Buenos Aires

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After an 18 hr bus journey from Iguaçu, Gareth and I arrived in Buenos Aires, the bustling capital of Argentina. Once again we managed to latch onto a couple of travellers who could speak the lingo and seemed more organised than ourselves so with their help we got a taxi with them to a hostel.

Buenos Aires is a massive city renowned for its stylish steak restaurants, cafes and tango dancing. The first few days were spent freezing our nuts off trying to acclimatise to the colder weather and we spent most of the day shopping or drinking coffee to warm up. The hostel we stayed in was brand new so all the facilities were quality but the main lobby of the hostel didn't have a roof so at night it felt like you were sleeping outside. I'm quite sure the tramps on the street were warmer than us most nights!

We had heard from other travellers along the way that the steak in Argentina is probably the best in the world so one afternoon we headed to a local steak house to see what all the fuss was about. This restaurant was incredible, it was an all you can eat buffet which cost us in total about 5 pounds. The salad cart alone was enough to satisfy a sumo wrestler and I didn't realise there were so many different types of steak you could eat. After a couple of trips to see the man who hacked carcasses to pieces behind a counter i was soon walking back to my seat with a plate full of steak and felt like there would be no need to eat for a week.

The following day was spent at the local theme park with three peruvian girls we met in our hostel. The theme park was no Alton Towers but was a good laugh and the highlight had to be the Superman bungee jump which was a 60 metre high pendulum bungee. I tried all the classic excuses to try and get out of of doing it but no one was believing me. Three toilet trips later whilst waiting in the queue i soon found myself hanging 60 metres above the theme park strapped to gareth with some girl counting down from 3 from some speaker. At first i thought i was dead when nothing happened then I realised Gareth hadn't pulled our release cord, if it was me to pull the cord i'm quite certain we'd still be up there now. A grin from Gareth and a quick 3,2,1 and i was soaring through the skys loving every second. A massive adrenaline rush and a huge sigh of relief at the end finished a great day out at the theme park.

We spent most nights in Buenos Aires drinking, anyone lucky enough to have been here will be able to tell you that it is nearly impossible not to go out and end up in some funky club. The drinking culture is totally different from home and nobody goes out until about 2-3am so there was more than one occaison Gareth and I returned home in time for some breakfast and an orange juice before hitting the sack.

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