Horse Riding

We spent a few days in Rosario before heading on to a little town called San Antonio de Areco, just an hour out of BA. Sal wanted to go horse riding, and so it seemed foolish not to stop in gaucho country to give it a go. As we had an apartment booked for BA, we decided to blow out on a nice hotel and jumped on the bus. Unfortunately, when we arrived in tiny…

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Taxi!

There was a time–let’s call it 8.20pm–when, still standing outside our hotel in the centre of Mendoza vainly waving at every full taxi that passed us, we started to think that maybe we weren’t going to be catching our 8.30 overnight bus to Rosario on the other side of the country. Gone, by this point, were the days when we used to turn up at the bus station an hour or so before departure. We’d…

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Thoughts on Argentina…

* Gosh. They don’t half like a protest here. You can barely move without coming across a group of people airing their grievances. For the first part of our stay in the country there was a big ongoing protest by the country’s farmers against new export duties that president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was trying to push through. Every time we turned on the telly there’d be the same footage on each of the five…

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Chile and Argentina…

As nice as it was to be back in civilization, in a land with paved roads and road signs and everything, we didn’t exactly hang around in Chile. In fact, less than 24 hours after we’d entered the country we were back at the same border post being stamped out by the same guy who stamped us in the day before. He didn’t even bat an eyelid as he removed the tourist card on which…

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Salt

There was no electricidad again. This time we were in the tiny dusty nothing town of Uyuni, ready to set off on our 4WD tour of the amazing Bolivian salt flats. We’d left La Paz the day before on the bus, travelling to a forgettable town called Oruro up on the top deck at the front. Our seats were panoramico, apparently, according to the woman who sold me the tickets. And we certainly had a…

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The 1980s

In our room at the hostel in La Paz was an ancient tourist information book, called Discover Bolivia, or something like that. It claimed to have been published in 1991, but it also included helpful information about the country such as “the currency of Bolivia is the peso…” which hadn’t been true since 1986. In amongst the adverts for VCRs and other state of the art gizmos, I found this gem selling British Airways to…

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How I Failed To Get Into Prison. And Other Stories…

After the peace and quiet of the island we returned to Copacabana to catch the bus to La Paz. All our other buses up to that point on the trip had been public buses mostly containing locals, but this time we’d somehow ended up on a bus entirely filled with fellow gringos. And even after being away in our own little world for just a short time, I’d almost forgotten that this continent is full…

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Bolivia

“No hay electricidad”, said the guy from the guesthouse as we made our way to our room. This we knew, as we’d just finished eating our delicious Lake Titicaca trucha criola by candlelight. We didn’t mind so much, as it sort of added to the charm of being one of just a handful of tourists spending the night on the quiet Isla del Sol, but I imagine it’s rather annoying if you live there (and…

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