The Travelling Buncebury's

Covering 05 Feb - 10 Feb 2019        Valparaiso from some of the many viewpoints Bonnie, Heather, Newt on a flight of steps with only the risers painted Well, what a place !     The whole area around us is brightly coloured with street art everywhere and I don’t mean scrawls by semi-literate vandals.   A lot of the wall murals can only be called primitive or naïve (think Grandma Moses) but there is a lot of really clever and witty artwork about.   Rough plaster adds a good degree of texture to skin drawings   and I have never seen so much artwork outside before.   Flights of steps often have paintings on only the risers so the finished article can only be seen properly from a particular angle as you approach.   Many buildings here are clad in corrugated iron with a smaller profile than we’re used to and these sheets are often multi-coloured.   It is just fabulous.   It appears that there’s a sort of unofficial truce in that walls with clearly talented

Covering 24 Jan 2019 - 29 Jan 2019        well this might look like England but it's southern Chile  - coming in to land at Puerto Montt After The Torres del Paine National Park we begin to head back northwards.   On a map it doesn’t look far but from Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt in a straight line is 811 miles.   By road the route has to go via Argentina and is 1,347 miles which because of the dearth of roads down here in deepest Patagonia even runs for some way along the Atlantic coast.   We flew.  Well, what would you have done ? Puerto Montt is a busy port at the southern end of Chile’s Lakes District and we only spent a night stop here before catching a proper local bus to our intended base for a few days, Puerto Varas.   These are not the local buses beloved of travel documentaries with boxes of chickens tied on the roof and piglets running about inside, just friendly local people and a helpful driver for an hour’s trip costing next to nothing. Pu

Plaza de Armas in Arequipe Unless you want to travel eastwards and down into the Amazon basin, many of the major sights in Peru are along the coast and then as you get towards the Nazca desert   south heading eastward and inland.  We were staying away from the Amazon and every other potential malaria region on this trip and so we were o n our way to one of the most famous prehistory sites in the world.   The Nazca Lines, something I’ve wanted to see since I first heard of them.    The town of Nazca is a little to the south of the desert where the lines are and there’s a viewing tower by the side of the Pan-American h igh way  just south of  The Lizard - sliced in half by the Pan-American Highway  where some dolt allowed the road to be built right through one of the figures.   The lines, dated to between 500 bc and 500 ad are giant stylised figures and shapes formed on the desert surface covering in total an area of about 1,000 square kilometres.