For pictures from Mendoza, click here. Quick final post. I´ve got 20 minutes to wrap up this blog, pick up my laundry at the Bubbles Lavados up the street, and meet the group for supper, and a briefing on tomorrow´s activities. We arrived early in the morning to this beautiful city. Jody and I opted out of any city tours or any responsibilities. Instead, I got some laundry together, and explored the city on my own. Local busses, trolleys, and just plain locals in general. I´m really enjoying practicing communicating down here. I ended up getting a private tour of the city hall by a security guard, who took me to the roof of the building for some very impressive views and chit-chat, even though we were both out of our language comfort zones. It was quite cool. I then went to a very large park honoring San Martin, the man largely responsible for liberating Argentina. There is a mountain-top monument to this, the greatest of National heros. The location is known as Cerro Saint Gloria. It was a nice view, and nice moment. Then, local busses back here, and now I´m writing you. It was a bit funny, because a lot of the tour group opted to take a bus tour of the city, paying a bit of coin for it. My personal city tour, using local busses and my own two feet, was almost the same thing, but cost me 3.5 pesos, instead of 25+ pesos paid by the rest of the group. Of course, I didn’t go quite as far, but I still saw most of the main sights, and even crossed paths with them twice! Well, gotta go. Just realized it´s October 31st. Hope everyone´s having a spooky night, and I guess we´ll see you in less than a week now. Till then, enjoy the week!
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Click here for pictures from Salta. Another sunny, beautiful day in Salta. Our last day and night before heading to Cafayate, the land of delicious white wine, particularly a variety known as Torontes. For a final fun experience, half of our group decided we´d go out for a half day of horseback riding, then a lazy afternoon in the city, hence my time to blog right now. Argentineans in this region are definitely leaning towards more of a desert-like frontier, and that means there are plenty of cowboys and riding to be done. They apparently don´t ride western style. I didn´t know what that meant. The short version is that they have diferent saddles, and use only one hand, rather than two on western style. I was quite excited to do this, in spite of the fact that I really have no horse experience. This will come into play later in my story, believe me 😉 The start to our day was a little confusing, as we hadn´t really been given much information on how the day was arranged, ultimately, we were picked up by two taxis at 9:30, and headed to a place called San Lorenzo, which I think is a rich enclave not far from Salta, the land is much more lush, and the houses quite large. As the cowboys put it, mucho deniro. read on.
Jody and I had plans to go see Monty Python’s Spamalot at the theatre in Toronto on August 12th, along with Alix, Matt, and Andrew Raven. The tickets were bought months ago, and the time was finally approaching. Well, rather than simply go see the show, Jody and I decided we’d make a long weekend of it and hit Paramount Canada’s Wonderland for some serious thrill-ride action! We took the Friday off, so we could hit the park outside of the crazy weekend window. I think it was a good plan. Even though we did end up waiting an hour for one of the rollercoasters at mid-day (Top Gun, if you’re interested), most of the waits were much more reasonable. We also got to do a lot of front seat rides, and multiple trips on our favourites. There are a lot of rides at the park. We had some faves, and some not so good. The thing that sucks on some of the rides is the beating your body takes. They have a new ‘flying’ coaster, called Tomb Raider, and we really didn’t enjoy the bone rattling that went with it. As usual, our favourite was the old-school woodies. Wooden Coasters are just more thrilling. Sure, they don’t do inverted loops or anything, but they feel rickety, and you only have a little lap bar holding you in while you whiz around at top speed! We like them so much that we capped off our visit with seven consecutive runs of the Wild Beast, without even getting off the coaster. It was pretty quiet late at night, so the ride attendants said we could just stay on. It was crazy! When we finally went to bed that night, I still felt like i was riding a coaster! If you’d like to check out some pictures of that day, check out the folder on Flickr.
31/12/07
Hi Gang. Wow, time flies doesn’t it? I’m already another day behind in my blog posts, so I’ll have to be somewhat brief as I prepare this little monologue for you all. The last post was coming live from my tent in the middle of Waihi, the mining town. Well, this one is coming to you from the comfort of a beautiful home in Tauranga, where I’m spending New Years thanks to some contacts I received by way of my sister in Saudi Arabia. Thanks Sis! This post will focus on my ride to Tauranga, and the next one on the activities I did in the past day and a half. As you know, there is a map already up on the website, so check it out. I’ve also now had the opportunity to upload all of the pictures I’ve taken to date on this trip, so please feel free to view them all on Flickr.
Well, it’s high time that I put fingers to the keyboard and started sharing with you all some of the stories from […]