tunes and reading

Music I´ve been listening to:

1/Animal Collective with a special mentioning of singing My Girls out loud when hiking (or when in a supermarket for that matter). Doing all the voices by myself, bien sur! funny stuff!

2/Berlin Calling - Paul Kalkbrenner.- Aaah what can I say! MJ, you know what I mean.

3/I Tank U - T.Raumschmiere. Especially good when I´m on the verge of getting into a foul mood. Angry music makes me happy again, apparantly...

4/Hitsville U.S.A The Motown Singles. dank u Marco!

5/The Lost in Translation Soundtrack... The strange atmosphere both movie and soundtrack contain is so recognazible when you are traveling and wonder what the hell you´re actually doing in a bus terminal in the middle of the night.

6/Mota - Cultura Profetica. It´s Puerto Rican and it´s not reggaeton!

7/Musique Concrete -Calibre. When I´m hiking and need to speed up. (or whenever I need to speed up basically) Goldie has the same effect

8/Different Places - Plastic Operator for sunny, somehow melancholic moods

9/Hercules and Love Affair. Always, just in love with this album

10/Yo Majesty -Futuristically speaking Never be Afraid. Exactly for that reason in the title.Sometimes a girl on her own needs a kick in the ass.

And lots more, ofcourse,but it´ll get boring soon.

Books I´ve red and swapped:
1/On Chessil Beach -Ian Mc Ewan. Blew me away. Incredibly funny and sad at the same time.

2/The count of Monte Cristo. Trust me. a 1200 pager from 1840 is not a book you want to be traveling with but it was the only decent book I could get my hands on on that moment. Plus a classic that had been on my list for some time. People would dazzle and aks me with I in christ´s name i´d be reading. A profound ¨the bible¨was my standard answer.

3/Me talk pretty one day - David Sedaris. Great discovery! Just too funny!

4/Jesus weed. Don´t even bother, it´s even worse then the title predicts. It was a loan from a travel friend and kindly given back after 50 pages.

5/ Veronica decides to die - Paulo Coelho. I´m on it... Started very promising with the main character killing herself on page 1. An hour in the same bus terminal as where I am typing these lines and I´m already on page 64.

I ve never been so far behind on blogging, I´m afraid. Last post is on glaciers in the south and i´m now in the desert in the north of chile. Following post will be with lots of info, with lots of holes and with lots of spelling mistakes but try to enjoy it anyway!!

From El Chalten I went to Los Antiguos. Nothing too special to mention except for the fact the prefectura (the argentinean baywatch) offered me a ride on Lago Buenos Aires in a zodiac boat. A loud and clear ´claro que si´ from my side got me in a boat with some argentineans and 2 local david hasselhoffs. A bit showoffs as we went faaaaast but it was good fun. Lago Buenos Aires is the biggest lake in south-america after titicaca and at its deepest is 590 metres which ment lots and lots of waves, wiehieee!
I crossed the lake on the Chilean side on a very rough ferry ride. It took the ferry people several hours to decide if we´d cross or not due to the strong winds. I was glad we did cross but kinda changed my mind when I set foot on the other side, dripping wet.


This was my starting point for the carretera austral, an epic road going north. Epic as in very amazingly bad shape and with very few public transport but also very beatiful and hitchhiking is the national sport here.

First stop was Coyahique. I ran into 4 American girls who I had met a few times before already. The travel-world is even smaller then the real world. We went together to a rodeo which was amazingly funny. Drinkig beers, having some asado meat chatting to your friends and at the same time watch people getting kicked of a horse, I mean, what else do you need in life!




From Coyahique I made my way up north, with some stops in a few vilages. The last one being Chaiten. Now, this village has been struck by a few volcano eruptions over the last year while everyone thought the volcano was as dead as they get. Nobody got hurt and no lava reached the village bit it´s covered in ashes and a river now runs straght through it. The village is supposed to be closed but 70 people still live there and refuse to leave it... I just passed to take a ferry but I was impressed with this village that seemed to be covered in cement and with volcano right next to it, blowing white, red and black smoke...

This ferry took me to Chiloe, which is Chile´s largest island. I planned on staying a few days but ended up staying 9 days. One of those places I fell in love with. People are too friendly to be true, the biggest difference on high and low tides on the planet and they have the biggest and most amazing shell food on this planet, I think. An amazing time, we camped on a beautiful beach in a National Park.

Weather is ¨changeable´though. Meaning pitching your tent in the sand might sound like a good idea on a sunny warm windless evening but kinda looses its charm on a more then windy morning. Almost all the poles of my tent split. While I was preparing its funeral already, one of my fellw travelers miraculously fixed it up with ducktape and I´m still carrying the thing around as we speak. Plan was to dump it about a month ago, but I think i kinda got attached to it...
We has some fun days in the island´s capital which had, surprisingly anough, an amazing nightlife and we visited a few of the small islands. Think 100 inhabitants, 1 small grocery store, electricity from 7 till 10 PM.


From Chiloe I moved on to Bariloche, Argentina again. What did I come here for? Wel, apparantly they have one of the top 10 best panoramic views according to National Geographic. Another item I can tick of my list!
After a day or so, the weather turned very bad, making the hiking in the mountains plan a little less exciting then it was supposed to be. I was determined to do this one specific hike so I just waited in town for the weather to turn again. Luckily, Bariloche is also famous for its chocolate.
I did get to do my hike.
On my one though, no fanatic hikers in my hostels. Woosies I thought while I just went for it. And it was amazing. I got so high the condors were actually flying below me, giving me a dance just a few metres from me. The refugio I got to had the most amazing setting, in between 2 huge glaciers, each one at about 100 metres. Last part of the hike, I did in snow which was a funny sight as I was wearing shorts and went down till my knees.