Travel Bus Times

1st December 2008

Chile
Santiago - Pichelemu : 4 hours
Pichelemu - San Fernando : 3 hours
San Fernando - Valdivia: 11 Hours
Valdivia - Pucon : 3 hours
Pucon - Puerto Montt: 7 hours
FLIGHT: Puerto Montt - Punta Arenas: 2 Hours
Punta Arenas - Puerto Natales : 3 Hours
Puerto Natales - Torres: 3 Hours
Torres - Puerto Natales : 3 Hours
Puerto Natales - Punta Arenas: 3 Hours
FLIGHT: Puntas Arenas - Puerto Montt: 2 Hours
Argentina
Puerto Montt - Bariloche: 7 hours
Bariloche - Bahia Blanca : 14 Hours
Bahia Blanca - Pinamar: 8.5 hours
Pinamar - Villa Gesell : 40 mins
Villa Gesell - Buenos Aires : 6 Hours
Buenos Aires - General alvarea : 8 Hours (train)
Geeral Alverea- Buenos Aires : 8 hours
Uruguay
Buenos Aires - Montevideo (boat and bus): 10 hours
Monte Video: cabo Polonio: 5 hours
Cabo Polonio - La Pedrera : 1 hour
La Pedrera - Montevideo: 4 hours
Montevideo - Salto : 6 hours
Salto - Concordia : 11.5 hours
Argentina
Concordia - Posadoas: 8 hours
Posadas : Puerto Iguazu : 6 hours
Puerto Iguazu - las cataratas : 0.5
las cataratas - Puerto Iguazu : 0.5
Puerto Iguazu - ciudad del este : 1 hour
ciudad del este - asuncion : 6 hours
Paraguay
Asuncion - Santa Cruz (Bolivia) : 30 hours
Santa Cruz - Sucre : 14 hours
Sucre  - La Paz : 12 hours
La Paz - Cocacabana : 4 hours
Cocacabama - Puno : 3.5 hours
Puno - Lima: 22 hours
Lima - Mancora : 17 hours
Ecuador 7th February 2009
Mancora - Guayaquil : 10 hours
Guayaquil - Santa Elena : 2 hours
Santa Elena - Ayampe : 2 hours
Ayampe - Montanita: 40 mins
Montanita - Guayaquil : 3.5 hours
Guayaquil - Piura : 12 hours
Piura - Lima : 14 hours
Lima - Tacna : 20 hours
Tacna - Arica (chile) : 1.5 hours
Arica - Iquique: 4.5 hours
FLIGHT: Iquique - Santiago : 3.5 hours (24th February)
FLIGHT: Santiago - Paris : 15 hours (25th February)

This fly by trip took a total of 323.5 hours, something close to 2 weeks straight on buses and transport.  Crazily done within a 3 month period!  This is far from some sort of narcissistic rant about how great a traveller I am - rather my intention to gather some memories and thoughts together about a whirlwind of a trip and try and make some sense out of it.  In fact, truth be told I would not recommend the rushed pace of my trip to anyone who has the time to spend each of these awesome countries on the Latin American continent!  I stupidly envisioned the continent as a whole, much as one would see the whole of one country, say England (somewhat of a similar shape I might argue) with each of the countries compressed into easy stepping stones that one intrepid traveller such as myself could quite easily jump across.  So caught up in this classic schoolboy error of a move that I decided that I could meet my girlfriend Kate "anywhere in the whole continent" whenever I wanted, as i could simply "catch an internal flight" if things proved difficult.  So, setting off on my trip I had no intention of meeting her until one day surfing she calls and says that she will use a government grant to buy half the ticket.  So, I, completely wrapped up in the idea book her a flight to Ecuador without little consideration of my intentional route of hitting the south of Chile, then to Argentina to meet my mate Will in Buenos Aires for just after New Years - and then to wherever the path of destiny chooses to take us.  In this case, it was to the other end of the continent....Ecuador - from Uruguay.   If in any doubt the true scale of this feat, check a map. And so, with less than 3 weeks to cross the continent to meet Kate I found myself sitting on a beach in Cabo Polonio (more details further on) and realised that in fact I was very much looking at the wrong ocean to that which I should have been if I had any concept of distance!  So - to cut a long story short - I fucked up.  The distance between where I was seated with Will, chewing on a rather tasteless fish (spending our last penny's on a meal we were expecting to be the 'boom ting' and ended up being what led to our departure from paradise to find a bank machine only to come back again...), to where I was meant to be in less than 3 weeks was, as I later found out, something like 4000 km (as a rough birds eye view.)


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Alas, i digress once again, I merely wish to offer an excuse for rushing one of the most amazing trips I have done and condensing it into a petty few months.

Much like the hated genius Salmon Rushdie wrote in his essays "An Imaginary Homeland" on his novel Midnight's Children: "I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and of circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary" I too intend to show remnants of a memory pieced together to forge a new whole picture.  Indeed, Rushdie saw fragmented memories as the key concept of his protagonist Saleem.  In this light, much like Rushdie's journey back to the past in order to create a new present, I also am hoping to find in my memories new and exciting stories that will either be a complete fabrication, a figment of the truth or the entire truth.  The issue being that all three will be completely disseparate and indistinguishable.  My memories will always be a cross junction between the truth, the semi truth and a complete lie, but surely that is exactly what we as humans subconsciously do when we recall a memory.

Anyway, enough of the metalinguistical rant, my journey began after 6 months studying in Santiago de Chile- another yuppy student from Europe coming to reap the wealth of Chile.  Prior to the flight I had found myself in a festival just outside Cambridge, England - the Secret Garden Party (which over the years has grown and grown.)  I use the word 'found' to the full literal effect, for, the night before had been a leaving party for me at the the local river hotspot the Millpond, and after a copious amount of beer, finely tuned with weed and a blend of other medicines we were back at my house ordering a Taxi to the outskirts of Cambridgeshire to break into this festival....

A somewhat chaotic Taxi journey, which found me once again arguing profusely with one of my closest friends about his complete disrespect for women (in front of, naturally, a group of women), we were deposited outside the festival walls.  Hiding in the long grass believing to be completely stealthing it to the extent G.I. fucking Joe wouldn't have known what the fuck was going down, we were abruptly woken up to the fact that there was a flashlight shining at our secret patch and a bored security guard saying "there's no way your getting in like that."  Accepting our first defeat we took to the road and found a little clearing in the woods, that after a certain amount of blood gave way to more thorns and finally a wall that we managed to scale and eventually led, to what I still consider today the closest remnant to a 'secret garden' I have ever experienced... I'm talking cheeky little mazes made from funky fish shaped hedges, brick walls scattered in the most random situations as if the mad hatter had decided to lay foundations for his backward house, ponds with no real placement, tree houses with the most amazing carvings of heavens hierarchical order (descending from a distinctively devilish creature)..

After these wonderings, sure that the same security guard would pop up with the same bored expression and repeat his warning that we wouldn't get in that way, we found ourselves faced with a lake.  All it took now was to bypass this and we were in...so a few of us braved it into the waters until the cleverest one decided the easiest route was to scale another fence and then BAM, PRESTO, we were in... the rest was another haze of a festival, drink, drugs, funny costumes, heat waves, expensive food, sleepless nights, cramped into tents of people we didn't know, it was a great time..

However, after this sporadic episode, at which I now recall being thrown out not once but twice for once stealing 10 bottles of champagne from a bar I ended up knowing the manager for (which at the time I had thought was the best idea ever) and secondly for the apparent possession of drugs, I woke up to a sudden jolt in a plane 40, 000 feet up in the air.  This is no exaggeration, this was far less waking up from a dream to reality but rather waking up from a warped version of reality into a more warped dream which ended up being the truth of reality.  Immediately I recall Brad Pitt in Fight Club waking Edward Norton mid sleep on a flight posing as an air steward for the first time he accepts his insomnia, yet this was me on my way to Chile, in a delusional state, emotional for leaving my girlfriend and friends with no real idea where I was going and with no where to sleep.  I had a return ticket and some money, I knew I had to attend university to pass my degree but even that wasn't top priority to begin with - it was all secondary to the idea that South America was a land I had never set foot on and from all sources was the land of adventure, cocaine, whore houses and pisco....

Landing in Santiago de Chile I was greeted by a herd of sniffer dogs which did nothing to soothe my 2 day hangover and bewilderment from being handballed from one continent to another.  I later found that these dogs were less keen to find drugs than fruit and meat, for South America has a very strict policy on importation due to a growing amount of diseases.  Secondly, awaitieng my luggage amongst these fruit hounds and Chileans speaking the most absurd version of Spanish I had ever heard, I soon realised that the  majority of my flight had peeled off and there were a few gawk eyed tourists staring at the conveyer belt with the same certainty as me that our luggage was next.  Yet, nope, it was that same battered suitcase that had been doing the rounds for the last three loops.  It was set, I was a hobo in a new land with no luggage or clothes apart from those on my back - Air France had given me a washbag and promised me some compensation money.  A Solidier of fortune, a lone Rambo, I walked through the automatic glass doors from the airport to the brisk winters climate of Santiago.

A swift yet jam packed ride on el metro, described as a winding metallic snake of facelessness by one chilean poet, took me into the vortex of the city for something like 25 p ( quite impressive considering the Taxi driver was trying to convince me that a 50 luca - 50 quid - trip was a standard.) 





SALMON RUSHDIE, fragmented memories concept --> what I am trying to do with this blog etc. recreate a space in time....falsify ideas but these are still true within my memories

lands shifting

2 litres of beer and I still can't come clear
fear walks tall on this planet
and I'm stranded-
stuck between time zones
but still things seem the same
the same shoppers, the same drunks, the same complaints
the same flashing lights, the same fights for the same civil rights
different faces prove to have the same hidden hatreds
seems like walking between warps only changes the race
getting cased side by side, two guys
the straight don't give a fuck type
no surprise when I see there's no way out in their eyes
man - I could travel the globe in search for change
and still be stuck for lack of words....

a midnights child

broken memories like a midnights child,
shards of mirror fragments run in rivers wild,
uncertain truths of a subconcious style-
I've run for miles but always past the same scene,
dejavu questionings of "what does it all means?"
banal day dreams of a replica panoramic
I stand still - static.
Life's a tragic comedy - no need to panic!
(no time to damn it)

It's one long siberian train ride
flashing through day break to the suns demise-