South-West Gets Scholziger

Humppa! Our beloved Petrus seems not to like us a lot. Even at the Caribbean coast we encountered but a hand full days of sun. The Lonely Planet of Colombia often has a completely different opinion than us. I think travelling without any guide book is the best idea. Just stick to the locals’ stories, buy one good map and you’ll find the best spots. I have to admit that we did not couchsurf at all until now. It is somewhat more comfortable to directly go for a hostel if you are travelling spontaneously.

Till now I am deeply impressed by this country. We had not one uncosy situation and the people are soooo totally different regarding the regions we have been to already. In general nobody wants to trick you and you will mostly pay the same prizes the locals pay. At the Caribbean this looks a bit different in crowded spots. All hyped tourist places are full of people wanting to sell junk to you. Now we are in Medellin, the people look different, they are fresh, younger and our first impression was a much more friendly one than at the northern coast. In contrast the eastern Andean region around Cocuy was one big siesta: Mostly old people with ponchos sitting in the street and smoking, greeting, observing, accepting.

It’s an expensive country. Bus tickets are expensive and there is no possibility to bargain, they stick to their prices. We payed around 45 Euro to get from Cartagena to Medellin and our trip was prolonged from 13 hours to 18 hours because in the middle of the night the clutch broke somehow and we were fixed to one spot until the bus drivers repaired it … haha.

Moep, we did it. Sierra Nevada del Cocuy rocks … as long as the sun shines on your crazy diamonds. We ascended from Guican to a lodge with a market truck during cold rain, followed by frost. I think I never ever felt that wet and cold before. The next three days weather was on our side from morning till early afternoon. Dawn at 4000m when you start climbing up is gorgeous! Reaching the first 5000m peak was surprisingly neat with just some oxygen problems but the next day we got overwhelmed by the usual altitude sickness. Your body just starts to feel falling into parts, knocking out your life … The only thing which helped was descending which we did. Down at 3000m all sickness went, our lives came back. What followed was a butcherly bus trip from El Cocuy over Capitanejo to Bucaramanga. In Bolivia they would ban such a track, restricting it to mountainbikes only and call it “Carretera de la Muerte”. We spent 7 hours on such a carretera in a medium-sized bus and survived with four hands full of thrilling situations. If you ever wanted to discover your pretty life from a different perspective, go straight to the Andes my friend. You probably will stay forever. What else? Bucaramanga? Bucaramanga = paragliding. That’s it, that’s what we did.

That’s all funny. We spontaneously decided to go hiking in national park Sierra Nevada del Cocuy. Gooood stuff but unfortunately I haven’t thought before of being able to convince Julia of a hard hiking trip. This was why I left the tent and my multi-fuel stove set at home :-/ But, even better now that I know how flexible this girl is She’s so open to new things and gets directly crazy about them. Greeeat! Due to the heavy rain we can not walk the planned 7-day round trip but will go for some day hikes starting from a mountain lodge with two other Germans .

Grrrr, bloody rain season. I do not have any dry stuff left but one slip. Nevertheless our necks, noses and ears are burned because of three hours of sun today in the morning when we climbed up a hill here in Villa de Leyva.

Dear Colombia, thank you so much for entering into my life. You are nice. I like you. We like you. We?? Damn good question … to be clarified later. So, we had a couch for the first nights in Bogotá. Exactly, we had. The night we spent in Duesseldorf before our flight in the morning we realised that our CouchSurfing request has been declined belatedly. This is some kind of a great feeling; knowing that you are straight on the way going to Colombia and not knowing where to sleep the first night. I call it ”the miracle of life”, but most would prefer “life’s tragedy”.

Air France did it well, they were able to satisfy our hunger and our need of a chilling flight. Now we start to clarify everything: First we’ll start with Venezuela’s main airport Simón Bolívar. Imagine this airport being the size of Muenster’s central railway station. Done? Now imagine something being one third of the size of Simón Bolívar airport. This then, is Bogota’s El Dorado airport. Sweeeeet! Next imagine a pretty, long-leged, blond German girl in the middle of Colombia. Done? What is the difference between this girl and me? I get a 3o-day visa, Julia gets a 60-day visa. Right, that’s the difference between me and the we. Sweeeeeet!

Huch! I totally forgot about you all, to write my “Welcome back to Germany” post. To summarise all, I can say that I really did not want to leave nice Buenos Aires, Argentina, South America. Deep inside I cried but in the end it wasn’t that bad at all when I arrived in Düsselsorf. My last nights I spent with Daniel in Mauro’s Couchsurfing home because I had to leave my previous couch unexpectedly. It was the right decision because Mauro turned out to be a god of mate. Never met anyone else before who can teach you the philosophy of drinking Argentinian mate with such a passion. You want to study, to live Argentina? Take your first lesson with Mauro, though for me it was the last.

I bought an extra bag only to take around 13 kg of mate home to Germany. There were not the slightest problems declaring my customs. I simply did not declare anything. But as I read somewhere there are no strong restrictions importing tea in huge amounts into the EU, it only may not exceed the value of 430 Euro which it did not.

The first thing you notice when coming back from the dry Patagonian desert into the German fresh spring is some kind of ubiquitous green slime, filled with never ending background concerts of local winged somethings. Wow. This Münsterland here has a special charm you won’t find anywhere else. Light greenly glowing fields merge into full juicy deep green forests when you cruise around outside of the wannabe-cities. Mmmmhm … jummy jummy

The past few weeks back in Germany I spent with finishing my Venezuelan project, migrating all collected geodata into a clean database, building some maps for online publishing purposes and finally playing around frustratedly with ESRI’s ArcGIS Server to get the things accessible from the World Wide Web. I stepped deep into server administration which was rather new to me but I hate it. All these necessary rights managements to get things to work … it’s boring. Either the firewall or some user accounts steal days and days of your free time, you forget to eat, to sleep, … Blöäh!

The final web application will be updated and bug-fixed from time to time. I still have to adjust the look and feel of the maps but for every publishing step I have to recalculate all the small image tiles which are used by the server to produce the map output. Recreating this cache keeps my laptop busy for three days each time, so I definitely will not do it frequently If you are interested in accessing the WebGIS, post a comment and I’ll mail you the login information. Some day the access will be free.

My attached photos will show my very few impressions of Buenos Aires. In future this blog will be silent. May be there are following others about coming trips, or a pure photo blog in cooperation with my dear friend Kono. But one of my visions is to recapture my best past trips and produce something like a retrospect, underlined with amazing photos and sharp short stories I underwent. Time consuming mind breaking ideas I have …

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I arrived in Monte Hermoso to visit Edgardo, the guy who took Daniel and me from Ushuaia in his Lady Benz. There are trees around, and green grass, woah! Pampa seams to be over soon. He lives in a self-made nice house with 8 big dogs, 5 new small ones and around 8 cats, 4 fresh ones. We had some great asado out of other animals and I created a new e-mail account for him

This night I took a luxurious bus to Buenos Aires where I’m waiting now for my couch host to wake up because she still seems to be asleep after Saturday’s hard night. Here some photos of last days in Puerto Madryn with Daniel and Monte Hermoso.

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Hihi. I left Daniel! Hahaa! We just separated yesterday when I took a night bus to Bahia Blanca and he stayed for one or two days more in Puerto Madryn. Our roadtrip through Peninsula Valdés was cool! We saw magallan penguins, orcas and sea elephants but yesterdays Kayak tour alongside the coast was even better. Bitter cold in the morning with the low sun, clear sky and tranquil sea without wind. The water was transparent but at the same time deep blue and gave a great contrast to the yellowish cliffs. When we passed a seal colony some of the younger ones jumped into the water and came to us, diving below our kayak and spraying salty water into our faces. Cool!

There is a new confluence point report from Seniorscholz online.

Eeeeep! Hmm. Hitchhiking. Yes. Works pretty well here in south Argentina as well. We started in Ushuaia and did the whole way north to Puerto Madryn in 3,5 days with one guy, Edgardo. He is the coolest of all! 47, fought in the Falklands War in ’82, eight days ago divorced the second time and breeding Labradors. He went down  to sell some dogs on the way and enjoyed the time with us heading back near Buenos Aires. He had bad luck in Ushuaia because someone stole his car papers and he had to fly back to Buenos Aires to get some new ones because without he was not able to cross the Chilean border. Then they phoned them, having found his papers somewhere. He headed back but had to return and go back again, I forgot the reason for all of this, but it was crazy. So he picked us up and we cruised through the Pampa, saw Guanacos, also many dead ones and enjoyed the fresh coffee at every gas station. Here you get good coffee again! The first night we had to hurry to get the ferry back from Tierra del Fuego to the main land, so we drove into the night. This is not recommended in whole Patagonia, at least on unpaved roads. So, this night we crushed the front of his old ’94 Mercedes Benz van as we approached and crossed a small hill. We were just going like 40 or 50 kilometres per hour and on top of this hill in the curve the unpaved road was a small lake. Funny, not? The hell knows why, but some new river decided to cross the road, though it had not rained for days. Just add some aquaplaning to this small formula and you get what we got. This spot approached so suddenly that there was no time to break and we funnily slipped around on this small water hole. Some force smashed us to the right, we nearly tilt over to the left, we already were on the two outer wheels and then stopped in the ditch. Some half wheel deep water around us, the front of the car buried in mud. Hihi. So, the whole front was for the fishes, but good old lady Benz still worked as it should. Luckily there came some other 4×4 cars to pull us on the main puddle and we continued. Next stops were Puerto San Julián, Trelew and we reached Puerto Madryn. For tomorrow we rent a car to take a ride to the Peninsula Valdés.

Consume more horses! Cook them, grill them, fry them, whatever them, at least please eat them! Our two day hike north of Ushuaia through some deep valleys could have been even more beautiful if you had eaten more horses. There exisit some people who prefer horse back riding through rough landscapes instead of hiking on their bare feet. This would be no problem and I would not have such a problem if these people used special paths with their horses, but not the same paths as hikers do. The result in this humid region is that all hiking paths are mud pools and our hike was rather a mud war than a chilling adventure. Horses turn a narrow trail into a highway of mud. Tartar will be our best friend!

Consume more dogs! Fry them, grill them, cook them, whatever them, at least please eat them! Wild dogs can get a really annoying natural phenomenon. When you think about leaving the city down here and exploring the outer region on your own, make sure to carry some pepper spray or a big axe with you. The further you get out of the city, the less conscious the people get with their dogs. Why do all giant dogs have to run around freely, barking and jumping on every foreigner passing by, the improvised fences not holding back even a cow …?

Tonight we had our coldest night in the tent. First time that I had to close my sleeping bag completely. Must have been around -3 degree Celsius. Sell your synthetic fibre sleeping bag, buy a down one. The only reason buying this plastic stuff is its lower price. All arguments that down bags have problems with humidity are nonsense unless you sleep without any cover in the pouring rain. One rainy week of hiking is no problem, two are no difference. Sleeping in the cold night outside is no problem, the morning dew stays outside and gets not inside of the bag, it dries away fast. Once the wind carried my sleeping bag into a river and even this was no problem because the outer material is water repellent and within these few seconds nothing has happened. For five years now I had not a single day having humidity problems. Goose down rocks!!

Nice it was down here! Patagonia is very cool! Especially the Chilean islands, national park Los Glaciares, Torres del Paine, La Pampa and the vast distances. Tierra de fuego is something comparable to some northern European stuff but on midday you’ll find the sun in the north instead of the south. Tomorrow we have to head north again, poco a poco I have to reach Buenos Aires. There are only two weeks left, ohjeh!