Iguazu Falls We arrived in Iguazu on a plane from Buenos Aires' domestic airport. Stepping out of the plane immediately reminded us of the heat, humidity, and smell of a tropical rainforest. It's great to be wearing our shorts and sandals again! We grabbed a taxi to our hostel and were happy to see a swimming pool just outside the door to our room. The hostel was a little more expensive than we've been paying, but we decided to treat ourselves on the final stop of our journey. The Iguazu falls are the main tourist attraction t [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Buenos Aires at about 8pm and driving in from the airport we could see this was going to be a really neat city. It was a welcome change after being on the boat and the weather was nice and warm. We were pretty exhausted from our day of travel, so we checked in to our hostel and sat down at the hostel restaurant to plan our time in BA. Luckily, the hostel staff were super friendly and helpful and gave us tons of great recommendations. We woke up to a clear blue sky, sunny day. The weather was [View Full Entry]

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After our amazing horse trek in the Andes we made our way to Puerto Montt, where we launched our 5 day Navimag cruise to the glacier at San Rafael. We checked our bags and strolled around the city for a few hours before disembarking. On board there were 130 passengers of which 110 were Chilean. The remaining 20 were English, Spanish, French, German, and Canadian. Rounding out the passengers were 40 crew so it was quite a full ship. The ship was originally a cargo vessel that has been partially transformed to transport passengers. It's [View Full Entry]

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A family friend with Chilean contacts arranged for us to meet his friend in the small village of Cochamo. His instructions were: "go to centre of town near church and ask for Cochelo. Everybody know him". We realized we were heading into a pretty rural area so we thought it would be funny to see if it all worked out as the directions said they would! Arriving in Petrohue we had a taxi driver pick us up to drive us to Cochamo. The trip takes about one hour and we had to arrange for it since there is not a bus [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Mendoza, Argentina by bus at about 9pm and grabbed a taxi to our hostel. After checking in we left to check out the city and get some dinner. We found a strip of restaurants near the central plaza and had some great local wine (Malbec, the region´s specialty wine) and a nice meal trying our first Argentinian steak! The restaurant had an inviting atmosphere, there were a lot of people out dining which seemed normal at first unt [View Full Entry]

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¡Hola! - we really wanted to take advantage of that cool upside down exclamation mark!¿ Well it´s been nearly a year since we completed our travels in Asia, so we decided it was time for another excursion! After checking our schedules we realized we had about 2.5 weeks with which to travel, so we narrowed our destination to two countries we´ve always wanted to visit: Chile and Argentina. What makes us laugh is our list of places to visit seems to be getting longer instead of shorter! After working a full day our friend Lianne dropped us off at the airport. [View Full Entry]

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We had one of the best experiences of our lives the last time we were in Japan. So, needless to say after the earthquake adventure and several sleepless nights we'd had in China, we were very happy to arrive back in Japan. It felt like going home. The four of us arrived in Tokyo just in time for a great bowl of ramen for lunch. We stayed near Shinjuku which made seeing the sights a lot easier than when we used to live further out. We showed Johnny and Mike around Shinjuku and Kabuki-Cho before stopping at an Izakaya for some [View Full Entry]

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Beijing Next stop on our trip was Beijing. We planned to visit Bob and Gabrielle, two teachers that Travis taught with in Japan, for a few days. Gabrielle and Bob are now teaching at Hwa Bae Dien Li Da Xue, the power University. We arrived at the beautiful new terminal of Beijing airport and hopped in a taxi. We were given instructions to ask a student to borrow a phone and call to notify our arrival. We weren't sure if it would work, but the students were so nice and helpful. We arrived smoothly and had a nice time catching up [View Full Entry]

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We are posting this blog from Chengdu, the day after the big earthquake and wanted to let everyone know we are all safe. We had written most of this blog prior to the quake, and our travels sure seem insignificant compared to the events of yesterday. We'll give more details about the quake in our Chengdu blog when we get a chance. At this point we're still trying to process everything that happened. We feel really lucky since we were so close to the center. Thanks to everyone's messages of wishing us safely home. The blog below took place between April [View Full Entry]

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Macau Getting from Kuala Lumpur to Macau was pretty easy, involving a monorail, train, airplane, and two bus rides over 8 hours. Macau is our first experience with one of China's "special administrative regions" (the other being Hong Kong). Macau is listed as the world's most densely populated region at 18,428 people per square kilometre! In contrast Canada's population density is about 3.5 people per square kilometre! Macau is a strange place, and it seems to have 3 faces: Portugese colony, Chinese Island, and Casino hotspot. It's [View Full Entry]

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