To Iguazu And Beyond

We spent two full days at Iguazu Falls in the end. One on the Argentine side, where you can get close up and very, very wet by taking a boat right underneath the waterfall itself (aftermath pictured below), and one on the Brazilian side, where you get the full panoramic view of the falls in all their glory. We did our best to avoid the crowds, by catching a ridiculously early bus to the Argentine…

Continue reading

Buenos Aires: Slight Return

So what do you do if you unexpectedly find yourself back for one last weekend in your favourite place on the entire continent? We couldn’t quite believe we were back. As the taxi took us across town to Palermo I started to think about all the bonus stuff we were going to be able to do. The lovely little hotel we’d booked into at the last minute was on the corner of Carranza and Gorriti,…

Continue reading

Buenos Aires

From San Antonio it was just an hour on the bus to Buenos Aires, where the apartment in which we were planning to spend the whole of August was waiting for us. I had a wallet full of US$ to pay for it, and we were ready to stop lugging the backpacks around for a bit. Actually, getting the cash to pay our rent had proved to be something of a challenge, as Argentine ATMs…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading

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…

Continue reading