In roughly an hour I board an overnight bus to Arica, the northern most city in Chile which is on the coast!! Really hoping for some hot weather. There are beaches there so hopefully it is hot enuf for some beaching. Have just been wandering about mindlessly in San Pedro for the past 3 days. San Pedro is a very small desert town with lotsa cafes and hostals as it is a popular tourist spot for both foreigners and Chileans. Went on two tours, which I both enjoyed! I did the sunset watching in the Moon Valley national park just 12 km from San Pedro, the landscape was gorgeous and exotic, felt like being in the movie Star Trek. The pinnacles of the nearby mountain resemble tips of lemon meringues in the color orange, so really quite cool!

The second tour was a more scientific tour, basically a three hour astronomy class outdoors where we learned to read constellations in the sky (not necessarily zodiacal but I did see the sigs of Scorpio, Sagitarrius, Libra and Capricorn and the planet Jupiter). I learned to read the southern axis so that I can tell about where in the world I am by looking at the sky. Unfortunately this only applies when I´m in the Southern Hemisphere so have to relearn when I return to HK. First I need to buy myself a red flashlight if I wanna do this again, which will allow me to point at the nightsky! I also learned that astronomists nowadays actually use advanced digital cameras to view stars (instead of telescopes) because you can basically record stars from the night sky that no naked eye or telescope can see with a digital camera set on a very long exposure time (like two weeks!) and you´ll be able to see galaxies from 5 billion light years away or something, really incredible!! Another really interesting finding is that apparently all astronomists in the world concur that there have to be lifeforms outside of Earth (apparently some planet was discovered in 1995..) and this is inferred from a very basic rationale which says that if our Sun is a star, then all the stars in the sky must also be somehow serving as the suns of other solar systems, whether like ours or not! So this is all really interesting for me!

Alright, enough for now. Need to run to get some water and snacks before I board my bus. Bye bye.

Hola from Chile! I´m really exhausted at the moment, didn´t actually mean to update my blog, but since I´m waiting for my new friend I met in my tour making me and him CDs from our pix, I thought I´d write. My friend will leave in two hours to Peru, just as everyone I´ve been meeting here so far, hi, then bye the next day! Don´t mean to sound cynical, but it´s actually really fun!! Some of which I´m so sure I´ll c again in the future, the world is small, u never know =)

So, just as everything from my three-day Salar tour from Bolivia to Chile is fresh in my mind, I´ll color it for you with the best of my abilities. I can´t really think of any other word to describe the trip than Magic!! I know this sounds cheesy, but yah, that was how I felt during the tour. Well to take a lil´ detour first, magic was preceded by darkness. I landed in Uyuni, a freezing desert town with no real settlement other than that concocted for tourism, at 8am on Saturday. The bus ride was really bumpy, nonetheless it was still a nice bus with heat, warm meals and even a TV. On the same day of my arrival, I came down with a stomach flu and basically had diarrhea for 24 hours (not continuously of coz but u know what i mean) and some fever. Struggled hard to get rid of it with all kinds of methods, spiritual, emotional, physical/metaphysical, u name it. I was signed up originally for the Salar tour on the next day, which I smartly postponed to the day after, and thanks to myself and the universe, my body was back up functionally at 90% efficiency by the time of the following morning. So that was a short but dark episode. Well, Uyuni was really cold, even in the hotel, not fun to be sick there.

So, the tour started around noon on Monday. Out of tens of agencies, I picked Tunupa Tours, which felt right. We had six people on our tours, which I´ll briefly introduce: Josef and wife (sorry forgot her name) from Spain, who are experienced mountaineers and South America travelers who basically served as our guide on this tour because we didn´t have one in practice (the driver just drove and that was it), Lena from Denmark who´s been traveling in Argentina since January and has changed her flight home twice already, Kristofer from Sweden, an engineer who just finished his six-month work in Santa Cruz (Bolivia) and is traveling in Bolivia, and Dylan, Amderstam boy doing three week in Peru and Bolivia who´s copying my pictures right now cuz´ apparently my camera takes better pictures than his. Ok, the first stop was the much anticipated Salar de Uyuni, which is basically the largest salt flat in the world and pretty much what drew me to the trip in the first place. Much to my disppointment, this was probably the least interesting of the tour. The salt flat was nothing but miles of flat white land with lil´ mounts of white cones that are often not even white because so many jeeps pass by them everyday. (I may not even show u my pix here cuz´ they are sooo bad). Second stop was the Isla de Pescadores, kinda interesting, a lil´ island of chunky cactuses in the middle of these white salt flats. We had lunch there in front of the island, and what was funny was that the entrance ticket of this Isla shows NOT the island itself, but the jeeps that line up in front of the Isla having lunch. The first day was relatively short and we landed in our first overnight stay in San Juan. The room was bare and we slept in our sleeping bags. Dinner was yummy tho, had BBQ chicken and fries. No showers of coz.

I can´t remember exactly all the different sights we saw on the second day, but everything we saw were just gorgeous, from funky mountains in a distance to desolate red lakes with flamingos to huge rocks on deserts etc... they were all so just beautiful. I wish I could describe them better in words but as I try to recall those images, I can´t seem to anymore, it´s like it was an experience and that was it. The third day is even more amazing, cuz´ the landscape really turned more and more unearthly when we approached Chile. Basically you would feel like you´re on Mars. Incredibly high altitudes, I think we almost hit 5,000 m at some points, crazy windchills, and just vasts and vasts of brown land with these exotic alien looking mountains that have lime green and pink colors in them, oh! and we saw Dali rocks (you know those rocks that Dali the painter painted). The geysers (volcanic springs?) that I saw this morning (3rd day) was totally my favourite. Hopefully my pictures will capture at least some of how it really appeared to me, so will share those shortly. Forgot to talk about my second night stay tho, gruelling cold I hated that part. The shack we stayed in used tin or aluminum as the roof in the hang-out eating area which basically conducts heat AWAY from anything, so me and some of the tour friends decided to dance (without music) after dinner to keep ourselves warm. The night sleep was ok, managed to catch a few hours as we had to wake up at 5am in order for the group to finish seeing all the sights and drop Dylan and I to take another bus to cross over to Chile. So I´m exhausted. San Pedro de Atacama seems really boring to me now, but I´ll rest here probably until the day after tomorrow before I take an overnight bus to Arica, the northern most city in Chile, where I can cross over to Peru. I hope to do some trekking near Arica (there´s a really nice national park there) after some good rest.

Tomorrow I´ll chill and maybe take a short half-day tour to see sunset on some valley nearby. Will write again very very soon. Yes, and the pictures.. let´s see how I can effectively share them. Ciao.

Just a short one today. Am leaving for the Salar via 10-hour bus tonight at 9pm, which will arrive at 7am tomorrow morning. Hope to sign up for a tour right away so I can start the four-day jeep journey across the salt flats and various lakes. I plan to end the tour in San Pedro Atacama of Chile, which is couple hours from the Bolivian border. San Pedro is a desert-town which is supposed to be really nice. After which I will slowly work my way up through Northern Chile back to Peru.

Had big fat meals today: scrambled eggs with ham and toast and orange juice at breakfast, then a tempura udon and green tea ice-cream for lunch, followed by a strawberry milkshake which was really yummy, but kinda knocked me over cuz´ too much dairy products can make one really tired in this altitude. Am just hoping that the slightest layer of additional fat can keep me warmer on my trip in the Salar! =) Also went to exchange my book, Coehlo´s ¨The Devil and Miss Prym¨ for one of Nora Roberts´ romance novel. (There are no bookstores here, only places where you can exchange books.) Will see how that goes... Did some last minute shopping plus a snack spree. Going to grab dinner before I leave now. I know, I´m all about food.. hehe. Probably won´t write until I´m in Chile! Hasta luego mis amigos!

Hi I´m alive! I survived biking on the Death Road to Coroico! It was really cool really fun, highly recommend it if you happen to be in La Paz! Ok, I have to share all the details. First we started in this place called Las Cumbres at 4750m, beautiful landscape, put on gears, learned to use my bike (mainly the brakes) and had a lil´sip of this very sweet local alcohol as a blessing to Pachamama (what they call Mother Earth here). My group had about 12 ppl and we had two guides and a bus following the bikers. I was the slowest I believe because of my weight and my skill, so one of the guide spent the first hour biking on my side to make sure I´m ok! Actually the best part of the trip was actually the biking on the paved road which wasn´t the death road itself. I felt like I was a motorcyclist zooming downhill amidst barren hills in thin air. Then about two hours later, the Death Road biking part started and we were given new instructions. Basically we were told to bike on the left side always (which is the side of the cliff because that´s the side of downhill traffic) and we were told ALWAYS to get off our bikes on the right side, because if we get off on the left side, and a car comes by next to us, we will easily slip off the cliff, and... die (which has happened before to some girl in another tour group). Also, guides will whistle whenever there´s traffic coming behind us (downhill) or coming uphill (even tho we´re on the left side) so we´ll have to stop our bikes and wait until the cars have passed, because the roads sometimes can get very narrow where there will not be enuf space for traffic plus bike, it is that narrow. So anyway I was nervous, but actually the biking bit wasn´t really that scary cuz´ the whole time you´re focused on the road itself (you never wanna look at the scenery because you´ll then become a part of it!) and kept a healthy distance with the person in front of you. I was always the last in the pack because I was just so slow.. hehe. I figured that under normal circumstance, you really won´t slid off the edge, just like when driving on a bridge, you are not just suddenly going to fly off the bridge. So anyway, the ride was bumpy and tiring on my thumb cuz´ I had to keep the brakes slightly on most of the time because it´s downhill. The whole biking trip took about 4 hours, I had to stop in the last 30 minutes because I was getting too tired from the bumps so I decided to hop onto the bus to rest.

Coroico is a lil´ boony town, hot and low in altitude so I was able to catch a glimpse of summer weather. The scariest part of the trip was infact the bus ride home (4 hours at night). I thought I´ve seen narrow roads in China, but this one really has earned its name. We would see debris of fallen trucks from looking over certain parts of the road, apparently we were told that 4 days ago a truck went over and 2 weeks ago another one did. There were several moments where I thought the truck coming towards us will roll off! Normally, uphill traffic (which we were on the way back) has right of way and is on the inside of the road, which is much safer, however, there were numerous times where these huge Volvo trucks carrying I-don´t-know-what would force us to take the outside and that was a bit scary, cuz´ i guess they dun wanna risk falling over.. Nonetheless, our driver has had 31 years of experience on this road so that kept our confidence level up.

So that was my interesting one-day fun trip. Went to a bar with the groupie afterwards that served normal American cocktails like Red Bull and Vodka, which cost HKD38 dollars, more than probably alot of what many travelers´ are paying for their hostals here. Then we went to an oxygen bar where we had 10 minute of oxygen intake each, which I didn´t feel anything from at all.

Today is rest day, laundry day and travel arranging day. Hope to leave La Paz in a day or two to see the Salar. Bye now.

Photo: Las Cumbres at 9am

Sorry its been a while since I last wrote. Frankly not too much has happened, have just been chilling in La Paz, enjoying the altitude (panting whenever i walk unhill) and hanging out with some travelers that I met here and there. I have been forced out of my original hostal so I am currently staying in my third room (first forced out of my room to another shared room then to another hostal). All a blessing in disguise, because my current hostal, called La Posada de la Abuela is really really great, like international standard, and only USD20 bucks a night. The weekend that just passed was a national festival (La Paz city day or something) so all the hostals are really full. The reason why this one isnt is I think because it is new and its not on any guidebooks, not even on the yellow page! I learned it from the Aussie girls who were staying here before they left for Lake Titicaca.

So a typical day for me in La Paz is wake up around 10am, have breakfast if I make it before 11am, if not, have lunch, walk around city, shop a bit, eat afternoon tea, walk around a bit more, go to the internet cafe, try to figure out how to go to the Salar (you will be amazed, the information about the transportation is so confusing I took several days to really find out how to go there), then have dinner (had two nights of Japanese food here, one at the best Jap restaurant in town called Wagamama and one night at the second best Japanese restaurant called New Tokyo). Anyway, am booked to do a mountain biking trip on the Worlds Most Dangerous Road (WMDR) tomorrow that takes me to Coroico. The reason it is called WMDR is because statistically there have been the most accidents (like buses rolling off the cliff, about 100 a year). Well I am going with a very established "American" tour group which hasnt had any accidents in 10 years, so I should be alright. Heard the vertical scenery is absolutely breathtaking, will share once I am done with it. I really wanna post pictures on here, i did try but somehow I failed, probably cuz the resolution is too high, then becuase these computers are in spanish, i really cant figure out how to reduce the resolution. Maybe later on, I will email out a group of photos for you to enjoy!

Lotsa love and missing everyone and home, from sunny La Pazzzzzz. This keyboard doesnt have the apostrophe...

Photo: Bolivians on strike. Picture taken under high risk of camera being snatched, so no more of these.

I am currently in La Paz, the de facto capital city of Bolivia. Let me retrace how I got here! I was booked on a 230am Lloyd Aereo Boliviano flight leaving from Lima to Santa Cruz (which is way east of Bolivia while La Paz is much closer to the West side and Peru) to La Paz that was scheduled to arrive at 845am. The flight was delayed til 445am, and what was supposed to be a two-legged flight, ended up being a four-legged flight that flew from Lima to Santa Cruz to Cochabamba to Sucre then to La Paz!! I arrived at about 2pm in the afternoon. The great thing about doing such a flight is that you get to see a lot of Bolivia all in one morning! I was able to take some aerial photos of the Andean mountain (oops, it´s not the Andes, just some mountain range) with interlacing clouds on the way to Cochabamba. On my camera screen they look awesome, hopefully the dirt on the plane windows wont be too much of a distraction! Also met an Australian girl on the flight, her name is Gabi, and she was coming from Buenos Aires. She got two other friends who are backpacking South America for a year who she is here to join and we have been hanging out since yesterday, which is nice!

I am staying at Hostal Republica, a cute cozy and quite place with two courtyards. I really like it! The altitude here is quite high, 3660 m. Basically La Paz is built on hills and valley, so from the center of the town, you can see lotsa houses on very steep hills surrounding the center part, which is really cool! To acclimatize myself to the altitude, I am drinking lotsa water, walking slowly and taking many doses of the Water essence. My sleep was light and I was getting some headaches in the night time, but today is good so far. Yesterday I had dinner with the girls at this place called Dumbo (yes, the Dumbo the elephant) where we had lotsa fried food and chocolate sundae. Today we strolled at the Witches´ market, which is a major tourist attraction. The guidebook makes it sound all spooky and intriguing, but it´s merely a lil´alley with lotsa souvenir shops, and the only relatively spooky thing they got selling there is the llama fetuses, which are supposed to used as gifts to Mother Earth for burial or something. I bought some alpaca clothings which are realy cheaper, most things for less 50 hongkie. Btw, the Boliviano has the same exchange rate to the dollar as Hongkie..

Anyway, the altitude is making me sleepy and my eyes feel really dry at the moment. Later on, I will try to post some of my photographs on the blog as well. But I probably will wait til´I have enough pix to burn on a CD, which is what everyone does here to clear room for their memory cards. This keyboard is horrible. will write again later. Am in La Paz until Sunday.

Photo: Aerial shot on flight from Santa Cruz to Cochabamba, Cordillera Real de Bolivia

I realized last night that I had some fears of moving forward (trapped in my legs), so I had to sit in it for a bit, let it surface, and say bye to it so that I can move on. Isn´t this a classic one! So today I was able to decide on where to go next - Southwest Bolivia where I get to see the famous Salar de Uyuni (salt desserts), the tour there traverses one of the wildest and most dramatic landscapes in the world! Also, the climate there is supposed to be really extreme during this time of the year especially (can swing from negative 30 at night to 30 degrees celsius during the day) because of the altitudes, so I went to get myself a big thick sleeping bag today, just in case the accomodation happens to be shy on heat. Tomorrow I will book my flight to fly into La Paz (Bolivia´s capital city), where I will hang out for couple days and take public transportation (bus and train) to go to Uyuni where I can join some group tours to do the touring.

Besides this, Lima is nice, but not so interesting anymore. Yesterday, I did find a really awesome place for buying handicrafts and jewelry, called Las Pallas. The store is part of the owner's home, who is a Norwegian lady with a trained Peruvian dog. I spent a handsome amount snapping up goodies such as jewelries and a wall tapestry. Can´t resist! Pulled angel card Abundance the night before so I guess the abundance comes from me spending my own money to create more abundance in my life.. hehehe.

Alrighty, write again soon.

Hello from beautiful Peru in Southern Hemisphere!!!! Today is my first full day in this beautiful amazing country. I absolutely love it here. Everything has been great so far, albeit not having done much really on my first day. Let me retrace all the nitty gritty, since I´d like to use this blog as sorta a log of the places or hostals I´m visiting and staying, for future references! So I landed in Lima´s airport last night near midnight. The airport was completely packed, and there were at least 5 more flights going to arrive after mine. The airport was surprisingly nice, I wud say it´s even US standard, as you know how some airports in the US are really not so great anyway. I guess I´m spoiled by HK standard. I had a taxi guy Antonio pick me up which was from the hostal I stayed in, called Posada del Parque in Central Lima. I found this hostal from my travel guide Moon Peru and it is a lil´ cute hostal with adorable wall decor and a very homely ambience to it. I liked my room and my bed quite alot, but unfortunately, it´s booked up after last night so after I checked out at noon today, then had Antonio from last night take me to Miraflores, another part of Lima which is relatively affluent, to look for another place to stay.

The new place is called Hostal Oro Blanco, the name sounds great but the ambience is much worse, albeit more expensive because of the location. I wanted to stay at Hostal el Patio which has lotsa fauna and plants surrounding it and more colonnial style, unfortunately it´s also all booked up. It´s high season so I´m lucky to even find a room this last minute. So after checking in, I grabbed lunch at a lil´restaurant next door and went straight to South American Explorer Club, which is 15 minutes walking distance from my hostal. I signed up to become a member, USD50 dollars per year per person to become a member, not cheap, but very helpful because you get to use their library to access travel information for South America and can store luggages for free there, which is what I most want. I realize only yesterday that my big backpack weighs 43lbs and small one weights 18 lbs. Together they weigh more than half my size. There is no way I´m carrying that around to anywhere rural, so for sure, I need to slash out ideally 30 to 40% weight and store at SAE before I leave Lima. Did some research in SAE, I was really pulled to going to Bolivia to see the salt lakes called Salar dUyuni at the moment, but will see how my research goes in the next few days, as my mind seems to change every few minutes. Then I went to a really nice restaurant for dinner called¨Astrib y Gastron, which was by far the best meal I´ve had since traveling, beating even the great food in LA! Although initialy I was a bit bummed out that I have to eat by myself, very soon after, I became fully engrossed in my guidebook again and my spanish-english dictionary, scrambling for the right Spanish phrases to say to the waiters. I was also in awe with my appetizer Ceviche, a very famous Peruvian dish, which is basically a cold fish dish with very sour sauce.

Ok writing too much. I better return to the hostal before it´s too late. This computer is really bad, the symbol keys are all screwed up...

Today is my last day in the United States as I'm leaving for Lima, Peru tomorrow. I only just confirmed one night of hotel booking in Lima because places are full from high season. It seems that the universe does not stop testing my trust and has already been preparing me with little exercises, like making me lose my car key when I most needed it (yesterday) cuz' I was in a rush to post my stuff to HK before July 4th! Got into a lil' scramble and when I finally had some peace I got a flash and ran straight to the guest bathroom and found my car key lying right next to the sink.

Last few days in San Diego has been relaxing, albeit still feeling that I could've taken life more easily. I practiced a lot of soul memory on Karen and her two dogs, each first session takes approximately 2 to 3 hours. Cindy (Karen's dog, a Weimaraner) was so cute she would sit up each time I had to pull stuff from her aura. The work is quite amazing, my energy field seems to become clearer and clearer as I facilitate the process for others, as issues carried by others are always a mirror of ourselves in some level or another. The other very exciting thing that occurred within these few days is that I started to create my own essence from nature. The idea suddenly popped into my head when I was connecting with the huge papertree in Karen's backyard which had miraculously quadrupled in size over the past decade. The papertree feels so happy and I was so incredibly touched by the joy and peace it emanated. The essence is still under creation so I will wait until the process is finished before sharing its qualities and messages with you. Will go for a walk in the beach nearby and pack up for an early flight tomorrow.

Write again when I am in Peru =)