We decided to go to Córdoba because you could fly direct from there to Iguazú - and it was also in that general direction. Other reasons were: * We didn´t want to go back via Buenos Aires - seemed a bit silly for some reason * The bus journey was about 23 hours from Mendoza to Córdoba * The flight was only 300pesos, and if we went to Córdoba we would see an extra place too * Córdoba had a fierce reputation for being a better party city than BA and we didn´t get to party properly in BA So, the [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Mendoza after travelling all night from Buenos Aires. The local tourist information office referred us to a hostel called Lifehouse which had a pool. This was very welcome, Mendoza was baking! We chilled for the rest of that day and decided to do a wine tour the next day and a hike the day after (to get rid of some of the post-Christmas podge). Wine 1-01 After some admin stuff in the morning (sorting out buses, planes, accomodation for the next leg) we headed off on our tour of two bodegas (vineyards). The first bodega, Lopez was [View Full Entry]

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What a really great city Buenos Aires is, definitely a contender for a place in the top 10 of the world - out of the cities I've seen anyway. The city itself Firstly, it's absolutely massive - I've heard that the greater BA area has in excess of 14 million "Porteños" (pron. por-tay-nyos) as the inhabitants of BA call themselves. The centre, which most tourists probably only venture out of to visit one of the city's nightclubs, is compact and extremely easy to navigate - the streets (narrow) and boulevards (wide) are arranged in a logical grid system, with each city [View Full Entry]

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To ease our return to regular backpacking we decided to stop off in Colonia on our way back to Buenos Aires. We got a late bus from Punta del Este and checked in to a little hotel on the outskirts of Colonia for the night. Exploring Colonia Next day we set off to explore Colonia. It is a really pretty little place with tree-lined cobbled streets and colonial buildings. It was founded by the Portuguese in 1680 but lost to the Spanish a century later. We visited the local tourist information office where we got a walking tour of the town. [View Full Entry]

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On the 23rd of December we took a ferry from Buenos Aires (the Buquebus - pron. Bukkybus) to the capital city of the second-smallest country in South America, Montevideo. The Ferry Crossing Much the same as getting the ferry to France it was a smooth and relatively uneventful affair. The queue at immigration for passport stamps and suchlike could have been more smooth - these countries really do need to create some kind of mini-EU where nationals need only to show a passport - but anyway, we got through whilst noting that the population travelling with us probably had an average [View Full Entry]

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Even with all of the excitement of our day on the Moreno glaciar, we managed to book a flight to Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego for the same afternoon. We landed in the southernmost tip of Argentina after only an hour by plane and found ourselves in an even colder place than El Calafate, it did feel very Christmassy though. At the tourist office we were given the name of a B&B, ´Los Retamas´ run by Eduardo and Monica. They were a lovely couple who really took us under their wing and within half an hour of arriving we knew the [View Full Entry]

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After a quick flight to Buenos Aires from Santiago (2 hours) - the second flight on our round the world ticket - we immediately went to the Aerolineas Argentinas ticket sales counter in the airport to buy our tickets to El Calafate. The flight left next morning, and cost only 300 pesos - about 50 pounds each, bargain. I´ve dated this article 16th December, although we arrived in BA on 15th. We´ll add another article later when we´ve got something more on BA. So, we got to El Calafate and shared a taxi into town with a couple of Frenchies. We [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Santiago after our longest bus journey to date, twenty three hours on a bus from San Pedro de Atacama in the north of the country. We were met at the bus station by Claudio, the owner of Donde Claudio where we would be staying. He was a jolly Chileano with perfect English and immediately set about organising everything from doctor's appointments to transport to the airport for us. His hostel was great too, very communal, relaxed and sociable. The location of the hostel was perfect, it felt like a quiet suburban area (there was a ballet school across [View Full Entry]

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Our First Road in a While After being left for a while standing on the border with Chile, our bus finally turned up. I've never been so pleased to see a cloud of dust rising from the road in the distance - the sure sign of a vehicle coming our way. After 5 minutes of dirt track we reached something quite unexpected - a road! The first proper road we'd experienced in quite a long time - it had lines on it, (yellow at the sides and white down the middle) and it also had signs proclaiming a speed limit, warning [View Full Entry]

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So we arrived in Uyuni at four in the morning after the bus journey from hell. It took two hours longer than it was meant to and the driver hopped off the bus every half our to perform the very technical act of banging the front wheels with a piece of metal! However we got there and were on a Salar de Uyuni tour by 10:30 am that same morning. In fact we had our choice of tours and had tour operators following us around the central plaza (competition is fierce). We decided on a group called Reli tours as they [View Full Entry]

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