Yes, folks, that´s its official title. Well, you can choose between that or "The Death Road" but either way it´s pretty frightening. I covered the Death Road in the last entry but I thought it was significant enough an experience to create its very own entry with a load of photos to show you exactly what I´m talking about..... NB: Our pics to come!! And videos!! As soon as I can find a half decent internet place, so make sure you log back on every now and again coz I´ve added loads of photos to previous entries. Fast facts: The North [View Full Entry]

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La Paz... La Paz, La Paz, La Paz......!!! (shouted out at a million times a minute from thousands of mini bus windows which absolutely saturate the city...) La Paz... What an amazing place. I loved it. LOVED IT! So many people - so many dodgy street stalls - so many weird and wonderful things - so many bad smells and unidentifiable street food - so many bargains to be had as long as you like things made from llama and alpaca wool AND if you know the difference between the many fakes and few genuine articles - so many Bolivian women [View Full Entry]

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Again, more to come on this one (see previous entry) - pics, lewd stories.. the lot.. :-) Sucre is a gorgeous city in Bolivia. Full of beautiful old Colonial buildings and architectural plazas and squares. It´s the home to the country´s courts and judicial goings on. So who would have thought it would be the place where we would get robbed within hours of arriving..? More on that later, but these are the highlights I´ll expand on soon... - Lovely city.. the buildings, the streets in the centre, the trees, the .. everything - Horse riding We had a great day [View Full Entry]

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More to come on this one folks, but just have to create these entries in order! Got some great pics too, as soon as I can find an internet place with DVD capabilities because most of our pics are on DVDs, not CDs, which causes loads of problems when it comes to uploading them onto this blog. Aaah! But in short.... Potosi is the highest city in the world. And MAN, do you feel it..! We got there on (yet another) near death bus experience, climbing up and up and up dirt tracks on the edge of mountain with massive drops [View Full Entry]

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This trip is like a rite of passage for thousands of travellers just like us. But when you´re doing it, you feel like a modern day adventurer, a naughties explorer, a bit of a lets-get-out-and-really-rough-it trail blazer... kind of. DAY 1 We set out in our banged up (but newer than some of the others) Toyota Landcruiser 4x4 with Chris and Amy, Tung and Vi (see last entry) early in the morning to spend all day in the car climbing across the desert to levels of higher and higher altitude. We left the roads behind very quickly, crossed the Chile / [View Full Entry]

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Atacama Desert in a factual nutshell... The driest desert on earth... it never rains here - never ever. It is also massive - 966 km (600 mi) between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It is created by the rain shadow of the Andes east of the desert. Its area is 181,300 square kilometers (70,000 mi². It is made up of salt basins (salares), sand and lava flows, and is more than 20 million years old and 50 times more arid than California's Death Valley. Salvador Dali got his rocks off here and the view out every Toyota Landcruiser window [View Full Entry]

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Salta was a really pleasant surprise after Mendoza. To start with, on the way there fable became truth which then became legend for us, when we actually got a FLAT BED seat on our overnight bus from Mendoza. Yes, it´s true, gasp shock horror.. For those of you who haven´t heard us whinging about it, we have been trying to find and book one of these bloody beds for the last 6 weeks but every time it is not the real deal.. they don´t go back, and the service is Class D not VIP, much to our (mostly James) grave disappointment. [View Full Entry]

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Started out brilliantly in Mendoza... It was big Russ´s birthday on the day we arrived (early) on the bus from Bariloche so all the troops gathered to help him have a good time. Went out for brunch, then we all saddled up and went on a ´wine on bikes´ tour of Mendoza. This place is Argentina´s biggest and best wine producing region so it would have been rude not to check it all out... On the way home from the wine tour we biked across a local suburban butcher who thought his Christmases had all come at once when a massive [View Full Entry]

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I am conscious that this Bariloche section has been word-free for AGES now and that I should really put something in there. I have been waiting til I had enough time to give it the write-up it deserves, but realistically, ...... is that EVER going to happen?? In a nutshell, this is Bariloche... * It´s a beautiful ski village perched on a mountain side on the edge of a massive blue lake in the Lake District of Argentina * James and I stayed in THE BEST place in town.... Penthouse 1004. Stay there, go there, it´s the best view in town. [View Full Entry]

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Picture yourself in a boat on a river.. with tangerine trees and a marmalade sky.... Ok, ok, so it was NOTHING like that. Actually, picture exactly the opposite. Something like: picture yourself on a crowded, hot, stinking bus with no air conditioning or suspension, bumping along for two days over the rockiest, unpaved, dusty excuse for a national road you would NEVER want to imagine... And then you are getting half way close to what Argentina´s infamous RUTA 40 is like. We caught the bus from El Chalten in the south to Bariloche in the north of Patagonia for two days, [View Full Entry]

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