A happy-go-lucky English rambler dude goes to New Zealand for a year. Here he interfaces with some of those he left behind and details his nefarious activities. Or summat.
Recently clicked on MP3s - 7th June 2005 The Lucksmiths - Warmer Corners
Jens Lekman - When i said i wanted to be your dog
The Trashcan Sinatras - Weightlifting
Teenage Fanclub - Man Made
Laura Veirs - Carbon Glacier
The Decemberists - Picaresque
The Eels - Blinking Lights
Monday, December 20, 2004
Hola! from sunny Santiago... Hope everyone's ok? And looking forward to Chrstmas, with the presents all purchased and full of hot toddies and mince pies?
Can't say i'm feeling too Christmassy myself, despite the Santiago town council going to all the effort of creating a massive fake christmas tree in the Plaza de Armas. Sun burn and insane, need to buy a coke every 30 minutes type heat just doesn't seem to put me in the right mood for it.
I've been meaning to let everyone know more about what i've been up to, but without wanting to bore the arse off you all with the sort of email that contains details about what food the airline served, and bragging about how nauseatingly great a time i'm having (even tho i am i spose).
I'm just about finished in Chile now, and fly out to Easter Island tomorrow. My last day has been filled with irritating jobs such as getting clothes washed, trying to explain to the busiest camera store in Santiago in my shite Spanish what i want them to do with my camera's memory stick (Es muy caro! No breako por favor!), and working out how many zillion pesos it costs to send eleven post cards to the UK.
In a nutshell, my time in Chile has been divided into 4 sections:
(1) Hanging around in Santiago, getting my head around being in South America, not having my own bedroom anymore and waiting for my luggage to turn up (Never fly with Iberian Airways - They make Ryanair seem like having your own personal Lear Jet).
Highlights include going to a properly bonkers football match involving much needed riot police referee escorts, dodgy penalties galore, a last minute meltdown from my team Universidad de Chile (Very Leicester city) and even a one man assault on the entire opposition team from an irate fan, temporarily assisted by some U de C players.
Also, meeting more new people in a week than i've met in the last two years was a wonderful, if bewildering at times, experience.
(2) 4 days in Pucon. Spent climbing Volcan Villarricca. A snowcapped, extremely active volcano. At the top you could peer down at the Lava sloshing around a few hundred feet below you, in between bouts of being pepper sprayed with lungfuls of acrid, sulphurous volcano fart. For some odd reason I've always preferred ascending mountains, but i think the high-speed-arse-slide descent of 1000 vertical metres was about as much fun as it's possible to have on a mountain without a gaggle of French actresses and a bag full of Rohypnol.
The Summit of Volcan Villarricca, not a bad place to while away a few hours
Also a days mountain biking got me away from the crowds, onto some gorgeous riverside single track, and even more sunburned than i was already.
(3) A week's rambling in Torres Del Paine, Patagonia.
Basically the intial reason i bothered to stop in Chile, the Torres are a super pointy group of mountains, that seemingly everyone i met in Chile was going to visit. Happily though, most of the non-hardcore ramblers took a day trip out to see them, wheras i lugged a tent, sleeping bag, a litre of cheap wine and 5 days worth of muesli bars out with me, to do a full circuit of them.
The circuit is supposed to take 10 days, but i hoped to do it in 5 due to a shortage of time, and an overly confident assesment of my own fitness. The guffaws from various people in the know in Puerto Natales didn't put me off one bit. However the weight of my bag, a gammy achilles tendon and general knackeredness on day 2 did start the doubts creeping in.
The final straw was on day 4, when an all day soaking and a worsening ankle lead me to wimp out, and catch the oh so tempting catamaran round to the start, where i did the final leg, and caught the next bus back to Puerto Natales, where i was met with several "told you so" type looks, but more importantly with a plate full of top veggie tucker at the wonderful "El Living" cafe.
At times the walk was hilariously grim, picking your way though knee deep bogs, in the snow, on your way up a 1200m pass, carrying the equivalent of a wide screen tv on your back, but even so every day you saw Condors wheeling around overhead or could look down on glaciers the size of Coventry. So well worth all the effort.
Me getting in the way of the Torres del Paine
(4) Possibly the thing i did most of all in Chile however, was ride on buses. 8 hours from Santiago to Pucon. 8 hours from Pucon to Puerto Montt. 36 (and the rest) from Puerto Montt to Punta Arenas (Via Argentina). 4 from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales. Etc, Etc, Etc....
Sometimes they were like the best ambient music video you could imagine, crossing a pass over the Andes, rolling on through the indescribably beautiful Argentinian Lake district and then on through the never ending Pampas heading into Patagonia, all to the sounds of the Beta Band, The Orb, Belle & Seb (natch) and The Smiths (Shouldn't work but it did).
At other times though, the airline-steward like bus conductor came up with worse sonic torture than the US army could ever devise for the poor buggers stuck in Guantanamo bay - bad, high volume JC VanDamme films, The fast and the Furious dubbed into Spanish (Still fairly easy to follow) and a ridiculous selection of music videos - numerous 80s hair rock acts (inc. "Carrie" by Europe - "the final countdown", i could forgive) and multiple Swayze videos (She is not like the fucking wind, and i want to look at these mountains in peace!) once beginning at 8AM, good lord. The numerous nappy changes on the seat ahead of me weren't the best either.
Hmmm, i'm starting to realise that the two tinnys of Cristal (the Stella of Chilean lagers) have lead me to ramble on much more than i meant to, and this email has in fact descended into the typical self indulgent travellers codswallop. If so, i apologise, and i will now bugger off, as it's 10pm, and i need to find my way back to the hostel, get packed and be ready to leave for the airport at 7am, a time i have not had much experience of since leaving England.
Well, thanks for reading this far if you have and a very Merry Xmas / Feliz Navidad to you all!
9:45 am Friday, December 03, 2004 Down and out in Santiago - A novellete by Mark Edward
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times (I´m stealing from the wrong book here i know, but there´s a queue of people behind me waiting for the computer, and i´ve never actually read Down and out in Paris and London).
The story concerns a young traveller, making his way to South America for the first time, excitedly taking his first steps in a new city, county and continent.
Everything is not well however, as our hero has to meet obstacles thrown into his path by inefficient Spanish baggage handlers, who couldn´t be arsed to shift his rucksack onto the right plane in time, leaving our main character wearing (a rather fetching) green chequed shirt, kanckered old Firetrap jeans and walking boots. And smelling rather the worse for wear.
All is not lost however, as friendly Chilean chemical engineers, New Zealand opera singers and New York camp directors spring to his aid, and hopefully, lead to a happy ending.
Watch this space for further details. Publication due in early 2005.
10:13 pm Monday, June 21, 2004
NOTE TO SELF: Start using your website again.
Keep it simple at first, perhaps putting on links to nice little websites that you find, such as this one
See, that wasn't so hard was it?
10:28 am Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Woo! Spring has well and truly spronged.
How can you tell? There's now enough light to go for a 17.3 mile bike ride after work - hurrah! And judging by the number of brightly coloured, lycra clad butterflies i saw emerging from their wintery chrysalis' last night, the rest of Leicester's road biking community had dusted down their bikes, and gone for a ride too.
An (incorrect) Artists impression of cycling round Leicestershire last night
Whatever the actual truth behind the amount of performance enhancing drugs he took during his career he was an amazing rider, who still holds the record time of 37 minutes and 35 seconds for the ascent of Alp D'Huez.
When I cycled up Alp D'Huez last summer, I took 1hr 30mins. Which either illustrates just how unfit i am, or how insanely fit professional cyclists are. And sadly, judging by the spate of recent sudden deaths of cyclists, perhaps it seems that to excel at cycling you have to be unhealthily fit?
Maybe drugs contributed to many of the deaths, but the hounding from the press and authorities the riders recieve when found guilty (at least in Pantani's case) surely contributed too. And as someone who has spent more than two days on the trot cycling up large mountains - let alone a month like in the Tour de France - i can fully sympathise with the desire to take some pills that might make the whole experience slightly less painful... (I only took Power Bars tho, honest)
Sign in honour of Marco Pantani's stage win on Alp D'Huez (Taken while i was having a breather on the way up)
7:43 pm Monday, February 16, 2004
Shock Horror Probe! I've managed to get round to scanning and fiddling with a bunch of not too bad photos from my recent snowboarding holiday in Andorra, with Alison & Graham.
Anyone hoping for a series of all action shots of me doing 360s while leaping off snowy cliff faces may be a tad disappointed, but frankly unsurprised, to hear that the camera only came out when i spent a day snow rambling. Although a 2715m peak, in the Pyrenees, in winter, does count as some fairly extreme rambling i'd like to think. To see more pics of Pico del Pedro, and me wearing hideously uncoordinated lime green and red clothes, click here
Apologies for the extreme lack of updates in the last month, it's not like i've got absolutely nothing to write, just that i've got out of the habit of blogging really. My new year's resolution however is to kick a bit more ass in all areas of life, and although it's showing signs of waning here and there, i do fully intend to start wibbling on here again.
Having said that, i can't do much now, as i've got to start getting ready to go Snowboarding on Sunday (Hard life, eh?), for instance my salopettes need the crotch sewing back together (They saw some hard action last year, and no mistake) and obviously i need to start compiling new cd's for the journey out there too.
So for now i'll just mention my utter bemusement at the fact that Belle and Sebastian's new single, "I'm a Cuckoo" is single of the week on Ken Bruce's Radio 2 show, and that Grandaddy's single "I'm On Standby" is high on their playlist. Essentially i only listen to Radio 2 (The station of choice for the Daily Mail reading, Conservative voting, coffin dodgers, if you didn't already know) as it was always on in the mornings at work and i have little choice. But, gradually Ken Bruce's amiable grumpiness has grown on me, and now they're actually playing some bearable music (at least two good songs a morning) it goes some way to making up for all the hours of brain searing agony caused by their repeated playing of "Mandy" by Westlife, as well as the Alzheimers inducing inanity of Steve "The world's biggest C*nt" Wright in the afternoon.
As you can tell, i do still have some issues with Radio 2, but anyone who plays Belle and Sebastian and Grandaddy records is probably worth sparing come the revolution. (An indie music based revolution? Sounds improbable i know, but Stuart Murdoch was talking about starting a new 'Project' in his web diary the other day, in between listening to Ladybug Transistor records, and nipping down the caff anyway....)
Belle and Sebastian pictured listening to the Ken Bruce show recently
