Oi gente, We made it to Brazil.. Actually about a week ago- And now we are happily relaxing at my grandmothers house in my birth city, Londrina (that means little London). Its not that little though, and not really like London either for that matter. I may be biased, but I personally love it here. My family is enormous, and in line with the Brazilian stereotype, they are all incredibly welcoming and generous. I am having a blast introducing Stephen to favorite foods from my childhood, and reminiscing about the past. I think we are going to chill here for a [View Full Entry]

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Hello again! I am going to try and make this blog happen tonight, but I am uncertain if it will because the internet connection here is very sloooow. Anyway, we just got done with our long weekend of ¨rural tourism¨at the La Quinta farm set in the hills of Paraguay. As I suspected, it wasn´t so much rural as it was a resort, but no matter- We still had a good time. Heres the skinny: The grounds are beautiful as well as the wilderness scenery. We chose the place because we were told it was the farm with the best food, [View Full Entry]

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Buenas Dias! We have just spent 5 very full days in Asuncion. From the brevity of the Paraguay section in our travel book one would think there isn´t much to this place, but thats definitely not true... We have been livin it up in the city for sure. We are staying at the resonably priced Pension Da Silva, run by a very cute and friendly old lady. The place is centrally located, right off Plaza Uruguay. Its clean and perfectly comfortable but without frills. The city itself is actually really low-key. By about 7 pm almost everything (save restaurants and clubs) [View Full Entry]

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Bueno! Well, we are in Immaculate Concepcion, Paraguay right now. I´ll get back to talking about that in a second, but first I want to discuss a couple other things- 1. Bus from Santa Cruz to Filadelfia- After our experience with the wayward bus to Samaipata we wanted to make sure we would get to Filadelfia. So I asked all of the bus guys multiple times, made sure our ticket said Filadelfia on it, and had the ticket seller introduce us to the bus driver who also assured us that the bus would go TO Filadelfia. Not near it, not past [View Full Entry]

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Yo! Ok, this is a quick special report, especially for VLM. We went to the Santa Cruz Zoo this afternoon. This is a seriously wacky zoo. For instance, there were almost as many animals roaming freely about the grounds as there were safely in cages. Among the animals that scampered accross our footpath were: a sloth (well, it more slothed than scampered), a capibara, and an alarmingly large monkey of sorts. That one was actually sitting on the fence OUTSIDE of the monkey cages of its same species (see photo). The main purpose of our visit was to find and photograph [View Full Entry]

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Que Paso? So we survived the 18 hour busride from La Paz to Samaipata.. Wait, did I say Samaipata?? What I meant was the busride from La Paz to SANTA CRUZ!! Although the guy we bought the bus ticket from claimed that the bus went to Samaipata, it did not, and in fact never does it even pass Samaipata. WOW.. (Can you imagine out-and-out lying to someone like that??) So we took a taxi from Santa Cruz to Samaipata. 3 hours, semi-paved roads, and lots of slippery mud. It was a little scary, but we made it and it was well [View Full Entry]

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Hi again all! We are back in La Paz and have been for a few days (that last blog was a few days late in publishing)... Long story short, we almost bought a car to drive back to California and decided not to at the last minute. I admit, at first it was MY idea. I had secret visions of rescuing a puppy and bringing it home with us. We looked at the car several times and I was dubious whether it would have even gotten us to Brazil, much less the US (it was a 1975 Toyota Landcruiser) even though [View Full Entry]

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Hello everyone! This ones coming at you from Oruru, Bolivia. La Paz locals who heard we were traveling there usually wrinkled their noses and said something to the effect of "ohhh... its dirty little mining town!" Well, it isn´t that dirty, but its not much to look at either. It is also very cold! We can see our breath in our unheated hostel room. Besides cold, I can declare Oruru to be an oddly interesting place. We met this man in a coffee shop one morning (turns out he was a professor of Anthropology at Oruru University) we had a long [View Full Entry]

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¡Buenos Dias! We are still in La Paz, 8 days later.. We had planned on leaving this morning, but upon learning that tickets for the World Cup qualifier match of Bolivia vs Venezuela go on sale TOMORROW morning, we decided to stay another night. Everyone wish us luck getting tickets. The box office opens at 9am and we are going to be there at 7 sharp. Speaking of event tickets, since we now have some experience with this I am going to pontificate upon this subject briefly. There is no Ticketmaster here, no Stubhub... The system is much more democratic in [View Full Entry]

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Hola beloved friends, This ones gonna be a doozy because there is lots to say about La Paz.. We´ve been here for a solid 3 days now, and we are loving it! It is a quirky city of many many hills, and contrary to what we have heard from other travelers, it isn´t really all that noisy or chaotic in my modest opinion. It does help that the hostel we are staying at (Hostal Republica) is pretty nice and our room is quiet. As long as we have somewhere calm to escape to, we can handle pretty much anything. Notable are [View Full Entry]

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