Strollin´ on the beach

The last two days have been heaven and hell, simultaneously. How is that possible, you ask? Well, imagine a long walk beside the Pacific surf - the sound of seagulls in the air, soft sand underfoot, and a misty haze surrounding you as the damp sand sends its moisture into the sky when kissed by the sun. Ahh. How lovely.
Now imagine that same beach four hours later. You are still on it, still walking. Sand is in every crevice of body and backpack. Muscles ache from trudging through mile after mile of beach. Legs are so sunburnt it feels like the skin will split with every step. Not so lovely.
Yep, we hiked 10k on a sandy beach, then some more on trails, probably about 22 kilometres by the time we pitched our tent in a farmer´s field among the geese and horses and innumerable dogs. Needless to say, we were a little tired. We scarfed down a mouthwatering concoction of sundried tomatoes, sausage and instant mashed potatoes (believe me, it was the best thing I´d ever tasted after a day like that) and tucked into the tent. Lulled by the sound of the waves once again, we slept like rocks, despite the feeling that my legs were going to self-combust from the sunburn. The next day, we got up and did the long walk on the beach all the way back...
Now I have aloe gel and life is all better.
We´ve treated ourselves very kindly on rest days, and got a cute little cabaña in Castro (capital of the island of Chiloé) where we can cook and do laundry. The contrast of camping to these forays into civilization is a bit shocking to the system, but Lu and I both like our creature comforts. Plus, it´s heavy to carry so much red wine, so we have to stop in town sometimes. We are also questioning the sanity of hiking the 8 day Torres del Paine circuit with 60 lbs on each of our backs, but we are committed now!
Tonight we head to Puerto Montt, from which we catch the ferry south to Patagonia tomorrow. The journey will take 3 1/2 days, and we are hoping for good weather! The island of Chiloé has been fantastic, and I am sad to leave, but we´ve done what we came here to do. I will not miss the horseflies!
Happy trails! Seeya at the South Pole!

Chillin´ on Chiloé

Hi, all - sorry about the lack of photos. I lost a bit of camera gear (not the camera!) so it´s a real pain to post photos at the moment.
We made it to the island of Chiloé, about halfway down the country, and it´s blissfully warm. For the previous two days, Lu and I hiked the west coast of the island, from the village of Chepu to the national park and back. The scenery is stunning - the Pacific Ocean hurling its waves at the rocks below, colonies of penguins sunning themselves on skerries, and flowers everywhere. Despite the beauty, most of the vegetation has spikes or thorns of some kind. Even the ferns are tough and leathery! Still, it´s so nice to be in a summer environment.
The Pacific breeze played nice with us for the hike, and the weather stayed warm and sunny, but the wind was no deterrent to hordes of humungous horseflies that plagued us for the length of our hike. These things were vicious! They went for joints - shoulders, wrists, elbows, knees - and they wanted blood. They seemed to like Lu better than me, thankfully, but they nearly drove the pair of us crazy!
We preservered, and were repaid with the gregarious company of Paméla, a resident of the land adjacent to the national park. She and her husband, Manuél, live in a remote settlement and harvest seaweed for a living. They host campers on their land. We stayed as soon as they told us about the penguins - an excellent camping spot in earshot of the ocean, with great amenities as long as you like cold showers and plenty of horse shit on the ground. Paméla hiked us up a hill to look for Zorros del Mar (seals) , but no luck. We´d seen one of these massive fellas sunning himself on a beach on the way up to the campground, anyway, so we didn´t feel cheated. The penguins, alas were separated from us by a high tide and pounding surf. We couldn´t wait long enough for the tide to go out in order to see them - we had a meeting with our return boat to Chepu scheduled, and were terrified to miss it. So the penguins remained distant, and we caught the boat. One small compensation was that the boat captain refused to take our money for the 45 minute ride to Chepu.
So much more to tell, but for now, I have to go!
Sending you all sunny thoughts,
L

Doing nothing is hard work.

Lu and I had a ¨proper travel day¨today. We had been moved from our little cabin paradise to a hotel just down the road, due to a wedding party filling the whole facility on our intended second night at the cabins. No trouble, since the new place had bikes for rent, and the grand plan for today was to cycle all day, then catch a night bus to Puerto Montt.
We got up and secured the bikes after a hearty breakfast of croissants, jam, and instant coffee (it´s all Nescafé down here. Pity.). Our trusty mountain bikes whirred happily to the bus station, where we got the tickets for the long haul tonight. Then we decided on a challenging trail up the hill just outside town, which afforded an amazing view of Talca and the Maule Valley. At the end of the trail we discovered a movie-star quality house with a tempting azure pool. It´s just a little barbed wire, we thought, and probably nobody is home...
No, friends, we didn´t break in for a swim. We changed course, and, because we are both guides and have an amazing sense of direction, decided to follow a faint trail back down through the woods. (It was hot! We needed the shade.)
The barbed-wire fence should have been the first clue that this was not an "official" trail. We crossed it anyway, confident that the road was not far. This assumption was correct, but in order to get to the road, we had to excuse ourselves across a farmer´s yard. He took it with good grace, and we were just about to continue toward town when my rear tire went flat. Completely.
Sheepishly, we returned to the farmer´s home and, with the help of the phrasebook and the internationally understood waving of the hands, got one of the ladies of the house to call our hotel and report our situation.
So it was, that we passed an entertaining half hour, making the smallest of small talk with an entire Chilean family, sitting in the shade outside their casa. The best was when the matriarch of the clan, preparing vegetables for the midday meal, made a joke about her husband and the large number of children they had - it needed no translation!
After a while, Jaime (our personal concierge at Hotel de Rio) picked us up and brought us and the bikes back to the hotel, all in one piece. So much for cycling, and it was only 1:30! What to do?!
Lunch, naturally.
Sunday had us worried, since a lot of the businesses close in this very religious country. We´d stockpiled some goodies in case nothing was open for a meal. Never fear, Chileans love their food! Near the main square we found a charming restaurant with a patio, and tucked in to some amazing local specialties: I had a bean and corn stew topped with crispy pork cutlets, and Lu got a tender braised chicken with fries (FYI: the Andes are the birthplace of the potato. Ireland only borrowed it!). Topped off with the ubiquitous Pisco Sour, a devillish combination of the local grape brandy, lemon juice, sugar and egg white (trust me, it´s great!) we felt pretty lethargic in the 30 degree heat.
Best remedy? A pool!
Trouble is, neither of us is very good at doing nothing. We discovered this at the local pool, when after about 15 minutes of sunning our pink selves, we were ready to go. Awww, poor dears, you are thinking, right? But it´s a lot of work to force yourself to do nothing when you are accustomed to being busy all of the time! At least we are both like this. It would be really hard if one of us was up to staring at the ripples on the water, but we were both bored.
You can always count on kids for a laugh, so we hung out at the kiddie pool, and fell in love with a pint-sized scamp of a boy, about three years old, who was playing with a plastic shark. We feigned terror at the shark, and he ran back and forth in the shallow water, saying "grr! grrr!" Good times for all.
The afternoon stretched like taffy at a fair, but we hung out at that pool for three and a half hours.
Next big idea was to take a nice bottle of red wine we´d acquired yesterday, and sip it gracefully by the side of the river. Guess. The riverside was a zoo of humanity (mixed with the hordes of wild dogs that roam the streets, the donkeys and ponys to ride, and two gringas that probably could have set up a freakshow tent ¨see the giant gringa!¨to fund the remainder of our trip. Yeah, there have been a lot of stares.) We didn´t see anybody else drinking outdoors, and were getting looked at enough, so we felt like we ought to hide the wine, or at least disguise it. So we walked the whole length of the riverside park, looking for a quiet, shady spot to open the bottle. No such thing was to be found. The place was crawling with what seemed like half of Talca´s 200 000 people. Vendors and hawkers lined the sidewalks, offering cold drinks, ice cream, churros, and all sorts of trinkets. So we ducked behind a bush, dodging the dogs sleeping in the evening heat, and popped the cork. An MEC mug disguised the beverage, and we giggled all the way back to the boulevard, where we finally found a shady place to sit. There went another hour, but what to do, what to do? Busy girls have to stay busy!
So now I come to you, my dear readers, and pour it all out here. It´s almost time to catch the bus now. We´re headed south, to cooler weather. Seems strange to say that, but that´s how it works here! The island of Chiloé has a two-day and a three-day hike that will be warmups to the big hike in Torres del Paine National Park. After Chiloé, we catch a ferry to near the very southern tip of the continent, where there should be penguins!
For now, it´s an overnight bus to a new adventure tomorrow.
G´nite!

It´s not broken, I´m okay.

Whew! It was a whirlwind return home, and I now report from the fantastic town of Talca, south of Santiago, Chile. Current temperature is 25 degrees Celcius, and it´s sunny like it´s never going to stop. Lu and I are staying at Stella Borbastero, an incredible piece of paradise in the middle of wine country (it has a pooooooooool!) and we are soaking away the stress of Santiago.
Typing is still a bit difficult, due to an incident in Saskatoon. Hence the title of today´s entry. Here´s the scoop:
My soon-to-be-sister-in-law graciously arranged for me to have a massage on the day after my arrival in Saskatoon. I was in such a tizzy to get to this massage that I forgot an important rule of physics. See, my car had been stowed in part of the three car garage - the one with the manual door, as opposed to the section with the automatic door. Due to my extreme excitement at the prospect of a damned fine backrub, I wasn´t thinking about how best to close the garage door behind me. I could have easily closed the manual door from the inside, then hit the button for the automatic and ducked under as it descended. Oh, no, my friends, what did I do? I made a valiant attempt to close the manual garage door from the outside, grasping it by the little ledge, and giving it a good shove downwards.
This is where physics took over.
The downward force could have closed the garage door, had it not been for the presence of my middle and index fingers of my right hand on the little ledge. Unfortunately for aforementioned fingers, the ledge that I was using for purchase closed up as the door went down, effectively bludgeoning my fingertips under my own force.
In the half-second that it took for this message to register from my fingers to my brain, I knew that my strategy for getting the door closed had been a BAD IDEA.
To make a long, painful story short (believe me, I could go on...) Mom determined that the fingertip is only cracked a little bit, it´s healing well enough that I can type with it now, the fingernail might not fall off, and I made it to the massage! So life´s not all so bad.
(Okay, the massage sent my back into spasms, but Karen fixed that (she´s a miracle worker! Support your local chiropractor!!!) and then I got a cold, but that´s getting better, plus I had a bag stolen in Santiago, but I was not threatened or physically harmed, and I didn´t lose anything I couldn´t replace, so life is still all right. Mom & Dad, please don´t worry. Everybody else in Chile is extremely helpful and nice - this could have happened anywhere.)
And now Lu and I are going on a vineyard tour with the sweetest hotelier ever! He couldn´t find us a guide for the day, so he is driving us around himself! I expect to be pleasantly buzzed by dinnertime.
By the way - Empañadas are delicious.
Ciao, niños!

I have never known a cat so adept at typing as Wendy-Bear (see her comments on previous posts). She is currently helping me at the computer by purring loudly and offering editorial suggestions. She likes this photo because it makes her look slim. 

Those of you who know me well, know my deep, abiding love of food. This meal was my sendoff from Stockholm. I found a medieval restaurant and had a rustic plate of sausage and saurkraut (eep! Cabbage!) with a frosty glass of mead. All of this was served by proper wenches in a candlelit basement in historic Gamla Stan. The building probably dated back to the 1500s! The food was considerably fresher. 

Poland is a strongly Catholic country, and it was no surprise to see their beloved, recently departed Pope John Paul II immortalized in a sculpture in St. Kinga's chapel in the Salt Mine. ("Kyle! No licking the Pope!") 

Kyle just couldn't stop licking the walls in the Weiliczka salt mine. This was a super-highlight of the trip ( the mine, not Kyle licking things. Dirty birdies...) 

By the way, I am back in Canada, but this is an attempt to catch up, from so many days away from a computer while on the road. This is a market stall in Cracow, where I purchased a local cheese (that's the cheese on the stall behind me) which is lightly smoked, and a nice accompaniment to the local pretzel-type bread (see previous post). We lived off this stuff for two days! With a bit of wine and some chocolate, it was damn near heaven. 

The print might be a little small, but these are the regulations posted on the ferry for the importation of duty-free liquor from Poland to Sweden: 10L of Spirits, 20L of Intermediate Products (fortified wine), 90L of Wine, and 110L of Beer!!! Now, the issue is: how can I carry all of that? No problem. They will sell you a cart on the ferry to get it all home! 

Street food in Cracow. They have these pretzel-like bread rings (for about a quarter!) that are sold from carts all over the place. We lived on them for two days, just for fun. And they contained no cabbage whatsoever. Gotta run now - catching a plane to Stockholm today! Back in Canada on the 10th. Besos to all! 

'kay, so it's a little blurry, but this is where the whole Snow White thing started. Well, maybe I'm making that up, but this is from the most amazing place I've visited yet on the trip: the Weiliczka Salt mine, just south of Cracow. Salt has been mined here since about 1300, and the chambers are filled with sculptures and chapels carved out of the salt rock. For those of us who are Heritage nerds, this is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, too! I completey reccommend a visit, if you are ever in Poland. Wowee.

We did a lot of this in the last few days - slog luggage from one train to another. The train system is quite excellent in Poland, as long as you are vigilant against thieves (apparently they are fairly common, and sometimes spray drugs into compartments to incapacitate the passengers, then rob them) although we had no problems. We lucked out on all of the train rides, getting lots of elbow room, and only sharing with a few people. On the overnighter to Ocweicim, we played Jedi mind tricks on people inspecting our car for a place to sit. "this is not the car you want to sit in..." Also,the violent coughing that we were doing might have discouraged them. No, we weren't sick. Just crafty. Crafty.... 

Positively Poznan

Anna is an amazing tour guide and very gracious hostess. We have seen the major sights in Poznan, shopped until our feet ached, dined at some of the finest establishments (more detail below) and museumed ourselves smart! Not bad for two days in town...
One of the curiosities of Polish cuisine is the apparent fascination with cabbage. Not that it's such a bad thing, it's just really noticeable when it features in every meal (except breakfast, thanks to our hostess!). We sampled the delights of the Sphinx restaurant last night, since for Kyle and I, the prices were uber-cheap (a huge meal plus wine and dessert for three people came to about $35 Cdn. ). Sphinx is like an Earl's-type place. It's a chain, and they have a policy of hiring cute boys to serve there, in order to attract the female clientele, who apparently make all the decisions on where to go (go Poland!!!). Dinner consisted of an assortment of tasty grilled meats, flatbread, spiced rice, and you guessed it: about 2 lbs of shredded cabbage. Sure, the cabbage was half red and half green, and both varieties came with a tasty dressing, but it was the wallflower of the meal, I have to say.
Another curiosity we encountered today, lunching on peirogies (that's the local spelling) at a holdover of the communist days. The name translates to "milk bar" and you can find no-frills, filling, and very local style food at these places, still subsidized by the government, for about $3 per person.
Enough about food, for now. Shopping in Poland is a treat! A treat if you are young, skinny, and read Vogue a lot. For me, clothing is just not the thing to buy here. Kyle and I both figure that neither of us is cool enough to pull off some of the items on offer. Nice to look, tho.
Sorry for the lack of photos - I'll update those when I get back to my computer in Sveeeden.
Tonight's festivities include taking an overnight train to Cracow to see Auchwitz in the morning. Not the most cheerful holiday spot, but I feel compelled to pay homage to the millions who suffered there. Being so geographically close, there is really no excuse to miss it. Unless you are Jim Keegstra and the whole thing "never happened." It's a bit grim to think that the place where so many suffered is a tour destination. At least Disney hasn't got ahold of it... (C'mon kids! Let's go for a train ride!) Yeecchh.
So with those happy thoughts, I bid you farewell until the next big shiny installment of "pole to pole with ME!!!

P.S. It's still okay to email me! I do check, y'know... And I simply adore the comments - keep it up!

Happy New Year!!!

SO... first of all, I would like to wish all of my friends and family following this blog (and even those who aren't) a very happy and prosperous new year. It was definitely an experience to ring in 2006 in Karlskrona. The whole town goes nuts with fireworks! All day on the 31st, people were setting off noismaker firecrackers in the streets & in their yards, then when midnight struck, the place looked & sounded like a war zone (minus the screaming in agony & bloodshed). I wish I could post video, to show you what it was like!
Kyle and I had front-row seats for the display in the sky: we were having dinner with some of his classmates from the Sustainable Development program, in this totally amazing manor house on a hill, with a balcony overlooking a good deal of the city. The landlady showed up at about 11:30 with her son and a whole lot of fireworks of our own to launch from the balcony. I thought, from the size of the fireworks, that they would be pretty meagre, but WOW! They were the full-on type that you see at Canada Day!
So we toasted 2006 with some bubbly and watched Mad Max, because it happened to come on right after the Swedish version of Dick Clark had done his thing.
The next day was spent in some hard-core relaxation, and we packed to go to Poland.
Yesterday, we hit the road at 6:30 to catch a ferry to Gdynia (10 1/2 hours across the Baltic Sea). Upon reaching Poland, we promptly got turned around & took the right bus the wrong way. All persons that we'd asked at the ferry terminal insisted that the 150 bus would take us straight to the train station. "You can't miss it!" was the consensus. We missed it. We dutifully hopped on the first 150 that we saw, and rode it to the end of the line, with nary a train station in sight. When, at the final stop, the last few passengers bailed out, and the driver turned off the engine, we approached him with the words "train station" in Polish, written on a scrap of paper. He laughed his ass off. He motioned for us to stay put. In a few minutes, he started the engine again, and we went whizzing back along the route we had just come, past the ferry station, and to the very obvious train station. Phew.
I'm very glad to have the "point-it" book (a traveller's tool of all kinds of images to help you communicate), and I'm sure it will continue to come in handy, since I am hopeless at Polish, and very few people seem to speak English. Their attitude is friendly and willing to try to help and communicate, though, so that makes me feel a bit more comfortable.
The train ride was not so comfy, though. Because of our ineptitude with the bus, Kyle and I were left with very little time at the train station to figure things out. We got tickets to Poznan, thanks to Anna, who sent the appropriate phrase to get what we wanted. Finding the track to catch said train was a bit more of a challenge. The departure boards were unclear, and constantly changing. We ran from platform to platform with our heavy bags and couldn't get a straight answer from anybody. Finally, we asked a young man waiting on a platform where the train to Poznan was, and he explained that it would arrive just before the departure time. Great! That meant we had 25 minutes to grab food from the kiosk downstairs. Gawd. An epic unto itself!
There were two kebab stands open in the questionably clean station. One was lined up a dozen bodies deep. Too busy. We were in a hurry. We chose the other stand, which was sporting one customer, and ordered two kebabs. Kebabs here are very different from back home: they are slathered in a ranch-type dressing, filled with shredded cabage and rotisserie chicken, and topped off with another heart-stopping dollop of creamy sauce. Tasty, tho!
Anyway, the woman behind the kebab counter soon made it plain why there was nobody at her stand. As we watched in dismay as the dozen customers at the other stand, then a dozen more, got their food and scurried off to their trains, we watched Slowey McSlowerson plod from the bread to the meat, the meat to the sauce, the sauce to the veg and back again in a circle that seemed to accomplish little more than fray our nerves. We checked the time. 10 minutes to departure. Our Kebab lady checked the progress of the grilling bread, and was about to give it another bit. I nearly shouted at her, and made some gestures to indicate that it was bloody well good enough and we had to go! She took the hint and proceeded to very slowly fill my kebab with an intricate arrangement of fillings. I took the meal and ran for the train, leaving Kyle to catch up as best he could (at least I could try to get the train to wait for him). As I was approaching the platform I had terrible visions of there being no food allowed in the cars (and a five-hour journey ahead!) but thankfully, it was all okee-dokee. Kyle made it with moments to spare.
The ride down was dark and steamy, since the fellow passengers closed the window, and it was to remain closed for the whole time. Most of the way, we dozed, interrupted a few times by military-type ticket collectors, who inspected our tickets repeatedly. Intimidating, but not as bad as I had feared on Polish trains.
So this post is coming from the city of Poznan, in north-central Poland. The county is Pomerania (yes, home of the little fur-ball dogs) and we haven't seen too much of it yet, but the first impression is of a fairly gritty facade. The churches and historic buildings we glimpsed in the dark from the train are truly spectacular, and Anna is going to show us around many of them here. The plan is to head to Cracow & see the well-preserved old town there.
She left us to sleep in this morning, and we awoke at noon to a beautiful breakfast laid out on the table! What a gal.
Can't wait to see more of Poland!