Hello again, Well, we hit the half-way point. We have exactly ten weeks left in the trip, but that´s OK. All trips have to have a half-way point. Knowing we get to spend the same amount of time down here as we already have is a wonderful feeling. Our trip is by no means long by South American travel standards. The average trip to South America for people we have come in contact with is about 3 months. And many of the people are doing this trip as one leg of their year-long around-the-world trip. Today we find ourselves in a [View Full Entry]

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Hi, Well, we have been in Santiago de Chile for the last four days. It´s been rainy here. For that matter, it was rainy in Mendoza. Which is why it was so much fun getting here. To get from Mendoza to Santiago, we had to cross the Andes again. The pass is at about 9000-10000 ft. Since it is mid-May (Autumn), rain in Mendoza meant snow in the mountains. We drove two hours out of Mendoza to the foothills of the Andes where we stopped and were told that the pass was closed. The weather was blue skies (it stormed the [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone, We are currently in Mendoza, Argentina and have spent the last week in the wine regions of Argentina. The day after the Train to the Clouds, we went to Cafayate, about 4 hours south of Salta. It´s a small, touristy town, which made it real easy to relax and be lazy. The area is surrounded with vineyards and mountains. The road on the way into the town follows a gorge called Quebrada de Cafayate. The rocks looked very similar to those in Red Rock Canyon in Southern California, but much more extensive. When we got to the town, we [View Full Entry]

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Saludos a todos, We woke up about an hour and a half before the sun to take a fifteen hour train ride that ends in the same place it begins. Are we mad? Probably not. One would think we would be sick of sitting all day long on buses and trains, but we wanted to go on the Train to the Clouds. El Tren a las Nubes is a tourist attraction that runs from Salta on the eastern side of the Andes at about 1200 m (4000 ft) to the Viaducto La Polvorilla in the Puna, climbing to 4,220 m (13,776 [View Full Entry]

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Hola a todos! We followed our visit to the falls at Iguazú with a visit to another town in Misiones Province, San Ignacio Miní. San Ignacio Miní has some of the best preserved ruins of the Jesuit missions in South America. The ruins here and in three nearby towns have been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Admission tickets are good for a period of 15 days, allowing for one visit to each mission with guided tour. The Jesuits set up some 30 missions in what was the Virreinato de Paraguay, covering parts of modern day Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. These [View Full Entry]

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Hi everyone, It's Sunday and we are in Puerto Iguazú. Home of the famous Iguazú waterfalls. Puerto Iguazú is located in the very northeastern tip of Argentina. We are right at the border of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. And a long way from Ushuaia. We also just past the 1/3 mark for our trip, but we won't dwell on that. We left Buenos Aires on Friday for our 16 hour bus ride. It went quite well and very easy. We even got to see two bad movies, Stepford Wives and Shall We Dance in English. Most foreign films in Argentina and [View Full Entry]

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Hello again, We have spent nearly a week in Buenos Aires being good tourists. For those of you wondering, "When are they going to get to the good stuff?"(Evita, tango,etc.) Read on. Monday (the 25th), we got up early enough to sign up for the tour of the Casa de Gobierno, or Casa Rosada. The tour is free, but one must sign in with original identity documents starting at 11am the same day. Space on the tour is first come first served. Tours start at 4pm. To fill in the time until the tour, we strolled around the center sight-seeing. We [View Full Entry]

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Hello! We finally made it to Buenos Aires! Okay, we actually got here on the 23rd. Can you believe it took us almost six weeks to reach the first big city of our trip? First, a bit about the journey here. After our finishing our last blog, we walked around Sierra de la Ventana. We eventually made our way across the railroad tracks to a nicer residential neighborhood. We stumbled across Casa de Té La Angelita. It is a lovely old house set amidst walnut trees. Here we enjoyed late afternoon tea and pastries. Headed back to the center, had dinner, [View Full Entry]

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Hey all, We´ve made another stop on the way to "La Capital Federal". We´re in Sierra de la Ventana, a small town near some of the oldest mountains in South America. Depending on which source you believe, the mountains are either about 2 billion years (guidebook) or 260 million years (park). Someone´s grasp of the base ten number system seems to be questionable. Sierra de la Ventana is in the Pampas Region of Argentina. The town is named after a mountain,Cerro Ventana, that has a ¨window¨in it. The mountains were created through sedimentation and uplifting. What is now the Ventana u [View Full Entry]

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Hello! After all our walking around Bariloche, we needed a break. We had a lazy day in town on Friday. Then we did a day trip to El Bolson on Saturday (the 16th) to visit the town and feria (market). El Bolson is the Berkeley of Argentina. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday their is an artisanal fair in town with close to 300 vendors. Hey, even hippies need an income. Ana felt right at home in the nuclear free zone. We went on a spending spree in the market. Ok, not a spree, this is us we are talking about. We [View Full Entry]

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