A happy new year to one and all! We also hope that Santa brought you loads of cracking pressies. We've been told that in Holland they have a guy called Evil Pete who works alongside Santa. Everyone that is not on Santa's list gets a visit from Evil Pete and I don't think he makes do with just eating your mince pies and quaffing your scotch. We trust that none of you lovely people ended up cowering behind the sofa over Christmas while Evil Pete set about your house! We've been taking a well earned break from travelling. It's been amazing [View Full Entry]

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El Calafate is a one horse town. It's pretty much been solely built on the back of one tourist attraction - the Perito Moreno glacier. Why such a fuss over one glacier when there are hundreds of them spreading out from the South Patagonian ice sheet? Why indeed does the glacier have the honour of bearing the name of one of Argentina's most revered pioneers, Francisco Moreno? Well, it's because the glacier is a stunner. OK, it's not the biggest glacier, but it's probably the most dramatic in South America. The PM glacier lurches out of the mountains and out into [View Full Entry]

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Well the weather has indeed been as if it were the end of the world. It's bucketed it down and all that's missing is the four horsemen of the apocolypse riding into to town and stopping off for an empanada (well ok, maybe not Famine - he´d probably give that one a miss). Ah well, we're only 100km or so from Cape Horn, the last land before Antarctica, so what do you expect... Being in Ushuaia has given us the opportunity to kick back for a while. We've had 6 days here, which is a bit of a record for us. [View Full Entry]

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We're already running out of superlatives with which to describe the places that we have visited in South America. As far as we're concerned Torres del Paine trumps the lot - it's probably the most stunning place that either of us have ever visited. We'll try to describe it as best we can but we could never do it justice - you'll just have to visit it for yourselves. Torres del Paine is a national park just to the south of the southern Patagonian ice sheet. It encompasses a variety of terrains but the centrepiece is a cluster of jagged pinnacles [View Full Entry]

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Puerto Montt has a face only a mother could love. It's a run down port town for cargo in transit. One local that we met was incredulous that there would be any tourists there and he had a point. However, the southerners are friendly. Strangers enquire who you are and where you're going and shake you by the hand. It's small things like that make travelling great. Just before we set sail on the Magallanes (Navimag's cargo ship to Puerto Natales) a viscious storm rolled in off the Pacific Ocean pummelling the port with a torrent of heavy raindrops. An inauspicious [View Full Entry]

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Welcome to Chile´s Lake District, a spectacular glacial landscape of sheer mountains, rolling valley floors and (least surprisingly of all) a multitude of beautiful lakes. Like Bolivia, Chile has a variety of terrains. We have been up high in the Andes, scorched in the desert and relaxed in the Meditteranean-like coast, but it has to be said that the scenery here is the most classically beautiful. We arrived in Pucón in the early morning, dropped off some kit at a hostel and decided to head out to Parque Nacional Huerquehue (pronounced "wear-key-wear" - took a bit of time to get that [View Full Entry]

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Santiago came as a bit of a shock. Anything that you want is on tap, the youngsters wear funky clothes and hang out in roadside cafés slurping beers, the food is good, the wine is great and the parties don´t stop until dawn. We can certainly testify to the latter - our hotel was located in Bella Vista, which is rammed full of bars and clubs. The music didn´t stop until after 6 am. However, that was no problem for SuperSnoozeSuse and her earplugged sidekick. As it was Doug´s last night we felt like we ought to get in on the [View Full Entry]

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Hi all. Well the show is back on the road. In fact we´ve seen a lot of roads over the last week. The plan was to travel down to Uyuni and do a trip around the Salar de Uyuni, the world´s biggest salt flat covering 12,000 square km. First we took a bus south to Oruru from La Paz. All going to plan at this point - we only needed to either get the train or bus to Uyuni and all would be well with the world. However, the gods were not smiling on us, in fact their demeanor was to [View Full Entry]

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(with apologies to Señor Garcia Marquez for the cannibalisation of his book title) It had to happen at some point and now it has - we´ve been hit by illness! Tom has been laid low by a devilish combination of an intestinal amoeba, gastroenteritis and another infection. What started as a painful stomach rapidly deteriorated into a serious condition and bang goes a week in Bolivia. We called in a doctor straight away and were pleasantly surprised when the ridiculously friendly Dr Ebert Orellena Jordán pitched up. He speaks excellent English, though he claims that he talks like a drunk par [View Full Entry]

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You've got to love the Bolivians. If they're not happy they get out on the streets and make themselves heard. They could even teach the French a thing or two when it comes to civil disobedience! (Sorry Sylve!) Our bus journey up to Copacabana started early and the guys seemed to be in a rush to get moving. Once we climbed out of La Paz and into El Alto on the Altiplano we soon realised why. The main roads out of La Paz to the west were all blocked by the residents of El Alto, who had brought their gas cannisters [View Full Entry]

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