Another good thing about New Zealand: long buses stop every hour and a half or so for 'comfort breaks', and if there is something interesting to see nearby, they give you a few extra minutes to go check it out. On our 9 hour bus marathon from Nelson down to Franz Josef (we're missing coche cama!) we got to stop off to see the Pancake Rocks - crazy rock formations on the coast. Far more picturesque than South Mimms service station. The rocks get their names from the fact that they are in layers and look like piles of pancakes. They [View Full Entry]

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Sounds are a bit like Fjords, apparently. That watery bitch, the Sea, invades the land, flooding river valleys, drowning bunnies, and leaving cows stranded. But it's not all bad! The fish are happy, and you end up with some quite stunning terrain. Like the Queen Charlotte Sound. Just ask Captain Cook. The rum soaked old sea dog spent more time around the Marlborough Sounds than anywhere else in New Zealand, stopping here on 4 separate occasions before coming to a sticky end in the cooking pot of Hawaiian natives. A seasoned explorer, indeed - ba dum! Our own landing in the [View Full Entry]

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New Zealand is about as far as you can get from the UK, so for the final few weeks of our trip, we will be homeward bound the whole way! Despite arriving in Auckland at 3.30am with a cracking case of jetlag brewing, our first impressions of New Zealand have been great. There is a lot to love about the country - everyone is mega friendly and helpful, the scenery is beautiful, the food is amazing, and the place names are just great...the first bus we got on, when the driver read out the list of places he was stopping at, [View Full Entry]

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Well, we're still alive. The record time period between the last blog and this has nothing to do with kidnapping, murder, being caught in bear traps whilst hiking, or turning on each other with swiss army knives in a fit of travel rage over who got the window seat in a 23 hour Andean bus epic. The explanation is far more economically based. Internet in New Zealand is freaking pricey. For New Zealand is where you find us. I was intending to start this blog with the rhetorical question "where have the last 10 months gone?", but really, the whole point [View Full Entry]

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Uyuni, Bolivia is a tourist destination in the loosest sense of the world. The only real reason for coming here is to get in a jeep and drive out again to see the nearby Salar de Uyuni, the world´s largest Salt Flats. We arrived here on the surprisingly comfortable train from Tupiza sometime after midnight, only to be greeted by sub zero temperatures and feral dogs. Originally we´d planned to get straight out of town, but we couldn't bring ourselves to obey the call of the alarm clock in the morning, and instead took to shopping for a tour the following [View Full Entry]

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If you've ever been on one of those machines at the gym that vibrate you violently while you do your crunches in order to give you extra muscle toning power, you'll have a good idea of what our bus journey from the Bolivian border was like. Neither road (when indeed there were roads) nor bus were in very good nick, and our skeletons got a good couple of hours of clanking. Unfortunately, however, we didn't arrive with those perfect six packs! Our destination, Tupiza, is an old mining town and is apparently where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid met their [View Full Entry]

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Our first set down in the Argentinian Andes was Salta. Salta for me was pleasant enough, but it suffers a bit in comparison with the last few towns we´ve been in: Buenos Aires, Bariloche and Mendoza. However it´s a pretty interesting comparison as it´s nothing like the rest of Argentina. Instead it´s got more in common with the Andean regions of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, and not just because it´s chilly. This is the one region in Argentina where there´s still an large indigenous populace, and the European descendants appear to be in the minority. You can get pretty much anything [View Full Entry]

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Next stop after San Juan was a night in a tiny town called San Agustin de la Valle Fertil where we headed to access the Parque Provincial Ischigualasto (also known as the Valley of the Moon). The Park is known for its weird and wonderful (moonlike) rock formations, bleak (moonlike) appearance, (moonlike) lack of vegetation - not much except for a few crazy prickly desert plants, and especially the profusion of Triassic era fossils... from ferns to the two oldest dinosaur bones ever found. It´s noticable that rocks in Latin America can never look just like rocks. From caves to lunar [View Full Entry]

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What´s red, sticky, stains most of your clothes and turns a pleasant pootle on a bicycle into a death defying danger sport? Well, wine of course. More specifically I´m referring to Mendozan Malbecs. We arrived in Mendoza from Bariloche grateful for the vast improvement in climate ("I can feel my fingers! I love you, fingers!"), and ready to take on the best that the region has to offer... Out of a bottle. Mendoza, while not as pretty as Bariloche, is still quite beautiful. It has large, tree lined streets, and is chockful of lovely plazas and parks. It turns out that [View Full Entry]

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Hola Amigos, After leaving Iguazú, we 'popped' (if that is the right word for a 20 hour bus journey) back to Buenos Aires to pick up our bags and bid a fond farewell to the city that is a new entrant in my Top Five Cities Of All Time list. We did a bit more shopping, visited the restaurant with the best garlic bread in all Latin America (Señor Telmo, if you're interested), and I went for a nice sunny run along the waterfront (the first in two months - my legs ached for 3 days!) After 24 hours on dry [View Full Entry]

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