Starting with a considerable amount of down... Road of death It would be hard for people to visit La Paz and not at least contemplate traversing the 'road of death' on a mountain bike (run a google search, there are some horrific photo's to be found... Here's one report...BBC Report ). Given that the email pictures Cath received of this road prior to our travels nearly scuppered plans for any Andean bus journeys, we had to at least take a look. It all came down to 2 companies, and we went wi [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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For months I had been dreaming of climbing Huayna Potosi . Firstly, because it was over the magical 6000m, and as Edmund Hillary of Everest fame once said, “because it is there”. We had chosen an agency called Refugio Huayna Potosi as it is run by Doctor Hugo Berrios Martin, who has not only been instrumental in training guides for the mountain (so he should know the mountain well), he is also versed in high altitude medicine, a skill I hoped we would not need to use. After 5 days acclimatizing in La Paz (3600m) [View Full Entry]

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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 t [View Full Entry]

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The latest stage of our travels took us off the gringo trail into the less explored country of Paraguay. For some inexplicable reason backpackers don't seem to have a very high opinion of Paraguay as demonstrated the night before we left Brazil. We'd just returned from the Pantenal and were relaxing in Campo Grande with 2 others from our trip. Another traveller started chatting to us. We did the usual 'where are you from, where have you been, where are you heading' conversation that typifies all conversations between backpackers. When we said we were heading to Paraguay a look of [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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Uruguay We finally had a new country to enjoy after 6 weeks in Argentina! Pity it turned out to be a bit of a let down... Ok, we're probably being a little harsh on poor Uruguay, after all, we were visiting in winter (and a fairly dampening seafog), we were only in the country for 4.5 days, and we actually had quite a good time. However, we encountered more people with social ineptitude / other unwanted issues here than anywhere so far on our travels. They were also all fellow travellers... We caught the ferry across to Colonia from Buenos Aires [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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The title of this blog originally had the word armadillo in it. However, despite 4 days looking for them on the Peninsula Valdes we didn't even find a trace. This was more than made up for by the MANY sightings of Right Whales just off shore, splashing about and doing their tail / flipper waving thing, but more on that later... Time to start one of our blog entries with a celebration - Cath celebrated her birthday on 28th April (hurrah). To unintentionally add a touch of humour to the event, Rob got Cath a card in Spanish very carefully chosen [View Full Entry]

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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 [View Full Entry]

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