Hola Chicas!!!!
How´s it going everyone? As usual we are struggling with the pesky Spanish keyboard so hope you can understand this! We are currently in a small town called La Rioja in Northern Argentina, we have come here to sleep and eat some good food! At present we are feeling very old in a cyber cafe where all the kids are playing games, there appears to be bad U2 covers playing on the radio and the school girls have been practising their English asking us our names and what the time is!
Well since we last wrote we moved from Southern Chile up to a place called Puerto Varas, we flew there and had an amazing birds eye views of the glaciers on our way. Puerto Varas was colonized by the Germans in the 1840s and the result is a lot of beautiful wooden houses and German style churches. The town is on Lago Llanquihue (sort of pronounced Jankeyhooie)the lake is surrounded by 3 volcanoes (dormant ones), the most impressive is Volcan Osorno approx 2000 metres high and a perfect cone, don´t worry there are lots of pictures!!!! Here we walked around some of the lake shore (it is the third largest natural lake in South America).
Next we got an overnight bus to Santiago, the capital of Chile. This is a beautiful city with many grand old colonial buildings, but they have a major smog problem. We climbed the famous hill there where you can get a view of the sprawling city and suppossedly the Andes behind it but they are really just a haze hidden behind a thick layer of smog. We stayed in a party hostel where most people seemed to be 18 and just finished high school, we felt VERY old. People were going out for the night when we were going to bed (remember we had an overnight bus to get there!) and coming in from their nights out when we were getting up! We went to a really nice Spanish restaurant and saw a Flamenco show, we got chatting with a local couple, well chat might be a bit of an exaggeration with our pigeon Spanish but we communicated nevertheless. They shared their wine with us and gave us a ride home with a mini tour of the city at 1am. The next day we walked and walked and walked to find the largest artisan market in Chile only to find it had been replaced with a department store, blinking lonely planet!!!! We found some more nice helpful locals who drove us a few kilometeres to another market, where we bought a clay spoon that has since broken!!!!
From Santiago we said goodbye to Chile and got a bus to Mendoza in the wine country of Argentina. The journey crossing the Andes was amazing, we climbed up and up on switch back roads to find the border crossing. It took 1 and a half hours through immigration - 1 hour 27 minutes on the Chile side and 3 minutes on the Argentinian side! Mendoza was a really nice quiet town. We had some really good food and also took a local bus out into the wine country. We hired some rickety old bone shaker bikes and did a little tour of some wineries, olive factory and chocolate and liquor factory. Sampling was mandatory!.
Next we headed a little North to San Juan to change buses on the way to San Augustine Valle del fertil. This is a tiny little town with 3000 people pretty much in the middle of no where. We went there to go to two National Parks, NP Talampaya and Valle de la luna. Talampaya is a park full of 250 different canyons, we only visited one but it was amazing, we cannot compare it to the grand canyon as even though we lived in San Francisco we never managed to visit there! Anyway it was AWESOME!!! Valle de la luna was like being on the moon with lots of crazy landscapes and rock formations, we took at least 100 pictures. The parks were definitely worth the trip to get to them, even though the bus broke down on the way home and it took an extra three hours to get back. We were with a guy from Singapore and two people from Belgian and 5 old Argentinians at the front (the old folk didn´t talk to us and we were considering eating them if we were left there for days). It was very entertaining!
We left this morning at 3am and came to La Rioja where we slept for a few more hours and then have wandered around went to a really cool museum where the curator gave us a guided tour about dinosaurs and fossils found in the surrounding area and parks that we visited yesterday. Tomorrow we are going further north to Tucaman and then Salta then it is back to Buenas Aires and then up to Iguazu falls.
Well congratulations to those of you who didn´t get bored and read to the end, we love you all. Will try and write more frequently in future!!!!
Thank you for all the lovely comments too!!
Love K & N
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