanian Devil (a sort of
diminutive marsupial Rottweiler) is hard to see in the wild, so we
snapped him (her?) in a wildlife park. Everywhere we found
spectacular tree ferns. Here and there we saw middens -
refuse
accumulated for millenia, sad reminders of the Tasmanians who lived on
the island for 10,000 years in complete isolation from the rest of
humanity.
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Tasmania
Photos
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Back on the
Australian mainland we first drove west from Melbourne along the Great
Ocean Drive. We went as far as "London Bridge".
About 20
years ago this was a real sea bridge that you could walk across.
When the bridge fell into the sea, the lucky tourists on the
far
side had to be rescued by helicopter.
East of Melbourne we drove to Wilsons Promontory, then further east
through Lakes Entrance and eventually to Sydney.
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We
flew from Sydney to Auckland, and explored the far north of New Zealand
(the thin bit). We saw the forests where the kauri trees
grow.
These are really enormous trees. Many were cut down
for
timber 100 years ago, and there is an excellent museum which shows you
just how big some of them were. We had to go to Cape Reinga,
the
very end of the North Island, and came back via the 90 Mile Beach
(actually 63 miles long), and its famous sand dunes where (in tune with
the Kiwis' penchant for extreme sports) one of us indulged in some
"snowboarding".
Another highlight was the Bay of Islands,
where we went on a boat trip looking for dolphins to the Hole in the
Rock (this being New Zealand, the boat had to go through the Hole).
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We
spent our 3 days in Tahiti on the main island, which we saw little of
on
our 2006 visit. We drove around the densely populated coast
(the
interior is uninhabited), and saw Gauguin's house. We also
visited Tahiti Iti in the south east.
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From Tahiti it was a
2000 mile flight to Easter Island,
the distance travelled by the Polynesians who discovered the island
over 1000 years ago. It was quite a feat to find the island.
It's only 13 miles from end to end, and thousands of miles
from
anywhere else. The big things to see are of course the
statues
(known as moai),
of which
there are plenty, some standing, some fallen, some still on the
mountain where they were hewn from the rock. To move them
from
the quarry to the erection sites the islanders needed timber, so ended
up cutting down all the trees. So they could not move them
any
more, so they stopped carving the statues. Also they could
not
build any more canoes, so they were stranded. Their next
great
idea was the birdman cult, which involved the men swimming out to two
tiny offshore islets to collect birds' eggs. Then the
eggs and birds ran out....
We hiked up the mountain at the
western end of the island where the birdman cult happened. We
could see the whole island. We were fascinated by the skies
over the island, which were always
changing as rain squalls passed over.
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We
flew to Santiago in Chile, and after a day in Valparaiso flew south to
Patagonia. In Bariloche, on the Argentine side of the Andes,
we
found a rental car company prepared to let us take a car not only on
thousands of kilometres of dirt roads but also to Chile. So
off
we went in a little Renault Clio. We headed south to the
Carretera Austral, the main (only) road south on the Chilean side of
the Andes (the wet side, although the weather was kind to us).
We
eventually arrived at Lago General Carrera, the second largest lake in
South America, which we crossed by ferry.
The
lake is shared
with Argentina, which calls it Lago Buenos Aires (the two countries
don't seem to agree on much). Back in Argentina we took Ruta
40,
a mostly gravel road which runs the length of the country just east of
the Andes. We took a side road to the Cueva de las Manos
(Cave of
the Hands), a very isolated
spot, where prehistoric men painted on the cave walls.
Further
south we came to the second house in 200 miles, the well-named Estancia
Siberia, where we stayed the night. At last we reached the
Glaciers
National Park. There we hiked to various viewpoints to see
Mount
Fitzroy and the Cerro Torre (Tower Peak), an almost unclimbable
mountain.
South
again we came to the Perito Moreno Glacier. Then we crossed
back
to Chile to revisit the Torres del Paine. We finally reached
the
Magellan Straits, before heading north across the Argentine pampas.
We stayed in a Welsh B&B and saw the scant remains of
the
Patagonian Welsh. Our last few days in Patagonia were spent
looking for wildlife on the Valdes Peninsula, where David Attenborough
got his famous shots of killer whales hunting sea lions.
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Patagonia photos |
We
dropped the car in Bahia Blanca, and took a 10 hour bus ride to Buenos
Aires - tango central. After a few days there we took a boat
across the River Plate to Montevideo and the old colonial city of, er,
Colonia in Uruguay. We then flew north to Salta, and bussed
it
over the Andes to San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. More buses
to
the Chilean coast, north to Arica and back across the Andes to La Paz
in Bolivia.
We flew from La Paz to Florida, and home after a few days rest there. |
Photos
of northern Argentina and Chile, Uruguay and Bolivia |
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