This podcast has been recorded whilst I’m volunteering at an Eco Yoga Park near General Rodriguez, 60km west of Buenos Aires in Argentina. (Photo slideshow of The Eco Yoga Park)

Run by Hare Krishna devotees, and known by its other name Nueva Vrindavan, the Eco Yoga Park proved to be a wonderful break after nearly 8 months on the road. At only US $12 a day for food accommodation and yoga and meditation classes, it was also great value.

Show notes

As it’s a longer podcast than normal, I thought I’d include a summary of contents with approximate timings:

0-7 mins - Introduction, temple sounds, why I came to the Eco Yoga Park
7-9 mins - Temple Service sounds
9-19 mins - Interview with Svayam, a Hare Krishna Monk/Devotee
19-21 - Hatha Yoga session
21-29 - Tour of the Eco Yoga Park grounds
29-39 - Interview with Jameson & Laura, two volunteers
39-44 - Sounds, music….

Links

Photos of The Eco Yoga Park, Argentina
Laura & Jameson’s blog
Eco Yoga Park website
Eco Yoga Park alternative website (in Spanish)
Volunteer in an Eco Yoga Ashram in South America
International Society for Krishna Consciousness

Every Monday they play at Ciudad Cultural Konex in Buenos Aires, and most Mondays it turns into a percussion-driven rave. I was lucky enough to arrive in Buenos Aires on a Sunday and go to the Monday show - and I can honestly say I’ve never seen a percussion show like it. What’s unique about it is the series of complicated hand gestures they have built up to direct/orchestrate the complex, layered rhythms. You can see these particularly well in the second half of the video.

Bomba founder Santiago Vázquez used to be the only director for the group, but as more members learned the sign language to perfection, they too started directing. Now, there are usually 2 or 3 rotating directors each night, and they go back to playing their instruments when they finish directing.

La Bomba de Tiempo is a fantastic night out, and there are plenty of ‘after parties’ to go to if you’d like to continue the festivities ;-).

The entire Iguazu waterfall system consists of 275 waterfalls along 2.7 kilometers (1.67 miles) of the Iguazu River. Some of the individual waterfalls are up to 82 meters (269 ft) in height. The Devil’s Throat (Garganta del Diablo in Spanish or Garganta do Diabo in Portuguese), a U-shaped, 82-meter-high, 150-meter-wide and 700-meter-long (490 by 2300 feet) waterfall, is the most impressive of all, and marks the border between Argentina and Brazil.

The shape of Iguazu falls, and the walkways around the falls on the Argentinian side allow for spectacular vistas. At one point a person can stand and be surrounded by 260 degrees of waterfalls. The Devil’s Throat (La Garganta del Diablo pictured below) has water pouring into it from three sides, and being up close to it gave me a peculiar kind of vertigo.

Famously, upon seeing Iguazu, the United States’ First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt reportedly exclaimed “Poor Niagara!”. She was right, the water falling over Iguazu in peak flow has a surface area of about 1.3 million ft², by comparison, Niagara has a surface area of under 600,000 ft².

Here’s a few more photos I took - on two separate days, one cloudy, and one sunny:

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Links

You can view my photo slideshow of Iguazu Falls here.
Iguazu Falls on Wikipedia

Salta’s a medium-sized town in North West Argentina (View map) with about 500,000 inhabitants. It lies in the Lerma Valley, 1,152 meters above sea level, at the foothills of the Andes mountains. Salta was founded on April 16 1582 by the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Lerma, and has in recent years been nicknamed Salta la Linda (”Salta the Fair”). It has now become a major tourist destination due to its old, colonial architecture and the natural scenery of the countryside and valleys to the West.

Here’s a couple of random examples of some very creative street art I saw whilst walking around the backstreets of Salta:

In this Podcast from Bolivia I head from Isla del Sol on Lake Titicaca (birthplace of the Incas) to La Paz, the capital (and highest capital city in the world), where I go on a mountain biking trip down the most dangerous road in the world - the Death road. Finally, I head to Potosi (highest city in the world), then onto the Salar de Uyuni salt flats in the south of Bolivia

Links

Video of Salar de Uyuni salt flats
Photos of Salar de Uyuni salt flats
Photos of Potosi
Photos of the Death Road trip

Links

View my Salar de Uyuni photo slideshow here

Thanks to Joshua Knight for providing the song ‘Further’. Please visit his MySpace site at www.myspace.com/joshuaknightmusic

Listen to my Podcast from Bolivia here

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Links

Listen to my Podcast from Bolivia here
Video: Salar de Uyuni tour, Bolivia