laura says hi - from chile

07 Apr 2020 » IoT Sniffing

I bought a 25€ smart plug from a DIY shop, mostly because it was very cheap. I hadn’t poked at any IoT devices. I was struck by both the price and the complete lack of branding on the box - no idea who owns the infra, who makes it, etc. Getting it set up and on the home wifi was easy. I started poking at their app with mitmproxy. First interesting thing - it logs my phone’s location each time I use the app.

Steps for self:

Change linux box to forward packets, and change dhcpd clinets to send traffic though the linux box. Sniff with:
```
 tcpdump  -i enp2s0 host 192.168.1.20 and port 8886 -w /tmp/8886
```
and similar.
Use nftables to redirect packets from my iphone and the device to port 8080 on the linux box.
```
 nft add table ip nat
 nft add chain ip nat PREROUTING { type nat hook prerouting priority 0 ; }
 nft add rule ip nat PREROUTING tcp dport 80 counter log redirect to :8080
```
There are better ways. One problem I found was that a counter or log only rule in a type nat hook didn’t do anything, unless you had a rule that actually changed packets.

Use mitmproxy to peek at traffic. Add a cert to the iphone with mitm.it.

 SSLKEYLOGFILE="$PWD/.mitmproxy/sslkeylogfile.txt" mitmproxy --mode transparent --showhost --listen-port 8080

I had to repair debian bug 928749 with

 ln -s /usr/share/fonts-font-awesome/css/font-awesome.min.css  /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/mitmproxy/addons/onboardingapp//static/fontawesome/css/font-awesome.min.css

I had hoped to try wireshark’s support for decoding tls.

Try stuff out!

It turns out that it is a tuya device. See API calls or firmware.

At this point, I stopped poking, as I didn’t actually have any idea what to use the device for :).

24 Nov 2013 » Autumn

29 Sep 2013 » Yet More photos

A spider's web, one foggy morning.

The lights of Greystones.

14 Sep 2013 » Carlingford

25 Aug 2013 » Wicklow Head Seals

We saw Seals off Wicklow Head at dusk. We were chuffed as we'd seen more seals there at the same time of day and year last year.

13 Jul 2013 » Skellig Michael

We took advantage of a long stretch of uncommonly good weather to drive down to Kerry and take the boat over to Skellig Michael. For many hundreds of years, it was the Christian church's western-most and remotest outpost. Now, its a massive puffin colony. Its still a remarkably remote spot. Despite what seemed like at least a week of good weather - we were told that our day was the first time the boats had gone out in a week. On a bad day - and most days in Kerry are bad - an observer on the mainland can't see the rock. And it is a rock, rising directly from the Sea. The Monks landed at the base of a cliff, climbed up to the top, and set up a church. They lacked mortar, so all the walls are dry stane. They built 100s of stone steps down to the sea - tricky paths in the best of weather. The weather comes in right off the Atlantic. Its nearly impossible to imagine living there year-round.

06 Jun 2013 » Iceland Waterfall tour.

We were in Iceland for a couple weeks. We rented a dodgy old Vauxhall Astra (online reviews discussed the trials and tribulations of an exhaust falling off, but that didn't happen to us), and drove around the island. We camped, which worked out well. We saw tons of wildlife, geology, and scenery. We ate fantastic doughnuts. Nowhere in the world does better doughnuts.

View Larger Map

We arrived in Reykjavík, and wandered around the city. One thing I noticed was that the city didn't look like it had been hit by the crash as much as Dublin or Madrid. We saw Harpa Concert Hall, the Cathedral and the National Museum. Its not a normal European capital with grand buildings. It felt much more like a fishing port with a side business, which I guess it is.

First stops were the Blue Lagoon and Þingvellir National Park. The Blue Lagoon is perhaps the best flight stopover idea invented. Its a thermal spa not far from Keflavik airport, the water is aqua blue and warm and lovely. We didn't spend much time at Þingvellir, but its fantastic to look at the North American and Eurasian plates coming apart.

Camping worked out really well. Tons of places to camp, cheap camp sites. We had worried that it would be too cold to camp, but it was nice and mild. The big problem was the sun heating up the tent in the morning.

We headed up to Húsavík in a fantastic drive past miles of snowy mountains. We jumped out of the car to peer at a museum in Reykholt about a saga author. We then went to see Hraunfossar and Barnafoss. Hraunfossar is a series of waterfalls which fall into the river from it's bank. At Deildartunguhver water bubbles furiously out of the ground at 97 degrees C and it stinks of sulphur. We visited one of the northernmost Indian takeaways in the world in Akureyri. Oddly, Akureyri also has branches of investment banks - possibly its their punishment spot.

There's tons of bird life. Golden Plovers were a feature of each campsite and we were being woken up by drumming Snipe. There's an abundance of Waders, Geese and Eiders.

Húsavík is a fantastic place only about 25 miles away from the Arctic Circle. We went to the whale museum which was very interesting and then went whale watching in the afternoon. This was a major highlight of the holiday. We went out in traditional wooden boats and saw thousands of puffins and 5 or 6 humpback whales. They are absolutely huge, and can be up to 33m long with a heart the size of a VW. Whales feed in Iceland in the summer and breed in the south towards Panama. Whales are extremely intriguing with some species never having been seen in the wild.

We headed down to Lake Mývatn via Goðafoss. Lake Mývatn is quite a touristy spot, but well worth it. Walked up Hverfell - a massive volcano crater. We went for a walk in Höfði nature park, and saw red-necked phalaropes!! Around Skútustaðir, we saw pseudo craters, horned grebes, whooper swans, arctic terns and many others. We wandered around Hverir mud pots - bubbling mud, steam, fumaroles and very colourful ground. We saw the geothermal power plant at Kofla and walked around the crater at the top of the hill - massive hole, and firmly frozen at the bottom. We swam in the hot pools while looking out of the lake. We didn't go to sleep until midnight - when it was still light.

We hung around Mývatn for as long as we could, but in the end we had to get moving. The weather had been better in the north than the south, but we wanted to get around the island before having to go home. We pressed on, stopping at Dettifoss on the way. Europe's most powerful waterfall is indescribable.

East Iceland is very wild. We saw reindeer by the road. At this point, the only road around the Island is paved with gravel. We spent one evening crawling along at 30mph waiting for the sun to set. However, it was a wonderfully scenic drive, with the sun setting on snowy mountains. We spent one night in a free campsite in Breidalsvik, which is very much the end of the world. We pressed on around the fjords into south Iceland and Skaftafell National Park. Here the landscape has been blasted by volcano and glacier - we drove for miles across glacier and volcano runoff, clouds above us, never seeing a soul. All in all, fantastic stuff. The one tourist spot was the black basalt columns of Svartifoss.

Closer to Reykjavík, we started seeing signs of civilization again. As we came close enough to Reykjavík, bus loads of tourists appeared. Popular spots included Geysir, Seljalandsfoss and Gullfoss.

All in all, a fantastic drive, at the edge of Europe. More photos

05 May 2013 » network

Many years ago, I started using a 10/100MBit ethernet switch at home. At the time, gigabit switches were about 5-10x as expensive, and it didn't seem worth it. After all, spinning disks in ideal usage do about 100MBit, and I couldn't imagine that I'd end up wanting to go from RAM to RAM on two different machines.

Anyway. I've been copying SD cards from our trip to Utah from my laptop (which has a SD port) to my file server. iftop pointed to the reason the copies were taking a while - I was saturating my switch. Upgrading to gigabit was pretty cheap, so I did that. I suspect that this will double throughput, because the file server (which is a raid5 array of disks) is at about 55% io usage.

Anyway. I was just surprised that I've finally hit that bottleneck. And that waiting for prices to come down has paid off. Yey.

24 Apr 2013 » Arizona and Utah.

I was in California for work a few months ago, and we flew from there to Las Vegas. Then we drove to Salt Lake City, visiting three national parks on the way.

View Larger Map

Las Vegas We got out of Las Vegas as fast as we could, being somewhat crippled by only being able to make right turns. We got a look at the place from the air and boggled at the slot machines in the arrivals hall, and figured that was enough sin for us.

Hoover Dam. We stopped by the Dam and peered over the edge. Its a very impressive concrete plug with miles of weirdly suspended power lines. Naming a depression-era Keynesian employment scheme after Hoover is a bit like naming Tony Blair as middle east peace envoy. Now, of course, the dam provides the power for the millions of air-con units and miles of neon in Las Vegas. The dam has flags and eagles and angels and a monument to the builders. And Nevada has two senators arguing against the US government spending money to create jobs. Nowhere is history's sense of humour more evident than in the USA. Anyway, we saw a Turkey vulture over the dam.

Grand Canyon We spent three days in a tent on the side of the Grand Canyon. It is nearly impossible to describe. We hiked down into the canyon, we walked along the edge, we saw a California condor, we disturbed deer, we watched the sun set, we sprinted along a road to be there for sunrise, and we were very sad to go in the end. A spot to return to.

Quick aside: One of the things that is great about the USA is that food is good and cheap. We ate at the Grand canyon lodge each morning, and they did a massive and tasty breakfast for a very reasonable rate. Another aside: folks in the states (like everyone else) export their terrible beer and hang onto the good stuff. All across the South-West, I found myself drinking local, excellent, beer.

We drove from the Grand Canyon to Zion. Due to road closures and a urge to stay on the right side of the Arizona highway patrol, this took all day. On the radio there was: a right wing radio host so controversial he had been banned from Britain, a preacher preaching on a point of theology so complex and fiddly that we couldn't tell if he was a Mormon or not and both sorts of music. The heat pounded down - there were mirages on the road. The Indian reservation was a grim sight. We carefully avoided: a town (called Virgin!) which passed a by-law insisting that all residents own guns and a town infamous for being the last stand of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, complete with polygamy. We did find this sculpture next to the Powell dam.

We see why the USA is the land of the road trip - fuel is cheap, roads are good, distances are massive, speed enforcement is lax. Its the only place we've been where owning a Harley or a massive pickup truck makes sense. However, when we rolled into Zion, we were pretty sick of driving.

Zion National Park is a place we hadn't heard much about until we started researching for this trip. That is a real pity, as its as glorious a national park as America has anywhere. We walked around the bottom of the park, looked up at the hanging gardens, saw more deer and had a good time. We went up Angels Landing, along with half of the population of Utah.

This deer came right at us

deer

Around the park

pool

hanging gardens

hanging gardens.

sun

sheep

Desert Bighorn sheep

squirrel

Angels' Landing

I did think, both on Angels landing and in the Grand canyon, that the national park service is a bit too cautious. Angels landing has a major advantage over every Scottish scramble - the rock is dry most of the year. I did see a lot of people clinging to the chains for dear life rather than trying to stay balanced.

Bryce Canyon was the final park. It contains thousands of wind and water created spires called Hoodoos. The man who the canyon is named after was the first Mormon settler in the area. Asked what he thought of the rocks, he replied "Its a hell of a place to lose a cow". We got there right on sunset, and could not believe our eyes.

Salt Lake City. We rolled into Salt Lake at the end of our trip. We had budgeted a day in the city to soak up any delays. We ate at the Copper Onion, which was the best bit. They have an excellent stroganoff. A stroganoff so tasty that I wished that flights from Europe stopped in SLC so I could go there more often. We also went to the Mormon Temple, since that is the only thing to do in Salt Lake City. The Temple is very pretty and the grounds are full of flowers. We didn't go in, not being one of them. I probably would have refused to give them money to wander around and have a gander, but its free.

This man is one of the founders of a major world religion, and not, as I thought, a pirate.

Mormons are a sensible, serious group.

I do think that the temple builders have a certain amount of envy for the Vatican. And I do think that the Mormon faith is, at best, weird. We headed for home, with Laura throwing a tray at a TSA officer on the way.

The rest of the album.

07 Apr 2013 » Stockholm, Youtube, snow, oh my.

We were off to Sweden for Easter. Cold air, good cake, good coffee and fantastic museums. We wandered around the waterfront and went on the tour of Drottningholm palace. The medieval museum was a real find - thanks to my parents.

We also had some excellent yet casual food. Laura is saying nice things about fish eggs. Stockholm. No one ever talks about it, yet its a lovely lovely city well worth a long weekend. More photos.

In other news, I took some videos from the top of a mountain in Patagonia:

We've also been walking in the snow in Ireland.

And some photos from the bike:

We're off again - I'm in the states for two weeks for work, Laura is coming along, and then we have a week long road trip through the southwest USA. Looking forward to it!

24 Mar 2013 » reader replacement

I've spent some time over the St Patrick's day weekend and this weekend working on my google reader replacement. Its pretty much there. The code is at github and there is a okay readme there too. You can visit reader to try it out.

24 Mar 2013 » logging out

At work there is a web single sign on system. And it has the feature that visiting a single page will log you out. This leads to people setting up comedy redirects. I may have been one of these people. The problem is called logout CSRF - and the folks who look after the system say its working as expected. The google app security reward program explicitly calls out logout CSRF this as "Difficult, long-term browser-level improvements are required to truly eliminate this possibility.".

CSRF is a simple attack. The user visits a malicious website. The source for that website refers to a good website in either html or in JavaScript. The user's browser runs the code and sends GET or POST requests to the good website. The good website assumes the user is telling the browser to send the requests - for example to transfer the money. This is the Confused deputy problem.

This is a pretty well understood attack now. Most sites have defences, but the logout hole lingers. Here's a example Don't click it!

I thought that this would be a fun thing to explore one weekend. I threw together a pretty simple login system in python and web.py. Quick aside: web.py is lovely. The user logs in, and gets a cookie. For every user action, the cookie is sent by the user browser, and validated. There's no server side session stuff at all. When the user logs out, the cookie is deleted. The code is on github.

Quick note on the cookie contents. The cookie contains the username, the timestamp the cookie was generated at, the cookie expiry time, and a HMAC. If a attacker changes any of the data in the cookie, the hamc is invalid. The attacker does not know the key for the HMAC, so can not generate a valid cookie.

Why store all the information client side? The main reason is dos protection.

Anyway, there are CRSF attacks in both the login and logout pages. For logout, the evil site loads the logout url in a iframe. For login, the evil site has javascript which submits the login form with a different username and password. Code for both is in git and live on another site.

The defence against CSRF is pretty well known - for every form or url, include a hidden value that the attacker can't guess. Check for the hidden value on every action. If its missing or corrupt, reject the action.

I ended up using the user's IP, a timestamp, and a expiry time and a hmac. The timestamp and expiry protect against replay attacks. The user's ip protects against a attacker scraping the login form, getting a valid token, and using it for the attack. Once again, the only server side state is the hmac key.

Clearly, all of this has to happen over https. Otherwise a passive attacker can sniff the password or the cookie, and do what he wants. https also protects against a active attacker from changing the requests or responses.

At this stage it seems things are pretty well protected - any user action, including logout, is tied to a token that attacker can't discover or fake. So why doesn't Google protect against logout csrf? The answer is in cookie bombardment and forcing. They worry about the case where there is a active man in the middle attacking the user, and the user is doing some other browsing while logged into gmail. The MitM can inject or modify http requests and responses, but not gmail's https requests. When the user requests a different site, the attacker can 302 them to the http version of gmail, then can intercept the request for gmail, then can reply with a cookie-clearing header. Volia, the user is logged out.

Cookies have grown two features over the years to protect against different attacks. secure and httpOnly. A HttpOnly cookie is only sent over the wire in a http or https request, and can;t be accessed by javascript. A secure cookie is only sent to a https url. However, a http page can set a cookie with the same name as a secure cookie, and therefore overwrite the secure cookie. This is a bug, in my opinion, and it lets a active attacker force a logout of a https only site.

The solution to this, in my mind, is HSTS. This is a header to tell the browser that all traffic for a domain is over https. This prevents the MitM from injecting a request over http, and therefore from injecting cookies. Wee.

The next attack is cookie bombardment. The MitM starts sending lots of cookies for unrelated sites. The browser's global limit on the number of cookies it can store is reached. The browser starts evicting cookies. It evicts the login cookie, logging the user out.

Its hard to tell how big a deal this is. The attacker can issue up to 20 redirects between different domains for each user http click. For each of those domains, he can set 150 cookies with 4k of data each, which is 12M of data. I haven't worked out what the limit is. My Cookies file is 700k.

Anyway, at this point we've gone past a attacker tricking the user to click on a url to a active attacker spraying cookies around. I figure the logout hole should be closed a bit more than it is.

16 Mar 2013 » spdy

I started supporting spdy this morning. It as pretty simple. I downloaded the most recent version of openssl (to pick up NPN) and the ngnix source and a patch. Applied patch, built a static ngnix binary, and off we went. Only problem was fiddling with the init script refer to the new binary and the config in /etc. I also cleaned up a few bits of the ngnix config. Spdy check is happy.

Oh, can you spot why this extract from debian's /etc/init.d/ngnix might not be ideal?

set -e
  restart|force-reload)
        echo -n "Restarting $DESC: "
        start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON || true
        sleep 1
        test_nginx_config
        start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile \
                /var/run/$NAME.pid --exec $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS || true
        echo "$NAME."

10 Mar 2013 » Splitters - or nerdy stuff going elsewhere

I've started putting the nerdy content in tech. There's a atom feed too. There's also a everything page.

Sorry about breaking the atom feed and spraying updates everywhere.

24 Feb 2013 » rise of the middle management machines.

Nerdy content Over on hacker news there was a guy showing off his website that prints inspirational quotes at you. I'm sure that by now he's worth more than Bill Gates. I'm not really a fan of inspirational quotes. I wondered if it would be possible to generate such quotes at random.

Enter python. Enter a Markov chain. Enter a collection of quotes taken from the internet. Look on the following and despair.

Simplicity is art.
Love it doesn't matter how far it work make it doesn't matter how far it as I like the journey is a man while he who i feel myself moving forwards.
You just about as a runner it's only way to failure without losing your enthusiasm.
Any road will fall for life is the artist, and the courage to all success.
Make it doesn't matter if you there is that I can hold the day or if you can do excellence, therefore, is calm.
Do and thoughts as if you don't stand like a succession of opportunities.
Govern thy life is a good designer by going beyond them into the artist, and go slowly.
One can or how fast or nothing.
Make it fast or if today is the miracle is what dies inside a little bit, one can distort them into the life is the creation of their dreams.
Simplicity is a habit.
In your enthusiasm.
The same box.
We need men who can imagine is the future better than the pawn go into the best way to get you are what dies inside a succession of creation is the limits of principle, stand like the miracle is not wait to live.
Make up their minds to be understood.
In motion just a habit.
No incentive to prepare for life is the history of the current; in matters of their dreams of life is the sum of the artist, and more and less, I grow to be.
We repeatedly do excellence, therefore, is the sea is a little bit, one can or another.
Success.
Any one way of finding the possible is to those who believe in your enthusiasm.
If I'm completely satisfied with what I grow to start.

Simplicity is art. sounds real to me.

19 Feb 2013 » Ngnix

I've moved this web server over to Ngnix. Let me know if it broke something.

19 Feb 2013 » House hunting

I wrote this a while ago, and we now have said yes to two places, and have actually given money to one.

We went around to see two places tonight. The first place turned us away - they had gone already. Laura talks about sleeping on picking a place, but that is not going to happen. Some other guy would snap it up. People rent with the speed and lack-of-care that normally connected to twitter during a major event. Ireland, having decided contraception is okay, has found another thing where snap choices lead to long term things. Anyway. Also, Laura points out contraception has been legal for 20 years.

Popped around to see the second place. Spent 10 minutes talking nonsense on the step. The main topic was the landlord of the place we were going to see. You see, on Saturday, we had spammed 13 different people about their houses. Estate agents work much the same hours as everyone else, so I was a bit surprised to get a reply at 1am. The only reason we knew it was 1am was because we were on a internet binge, but that's another story. He offered to show us the place on Sunday or Monday. Laura ended up talking to him on the phone. He spoke very very quickly. He was determined to get us around to see it right away. If he had a teleport, we would have been in his living room before we knew it. We decided he drank tons of coffee - enough to quicken his speech and keep him awake till the small hours. Anyway, after 10 minutes or so, we called him up to find out where he was. We imagined him in a caffeine crash. You can guess where he was.

Place was nothing worth talking about. Tons of space. High ceilings. Made up our minds pretty quickly, and chatted to the landlord. The highlight of this was his suggestion that we would be friendly and intimate. Now, I don't know who you think you are, but only one guy gets to be intimate with my wife. Sorry about that. Another gem was him talking about how the bills were low and it was a mild night. Now, I was shivering and Laura could see her breath. Laura and I have been talking about a "very mild" day thereafter. Less amusing was his suggestion that Laura could do some gardening. If you want a gardener, mate, get a gardener. As we left, he said that he did think the place was a bit run down himself, and that "burglarys aren't a problem here, fires are".

16 Feb 2013 » Back!

We have been back in Dublin for a week and pretty pleased about it despite the grey and Baltic weather. We’ll put up some albums in a few weeks when we get a bit more sorted which hopefully includes having even faster Internet.

Reasons it is great to be back include:

Having more than 2 changes of clothes
Having clean clothes
Going into a supermarket and buying food which you can actually construct a meal with
Having access to a working oven
Fresh milk, strong cheese, bacon and sausages. (3 months of warm UHT gets to you in the end).
Driving is so easy. I used to hate driving in Dublin city centre. After Argentina it's a breeze. People obey rules and there are lanes!
Not constantly packing and unpacking
Wholegrain food. We’re sure we couldn't take any more tasteless white bread
Our own proper trustworthy computers with a sane keyboard layout
Faster Internet!

A few things which stand out about Dublin which we didn't really notice before:

There are pubs on every street
Everyone wears such dark clothes

For now we only miss the sun, but over time we’ll probably miss:

Empanadas
The amazing bird life particularly Crested Caracaras which are my new favourite species. Look at the mad head movement! If you aren't disturbed by one feeding on a dead cow, this video is also good
The quality of the steaks and the cost of great wine
The mountains, of course
Street dogs, (although we would not welcome their descent on Dublin or any street dog-related scandals such as we found in Punta Arenas)

Things that seem strange:

Pete wearing jeans
Putting toilet paper in the toilet

I suppose we should say a bit about Buenos Aires, our last stop:

Having heard only very good opinions about it we were disappointed, putting it in the same category as Paris (granted there are excellent museums). It is absolutely huge and we found getting around difficult. We tried the tube and it was dangerous so we got off fairly quickly. The bus system is incomprehensible. Cycling would have been suicidal. And so getting a taxi was the best way of getting around, not good. The guidebook had bad tales of taxi drivers, but all ours were fine until the last one who asked far too much money (probably still cheap compared to Dublin), got grumpy and flatly refused to bargain. Humph, we were glad to be leaving. There are many lanes of traffic (up to 16 in each direction) and it is extremely fast. Motorway speeds through city streets. There are dog walkers with over 10 dogs on untangled leads, apparently a Buenos Aires thing. Strangely not as many street dogs as in other places.

By this stage in the journey we had well and truly ran out of steam and were uninterested in seeing museums etc. We did see the main sights in the city centre from the outside. Some grand buildings like lots of other cities.

Reserva Ecológica Costanera Sur is an amazing place and provides welcome relief from the noise of the city. Parrots, hummingbirds, woodpeckers, woodcreepers, cardinals and many others. A highlight was seeing a flock of Nanday/Black-hooded Parakeets using their feet like hands to eat fruit/seeds in a tree. The whole tree was raining down debris. Other highlights included a pair of Green-barred Woodpeckers and a Yellow-billed Cardinal.

Buenos Aires also offers a welcome change from empanadas, steak, pizza and pasta. We went to Tandoor Indian restaurant on the first night, and a Thai restaurant in Palermo district on the second night. Actual spicy food!

All in all we had a great trip, saw a lot, did a lot, learned a lot and met some interesting folks including a closet gynaecologist.

03 Feb 2013 » End of the world

After writing about penguins, we wandered down to the naval museum in Punta Arenas. We found ourselves watching a film about Shackleton's first trip to the pole. Then we got on a boat.

It was the roll on, roll off ferry to Puerto Williams. The ferry is pretty small / about 10 cars aboard. It didn't seem ideal to spend a night on, or for traversing tiny channels at the end of the world. However, we didn't sink. Nor did we end up cruising around the Antarctic ocean with only a sextant.

The boat ride was pretty good. The food was dire, and it rained, was windy, bleak and cold, but otherwise fantastic. We saw dolphins, wandering albatrosses, tons of other birds, remote mountains, glaciers, shockingly bad movies, Chile win at football, and lots of waves. The boat runs through many tiny islands into the Beagle Channel, and we had great views of the Cordillera Darwin and the glaciers coming down. Chileans are pretty fond of Darwin, the boat had maps of their route, and a picture of him as an old, somewhat stern, man.

Puerto Williams is the end of the world. Isla Navarino is a wooded, boggy, island. There seems to be little industry or agriculture. People visit either to do the Dientes circuit (a trekking route through the mountains of the island), or to sail around Cape Horn. The yacht folks have an excellent bar, a converted German cargo boat. The museum is well worth a visit and is free. It explains the lives of the Yaghan people. Only one Yaghan survives today, in a village just outside Puerto WIlliams. Their language included words for such activities as "to walk eastwards along a shore looking for mussels as you go". Their children were not allowed to look at ibises, they had a great respect for the sea, mostly wore no clothing and were able to keep fires inside canoes which were a central part of their lives.

Oh yeah, Chile is determined to hang onto this lump of rock. There are naval ships in the harbour, tons of old guns pointing out to sea, etc.

We took the boat to Ushuaia, in Argentina. This is a quick ride over the strait. This is a real city, with hustle, and also bustle. And real roads. And more than one place to eat. The town is obsessed with two things - that its el fin de mundo, or the end of the world, and the Falkland islands. We tried not to be too British at the Falklands memorial, though the following is in a style I like to call Belfast impressionist. Visited another museum, with 100 stuffed birds. Laura was very excited by this.

Its cold down here, and raining on and off. We'll be back in Dublin on Friday. We're training up for it. We have more photos than internet, so we'll stick more on later.

31 Jan 2013 » Island of Penguins

We rolled out of bed a bit before 6am today and set off to Isla Magdalena. When we got there, there were Magellanic penguins. Hundreds of thousands of them (estimates range from 150,000 - 300,000). Penguins sleeping, penguins grooming, penguins kicking up dust, penguins maintaining nests, penguins waddling around, penguins telling off their kids, penguins calling, penguins preening and penguins engaged in various forms of pair bonding. One had built his home on the path, and pecked tourists who interfered with his construction. Laura, as you can imagine, was in seventh heaven. Penguins swimming are lighting fast and nothing at all like the waddling penguins on land. There were a lot of Kelp gulls too and a few dead chicks. Other species included Chilean skuas and Rock Cormorants.

Next stop was Isla Marta where we could not land but were able to see sea lions and more bird species. The smell and noise! A fantastic wildlife experience. We went with Solo Expediciones and they were grand. They have a real tank of a boat and it ploughed through the waves quickly, water lashing against the windows.

Next stop Puerto Williams, Isla Navarino, still in Chile. 30 hour ferry ride. Glad to be leaving Punta Arenas town!

30 Jan 2013 » South of Punta Arenas

Punta Arenas is an odd town. It seems to forget its at the end of the world, and looks inwards on itself. Its a sprawling grid of statues, city driving, casinos, hotels, civic history plaques, seaside promenade, cycle tracks, tanks, tooting horns, horrendous looking nightclubs, massive shopping centers and the other trappings of a big city. Perhaps there is a reason for all that. We rented a car and headed south.

To the south ruta 9 runs through forests and over bog. Rusting boats are pulled up on the beach. Wind battered, shambolic buildings scarcely dot the landscape. Grey clouds swirl above, and the grey Magellan strait stretches out. On the horizon, the far side can be seen. Toward the Pacific, the white of the last of the snow stands clear on mountains on both sides. Apart from the mountains, it reminds me of the Hebrides. The Strait is much wider than I expected.

We pulled off the road at Fuerte Bulnes. This is where the first Chileans came. They sailed down from Chiloe, stuck up a flag, and claimed the Strait of Magellan. A replica fort stands on the spot. We wandered around the empty wood and peat buildings, peered at the rusting cannons, and looked out to sea. From the site, the far side of the water is a maze of grey islands drifting in and out of the fog. There is not much at the fort. We drove away. The first settlers left as well - they had picked a site without any water and a lot of wind.

Up the road, we paused at the middle of Chile monument. This is half way between Arica and the South pole. Chile includes its Antarctic claim on all maps. The 2002 census proclaimed 130 Chileans living on Antarctica proper, and optimistically proclaims it a rural region.

Down another road, we found Puerto Hambre, another attempt to live on the side of the strait. Spanish settlers came here in 1584 and founded the port. The plan was to deny the straits to the English pirates who were raiding their pacific ports. In 1587, the English captain Thomas Cavendish stopped there, to find everyone dead of starvation. He renamed the place Port Famine. There is nothing at the side now but an odd marker. In the bay, there are many tied up fishing boats. The local shellfish have a disease, resulting in many many warning signs and the odd dead tourist.

Further south, we stopped at a memorial to Phillip Parker King, then the grave of Captain Pringle Stokes, the first captain of the HMS Beagle. Both came here to survey the Strait. Pringle Stokes committed suicide. Sat down below the grave on a massive bit of driftwood. Stared out at the water. Waves hissed onto the beach. Clear water, stones at the bottom. The odd shell. A squall splatters down.

Over the Rio San Pedro, the road became impassable for a normal car, so we walked. At the end of the road, there is a bullet-pocked sign proclaiming Cabo Froward, the end of the landmass, to be another 38k. We walked out on the beach for a bit. A long strip of seaweed on in the water. Only our footprints in the sand. The beach is clean. The woods come right down to the shore.

On the way back, the sun came out. The water is green close in and blue further away. We are going to see penguins tomorrow. Back in the Office in a week or so.

28 Jan 2013 » Punta Punta

--- layout: post title: Punta Arenas ---

We are at the far end of the Americas. Cabo Froward, the end of the landmass (Cape Horn is an island), is not that far away. Punta Arenas reminds us of Inverness. Also the whole place swarms with Chilean squaddies. War with Argentina? Penguin uprising? We shall let you know.

23 Jan 2013 » Another quick update

We are still in El Chalten. We have been trekking around Mount Fitz Roy for the last few days, and then we went kayaking. Tomorrow we go ice climbing. The internet has about 14% packet loss, so you only get one photo. Sorry!

19 Jan 2013 » El Chalten

Laura thinks we should give a general update, so here goes. We flew from Bariloche to El Calafate where we saw the glacier. The only other thing was that the airline pretty much trashed Laura's bag. The first thing she saw was a nut bar circling the belt. Oh dear, said Pooh.

Since then, we took the bus though the patagonian steppe to El Chalten. We think this town is fantastic. From the bus station, we had a view of Cerro Torre and Mount Fitz Roy. The sky is blue. The sun is shining. Its not even windy. We have been very fortunate with the weather.

So far, we have had a day's walking up to Laguna Torre and a day's climbing. Both have been excellent. Sadly, the internet is not so no photos. Tomorrow, we hare off trekking around Mount Fitz Roy.

16 Jan 2013 » I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous

We have seen glaciers before. I think the first time for me was in Canada. We visited a closed viewpoint in Banff national park. We waded though waist deep snow to peer down on a very blue lake and the grey ice below. Snow was all around, and heavy clouds hung over us. The white of the snow and the grey of the rock is all I recall seeing of the glacier and the ice field beyond. It was cold. We had a way to drive before night and snow fall. The first time Laura tried to turn the car, it slid off the snow covered road and into a gentle snowbank. We turned away from the glacier. Perhaps its more spectacular in summertime, when, you know, its actually open for viewing.

School had a photo of a glacier in France. It looks muddy and was a odd grey-brown colour. Each year a field trip visited it. School had a collection of photos taken from the same spot, year after year. Each year it had retreated many meters. These days I assume the glacier has retreated out of shot. One day it will be gone altogether. Needless to say, this makes me a bit sad.

Perito Moreno is nothing like these. A massive white wall of ice advancing over the valley, it seems otherworldly. It is impossible to fit it all in. Behind the leading wall, the glacier and the ice field behind it stretch to the horizon. Up close, one watches spires of ice fall silently until they hit the water. The boom of impact echoes from the mountains. Enormous cracking noises, like a giant standing on a frozen sea, come from deep within the glacier as it crawls forward. Icebergs bob in the milky water. Semi circles of ice come out from the edge - marking places where the glacier has calved off more chunks. Peering into the cracks, one sees a deep blue white colour, suggesting a impossible maze of chasms and fractures.

The glacier has crawled down out of the Andes. It has hit two problems - a mountain, and a large river. The glacier crawls out into the river. After many months, it reaches the other side and blocks the river. Neither the ice nor the water can erode the mountain fast enough. The water level rises until the pressure undercuts the glacier, leading the river to flow under an arch in the ice. After yet more time, the arch, worn by the water and pressured by the weight of the ice, cracks and explodes, leaving the river to run free once more.

The only way of fully understanding the size of the glacier is to take to the air. The mountain, bigger than anything in Ireland, in barely noticeable in the pictures. The river, large enough to have a detachment of the Argentine navy (no, I don't know why or what they were doing), shrinks on the postcard. The glacier, miles of cracks and wrinkles covering its surface, looks like a unstoppable force, sent down from the Andes to march, Sherman like, over the Patagonian steppe.

Anyway. We have no photos because this whole town gets it's internet by encoding bits into icebergs floating down Argentino Lake . The acks come back in the tourist copies of In Patagonia. If you think the Mylodon is a metaphor for Chatwin's sanity, you are carrying a 1.

15 Jan 2013 » Nahuel Huapi Traverse

We are back from the Nahuel Huapi traverse. Its been a tough six days, and now we are completely shattered and drinking lots of water. Also everything stinks. I have this fear we'll be kicked out of the hostel due to the smell. Here are some notes on the route, which might be of use to others.

Maps and stuff: we used the lonely planet book Trekking in the Patagonian Andes. The times in the book are optimistic. Speculation as to why:

The author retired from the SAS, or some other job that required running up hills.
The author wasn't carrying a tent, food, stove, etc.
The author was in the process of writing a book on patagonian treks and was therefore somewhat fitter than us.
The author had spent the past few years working as a mountain guide.

I like the first theory, though the last two have the advantage of being true.

The map was kinda crappy too. Crags aren't marked. I suppose that if you want a map with crags they start with a black bit of paper. The nav was pretty easy throughout the trip, but mostly because we could see the way owing to good weather. It would be a pain to do in poor weather.

We drank the water from the rivers. It was lovely and freezing cold. We often had our cups on the outside of our bags, and dipped them into streams. We passed a gang of scouts singing the Spanish version of "I want to go a wandering". That's our life now. Drinking water from streams, singing kids, green trees, Lewis and Clark wandering past, foxes barking.

In less good water news, the folks down in CAB suggested added a drop of bleach to each litre of water.

The book claims you can get food and sleep in huts known as refugios. We shunned this option, mostly because we had the tent etc. and we didn't fancy booking ahead. One hears mixed reports about the quality of the places, how watertight they are etc.

Day One

We headed up on the ski lift from Villa Catedral (this is the primary route in the book) mostly due to the parties of Argentine teenagers heading for the path up to Refugio Frey. We were warned about the wind at the bottom. It was a cold strong wind, but we were pretty stable on our feet when we were up there. We did end up wearing thick gloves, balaclava, many layers etc. Only one lift at the ski centre was operating, so we took that one and had to figure out where we were at the top.

We did the traverse from the ridge above the ski center to the turning for Refugio Frey. This is mostly over shattered rock, following the dots. There were good views over the ridge at a low point. The turn off to Frey (the left) and Jacob (the right) was drawn on a rock.

The book suggests dropping down to Frey, then climbing back up and down the other side the next day. We shunned this option. It featured a pile more height gain and loss, Megan (who we had met while white water rafting) described her night there as an effort to hold the tent down in the wind, and we didn't fancy hanging around with tons of teenagers.

Its worth noting that the trek had quite a few parties of folk in different levels of gear. We saw folk in trainers, without rain protection. Slow progress down to the valley - long scree descent. We hit a low point when Laura stepped in someone else's poop. A shame everyone doesn't carry a plastic trowel. Camped in the valley - its a big site along the path. We didn't see anyone else that night, but more folks showed up when we went to bed. In the evening, three dogs came and sniffed around. No idea how they got into the park. It was brass monkeys in the valley (see Committee to Ascribe a Naval Origin to Everything).

Day Two

This was a short day - and we had hopes for day three - we pulled out of the end of the valley and over the pass to Refugio Jakob. The descent is more on scree fields and pretty slow. If you like walking over shattered rock, you can do the two tops here.

When we got down to the Refugio, they said that the high route over to Lag Negra by Cerro Inocentes and Cerro Navidad was closed due to snow. This led to much griping. We wandered up to a high lake (and wonderful corrie coated in snow) to peer at the next day's route. It looked good to us. We had scanned the route with binoculars from the other side of the valley, and were unconvinced by their concerns. We restrained ourselves from sneaking off at 6am, and planned to do a extra day walking out and walking in the next valley.

Day Three

Foiled, we headed down the valley. This is a bit slow to get started, but once over the bridge, we bombed it down the valley. Its a nice gentle slope. However, its longer than the book says. (the book claims 13k, and the sign at the bottom claims 18k, and the sign is a good bit closer). Its a nice walk in the trees, but its nothing like as good as the ridge would have been.

We hitched from the bottom almost to Colonia Suiza. As we walked the last mile or so, we could hear a very long rock and roll guitar solo. This kept on playing for about forever. We pitched up at a big camp site somewhat more used to holidaying Buenos Aries folks than smelly hikers. I almost fainted. We ate massive burgers and drank wine. This is the life.

Day Four

We were slow getting off the next day, mostly because we had lost motivation due to the massive detour and missing out on an awesome ridge. At least the village gave us the opportunity to get rid of rubbish which has to be carried out. Then we picked up some left by others. It grates on me to see such spectacular places marred by human waste. I did jump in the lake off the pier, which was fantastic. I think we should carry swimming stuff. The camp site showers didn't work. We ate lunch in the town before getting back on the hoof. The walk up the valley was hot and full of flies. There really isn't much to say about it. Just lots of forest, lots of pesky flies, and lots of other walkers.

The end of the day was probably the toughest uphill of the walk - a 400m pull up by the waterfall. Slow slow progress with the heavy packs. The location of La Negra refugio is fantastic. Its on the rocks by a high lake, above a massive waterfall. The rocky sides of Cerro Negra tower above. We camped in a hollow in the bushes. There were many such hollows - no one is brave enough to camp in the open. The notorious Patagonian wind howled most of the night. Laura shunned pasta, ate cold pizza leftover from lunch, and woke up at 4am in a hunger. Considering how bad the pasta was, this might have been the better route. If you have suggestions of camping dinners other than soup, pasta and sauce please send them on!

Day Five

This was by far the best day. We went around the lake (which is harder than it looks, and features hanging off dodgy bits of fixed rope), up to the ridge on the far side, and along to the top of Cerro Bailey Willis (1850m). The views from up here are fantastic. The speedy Israeli bloke cut under the summit, and you can do that too (He seemed to do the same as us until the top of Pico Turista, then he when back to the Refugio). We dropped down to a col on the ridge, then headed to the top of a valley where there is a camp site.

That was the first half of the day. From then on it got harder. We headed up Pico Turista, about a 400 meters climb up a very steep scree chute. Going was slow and unpleasant. We then went right down the other side, climbing down loose rock. This was slow going, and the massive bags didn't help.

It was a slow 400m of vertical descent down to Refugio Lopez. Once there, it was about 8pm. Again we found Lonely Planetś times optimistic. The Refugio was full of scouts. We wanted to stop here, but the book suggested camping lower down, further from the wind and on green grass. Sadly, when we got down to the area suggested, it was a bog. And not even a flat blog. We were also pursued by a fox down to the area (which was maybe 200m below the Refugio Lopez). We figured the fox wanted dinner, so we kept on moving.

The map showed another Refugio called La Roca below Lopez. We went down miles of 4x4 track (which was massive switchbacks) until we turned up at a restaurant and asked for two beds and dinner. The Netherlands-Argentine couple explained it was a restaurant and had never heard of the mythical La Roca refugio. We were persuaded to eat but as it got darker fortunately they allowed us to camp outside the restaurant which we very much appreciated. There was a great view and no electricity. The waitress told us what food they had and we ordered almost all of it. The hunger had set in. Four empanadas, a pie, a pizza and a salad, followed by dessert. She said "wow you are really hungry!" We explained we had been walking for 5 days. And 12 hours of walking, a tough day.

Day Six

We had coffee and a chat with the restaurant owners which was interesting. It turns out that only about 30% of Argentines have official jobs and pay tax. Most don't have bank accounts. We then walked out along the switchbacks - this wasn't far, but we don't know how far - and back to Colonia Suiza. Laura saw Magellanic woodpeckers along the way. We aimed to appear on ruta 79 as close to Colonia Suiza as possible, and we popped out on a road with private property notices all over it. Oops. No one hassled us. The bus back to Bariloche was the final straw - we waited 50 minutes past the time, then got lunch, then went back and waited some more, all with no sign of the bus. In the end we got a taxi. And then steak. Massive steak. We wore the same clothes for 5 and half days and we are sorry for whoever washed them for us.

13 Jan 2013 » White water rafting

Hello folks, Laura here. As promised, a few details about this excellent day out over a week ago. We went with Extremo Sur and highly recommend them. It was so much fun. We went up a valley to a farm where we got changed into wetsuits and the rest of the gear. Then it was down to the Río Manso Inferior (river) for a safety talk and then we were off. It was utterly superb and I didn't want it to end. The river is stunning - clear water, high cliffs, wonderful forest and views of mountain ridges. And the excellent rapids. I have always been hopeless at water sports and could just about swim across a river but we had an excellent guide and I loved it. We went in for an (intentional) swim twice. The swimming position is on your back with your backside lowered and the water carries you along. All good things come to an end and when we came out of the river we headed up to the border with Chile and then past a customs office and back to the farm for an asado which was excellent. We had some good chat with an Australian girl and two Argentinians who wanted to know lots about Ireland and the UK and what we thought of Argentina.

The whole album.

07 Jan 2013 » Into 2013, Bariloche

We are in Bariloche in the Lakes District of Argentina. This is supposed to be where Hitler Retired. I've guessed this from the title and cover of a Spanish book in a shop earlier this week. The guy knows how to pick a good spot - this is the Argentinian Switzerland. It's all very alpine, there are lots of wooden buildings, good chocolate and even rodelbahns. Laura points out how you just cant get away from Hitler. I point out how you've imagined an evil dictator on a small wheeled cart going down a hill. Possibly we need to spend more time in Germany.

That sun article reminds me of the tale of Hitler's visit to Knoydart.

The journey here has been pretty good, and we haven't had time to update the blog much. We left Arica in the far north of Chile on the 26th, and took a 40 hour bus journey - interrupted by a quick curry in the nicest Indian restaurant in Santiago. We then missed our bus from Santiago to Temuco, but Turbus put us on the next bus that evening. You might think that missing a connection would be a pain - and 40 hours on a bus would be the sort of thing the CIA would do to Pakistani teenagers, but you'd be wrong. Chilean buses (we've mostly gone with turbus) are cheap and comfortable, and the company doesn't gouge stranded travellers. Chile has better public transport than the UK. If we had only deported Pinochet, they might let us in on the secret.

The only unnerving thing about the journey was that just before we went to sleep, the conductor asked for our passports. He then pocketed them. Que freak out. Que farcical conversation with minimal shared language asking what he was doing. Identity theft? Crazy Chilean laws? A man explained that it was the law and everyone else handed theirs over and we got them back in the morning. On another internal bus we had our bags searched at a check point. Another oddity is that at Arica you have to buy a platform ticket from a special ticket office in order to get onto the platforms.

Temuco is a nice town - with real coffee and excellent chocolate (Cassis in the mall which is very European in appearance). Unfortunately we suffered from pickpocketing in the bus terminal only 2 minutes after arriving. The reason we were there was to rent a car. At this point, having rented in Norway, the US, Canada and Argentina, we expect to at some stage to go to Turkey and have a conversation like this:

Me: we're thinking about driving over the border into Afghanistan, then smuggling raw sewage cross country while being shot at by the Taliban. What do you have? Car rental: how about this Nissan Micra?

Anyway, First car rental lent us a really nice clean car that we knocked around, bottomed out on a dirt road and covered in dust. Not too bad on the scale of things. Also, it was a relief to see water, grass and trees after all that time in the desert. It's very different to when we were last in Argentina, cooler, greener, a bit richer and no more need for the clay dome-shaped ovens outside peoples houses. The cars are just as battered and the meat just as tasty. Another thing we have noticed about the Argentinian people, and to some extent the Chileans, is the importance of family. Everyone talks about their family and we even saw a parade which was a celebration of an extended family. Driving in Chile was much easier than in Argentina due to road markings and less recklessness from other drivers.

We drove into the shadow of the volcano at Conguillio national park. The volcano last erupted over new year in 2008 - everyone had to be evacuated and it left areas of the park devastated. The roads are lined with warning signs, volcano traffic lights, and the odd helipad. We were in the land of the Mapuche people (who have had a hard time of it) and whole forests of Araucaria trees (monkey puzzle). It was spectacular. We camped in the park over new year. To anyone thinking about going the camping is expensive but it's a nice site with lots of hot water. Once there, we tramped up into the woods on the start of a traverse of the mountains. Sadly, to get to the top of the traverse one needs tons of gear that that we were not carrying. Also, the area for camping along the traverse had the biggest, hairiest spiders we've ever seen - sleep would have been a challenge.

The next day we tromped up the lava field. This is our third valle de la luna/valley of the moon. The volcanic ash and lava looks and feels like snow. Laura disagrees. Its not clear what she disagrees with, but she put her disagreement in. Anyway. The only life is small lizards and insects.

Laura: it looks nothing like the photos Pete: perhaps the photos predate the eruption

On news year's day we floated around the local lake on a boat. The first time we tried to hire a boat, we got it into the water, and it leaked. It leaked like a waterfall. We went back the next day, and had a great time visiting empty beaches, isolated waterfalls, and so on. Also, its time for this video. (Thanks Jen!)

After our stay in Conguillio National Park we headed out for some cheaper camping in Melipeuco and found a gem of a place. Turismo Relmucura - camping and a dinner with two glasses of wine for about 20 sterling. The host was very welcoming and gave us dinner in her house with a view of the volcano. We got to eat pinoñes, the pine nuts of the Araucaria tree. Cake, chocolate and costs (including fuel - the fuel filling man laughed at Laura´s bunch of notes) have all improved on the journey south.

We jumped on the bus down to Puerto Varas - which is very German. There are two German schools and you can buy küchen and apfelstrudel as well as empanadas. The next day we headed though the Cruce De Lagos to Argentina. We were sad to be leaving Puerto Varas, and there is lots to come back for. This is the old road, featuring 4 buses and three boats. We were a bit nervous about it, since it looks more like a old person thing to do. We got on the bus and it was full of older, somewhat richer, people. They were also people who were staying in a place with a good shower. Things got off to a rough start as we were some of the last people to get on board, and folks weren't willing to share their second seat. Its hard to tell if this was a possible smell or just being grabby. We jumped off at some waterfalls, and everyone got in a neat queue for tickets (apart from the possibly-smelly heroes of this blog, who had a empanada. (side note, this was the first breakfast that wasn't bread and cheese or muesli and water for a while). Breakfast here is poor - white bread with jam or cheese is standard. Fortunately in Bariloche I had a bacon omelette.

The falls in Parque Nacional Vicente Peŕez Rosales were kinda British - there were tons of people, there were safety fences, someone came over and complained about Laura standing on a rock. Laura then insisted on rocking a bench.

You just gotta fight the man. The first boat had great views, though it was a bit full of people. Annoying people. I've noticed that men (and it is normally men) like carrying big cameras on these sorts of trips. I like to imagine that there's a pecking order going on, and the guy with the most camera gear is the alpha male of the pack. His genes and opinions on gear are spread widely. From time to time, a challenger rises. One this boat the fight was between a guy those camera lens was longer that my arm, and another guy who had two massive SLRs.

We got to a tiny village at the far end of the lake, and everyone mercifully wandered off. Wandering was helped by the descent of horseflies the size of bumblebees. These can bite. If you want to experience a bit of South America without leaving your sofa, squeeze the flesh on your arm with pliers until you draw blood. Thats what it feels like. Laura claims they can bite though clothing.

We did go ziplining through the trees, and watched a few birds. Zip lining is great fun. We should do more of that. The lake was massive, and the locals own boats rather than cars since there are no roads. The boat's handy public address system told us that the boat takes the local kids to and from boarding school on Monday and Friday. Finding ourselves on that sailing might have been worse than a pile of Americans.

Anyway, after more boat and bus trips, we made it to Argentina. Highlights including Mount Tronador, which is covered in glaciers, and people feeding the gulls off the back of the boat.

I recall hearing a story that the Brits fighting in 1982 were surprised by the skill and lack of fear and common sense of the Argentinian pilots. These are the same talents one needs to cross the road here. You have to walk out and hope someone stops.

Since I've mentioned the war, Lonely planet's history of Argentina takes a certain amount of glee over the abilities of the army. It turns out that experience in seizing power, machine gunning thousands of dissidents, and burying them in ditches does not translate to being good at fighting someone else with guns. While I'm rambling - that bit of Fawlty Towers nails the British attitude to the other war. Props to John Cleese et al (Who wrote the script anyway?). It would have been so easy for them to take the mickey out of the Germans. Anyway.

Since we need dollars for a hotel in Buenos Aires and it is impossible to lay your hands on them in Argentina, we exchanged some Chilean pesos into dollars in Temuco. The first place quoted us about twice the normal rate. We just walked out. The second place was about what we expected. The need for dollars is because no one trusts the Argentinian Peso - or the Argentinian banks. We pay in cash for anything smaller than a flight. Chile, of course, is also mad. They have changed all the phone numbers, and no one can make a phone call. Other things we haven´t quite got used to is no plates for eating bread and a chaotic approach to queuing!

Yesterday we went white water rafting and it was so much fun. More on that another time.

Well, we are almost caught up on this thing, and its getting late, so thats about it. We have ticked over the half way point, and the end is in sight.Yeah, we are sad about this.

More photos: Camping in Conguilla National Park and Road to Bariloche.

06 Jan 2013 » The fuel saga

We have been having a long yak shave over camping fuel. We didn't bring any as airlines frown on carrying it. Lonely planet tells horror stories of airlines throwing out stoves altogether. We have a Trangia. It burns meths. This is nearly pure alcohol. If it was pure, it would be odourless and colourless. And drunks would drink it. Most countries, including the UK, insist on it having an added smell and colour, and be made undrinkable. Of course, every country picks its own colour.

We knew all this because at some stage, dad had bought some in Norway (where its called Rod spirit). The bottle came back half full, and when I went on DoE, I took the rod spirit along to finish off. The teacher running the trip sniffed the bottle, peered at the red liquid, and declared it not to be meths. I pointed out it was Norwegian, hence the funny characters, and it burnt like meths. I came home from the trip with half a bottle of British meths and half a bottle of rod spirit. My dad was not pleased. However, it could have gone worse - if I had pointed out to the teacher that rod spirit was alcohol.

At the time, I figured this was some sort of metaphor for the DoE scheme - how the scheme had been corrupted into some sort of rule following exercise, and so on and so forth. These days, I figure the old Duke would be proud of the teachers knee jerk rejection of anything foreign.

Back to 2013 (a quick hi there to the woman on Amtrak who told me that the world would end in 2012. She was completely straight faced). Finding meths in Chile wasn't so bad - we asked in an outdoor store (which was useless, rant about that coming) and they directed us to the local hardware store. The guy there tolerated our Spanish (he must have been the one guy in San Pedro who didn't work in the tourism industry) and sold us a bottle. We filled up our fuel bottle, and left the remainder with the hostel owner in Arica. He was happy to get some "People are always asking me where to get this!".

That was the start of the odyssey. When we showed up in Bariloche, we figured buying more fuel (the Chilean stuff burnt hot but quickly, and we needed more) would be easy. We are in a hiking capital of the world, right? How hard can it be?

Turns out that the walking stores around here are mostly useless unless you want to buy clothes. No idea why. However, one shop assistant pointed us to the good store, where among fishing poles, guns, and actually useful gear, we managed to buy some stuff. They didn't have fuel, and were possibly the first place to mention MSR (so many places thought we wanted MSR that I considered getting a tshirt. "No. I don't want MSR, thanks for asking"). The local hardware store sold us universal solvente - no idea what it is yet. The internet turned up a list of names used in Argentina. The local pharmacy recognized one of them, and pointed us to a small supermarket selling nothing but cleaning products. There, in among the hairspray and the toilet roll, we found our fuel. The guy there asked if it was for fondue. Told you this place was like Switzerland.

26 Dec 2012 » Birds of Arica

After a relaxing Christmas swimming and body boarding, we are heading south at last. Next stop Temuco - we get there on the 28th. We have had enough of deserts and high altitudes and its time to start walking. Somewhat better news is that we have photos from Arica on the web. A selection is below. For Christmas dinner we had a barbecue - it was remarkably tasty.

24 Dec 2012 » Christmas eve

We are still in Arica, and will be here until the 26th. We've been out to swim in the sea and watch the local wildlife - one of these is not a normal Christmas activity. The plan for tomorrow is more of the same, with a barbecue for Christmas dinner.

23 Dec 2012 » Nerd updates

Nerdy content I made a few changes to the blog. I have moved the URL to www.nuttall.im, rather than http://nuttall.im/chile/. There was not anything interesting on / anyway. I should have got mod_rewrite to do the correct rewriting, but if a url is broken for you - or something is broken for you - let me know at psn _at_ nuttall.im.

I've moved to SSL and STS. The long term goal for ssl is either to set up ajaxterm or similar, or to play around with spdy. I would like ajaxterm as a backup for putty in internet cafes, and I want to play around with spdy anyway. STS protects against sslstrip, and also does a better job at flushing out mixed content warnings.

Adam Langley's blog is pretty good at explaining what to do. I got the certs off startssl - who were puzzled by an Argentinian IP and Dublin address and wanted to ask more questions. They were convinced by a Google maps photo of the roof of my block of flats. Ob Simpson's reference. I also screwed up serving the certs with Apache - and didn't send the full chain. This broke Firefox, but not chrome. Problem found by my Dad and reproduced with ssllabs test thingo.

I have found one problem with ssl - disqus broke. It fetched a resource over http. The Google suggested turning off their 2012 update. It seems to work after that.

I added the www subdomain so I could scope cookies to www.nuttall.im, not nuttall.im. I'm not doing much with cookies, so I might change that back.

23 Dec 2012 » Arica

Some non-nerdy content: we are in Arica, right at the top of Chile. The hope had been to spend Christmas in Lauca National Park, but we haven't had any success hiring a car. We might spend Christmas here, eating barbecue and sitting on the beach. This idea is growing on me.

21 Dec 2012 » Bolivia

Hello folks, it´s Laura here. On Monday we left San Pedro for the altiplano of Bolivia. We went with Cordillera Traveller and can recommend them, we had a great Bolivian guide. The border crossing is the most remote we have ever seen. Shortly after the border we crossed into Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa which is very rich in minerals and has isolated communtities of indigenous people living in harsh and isolated conditions. We stopped at several lakes and a pool heated by hot springs which was lovely even though it was thundering and hailing when we were in it. We stopped at Geyser Sol de Manaña. It was steaming away furiously. I couldn´t go close to it because of the sulphur but Pete´s lungs are stronger and he got some photos. The most impressive lake was Laguna Colorada, a Ramsar site which is red due to the pigments contained in algae present there. There were lots of flamingoes, mostly Andean but also Chilean and Puna/James flamingoes.

For the duration of the trip we were on dirt roads in a 4x4 and at 3600-4900m altitude. We have never been anywhere so remote. The wildlife and scenery are spectacular. The first night was spent at a small dwelling in the middle of nowhere´at 4200m. We slept reasonably considering the altitude. On the second day we stopped at more lakes and interesting rock formations. One of the rock sights was depressing, lots of cans, rubbish and toilet roll strewn around from previous groups. It seems that unless bins and toilets are provided in every corner of the Earth that humans reach there will always be some idiots who ruin places with rubbish. We broke down twice but after the fuel filter had been cleaned the trusty Toyota carried us on to San Juan a small settlement at 3600m where we spent the night in a salt hostel.

On the third day we drove on to the Salar de Uyuni, an amazing salt flat which is the world´s largest at 10,582 square km. The elevation is about 3600m and in places the salt is 150m deep. In the rainy season it floods and is impassable. In summer there can be water close to the surface so a good guide is needed to avoid falling through. Our guide explained to us that the Salar rises by about 5cm every year, but the process was lost on me due to not understanding enough Spanish. It is also the largest source of Lithium in the world and some salt is harvested by locals. The next stop was the train cemetry on the outskirts of the town of Uyuni. This was thoroughly depressing, the land around the town is covered in rubbish and it is grim. We passed a night there in a basic hotel due to trouble at the border. The indigenous people of Reserva Nacional de Fauna Andina Eduardo Avaroa are due 10% of the profits from tourism but they have not received it from the Government for one and a half years, so they are striking and blocking all access to the reserve. Hopefully they will get the money soon.

On Thursday we rose at 5am for the transfer to another border. It was a long, hot and uncomfortable day. We had to pay 15 Bolivianos to leave the country and then we waited around for a couple of hours for a minibus from Chile to collect us. We´re glad to be back on paved roads.

16 Dec 2012 » Around San Pedro de Atacama

We are still in San Pedro de Atacama, after several great days. We have seen geysers, swam in hot springs, watched flamingoes and other high altitude birds, toured ruins, and marvelled at the landscape. We have avoided the local minefield.

The El Tatio geysers are at about 4200 meters, and the best time to see them is at dawn. The option we picked was to get on a tour bus at 4am. It was -5 degrees C when we arrived. The crazy option was to camp up there. The reason for the early start is that they are at their most impressive with cold air. Of course, it warms up fast....

The geysers are really impressive. Bubbling mud, towers of steam, and fantastic colours. They come from a underground river from Bolivia which touches magma. When the water reaches the surface it is 85 degrees C. We heard some horror stories about people straying away from the paths and falling through fragile crust and others going too close for the perfect photo, falling in and later dying from the burns. Thankfully everyone in our group understood that the walls meant go no further. I'm hoping the photos come out.

We have been to see two archaeological sites built by the Atacameño People - mostly the remains of buildings preserved for hundreds of years by the desert. The local museum has many of the objects found - and is excellent. Pukara de Quitor has many walls up a slope - the last stand of the locals when the Spanish showed up. Aldea de Tulor is the remains of a two thousand year old village. Its mostly buried in sand to keep it out of the wind.

We been floating in Laguna Cejar - a salt lagoon! Its 30 metres deep but you can't drown. The water is denser than people. Its lovely and relaxing. When you get out and dry off you become covered in a crust of salt! We enjoyed it so much that we might go again if time permits.

I was saying the desert was somewhat green. Biking and travelling around shows the green to be the local oasis. Beyond there, its a barren arid landscape. What bushes there are only grow when there is rain.

We went to a high altitude lake - Salar de Tara - where there were thousands of flamingoes, with the snow capped Andes of Bolivia behind. A wonderful sight.

On Monday we are heading to Bolivia for 4 days to see the largest salt flat in the world among other things. Then we'll be back in San Pedro for a night and then it's the night bus to Arica, the northernmost town in Chile. From there we hope to go to Lauca National Park and maybe we'll be camping there over Christmas.

The album and the Birds.

16 Dec 2012 » Civil rights Captcha

Warning - nerdy content I spent a lazy afternoon back in Dublin pulling apart Civil rights captcha, and I wanted to save my notes by sticking them on the blog.

Background

Civil rights captcha is a system that aims to educate people on civil rights as well as tell humans from robots.

Note that wired and therefore hacker news talk about filtering out internet idiots with this, which isn't mentioned on their site.

how secure is this?

First idea - they only have a few questions. I think each question takes a human to come up with it and review it.They can't really raise civil rights awareness with a incorrect collection of ills and they don't want to be sued for libel.

Download the page 1000 times.

for x in {0..1000}; do
  curl -s -o dataset/$x captcha.civilrightsdefenders.org
  done

Compare them to one another.

for x in dataset/*; do
  diff dataset/0 $x | egrep '>'
done | sort | uniq > questions

They have given 8 questions. Theories as to why:

they only have 8 questions.
they shard questions by IP or user agent. For example, they might only give curl users 8 questions.

They might also have many correct answers per question. With a normal captcha you only have one correct answer.

How many answers are there? Use chrome to grab a image url. Use curl to hit that url a few times. Each file has a different sha1sum (it would be nice to have a command line tool that uses a cheaper hash), so possibly a bug in the loop or a different image. Download 1000 images.

mkdir images
for x in {0..10000}; do
  curl -s -o images/$x 'http://captcha.civilrightsdefenders.org/captchaAPI/securimage_show.php?sid=xJZNm2G1mK5TQQH69mX3&newset=7&lang=en';
done

Hash all the images, see 1003 different hashes. Ideas:

different words
different lines over each word.
some sort of salting in the image to defeat hashing
bug in the loop.

Look at the images. Lots of different words, some negative, some positive. Some dupe words, but not many. Download 6k images. All of them are different.

Peer at chrome's debugger. Watch the process. The javascript fetches one image with newset=1, and two more without the newset parameter. Each request has a sid parameter set to a random string. The random string is different for each image. The newset request sets a cookie, which is sent back to the server. Example cookie:

Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=eq0llt1rjtfr0h3fa0mlorrm67; path=/

Random string notes: its not clear what purpose the random string serves. If I had to guess, it prevents http caching.

Once the user enters a answer, it does validation with a request like so.

curl --cookie 'PHPSESSID=e66bfeidg9ukm1ovvk9cn1i8f6'
'http://captcha.civilrightsdefenders.org/captchaAPI/?callback=jQuery1&code=concerned'

result:

jQuery1({"answer":"false"});

So it presumably stores a map of session to correct answer on the server side, and returns a json blob if the user's input is correct.

Code for a session

set -eux
session_id=$RANDOM
dir=session-$session_id
mkdir $dir
random=$(printf "%06daaaaaaaaaaaaaa" $session_id)
curl -s -o $dir/1.png --dump-header $dir/1.headers
"http://captcha.civilrightsdefenders.org/captchaAPI/securimage_show.php?sid=${random}&newset=1&lang

cookie=$(awk '/Set-Cookie:/{print $2}' session/1.headers | tr -d ';')
awk '/Set-Cookie:/{print $2}' $dir/1.headers
curl --cookie "$cookie" -s -o $dir/2.png --dump-header $dir/2.headers "http://captcha.civilrightsdefenders.org/captchaAPI/securimage_show.php?sid=${ra
curl --cookie "$cookie" -s -o $dir/3.png --dump-header $dir/3.headers "http://captcha.civilrightsdefenders.org/captchaAPI/securimage_show.php?sid=${ra

echo $dir
echo 'work out the answer'
read answer

curl -s --dump-header $dir/answer.headers --cookie "$cookie" "http://captcha.civilrightsdefenders.org/captchaAPI/?callback=jQuery1&code=${answer}"

Can this be brute forced?

Start out by sending the contents of /usr/share/dict/british-english

% wc -l /usr/share/dict/british-english
99156 /usr/share/dict/british-english

It takes 30s to test 100 words. So to test british-english would take 8 hours. New plan: find a list of words for emotions on the internet. like so.

~700 words, so under 5m to test them all. Doesn't work.
How about solving the captcha, verifying it, then sending 10 verify requests for random words, then trying to verify the correct answer again? Fails.
How about trying a random word, then trying the correct answer? Fails.
How about trying the correct answer twice? Works both times.

Even though the key space is quite small, O(100)s of words, brute forcing is hard because any false answer drops the session.

Conclusion

This is more robust than I expected. A lot of the attacks I expected to work don't work. There are fairly few questions, but the questions don't matter. There are O(100s) of text answers, but its generating a new image for each request, meaning that there isn't any point in solving the images offline (or spending time trying to use their site as a oracle for the images). It reduces down to the normal image captcha problem - OCRing images online. Its also probably vulnerable to dos attacks on opening many sessions.

Post-script: actually reading their docs shows that its based on php captcha.

12 Dec 2012 » San Pedro de Atacama

Quick update, mostly to let my Mum know we haven't been kidnapped. We are in San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. The Atacama is the driest desert on Earth. We've been out for a walk, and its not as dry as I expected - there are streams and life along the watercourses. Of course, where there is no water, there is just dust.

The journey was spectacular - massive salt flats, colourful rocks, and more wildlife, including flamingos. We're popping back to take a closer look at the flamingos tomorrow. Laura is hoping to see the rare James' flamingo, avocets and any other waders that might be hanging around above 4000 meters. The pass at the top of the Andes is 4170 meters - high enough to cause headaches, weird tingling in the fingers, and a bit of nausea.

We're been out stargazing, and the town is lovely. Not much more to report. The whole album

09 Dec 2012 » Birding in the Cloud Forest

On Friday, we rolled out of bed and attempted to get to El Ray National park. Sadly, the rain was not on our side. The road to El Ray is a 47km dirt track with many river crossings, and our guide - who was in a real 4x4 - didn't fancy doing it in the driving rain. Instead we headed for his local birding spots, and on the way back towards Salta he demonstrated the realness of his 4x4 (and the fact it wasn't a chelsea tractor) by pulling another car out of a ditch on a flooded road. The rescue was very Argentina - everyone stopped, and half the local males got out, started running around in rain and the deep mud helping, finding rope, tying it to the car and to our 4x4, and in the end pulling the car and passengers to safety. The other half of the population lent on their horns - we've even seen drivers toot at the cops here (The garda would find a reason to arrest you if you did that). Final twist to the rescue was our guide producing a Crocodile dundee knife to cut the rope off the front of his car. (Final final twist - Laura found a online review of a tour near Salta that described a mostly silent guide leading his party deeper and deeper into the forest, slashing at vegetation as he went. I'm pretty certain I've seen that movie).

Anyway, he took us birding, both by the lake and into the cloud forest. He was fantastic and we saw a lot. Photos I'm happy with:

.

Spot the hummingbird in the last frame :-)

The whole album. We got to spend a night at Selva Montana Ecolodge which is a great place and has fresh milk - the first we've had since leaving Ireland. If you're wondering - we went with Mario from clark expediciones - well worth it!

09 Dec 2012 » Road trip to Cachi

We didn't do very much on Monday - we had hopes of going to the museum, but it was closed. The museum would defy all attempts to visit it. We did do a pile of planning and sorting stuff out, as well as tromping up the local hill. On Tuesday, we jumped in a hire car and took off on a road trip.

We drove the southern tourist loop from Salta - down to Cafayate, up a smaller road to Cachi, then though Los Cardones national park back to Salta. The lady in the tourist information office assured us we could do this in two days, sadly, this was not the case.

The road down to Cafayate was kinda boring until we got into the desert in Quebrada de Cafayate. Once again, weird and wonderful rock formations drawn by the wind and water. It was a lovely fast drive, although the Salta traffic is insane.

Cafayate is a lovely place. Its the second town in Argentina for wine, and if you are looking for a place to drink wine, go there rather than Mendoza. The local wine even comes in ice cream form! We wandered around for a while, drank some of the local wine, ate empanadas while drinking more wine from a jug, and peeked at the local museum - tons of pottery recovered from local archaeological digs. The best find in the local wine is torrontes - its a lovely white that people say is hard to get outside Argentina and in our opinion beats Sauvignon blanc hands down. We were a bit pushed for time, so we couldn't stay a day, much as we wanted to.

The drive to Cachi was mostly on dirt roads. We set out zooming along on tarmac, through vineyards, looking at wonderful mountains with the sun blazing down. We overtook a local in his junker. One of the things that got me when I moved to Ireland is that one sees more cars with dented paneling etc than one does in the UK. Argentina lowers the standards a lot more :-). There are plenty of cars from the 60s, 70s and 80s on the road and some are about 50% rust on the outside, so who knows what state the axles, suspension etc are in. We promptly hit the dirt road, and crawled along at 30 kilometres a hour. The local promptly overtook us, going much the same speed as he was going on tarmac. We laughed.

The scenery on the drive is Fantastic. Look at the pictures!

We saw parrots, woodpeckers, a small American Kestrel and a few Crested Caracaras among other birds.

We got a flat about 20 kilometers from Cachi. The car had been shaking about so much we didn't hear it go, but a passerby tooted to let us know. Two people who had never changed a tyre before (myself and Laura, if there is any confusion) jumped out, jacked the car up, and promptly failed to loosen the nuts. No amount of stomping, standing, and brute force would move the nuts. In the meantime, the car was heating up - by the end I couldn't hold my camera and the steering wheel was being held with fingertips. We asked a local for help in poor Spanish - he did the same stomping routine. He asked a friend, who had a extender for the wrench. The extra metre of leverage did the trick. Science! The nuts had probably expanded in the heat.

Since we were now without a spare tyre, had hundreds of kilometers on dirt roads to go, and it was getting late, we stopped in Cachi. Phoned up Hertz, who said they would deliver a spare in a hour or two. The guy who was assigned to deliver the new spare looked at his map and decided not to bother, and also not to tell anyone. Grr. We spent the night in a lovely hotel - El Cortijo Hotel Boutique. The thing about staying in hostels is that when we stay in a hotel, we wander about going "this is so nice! Feel the sheets! And air con!". The view was also lovely.

In the morning, we found the local tyre dealership (a massive operation - something tells me the owner doesn't want the road paved), got a new tyre, and set off. The road down to Salta is a fun drive. Through Los Cardones national park, the road is as straight as the eye could see, and lined with warnings about speed being enforced. I figure that once or twice a year the cops go and ticket everyone for racing on the road. The park is stuffed full of cactus. A legend tells of a priest who fled over the plateau at night - thinking the cacti were Indians chasing him.

The lack of turns in the park is made up for by the road down from it. The Satellite photo fails to show that it loses about 2000 metres in height - and its unpaved. The photo of the edge is a bit too scary.

View Larger Map

We just about managed to navigate around Salta and get the car back in time. In short, if you're planning on going - go to Cafayate for wine, take a few days to drive there and back (not two), and take a wrench extender!

Other advice for fellow travelers is to be prepared for the money situation here. In short it is crazy. Lots of small towns have no ATM or ATMs which run out of money. That's OK, it's South America and we've managed to plan and carefully budget our way around it. What is more frustrating is that even in large towns many places including accommodation (decent hotels included) and restaurants will not take card payments. This means that if you are travelling to an area with no ATM you need to start extracting the money days in advance due to the limit of cash that you can take out in one day. It also means that if you are staying for a few nights in one accommodation you need to start the withdrawal process days ahead in order to be able to pay at check-out. The other approach is to come with money in several current accounts.

All the photos.

02 Dec 2012 » The Desert

We are in Salta, after many hours on buses. album link.

We can tell you are not from around here, you are so white. -- some gent to Laura.

vital stats

Location: Salta, Argentina.
beard state: I found a razor. I'm happy about this.
steak tally: 7

We left Mendoza on the bus to San Juan. We found ourselves with a hour and a half layover there, almost all of it went into talking to bus companies about tickets. Transactions that would be trivial back home are nightmares of spanglish and pointing here. We then headed out into the desert - miles and miles of desert - to San Agustin de Valle Fertil (which everyone calls Valle Fertil). The bus ride was pretty comfortable, apart from whenever we crossed a dried up watercourse. Rather than bridging the drop, or filling in the drop, the road just dropped down and up again. The bus driver, being used to this sort of thing, thought slowing down was weak.

The name comes from the valley being more fertile than the desert, not because its more fertile than, say, Ireland. Its a really nice place and we recommend it. The hostel reviews on tripadvisor were scary, so we checked into a hotel. Turns out this was a wise move as the local campsite also appears to be a scrapyard, and shortly after we got to the hotel, it started to hail massive stones. This would have made getting the tent up something of a challenge.

The reason people come to Valle Fertil is that its the closest place to two parks in the desert, Talampaya National Park and Ischigualasto Provincial Park. These are still well over a hundred kilometers from Valle Fertil. Both parks are colossal, but both let visitors into a small area of the park by tour only. Both are famous fossil grounds, and one has rare and enigmatic pteroglyphs. Both have all extremes of weather (burning hot with no shade in the day, freezing at night, high winds, and sometimes snow lying on the cacti). I think they don't want people stealing stuff or being sunburnt to death.

We went on the tour of both, which is a 11 hour day. We got a local driver to do the driving. I would suggest that route for other folks interested in visiting - rather than taking two trips over two days. We think the three days of travelling there and back were well worth it.

Talampaya had a tour of the canyon system, miles of desert, red rock shaped by wind and water, and traces of the civilisation that lived there 6000 years ago. The pteroglyphs are tiny and hard to see - its incredible that people found them again. The canyons have a smear of green where the river has shrunk too, but there are traces of water a few feet up the canyons walls. Fear the flash flood.

The view out over the desert looks like nothing else I have seen. The rock formations are fantastic. I'm hoping the photos do them justice.

We whizzed off to Parque Provincial Ischigualasto. The landscape here is like another planet. My first impressions were of a dry dusty landscape and a wind that threatened to blow the doors off the car. The on-site museum protects the fossils from the wind and the water.

The tour is conducted from your car - in our case the ranger rode in the front seat - and it was excellent. This would not be a place to bring your own car, unless you hate the paintwork. The landscape lives up to the name Valle de la Luna - valley of the moon. A barren, lifeless, dusty gray landscape, marked only by the ravages of the wind and the occasional rainstorms. The ranger said this was the closest to the moon surface we could go to without leaving Earth. We saw fossils in the rock, more wildlife, and spectacular rock formations. Having the ranger explain the local bird life was great. Hopefully we'll stick up some of the photos from Laura's camera.

We spent the morning afterwards wandering around the town - the local museum was either closed or being used to store loud, violent dogs - and up by the lake we saw birds and an iguana. This is the first time we have seen one in the wild!

The bus back to San Juan was much the same, though it was carrying a couple of cops. As far as I can see, the police in Argentina are either slackers of the highest order, or never bother to take their uniforms and guns off. One does see them cuddling their girlfriends while in uniform. We still have not been shaken down.

San Juan is off the backpacking trail, so us with our crazy backpacks was the talk of the town. Much discussion of the size of Ireland compared to Argentina, the greenness of Ireland, if we were German, and my or my mum's view of Scottish independence.

We had many hours between buses in San Juan, so we went out for dinner. The steakhouse not merely had a window into the kitchen (watch the flames! Watch the chef hacking giant lumps of meat then tossing them onto his barbecue), it served the largest steak I have ever seen.

Of course, by the time we had eaten, we were massively short on time, leading to a fast taxi ride and a sprint up the bus station steps. The bus was a bit late, saving our bacon. This was a 16 hour overnight bus trip, and we had been worrying about it. Turns out that the bus ride was pretty nice - more comfortable than anything up to business class. Seats recline, wine and dinner at your seats (wine great, dinner terrible), tons of leg room. This put British public transport (and every airline I've flown with) to shame.

Salta is very nice, though we haven't seen much of it so far. Having spent three and a half days on buses in the last week, we want to be based in Salta for a while. The plan is to head back into Chile for the new moon.

27 Nov 2012 » Through the Andes to Mendoza

We are in Mendoza, Argentina. This place claims to be the wine capital of the world.

vital stats

Location: Mendoza, Argentina.
beard state: I can not wait to find a razor.
ping time to nuttall.im: 273ms.
ping time to google.com: 58ms .
steak tally: 3 (and a pile of BBQ).

We took the bus here. Its quite a ride. The border crossing was mental, we were there for 2 hours. Apparently that is standard and can be longer. The scenery was fantastic but it is all very dry. We arrived in Mendoza to find that the hostel was having an asado - an Argentine barbecue. After all day on the bus this went down a storm. There was great wine out of unmarked bottles and we met some good folks from various countries. The meat is as tasty as people say, juicier and with more flavour than anything we've had before.

Notes for folks interested in the same journey - you get the bus from Universidad de Santiago, its worth booking in advance (we hung around the bus station for hours until the bus went),and Chilean bus rides are both cheap and comfortable.

Today we went to Maipu to cycle around vineyards on a tandem. It was good but hard work figuring out where to go and how to pay. There's a major shortage of coins in Argentina. Our bus card ran out of money and there was nowhere to put credit on it but fortunately the driver let us travel back to Mendoza for free. The good news was we ate excellent food and drank wine before fighting the bus.

Simple things have become difficult. There is no obvious system when it comes to crossing the road so it is always dicey. There are giant holes in the pavement that threaten to suck you into a subterranean underworld. There are some fancy new cars but most of them are ancient and are hanging apart and totally battered. When we were on the bus we saw a guy riding in the back of a pick up truck on a fast road when there was a perfectly good passenger seat.

Communicating is difficult but we are picking up more words bit by bit. Fortunately the people here are very patient and helpful. The pronounciation in both Chile and Argentina is quite different which means that sometimes we are not understood when we speak what we were taught. It is amazing how many people have un poco de ingles though.

It is roasting hot. We are leaving here tomorrow and heading on to San Agustin de Valle Fertil to see some national parks. Yet another day on the buses.

25 Nov 2012 » Santiago

We are back in Santiago, where the internet flows freely and there is an English-speaking church full of welcoming people. We are having a rest day, and will be on the bus tomorrow to go to Mendoza in Argentina. The great thing about having working internet is we can upload some photos, links below.

The flight out of Easter Island was somewhat amusing. We hauled down the tent, then hauled our stuff to the airport (which looked like airports the world over, with the exception of a pile of island-este artwork). When we checked in - a process of signing many many releases for our baggage, they explained the flight was delayed for four hours. This explanation was communicated by giving us a pile of lunch vouchers. It turns out that the rules of the air (namely, feed people when delayed) apply even if one is on a small volocano in the south pacific. Other rules that seem to apply include drinking all water before getting on plane. Rules that get ignored include removing all metal from pockets before going though the detector.

Since the airport is a runway and a large shed, we were whisked off to a place in town for lunch at the expense of LAN. Said place had not had their delivery of food for the day. The sole thing they offered was garlic prawns. Pause. We could not imagine why they were on the menu to begin with. We clearly saw why they were the only things that the diners last night had not eaten. We worried about being on a plane for many hours with large numbers of people who had all eaten garlic prawns. We did not worry about vampires. We did worry about food poisoning. The waitress saw our faces and said they also had some smoked salmon. Saved!

The last couple days on the island were fun. We took a boat out around the sea stack Motu Kau Kau and another two islands. We saw Masked Boobys and Great Frigatebirds. It was wonderful but many other species of seabirds once nested on the islands so it was also a reminder of the consequences of unsustainable exploitation and overgrazing among other ecological issues.

We tromped up Rano Kau, an old volcano with the ceremonial village Orongo on the top. The view into the crater is like looking at another landscape altogether. The village consists of many restored stone buildings, which reminded me of Skara Brae.

On the last night we found ourselves in a small restaurant which a couple at the campsite suggested. Turns out this place had a giant barbeque. We found ourselves stuffed with only a few bites... on average we're eating about two meals a day, partly due to the heat, partly due to lack of need for more. The way we wash our clothes has also changed:

22 Nov 2012 » Easter Island

We are on Easter Island. It is a magical place.

vital stats

Location: Easter Island, about 2000 miles from the chilean coast, about 8000 miles from the UK.
beard state: bristly and annoying.
ping time to nuttall.im: 2212ms.
ping time to google.com: 1306ms (and 15% packet loss).
steak tally: 3 Laura thinks we should keep a tally.

We flew in on Monday, watched a massive downpour from the airport concourse, and got a ride to the campsite. The fact that the ride was in the load-bed of a pickup truck did suggest that this was a different place. We pitched the tent, and went for a look around. There are palm, coconut and banana trees all over the place. No one wears seatbelts. The Chilean naval base looks like a beach hut. We have taken hundreds of photos, A crude sneak preview.

The statues are massive and eerie. We spent some time staring at them. There are no signs as to why they are there or how they were made.

Pete They must have been raised by aliens. Wait, I probably said that yesterday.
Laura: Yesterday you just pointed and said aliens! aliens!

Tuesday we went horse riding up to the top of the Island. This was massively painful, and was probably a mistake. We are plotting making a parody of I´m on a horse. Afterwards we staggered around the museum (very much like Newgrange - they have no idea why the statues are there) and then wandered into town to drink picso sours until we stopped hurting. The local beer is wonderful too.

Yesterday we rented a car (a fake 4x4 - it looked the part but didn´t have four wheel drive) and zoomed around the sites. The sites are wonderful - hundreds of statues just standing there. We drove around to the island´s beach, which was paradise. White sand, lovely clear water, coconut trees. We watched the fishes swim past - a sight I have never seen in Britain or Ireland. There were flat fish and schools of smaller fish and the occasional large fish of different sorts. The beach had a excellent warning sign: danger, falling coconuts. It was just spectactular.

Notes from Laura: Car hire here is very simple, you ask for a car and you get the keys, no questions asked about a licence and no insurance. The locals ride around in the back of trucks and whole families ride around on a single motorbike without helmets. The Daihatsu chugged along and the engine sounded knackered. As soon as we got off the tarmac road and on to the dirt tracks we knew why all the controls felt so loose and shaky.

The bird diversity here is low although there are islands offshore which are important for seabirds. The highlight so far has been Red-tailed tropicbirds. Common diuca finchs are everywhere but they are non native. One bird of prey species is also everywhere and is probably the Chimango Caracara can´t be sure yet. Now back to Pete...

We´re met some interesting people here. Main source of giggling was an american family on the horse riding trip. The adult son was on his gap year in Buenos Aires, and the parents had flown down to vist him and tour the sites. Half way around the riding, Mum started nagging son about the fact he was not wearing sun cream on the back of his neck. "But mum, I do not want toooo". We also watched a guy run around the statues at Rano Raraku. He also did handstands in front of them. He was quietly mocked by a pair of german women walking ahead of us.

I sense the nerds might be interested in the internet connection. I suspect a sat connection. It has about 10kbs of bandwidth. I also think the router here is doing dialup to a number in mainland Chile, since its the second hop of the traceroute that has the crazy latency. ssh is pretty show but not terrible. web browsing is painful. The Picasa uploader for photos is useless. I think there are a few sites out there thinking we are doing a slowaris attack.

18 Nov 2012 » Valparaiso

Yesterday we went to Valparaiso, which is home to the planet's strategic reserve of Napoleonic tat. Its a lovely port on the coast near Santiago. It was a happening place until an earthquake and the opening of the Panama Canal pretty much wiped it out. Sir Francis Drake torched the place, so they are always happy when more brits show up. (just kidding).

In the good old days, ships bound for California had to sail around Cape Horn in the very south of Chile, then past tons of Patagonian fjords (Slartibartfast would be proud), until getting to Valparaiso, the first real port. The opening off the canal cut off the need to go around Cape Horn. It also cut off Valparaiso's source of income. The main things of note in the town now are the Naval College and port. We wandered around Naval Muesum, which hangs off the College.

More history: The Royal Navy began a massive demobilisation as Napoleon was shipped off to Elba. At the same time, the South American republics were fighting for independence from Spain. The Chilean founding fathers (one of whom has a massively confused ancestry and the surname O'Higgins, making many street names sound familar) suggested to out-of-work Royal Navy officers that they might like a job. The prize catch of this was Thomas Cochrane, who is a big deal in the history of the Chilean Navy. Approx one and a half Nelson's worth of a deal. The museum goes into this in some detail.

The main problem the museum has is that Chile hasn't actually been at war with anyone for over 100 years. The Coup is politely brushed over, though there is a room about a admiral who ended up in charge, with no discussion of how he became president.

The rest of the town is lovely - full of narrow winding streets, street murals, funicular railways, and a wonderful view. Go for a wander if you're ever there.

This afternoon we wandered up San Cristobal Hill. The view from the top over Santiago is immense. The city sprawls for miles.

We have actually managed to put up photos from Valparaiso.

17 Nov 2012 » Wandering around Santiago

We have been in Santiago for about two days now. In real terms, this is the end of our stay. We had assumed we would conk out due to jetlag, but that has not really happened. I think this is due to the time difference being pretty small - only three hours - and due to us being tired enough to sleep on the flight. We are staying at a lovely hostel in Barrio Brasil. Its a old building, full of wood panelling. We do not know what it was before it was a hostel - the guy on the desk thinks it was a government building.

The Hostel is in a area full of car parts shops. Every single business seems to be a car parts shop. No idea why. No one we have asked knows why. In the middle of the neighbourhood is a monkey puzzle tree. All the buildings are old and dusty and coming apart.

On the first day, we took the metro out to Las Condes - a modern neighbourhood that reminded me of Vancouver. Its has the same high rise glass buildings and looming mountains. Unlike Canada the mountains are brown - the same colour as the hills over the bay from San Francisco, but much closer and much bigger.

One of the things I like here is that eating and drinking often takes place outside, on the street. The climate supports that. Every now and again, some crazy guy suggests that Edinburgh could have the same cafe culture. Then it starts raining and people make fun of him.

On the first night we ate in a great restaurant and had our first pisco sours, a favourite drink here. They are made from distilled grapes and are very refreshing. Calf testicles were on the menu but we avoided them and had raw wild boar instead.

The second day we wandered out of the neighbourhood around the hostel and into la centro. We toured the old buildings of Santiago. The national museum is a very old building just off the central square, is pretty much incomprehensible without a good grasp of spanish. It also cuts right on a coup in 1973, which was a bit creepy. We then wandered over to the presidential palace and the statue of Allende. The main thing thats different about here is that all the old buildings, offices of government etc are overshadowed by lots of massive grey tower blocks.

We wandered up Cerro Santa Lucia - a hill near the center of town. Looked out over miles of tower blocks and smog. We wandered through the rush hour traffic - which is completely insane by the way, I feel like I am taking an advanced course in jay-walking - into Barro Bellavista. This neighbourhood reminded me of Fremont in Seattle, though without the "set your watch back five minutes" sign. We shunned climbing up a hill to see the papal statue.

We ate curry for dinner. Its not that, uh, exotic, but we freaked out at the idea that we might not eat curry for three months. Was good. So far, a good time being had by all. Had hoped to get some photos on the web, but that has not happened yet.

16 Nov 2012 » Google Authenticator

Warning More nerd content.

I found myself typing this (and the post before it) over Putty (Note for the more twitchy - Strong encryption is legal in England (where is computer is) and Chile and Argentina. The list of countries that outlaw strong encryption is pretty similar to the list of countries with records of making citizens vanish.) Putty does not understand ssh keys in whatever format openssh uses. I dare not dig deeper. Having a system where I download a ssh key onto a untrusted machine is not wise. Having a system where I enter a password into a untrusted machine also is not wise

To deal with this, I set up Google authenticator for pam. This works pretty well so far - on a trusted machine, I can continue to use ssh keys, and on a untrusted machine, I can use the same one time system as I use for email etc. I also have rescue codes in my pocket incase I lose my phone.

15 Nov 2012 » Santiago

We've made it to Santiago! Long trip, lots of packing. Looking forward to decompressing a bit.

Vital stats

Location: Santiago, Chile.
Beard state: soft sandpaper
Ping time to google.com: 42ms (200.10.266.231)
Ping time to nuttall.im: 290ms

When I was a kid I played Spycat which depicts a guy trying to get his stuff together and leave London. Thats roughly what the last few days have been like, without the cctv and the eighties parody. After two days of solid packing and little sleep, we made it to the airport with all our stuff - thanks to Mark our pastor for giving us a lift :-)

We flew into Madrid airport. The plane was only about a third full - probably should have been a warning sign - and the pilot didn't think much of this new-fangled concept of keeping his plane going in a straight line on takeoff. The airport was massive and completely empty. It was like wandering around in a ghost town. The size and quiet brought to mind a concrete cathedral. It reminded me of the new terminal at Dublin before it got airlines, or the cinema in eastpoint. Why do countries always decide to upgrade their capital airport just before the money runs out?

We had a many hour wait for the next flight, so we popped into Madrid on the metro. The metro was completely packed. Theory one: Madrid is some sort of prison camp for obnoxious people from all over Europe. They get carted off, taught spanish, and told to live there until they get manners. The only reason we haven't heard about this is the eurozone - if Britain would just join or Ireland would just stop losing money, we too could ship our folks off to Madrid. I also suspect the Spanish are dreading the arrival of Cameron. Theory two was that it was rush hour, which has the advantage of being simple and is probably true.

As I said, we've been working on speaking Spanish. Fears became flesh when we heard the first announcement in Spanish on the plane. We're probably doomed. Getting dinner in Madrid did nothing to reassure us. Leaving the restaurant, we promptly found ourselves close to a demonstration, along with many riot police. And when we got back to the airport, it was announced that Spain was having a general strike. This possibly explains the quiet airport.

I read through "In Patagonia" and "The old Patagonian express" on the flight; good reads. We'll probably get rid of the books soonish to save on weight. Paul Theroux makes fun of travel books that talk about arriving in places by plane "the toy town appearance of a city in the Andes" but for us it wasn't like that. We got on the plane, rejected the food and fell asleep. At some point - possibly after coffee - we flipped up the window blinds and the Andes were right there. Quite a sight. (Note from Laura: this is a classic case of Pete's reserve - it was an outstanding view).

We've survived Chilean customs (quick panic about the pepper pot we were carrying), pushed past the taxi drivers and got into town by bus. First impressions are its somewhat like California. Its hot and dusty, roads are big. They seem to be building concrete tower blocks here - possibly due to the earthquake. Seems crazy to me to build high and heavy on top of a fault line, but what do I know. Laura thinks the place is crumbly. No idea what she means. I fear her apple crumble. The hostel is nice, and has good internet. Woo.

12 Nov 2012 » packing

Today I watched Last exit to Springfield twice. This must be what being unemployed is like. Soon I will vote tory. In other news, I rang my british bank and asked them not to block my card. They told me the blocking was done by an automatic system, it was impossible to override said system, and it was for my protection. The back of my head went duh duh dun-duh duh.

We've been packing like crazy. Turns out that we have both way more and way less stuff than we thought. The good news that stuff packs really well into our storage space. The bad news is we have way too much stuff. Seems like we've been packing for weeks and weeks.

Vaguely amusing side story here - Laura has labelled the three euro boxes sold by the storage place as a complete rip off, a scam more blatant than my folder full of 419 mail. So we've popped around to the local off licenses and picked up tons of old booze boxes. A good chunk of them are for Prosecco. Who are our neighours? What are they celebrating? How do we get invites? The world is full of questions.

Its not all cardboard and tape. Some recent photos from around the area:

The schedule is simple - tomorrow, put everything in storage, and wednesday, get on plane ;-).

08 Nov 2012 » updates

I have one day of work left. My boss points out that I'm not being fired, and I even get to keep my badge. And my gun¹. Sarah, our admin, can't wait to have another free desk. She hasn't actually said "when do you go? I need the space", but she's thinking it hard. The other work related content is

Laura: While you don't work for the daily mail, you do work for google, which lets people find daily mail articles on cancer, so you're pretty much internet Hitler.

Laura's been making us learn Spanish. The idea is that we'll not be one of those annoying people who expect the whole world to speak English. Instead we'll be saying No lo entiendo a lot. The guide book claims that Chile is one of the places where the locals are really glad the visitors attempt to speak the language. Sounds like a lie. Reminds me of the Norway guidebook that claimed that speed limits were carefully followed and ruthlessly enforced. At the point in which the tenth BMW doing 150% of the limit blew past us, we saw the error of our ways. Or the walking in Ireland book which directed us into not one but two bogs. Getting to the top of one hill in the driving rain and miles of bog, then seeing the dry trail up the other side wasn't a big enough hint. A month or so later, still following the book, we found ourselves sliding down a very boggy, very steep hillside. You might wonder how one can have a non-flat bog. This is article seven of my mysteries of Ireland questions, after such greats as pondering the celtic tiger, the catholic church, and people still living in Limerick. Anyway, ranting over. We will see how the Spanish works out.

I wandered along and got some Chilean and Argentine money earlier in the evening. It came from the currency exchange place near Trinty college, which was the only place in all of Dublin to have south american money. Said place gives the faint air that its predecessor was target of a 4am ram raid. Or possibly a ned with a shotgun. Its hard to tell.

Chilean money reminds me of the collapse of the Wilmar republic. Its not that Chile is going into any sort of depression, its just that the numbers are so big. Argentine money, on the other hand, is shaky enough that places often just want to be paid in dollars. Sad.

We've started packing. This is not going well.

^{1. Just kidding.}

05 Nov 2012 » trains

"Are the train tracks still broken?" -- the internet

05 Nov 2012 » flying

We've been looking at flying around. Laura has been worrying about the standards of planes. Actual conversation this morning:

Pete: This plane looks completely normal.
Laura: Pete! Its like a hobby plane!
Pete: Hey! Its got windows n stuff.

04 Nov 2012 » nerdy notes

I'm a nerd. Here's some nerdy notes.

Cameras: I'm planning to take my point and shoot. its maybe a year old. Its grand. Now the bad news is that I can take a lot of photos - over 100 a day. So amazon sent us 10 8g sd cards. Betcha we still run out. Betcha that I look at the idea of only 80g of storage and laugh. I've also bought space on Picasa which was dead cheap. The hope there is that we'll be able to get the originals back through takeout later. Facebook is much more of a pain in this respect. We've also got some blank cds, which we'll try and back stuff up onto. The fear here is both losing or damaging a SD card, and also theft.

My Camera can upload photos direct to the internet. Making this functionallity work has been a pain in the backside. It also seems to drain the battery. We'll see if it works out there.

We'll probably want to get into email and facebook while we're out there. We'll probably do it from internet cafes with interesting collections of malware. So 2 factor and SMS auth. SMS auth is a bit more of a pain as we don't really know phone numbers out there - experience and common sense argues for buying a new sim card. I've also picked up a yubikey for lastpass. We'll probably still have problems.

I'm taking an android phone, and to reduce the impact of it being lost or stolen I've set up the android / google apps corp system for registering phones the control panel. It lets you ring phones, wipe phones remotely and tells you where they are. Its a google apps for your domain feature that actually costs money, but its pretty cheap. And it means I never lose my phone again. I also set up the normal security settings - encrypting the phone and so on. We'll see.

This site is hosted on a little virtual machine sitting in London. To get into it I depend on ssh keys. I've stuck those keys on my phone and can connect with connectbot, but using a unix text editor with a phone's keyboard may drive me insane. We'll see how much blogging we do ;-). I have thought about putting putty and the keys on a USB stick and plugging it into internet cafes - we'll see.

I also have a kindle. I like the kindle as its dead light and has a ton of books on it. Laura points out the kindle will probably be nicked. We'll see. At least I bought a waterproof bag for it at some earlier point.

04 Nov 2012 » eating up

Laura pointed out to me last night that we have been eating up bits of food (so we don't have to throw it away when we go) since we got back from Salisbury and Bruges. Thats something like five weeks of eating. Worrying. However, we have made ribs twice. Recipe is tasty and easy:

3 spring onions, white part only, finely sliced
1 tablespoon sesame oil
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 teaspoon wholegrain mustard
1 teaspoon chilli paste
3 tablespoons hoisin sauce.
3 tablespoons mango chutney.
½ sea salt
¼ black pepper
125ml Coopers pale ale
2 racks of american style ribs (600-700g)

Its really easy to make. Combine everything but the ribs together in a bowl - this part smells pretty bad. Cut up the ribs into eatable sizes and stick them in a deep tray. Pour the marinade over the ribs and leave them. The book says for a hour or two, but we normally leave them for a day. Stick them in the oven at a low heat for a hour or so, then grill them. Avoid comments from Laura about the lack of salad, veg, etc.

Swiped from the cooking with beer book my parents got us. Its a tasty tasty book.

03 Nov 2012 » First!

We're off to Chile!

Background: we've been talking about taking a chunk of time off. Its a good time for both Laura and I to take time off work, so now is the moment. We were talking about going to New Zealand and Australia, but we found photos of Patagonia on the internet, and our minds were set.

We've away for 3 months, going to Chile and Argentina. We have a flight into Santiago and another one out of Buenos Aires three months later. We'll see what happens in between ;-).

We're going to move out of our flat in Dublin - Its a nice place, but it needs some work, and the only way that work will happen is if the landlord has to rent it to some other sucker. We're going though all our stuff, sticking it in boxes, and getting it in storage. Its remarkable how stuff accumulates if you aren't moving all the time.

We've bought a tent, thanks to Dave. Its very nice, and weighs about nothing. We hauled it down to Galtymore, (see photos) where we froze to death. Worrying. It was well below freezing though.

We've started packing stuff for the trip. Long long lists. The yak shaving goes on forever. We've spent tons of time on the internet, looking at photos and blogs and reports. This is why we have started this thingo. Perhaps we'll be a warning to others.

Currently we're down to a week and a bit before going. Doesn't feel like a long time...

03 Nov 2012 » first aid

Among the unnerving thing about this trip is the first aid kits. We've both done lots of walking, and we've carried a first aid kit for much of that. However, south america ups the ante with this stuff. we've bothgotten a spray of vaccines, and we've spent time buying yet more stuff for first aid. There's something weird about standing in the tiny tiny first aid section of boots, going "where are your eye patches? or your sutures? How am I going to keep myself alive with hair products?" Al least its not a this level yet.