One or two things about travelling South

To those who are back home and being very jealous for we are here in sunny South America while they’re scratching the ice from the car windscreen I have one or two things to say. Travelling through South America is not always as easy as one could imagine. The first thing you learn to hate is the music they play on busses. Maybe the music itself is not that bad but when you’re forced to listen to it (out loud!) on a 10 hours night bus ride then even your favourite band would start to drop dramatically from your list of preferences. The texts of the songs are always the same. The plot: 1) a man and a woman are happily in love together; everything is beautiful so I don’t understand why bother writing the song in the first place; 2) a man is left by his woman so he starts to pray the virgin (meaning the mother of Jesus) to intervene so that the woman might come back. I’ve tried with ear plugs but they simply don’t work. Because it doesn’t matter in what part of the bus I sit there is always a speaker right above my head. Needless to say that this is not the case when they’re showing a movie am interested in and would actually like to listen to the dialogs.
Be it a bus or a boat there’s always some kid that is travel sick, and he or she is always sitting right in front or at the back of my seat. In my whole life I’ve never seen so many people vomiting as in the last few months. And is not that I blame them because these roads are pretty damn scary sometimes. I remember on the unpaved road from Huancayo to Ayacucho, on the Peruvian Andes all of a sudden I made peace with God and started to pray because I was sure we were not going to make it!
After a long bus ride when I can’t feel my legs anymore I get there and we check in into a hostel and the guy at the reception always assures us that the water is "caliente" but I get in the shower and my skin says that is damn "fria".
One imagines that we’d be waking up at 11 in the morning and taking it easy all the time. Going to a bar and sip a piña colada. But I can assure you that the bus timetables are always set up so that we have to wake up in the middle of the night. We walk to the station still half asleep and a terrible smell wakes us up. It comes from the breakfast places around most of the bus terminals. The scary things one sees boiling in a huge pan are what locals call "Caldo de cabeza". Yes! Hot soup made with chicken heads at 6 in the morning. That’s the local delicatessen for breakfast. But if one puts up with all this the reward is always some more beautiful peace of land.
Peru was amazing. Once we got used to the altitude we had the best hikes of our life. The Inca trail and also the Colca Canyon were spectacular. Although while walking up a steep canyon for 1200 metres, after 3 hours I was not exactly thinking of the beauty that surrounded me...
Here in Bolivia we’ve been to the jungle in the east of the country, close to the Amazon basin, in a place called Rurrenabaque. I loved it. It was like being in Macondo. The jungle, the river, the parrots and of course kilos of mosquitoes thirsty for my blood. From there we did a 4 days tour of the Pampas. We had alligators hanging around the camp where we were staying. Staring at us all the time. Even at night one would see their red eyes in the darkness of the river. Our guide fed them bred and they were actually quite friendly. We even got to "cuddle" them, as you can see from the pics. We fed bananas to the squirrel monkeys and went looking for the anaconda, walking in the mud high up to our knees. (I could have done without the latter). We swam with the pink dolphins in the dark waters of the river (freaky). There was an amazing variety of birds. The noisiest ones being the birds of paradise. From there we went to Cochabamba and on to Sucre, where we are now. We’ve spent the last few days mostly locked in our hotel room because here the local tradition for Carnival is throwing water at people. In a balloon if not with buckets from the balconies. So we had a partial shower every time we were going out to actually get something to eat. The plan is to make a stop in Potosi and then move on to the Salar de Uyuny, one of the marvels of Bolivia. From there we will cross the border with Chile and go to the Atacama Desert.