Hola from Argentina!

We are now well and truly on our tour and loving every minute of it. We spent our first 4 days in Buenos Airies exploring the city and pretty much walking every inch of it! We visited a ship called Presidente Sarmineto - this had done many trips around the world and stopped in Cape Town a number of times...it was really interesting to see the pictures of CT harbour in the 1800s. We went to see the parliamentary buildings and were caught in the middle of a protest...we still aren´t exacly sure of what they were prtoesting about but many of the historical buildings in the city and the statues were ruined with grafitti and paint which was very sad to see. We saw a tango show at one of the famous cafes called Cafe Tortoni...as well as tango, there was also Argentinian drumming, singing and apparantly a lot of humour...unfortunately a lot of it was lost on us due to it being in spanish but judging by the rest of the crowd, it was pretty funny.

One thing we have noticed is the amount of dogs and cats in Argentina....the parks and streets are full of dogs and cats which are well cared for - it does mean that you have to be extra careful when walking on the streets...we were both treated to the ´canine welcome to Buenos Aires´within the first few days! We visited the Botanical gardens (which had a very impressive cat population) and also the Evita museum. This was a really interesting and insightful look into her life..she was a pretty extraordinary woman.

Our Spanish is improving daily...we have really needed to learn quickly as most people do not speak English and we know that it is only going to get harder as we go into the more rural areas. Besides from a Mexican couple that we met at the tango show and a German lady that we met at our hotel we hadn´t come across any other travellers and hence no english speakers and were starting to wonder where they had all gone!

Our main aim in the next few weeks has been to get down to Patagonia so we left on a bus to Bahia Blanca on Wednesday evening. We chose Bahia Blanca as it was about 10 hours down the coast and our guidebook suggested it as a good stopping off point on the journey down. Our bus was fantastic = we had a suite which basically meant that the seats folded right down into beds - we had a really great sleep and the journey didn´t seem long at all.

Bahia Blanca was not all that! It was a pretty small, sleepy town with pretty much nothing to do! We spent two days waiting for the next bus but it was a good time to catch up on sleep and learn some spanish and basically just chill (being the hectic travellers that we are)!

We boarded the bus to Puerto Madryn 2 nightts later almost 2 hours late. Bearing in mind that we had checked out of our hotel at 10am and pretty much hung around town until 8pm when our bus was due to leave, we were less than amused when we had to sit in the cold windy night until boarding at 10.45pm! But that´s just the way the cookie crimbles and we are getting used to taking it all in our stride!!! We still think it´s better than London Transport!

We arrive in Puerto Madryn on Saturday moring and checked into our first hostel. We have met tons of people which has been great and nice to hear where people have gone etc. It makes such a difference to have first hand recommendations and also whets our appetite for all that we have ahed of us! Yesterday we dd a full days trip to the Peninsula Valderes = we were hoping to see Orca and Southern right whales but unfortunatley we were just on the cusp of the season and it was not to be! We did get to see sea lions and Sea Elephants and penguisns too and the whole day was so interesting as we had a really knowledgable guide.

We head further down south to Rio Gallegos tomorrow evening and are hoping to do a lot of hiking and sightseeing around glaciers etc..we hear that the temperature is 1 degree so we are in for a bit of a chilly time!