HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY:Waking up alive
BUMMER OF THE DAY: Waking up alive
BUYS OF THE DAY:My piece of meat (steak) and chips for lunch
WORD OF THE DAY:Happy New Year
HAPPY NEW YEAR. We woke at 9am, and I am feeling okay. Not great, but alive and functional. I am going to have to blame the vodka jellies. I don’t think it could have anything to do with the 2L of vodka that Kate, Paul and I shared all night, it had to be the jellies. Heck, I’ll just blame Malar. I will be sad to see her leave next week, who else can we blame once she leaves? Maybe we could still use her as out scape goat!
After the water got turned on and a shower and my favorite cereal, Bolita’s, which are like Coco Pops on drugs, I was knackered and maybe I hadn’t pulled up so well after all. The truck was the only place to be able to get out of the heat and the sun; it doesn’t take the ice box of a tent at night to turn into a sauna of a tent as soon as the sun comes up. Seriously I rekon you could fry an egg on the top of the tent in the middle of the day. So I say with my flight printouts from yesterday and I am now fine tuning my flights for –THIS YEAR. Yes people welcome to 2012. So my plans are 95% locked in with Beth holding another round the world ticket, I now have flights booked and my new itinerary looks a little like this:
30 April - My epic South America tour finishes
01-06 May – Easter Island - Chile
07-14 May – Kansas City - USA
14-26 May – Ottawa – Canada
26 May-02 June – Chicago – USA
02-06 June – Minneapolis – USA
06-13 June – Las Vegas – USA
13-20 June – Los Angeles – USA
20-25 June – Christchurch – New Zealand
25 June – 04 July – Hamilton – New Zealand
04 July-08 August – HOME TO BRISBANE
08-22 August – London – UK
22-29 August – Rome – Italy
29 August – Addis Ababa – Ethiopia
Phew how does that look? To me it looks AMAZING. And again I can’t tell you how it feels to have a plan in place. Beth and I are just twiggy the final itinerary but the one thing that will NOT change will be my arrival home in time for my god-daughter’s birthday. It was great to be able to tell Shelly that I would be home for Zoe’s birthday this year. Unfortunately Tess’s is in April and there were a few tears that I wouldn’t be home for hers, so Shelly has told a mothers’ white lie (nothing wrong with that) and told them both it will depend on the planes and that seemed to have settled that issue for now. Knowing how the Elkins celebrate birthdays and parties, it will also be a great way for me to catch up with everybody at the one time; I’m secretly going to call it my ‘Catch up with Bernie’ party to kill 2 birds with the one party. I would call it a welcome home party, but sadly I won’t be staying as I head back to Europe and then to Africa. More news to report on that soon but yes it looks like I may be settling my new life back in Ethiopia. Anyone know Amharic? I will tell all soon, but that is all I can let out of the bag for now.
While back home, I have a lot of people I want to catch up with and I also have a long overdue visit I need to make to Darwin to visit mums grave and say hello to my brothers and my new nephew Noah. Not to mention spending time with my god-daughters, my best friend, my boss, saying hi to old and new work colleagues, my Contiki Family, my Africa Family, my South America Family it is going to be an intense 5 weeks, but trust me I will be making the most of my time back home. I will probably also need to finalize my divorce, that Drew has been asking for the last 5 months and get visa’s etc……
So I am excited for 2012 and this is the first day of what will be a busy and rewarding year. A shame I wasn’t feeling a little better (alcohol induced sickness doesn’t get any sympathy) but what a great way to while away a morning. Working out your own travel arrangements to meet up again with friends. It felt quite rewarding, but it was time to get some serious food into the stomach, you know some typical hangover food material, but alas we are in the middle of the desert, so I will just go with what we can find open and available. After talking to Mark and Gray some of the cafes and restaurants were just starting to open their doors, so Kate and I made our way back to the slowest restaurant in town, where we were yesterday to find Paul and Lizzie already seated, so we pulled up a few chairs to be joined by Mick and we had a 2 hour lunch as we waited to be served, to give our order and to eat. Lucky we weren’t in a hurry and again the free Wi-Fi probably saved the sanity of the waiters as we didn’t complain about the snail service. The steak with onion and a mountain of dirty arse deep fried fries hit the hung over tummy, but enough was enough as the bill took another 20 minutes and it was time for an afternoon kip. Well we took our books to the picnic table to read, and I just couldn’t concentrate, so I tried lying in the bench for a while which wasn’t that comfortable, so I found a dusty box to lie on next to the table to get out of the sun, which lasted 10 minutes, which I then gave up and said to Kate, how hot can the tent be at 4pm? So we headed for the sauna we call our tent, and I have to say I rekon I lost 10kg just entering the bloody thing. It was HOT. But we were desperate to lie down, so we moved the pillows to the door, opened the fly and tried for the best. The door was facing the wrong way to get much breeze and as I was about to fall into a sweaty sleep, Gray came knocking with a small tub of ice-cream and 2 spoons. Ahhhhhh – life saver! AND Kate didn’t want any so I ate the whole thing myself and it cooled me down so much. Gray then started the truck to which I scrambled out of the said sauna and made a run for the truck. I had gadgets to charge and I wanted to get there before everyone else, which I managed and had my laptop and iPod charging in no time.
I decided to use this time to get all my ‘stuff’ sorted on the truck. I am lucky that Mick, who sits in front of me, doesn’t use his overhead space at all, so I technically have my crap spread over 2 chairs that on a full tour will seat 4 people, which the tour will nearly have maximum capacity from Rio in 45 days. I am going to have to get a different system happening before then, but I have plenty of time to work on that. For now I need some form of semblance as my stuff has started to stray into Seamus side to his disgust, so no time like the hung over present to get a start. The main problem is my stuff slips and slides with the road conditions (and Gray’s driving) so I have decided to fix this by emptying one of the book crates and using that to at least keep all my stuff together up top. Yeah great idea. It hasn’t really solved the storage issue as I am still over 2 seats, but it solves the sliding issue. I had souvenirs, toilet paper, soap, 3 pairs of shoes, a small backpack, a handbag and food and water all sliding around up there, so I have achieved something! I’ll work out the storage thing another day.
That took me up to 6pm and we were going to be heading out of camp around 6.30pm to go and watch the sunset on the first day of 2012 at a place called Valle de la Luna aka Valley of the Moon. Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) is located 13 kilometres (8 mi) west of San Pedro de Atacama, Chile in the Cordillera de la Sal, in the Atacama desert of Chile. It has various stone and sand formations which have been carved by wind and water. It has an impressive range of color and texture, looking somewhat similar to the surface of the moon. There are also dry lakes where the composition of salt makes a white covering layer of the area. It presents diverse saline outcrops which appear like man-made sculptures. There are also a great variety of caverns. Valle de la Luna is a part of the Reserva Nacional los Flamencos and was declared a Nature Sanctuary in 1982 for its great natural beauty and strange lunar landscape, from which its name is derived. The valley is also considered one of the driest places on earth, as some areas have not received a single drop of rain in hundreds of years. A prototype for a Mars rover was tested there by scientists because of the valley's dry and forbidding terrains.
As we were going to be there for sunset, which in this part of the world is round 8.30-8.45pm, we had dinner before pushing off which was a great move as by the time we got back after 9.30pm I was so tired I tried to read in the tent for like 3 minutes before giving up the ghost and turning off the torch and getting some much needed beauty sleep.
So that was the first day of 2012. We head out of Sleepy Hollow tomorrow as we slowly make our way to the big smoke of Santiago over the next 3 days and the end of this section of the tour.
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