what a whirlwind...... Since our last blog we have driven across salt deserts in Bolivia, trekked around Machu Pichu in Peru and have almost been part of a protest in Santiago. We have soaked in geothermal hotsprings with our friends in New Zealand and bumbled along the Sunshine Coast of Australia in a camper van. We sit now writing this from a hotel lounge having just arrived in Sabah Borneo from Japan. via Bangkok and a two night train journey to Kualur Lumpar and a flight to Kota Kinabalu. Non stop travel! We are pretty tired so are taking it easy [View Full Entry]

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Buenos Aires Note: We have been getting emails from a few people asking where the early blog entries are. There are 18 entries with photo's etc, so far. Just go back to the home page of the blog with this url: http://www.travelblog.org/Bloggers/karenandmarcelaway/ Here you can go back and forth to see all our entries and there can be more than 1 page per entry - scroll to the bottom to see additional photo's etc. So if you have time have a look at our early stuff too - we hope you like it. End of Note. We decided to stay in [View Full Entry]

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El Chaten The next day with clear blue skies, we were off again on a 5 hour bus journey to El Chaten; a town at the foot of the Fitz Roy Mountain Range. Through yet another wilderness (much more deserty this time), with a multitude of grey rocky mountains, screes from sandy brown to grey (we're talking serious sedimentary layers) and lakes of every hue of blue. Patagonian weather is still being kind to us as we arrived into El Chaten, a small town formed in a valley, with the buildings made by the people who live in them. New [View Full Entry]

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El Calafate On Marcel's Birthday we left Peurto Natales after a birthday (compleanos) hug from Omar and ran for the 5 hr bus to El Calafate. Oh what a birthday treat. There's nothing like a good bus journey to spend on your special day..... El Calafate is basically a high street full of parilla restaurants, ice-cream parlours and sourvenir shops, one notch higher on the tourist gear than Ushuaia, pleasant but really just a good place to move on from. We had uknowingly booked ourselves into what can only be described as a 'Megahostel'. Where the receptionist meets and greets [View Full Entry]

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Puerto Natales and the Torres Del Paine We had to get away from Ushuaia it was a place for cozy corners away from the sometimes harsh weather, the hostels, bars and cafes used this to their advantage lulling you into a somnombual state that kept you there longer than you wanted - there were a lot of people who were there longer than they anticipated. Combine this with limited spaces on coaches to other destinations and Ushuaia is a difficult place to leave. We began to hear of a hike you could do for 5 days around a national park [View Full Entry]

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Ushuaia The southern most city in the world (although actually there's a naval town just across the border in Chile which is a bit further south, but we aren't really supposed to mention that as we're in Argentina. There's lot of things we don't need to mention. Like the Falklands, Sorry: Isla de Malvinas that apparrently belongs to Argentina on all maps, signage, and at all borders where they like to remind everyone. (not that we care, it's just interesting.) So Ushuaia..... Until 1989 this was a sleepy logging town and fishing port. Now it is still half asleep, but [View Full Entry]

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Miami, South Beach The party capital of the USA! The place to see aesthetically enhanced beautiful people (I mean plastic surgery), top up that tan, see top of the range cars, eat in the best restaurants and whoop it up! Except that when we got there an uncharactersitic cold front was in place and it was cold and wet, the hostel we booked and paid for on the internet that looked so good in the pictures was under renovation, everything was so damn expensive and the place was deserted! So we didn't see the beautiful people parading themselves on the [View Full Entry]

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WE heart Nicaragua. (exception: Managua) Arriving at the boarder we all had 15 minutos to change money, buy cheap cigarettes or an orange sliced in half with some salty stuff on it.. So we jumped out of our luxery air con bus to be hit by 38 degree wall of heat!!! Oh my god. It was hard just to stand up, wearing jeans 15 minutes is along time, the orange helped! Over oranges we talked to a nice Nicaraguan man who gave us the low down on where to go, what to do, la la la. This was our first [View Full Entry]

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Honduras and the Copan ruins We only really made a quick trip into Honduras (we were not really sure what we were up to at this point) all we knew is that we had three weeks left in Central America, and Karen was still holding on to the fading idea of getting to Nicaragua...fading fast... Travelling is just one set of huge descisions about where to go next (oh what a life!!!). So we popped accross the border to Copan, (actually not just popped: a bus, another bus, onto a smaller bus, then an even smaller smaller bus. you get [View Full Entry]

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A hard rains gonna fall After enjoying our visit to Tikal we thought we would visit Belize as we were relatively close to the border. After a 3 hour journey to the customs office in Guatemala we were left a little lighter in our wallets after the unofficial 'tax'. On the Belizean side after declaring our contraband banana we found we were stranded with no local transport to the nearest town or bus station and with no Belizean (or US) currency. So after catching an expensive taxi to the nearest cash machine in San Ignacio we got on our first [View Full Entry]

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