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 to this region. The falls are mostly on the Argentine side of the border, although they can also be viewed from the Brazilian side. The falls are stunningly beautiful and we were lucky to visit them on such a nice ... read more

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 a little rough around the edges but we enjoyed it! We boarded at 4 pm and noticed we only had one roommate - we were expecting two - so that gave us a little more space. Our roommate was Alberto from ... read more

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 until we realized it was midnight and we were still eating. This is pretty much the norm in Argentina but hard for us to get used to. There were kids there too, including a really cute four year old at the table next to us. He was pretty restless and kept wandering around. We tried to ... read more

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 beer and tasty Japanese snacks. We enjoyed edamame, daikon salad, yakitori, a few rice dishes, and many types of sushi at the izakaya. It was excellent! We continued on to Kabuki-Cho, Tokyo's red-light district, and ... read more

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 29th and May 5th, 2008. Guangzhou After getting our visas in Hong Kong we just caught the last bus heading to mainland China. We passed through the border crossing pretty easily although our passports were ... read more