No work for 6 months!

We wanted to get into the more rural side of Argentina so headed to San Juan, north of Argentina. We were not sure if this was a good decision but it was only 3 hours away so why not?

We arrived in San Juan and immediately spoke to the tourist office to see what the area had to offer. Wow it all sounded fantastic and all only a few more hours on a bus ride away! Great!

We took the advice of the tourist office lady and booked onto a bus to a town called ´Barreal´. Unfortunaltey we had to wait 2 days to get a seat. Yes once again our lack of planning didnt help. San Juan itself was not brilliant but a normal typical large town. During the day the typical siesta starts at about 1. Shops close down and the town becomes like a ghost town. At about 6 pm the town becomes alive again. We can only describe this area like Elephant and Castle!

We were up early the morning of the bus determined not to miss our journey out of San Juan. It was absolutely pouring down, thunder was fantasic and the sky was lit by lighting bolts. The taxi arrived and we slowed ploughed through the rivers formed on the roads to the bus station.

The journey to Barreal took about 6 hours! We had the oldest bus of the lot and a group of young kids going camping without their parents so you can imagine the atmosphere on the bus. I´m sure I was never like that. To top of the journey we had a flat tyre. Off we all got and watched the extremely quick tyre change.

Back on the road again and we thought the journey was never going to end. For 6 hours it was desolate dry land, winding dirt tracks and a speed of about 40mph.

We arrived in Barreal and dropped off by the toursit office. We headed for a hotel that was recommended by the tourist office. Barreal was definatley a typical small Argentinan town. Everything was so spread out, everyone knows everyone, people sitting outside their houses having lunch, horse carts on the roads, many push bikes carrying the supermercado shopping and kids playing in the streets. South America has the most beautifull scenery, I know we keep going on about it, but its true. From Barreal you can see the Andes mountain range.

We arrived at the hotel. It looked lovey, a bit quiet, but this is what we wanted.

No one spoke english, not even a little. We now realised this is why travellers tend not to come off the typical travel path, its very difficult to get around and communicate! The rather weird lady took us to the 60s style room, smelling of funny herbs may i add, and we were set for the night. Where had we come too?? No other travellers were here at the hotel or the town, the hotel appeared to be run by young kids, weird ladies, and to be truthfull ´mingers!´. We tried to book some horse riding (I was still dying to do this in Argentina as in Mendoza the bad tummy and need for the toilet would´nt allow me to go). After a good hour walk to the stabbles they were shut. Great! No horse riding once again. That night a lot of beer was drunk to make the most of our stay!

The next day we were off back to Mendoza to plan our journey to Chile for Rob to do some surfing (at last!)

Mendoza is a lovely city of wide tree lined streets, many plaza´s, night craft markets, friendly Argentians and many restaurants and cafes.

Main Plaza de Armas

Usual spot for a quick 1 pound cocktail before dinner!

Travellers come to Mendoza to experience the wines of the region and the many activities it has to offer from horse riding to rafting.

Rob and I tend not to plan much of our travelling details and take every day as it comes so when arriving in Argentina we were lucky to find accommodation. The trusty lonely planet guide book, or not so as we have discovered, stressed that Jan and Feb were the most busy time and everything is booked up quickly. This was correct but we ignored the advice and continued on anyway.

We came to Mendoza for a bit of activity and night life. It was New Years eve and we had not yet found a decent bar to spend it in. We checked out the 5 star Hyatt Hotel in true backpacker style! Asked the price and the important dress code and walked out tempting by the offer but realisation set in that we didn’t have any clean clothes let alone a dress or suit!

New Years eve turned out fantastic. We had a 3 course meal at one of the nice restaurants. The offer included free wine and champagne so we took full advantage – 3 bottles of champagne later and we were well into the new year spirits.

Em realised that drinking straight from the bottle was far quicker!

The fire works in the street began and Rob and I headed outside to see the new year in. I attempted to sing "Auld Lang Syne" and dance around Rob in excitement however failed miserably with a comment from a US dude saying ´keep trying!´.

New tshirt for christmas. Looking good.

Back inside to finish off our meal and of course more champagne. On the table next to us I noticed that two old Italian dudes had clearly hired two young ladies for the night. Unfortunately one of them decided to take an interest in my feet! In my drunken state I was comfortably sat with my legs on the couch. While I popped off to the toilet Rob got talking to the guy. No problem as he seemed nice enough…………..until Rob went to the loo and left me alone. I heard a voice say “I noticed you feet and how sitting there seductively!!”, I burst into laughter and immediately checked out my feet to see if they were dirty!! “I said “why are they dirty?”. Rob returns and he says to Rob “Your girlfriends feet are gorgeous, I hope you suck them!!!” Arrrrrrrrrrgh, thankgod we were both so drunk and just laughed. We continued to talk to this guy, received an offer to use his soft top in Italy to drive along the coast and an invitation to dinner the next night. Hmmm I don’t think so. The two hired girls at this point were not best amused. Oh well.

During our long stay in Mendoza we took part in a couple of hours of rafting. We have both never done rafting before so we were very excited. A mini bus picked us up and we headed for Mendoza River. The water is so muddy and that day the water level was high due to the volume of water coming of the mountains. We passed by some amazing rapids but were told that these were too huge (grade 4-5) and we would not be riding these. :-(

We arrived at the camp where we prepared for the rafting. Full thick wetsuit and booties, a windproof jacket, life jacket and helmet. We were about to get very wet and muddy. Back onto the bus with the group to go further up stream. We were told the rules of rafting and signals that would help us ride the rapids safety. A lot of time was spent on what to do if someone falls out and how to rescue them!!!! Great, as Rob would put it "my bum was twitching!!".

We hopped onto the boat, took our positions at the back (yes I was too scared to go at the front!) and held on while we started to float down the river.

Front paddle............Back Paddle.............Stop.........Front paddle!!

About 40 minutes later we were told that we had finished. Our adrenalin had just started and that was it :-( What fun.

We will miss Argentina when we leave. The importance of family and friends is so strong. Its normal to kiss all friends and even strangers on meeting. Even men.....not sure Rob was up for this.

Wine and beer is so cheap! A litre bootle of beer 50p, a glass of wine about 1 pound (bottle same price!). There are many wine farms near Mendoza so of course I had to drink it to try it out. Why not. This is a typical wine cellar in some of the nicer restaurants. Not that we eat there much! Honestly. When steak costs about 3 pounds for one bigger than your hand its hard to resist.

As normal we had run out of clean clothes during our stay in Mendoza. I think the last wash we did was before christmas. Rob pants had been turned inside out many times ...... and mine, well, I decided to clean and dry my own rather than carry on wearing them. The room fan was a perfect drying machine!

After the success of drying the pants it was time to start on the clothes. The fan wouldn´t hold the weight so the entire contents of our backpacks were taken down to the cleaners and within 24 hours and 3 pounds lighter we were all clean and ready to go again. The smell of clean clothes is the best!

After leaving El Bolsen we were looking forward to spending christmas in our cabin in Bariloche, people had said how nice Bariloche was, with activities like Windsurfing and Mountain Bikinig to keep us occupied! We arrived mid day with clear blue sky, however there was a freezing strong wind blowing! Summer had definitely not arrived, but it didn’t matter as we jumped into a cab and headed for our cabin.

We had been researching cabins in Bariloche for over a month and had chosen this one as it looked the best and had an open fire, we were not disappointed. It was situated 6.7km out of town, but with a regular bus service just on the door step. It was one of six cabins built in a large plot of land with its own forest, it had one bedroom, bathroom, and a living room / kitchen, cable TV and most importantly and open fire! (oh and I forgot to mention, the cabin came with a dog named ´Calvu´, a very friendly old labrador who became a regular visitor over the following week).

In the afternoon we had unpacked and headed into town for some supplies. Now Bariloche was not what we were expecting, we had heard it was like a swiss town built next to a beautiful lake, so we were expecting a nice water front and nice restaurants etc....Bariloche was not quite like that at all, there was no water front to speak of, or any nice restaurants, and to be honest full of pikies! The lake however was amazing, too cold though for windsurfing!

The wind was so powerfull that you would beleive it was the sea (well Emily did comment that ´I think the tide is coming in´!). We did manage to find a pub selling pints of Guinness so Rob was happy! We stocked up on supplies for christmas and headed back to the cabin. That night we cooked a great meal and I (Rob) promptly smoked out the cabin with a fire that was a little to large!! Ok I got a little over excited!

The few days before christmas were spent going on walks, trying to kick Calvu out of the cabin, and shopping in Bariloche. We had agread to buy each other pressies up to a max price of 20 pounds each. Now I had already secretly bought Em a ring in El Bolsen so was very relaxed about the whole thing, and only had to buy a few extra small presents which was lucky as the shopping was not good here, what was Em going to get me??? Emily tried to get into the festive spirit by decorating the cabin while I (Rob) went in search of a christmas tree, equiped with my trusty penknife! I didnt manage to find one but did cut a branch off which resemled a tree!!!

The tree lasted all of 1 hour in our hot smokey cabin but fingers were crossed for it to stay up for chrimbo day. Stocked up on boose, inlcuding a few bottles of wine, champagne and a large bottle of Vodka and some beer, oh and our chicken - we were ready for Santa!

On christmas eve we thought we would head into town for a meal out, we downed quite a few vodka lemonades first and caught a bus into town....big mistake! We arrived at around 8.30 to find the town almost deserted, now we new it was early (Argentinians dont eat till 11 onwards) but everything was closed. We found a bar to have a drink, the only one open and planned our next move. There were a couple of restaurants opening and were doing set menus but they very expensive, so in our now rather drunk state we found a corner shop, bought a pizza base and went home and cooked what turned out to be a really nice pizza...with no cheese!!

We woke up on chrimbo day, with small headache a may add, and the beautifull hot sunshine and no wind! Yipee chrimbo was here and we were ready for the day. Eggs were on and Rob even managed to find himself bacon! One present later from under our branch, oh i mean tree, and we decided to head out to the lake and build up an appetite for lunch.

The outskirts of bariloche is just like the lake district, green lush trees, a gorgeous MASSIVE blue lake, cabins and hotels, and long windy roads through the scenery. While the chook was in the oven, we consumed our champers and smoked salmon with Calvu in the blazing sun.

After an amazing chrimbo dinner (robs gravy worked a treat and my homemade stuffing some how tasted good) we enjoyed the rest of the day watching movies and more drinking and presents.

Travelling is so hard!!!!

After christmas day and the huge consumption of food and drink we headed out to hire bikes for the afternoon. Unfortunatley what was a 4 hour bike ride around the outskirts of bariloche took only 2 hours. I was disappointed by the lack of exercise we had but happy to leave my moaning about the huge uphills behind! (yes i got of and pushed my bike many times. I´m sure the brake were constantly on!) We stopped at a small cafe on the edge of a strem for our sarnies.

Wood carving on cycle route

Bariloche may not have been the best place to go or live up to our expectation for christmas but the cabin and Calvu certainly made up for it.

After a disastrous rather quick visit to Puerto Madryn we headed to El Bolson as soon as possible. The journey was one of the best we have had, cama all the way!

– we slept through the night journey and woke up in El Bolson. Thankgod for the amazing Argentinean buses with bed seats!

El Bolson is a small town south of Bariloche in the Lake District area of Argentina. After a quick hot choc we headed out to find a Cabana (Ems thoughts were to hide for a while and just watch TV and cook our own food). We found a gorgeous place to stay, ´El Surco Cabanas´.

El Bolson was a particularly quiet sleep town surrounded by huge beautiful mountain ranges. The so called ´non-nuclear municipality´ had a friendly atmosphere and a hippie market on the Tuesday morning selling everything from cheese, chocolate, jam and cherries to rather scary painted foam hand puppets, a variety of witch like ornaments and an array of herbs and plants. We attempted to buy a few presents during our visit but was not too successful (oh except for the chocolate for ourselves!)

A lovely lady called Betty owned the cabanas however conversation was interesting with the lack of our Spanish speaking and her English understanding. Betty was so helpful and even let us take her mountain bikes out for the day! Well, out of pure kindness we attempted to ride them to the mountains. With a slight adjustment to the wobbly seat angle (painfull for Robert), a good pump up of the forever flat tyres, and a practice at the peddling backwards to slow the bike down, we managed to get about 5 minutes down the road. Sorry Betty but we don’t think the bikes had been rode for a very long while. We did try.

As the town was so sleepy we spent the majority of the time in our warm cabana enjoying our home cooked food, gorgeous red wine, numerous beers, and many card games of ´shit head´ (by the way Em is currenlty in the lead)! We said a sad goodbye to Betty and headed to Bariloche excited about christmas. Betty gave us some jam for chrimbo too - bless.

´It seems betty was warned of Emily´s cooking - hence the fire extinguisher!!´

We arrived in Puerto Madryn, on the east coast of Argentina after a rather long 24 hour mini bus and coach journey, at half 3 in the morning!!! Being poor travellers we didn´t want to pay for a hostel for a few hours so we headed off in the darkness to find a cafe. As it was a friday night there were many people rather drunk hanging around the streets. Being called a yank by some of them was not too welcome!! Eventually found a cafe and had some food and drink to pass the time. At sunrise we headed off to sit on the beach and find a hostel. The town seemed like a nice area however during our morning stroll equiped with a full backpack, rucksack on our front, handbag and all, 3 guys and a stick (or broom handle!) decided we were a perfect opportunity for them to become rich, shame we had less than $1 on us!. After a few minutes and a few blows to Rob legs we were saved by a local guy shouting at them. The offer of some toilet roll out of Robs pocket didn´t surfice!

Our idea of staying in Peurto Madryn we slightly different following our morning attack! We booked the next bus out of there for that evening to El Bolson and hired a car to drive to Penninsula Valdes in hope of seeing some whales! This area is know for the wildlife (seals, dolphins and whales). Our luck was not in with the whales or any animal in fact but the picnic on the beach (admitidly in the car as it was so windy and the flies were slightly annoying) made up it. This must have been the most expensive day we have had, rented a car, paid a fortune to get into a national park to see non-existent whales, booked an expensive coach trip for 15 hours inland to the mountains and nearly got mugged. Thankgod we didn´t have any money on us!!