So then to continue my voyages, I hoped on a bus to La Serena. which is the capital of the Coquimbo region. It was a very spectacular busride as the landscape changes dramatically when you go further North. The Pan American highway hugs the Pacific coast on one side and rocky mountains on the other. The green gives way to small coastal villages, sandy beaches with great waves for surfing and small coarse shrubbery. Definitely worth the drive. La Serena itself is a beautiful small town, by the beach and beautifully designed. There are a few churches around and lovely squares [View Full Entry]

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So, we move on to Part 2 of the Chilean adventure. By the by, Chileno is very difficult to understand. I have to retune my ears to that particular accent of Spanish, but I´m not doing too badly. Anyway, I digress. So I spent a couple of days in Valparaiso, or Valpo as the locals call it. There is a stark difference with Santiago. The latter is serene whilst Valpo is more edgy. Difficult to say which city I prefer as they are so different! Valpo is a city built on 42 hills. There is no order in the layout, streets [View Full Entry]

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Hola todos So it´s been a bit of an absence. Did you miss me? Well, I have been travelling in Chile and I´m here for a couple of days more. Then, it is off to Lima to meet up with my friend, Rupal. My other friend, Annu, will hopefully join us in a couple of days. So what I have been up to these past three weeks? I guess you could say that this trip has been a voyage of four quarters. I landed in Santiago on a cold rainy early morning. I stayed in a lovely hotel in Providencia district. [View Full Entry]

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Hello all So I have lost one travel companion and decided to treat myself by going to Tortuguero National Park. So what if it was expensive and not tortoise season, but I figured that I didn´t know when next I would be in Costa Rica. And "we only live once","it's only money", etc... I am glad I did it. It was a long trek from San Jose with an overnight stay in a nature lodge. What is a nature lodge, I hear you ask. Well, let's say that it was not in Leena's vocabulary before. It's a nice wooden structure on [View Full Entry]

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Hola chicos y chicas Long time no blog. Yeah, we have been completely chilling out in Costa Rica and these two weeks have gone so quickly! Taruna is now headed back to Houston as I type. I guess I will have to change the name of the blog, but that will involve sending you all new links, which might be a bit of a pain! So I have taken the executive decision to retain the title as is, although I will be joined at some point by two other fellow travellers. For the time being, I am on my own and [View Full Entry]

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Costa Rica is not in South America, so the blog should really have been "the adventures of TJ and the Beej in Latin America" but you´ll forgive us this poetic licence... So continue our adventures, after a week of Level 2 Spanish courses in Buenos Aires for me and a week at home for her mother´s 60th for Taruna. We arrived in San Jose on the last day of May and managed to arrive within half an hour of each other. One would think that we had planned it all along... I had an uneventful flight from Buenos Aires with a [View Full Entry]

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So, I am on my own for a week or so. TJ has gone back to the US to celebrate her mum´s 60th and probably get a new set of cothes for Costa Rica! I decided to go to Colonia Del Sacramento in Uruguay for a day trip. It´s only one hour by ferry from Buenos Aires, and it was the chance of gettin another stamp on my passport. The weather was superb in Colonia and I have an amazing set of pictures to prove it. The downside of travelling alone is that one has to depend on the kindness of [View Full Entry]

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This is going to be a very short blog! We arrived in a lush tropical paradise, and stayed in a hotel which overlooked Brasil. We spent two days at the Parque and one day walking around Puerto Iguazu. We didn´t have the opportunity to make it to the other side as US residents need visas to entre Brasil! So instead of words, we leave you with a set of amazing pictures and videos... [View Full Entry]

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Mendoza Mendoza - malbecs, desert, food and cheese. This is such a chilled out town - I feel so relaxed that I wouldn´t know if I was missing a spine. We got there by the night bus after 16 hours from Buenos Aires. After El Calafate, it was hot, hot, hot, at least the first day was... Unfortunately TJ was a bit under the weather at the beginning and it was my turn at the end, so we didn´t go all out crazy, well, kind of... We were there for four nights, and the night was spent in Hostel Alamo. My [View Full Entry]

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The next day started again early, and we set off in the cold dark morning to Perito Moreno. This was the trip I was most looking forward to as we were actually going to trek on the glacier with crampons and guides. We arrived at the entrance of the park and boy it was cold! It was snowing properly and again we were glad that we had our thermals on. We took a little boat to the bay, went up the mountain for 1 km and got close to the glacier. On the way up there, we heard a couple of [View Full Entry]

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