Ah, Argentina

Route:
Mendoza to Buenos Aires (bus)
Buenos Aires to Puerto Iguazu (bus)

• Argentina has been really chilled. I´ve done hardly anything except chill out and go out. And spend time on buses. The buses here are, quite frankly, amazing. You can pay for seats that are like business class in a plane. Love it.
  
• Mendoza was a real blast. I did a wine tour with some Americans, English and a Scotsman. We got on bikes, cycled a leisurely 22km over the course of a day, ate, drank some splendid wine and some average wine. Afterwards, we played drinking games with beer. After that, we drank Jameson until 6am. You might imagine that I didn´t feel too hot the next day. Actually, by some miracle I escaped hangover free. Life is funny sometimes!
  
• I was going to go to Cordoba from there but a chunk of the group I was with were heading to Buenos Aires so on a whim I decided to tag along. I spent two nights in Palermo Viejo which is a beautiful area that reminds me slightly of Notting Hill, or somewhere like that. BA is quite European in parts and Palermo is the perfect example. Lots of boutiques, sushi restaurants and nice cars. I´d go back in a flash. In fact I probably will...
  
• I did a fair bit of walking in BA, exploring the city. It´s a really cool place, the vibe is pretty excellent. After a couple of days in Palermo we moved downtown to the Milhouse, a party hostel. Thus commenced three nights of pretty good clubbing. Thursday was Club 69 which features dancing transvestites on stage and some decent music, and a friendly crowd. Got home at 8am. Friday was Cocoliche which is my type of club - dark, underground, some pretty banging techno (although it got a bit cheesy minimal towards the end - think the dude was called Renato Cohen). Got home at 8am. Saturday was Pacha for hands-in-the-air cheesy minimal and trance in the big room. Thankfully there was a more entertaining room with some more listenable techno upstairs. Got home at... 8am! There´s a fair few sound people of various ages knocking around the hostels. Although I do tend to be in the oldest age range typically... that said most people seem to think I´m 25 which comes in useful at times.
  
• You may have noticed a pattern in the above. BA is a late night city. I´ve been eating at 10pm, drinking at midnight and clubbing at 2 or 3 in the morning. To be honest, I quite like this style of doing things!
  
• I´m in Puerto Iguazu. It took 18 hours to get here on one of the amazing buses. There is little to do here except visit the Iguazu Falls. These are bloody spectacular to say the least. Apparently something like 400,000 gallons PER SECOND flow over these falls. Words and pictures can´t really do it justice, just go there if you´re ever in Argentina.
• Back on the bus shortly for another 18 hours. I´ve only got half a book left and my mp3 player doesn´t seem to be charged, so it could be challenging... I´ll be spending the next ten days in BA then it´s off to Sydney on the 29th. I can´t believe that my time in South America is coming to an end. I´ve loved it!
  
• Ciao for now!
  

Bye to Bolivia, Hola to Argentina

Route:
La Paz - Uyuni (bus)
Uyuni - Villazon (bus)
Villazon - La Quaica (foot, crossing the border to Argentina)
La Quaica - Salta (bus)
Salta - Mendoza (bus)

• I´ve covered a fair bit of ground since the last update. I´m all the way down in central Argentina - I just arrived in a city called Mendoza after an 18 hour bus journey. Thankfully the buses in Argentina are amazing - I got a sleeper bus and spent most of the night comfortably dozing away. They serve you food and I even got a (fairly massive) glass of whisky after the meal, which was unexpected but nice, and helped me sleep!
• There is no comparison between buses and roads in Argentina and Bolivia. Argentina actually has roads. Bolivia has dirt tracks carved into the side of a mountain or the desert. Bolivia also has batshit insane drivers that think they´re Michael Schumacher and that they´re driving his Ferrari when they´re actually most likely drunk and are driving a shitbucket from the 70s. On those bloody dirttracks.
• I loved Bolivia, but it was definitely the most challenging place I´ve been, so I was quite glad to get to Argentina. The infrastructure in Bolivia is pretty awful and the food isn´t the best. But there is so much to see in terms of crazy landscape, excellent tours and the like, and it is ridiculously cheap. Less than a fiver for a decent hostel, and I had a really excellent three course meal, with an Irish Coffee, in one of the nicer places I could find in La Paz for about 8 quid. Try doing that in Edinburgh or Dublin!
• The last week in Bolivia involved one of the highlights of my trip - the Salar de Uyuni. This is basically the dried out remains of an ancient salt lake. It´s an expanse of flat, salty terrain about the size of Northern Ireland. It´s a crazy, surreal place. It´s punctuated by a few odd features - the Isla de Pescada which has living cacti - this looks rather odd right in the middle of what is essentially a desert! There are also the remains of a volcano which were pretty spectacular. Travelling through the south of the country was also pretty special, the desert there is very like the wild west.
  
• I´m feeling a lot bloody healthier. La Paz is pretty polluted, and as I said before, travelling around the country is pretty horrendous. As well as this, people party their way through La Paz repeatedly. This meant that pretty much everyone I met in Bolivia was, or had recently been, ill.
• I went to Salta in Northern Argentina next. There is nothing to do there, apart from chill out. Which suited me fine after at 27 hour journey from Uyuni!
• Mendoza is wine territory. Tomorrow, I´m off to ride a bike between vineyards and get slowly pissed. Life is good!
• Six weeks of crappy South American music have made be crack and buy a new mp3 player today. Thankfully I´ve got a 2Gb keyring with some tunes on it for just such an emergency!
  
• I hope you´re all well and miss you guys! Edinburghers, hope you´re enjoying the festival!