We e-mailed an address for an Estancia (ranch) that we found on a random blog. We received the reply a few days later apologising for the delay. It explained that the Estancia was a real working farm, not a tourist hotel and said that, yes, of course we could come. It finished with a polite goodbye… and then came the PS's… PS: note: if you are a british teenager; we are not a party place nor an entertainment center. PS 2: if you are a sixty something north ...

Did I make the mistake of saying how good Argentinian buses were in that last blog? Well, big comfy seats don't make up for a bus that turns up over 4 hours late, picks you up and then breaks down half an hour later only to return along the highway to the place you just came from in the dark of night with no headlights on… But - that's part of travelling which, as a side note, I'm still not sure about. I like the 'being' thing but the bits in between are not m...

We decided to don crampons, grasp an ice axe in each hand, tie ourselves into a rope anchored on the top of a glacial mound and then chip our way up the slippery slope... that's just something you have to do if you are visiting an area crammed full of glaciers, which is exactly what we were doing in the aptly named Parque Nacional De Los Glaciares. I assume no translation is needed there? Our long journey here began with a 32 hour bus journey from Bariloche....

Q: What is the best thing about Mendoza? A: It isn't in Chile! Having been handed our Argentine visas at their Embassy in Santiago we got on a bus armed with our emergency 'passports' on a trip over the high Andes and into Argentina. I have always wanted to be the first person ever to do something, to go down in history - unfortunately I achieved this by being officially the first person ever to have a British Emergency passport that allowed me to travel int...

You're probably getting bored of us extoling the virtues of every country we've been to while you are stuck behind your desk back at home. It'll be somewhat refreshing therefore for you to hear that we don't really like Chile. For the particularly resentful, you'll be even more pleased to hear that we are also unable to leave… Now, nearly every other country we have been to so far we would be more than happy to be stuck in for a few weeks. Maybe if this were...