We left Mendoza on Jan 11th and took a bus across the Andes to Santiago.The day was a bit of a trial and resulted in a night 'on the streets' (kind of).The road took us from Mendoza towards the seemingly impenetrable wall of the mountains, then picked a route along riverbeds, up switchback roads and through the snow line into Chile.The day started to go down hill at the Chilean border post which is a huge concrete shed, high in the mountains.All we had to do wa...

It has been a while, but we have been busy and away from WiFi for a while. Please bear with us!!! We left Salta on 6th Jan and headed south to Mendoza on another comfortable overnight bus.Mendoza is no stranger to devastating earthquakes and the city fathers have taken advantage of these opportunities to redesign and build a well laid out, green and spacious town.Most of the roads are lined with trees so it is easy not to notice that many of the buildings are r...

Pants. Travelling is so often all about pants. At home, pants are always available thanks to the washer/dryer and a man has to be a real slacker to run out of clean pairs. However, when travelling it all gets a little harder. As the number of clean pants in your bag decreases to critical levels, the need to find a laundrette and stay nearby long enough to use it becomes an increasing obsession. It is due to pants that we find ourselves still in Salta and not in M...

The stay at Estancia Colome was just about perfect. It is a fantastically well laid out small hotel, sitting on the side of a hill, in the centre of a green oasis that lies in a huge expanse of desert and mountains. The place was completely silent (except for the occasional whingeing and whining from the spoilt American toddlers whose parents did not understand that the phrase 'children under 12 are not encouraged' was a subtle hint meaning 'keep the sods away')....

We left Iguazu on the 21st and travelled for 23 hours on another bus to Salta, the capital city of Argentina's north west province. Unfortunately there was no really posh buses on the route and the posh seats on the less posh bus were sold out, so life was less comfortable, but still OK. Salta is a nice, quiet and open city, but rather wet at this time of year, though when the sun is out it is very hot. We only really used Salta as a staging post on this occasion...