Bear-necessities

British Columbia is bear country. There are lots of signs that say this. I read (parts of) a book about bears. It was not too cheery. Some is the advice was a little confusing. There are 2 types of bear here, black and grizzly.

Generally black bears like berries, and do not pose much of a threat. If you see one, you make yourself big and scary and shout in a low voice. If the worst happens and it attacks you, fight back in any way possible.
If the same happens with a grizzly, the book advises playing dead- the opposite.

So far so good, simple instructions to follow. Until... In some situations even experts may not tell the difference...

I am certainly not an expert, and it seems like the bears are doing their best to keep the non-expert on their toes. For example, I have now seen 4 black bears. 2 of these were brown. Confusing eh.
Luckily, only 2 were from the bike, and one was on a downhill so going fast! Also the bears were far more interested in eating foliage than even looking at cyclists with silly flags.
There's lots of awesome wildlife here, deer, elk, gophers, beavers, raccoons and I even saw coyote pups (cute) whilst pedalling the other day. Still on the 'to see' list are moose and marmots. Think I'm ok to skip the grizzly bear though...

Happy Canada Day!

July 1st is Canada Day, so today there has been fairs and street parades across the whole of this giant country. As a break from cycling, Revelstoke seemed a good town to spend it in. It couldn't be much more Canadian here, wide river, snowy mountains and the Canadian Pacific Railway passing through- very long goods trains.
I have Canada-ed up the bike by adding a Canada flag to the union jack on the back.
Tomorrow will be the highest height reached on a bike so far with only pedal power. Rogers Pass is well over 1300m, and will be the third pass (route through mountains) in ten days that is around Ben Nevis height. Good job the bike has low gears!

some updates...

May seems to have been a bad month for blogging.  A few technical hiccups, real work and lack of internet time were the main causes - skype has had more of my time than blogspot recently, and had a few camera issues at the Grand Canyon.  Who would have thought that a toothbrush would be the tool to save a broken digital camera?  Top tip should you ever drop yours in sand a long way from a camera shop... Anyway, there's some stuff from the USA, the first few weeks in Canada, and some extra photos etc from South America for you to browse over halfterm.
Enjoy the Jubilee celebrations, (not much in the way of jubilance here, can't even find a union jack at the moment!) and have a great extended holiday.
Miss Butler  

Road Tripping: America is very American

 
This is the third time I have crossed America over land.  In 2007 I went from New York to Los Angeles by many Greyhound buses to work as a soccer coach. When my job ended, I drove from LA to Savannah, Georgia (on the East Coast), and then travelled back up to New York to fly home.  On this trip, the plane landed in Miami, and I needed to get to Vancouver, Canada.  If you look on a map, there's a lot of USA in between!



 


Then and now the overwhelming impression I have of America is just how American it is.  Everything looks like it should, like it does in films.  Stuff is huge, from trains to soft drinks, there's signs about rattlesnakes, big deserts and bigger desserts.  Every puddle in Florida seemed to have an Alligator in it, people are really friendly and just lo-ove my  English accent.  The National Parks look like they have been CGI-ed to be absolutely perfect.  America is brilliant!










 Alligator - Florida Everglades.  Also lots of turtles, snakes and very big birds.

Above:  There are lots of flags (very patriotic), though I guess at the moment there are plenty of Union Jacks around the UK!  (Bet the jubilee has been fun - have been trying to keep up to date on the BBC news site - looks like a good party).

Below:  Very tall waterfall in Yosemite National Park.

Rodeo Time!

An example of this amazing American-ness is this.  One day after a long drive through an area of swamps we reached the town of Bowie, Texas.  It was about 8pm, and seeing some big floodlights on in this small town, decided to investigate what might be happening.  It turned out to be a high school rodeo.  The students on the gate told us that relatively this was a pretty low level one, but it looked very impressive to me.  



The horse riders were just fearless doing speed courses, and there were some not big young people wrestling some fairly sizeable calves to the ground.  Everybody was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats, and supporting all the competitors as they rode, lassoo-ed and wrestled in a variety of events.  Much better than Britain's Got Talent. 

(I have some video of the bull-riding, so when I can work out how to get video from my iPod to here you can see that - any help with that much appreciated!)

Ruins - Peru

 



 


Other than crazy scenery and big mountains there's a lot of old stuff to look at in this part of the world.  Most cities and towns have very old Spanish Churches, but there are also older buildings/ruins that are from Inca times and before.

There are many websites that give much more and better information than I could about the Incas, so I will just stick to pictures a few things that I found interesting.

 


You may see that not only are some of the stones used huge, there is no mortar between them.  Pretty impressive to build in this way and it last so long. The picture on the left is a temple at Machu Picchu.

The Incas were smart in many ways, and all over the place there are waterways to irrigate the terraces for growing plants, and to move and save water.  Pretty advanced when you consider how much water is wasted in many places these days.

Some of the buildings used existing rocks, and are perched in seemingly impossible places. 

 


The most impressive of all the ruins was the world-famous city of Machu Picchu.  The location is incredible, perched on steep mountains in a remote area.  The ruins were only rediscovered 101 years ago by some locals and an American explorer (8DB might remember we had a quiz question about that on the 100 year anniversary).

I walked up Huayna Picchu, the mountain in the background. Very tiring, but I must have acclimatised a bit to the altitude because it didn't seem as bad as previous walks, despite being hundreds of very steep steps.

From one America to another...

Written in April 2012, not sure why it wasn't up on the blog earlier...
Tomorrow morning I'm flying from Lima, Peru to Miami, USA.
South America has been a great place to visit, though much more tiring than the rest of the trip so far.
Here's a few thoughts, good, bad and otherwise!


-I'm pleased to have learned enough Spanish to chat to people and get around, good one for the phrasebook and Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal.  It will be nice to speak English all the time again though!
- It will be amazing to drink fresh milk.  It just doesn't exist here.
- The altiplano scenery is amazing.
- My favourite South American food item is fried donut type things called Piccarones.  Awesome.
- It was fun working on the farm in Chile, living in a clay cabaña and eating really fresh food grown on the farm.
- In general the people have been friendly and nice, but it is very tiring travelling in countries where to be safe you have to be so careful of where you go and where your belongings are, especially for girls.
- The ruins were very impressive to see, especially Machu Picchu.
- It would be a tough place to cycle tour because of the altitude and lack of campsites.  Good job I left bike number 1 in New Zealand!

Extreme Sports (attention top gear fans)

Hola! I have no excuse for the lack of blogging other than that internet is a little patchy in Bolivia.  Also i have got pretty far behind as there's some New Zealand bits still missing.  I'm sure none of you are losing sleep over it though.

To try and catch up a bit, i thought i'd put a few activities together, some are more extreme than others!

New Zealand is well known for adventure sports and Queenstown is the adventure sports capital of the world.  You can jump off, swing over, bungee, jet boat, raft or dive anything you want to here.  Last time I was in NZ, when I did less pedalling and had a lot less grey hair i skydived, rafted a 7metre waterfall (that's higher than your house) and a whol host of other crzy stuff.  This time I have found that dicing with logging trucks on narrow roads every day is enough, well just about anyway... In Queenstown on a cycling 'rest day' i rented a dual suspension downhill bike to take to the bike park.  This is not like a bike park in Leicestershire. It is on a 900m high hill, you get a cable car up, and ride down on one of 5 different tracks, which are really steep and have obstacles and sharp bends.  This is probably the coolest sport I have ever done, though in my lycra and pink t shirt maybe did not style it out in the correct way! It was crazy how fast and steep the tracks were, even the 'easy' ones. After a few runs it was awesome though, and with only one fall and virtually no pedalling (clue is in the name - downhill) it was great fun.

A quick continent change, and a few long bus rides to the Atacama desert, the driest place on earth, and home to some very big sand dunes... Great for boarding down!
Not being a snowboarder, I did spend quite a lot of time falling over, it took a long time to de-sand afterwards!  
The real killer here was walking back up the slope to go down again.  The following day's cycling was also very tiring. 


Telling you than San Pedro de Atacama is about 2500m above sea level might explain this for some of you.
This is very high up (though nowhere near the highest place in this area), and, in simple terms there is less oxygen in the air the higher you go. When you exercise you need more oxygen than usual, and when there's less available you don't feel so good - get breathless very quickly for example.
The higher you go, the more noticeable the effects become.  Some people get acute mountain sickness, often called 'altitude sickness.' The best way to avoid this is to ascend slowly, and drink lots of water.  You might have heard of people aclimatising at altitude, or of athletes doing altitude training.  (If you are interested I can include more about this, please get in touch).
2500m is not really that high, so I just felt very unfit exercising.  Maybe I should include at this point that Ben Nevis, the highest UK mountain, is only 1344m and Greengate Lane (a little closer to home) is a piddling 90m above seal level.

On a trip across the Chile/Bolivia altiplano, I spent a night at 4200m, having been up to 4950m during the day.  I have to say I felt a little strange, a bit light-headed (or maybe that's just empty headed!) The following evening (at 3800m) a few of us tourists played football with some kids in the village we were staying in.  5 (adult) tourists vs 4 Bolivian kids.  We won... just.  I can honestly say I have never felt so untrained. Jogging a few steps made my heart hammer like a 100m sprint, and my lungs felt like they had never worked so hard.  Living at altitude all the time meant that the children had no such trouble, and they had a lot of skills - futsal is very popular here.

So why the Top Gear reference? Some of you might have seen the Top Gear Christmas specials, where they do a long distance challenge.  A few years ago, they went to Bolivia, and drove along a road that had been branded 'The World's Most Dangerous Road.'   The road is no longer heavily used by cars, as there is a new road, but in true kiwi-style, a New Zealander set up a mountain bike company doing trips down it.  What better way to spend a day out of La Paz than a very big downhill trip?! 
For those of you that haven't seen the TG show, the road is a little hazardous because:
- It's very narrow
- Has lots of gravel/rubble/mud/potholes
- On one side at all times is a very very steep drop, in places 800m, to the valley floor.
- Bolivian people are very nice, but they are crazy drivers.


To help things out, there was torrential rain for about the first 20km of riding too.  I'm not sure I have ever concentrated harder!  It was awesome fun though, so good fast bits, streams and waterfalls to ride through.  Fortunately everyone else finised safely too!


Pictures and video for this to follow...

some pictures...

There's some amazing and crazy stuff here in South America.  Here's a few highlights from the last few weeks...

 Some borders have more hi-tech equipment than others...

Lots of llama, alpacas and vicunas, though not many with such fine ear decorations as these!

Pink flamingoes, red lake, no photoshopping.

 

Salar de Uyuni - the world's biggest salt flat.  In some directions just pure white as far as you can see...

Made for some fun photos...

 

USA, USA!

Road trip time- apologies for lack of blogging, I have 3 ready to upload as soon as I can find a pc to do the photos on- I realise the pics are the interesting bit!
Driving across the States is brilliant because everything is just as American as you expect. More road trip news later, hope all's good in England!

El Futbol

Something I really wanted to do in South America was to go to a football match.  It always looks so crazy on TV.  I can confirm that this is so!  I'd looked online to see about matches, but Mendoza's A league team had an away game.  When walking through the park  in the afternoon though, I saw lots and lots of police officers around a stadium.  Chatting to them found that Mendoza also had a B league team - Independiente de Rivadavia (or something), who were that night playing Huracon, from Buenos Aires. 

Later that evening, after buying tickets from people sat in something like a blue letter box (for security) and undergoing a very strict search, we got into the stadium just as the game kicked off.



 ...Lots of police

 The Home Fans

    

The Away end

 (Buenos Aires is a LONG way away)

 

You can see from the pictures that it looks pretty crazy.  The end with all the flags only stopped singing and clapping for about 60 seconds in the whole match, and that was to try and hear the away fans.  There were loads of drummers, and lots of different songs, though not many i could translate! 

 In terms of standard, I'd back Leicester to beat either of these two  well done the foxes at Stamfprd Bridge too, I saw the two goals on TV earlier

About 70 minutes into the game, when it got dark, the fans were obviously a little unsettled at the lack of goals and this happened for about five minutes, stopping play (See video).


.

The game finished 0-0, not a classic, but a great evening out! Independiente pretty much did everything but score though, they had so much possession, hit the underside of the bar etc...  Shooting practice at training!

Don't cry for me...

...I'm in Argentina, and it's very nice so far! (The don't cry for me thing is from a famous musical btw).  I am in a town called Mendoza, in the Central West of Argentina.  The bus ride to get here over the Andes (BIG mountains) was amazing!  The road was really twisty to get up so high, and we went right past Aconcagua (pronounced A-con-cau-wa) which is the highest mountain in the world that is not in the Himalayas (where Everest is). I will apologise now for any typos in these few posts - the keyboard is Spanish layout and has all the letters rubbed off, so finding letters and punctuation is a little tricky!

 It looked like these riders got taken to the highest point on the road, near the Chile - Argentina border, and got to ride back down - what an amazing ride!

 


Spanish speaking is improving.  Now 2 and half weeks into my learning via Harry Potter I know the words for wizard and wand, but also today managed to ask lots of quite difficult questions at four different bus companies and understood at least half of the answers!  Looks like I am right on track to get to be OK just around the time I fly to Miami!  I think that's called Murphy's Law in polite company.
Here's some pics of Mendoza and bus ride - check out the Futbol blog too...

. 

Wilson's story

It is 'onces' time on the farm - elevenses. Time for a cup of tea and a snack, and to tell you a dog story...
On the farm there a few dogs, often others come and go. Several years ago, a dog arrived and was a bit of a trouble maker, chasing farm animals etc. The owner of the farm asked for him to be shot. (sounds harsh, but the naughty dog could have done a lot of damage and hurt other animals).
One of the staff shot him, but only in the shoulder, the dog was driven a few miles away from the farm and abandoned.
A few weeks later, however, the dog reappeared. Again, he was put in the truck and taken 6 or 7 miles away and left.
This time it took him 4 weeks, but sure enough he found his way back. Wanting to be rid of the nasty dig once and for all, this time the lady who owns the farm asked her husband to make sure the dog couldn't come back.
He drove the dog 12 miles away, and left him.
After 7 weeks the problem dog was all but forgotten. You can guess the end though- once again he found his way back to the farm. At this point the husband and wife decided that anyone who wanted to live there so much that they would keep coming back should be allowed to stay. Wilson still lives here, and since being back he has settled down completely, maybe he is grateful for the home!

Perros, paintings and la playa

There are dogs everywhere in Chile, and they are the rulers. Everybody loves them and looks after them, and the dogs pretty much do whatever they like. They are varyingly scraggy, and there are some great dog stories- see Wilson's story. In Valparaiso there was a lot of street dogs, some of which appeared in the town's street art. The town is built on a series of very steep hills, and has seen better days. In seafaring years gone by it was THE port city to stop at for supplies and partying. Sailors would stop before or after the long trip round the Cape of Good Hope- the very bottom of South Since the Panama Canal has been open Valparaiso has been in decline, though tourism in the town is helping.

Spent a few days at the beach to relax- it is quite hard work being in busy places where the language is different. Without a car (or bike!) you have to use Spanish to find out about and catch buses etc. Spanish learning is going ok, at the moment via Harry Potter- in Santiago I bought a (photo)copy of hp1 in Spanish. Definitely could not manage a grown ups book!
Adios...

Cute!

Working on a farm in Chile at the mo- proper update later but check out how cute these are! One hour old!