It was our intention to do the morning walking tour of the city, but we woke to the heavens opening and bucketing a lake-full of water over the city. We caught a bus (courtesy of our host's Metro bus card) to the shuttle that would later take us to the airport and stored our luggage there in a locker and then walked to the centre of town to do what we could there in the torrential conditions. Needless to say that by the time we sat down for our final lunch, we re...

The bus trip from El Chalten to Calafate was uneventful and the scenery not really much to write home about. Santa Cruz is a very arid environment and nothing much animal or plant-wise can survive there. It is the biggest province of South America, but has a population of only 2 000 000 and Buenos Aires has a population of 12 000 000. The colour of the water of the rivers and lakes were a striking aquamarine against the very brown and yellow background of the mou...

Our bus arrived half an hour earlier than scheduled and we stepped out of the heated interior into a wind that sped off the glacier at the top of the mountain and sliced through every layer of clothing we had on. We then had to walk the streets of a town that would only start waking up 3 hours later in an attempt to find the home of our couch surfing hostess. Houses with no numbers in icy cold conditions do not have a particularly welcoming feel to them. We event...

The day after the hike I couldn't move further than the room beyond the bedroom and so opted to read an Agatha Christie mystery I found in the hotel library. Graeme and Amber decided to walk 3km to the cable car to view the town from the top of the mountain. They returned much later to report the cable car had been closed for Christmas Eve and so they had walked back into town and gone in to confirm our Christmas dinner reservation and did some other odds and end...

The bus arrived within 5 minutes of its scheduled time and we boarded what was to be another rattle trap, but never half as bad as our introduction to Bolivia. We knew we had another whole day in the bus, but this time with border control going back into Argentina. We were dressed warmly enough, but my goodness, snow-capped mountain right there at the customs gate ensured frozen marrow in the bones. Amber realised to her utter distress that this was not going to ...