Marie Takes Off

A final hello to you all.... I am actually back home now (after just a short delay out of Buenos Aires and a sprint through Madrid huge airport with some 20 other fellow travellers trying to make the Amsterdam flight) enjoying my sofa and being back home. Unfortunately it is minus 1 degrees and so, so dark (how nice was it not to enjoy the sunny evenings of Buenos Aires, it was like being back in Sweden for summer !) My Christmas week turned out really nice. Arnaud, a friend from Amsterdam, was travelling through B.A. on his way down to Patagonia. He also met up with his friend Eva, who had already been travelling around South America for 4 months. We booked a day early in the week to an "Estancia" where we rode horses ... read more

We have just recovering from 3.5 days of hiking in the national park in Patagonia. Our legs are aching and Im really not sure what I will feel like after next week (our guide said this week has been a good "warm up" for what is to come !!!) When looking at the forecast for the area it has shown a maximum of 16 degrees celcius which I figured would feel pretty cold. But when the sun is out (which it incredibly enough has been for the last 4 days !!) it is well over 20 degrees and this brings with it the trouble of all the rain clothes, warm jacket, gloves, fleece having to fit in the small backpack + extra bag I brought for 3 days of camping (the rest we left behind in ... read more

... oh yes - South America !!!! After seeing some amazing pictures from Iguazu Falls and Patagonia from friends travelling I figured I also had to go there one day. The fact that I could again practice my Spanish and that a girlfriend from Amsterdam headed down to Buenos Aires for 4 months settled it - I booked my ticket sooner than I thought ! So after a 13 hour delay in Madrid (a plane doesn´t fly that well with engine problems.... we had to be sent out to different hotels and wait until they found another plane to take us) I arrived Monday in - a RAINY (!!!???) Buenos Aires. Hey, this is not what I signed up for....! Luckally the weather turned for the better. And last minute my friend Julie had decided to ... read more

Hola todos ! I wanted to update you on the weeks since New Years as I only wrote about the Inca trail in the last blog. The Intrepid tour started in Lima on Dec 28 with 11 other persons (6 from Australia, 1 Kiwi, 2 English, 1 Dutch and 1 Russian). We started with two days in the Peruvian Rainforest where I saw some more monkeys and enjoyd a very luxorious lodge (we even had a swimming pool !). The river was much larger than in Ecuador, so a different Amazonian experience this time. For New Years Eve we had all moved on to the beautiful city of Cusco (where Claire, our English tour guide, lives). We celebrated midnight at her bar The Muse, overlooking the city (so we could see some fireworks from the big ... read more

Here comes Christmas greetings from Montañita, at the beach in Ecuador :))) The trip to the rainforest last week Monday started with delays at the airport (flights had been cancelled the night before due to the weather in Quito). Mine (and 2 others in the group) TAME flight was only 3 hours delayed in the end (for a 30 minute flight) but the others were worse off: the VIP flight should have left 7 in the morning, but only got in at Lago Agrio at 5 in the afternoon. And two persons had taken the night bus, arriving at 4.30 in the morning - and they had to wait for all of us to arrive !!! We were nine in total heading with the minibus for 2.5 hours to the meeting point for the motorised canoe ... read more