Greetings from Puerto Varas - about 25km from Puerto Montt on the shores of Lake Llanquihue (which means "deep water") (wonder how they worked that out?). My hotel is the Bellavista and for once the billing lives up to the name - it is on the lake front & from my room - (complete with balcony) i can see the volcano Osorno in the distance. Osorno does a passable imitation of Mount Fuji - with the cone covered in snow. Calbuco - an extinct volcano - c...

Greetings from Punta Arenas and apologies for the radio silence. I have been in the Torres del Paine national park for the last 4 or 5 days - that's a bit vague, i know, but kind of losing track of time here..... I need to finish/correct the Calafate entry - plus, of course, write this one..... Well - the bus journey from El Calafate was pretty straightforward - just long & boring. Oh, and tedious. It was dull, too..... - my itinerary details said it would ...

Hola! - well, would you believe it - i've been in the southern hemisphere for 3 weeks now - far too long - i'm clearly getting a dose of the Ben's - that's where you find minor things start to irritate you and you start whining at people that are merely serving but not in charge (i owe someone a big apology) (sorry, Bennie) - and according to Foreign Office advice (www.fco.org.uk ) - if you start to suffer from these symptoms - i should avoid driving and the use ...

Greetings from the end of the world - as they seem to like describing it here. Ushuaia started off as a penal colony - building of the prison commenced in 1902 and was finished in 1920. General Peron ordered its closure in 1947 declaring that Tierra Del Fuego needed families not prisoners. By the early 1980's Ushuaia had grown to about 7,000 people - but was still pretty much a remote fishing town. Later in the 1980's the government turned Ushuaia into a free por...

Well - i've now rewritten the Montevideo bit to include Colonia and corrected Dolores.... A website you might find interesting is www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook - it has top-line information on every country and is frequently updated. You might also like to know that there are branches of HSBC and Santander banks throughout Brazil, Argentina & Uruguay - Santander own Abbey National; Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester in...