Click here for photos from this day. End of first long day in Argentina. It’s been an interesting one, culminating in me sitting in a bean-bag chair working on my 3.40 peso beer – A delicious 1 liter bottle Quilmes Cristal. That works out to about $1.25 CDN. That’s more like it! In the room, a german, couple Scots, and a Dutch guy, all enjoying a couple bottles of red wine. Flashback to arrival in BsAs. No problem getting through customs. Off to baggage claim. World’s slowest conveyor belt. Time passes. I finally get my backpack. Wait another eternity, no 2nd backpack! Oh shit. Yup, somehow, Jody’s bag never made it. Bad news. Sadly, not a hell of a lot we can do. Report is filed, but I’m not holding my breath. We manage to navigate buses downtown, and check into our hostel. the tiredness doesn’t help. We shower and re-group. Personally, I say it’s all part of the adventure, but with no clothes and toilettries, Jody may not agree. Luckly, stuff is relatively cheap. I think the new plan is to replace and move on. We’ve got the toilettries replaced, which is a good start. We move on to a preliminary exploration. BsAs is a big city. Compared to Lima, Peru, BsAs clearly has more wealth. I’ll reserve additional comparisons between the two nations until I see more of this country, but at first blush, it would appear Argentines are a bit better off. That’s if for now, gotta finish my beer and hit the hay. It’s been a long 29 hours.
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23/03/08
No, that’s not a typo in my title. I mean to spell it like that. Why? Well, because I spent the better part of today in the Luckie Strike cave system on a caving expedition being led mostly by me! Of course, if you’ve been following along in my stories, you were already aware that I had planned on caving today, so this will come as no surprise to you. If you haven’t been following along, well then shame on you 🙂 After a good night of sleep at the Kiwitown Holiday Park, I was picked up my Emma from Absolute Adventures and whisked off to their cave system for a day of fun. From there, it was back to the train station for the final leg of my journey back to Auckland, and where I started my grand bike tour over three months ago. It was a bittersweet moment, and had some sense of finality to it. To read more about the caving and the final trip to Auckland, read on. Sorry, no maps of course, as the GPS remains dead. [No blog picture until I convert the pics from CD to my USB key, probably not till I get home]
Welcome to the second post detailing some of the awesome experiences Deanna and I had in Morocco. This time, I’ll take you a bit off the beaten path, and talk about two particularly awesome experiences. Namely, the high of trekking and climbing in the High Atlas mountains, including sumitting the highest peak in North Africa, as well as the lows of heading to the depths of the deepest caves in North Africa, the Friouato Cave system. For Deanna, these were particularly fun, as she had never climbed a mountain before or gone cave exploring. In another post, I’ll visit a first for BOTH of us, but this time, it’s all about Deanna’s firsts. If you check into flickr, you’ll eventually find pictures from both, but for now, only the Atlas Mountain pics are up. Eventually, they’ll all be in the collection though. For now, I’ll just give you a bit of the blow by blow in written words. Enjoy!
16/02/08 to 18/02/08
Wow! Well, I’m back from another great weekend of tramping in the wilds of New Zealand. This time, I was tackling the Rees-Dart Track, as well as tacking on a full-day hike to the Cascade Saddle and back. Normally, they rate this as a 4-5 day tramp, but I was doing the whole thing including the Saddle side trip in 3 days. Perhaps that’ll give you an idea of why I took a day off when I got back. The third day was definitely killer, and took me 9 grueling hours of hiking to finish off. However, I’m getting a little ahead of myself, and I’m aiming to fill you all in on at least some of the details of those three glorious days. Read on for the details, and check out the maps (day 1, day 2, day 3) and the pictures (day 1, day 2, day 3). The day 3 map is highly abbreviated, as the batteries were dead fairly early that day. Oh well.
01/01/08
Well, I’d better get used to starting to type out 08 instead of 07, since the new year is now upon us. As I write this, I’ve already spent an entire day in 2008, and am indeed looking forward to getting to bed and resting, as tomorrow it’s back on the bike for a tough slog up a very long hill up to 500m to get to Rotorua. Luckily, I don’t have to stress too much about it, as I’ve already booked accommodations, as well as deciding to spend 3 nights in Rotorua, since it is basically one of the major tourist locations, and a center of sorts for Maori culture, which I’d like to learn a bit more about. However, this post isn’t about tomorrow, even though it comes to you from the future 🙂 Read on about my day off in Tauranga, as well as my New Years experience in this charming city.