Antofagasta is 19 hours from Santiago, 11 hours from Peru and 8 hours from natural vegetation. Stuck between the extremes of the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world, Antofagasta has been said to be the "ass end of the back of nowhere". Although that may be quite true, Antofagasta is quite an enjoyable town. Back in the day when nitrates, used for fertilisers, were found in the Atacama Desert, Antofagasta was the main export port. Today, with a population of just under 300,000, Antofagasta exports much of northern Chile's vast copper resources. I jumped on the [View Full Entry]

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Well I left Cordoba on Saturday evening with Eileen and Rob, on the overnight bus to Santiago. We got to Mendoza by 6 in the morning before crossing over the Andes, arriving in Santiago at around lunchtime on the Sunday. The Andes were absolutely spectucular, almost like a different world. There was no foliage on them whatsoever (once you got up past the scrub line), their surface was solid brown rock. In places there had been landslides of gravel down the sides of the mountains, which from a distance made them look shiny, smooth and surreal. Once we had got our [View Full Entry]

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What a lazy week I´ve had! I arrived here in Cordoba on Monday, and today is Saturday. I realised yesterday that, guess what, I´ve only got another 6 weeks in South America, and I really need to get a wiggle on if I want to do everything that I´d love to do in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. Quite a scary thought, really, having so little time. But I still find myself in Cordoba, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, with more than enough time for some reflection on the week just past. Looking back on what you have done during a week [View Full Entry]

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I really should write blogs more frequently before I forget everything that happened. Here goes. Canadian Judy, the independent and mysterious traveler, and I did meet up Hungarian Krisz and Mindy on Sunday, after we had accidentally fallen asleep instead of going to Krisz´s birthday party. Every Sunday there is a large market in San Telmo, which is Buenos Aires´ old part of town, with cobbled streets and supposedly a tango culture. After having breakfast at a cute corner cafe, basking in the sun, Judy and I walked around the markets, which stretched for perhaps a kilometre down Defensa, the main [View Full Entry]

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Well I got to the bus station in Puerto Iguazu, after writing my last blog at the internet cafe down the hill, only to find Canadian Judy waiting for the same bus to Buenos Aires as I was. Mindy, Judy and I all hung out for the 22 hours that it took us to reach Buenos Aires. It was supposed to have taken maybe 16, but due to protesters on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, who have set the vast agricultural fields alight, the main road is closed to traffic. So we ended up on many a dirt road in the [View Full Entry]

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Well, I wanted this entry to be called Curitiba and Foz do Igua(insert c with the thing here)u, but since my Argentinian keyboard is xenophobic, I had to call it Curitiba and Puerto Iguazu instead. When I had last written I was in Curitiba, a beautiful city full of universities and culture and fun. Well, after a beautiful night´s sleep in the university dorm I got a day´s full of cultural analysis in. I checked my emails, had some breakfast at the corner cafe before racing off to have a shower. I raced back to the Plaza at the University just [View Full Entry]

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What a place. I boarded the bus in Rio de Janeiro at about 7:15pm for an 11 hour bus trip to Curitiba, the capital of the Brazilian state of Paraná. And damn, was it good. The two seats that I enjoyed reclined to just above horizontal, with footrests and calf rests and blankets to keep you warm and snug. I knew that I had had a bloody fantastic sleep when I woke up and felt the dried saliva on my cheek. We arrived in Curitiba at about 9am, the roads wet from some overnight rain. I got talking to an English [View Full Entry]

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I mean, I always err on the side of optimism. I am writing this from the Rio de Janeiro bus terminal, the Rodoviaria Nova Rio, rather unsure what to do with myself. My last few days have turned out like this: Since I wrote last, after a lovely day lying on the beach, I really haven´t done much. Last night I was feeling rather tired after my whole four hours of shut eye, though it was a Saturday night, and I was in Rio, so I thought I might put up the good fight and head on out. A bunch of [View Full Entry]

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Ah yes. I spent my last 3 days in São Paulo having all in all a very good time. On the Monday I think (I can´t quite remember, seeing as it was a few days ago) I went to USP (University of São Paulo) to the Instituto Butanta, which was and is a herpology centre and a centre for microbiological research and vaccine development, and all that kinda shiz, back in the day when Paris had the only supply of Plague vaccine in the world, and there was plague in Brazil, and someone didn´t quite see eye to eye. So the [View Full Entry]

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São Paulo continues to amaze. The evening after I wrote my last blog entry Marcos invited a couple of friends around, and throughout the course of a delicious dinner (a fish called Pescada Branca) and thereafter, a lot of beer was consumed. Since my trip could be classified as a beer tasting tour of the world, I should also comment on the beer drinking nuances of the Brasilians here in São Paulo. When you order a beer in a pub here in São Paulo, you get it served to you in a mini glass, perhaps a little over 150 ml, quite [View Full Entry]

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