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.
You may also like
A well known saying goes something like this. Never put anything smaller than your elbow in you ears. Well, I’m never one to listen to sayings, and I guess I paid the price this past weekend in New York City. On the upshot, I got to experience private health care. On the downshot, it ain’t any better than public health care. But I digress. It all started on the [long] bus ride to New York. It was an all-nighter, and to pass the time, I brought my MP3 player to listen to old BBC radio broadcasts of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy. To do this, I was using my Shure E3 headphones, which are in-ear headphones to block out noise, which I also use on stage when playing music. Well, wouldn’t you know it, at one point, I tried pulling out the earphone to hear someone talking, and the damn bud stayed in my ear!! I’m talking waaay deep in my ear.
13/01/08
Yeehaw! I did it! I reached the highest point in the North Island of New Zealand. Yup, Ralph and I achieved our goals yet again on another glorious day in Tongariro National Park. We managed to summit Mount Ruapehu, through the aid of both a car, and some chairlifts. Hows that you say? Well, the start point was 6km up the road, very much uphill, so we decided to hitch-hike up and back instead of biking. Also, rather than try to scale the entire vertical distance by foot, we took the park people’s advice and paid 20NZD for the chairlifts to take us up to 2000m, leaving us only an extra 700+m of vertical to climb. Our plan was to be on the first chair at 9am, and be back in Whakapapa Village around 1pm, and in National Park Village and the included spa by 3pm. Read on for a bit more of the day, and check out the map. Sadly, the GPS was paused at some point early in the climb, and I didn’t realize till much later, so a lot of the pictures are in the wrong place. Sorry, but that’s the best I can do for now.
Click here for pictures from Cafayate. Ahh Cafayate. I´ll remember that place for a long time. I may even have to re-visit. It was just that nice! There is no way I can truly do justice to any of the places we are visiting on this trip. To really appreciate it, I recommed that you start booking your own trip very soon. It´s the only way to go. Perhaps the >1000 pictures we´ve taken will help convey the thoughts, but really, it´s pointless to explain. I´m almost at the point of stopping writing for the simple fact that there´s too much to tell. But I digress (btw, did you notice I gave up flash-blogging? that wasn´t fair to you all either, you deserve the benefit of my sometimes long-winded stories). Now back to our tale.
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!




