… a busy week indeed!

Monday we took the ferry to Colonia (only takes an hour – high speed fancy boat so it was). We´d a nice lady with a crazy accent (mix of Uruguaian, British and American) who brought us round the town and told us a bit about it … they´ve a 63% divorce rate (!) and they also have ´public´ dogs. At home these would be called strays but not in Colonia, everyone in the town looks after the dogs collectively, and they all have names too. Apparently one of the dogs, Rocky, used to help our guide give the tour but he´s quite old now so only joins in at the end by the Church to say hi It was a lovely little town and well worth the day trip, the best bit however was the sunset which we watched from the beach … never knew the sky could go quite so red.

Tuesday we headed off to an estancia (ranch). That was great craic. We got to pretend to be cowboys and ride horses around the farm … although ´ride´might be overstating it … basically the horses knew the route and nothing was going to deter them from walking it so you better just sit there and leave them do their thing! After the horses we´d a bbq and were treated to some traditional folk songs and dancing from different regions of Argentina, of course audience participation was required and guess who got called up? Colm!! It´s becoming quite a habit We then watched two gauchos (cowboys) demonstrate their horse skills and trying to out do each other. Then a cup of mate (tea drink that they´re all obsessed with here … and they say the Irish drink a lot of tea? These people carry round flasks with them all day just so they´re never without!!) and hometime.

Wednesday we bid adios to Buenos Aires and flew down to Puerto Madryn. Once we arrived (and located a hostel) we headed down for a stroll to the beach. Now the primary reason for visiting Puerto Madryn was to go whale watching and we were discussing whether we would try book the trip for the following day or the day after, only to suddenly realise that you could see whales from the beach!! We headed up to the pier and spent the next hour or so watching whales showing off. As you can imagine we decided to book the whales watching for the following day! We were collected at 8.10am (freezing so it was!) and headed off on our trip. First stop was a nearby beach from which you can usually see whales around 100/200 meters away – this was to give us a ´taster´ … however there was a whale only 20 meters off the shores! He was rolling in the water (scratching his back on the seabed). I don´t know quite how to describe watching a whale from that close a distance while the sun is slowly rising over the sea, only than to say that it was absolutely awesome, in the true sense of the word. We then headed to the harbour to head out on a boat to see if we could find some more whales. It was a bit slow initially and looked as if our ´taster´ that morning would not be topped … however then a whale swam right up to the boat, lifted his head to take a peek at us all and then dived under the boat! … and then another dove under the boat a few minutes later!! As our captain said, we had achieved “maximum contacto”! We headed back into the harbour only to come around two more whales that drifed in with us, once of which leaped up out of the water several times creating huge splashes. It was definitely a day that neither of us will be forgetting in a hurry!

Now unfortunately the hostel we´re staying in has internet that seems to be constantly in demand so we´ve headed out to an internet cafe to upload some photos, but the connection is very slow (and then crashed altogehter … grrr) so we´ve only been able to upload some of the Colonia photos. We´ll upload the rest of the Colonia photos and the photos from the whale watching yesterday asap … promise!

PS … proof Irish people can´t go anywhere without meeting other Irish people … when we got on the bus yesterday morning to head off to see whales the driver was asking us all where we were from, and out of only 8 other people, 2 were also Irish … from Dublin! We were chatting away to them during the day and we all decided to head out for dinner last night when we got back to get some proper Argentinian steaks (very yum! and cheap!!) and during the course of the conversation, discovered not only were they from Dublin and she had done Arts in UCD too, but the guy was in Colm secondary school a few years behind him! Madness!!

In one of the guidebooks I read prior to travelling I read the phrase “Quein es mas macho?”, meaning “Who is more macho?”. In the guidebook I believe it was referring to shoving matches which took place over seats on trains, but it seems to be a question which Buenos Aires taxi drivers ask themselves constantly.

A taxi ride in Buenos Aires is an experience in itself. Our journey today was an extreme example – we went from Boca to Palermo, essentially right across town. We got in and discovered that, as per usual, there were no seat belts. Shouldn´t be a problem – surely our driver has great concern for our safety and will drive with the necessary caution. It didn´t work out that way…

Our driver seems to want to know just how fast his car can go, and whether or not he really needs to brake when he takes corners. He also seems to suffer from some unique problems with his vision – he sees gaps that aren´t there, thinks far away orange lights are green, and cannot distinguish between the right and left sides of the road.

He has three signature moves which help him beat* the other drivers

- if he wants to be in another lane he moves into it, even if there is another car already there. He will then hover between lanes until he forces that driver out.

- if the driver in front is not travelling fast enough he will flash his lights frantically and drive within inches of their bumper.

- if there is a pedestrian crossing the road he will speed up, throw his hands up to heaven, and try and roll over their toes.

We spend the majority of the journey wincing as he tries to move into gaps that aren´t there and clutching the door handles for comfort. I start to think that maybe I should have taken up religion.

When the journey is over we both fall out of the taxi laughing and promising never to badmouth Parisian drivers again.

* Yes, it´s a game. Only taxi drivers know the rules, but essentially it seems very similar to ´chicken´. During another taxi ride we were actually shunted from behind by another taxi while stopped at traffic lights. Our car moved a good bit forward, but neither driver left their vehicle. I think maybe you lose points when you make physical contact with another car?

Still in Buenos Aires, but we moved hostel yesterday. The new one is in a much fancier area than the last hotel (Garden House Art Factory) which was in San Telmo – an area that is slightly ´rough around the edges´shall we say. Art Factory was more of a traditional backpacker place, and we got talking to a few different people about what they´d done and what they were doing next, which was good. Each room had been decorated by an artist, and our room, room 7, was the ´splash room´- you can see why from the photo! The down side, apart from the fact we were told not to wander around after dark if we could help it (not the most encouraging!), was that they were doing maintenance work and so we were woken by drilling and sawing each morning at 8.30pm – not the best way to conquor jet lag I have to say!

Our new hostel, La Otra Orilla, is more of a B&B and so we far we´ve not been talking to any other guests, although there was a backpack in reception when we arrived and so it´s obviously used by backpackers. It´s very nice and smells like a spa, thanks to all the candles dotted about the place It´s also very quiet so all in all quite a contrast to Art Factory. No doubt we´ll try to stay in a mixture of traditional backpacker places, and places where we can sleep!

Yesterday was pretty eventful. After checking into the new hostel, we went to the Zoo. The elephants and lone giraffe seemed very happy but none of the big cats or bears looked happy at all, and paced continually in their enclosures, which was very sad to watch. None of the confinements were particularly big . . . it made me feel very proud of Dublin Zoo with all it´s fancy newness. The other strange thing was that far from the “don´t feed the animals” policy that most zoos adopt, this zoo actually sold food for visitors to feed the animals with. Now how you can devise one single type of food that can be suitable for everything from aligators and elephants to monkeys and beavers is beyond me. The food itself looked like fish food (hopefully it wasn´t). This did make us wonder how the zoo keepers could possibly control the animals diets, and given the scrawniness of some of the big cats, we worried that perhaps they didn´t at all.

The next stop was La Recoleta Cemetery (cheerful day wasn´t it!). This cemetary is as famous as the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris and is where several presidents, and also Ms Eva Perón herself are buried. The cemetery is like a small city and so we´ve taken to refering to it as ´The City of the Dead´. Some of the mausoleums were so incredibly ornate (think chapel sized), and what surprised us most was that all the ones we seemed to find dated from the last 150 years. I had assumed that the ornate ones would have been much older, but in fact many were from the end of the last century. Some had glass fronts and so it was possible to see coffins piled up inside (a little creepy) and some had had their doors smashed in, one of these also seemed to have the coffin popped open, so we assume grave robbers and been and gone. It would definitely be a good place for a zombie movie . . . we were there in broad daylight and it was creepy enough!

Last stop yesterday - much more cheerful! - an evening of Tango! First we arrived and had an hour´s class. We learnt one of the basic tango steps and then spent much of the hour bumping into other people in the over crowded room! We then had dinner and just as we were served dessert the show began – the professionals making us feel like what we had just learnt and what there were doing on stage were two very different things! It was a very enjoyable night, and not one to be missed while in Buenos Aires . . . especially when your other half gets pulled up to dance with one of the professionals* in the aisles! Poor Colm – got a nice photie though
 

Off to check out the markets tomorrow, and then a day trip to Colonia (Uraguay) on Monday.

You can see all our photos to date on the following flickr page – http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarahhickey/sets/72157605866660319/

* An aside from Colm – this is not the first time that someone has attempted to get me dancing at a show. At a panto when I was younger Twink tried to get me up to dance ´The Locomotion´. I refused, and we had a stand off until my sister caved and got up instead of me. The tango dancer was much less scary than Twink.

We arrived safe and sound, if very tired, on Tuesday. Our bags however, thinking the 16 hour flight far too long to attempt in one go, decided to stop over in London and Sao Paulo on the way and only joined us today at 6pm. But we now have lovely clean clothes again and so are happy peoples

So far Buenos Aires seems nice – they´re very fond of shoe shiners, but unfortunately we´ve no leather shoes and so cannot avail of this service

Biggest surprise so far – not everyone assumes that we´re foreign (!) in fact we´ve been asked for directions on more than one occasion – huzzah!

Also despite there being 13 million people here the traffic seems no where near as bad as home … one road we passed yesterday had 8 lanes of traffic …. in one direction! Motobikes perhaps hoping to create a 9th lane seem to enjoy driving on the paths and make pedestrian life more interesting.

Bags packed … check!

Passports … check!

Tickets … check!

World’s largest first aid kit … check!

Flight to London delayed resulting in mass panic that we’ll miss our connecting flight … check!

 

… talk to you all on the other side of our 16 hour (!) flight … assuming we make it to London on time … and assuming we don’t kill each other from boredom!

After spending a good chunk of Tuesday hanging around in the Great Outdoors we now have backpacks to bring with us on our trip. Neither of us have backpacked before so we were relying on the advice of the staff. They were really helpful, and didn’t just recommend that we go for the most expensive options, which was nice.

We got a whole load of other useful stuff while we were in there*, much of it recommended by friends who have gone on similar trips.

Because we are travelling over such a huge area we’re going to be in a number of different climates, so we had to be a little smarter about our choice of clothing. Instead of big jackets we’ve opted for a couple of micro fleeces which can be layered for warmth coupled with light rain jackets. We’ve also got magic trousers that can turn into shorts at the drop of a hat.

There seems to be an entire industry devoted to taking normal every day items and shrinking them so that they can fit in a handy travel pack. From that department we have:

- Rainjackets – waterproof, breathable and fit into a handy travel pack.

- Sleeping bag liners – handy in case we don’t trust the sheets in hostels. They are light, warm and fit into and handy travel pack.

- Quick dry towels – these are about 8 million times smaller than a normal towel, dry quicker than you can blink, and can absorb an entire swimming pool’s worth of water. More importantly they fit into a handy travel pack.

We also picked up the following gadgets:

- Universal bath/sink plug

- Travel clothes line – has a twisty thing so you don’t need pegs

- Alarm clock (nothing special)

* As a result we can no longer afford to travel. But we do have these lovely backpacks

Hi Folks.

As you know we’re going to be traveling around South America for the next few months.

We’ll try to keep you updated on all our adventures, and hopefully add lots of photos too!

Feel free to leave us comments and let us know whats going on at home

Sarah & Colm