Gettting to Chile and Celebrating Beard Day 100

Getting to Chile

So from London after a lovely break to sort through my Madagascar photos while watching Columbo on the couch at my former flat and catching up with friends, notable for the Friday evening repeated attacks on my 94 day old beard by J-Fo, I began my official "trip round the world" that left from London to Santiago Chile (via Zurich of course) on November 17, 2008 and returns from Stockholm to London on March 31, 2009.

Well I luckily made it to Chile. You see I barely made my flight. I'm talking minutes or maybe even seconds at the check-in-desk to spare here. Here's what happened:

During my travels in Madagascar I had been listening to a few audiobooks (Catch 22) and lectures from the teaching company on random topics* and some standup comedy. A lot of the time I use my ipod is at nighttime to help drown out ambient noise (like dogs fighting and annoying Malagasy music on taxi brousses) and find that people talking does a better job than music. So while I had some couch/internet time when I was back in london I searched out as many audio books and lectures that I could find to add to the collection. The only problem was that with all the new stuff I now exceeded my 80gigs space on my ipod and had to now select individually the tracks that I wanted to keep. The reason this was such a problem is that I had left it til 2:30pm on the day I was supposed to catch a 6:40 flight from Heathrow to synchronize my ipod. 2 1/2 hours later at 5:00 I had to shut it down the syncronizing process at 50% and make a mad dash for the airport at rush hour.

Since you already know that I made it I'll spare you all the details:

Details like 1)how I was sprinting so fast with my 15kg backpack**that a lady on the Hammersmith and City Line to Paddington offered me a stack of tissues because I was sweating so much. Or that I missed the 5:25 Heathrow Express by one minute***.

Or that 2) my dead all out sprint to terminal 1 was for naught as, despite what my ticket said, Swiss Air actually flies from terminal 2.

Or that 3) another all out sprint from T1 to T2 caught 4 police officers off guard as I charged between them yelling over my shoulder, sorry, I'm late for my flight.

Or that 4) the guy at the check in desk had to check with his supervisor who in turn had to check with her supervisor to see if 6:10 was too late a check in time to let me on the flight. "Ok but he is the last one" was the consensus that I was grateful to hear.

Actually that's quite a lot of details for someone who was leaving out the details. Sounds like something I would do.

Anyway, so I got there and after accidently tipping the taxi driver the equivalent of GBP 20 due to an exchange rate misunderstanding I arrived at the Chili Hostel (play on words deliberate) http://www.ajihostel.cl/ which was a really social place where I met lots of fun people.

One of the fun people was a guy who worked there named Alvaro, a big fan of Rush, which I can't say helped endear him to me but since they are Canadain it fostered conversation about music and in general. Alvaro is a bit of a metal head. Or if not a metal head then definitely a hard rocker.

Anyway, on beard day 100, which happened to coincide with the hostel's Friday nigt bbq, Alvaro broke out the hard liquor, a Chielan firewater called Pisco and then took me and Randy, a guy from the states who is about 10yrs my junior with the energy of a guy about 20 yrs my junior, on a random tour of hard rocker type clubs where the people where scary looking and the music was hard rock (though due to Pisco related memory loss I don't remember any actual songs that we heard).

In general, though much is hazy, beard day 100 celebration was a roaring success and saw me get back to the hostel sometime between 5:30am (the time stamp of the last photo) and 6:30am when Randy scaled a wall and climbed through a 2nd storey window ****to let me in the building because no one was answering the door.
The major issue with the beard day celbration, other than it was to celebrate 100 days of an awesome beard which is less an 'issue' and more a statement of fact, was that I had a 7:51am bus ticket to Mendoza (7hours away across the border into Argentina) already purchased for the next day so waking up at 10am I scrambled around as fast as possible to make it to the bus station in time to catch a bus that would see me arrive in Mendoza before dark.*****

After a healthy breakfast of a double whopper with cheese at BK, I still had about 1/2 hour til the next bus left at 1:30pm so I decided to look through my bags and take inventory of my stuff. Hmmm.....where are my GBP 200 brand new never been worn prescription ski goggles. They should be here. or here. or here. Crap! Crap, crap crap crap crap. I must have left them at the hostel. Damit. there's only 15mins left now til my bus leaves. Decision time....do I say "forget them" and continue on? or forget the bus ticket (after all I was going a day early for my mountain tour anyway) and go back and get them? I can't very well leave them just to get value out of this bus ticket. Guess I'm going back to the hostel for another night.I was greeted with an amused smile from the girl at the desk and sure enough my goggles were there. My pride was nowhere to be found but I had a quiet afternoon and used the time productively to send an email to Mom and Dad informing them that I had planned a kickass Beard Removal Themed party for New Year's Eve at their house if that was all right with them. I was calling in New Beard's Eve and during my mountain expedition it would take on a life of it's own.

Photos 1) Nothing to do with arrival in Chile but I just find it interesting that a guy named O'Higgins was such a great Liberator of Chile that he has the main st named after him. Mental note to wikipedia Chilean history and find out what's up with that? 2) Mi amigo Alvaro and his buddy who's name I don't remember one of the rocker clubs in Chile.3) Me and the official beard calendar. 4) DG and Randy taking a "when in rome" attitude and getting into the spirit of the local rocker clubs.

*The best one being History of Roman Empire which I originally downloaded in April when I went to Rome but revisited in Madagascar due to lack of selection

**Despite now carrying winter weather clothes I still managed to ditch a lot of stuff that I was carrying around Madagascar. Nearly 9kg worth which really helped for the sprinting through airports.

***26 mins from Old st to Paddington is pretty good at rush hour I thought after the fact.

****Before I could even finish my response "No way man I'm way too drunk for that" to his question of who should climb through the window? his feet were already hanging out of the window.

*****Normally I would opt for the overnight bus but since it arrives at 4 in the morning I decided against it.

Madagascar 8 - La Dernier Chapitre

Ok so I´ve left Madagascar and am now in Chile. Big deal. I´ve got a couple of unaccounted for weeks on the blog so instead of writing a chapter on each event (which would be amazing but time consuming) I´ll sum it up with a paragraph on each.

Parc Ranomafana

Amazing park. Greenest place in the whole country with lush rainforest and beautiful waterfalls and rivers along with lots of lemurs and a nice campsite. As I arrived in the middle of the night on a taxi-brousse it was an amazing awaken to the sight of mist rising off the rainforest and birds chirping. That´s right birds. Going tweet-tweet. Not roosters cock-a-doodle-do-ing or dogs barking just nice tranquil bird song. The main problem then was that the hotel was in the village and the parc, my destination, was 6.5kms away. According to the guide book it was a slightly windy road but I figured it must follow the river or something like the road near the hotel so I thought I'd walk it. It turned out to be entirely uphill. Lucky thing I was in training for Aconcagua climb and I had just made an awesome "On-the-go" playlist by selecting 2 songs titles beginnig with each letter of the alphabet. I arrived at the park in the middle of Lenny Kravitz´s "Lady". 13 songs. Not bad time considering it was all uphill. The well deserved honey rhum (a bit on the sweet side though if you ask me) went down a treat and was still in time to tour the park and see some lemurs. The brownish ones.

Ambositra ("Boringtown, Madagascar)

If boredom could be exported and capitalized upon then Ambositra would be the richest town in the world. The guide says something like "all the fresh mountain air you can gulp" and that made me think that since I was going past there anyway, why not stop for a couple of nights and check it out. Except for the scenery and the half decent although seriously difficult mountain biking there is "rein chose a faire la."*

I tried and tried and tried but I just couldn´t make the "woodworking captiatl of Madagascar" interesting. Sure, the little wooden trinkets are hand made but so are pirogues and bricks and just about everything else in Madagascar where labour is cheap and the zebu cart represents cutting edge technology. I think it was a good eye opener for me and reinforces why I am not a writer for guidebooks. If I were under Ambositra I would write "this town sux. Don´t go there. Ok sure. If you really really really think woodworking is interesting and want to buy some mass produced trinkets carved and assembled from wood then stop by for lunch on your way through, but by all means don´t go out of your way". One thing that was cool was that I could pitch my tent in the yard of the hotel for only 2 euros a night and there was a baby tortoise sharing the yard with me I named him Georges because the Malagasy lady and child who welcomed me either didn´t understand me when I asked them his name or they ignored me.

28 Hours in a Taxi-brousse and the Search for Nosy Mistrio

Madagascar is ridiculously huge. So if you want to see the north and you are currently in Boringville, you either need to fly there, (rubbing fingers and thumb together indicating that it's a bit pricey) or suck it up and take to the road. 1,200kms is a long way to go on windy mountain roads at the beginning of the rainy season but in the end after leaving Snoozetown at 9:00 on Thursday I got to, where I thought I wanted to go, at 1:00pm on Friday, Ambilobe, gateway to the north and where the streets are paved with, well, nothing.

Before you read this just remember one thing. I am an idiot. Also, language barriers suck.

The guidebook says that Nosy Be, while amazingly beautiful with world class beaches and diving, is also infested with vazahas, and the island even has direct flights from Italy and France to facilitate vazaha visits. No thanks. Not my cup of tea. The guidebook also says that Nosy Mitsio has even better worldclass diving and hardly any vazahas but it is hard and therefore expensive to get to. BUT, the guidebook map has a dotted line indicating a ferry that goes from Grand Mitsio Island to a mysterious place called Ampasanantenina.** People in and around Ambilobe generally agreed with this and so they dropped me at a place called Port St. Louis. Language barrier issue 1) Is this where I catch a "bateau" to Nosy Mitsio. Technically no. it isn´t but it was where I could catch a pirogue which for some reason is not considered a "boat" even though it floats and has sails and whatnot. Ok then, I´ll go to Ampasanantenina where the "ferry" goes. I knew something was wrong. There was no road to get to this place. Wouldn´t a ferry carry trucks and supplies and stuff? No there was a tiny zebu path and some very surprised children and villagers when I arrived. Luckily, the villagers were friendly and welcoming and let me set up my tent on the beach and it was only after 20 mins or so when they tried to get money out of me. Luckily again they are not that smart and after about 2 hours of negotiations I made them think they got me when in reality I scored a 75% off "boat" trip to the island. One catch, it leaves at 3.00am. For me, I had just travelled 28hrs on a taxi brouse, then 2 hours in the back of a pickup truck, then walked for 90 mins and forgot to eat or pick up extra water and now I was going to sleep on a strange beach in the middle of nowhere and no one knew I was there and then wake up and get in some dudes carved out canoe and sail 31kms offshore to the big island where I had no hotel reservation or even knew if there were even any hotels.

When I got there, the hotelier said, "sure you can stay here (though I don´t think he was expecting guests!) but there is a problem with the food. There is none." What? I said. Well what about water. I mean I haven´t eaten or slept in a while and just spent the first 6 hours of the day in the sun on a "boat". Nowe have no water either. Oh man I felt like crying. I think he could see the deflated look on my face he instructed a guy to climb a tree and get some coconuts and I tell you what that was the best coconut I´ve ever had in my life and maybe even the top beverage ever as well. After I was sufficiently hydrated we established that the problem with the food was not lack of existence but lack of variety which was a much much better problem when you are in the middle of the mozambique channel on a tiny island that you arrived on unexpectedly and unannounced. Hell of a beach though. The guidebook got that bit right.

That night, one of the staff at the hotel, a bit wasted and talking loads of crap, asked me if I was married. I said no. He said was I interested in Malagasy women. I thought he meant generally and I said that they were generally quite pretty and smilely and friendly and then he left and I forgot about him. A while later, after dinner once I was in my room I heard a knock, and so there is this guy with "my choice" of two local village girls.***I had to decline. It was just too weird. Also the 3 carb meal (spaghetti, with fries and a side of rice) combined with no sleep for nearly 2 straight days had me a little on the tired side. Maybe it would have been a night to remember, as it was it was quite memorable, but I´ll never know and I´m ok with that.

Communication problem 2) yes i would like to "plonge" meaning dive. But they also use the same word to mean snorkel. I don´t want to fucking snorkel. I want to dive so I add "avec boutaille" (with tank of air) but for some reason this also got lost in translation. So instead of being taken to the dive store. I was taken to a remote smaller island to snorkel where I felt quite lucky that they didn´t just leave me on it and take all my stuff. After explaining that under no circumstances was I going to leave all my bags and money with my priogue crew while I go snorkeling off a deserted island we headed inland.

Dave is a big stupid idiot: right so we sail all afternoon and get back to the mainland. Port St. Louis where I originally landed. It´s only 27 kms from Ambilobe. If it comes down to it I´m a hardened backpacker and I´ll walk it. (What? that is stupid! don´t be an idiot!) Oh look it might rain. I´ll just get my rainjacket out. That should help. (You are a retard) Ok I´m off I´ll just start walking by myself in rural Madagascar on the verge of darkness on a sunday when there are no taxis this should work out fine (It is a wonder you were´nt mugged and left for dead!). Right well anyhooo, long story short after a brief conversation with a complete physcho I managed to pay a ridiculous but worthwhile sum to a private taxi driver (guy with a car) and just as I got inside it started to piss down rain like I´d never seen before. And lightning. Holy crap the lightning. What great weather this would have been to walk 27 kms with over 30kgs of luggage. Theres roughing it and then there is being stupid. This was a million miles into stupid.

Result: Nosy Mistrio found. Dives completed: 0. Amount of stuff I had left:all (what a ridiculous miracle)

Diego Suarez

This place is like a proper city. Except for the number of old french expats with young Malagasy women****, the city makes sense and is tourist friendly with lots to do. While updating the blog I met up with Nero the poker instrcutor at the local casino and stopped in a couple of times to play. I also climbed my very first real rock face to a ridiculous height of 28m, hung out at the pool at the Grand hotel working on my tan and chilling out, mountain biked about 150kms, climbed French Mountain, would have taken windsurf lessons but a group of russians had booked months in advance for the time I wanted to do it and went on an amazing ATV excursion with my new ami and the coolest guy in Madagascar, Garcia.

Garcia welcomed me into his house for dinner 2 times and showed me the town and even introduced me to lots of ladies (he´s quite the ladies man you see) on halloween when I went out on the town dressed as, yes, Chuck Norris, even though no one else was celebrating halloween.

I ended up making the 1,200km trip back to Tana in time to hang out in the Capital on a Sunday when everything is closed and then got wasted and made my flight to France just in time to pass out and wake up mid flight with my first case of African traveller´s diarreah.

All good now though. Starting the climb of Cerro Aconcagua on Sunday, 6,962m (22,841ft) of Argentinian Mountain. I´ll wave from the top on Dec 8, 9 or 10 so have a look up.



*A phrase that I would repeat over and over while drunk and generally badmouthing Ambositra to my new Malagasy friends when one of them said they were going there. The enthusiam with which I trash talked the town was received with much hilarity and it became a running joke for like a week (ie. What´s going on? I don´t know but I hear there´s lots happening in Ambositra.)
**Amazing that I remembered the name as it´s been about 3.5 weeks now but I asked just about everyone I encountered if I was going the right way.
***He said they were 20 but who the hell knows.
****I still can´t decide whether to cheer them (nice work buddy!) or feel sorry for them (they{re only with you for your money!) I think the fact that none of them were ever smiling despite living in a tropical paradise with enough money to live like a king with a beautiful women on their arms has me leaning towards feeling sorry for them.

Madagascar 7 - Chooo-choooo! All aboard the FCE (Also known as taking the long way through Banana country to get to Parc Ranomafana)

I'll be honest. Originally I had no interest in riding in Madagascar's only passenger train the Fianarotsoa Cote Est (FCE). It's one of those things that they build up in the guide books as being a must do but I could see right through it. Or I could, until some people who had already done it sort of convinced me that it was worthwhile and since I didn't have an agenda anyway I figured I'd give it a go.

I have a couple of problems with this train though:

First, It starts in a city that I had no reason to go to (other than to catch the train)* and ends in a city that I had no desire to go to** and that was a day's travel out of my way (to the extent that I had a "way" not really having a set travel itinerary and all).

The second problem I had is that is overhyped and swarming with vazahas. Actually that's two separate problems but one is a consequence of the other.*** In the description it notes that it traverses "some of Madagascar's most scenic countryside". Having already been here for six weeks I've seen a lot of the countryside and while I can't argue that the view from the train wasn't scenic, it was no more or less scenic than you can see in many other places (and how exactly do you rank whether one amazing landscape is more or less scenic than another anyway?)

It goes on to boast that it "offers the traveller magnificent vistas". Ok this may be true if you had a window seat (which I didn't) and it was on the north side of the train (nope again) then you could hang your head out the window and partake in some vistas and also block the view of all the other passengers such as those sitting on the aisle on the south facing side of the train (ie the side where there is just a sheer rock wall along which they built the railroad of which my view was splendid thanks).

The other descriptive words they use are "liesurely" to describe the pace (aka slow) and "lots of opportunity to enjoy the bustle of the 17 village stations as they come alive with the whistle of the train" (ie the train stops a lot).

As a result of this exotic sounding description the train is swarming with tourists. Not the young hip, bearded backpacker types that I like to socialize with (or non bearded in the case of girls) but the older french vazaha's who wear out of context adventure gear like those old photography vests and big hiking boots even though they now have digital cameras and are presently taking a train. They all go in the first class carriages. Wanting to distance myself from that kind of pre-packaged group travel I booked in 2nd class.

So to recap, the train starts in a city I didn't want to go to in the first place, travels extremely slowly and stops frequently and I can't see the vistas because I'm stuck on the aisle seat on the non vista side of the train having got up at 5:30am in time to get my ticket (oh yes that was the other thing I meant to complain about) and then arrives at a city that I don't really want to be in at night time with no hotel reservation.


Hmm, how did I cope with this situation. Get pissed I bet you're thinking. Well that would have been possible because as I said the train stops a lot. And actually, now that I think about it you could turn the FCE into an all day drinking game/pub crawl. If you had a beer at each of the 17 stops you would be pretty wasted when you got to Manakara (especially since beer comes in big 650ml bottles). But then if you saw the toilet in the 2nd class compartment the last thing you'd want to be doing is drinking more fluids. So no I didn't get drunk until I arrived.

Instead I took photos, lots and lots of photos. Photos of the train stopped, photos of it moving, photos out the window (once people got off at about the 5th stop so I could actually take in a bit of vista action) photos of people on the train, photos of people at the station, photos of chickens crossing the tracks and photos of the biggest most prehistorically huge bananas I've ever seen in my life. Then I switched to videos because hey why not capture some of the sounds as well? If I could have somehow captured the smell of the deisil engine it would really be a collection for the senses (the bananas taste the same so just eat a banana while you check this out for the taste sensation).
The other thing that helped me pass the time was expaining to the locals, especially the kids, how my gps works. Basically, despite having read the wikipedia article explaining how the gps works when I first got it, I have no clue. Malagasy children can't seem to sense BS though so I just started randomly explaining the things I did know (like how many kms were left to where the GPS map thinks Manakara is (it's 5kms from where it actually is btw) and filling in the rest with technical jargon and making sure to pronounce "satelite" with an appropriately authentic sounding french accent.
Once I had a few photos of the beard out the window I felt like the whole train journey was actually worthwhile. After all as long as I got one good keeper beard photo with the train in the background that I can use to encapsulate all of the travels of Dave and his beard and from that perspective I was right it was worthwhile. Hell it was worthwhile just to see those giant bananas.

But then I got to Manakara. Adrien, one of my group members from the Pic Boby ascent told me that it was worthwhile going there because it had a kind of end of the world feeling. Didn't sound all that great to me. I'd been trekking and taxibroussing around for the past 10 days I think some right smack in the thick of the world would be pretty awesome right about now.

Since I was pretty sure I didn't want to go there I had consulted the guide book and just figured I'd get the first pousse-pousse guy to take me and my bags to any hotel he could recommend that might have a room. We agreed the price up front but as I didn' have the correct change he decided to up the price to match the currency I did have (double) on the grounds that the first hotel that he recommended was full and he took me around the corner. I argued that I agreed the ridiculous price that he quoted in the first place on the understanding that he would actually find me a hotel and would therefore save me a lot of hassle but then he brought his kids into it and the hotel wouldn't make change for me so I had to suck it up and pay the man his £3.50. Consulting the guide later saw that there was actually a big article warning against the Manakara pousse-pousse drivers and how ruthless and relentless they were.

Even though a ride from the train station on the outskirts of town to find a hotel in the dark might well be worth way more than the price I paid in London or elsewhere in the world, in Madagascar I should have paid about £0.50 for it and it is the feeling of getting ripped off which starts to wear on you after a while and makes you stop returning peoples smiles knowing that they are almost always followed by some kind of request or scheme for you to give them money.**** I deliberately didn't take another pousse pousse ride just out of spite even though it would have been much easier. On my way out of town I walked with my pack the 4kms to the taxibrousse station passing pousse-pousse after pousse-pousse explaining them my distaste for their dishonest business practices and arguing that since I was generally younger, stronger and fitter than them it really didn't make sense for them to be carrying my stuff anyway. Photos: 1) Train leaving on time (ish) from destination 2) I like this one. You can't really see the red of the engine but you get the kid's head in the foreground looking out. 3) Why did the chickens cross the tracks? Don't know. In this photo they're more walking along side the tracks but it still seemed a bit risky if you're a chicken .4) This one didn't turn out so great partly due to my overwhelming enthusiasm for the pre historic bananas but it's the best one I have that really show's how huge they are. 5) A random one after the bananas were put down and lots of people got off the train at the rest stop and the kid was sleeping. 6) Self portrait out the window of a moving train with the left hand. Let's see you do that with an SLR eh? 7) Ok so Manakara does have a kind of end of the world/old west feel about it. It doesn't mean I'm ever going there again now does it? Just look how lazy those pousse-pousse drivers are! Also I've locked in photo number 5 for the beard chronicles and can save the rest of my train pics for the trans-siberian.



*After spending 2 days there because the Thursday train was cancelled I realized that I also had no desire be there either.
**This was reinforced after I was actually there and had no desire to be there.
***It is overhyped DONC it is swarming with vazaha's. Merçi Simon R. pour la leçon français.
****Actually I smiled but just a sarcastic smile often accompanied by an some english that I know they don't understand. What? don't understand eh? Well I don't understand Malagache so welcome to my world. No "argent" for you. BTW friends beware due to the lack of speaking english I have a lot of pent up sarcasm that will need to be released when I get back so by no means interpret that as me complaining or not enjoying my madagascar experience