Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Colca Canyon Condors

We left Ariquipa for a couple of days to do a quick trip to the Colca Canyon.  Which ever company we went with would likely prove irrelevant as here as elsewhere in South America there are far more tour booking offices then actual tour companies (despite claims by every agent that the bus is theirs!)

The tour involved a long bus trip to Chivay with a couple of stops to medicate ourselves with Coca (yes that’s coca not cocoa) in the form of sweets, tea or just chewing the leaves.  This is meant to help alleviate the symptoms of altitude sickness (and if you believe the hype stop you needing to eat, sleep, drink, keep you alert and any number of other side effects.. of course that sounds more like the effects from the processed form to me).  As we approached the high point on the road, marked by the thousands of small cairns of rock, each of which represents a wish made, we discovered one of the members of our party wasn’t handling the altitude very well.  We reached 4900m  the highest point we have ever attempted to walk  and we were both out of breath after just a few steps. We were a bit worried for the woman as she was planning to continue upward after the tour to do the Inca trail.  We were  grateful that we had spent the last 3 days at 2600m in Areiquipa so we had acclimatised a little.  (We suspect we went higher on the bus trip between Salta and San Pedro de Attacama but we sat the whole way for that.) 

From there we made our way down into the township of Chivay a spectacularly green valley after the barrenness of the road that we had journeyed along.  We were fortunate enough to see some of the local dancing in the town centre that we suspect was put on for one of the more expensive tours, (our organised dancing for dinner was somewhat less inspired).

Waking up for the second time the next day (our five o’clock wake up call was actually delivered at 1am!!!) we bundled into the bus to the Colca canyons.  We played the part of tourists on the way even paying to hold a hawk and take some photos.  Arriving a little early we walked up the path to the Condor view point that most tours take on the way out,  having it to ourselves was beautiful and relaxing.  Reaching the view point we were given two hours for the main event.  We hadn’t expected much as the photos in all the tour agents led us to suspect the condors wouldn’t come within 30 meters of us,  We were incredibly surprised as the morning went on different groups of condors would rise up on thermals out of the canyon some of which came well within 2 meters of us.  We spent a very happy two hours snapping pictures and enjoying the flight of the condors and other birds, the only disappointment was the “Traditional music” that a group of locals would play for the tourists disrupting the tranquillity of the place far more than the quantity of watchers would have.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Nuns... with servants

The highlight of Arequipa is the Monasteria de Santa Catelina.  The convent was founded in 1579, 40 years after the arrival of the Spanish to Arequipa.  Initially most of the nuns came from rich families and so the convent is a little more elaborate than you might expect as the nuns weren’t quite willing to give up their previous life.  There was however a pronouncement by the bishop sometime in the 1600s limiting each nun to only one servant.  The convent is absolutely beautifully and a warren of small streets and smaller rooms, with kitchens littered around everywhere.  Different sections of the convent show different periods of architecture as the convent has been built in sections, and occasionally destroyed by an earthquake.  There are currently 30 nuns still living their and the section they are in was built in the 1960s and is completely different to the sections that are open to tourists.   The nuns agreed with us in terms of where to eat, as on our last night eating at our favourite restaurant in Arequipa, there was a group of 6 nuns eating at the next table!

Friday, April 24, 2009

Explosions and Buses

We have now journeyed from Iquique Chile to Arequipa Peru, deciding that doing the trip in stages would preserve our sanity a little better we paused a night in Tacna. We departed Iquique early on a bus of the standard we had become accustomed to, but this would only get us to Arica. At the bus terminal we were deluged with offers from  taxi drivers to go to Tacna and beyond. The trust between Chile and Peru could be seen by looking around the town with its large military bases. 

We braved finding a colectivo (a shared Taxi) and made our way to Tacna, a contrast in technique occurred, the Chile officials had bare offices with a computer that they scanned the passports while Peru had a huge shiny building but the passports were entered manually and we suspect the metal detectors and xray machines were just for show (ellen walking though the metal detector with her backpack on containing scissors, cables, laptop - didn’t trigger a beep – although she was asked to put the bag through the xray machine, nor was our organic food noted on the xray machine.)

We spent the night in Tacna where we were awoken by something that sounded distinctly like a bomb going off.  A short while later the sirens that you associate with air raids started.  Followed by the sound of army marching songs.  “Has there been an invasion… Should we hide in the hotel?” but no much later in the day we found our that a gas plant exploded.  The departures terminal of Tacna we discovered where the people hoping to become auctioneers go.  The rapid loud, and astonishingly clear call of “Arequipa” by those trying to attract customers was incessant.  After a very uneventful (but much getting out of passports) bus trip we have arrived in Arequipa.

Here we did a most unusual thing for us.  Not feeling like traipsing around the second biggest city in Peru at 8pm with all our gear we went to the tourist information bureau and picked one of the three hotels they had on offer and got them to organise a taxi for us (the taxi paid on commission rather than by us).  This turned out to be an excellent move.  The hostel was one of the nicest hostels we’ve stayed in.  It was an old colonial house and our room had 14 foot ceilings covered in incredibly ornate moulding.  There were even some very nice touches, like the speakers for an MP3 player with the sign “Because music is important in life please attach your MP3 player or iPod.”  The only downside was that they had no free matrimonial rooms so we didn’t really want to stay there for more than one night.   So this morning we went for a walk and found another place to stay, not quite so nice but still a big step up from our Chilean accommodation, or that in Tacna.  

 

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Finally, a beach!

We have been longing to get to a  beach nearly since Christmas, so Iquique seemed like the perfect place to hang out, relax and spend some time listening to the waves crash on the sand.  The hostel here is very different to others we’ve stayed at in South America.  For one thing it’s full of Aussies!! This is a place for surf, so no real surprise there.  It’s a social place and the tiny kitchen is almost always full as people cook most meals.   Everyone hangs out at the hostel in the evenings, reading, watching TV and chatting.  One such evening on our second night we suddenly felt something… Jason thought a train was speeding by, I thought the wind was picking up… and then half a second after that we realised that no, this is an earthquake.  So we sat there whilst for 30 seconds the entire building shook, afterwhich everyone started making those inane comments when you’ve just experiencing something new and slightly scary.  “Did you feel that?”  “Was that an earthquake” “Cool!”.

 

One of the other big things to do here is to paraglide.  The guidebook mentions 3 day courses from $140, which sounds like a lot of fun.  However, when we started trying to find one of these courses we turned up nothing.  That is, nothing that short.  The shortest course we found was for 10 days, which is a bit long as we have a deadline for getting to Lima, not to mention an awful lot more expensive.  So instead of learning how to jump by ourselves, we will be strapped to the front of someone else as we take to the skies this afternoon.

 

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Soaring with the eagles – or should that be not eagles

We were picked up from our hostel ½ hour early much to our shock, as we were still eating lunch counting on the normal, tardy practices that much of our trip has demonstrated.  As our vehicle wound it’s way up the hairpins along the hill facing the upper suburbs. (Iquique ran out of space along the coast and so has many of it’s suburbs separated by a 500m high escarpment – according to my pilot anyway.  Ellen’s pilot said it was a separate town). We got to have a much better view of the city in the daylight, bands of houses/apartments were painted one bright colour or another, one swathe green another blue, but for some reason all the roofs were the same desert brown iron roof.  Reaching the top of the escarpment we bundled out and were assigned our pilots, while they readied the chutes we had a bit more of a look at the lower part of Iquique.  Strapped into our seats and attached to our pilots we were ready. Ellen took off first, no running required just up up and away, while my pilot fiddled a bit longer and when it came for take off we went up, but only just my feet barely brushed the ground even on tip toes but I was being instructed to run.  “HOW?” with what little grip I managed to get us moving forward enough to launch into the air.

This experience of paragliding was very different to our previous one, where before we raced down to the bottom as quick as possible (so the next person could hand over money) we instead spent time competing with the birds for the thermals.  There were two species of eagle sharing the thermals but they were heavily out numbered by another species that our guides informed us where “not eagles” but as neither Ellen or I can find an image of the birds they shall have to remain anonymous.  We followed the escarpment along finding different patches that allowed our pilots to spin and gain us the altitude to glide over the city to the beach.

As my pilot and I crossed the beach to start our decent I was lucky enough to spot some seals playing in the ocean.  Landing was a breeze but one of the pilot’s dogs was there to greet us noisily and there was a moment where it looked like we would be landing on the dog’s back!  It was a wonderful experience but we decided that it wasn’t as exciting as we may have hoped so it is now off our list of skills to acquire.   

Monday, April 13, 2009

Don’t fall in, the nearest hospital is 137km away

Today we went to El Tatio Geisers about 100km from San Pedro.  All I can say is WOW!!  Just an amazing day.  All the tour companies in San Pedro obviously got together at some point and decide to get some of their own back at the stupid tourists by deciding that you just have to be at the Geysers at sunrise.  This means getting picked up at 4am and waking up at 3:45am (that seems more like a time I should be going to bed on holiday, not waking up!!).  Every single tour company only runs it at that time.  Definitely a conspiracy.  So the night before we dutifully tried to go to bed early, meaning we weren’t tired enough to sleep and we were both so worried we would miss Jason’s rather subtle watch alarm that we kept waking up all night.  When it finally did go off we stumbled out of bed into some clothes and onto the street to wait.  The other person from our hostel who was waiting and wearing a lot more clothes then informed us she had been told it’s around -10 at the geysers.  WHAT?! We had been told to dress warmly, but it’s rather chilly at 4am in San Pedro and no further explanation had been given.  Jason quickly rushed back in and put on trainers rather than sandals, and grabbed a thermal top which I put on underneath the two jumpers I was already wearing.  We were as ready as we were going to be and on our way. 

 

Nearly 3 hours of very bumpy twisty mountain roads later we reached the geysers just as the sun was beginning to light the sky.   It was indeed around -10, if not colder.  We fought over who should take photos as neither of us wanted to risk frostbite from holding the camera too long.  “No, you take it… you’ll do a much better job.”  Our very thin travel pants didn’t give much warmth to the legs either and we began to wonder how susceptible legs were to frostbite.  But enough about the temperature… onto the geysers.  The whole area looked like something from another planet.  We were at 4320m  but it looked like we were in a depression as the area was surrounded with volcanoes and snow covered mountains that top 6000m.  The ground was issuing steam all around and as you got closer you could hear the boiling water under the ground that would suddenly burst forth and threaten to scald those standing too close.  The minerals from the water had left interesting shaped and coloured deposits which further led to the alien feel.  Words can’t really do it justice but hopefully our photos do a better job. 

 

Following an hour or so wandering around the geysers we went for a quick dip in a hot spring.  Only 15 minutes was allowed though as otherwise the minerals start to do nasty things to your skin.  After this we thought the tour was over, but the drive down was just amazing.  Looking out from either side of the bus you could be mistaken for thinking it was two entirely different places.  One side would be covered in snow rising up to volcanoes or mountains whilst the other would be a typically desert scene with sand dunes and cacti dotting the landscape and bizarrely no snow in sight.  We were constantly snapping pictures out the window and almost as frequently stopping the bus to have a proper look.  The scenery was kind of expected, but we weren’t expecting a wildlife tour as well!  We saw herds of guanacos, vicuna and llamas (all closely related), multiple bird species and some very weird looking rabbit type animals that I’m pretty sure are called vizcacha.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Further evidence that we can always get bad weather when it matters.

The Lonely Planet describes the Atacama desert as the driest in the world.  Days were reaching well into the 30s so we booked what sounded like a nice relaxing tour.  A trip into the desert and to a couple of desert lakes.  The first is a salt lake in which you can float in much the same way as at the Dead Sea, the second was a fresh water lake to help you wash off all that salt.  Finally the tour ended at the Salar de Atacama (salt plain) where sipping on a pisco sour you would watch the sun set behind the mountains.  Sounds like bliss.  Around 1pm that afternoon we started to notice some clouds.  That’s strange we thought, having not seen any clouds previously here.  We were however unperturbed as it’s a very dry desert and it never rains here. By 2:30pm (with the tour leaving at 3) we felt the first drops of rain.  We headed to the tour office where the travel agent denied that it could be raining here, as it just doesn’t.  Then she came outside… but she assured us we were going out into the middle of the desert so it should be fine.  The storm clouds continued to build however and the temperature drop and the rain followed us to the first lake.  We debated getting in anyway but the water was cold and we were already feeling chilled despite wearing jumpers!!  We watched those crazy enough to risk pneumonia float sitting up and watched the storm get closer.  We ended the tour at the salt plains (basically a huge area with 15cm deep of salt) and took a few photos before the rain caught up.  We then huddled beside the van drinking our pisco sours and mango sours pretending we could see the sun setting behind the clouds.  Although we had a few drops of rain the heavens didn’t actually open until they hit the mountains where the lightening lit up the sky far and wide.  But we still feel that our reputation for being able to bring the rain when you want it least is safe for now.

Friday, April 10, 2009

How many stars do you thing you see at night?

One of the things we were really looking forward to doing was going out into the middle of the desert with a professional astronomer and gaze at millions of stars whilst having some of his knowledge passed to us.  When we got there we were told ‘millions of stars is what we say in the brochure.  You’ve paid now.  You can only ever see about 3,000 stars with the naked eye and tonight with the full moon it’s less than 1,000.’ Both he and his wife were incredibly interesting however and pointed out various constellations, the closest stars, the zodiac part of the sky – which is also the elliptical plane the only part of the sky where you will ever see planets.  He had an assortment of huge telescopes through which we were shown the moon, Saturn, nebulae, a globular cluster, the jewellery box (3 stars close together which are yellow, blue and red respectively) and a binary star.  Definitely something I would recommend!

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Where shall we sleep?

San Pedro was not quite what we expected.  We knew it was a desert oasis town, but we also knew it was a major tourist centre, so the dusty mud brick homes that make up the entire town were a bit of a shock coming from very European Argentina.  We were a little concerned on the way about finding a room for the time we would be here.  Arriving at 6pm the day before Easter long weekend in a major tourist centre, that is also a very small town seemed to be a bad combination.  After wandering around San Pedro for an hour or more it seemed to be a complete disaster.  So we asked the hostel we had just found where else we could look, he called a friend and we were on our way to a room with a bed.  Woohoo!!  Our host is Nadia and we spent the walk to her house in very enjoyable conversation, her teaching us Spanish and us teaching her English.  She wants to set up her house as a hostel and as such currently only has one room available but I’m sure she plans more in the future. 

How high can you go?

The trip from Salta to San Pedro de Atacama was a jaw dropping, finger tingling, headache inducing experience.  Of course the later two were from altitude sickness, whilst the former was from the absolutely spectacular views.  The scenery didn’t really start to be anything special until we had made it past the blockade.  We aren’t quite sure what they were protesting about, but they were obviously camped out there and had blocked the roads with logs, branches, rocks and anything else they could find.  There were also a fair few armourned trucks with police or army men which I assume is why we did get through it eventually (2 hours later).   From there the road began to climb into the Andes, past mountains, canyons and salt plains.  At various points the effects of altitude became obvious, there was that moment when I tried to sit up and my vision went blurry and I thought I would pass out – we were eye level with snow at that point though.  Around 4pm we arrived at the border crossing… or at least the Argentinian side of it.  We were all stamped through fairly quickly but then had to wait forever for the paperwork on the bus to be completed.  Whilst we were waiting Jason made the suggestion that we really should all just walk across no-mans land and wait for the bus on the Chilean side of the border.  (Something we had done frequently in Africa).  Shortly thereafter we were all piled back on to the bus and given our lunch (yes, it was a very late lunch).  We weren’t sure at this point if we still had a really long wait before the bus was going to be able to move, or the lunch wasn’t allowed across the border and they had just forgotten to feed it to us earlier.  The bus did start moving though and we proceeded to go through the longest border crossing so far.  It was 2 hours driving later that we finally reached the Chilean immigration – actually in San Pedro de Atacama!  

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Child mummies

Salta is one of the last cities before the Andes and as such is the base for archeological expeditions into the mountains.  One of the biggest finds was in 1999 when 3 children were excavated in nearly perfect condition from the Llullaillaco volcano.  One of the children had been struck by lightening sometime in the last 500 years, but the other two are scarily well preserved.  They don’t look alive, but very much in the way taxidermied animals don’t look alive.  Their skin, clothes and teeth are all in excellent condition (none of them had any cavities and the oldest was 15 years old).  Even scans of the internal organs showed them to be perfectly preserved down to what was in their stomachs on the day they died.    The volcano where they were found is over 6739m and it is thought that the cold combined with lack of oxygen, low atmospheric pressure and low humidity all contributed to their amazing preservation.  This is now being maintained in the museum, and the children are kept at -20C permanently.  The children were all sacrifices, but it was never stated how they died (at least in English), it seems they were just left there and expected to stay until they died.  The only abnormal finding on tests was lung shrinkage possibly from dehydration.   Our only gripe with the museum was that as it was charging 3 times the price for foreigners as locals the text (of which there was a lot) could have been translated into English.  My Spanish regarding sacrifices and religious practices of the Incas is just not good enough!! 

Saturday, April 4, 2009

More bus journeys

We weren’t planning on writing about every bus journey, but each one is its own unique form of torture.  By starting in Buenos Aires we have started with the best and will slowly be making our way down (we hope not to get to buses as those found in Ethiopia, but you never know).  The first bus we basically had beds, were served a hot dinner complete with wine and snuggled under the provided blankets resting our weary heads on the pillow.  That is coche cama/total cama or a myriad of other names.  Next we took a cama class bus to Resistencia.  Gone was our ability to recline fully, but it still came close and the seats were again wide and comfortable.  We didn’t receive blankets or pillows but there again it was during the day not at night.  Meals were no longer hot, but still existed.  It was a fascinating journey though as the bus also acted as a local normal bus picking up passengers every few minutes.  In this way we got to see our first ‘gauchos’ cowboys – the clothes were amazing! If the situation had been different you would have assumed they were dressed up for tourists to take photos of them.  Hat, boots, belts, silver chains the whole full bit.  Anyway.  The next bus was semi cama class and we’re now back to something closer to a greyhound bus in Australia or Canada… ok, not quite that bad, but close!  Mostly upright seats, food that the airlines rejected 10 years ago, but worst of all no blankets.  We had stupidly assumed these would be provided and spent the entire night shivering away (occasionally sharing one seat for warmth, but that wasn’t exactly comfortable) whilst every joint in the bus seemed to blow in cold air.  Of course we are also reminded of how quickly your expectations can change.  In Africa if a bus came even close to the level of Greyhound we were ecstatic... more often it was a school bus with 6 people squished in each row.

Of course it’s not just the buses that have gone down in quality, we also seem to be staying in grottier and grottier accommodation.  This is the first place we’ve stayed in South America with a share bathroom (yes, I know we’ve been living the high life up until now).  That is fine with me.  The problem is that we have two choices for showers.  Option 1 is a full bathroom (shower, toilet, locked door) but only cold water.  Option 2 is a hot shower but only a curtain between you and the corridor.  And it’s cold enough that we are going for option 2!

 

We are now in Salta, but I suppose I should quickly mention Resistencia.  It was Sunday, so everything was shut which was stupid planning on our part.  We planned to spend the day sitting in the park, but then I got stung by a bee (it got inside my shoe somehow and then stung me when it couldn’t get out) so we spent the day avoiding bees, looking at statues and drinking gallons of liquid.  

Vote for us!!

It seems whenever you go to a great natural wonder of the world these days you are asked to go online and vote for it to become one of the seven natural wonders of the world.  So, why are we restricted to seven… there are lots of natural wonders to see!  Iguassu falls was something special though.   It was everything you would expect – flowing rivers, deafening waterfalls, drenching spray – but also something we did not – a butterfly sanctuary.  Everywhere you went you were surrounded by butterflies, frequently landing on you to drink your sweat (I did mention it was hot, didn’t I?).  And everywhere you looked you saw tourists taking photos of butterflies. And along many of the paths if you sat at the benches lizards, small ones and ones the size of your arm would often appear at a discreate distance (although their thunderous approach was anything but subtle) to see if you would leave any morsels of food.

  

The wheels on the bus go round and round

I thought that our first bus trip in South America deserved a quick mention.  These will quickly become routine I’m  sure but it was the first time we’ve ever sat on a bus for 16 hours straight, with no stops at all.  It was however, amazingly comfortable!!  There were only three seats across and only 7 rows on the top floor (only about 4 rows underneath) with each seat being able to go totally flat.  Ah bliss, particularly when compared to the 6 people across and about 40 rows that was squeezed onto Ethiopian buses.  They also showed a couple of movies on the bus, we only watched one and it seemed an odd choice for a bus trip being an anti-travel movie.  Two girls head to France and share a taxi with a guy who proceeds to kidnap them.  Ex-government agent paranoid father who had never wanted his daughter to leave safe America for dangerous France immediately sets off to rescue them.  It was an entertaining movie and once it was over gave us plenty of fodder for further conversations regarding the many and numerous holes in the plotline.

The belief that wherever you don’t live has to be dangerous was reinforced by a very nice guy we met who was having dinner with his mother.  On hearing that we had travelled to Africa he started saying how much he would like to go there but that his mother was too frightened and wouldn’t let him go (he was our age, so not a child).  He had spent 2  years in Brisbane studying and was currently travelling a bit before going back home to Columbia.  His mother who was kept trying to shush us as we were telling him how safe Africa was and how much we loved it. 

 

Hablas Espanol?

One of our goals is to learn enough Spanish to at least get by comfortably.  So we planned to do a weeks worth of lessons in Buenos Aires to get us started on our way.  Luckily we didn’t pay for the whole lot up front.  We did a two hour private lesson just to test it out and see how it went.  It was useless!!   Even for private lessons they seemed to categorise you into beginner/internediate/advanced.  So despite the fact that we already knew a few basics the teacher started right from ‘Hola’.  Fair enough, I could cope with that.  But the teaching style seemed to be give us a script to read.  Read it.  Explain what all the words mean.  Alright, next script.  Reading is definitely a good skill to have, but not the way to teach a one week crash course in a language.  In two hours the only thing we learnt was that ll is pronounced more like ‘sh’ in Argentina, whereas we were saying it as a ‘y’ sound which is correct for other parts of South America.  Even worse rather than being a good way to boost our confidence and help us have the courage to speak to people in Spanish she made us feel like complete idiots who knew nothing.  Needless to say we decided not to continue with the lessons.  

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Will you tango?

We had four more days in Buenos Aires during which time we tangoed, demonstrated and ate meat.  The tango show was in the basement of a lovely old café called “Café Tortoni”.  We were led through the actual dining room which was all high ceilings, crown moulding and crystal chandeliers down a narrow winding staircase to a small room in the basment with exposed brick and about 20 tables set facing the stage.  The show was nothing like what we had expected, being much more of a show rather than just a tango dance.  I’m sure we would have got a lot more out of it if we could actually speak Spanish, but not much of what they said had to do with ordering dinner or booking hotel rooms.   The lighting, however, seemed to have been purposefully designed to make taking a decent photo impossible as it changed about twice every second. 

The demonstrations were daily, but that is just part of life in Buenos Aires and we learnt to pay them no mind.   Although it was interesting to see how quickly the police could block off a street. 

The meat in question, was a traditional pasillo or grill… basically all the meat you can imagine and that’s basically your dinner.  We managed to identify beef, chicken, pork, kidney, spicy sausage, blood sausage and there were a couple of other things that defied identification.  It was an incredibly nice dinner though and more than even Jason could eat!!  (At least here in Argentina.  But he is eating about a third of what he was eating in Canada.  When we first arrived in Canada we were eating similarly to what we would eat in Australia, always a little hungry but not that worried about it until we realised that Jason was down to skin and bone weighing less than he ever had as an adult.  So, we started eating more.  We were mildly worried we had just become gluttonous pigs, but on arrival in South America we reverted to more normal eating habits – or eating even less as the heat seems to suppress the appetite, so the conclusion is that being cold burns calories like there is no tomorrow, “The new fad – the freezer diet!”) 

We also explored the Sunday San Telmo market which went and went and went, it was about 10 blocks in length and a three wide in places.  There were street performers and tango music giving a wonderful atmosphere.  The other thing of note was the Evita museum which gave us the incredibly saintly history of Eva Peron.  Finding the other side of the story... now, that's not in any museum.  

We also had our first pick pocketing incident in South America, and only the second for the whole trip.  We had gone to buy our bus tickets and while ducking into the train station which was quieter to consult the map Jason felt someone brush against him but thought nothing of it.  It wasn’t until I went to get out a bottle of water that we realised two of the pockets on the daypack were open.  The first has the USB drive in it, which luckily she didn’t find.  The second had the ipod in it, which luckily she didn’t find.  What she did take was our medication pouch, so she made off with a couple of immodium and a packet of zyrtec.  Whilst we learnt to lock the pockets on the daypack, because even apparently blind pickpockets can take worthless items and it's a pain.