Category: Erik’s Travels

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2004 Journey Argentina Erik's Travels

In B.A.

Well, when we were planning on going on the overnight bus we showed up at the station in Viedma only to find there were no buses going that night. So we chilled another night in Viedma and bought a ticket for the overnight bus on Sunday. In Viedma little kids seem to be very intrigued by me. At one restaurant we went to there was a kid who was staring at me the whole meal then when he went to leave he came up to me and asked me where I was from and I told him and then he looked like he was thinking “Ok, that makes sense,” and then said “bye”. The other day at the bus station a little kid was starting at me so hard he walked right into a chair!

The bus journey went well though. We left at 7pm and got in at 7am this morning. Stopping at a restaurant to eat a meal that was included in the bus fair. My only problem on the bus was they had the heater cranked on high and I was literally sweating all night. But better then being too cold.

We checked into the Hotel Marbella this morning and slept for a bit and then today walked around for a while and checked things out.

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2004 Journey Argentina Erik's Travels

On to the big smoke…

We left Trelew yesterday and caught a bus north to Viedma. We had a ninety year old taxi driver with no teeth take us into the center of town and checked into another posh hotel for about US$16. Ate some more pizza last night. There seems to be more pizza restaurants then any other kind here, but that is fine by me. Tonight we are heading on the overnight bus to Buenos Aires.

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2004 Journey Argentina Erik's Travels

Cinco De Mayo Update

Happy Birthday Pa!

Today we took the bus north to Trelew. It is a pretty nice town that was originally a Welsh colony. Today we visited the Museo Paleontologico Edidio Feruglio which has a whole bunch of dinosaur skeletons. It is really cheap here in Argentina. Here in Trelew we are staying at a pretty nice big old hotel and it is only A$45 (US$15) for a nice double room. We were paying about the same for much more rugged places in Chile. Other things like internet and food and really cheap as well.

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2004 Journey Chile Erik's Travels

Puerto Natales Report.

I survived the boat ride. It was pretty fun actually. The Chef on board moonlighted as an electric keyboard player at night in the pub. He was actually a way better musician then a chef, but that is not saying too much either way. It was smooth sailing most of the trip, however, on the second day we had to venture out into the open sea for a while and it was very bumpy on board. They had free sea sickness relief tablets though and after taking one of those I felt fine. There were only about thirty passengers on board (in the summer the ship is full and can hold like 300 passengers) so it was pretty cool because everyone got to know each other. Yesterday we had our only stop on the boat which was at Puerto Eden, a small village of about 200 people. We got off there and walked around for an hour or so and got back on the boat. And that was that. So now I am in Puerto Natales and tomorrow we are going to go on a tour of the Torres Del Paine National Park and then bugger outta here on the next day.

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2004 Journey Chile Erik's Travels

Onto Patagonia

Tomorrow Thomas and I are going to set sail on board the Navimag ship Magallanes from Puerto Montt, where we are now, to Puerto Natales. We should arrive there on Thursday. It cost US$275 each, which is pretty spendy and my guidebook says that it´s both cheaper and quicker to either fly or to take a bus through Argentina to get to Puerto Natales, but we figure the voyage should hopefully be worth it. The boat goes through the fjords of Patagonia, which should be cool.

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2004 Journey Chile Erik's Travels

Mountain Climbing, What was I thinking?


Yesterday Thomas and I went on an organized tour mountain climb of a volcano near the town of Pucon in Chile. The pictures say it all, but basically it was a very physically challenging event and I made it two hours up the climb but then turned back because I was totally exhausted and could not keep going. Thomas kept going and made it all the way up. At the stopping point where I turned back everyone had to put on crampons (Spikes on the boots) and really started to use their pick axes. We had two guides with our group of ten people so one of the guides, a woman from Germany, took me down to the bottom and we picked up another straggler on the way. It was fun going down because I got to slide most of the way down making it go about ten times quicker! Once at the bottom we had to wait for about four hours until the first group made it down and we hitched a ride back to town with them. I had a great time even though I only made it up the easy third of the volcano.

Today we took a bus south to the town of Puerto Montt and from here are going to try to take a ferry boat south through the fjords of Patagonia. But we will find out more details about that tomorrow.

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2004 Journey Chile Erik's Travels

April 20th Update.

I left Valparaiso today and took the bus seven hours south to a city named Chillan. It was raining today and starting to get cold. For some reason I didn’t think it was going to be cold here so I left my fleece in Australia because I had not used it yet. But after reading through some of my guidebook today I think it is only going to get colder and wetter the further south we go and we are planning on going all the way down. Time to invest in some sort of local clothing I guess.

Not much going on in this town though. It is the birthplace of the first head of state of Chile and national hero Bernardo O’Higgins, but besides that it is your average place I guess. We are leaving tomorrow on the bus in the afternoon to head another six hours south to Pucon.

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2004 Journey Chile Erik's Travels

The South American Travels begin!


I arrived in Santiago, Chile at 2:30am on April 17th. Thomas and I had arranged to meet up at the Hotel Paris in downtown Santiago and I made it there via a taxi with no problems. Thomas had arrived the morning before me and just rested up in the hotel. On Saturday we walked around the center of Santiago and checked things out. It´s your basic big South American city I guess. Saturday night we dined on Chinese food and afterwards sampled a few of the local beers at a nearby pub.

Sunday we slept in and I was awoken by the phone in our room ringing. I answered and the hotel receptionist asked me if we were staying another night. I told him no and asked when check out was. He said 1pm. I hung up the phone and said to Thomas “They have a one o´clock check out time here, that´s pretty friendly.¨ And Thomas looked at his watch and said ¨Well, it´s five to one right now!¨ So we packed up quick and took a taxi to the bus station and hopped on the next bus to Valparaiso (the ticket for the two hour bus ride was cheaper then the 10 minute taxi we took the the bus station!).

Yesterday we checked out Valparaiso and today we took the train over to Vino Del Mar to find the famous Hotel O´Higgins where Uncle Walter stayed many years ago. I read the map wrong so we walked around for and hour trying to find it and the whole time we were just a few blocks away. But we eventually made it there to find a pretty empty big fancy hotel. So we had a beer there and then headed back on the train to Valparaiso.

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2004 Journey Australia Erik's Travels

The End of my Australia adventure…

The last week of my time in Australia was spent in Byron Bay attending the Blues and Roots Music Festival over Easter weekend. It was a five day music festival with bands starting around noon and ending around 1am every day except for the last night which ended about 11pm.

My new camera broke during my Fraser Island excursion. The lens got bent somehow, I think during one of the big bumps we had in the car. Anywho, I took it back to K-Mart as I had only bought it three weeks previous. The guy there looked at it and told me the lens was broken and that they could send it in to get it fixed. I told him that I was leaving the country next week and he said that it takes two weeks to four months to get them fixed and it would probably cost me around A$200-300. I asked him if he could just swap me for a new one because I had barley used it and I needed to get it fixed before I left. He was kind of a asshole and said that all he could do was send it in and it would take two weeks to four months. He said that they could only swap items if they were for under A$100 or purchased in the last two weeks. As he was saying this I noticed that the camera was now on sale for A$300, and I had paid A$320 for it. So I kindly asked him if he could at least refund me the A$20 and I would deal with fixing the camera on my own. He called his manager and asked her and she said ok. Since I paid for it via credit card they had to refund it and then charge me for a new one at the new price and when it was all said and done I had a receipt saying that I had bought a camera that day.

So the next morning I went to a different K-Mart and I got a really nice lady and I asked her to take a look at my camera because I had just bought it and could not figure out how to make it work correctly. She took one look at it and could tell that it wasn´t working properly. They were all out of that camera at that store so she apologized and said all she could do was refund my money. I said I could live with that, got refunded and had my mom buy me the same camera at home for US$180 and send it over to me with Thomas. So it all worked out good in the end, except I didn´t get any photos of the Blues Fest.

I camped with Pete and his childhood friend from ND Drew and his girlfriend. The camping was ok but it turns out that the “official campground” was on the other side of town from the concert and it was A$25 a night each so in retrospect I think we would have been better off (and dryer) staying in a hostel in town. But it was fun anyways. The artist I wanted to see the most was Xavier Rudd who played two nights and ended up joining other bands on stage quite a few times. He is an Australian musician I discovered after arriving in Australia and he plays the didgeridoo, guitar and a few other instruments.

After the concert was over we drove straight through to Sydney getting in around 11pm. It was Pete´s 25th birthday so he and I went out to the Emperor Pub in King’s Cross near where we were staying and had a few beers. Then Pete & company left insanely early the next morning (which for some reason the wake up involved Pete getting water thrown on him) and I left the hostel around 10am and had to get straight to the airport so I never got a chance to check out Sydney.

When I got to Los Angeles I had to wait the whole day for my flight to Santiago and when I went to check in I found out that the flight was canceled due to mechanical problems and I would have to wait until the next day. But the airline put me up in the Embassy Suites hotel so I got a chance to rest up and do my laundry so it turned out ok.

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2004 Journey Australia Erik's Travels

Fraser Island

I got back from my three day self drive four wheel drive adventure on Fraser Island. Fraser Island is a big long sand island off of the coast and they have roads through part of it and then the big long beach for a road too. It is really popular with backpackers and families to drive around and go camping on. I went with a tour from the hostel I was staying at and got chucked in a group with 8 other people. There was a German couple and an Englishman who were all really cool and then the other half of the group was five 19 year old English girls who had never been camping before. All I will say about them is that they are very blessed to know everything about anything. But since they couldn’t actually DO anything they were not exactly my cup of tea.

But I had a very good time nevertheless. There were quite a few different fresh water lakes to go swimming in which was nice because the ocean was full of Tiger sharks and stinging jellyfish. The first night we drove almost as far as we could on the island and camped. After dinner I headed down to the beach with two Canadian boys and we started up a bonfire and shortly after three Forest Rangers showed up and partied with us. They drove their truck down to the beach and brought us more firewood and had their stereo going. By the end of the night I think we had around forty people down on the beach partying with us. It was really cool because there were loads of people all doing the same three day self drive tours and all the fun people came down to the beach for the party.

The second day we got rained on quite a bit. Which was ok it was just that everything was wet which kind of made things miserable. But we drove around and saw the rest of the sights on the island and drove back inland to a different camping spot. That night there was a lot more of me sitting in my tent listening to rain and whining English girls then campfires on the beach, but what can you do? I am just glad I have my own tent!

Pete can now add “Macadamian Nut Harvester” to his already extensive resume. Today is his last day working in Bundaberg and he should be arriving shortly to collect me and then we are driving down to Brisbane tonight.