Buenos Aires to Iguazu Falls and back again (and then home...) I can´t believe I'm writing the last blog of this amazing trip. In fact, by the time you are reading it, I´ll probably be back in recession-ridden Ireland, crying into a very expensive beer that I cannot afford. All good things blah, blah, blah - my arse! So, our last two weeks have been spent in Buenos Aires, interrupted by a visit to see the legendary Iguazu Falls. B.A. is a very cool city - very European, with fabulous architecture, lots of green parks, 'beautiful people', great graffiti, yummy restaurants [View Full Entry]

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Get ready, this is a really, really long one!! Think of it like a few blogs in one, print it out and read it in bed! As I may have hinted in the last blog Ruta 40 was neither magical nor legendary, rather, it was the longest, most boring journey you could ever take! Please, if you are considering how to get from Bariloche to El Chalten or vice versa - for the love of god, fly! For the first half an hour the Patagonian steppe is fairly interesting for its sheer size and barreness, but it goes on forever. The [View Full Entry]

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I know its been quite a while since the last blog entry but we've been pretty much non-stop since we got to Argentina, and its been quite difficult to find the time to write my diary, let alone this blog. But here we go, hopefully I can remember it all! The border crossing into Argentina was PAINFULL to say the least, queues to beat the band and Bolivian border control who didnt know their arses from their elbows, or perhaps they enjoyed sending gringos in the wrong direction, I dont know. We had heard that Argentinian buses were a dream, but [View Full Entry]

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Bolivia has just kicked Peru´s arse! So, after the madness that was La Paz we headed to Sucre for a few days for some chillaxing. Its a beautiful, quiet enough town, called by the locals La Ciudad Blanca or The White City, as all the buildings are whitewashed and are topped with Tuscan-esque terracotta roofs, with lots of beautiful colonial buildings & churches set around the main square, and tiny narrow cobbled streets to wander. Having said that, the we couldnt actually get into any of the museums or churches as they all seemed to be closed all the time, except [View Full Entry]

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After getting over the Cusco Christmas hangover, we got on a bus bound for Puno on the Peru side of Lake Titikaka, where we stayed two days, visited the floating reed islands, and then crossed the border for Copacabana on the Bolivian side of the lake, where we stayed another two days and hiked the Isla del Sol. To be perfectly honest, Lake Titikaka and both towns were a little underwhelming. I think I was suffering from Post Machu Pichu Magnificence Syndrome. Its not to say they were not interesting, but you can only find alpaca and llama products, and women [View Full Entry]

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Well, if the last blog finished off with some trepidation, it was a case of first impressions not being right at all! Yes, our first couple of days in Peru were not so impressive. We basically came down from the mountains into the scrub and desert. It was like someone had flicked a switch at the border between wealth (relatively speaking) and poverty. The houses were really like little run down shacks. There was litter everywhere (big plastic bag issue in this country) along the side of the road, even well into the desert where it seems there was noone around [View Full Entry]

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Andean Ecuador - From Cotopaxi down to Vilcabamba Sometimes I wonder if Im actually in Scotland and not in Ecuador at all. The scenery here is gorgeous - dramatic isolation and quite spookily barren in places, very Scottish, and some parts of would even remind you a bit of Ireland. That is, apart from the fact that every time you try to climb a few steps or a go up a wee hill your lungs fail to work properly and your heart feels like its about to burst through your ribcage. Altitude and me are not friends! The further south you [View Full Entry]

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From Quito to Rio Napa We arrived finally in Ecuador after flying forever from NZ with a v. brief stopover in Santiago. Quito, I could take or leave to be honest. Its not the nicest place in the world, and the Old Town, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was nice enough, but a bit, ummm, grotty really. There were some beautiful churches, covered with gold leaf on this inside, and museums, and we went to the Vivarium (snake house) which was pretty cool. But there is definatey an undercurrent of unsafe in Quito and we met people who´d been [View Full Entry]

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I cant believe its come to an end in NZ! We´ve had the most amazing time and really, really dont want to leave! I was heart broken leaving Ruby back to the depot. Id grown quite fond of the old girl... Anyway, we spent our last fews days in Tutukaka, gateway to the Poor Knights Islands, and Paihia in the Bay of Islands, before heading back to Auckland for our last two days. Our time was seriously limited here and I really feel that we didnt do North Island justice at all. Three weeks is just not enough time here. But [View Full Entry]

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On our last leg in South Island we went from Punkaiki on the West Coast across to Kaikoura on the East, before hopping across to the North Island. Punakaiki is a tiny "blink and you miss" it place on the coast, made famous by the geological mysteries that are the pancake rocks and blowholes. I'd heard it was nice, and I wasnt expecting much, but Punakaiki is a cracking little place in a gorgeous setting. Our campsite was a right on the beach and we went to sleep with the sound of the waves roaring that night. The pancake rocks and [View Full Entry]

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