Buenos Airies

We travelled across the Chilean Lakes by boat and bussed through the Andes to San Carlos de Bariloche which was starting to materialise as the major ski resort in Argentina.  With a definite German/  Swiss influence in architecture, most buildings constructed from stone and wood. The atmosphere was 'lakeside alpine' generated by the early German settlers who migrated to this area and located the town in the western foothills of the Andes on the great lakes of Chile.

Our Plans changed in Bariloche, Lyn was still suffering from "Soroche" as we were still at an altitude of over 3000m and she was keen to get to city life and culture, which Buenos Aires offered. Thus my hopes and thoughts of tracing my grandparents and visiting my grandfathers grave, in Tierra del Fuego, which was still a thousand miles further south, with very rugged country still to be travelled, evaporated.,

The notion of leaving Lyn for awhile, to get there and back, a distance of over a  two thousand miles was not feasible, as we had deadlines to be in Rio in February for catching a berth on a tramp steamer to Africa and also to catch Carnival. Besides, leaving a good looking blonde female in Argentina, on her own, was a recipe for some unsolicited attention which was not desired. So we made for Buenos Aires where my father was born.

Friends who we stayed with on their island residence off the coast of Santos on our way to Rio De Janeiro.

Avenue Corrienties one of the main roads in Buenos Aires  CBD

Florida Street and elegant street, renowned for shopping and leather wares

Avenida 9 de Julia one of the widest roads in the world, with the Buenas Aires obelisk in the distance.

Buenos Aires is very European, the buildings as are the wide boulevards are re-mindful of Paris, the shopping was as expected good, with variety, especially leather goods. I bought a brown suede bomber jacket and Lyn shoes and coat. We stayed on Calle Florida, an elegant narrow street lined with boutiques and cafes similar to Melbourne's lane ways, in a boutique hotel owned by an Italian Family who became our guides showing us the Port area which was renowned for the Tango. 

Cafe Tortoni was one of the famous cafes not far from our hotel, which was nothing like any I had seen before and became our  favourite. In Buenos Aires they are called confiterias, which is what Cafe Tortoni was - confiterias are far more than a cafe or restaurant, they make their own ice cream, pastries, own on site bakery, and wine bar.

The appointments are all in the 'grand style' gilt framed bevelled mirrors on the walls interspersed with glass cases of memorabilia of the 'who's who'  who have  frequented the establishment over the years. Crystal chandeliers through out, a large room broken into several spaces with a beautiful timber an brass ornamented bar and grand piano for live entertainment, tango and live poetry readings.

Wanki Game Reserve & Victoria Falls

Wanki Game Reserve, Rhodesia.

After hitching rides across the Drakensberg, the highest mountain range in South Africa I received a lift with a bloke who was the vet at Wanki Game Reserve, where I stayed with him for three days. This allowed me to take the photos of the some of the game and Victoria Falls. From there we drove into Salisbury - the then capital of Rhodesia, which at that time was being governed by Ian Smith's Government.

Being broke it was necessary for me to find a job pronto and cheap accommodation so booked into the Salvation Army Old Men's Home, in Highlands, a suburb in Salisbury.Then took myself down to the Salisbury Sports Club where I had been told they had a rugby side.

The Salisbury Sports Club was very colonial in appearance, a long low slung building with wide veranda's overlooking hockey and football fields,that housed the clubrooms for cricket, hockey and rugby. I asked in one of the club rooms where the rugby club was and was directed to the end of of a long colonnaded walkway to the end rooms, and went inside where there were some blokes having a beer at a bar in a dark wood panelled room , who told me to turn up that afternoon as there was rugby training. 

A herd of male & female elephants with their young

A lone giraffe

Male & female Warthogs

Luck was on my side - as after training I was invited for a beer in the club rooms and  one of the blokes offered me a lift home. His name was Ian Davidson who was a Springbok hockey player and when he found out I was staying  at the Salvos, moved me that night into his parents house, who were away. I stayed there until I found a job which he was instrumental in me obtaining and  a game in the first fifteen after being outfitted with a total kit as I was training in bare feet.

The job was in a auto spare parts cum mechanical services business which was not my chosen career path, but beggars can not be choosy and there was money coming in which allowed me to move in with two blokes I met through rugby -  an  Englishman John Hardman and an Australian  guy called Graham Shields.

The mist in the distance is from Victoria Falls which rises to a height of 1000 feet, hence the name Mosi-oa-Tunya (Smoke that Thunders) 

Victoria Falls Bridge built to span the Zambezi River in 1905. One of the consulting engineers, Ralf Freeman who designed it also designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge

The Victoria Falls one mile wide and 350 feet high

At this time I received a letter from Lyn, who had been staying with my parents in Lane Cove, Sydney, that she was returning to San Francisco as she was missing her parents and though she had been welcomed into my home she had decided it was time to go back to San Francisco. Needless to say I was devastated, as this was a driving force in determining how long I was to stay.

I enjoyed Rhodesia more than South Africa, however neither country impressed me sufficiently to stay longer than achieving enough funds for my boat trip back to Australia, which was the cheapest way to return. So after a few more games of rugby, one playing against Northern Transvaal  where we were massacred. I hitched from Salisbury back to Cape Town and paid for a berth on the Fair Star back to Sydney. returning home after five years of travelling and working around the world.

I remember when hitching through the Ciskei outside Port Elizabeth I must have fainted whilst sitting on my suitcase waiting for a lift. I was woken up by a young guy my age who ended up driving me to Cape town to stay with his parents. His father was a doctor who was a specialist in infectious diseases  and  diagnosed me as having Bilharzia which is a micro worm that gets into the bloodstream from swimming in the rivers, any way he treated me with prescribed drugs which fixed me up so I could catch the boat home.

A wedding reception on the banks of the Zambezi River

I was sorry to leave Africa, I had not seen enough. I had always wanted to visit Kenya and Tanzania, one of my favourite books was "Something of Value" by Robert Ruark  which was about white hunters and the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.The time was not right especially the way I wanted to travel which was overland. I had been into Lusaka in Zambia, only for the day but it appeared unsafe and unhealthy - in fact scary. The aftermath of the war in the Congo was still on and attracting all the low life mercenaries, from South Africa, Rhodesia and the French Foreign Legion having being led by Mad Mike Hoare an Irish mecenary. Travelling overland through that country was something for another time.

South Africa

Lyn and I crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Rio to Cape Town on the Tjichalinga a passenger freighter that was bound for Yokohama, Japan. We had a cabin topside, which had another dozen or so cabins on the deck level. The bulk of the passengers were travelling in steerage, which was below decks and were not allowed on our deck.

We went down and visited often, there were about fifty young Brazilian/Japanese all going back to Japan for the first time, they were some of the best looking people I have ever seen both male and female, the women were very exotic with the mixture of Black,Oriental and Portuguese.

Arriving into Cape Town with Table Top Mountain in the background.

We caught a train to Durban and after a week in 

Durban, Lyn decided she could not take South Africa any longer as the rigours and strictures of apartheid with its separateness was an anathema to her especially coming from a liberal place as California and the "Summer of Love"'. She was disgusted with the police state attitude and we decided that having only sufficient funds, for one air fare, Lyn would fly home to Sydney and stay with my parents and wait for me to join her.

A mixed bunch of nationalities: from left to right - Aussie, Kiwi,Pom, Dutch, German our companions on the trip across the Atlantic.

Cape Town a mix of English, Dutch and contemporary architecture and our first experience with apartheid.

After Lyn left and went to stay with my parents in Sydney to wait for me to join her, I applied and started work with the the South African Railways as a rigger. My first days work was being transported out in the back of a truck with ten Zulus to Umhlunga Rocks about an hours drive north of Durban. We left about five am, two Afrikaans  were in the front cabin of the truck driving. It was obvious they did not like me or Australians, hence me being treated as a 'Kaffir' by being put int he back of the truck, probably due to sanctions imposed because of Apartheid. 

On the trip the Zulus decide it was time for their morning 'herb superb'. They administered the Ganga into the neck of a small coke bottle, the main part of the bottle was broken off, so their was just the stem of the neck, the ganga was stuffed into the broken underside of the the neck and lit and upturned, the mouth of the bottle used to smoke and to inhale. I watched this being passed around to everyone in the truck and the first round I was bi passed. As the  trip progressed they proceeded with another round of their morning 'smoke' and this time around I decided to partake which caused them great amusement and certainly put some spice into the trip to where we were going.

On arriving at the location, which was an isolated  railway embankment, near the coast. I was assigned four Zulus as my team, their task was to set up a twenty five feet extension ladder, with the top of the ladder resting on the  bottom  of the two electricity cables that ran above the railway line, the power had been cut off. My task was to climb up and straddle the line and with a wrench tighten the stainless steel seperator wire that joined the two electric cables. When that was completed the four Zulus picked up the ladder from the bottom, two on each side,and carried it at a vertical angle, with me twenty five feet above they slid  the ladder along the cables, till we reached the next seperator a distance of twenty yards.

This was managed with top of the ladder resting on the cables and my 

left leg crossed over the bottom cable and inside the ladder, keeping the ladder attached to the cable, the other leg on the ladder with the Zulus moving it from below. Hairy stuff to say the least and not for the faint hearted or for someone stoned on Durban Poison!!!

Two days of doing this and having to put up with the arrogance of Afrikaaner bosses who treated you as a Kaffir was enough and I snatched that job, picked up a measly fourty rand for two days work with the SA Railways and hitched hiked to Salisbury in Rhodesia.

Graham Shields, John Hardman & Meshak and the house we rented in Highlands, a suburb of Salisbury, Rhodesia, now Harare, Zimbabwe

A Xhosa Chief or Zulu or Amabhele, not sure which, with his wives in the Ciskei - one of the then tribal homelands.

Rio De Janeiro

We arrived in Rio in late January 1968 and stayed with a family for one month who a had a large apartment on Copacabana Beach. We found this through friends and it was the perfect arrangement, right on the beach, middle of summer and in time for Carnival, the biggest party in the world.

Carnival in Rio goes for one week and is a constant progression from one party to the next, there are certain functions that as a visitor your recommended to get tickets for :

 One being the main Samba Parade which is held on the Avenida Presidente Vargas, which is lined with temporary grandstands.The parade is monumental, the Samba Schools come from all the provinces and have from 3000 to 5000 people broken into sections and different themes and costumes and coordinated choreography, music, drum sections and songs.

 As each samba school approaches they have runners up front who distribute a song sheet, which gives the crowd time to ready themselves for the next lot, and as a prelude you hear the drums. The drums don't stop they throb through the city all the time.Then a float appears which is designed and themed to the same magnificence as the costumes and is a stage for their best male and female dancers and singers. Then the crowd in the stands join in, with the singing and dancing making it an integrated street party for  the crowd and dancers. The costumes are spectacular and extremely imaginative, all are original in design and can take from one year to the next to make.

Next are the parties, there is a main party for each night of Carnival, we were lucky to go to two of them. The opening night one is the 'Palace Ball' and held at the Tiradentes Palace which is in the CBD. We went to with the couple who we were staying with, the dress was all formal, I had to hire an out fit, Lyn  borrowed some outrageous outfit and looked gorgeous. 

The entrance to the palace was connected to an out door cat-walk, which everyone, in their finery,  walked along as if in a fashion parade.   Giving the onlookers, which there must have been a few thousand an opportunity to see the costumes the women were wearing to the Ball.

Inside was a magnificent mixture of French and Neo-Classical architecture, sculptures and eclecticism. The main salon would have accommodated fifteen hundred people, around the perimeter rising several levels were private balconies and boxes, filled to capacity with people throwing streamers across from one side to the other. The entertainment was by two orchestras at either end of the ballroom, when one stopped the other one started. People danced where they stood, on tables, in the balconies, the place went off and finished late the following morning with a breakfast buffet served,

Corcavada, The statue of Christ which dominates Rio from the mountains behind the City. The image below gives an indication of how high it is above the city and the view with Sugarloaf  Mountain in the mid ground.

One of the 'Favelas' which are shanty towns built on the hillsides along the main beaches : Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon, the image above is between Leblon and Ipanema. I went up into the pathways, not very far as they are not the safest places for gringos to go adventuring, they go up & up and the views are the best, looking up and down the coastline.

The two great beaches of Rio De Janeiro - above is Copacabana and below is Ipanema, the crowd below in Ipanema are following a samba group part of Carnival's celebrations.The mountains in the background are called - 'Dois Irmaos" the twin brothers.

The other party we were invited to was the Rio Yacht Club which is one one of the exclusives clubs in Rio de Janeiro. The location is like a movie set, privately tucked in a grove of coconut palm trees on the bay, with  views of Sugar Loaf and other  surrounding mountains. Presents an idyllic backdrop for one of the big parties of carnival for the movers & shakers of Latin America. They come from all over the world with their trophy wives and yachts to see and be seen.

The dress code at the yacht club was decidedly less formal then the Palace. The women all stunning, with plenty of jewellery and finery, revealing plenty of cleavage and slits showing a lot of leg, wearing beautiful designer  silk chiffon ensembles.The men, in cream tropical linen suits or reefer jackets others in Hawaiian style shirts worn outside white or pastels cotton linen trousers or tailored shorts.

This party is more intimate than the Palace Party, though there would still be five hundred, they all seemed to know each other , everyone dancing, entertainment and  music non stop,  with much ogling and flirtatiousness, becoming more and more promiscuous as the wee hours moved towards dawn, as is the way with Latins.

Chile & the Lakes

From Antofagasta we travelled by bus on the Chile Highway through harsh hot countryside which was desert type conditions the only breeze being generated was by having the windows down, as their was no airconditioning.The scenery was monotonous and the perpetual motion made you nod off to sleep, and then to be awoken to constant stops to pick up all sorts of people some with animals others lugging,what looked to be their sole possessions. We arrived in Santiago and immediately made for Vina Del Mar a beach side resort where we had friends who we stayed with and then were ferried to others who had an estancia (ranch) outside Concepcion

Vina Del Mar a beach side resort which is a suburb of Santiago

We stayed with a large family on their estancia which was one of the largest in Chile, called 'Las Sauces'.It was owned by nine brothers, eight of them all lawyers working in Concepcion, the youngest , Frido,who I became friends with managed the estancia which raised sheep ,cattle, wine, Alpacas and citrus fruit. They had large a stable of polo horses and used to visit the estancia most weekends with their families which brought the place alive.

Franco the youngest brother and his wife,  lived only in one section of one half of this huge fifteen bedroom hacienda, the dining room table was the shape of a horse shoe, made from some exotic timber and highly polished,  could seat thirty or more people and was used on the weekend when the brothers came for the weekend. The adults sat on the outside and the children sat in the inner section.

We stayed for a couple of weeks riding daily, sometimes to the local village which they owned, which was about five miles and you could ride as the crow flies as their were no fences.

The wine cellar was under half of one part of the house and had a collection of wines,brandies and cognacs equal to any international hotel and the largest collection of vintage 'Unduragga Wines'  which was Chile's premier vineyard.

A section of the Hacienda, it is double the size of this,  there were fifteen bedrooms and had been in the family since 1850, with a cellar full of international and Chilean wine that would do any international hotel proud.

Lyn horse riding, the estancia went as far as you could see to the mountains of the Andes, the village in the distance was owned by the owners who employed most of the people working on the estancia.There were few fences so you were able to ride for as long as you like with no fences or gates to impede the ride.

The Chilean lakes, Lyn at Puerto Montt  fishing and with her catch of the day.

Chile of all the Latin countries visited so far, felt the safest, especially after La Paz and experiencing martial law. We had heard the the president Eduardo Frei was very dictatorial but not much else as far as negatives so we decide to hitch hike to Puerto Montt which was in the lakes area and then to Osorno where we caught a series of boats across the lakes to San Carlos De Bariloche in Argentina

We met up with some peace corps guys from the USA who were working with some Araucanian Indians teaching then swine husbandry up in the Andes foothills near where were staying in Puerto Montt. These Indians were never defeated by the Spanish Conquistadors as were the Incas, and have remained remarkably independent.

We were given a lift by an old German man who insisted on us staying at his estancia for a couple of days, the area of Southern Chile has a large German population, this old guy was a widower and a bit lonely for company and was so hospitable.

Lake Titicaca, La Paz & Che Guevara

We left Machi Pichu and returned to Cuzco from where we caught a bus to Puno on the shores of Lake Titicaca, where we stayed over night and then embarked on a boat trip across the lake to La Paz in Bolivia, which did not look to swish. Bleak, barren and windy, built in a wide hollow valley it seemed devoid of vegetation.As such it did not appeal and we intended to move on the following day which was  October 10 1967.

This was the outer rim of La Paz in 1967, foreboding, however got better as you entered the city lower down, where the central area of the city is tree lined and the  Spanish Colonial  Architecture of the public buildings create plazas and boulevards .

That night we booked into a hotel  and after we had eaten and gone to bed, we were woken up to gun fire and explosions that sounded close by, which re-occurred through the night and the constant blaring of  sirens, so little sleep was had. The following day we were informed that Che Guevara had been executed and there was considerable unrest throughout Bolivia with the indigenous people, who were coming in from everywhere in the truckloads throughout the city and martial law was declared, which meant no one could move around after sun down or they would be shot!!

We moved into a safe house supplied by the American Embassy as Lyn was American and I had a diplomatic visa for Bolivia which I had secured whilst working in San Francisco.

The Bolivian Army executed Che in a small indigenous town several hundred miles south west of La Paz called La Higuera. He was either cremated or buried no one seemed to know, they had his hands amputated and preserved in formaldehyde and latter taken to Buenos Aires for official identification.

Che Guevara in his baggy greens. I was aware  of him from when I lived in the Bahamas as there were legendary  stories of what Havana was like before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, when he and Fidel Castro ousted Batista the president. The Batista's ran Cuba and with the the American Mafia they also controlled the gambling, drugs and prostitution in Havana.

After four days, martial law was lifted and all seemed to return to normal and we caught a train to Antofagasta in Northern Chile for the long haul through the Antofagasta Desert, the most barren desert on earth.

There were interesting narrow lanes and streets that branched off from the central area and the buildings had a similarity with covered  arched walkways, colonnades  and porticoes. 

As the elevation was sometimes around 12,000 feet even though summer it would be extremely cold so I bought a "Ruana" in the markets of La Paz, it was made from Vicuna which are a smaller Alpaca, the wool was a lot finer than Alpaca,  a cross between silk and cashmere, hence very light and yet very warm.

More of Machi Pichu

Machi Pichu fulfilled all my boyhood dreams of adventure and exploration, as a boy my father told me tales of living in Patagonia, and he encouraged me to read as I got older books by : Rider Haggard's "King Solomon's Mines" and the Australian, Peter Pinney's - "Dust On My Shoes."

These tales told to me, and stories read by me, influenced me to leave home at an early age after completing school, to experience the other worlds out there. Now having worked in different countries, and travelled extensively for the past four years, I was ready to get off the beaten trail. Machi Piichu satiated this desire for a different experience, away from the maddening crowd, living in these ruins  and exploring around where few had been, was, a dream come true for a young Australian travelling the world.

Further  images of the "Lost City of the Incas" known as Machu Pichi

This was one of the perimeter buildings, on the other side was a sheer vertical drop to the river thousands of feet below. The lay out is re mindful of fortifications as all the planning has been designed to face inwards. The exterior is fortress like with walls being interfaced with vertical cliff face making it impossible to detect or able to scale.

Most of the ruins had been excavated  and rebuilt by locals and supervised by archaeologists, which provided an indication of the lay out of the temples and houses for the village, the interlinking pathways and staircases were all made from stone which had been cut and measured for size. All the walls were- 'dry stone walls' with no mortar, only weight and precision cutting and exactitude kept them from eroding which is staggering considering the rainfalls storms and winds this part of the Andes would experience.

There were small herds of Llamas wandering around the ruins, not sure whether they were wild or domesticated.

This is the English couple we stayed with in this hut  for four days while exploring and climbing the surrounding peaks and mountains.This would be impossible to do in today times, because as a tourist attraction Machi Pichu rates as one of the biggest tourist attractions in South America. All people movement around the ruins would now be strictly monitored by guided tours and limitations on where people can and canot go. Going off and exploring and climbing would be severely limited if not impossible to do on your own.

The stonework in this place is monumental.