First Stop

Bariloche or to give it its full title San Carlos de Bariloche anyway after a very comfortable nineteen hour bus journey we got here!!.The bus company that we travelled with was great was better than flying first class with most airlines the seats have loads of leg room and you get this big thing to put your feet up on,they feed you give you wine and you watch videos(anyone from Bus Eireann please take note!!).
We managed to get a room in an amazing hostel called La Bolsa Del Deporte, more like a hotel than hostel but cheap. The whole building is made from wood and the interior decor is fab, they have cable tv too so Mal can watch the premiership!!

Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi (Argentinas oldest and most popular national park)surrounds the city of Bariloche and has so much to offer it contains many lakes and mountains.We spent an afternoon Kayaking which was great fun the instructor brought us the whole way across the lake and gave us coffee and buns!!.I got absolutly soaked and Mal remained dry even though we were in the same Kayak.....(funny that!!).

The next day when i recovered from my soaking, we hired a car and Mal drove (driving is very scary here apart from having to drive on the right hand side of the road,the gears are on the right too,and this place is full of the steepest hills i have ever seen so we both agreed that my clutch control may not be up to it!!!).We drove 80km to a small town east of the Chilean border called Villa La Angostura its a beautiful little town that sits at the tip of a peninsula.
On the way back we stopped in the mountains and had a picnic and Mal deceided to do a spot of fishing. It was a georgeous day and the fishing looked easy so i had a go and got hooked after a couple of attempts(no pun intended!!)determined to catch dinner until i lost the bait(whoops).

Nights in Bariloche are fun too. We met a really nice English bloke and an Irish couple (who we plan to meet in Bolivia).We drank many bottles of Tinto Vino with them and took it in turns to cook. One night we headed out to an Irish bar called "The Wilkenny"!(i know the owner obviously isnt Irish!!).
Never the less we stayed there drinking the local brew till Mal fell asleep and i got the hiccups then headed back up the dreaded hill at about 05.00am.

We arrived in Buenos Aries on Tuesday morning after a fifteen and a half hour flight(for some reason we thought the flight was only twelve hours!!).It was twenty two degrees when we arrived so needless to say we dropped our bags off at the hostel and found a bar with a beer garden!.We spent a couple of days chilling out,getting over the jet lag and sussing out this amazing city. Buenos Aries is a fantastic city like no city i have ever been in the streets are so wide (even wider than the Avenues in New York)and constantly buzzing with people,everything stays open almost twenty four hours,the bars till six!.Then just a few blocks away is the old part of the city,amazing you would think you were in another part of the world its full of tiny streets with really brightly panited old wooden houses.

The hostel we are staying at is called Downtown Mate (pronounced matae)which is the tradational drink in Argentina really bizzare its like ground leaves they put in a litte wooden cup and drink through a straw, it tastes like a really strange tea people here carry around the wooden cup everywhere they go with a thermos flask of water to keep topping it up!! Malcolm is addicted already.The people in the hostel are fab and give free spanish lessons(very useful)although the hostel its self is pretty basic (no locks on shower doors!)

We took a day trip to Uruguay on saturday which was fab,It only took a couple of hours by boat and wasnt that expensive either. We hired out a scooter and went all around the town of Colonia really old town on the coast breath taking views and beautiful beaches.On Sunday we went to the tradational market in San Thelmo which was fab hundreds of stall selling beautiful crafts and art had to restrain myself from buying stuff as wont be able to carry it!!Will post some photos soon.