A quick apology to anyone who may have tried to access our blogs in the last 2 weeks; this website crashed on the first of August and large amounts of data were lost. We've managed to retrieve most of our blogs now (with assistance from the host site), just a little missing text and some photo's to re-label, so happy reading!. We have a winner! For those who took an interest (however small) in our llama competition the winner was llama number three! Cath's personal favorite, but it would have been unfair to try and bias the voters... Another photo of her below... Now back to the travels... Samaipata - a beautiful haven We had the good fortune to land in the small town of Samaipata (admitedly at 4.30am in the morning) and managed to 'get ... read more

Apologies for the long entry. We've had an action packed two weeks and just didn't know what to leave out. For those of you who make it to the bottom, we're running a beauty competition... Don't forget, you can follow our route via this map Bolivia bound... via Salta It was time to take ourselves north to Bolivia, but we had a last stop to make in Argentina before bidding the country farewell for good. As with the rest of our trip we had impractically failed to plan in advance and once again crossed from one side of the continent to the other, giving the bus companies a large chunk of money and doing our bit to keep them in business. We had an overnight schlep to Salta, getting into town mid morning. We met ... read more

The Itaipu Dam (almost) and some retail therapy After bidding a sad farewell to Iguazu it was time to head even further north (hurrah for the beautiful weather) into Brazil. Time and money constraints meant we couldn't stay for long, but couldn't come so close without visiting a couple of key attractions. First on the hit list was the Itaipu Dam, a hydroelectric dam on the Paraná River located on the border between Brazil and Paraguay. It's impressively the second largest dam in the world and provides 80% of Paraguay´s (guess who has the largest proportion of renewable energy in the world) and 25% of Brazils electricity. We were slightly less than impressed with the fact that the lake for the $25bn dam flooded a set of waterfalls, Sete Quedas, which were apparently more impressive than ... read more

El Bolson Before we hit the sensory overload that is Buenos Aires we had a bit more mountain action to enjoy (hurrah - more up!!). We continued our travels from the last blog by heading to El Bolson, a little town nestled in a valley in the Andes, not too far from the Chilean border. Glorious weather when we arrived, which we celebrated with 2 bottles of very nice Argentinian red wine. We've been very impressed with both the quality and price of wine here in Argentina (if consuming quite a bit of it makes you an expert...) and have therefore been doing our part to keep the industry bouyant. Rob has grown a little concerned that we're polishing off a bottle between us most nights, but we may as well make the most of ... read more

We are now safely arrived in South America (Chile to be exact) and things are going well! We bid a sad farewell to everyone in Melbourne in mid-April as we set off on the next leg of our journey. The flight to Santiago wasn’t the best, but luckily the air smoothed out and we arrived safely in Santiago!! Hurrah!! We found Santiago to be a very chilled out city and a great place to start our South American travels. So far everyone has been very friendly and patient as we’ve struggled to get across what we need in Spanish. We're hindered mainly by the fact that we speak almost no Spanish. Our Spanish lessons have been a little delayed but we're on the case! Because not many people speak English we’re going to be submerged in ... read more