The highlight of my summer was definitely our incredible two week canoe trip down the Teslin and Yukon Rivers.  Unlike last year’s trip, this time Chelsea and I had some company – both our dads (Doug and Jim) came along for the ride, and Chelsea’s brother Shawn & his friend Sarah joined us for the second half.  As much as we enjoy each other’s company, it was a nice change to have some other people around to mix things up (and allow more options for the evening card games!).  One of the best parts for me was being able to share such an awesome trip with my dad, who’s the main reason I’m into all this outdoorsy nature stuff to begin with.  Thanks everyone for helping pack the trip with so many unforgettable moments!  =)

Since it’s taken me such a long time to put together this post (I’ve been busy, get off my back!), I’ll skip the nitty gritty details and stick to some of the more memorable moments.  If you’re interested in the practical details on the trip, I stuck those at the end.  So, with no further doo-doo, I present to you "Stories from the River".  Enjoy!
~ Mandrew

Who needs bear spray when you’ve got Mandrew Musk™?
One morning before we’d all gotten up, Doug was lying awake in his tent when he heard something moving around beside him.  He peeked out and saw a black bear sniffing about.  Not wanting to alarm anyone (or the bear) he quietly watched as it made its way around our camp and over to our tent.  Just as it reached us I happened to rip out a nice loud fart, startling the bear and causing it to flee for its life.  Yup, I've got skills.

After our time in San Gil we were ready to head north to the Caribbean and spend some time lounging on a beach, but not before earning it.  We arrived in Santa Marta early in the morning and settled into a hostel near the main market area.  At first glance the city was pretty terrible: smelled of urine and rotting garbage mixed with thick black car exhaust, noisy vehicles, sketchy people, etc.  I had no interest in walking around so after inquiring into “La Ciudad Perdida” (the Lost City) five-day trek through the jungle, I decided to relax and read a book for the rest of the day.  

Andrew went to the bank machine and for a little walk around our area.  I had expected him to take longer but after 10 or 15 minutes he barged into the room panicking, with something tucked away in his shirt.  At first I thought it was a mouse or a small rat, Andrew just mumbled that he had found it screaming on a sidewalk and could barely explain that no one seemed to care and someone made fun of him for picking it up!  It was a TINY kitten.  Couldn’t have been more than 4 or 5 days old, with eyes still closed and one of them swollen to half the size of its head.  Its hair was thick with dirt and smelled like human urine!  Our hearts broke and we didn’t know what to do.  Feeling like this kitten urgently needed some food, we left the hostel in search of a veterinarian.  It took us far too long to find one but we eventually did after wandering through nasty smelly sweaty streets and market stands.  We bought a container of kitten milk powder that you just add water to and a syringe we could use to try and feed him.  We hurried back to the hostel and sterilized the syringe.  Using a damp towel I cleaned the kitten as best I could while Andrew mixed some milk.  It took some time to convince the kitten to eat from the syringe, but with patience we got the job done.  

The bus to San Gil was pretty terrible; seats were uncomfortable and didn’t lean back very far, it was a bit too cold (air conditioning!!), the seat belts didn’t work and the road was insane.  For eight hours, overnight.  I looked out the window at one point a few hours in and found myself looking down a steep mountainside and endless switch back roads going down.  We were just getting tossed around all night, but I did manage to get a little sleep somehow.  We got into San Gill pretty early and found a place to stay at Hostel El Dorado after turning down the first two.  Favio, the twenty-something owner, told us about what there is to do in the area (anything you can think of, pretty much) and got us settled in.  

The second Colombia game (against the Ivory Coast) was on that day so we went out to a store down the street near the main square to buy some Colombia jerseys, and joined the hundred and something other people from the area to watch the game on the big screen in the main square.  It was very fun, and loud!  

This next post from Mandrew's parents talks about the incredible experience they had on their 12 day Mediterranean cruise.  Neither of us have been on a cruise before, but HOLY CRAP it sounds like they had an awesome time!  The idea of packing all that action into such a short time blows our minds... we're pretty sure Mama Bean (Donna) somehow extracts her endurance from red wine.  =)  Enjoy!

I'd like to present our latest video, a photo-based guide sharing some advice on how to best appreciate nature.  I had a lot of fun putting this one together, looking over our vast and ever-growing collection of photos from our adventures in the wild.  Hope you all enjoy!  - Mandrew

After our amazing (and cold) Patagonia adventure we were ready to head north to warmer weather.  Mendoza was our next stop and where we would drink so much wine. So so much.

We arrived after two days of buses; Puerto Montt to Santiago which was overnight and expectedly boring, and then Santiago to Mendoza the next morning, which was an incredible drive up and over the steep Andes Mountains, passing by the famous Aconcaga Volcano National Park and through several tunnel sections of the mountain.  

WOW - about sums it up!  We just spent two weeks in Northern Patagonia (the Arctic of South America) with a rental truck.  It is a weird time of year to do it since it is fall now and too cold for most tourists (but not us Canadianses) but it was great because we had the whole place to ourselves!  

Ideally maybe it would have been nicer to camp with either warmer weather, or proper cold weather camping gear.  We did camp a few nights but were really freezing cold (there was ice involved) so whenever possible we stayed in hostels (which were so expensive, like US$30/night compared to the rest of SA, avg US$10).  The coldniss and rainyniss also made hiking slightly less enjoyable, though for the most part we had pretty good weather, considering.

We started our two week truck rental in Puerto Montt (see travel map, southern Chile) and decided to also return it there since it would cost an extra US$500 to drop it off in another town, jeeeesh.  We got the extra insurance to be able to cross the border into Argentina (about $100 extra) and then headed out!  Our itinerary was a bit screwed up since we didn't have much success researching the best routes to take etc.  So if you are reading this as a travel guide for yourself I have a number of recommendations at the bottom of this so you don't waste time like we did!

Have you ever really looked at a map of Chile? Really looked at it? The country is long and skinny, bounded by the Pacific Ocean on the west and the Andes mountains (the world’s longest mountain range) on the east with not too much between them. It stretches 4600 km north to south from the driest place in the world to the most southern city in the world, and is only 150 km wide on average (about twice the length of the Panama canal).  This crazy geometry makes it impossible to look at a map of Chile on a single page, a bit frustrating when trying to plan our travels using our Lonely Planet.

We entered Chile from Bolivia after our salt flats tour and found ourselves in the tourisy town of San Pedro de Atacama, the driest place in the world (it rained for the first time in 5 years just last week).  Immediately we noticed a difference in the culture - the streets were clean, people were very friendly and happy looking, things were much more expensive, there were plenty of good food options available, drivers stopped at red lights and stop signs, and as tourists we didn't stand out quite as much as we did in Bolivia where streets were littered with garbage, people were friendly enough but also maybe, understandably, a little resentful toward travellers, everything was overly affordable, food lacked flavor of any kind and consisted mainly of stale bread and eggs, and driving or walking on any road was a significant risk to your life. Don’t get me wrong; I loved Bolivia for many reasons, but it was not a place that I would recommend travelling to with young children or if you have any kind of personal standards for cleanliness or health.

After checking out San Pedro for an afternoon we decided to spend the next day exploring the famous national park Valle de la Luna.  Although there were many tours offered in town, since it was so close by we decided to rent bicycles and check it out at our own pace.  We grabbed some groceries for a picnic lunch and rode out of town and into an incredibly unique landscape that’s perfectly described by its name “Valley of the Moon”.  We stopped at a number of recommended locations along the park road and did a few short hikes.  I found the area to be very geologically interesting!  Layers of weathered gypsum and caves formed by water and wind erosion.  The surrounding hills looked like they had been painted: sandstones and siltstones, reds and yellows, boulders and sand dunes.  The air was so dry that both of us had bleeding noses by the end of the day (that as of a month later still haven’t fully healed) but it was worth it to explore the alien landscape.  Our legs were very sore the next day but we got some rest on the bus while we made our way south.

Turns out, you can even be chili on the moon,
~Chelsea

To open the above photo slideshow in another window, click here.

After spending over a month in the jungle in Villa Tunari, we decided we were in need of a few days of civilization.  A couple bumpy bus rides later we found ourselves in Sucre, a beautiful, clean and relatively quiet city (such a nice change after nasty La Paz) with a bunch of history we weren’t really interested in.  Our main achievements in Sucre were eating some good food (so nice to have options again!), loitering at a number of cafés to catch up on our blogging, and finding a laundromat with hot water so we could sterilize our mold encrusted jungle clothes.  Sucre treated us nicely, but just the same we were soon ready to get back on the road and make our way down to Uyuni to check out the much-anticipated salt flats.

By far the most visited tourist attraction in Bolivia, the salar de Uyuni is salty, flat and incredibly huge, covering over ten thousand square kilometers.  We caught an overnight bus to Uyuni and sought out a tour – booking ahead is for chumps.  There are a ridiculous number of companies that offer identical tour packages for the salt flats, making it a complete crapshoot when deciding which to go with.  After speaking with a few different agents and hearing the exact same description but with wildly varying prices, we decided to go with the second-cheapest and most racially-appealing option, World White Tours.  The next morning we met our driver Pepe (who we were ensured was not a drunk) and the rest of our group, consisting of Luiz and Renata from Brazil, Casey from the U S of A and Gabriella from Israel (and a bunch of other places) and headed out of town. 

Our first stop just outside of town was the "train graveyard" where a bunch of old trains have been left to rot.  I’m not sure why they’ve been left there, but it’s a cool place to take some pictures with rusty, graffiti-covered trains.  Somewhere in the mix was the very first locomotive in Bolivia… kinda cool, I guess.  The real highlight of the first day was, of course, the giant frickin’ salt flat.  It’s really, really big!  Once we’d driven far enough onto it, it was pretty unreal – nothing but flat, white, salty crust almost as far as you could see.  If you’re lucky enough to visit during the wetter season the salar becomes a massive mirror, causing the sky to blend in with the ground making for an incredibly confusing horizon.  It was in a dry mood for us, with the exposed salty crust forming hexagonal crystals into the distance.  There was the odd spot where the crust had broken and the salty brine was visible underneath.  To me it felt a lot like driving on a huge, frozen Lake Superior – the chilly air was about right, too!  We stopped for lunch at Incahuasi Island, a lump of land covered in thousands of fuzzy cacti, where we made an attempt at some funky perspective photos (all the cool kids were doing it).  Finally, after a long day of salty driving, we left the salt flats and pulled up to our cozy little salt hotel (yes, a hotel made of salt) where we were treated to a salty dinner and then rested our salty heads.

Shamans, medicinal plants, earthquakes, ancient cities, mysterious symbols; Peru really is the most diverse and magical country we have been to so far!  Since this is our first visit to Peru (though likely not our last) we decided to go a bit more mainstream than usual and visit the recommended sites along the well-known "Gringo Trail", taking us through all of the major attractions of the country, starting with Lima.

To start out on our route we headed via airplane from Iquitos to Lima, in order to save a week or more of time (the other option was another multi-day cargo boat from Iquitos since it has no road access, followed by a 24+ hour bus ride).  We didn't spend much time in Lima before departing to Pisco to visit the Ballestas Islands and Paracas National Reserve, and to unexpectedly experience a 5.7 magnitude earthquake while face-timing with Donna and Jim, Andrew's parents.  The next stop on the Gringo Trail was Nazca where we saw for ourselves the infamous Nazca Lines and learned a lot about the ancient cultures that inhabited the area between 100bc and 800ad, and then spent the next few days barfing due to the horrific flight over the lines and/or some bad food or water, who knows what.  After Nazca was Arequipa, the second most populous city in Peru and the hub to get to the beautiful Colca Canyon (but we decided not to go there since it was a bit far and really expensive). Finally, we arrived in Cusco, our base for some intense Shamanism and of course, to visit Machu Picchu.  Next and last on the list (heading out this afternoon via bus) will be the town of Puno where we can visit Lake Titicaca before crossing the border into Bolivia.  We can really see why so many people travel this route: the diverse beauty and culture have taken our breath away almost every day since we have arrived.

Following our insane Rio Napo trip we spent a couple of days exploring the incredibly loud Amazonian city of Iquitos.  There were hardly any cars or trucks in the city, but thousands of moto-taxis (converted motorbikes with carriages on the back), thus the very noisy streets.  We have come to realize, however, that almost everywhere in South and Central America so far the people seem to need noise at all hours of the day.  You can't help but wonder if they purposfully design the bikes to be extra loud!

On one day while our muuuuuuch needed laundry was being done we wandered around the Belen Market, where one may find almost any kind of medicinal plant (or animal for that matter) you can think of.  Of course, as is always wise while wandering in local markets, we only took out our camera a few times and made sure that not many people saw us with it, and we left anything else of any value back at the hostel.