Pendo does South America

Well the good times have continued to roll here in Colombia - it is quickly catching up to Argentina in the race to become my favourite country in South America! After a great couple of weeks of volunteering it was back to travelling.....first stop was Bogota, the big city capital. Here I was lucky enough to have a friend introduce me to two Colombians, Andreas and Fabian, who quickly took me under their wing and put in a huge effort to make sure I had a great time in Bogota. This mostly involved feeding me every alcoholic beverage ever invented/drank/thought about in Colombia, although there were also some stops in Bogota´s amazing colonial sector and in its very interesting museums to keep me entertained. Next stop was the walled city of Cartegena on Colombia´s carribean coast. ... read more

Everywhere a boobie boobie...... No I have not turned into a dirty sex fiend, but I have just returned from the Galapagos Islands where the famous boobie birds abound! No doubt you can imagine the puns flowing freely throughout the trip, but before we get to the Galapagos Islands here are a few other updates for you. Tim and I spent around 2 weeks in Cusco and the surrounding areas in southern Peru. Tim learnt heaps of Spanish in his classes while I had a lot of fun volunteering at an after school drop-in centre for kids. We managed to visit a whole bunch of Inca sites as well as the huge churches that the Spanish built on a whole bunch of other Inca sites. We also sampled the local delicacies - whole guinea pig complete ... read more

Hi again everyone and welcome to the Easter edition of our blog! We have had a cracking couple of weeks in Argentina, so sit back, chomp on those leftover easter eggs and enjoy! First stop was El Calafate and the famous Perito Moreno glacier. This was pretty awesome as you can get very close to the glacier. It is also still advancing so big sheets of it fall off all the time which is very exciting (in the otherwise fairly slowpaced world of glaciers, anyway). Tim and I then spent about a week around the lovely little village of El Chalten in Southern Patagonia. We did a couple of hikes with our friends from Canberra Kate and Ryan. The first hike was a massive adventure in proving how HARDCORE we all are. We got to cross ... read more

Buenas dias from Argentina! I hope this blog entry finds everyone fit and well and enjoying the cricket season! After a great couple of weeks in Bolivia I have spent the last two weeks in northern Argentina and I have been having a great time. I spent a few days in the desert, which was similar to the desert in southern Bolivia so I won´t bore you with too many details, only to say that I loved my first taste of Argentinian life. Pretty much a typical day for an Argentinian seems to run as follows: 7.30am: Sunrise. But you don´t want to get up until a few hours later, just to make sure the sun is properly up. 9:00am: Get up. Drink mate (pronounced mar-tay) 9.30am: Think about possibly doing something useful, so walk around ... read more

Hi again everybody, Well, even though Christmas and New Years seems so long ago I thought I should give you an update on all the action! I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas and New Years and you are now settling into holidays/work/whatever else you may be doing. Quick note - I am on a dodgy computer and can´t get any photos to upload, so this is a very boring text only entry I am afraid! I spent Christmas in Costa Rica in a town called Puerto Viejo on the carribean coast - a very nice place apart from the fact it rained for 4 days straight! It was a bit hard to get a sense of Costa Rican Christmas Culture given that the entire place was full of tourists.....like me......but we pulled together a group ... read more