4 January to 8 January We flew in from Salta to a sultry afternoon in BA and joined a huge taxi queue at the airport to get into town. We turned up downtown to the apartment we had booked over the internet. 13 floors up in our penthouse junior suite (!!). Lots of space and less money than a decent hotel. First stop was the local laundry. Chilled out for the early evening and then went to a Chilean restaurant down the road. No tourists except us. Great old fashioned service from a waiter who looked like he should have retired years ago. The weather forecast promised that Tuesday would be a hot day and so it proved. We had decided that we would fill in gaps in our BA experiences by taking day trips to ... read more

Sunday 27 December: Tucuman We arrived in Tucuman feeling pretty good considering that we had been on the bus for 13 hours overnight from Mendoza. I had spent the last couple of hours looking out of the window, initially at the rain and thankfully at blue skies by the time we arrived. We had a breakfast of coffee and medialunas at the bus station before going in search of our hotel, thankfully it had air conditioning. We thought it had been hot before but Tucuman really was hot. Being the Sunday after Christmas the city centre was fairly empty with nearly everything closed. We wandered around for a while looking at the outside of some closed museums, tracked down the town centre cinemas which had either closed down - or now showed programming suitable for over ... read more

Saturday night in Cape Town - we decided we wanted to eat some of the local Cape Malay food. Our friendly hotel staff tracked down a restaurant at the Victoria and Alfred waterfront and put us in a cab to get there. The V&A is a spectacular waterfront development of shops, bars and restaurants, very smart and crowded on a Saturday evening. Most of the other streets in the centre seemed remarkably empty - apparently not too many people walk around after dark. Anyway we had a different dinner of Bobotie (sort of spicy meatloaf, samosas, and a dish called something like Smeer snoek - a spicy fish dish - and found that the restaurant was unlicensed so forced ourselves into Belthazar's wine bar. They claim to have the biggest selection in the world (over 600 ... read more

I am typing this at home in a grey and chilly England after coming back from Buenos Aires where we spent the last five nights of the trip. We had arranged to stay in the same apartment as we had rented in January. Thursday was the quick trip to the local chirpodists (more discussion about the shortcomings of the economy and politics) before they closed for the four day easter holiday and also a wander to look for some light weight books about Argentina to take home. Good Friday was a holiday but many of the BA shops were open as were the museums so we took a stroll along Avenida Santa Fe doing lots of window shopping and even spending some money in the fabulous El Ateneo book and record shop - housed in a ... read more

From San Jose de Jachal we headed north-east initially over a rough mountain road as far as Huaco and then onto paved R40 complete with fords (mainly dry) which took us up to Villa Union which is where we got to back in mid December. The only change is that the scrubby desert is a bit greener after the summer rains but it is still empty and hot! Felt some sort of mixed emotion about realising that we had gone all the way round Argentina - means that going home must be happening sometime too soon! Worked out later that we had travelled around 18,500 km so far, and that by the time we get to Buenos Aires we will have done around 20,000km of which about 7,000 have been in hire cars. Not a lot ... read more