Well, hello everybody. Hope you haven´t forgetten about us since our last update a month ago.

After a looong flight back to London - 2 hour flight from Fort Cochi to Mumbai, 11 hours sitting in the airport in Mumbai, 4 hours to Abu Dhabi, 2 hour stop over and then 8 hours to London I was so happy to see western civilization again with the tube, Boots (chemist), Marks & Spencer (store), continuous hot showers and a power supply that doesn´t continually shut off. We enjoyed our 4 days in London chilling out (literally because it was so friggin cold) and catching up with friends and my brother.

Then on to Buenos Aires. Nice city and great shops and restaurants if you had the money to spend, which we didn´t so we caught a flight south to El Calafate. Decided not to go north to Iguazu Falls as it was quite far and in completely the opposite direction to which we wanted to go. We may regret this as from continuous reports from travellers we meet along the way, the falls are amazing and not to be missed. But, decision made, El Calafate we went, which is where we checked out the Moreno Glacier which is one of the few advancing glaciers in the world, 30km long, 5 km wide and 60m high. While watching it you can see pieces of ice breaking off with loud cracking noices - pretty cool.

From El Calafate we caught a bus further south to Puerto Natales in Chile where we organised a 4 day trek, known as ´the W´ in Torres Del Paine, a national park We attended a talk at one of the hostels on trekking in this part of Patagonia and learnt how seriously windy and rainy it was likely to be, recommendation of trekking poles so you can balance yourself in the wind, how to waterproof your bag and so on... And so we set off a little nervously with no trekking poles but lots of plastic bags to keep our clothing nice and dry when it belted down with rain.

The trek is called a W because you go up three valleys the first of which has a glacier. The scenery is stunning and we felt pretty hardcore cos we were carrying our own packs (well Mark was carrying a big backpack and I was carrying a daypack). We spent 2 nights in refugios (hostels) and one night in a tent (which is enough thankyou very much). Most of our fellow trekkers were more hardcore carrying everything in their packs including sleeping bags, tents, stoves and food - there´s always someone else doing it harder! Fortunately, there was little wind and no rain, however, when you´re there you can appreciate how windy it can get this in part of the world with the winds coming in from Antartica.

Anyhow, after 4 days of all that strenuous hiking we decided it was time time to head back up north towards Mendoza to toast ourselves with some malbec (the famous wine region in argentina). Sent Mark off to get the bus tickets... he came back with tickets to Punto Arenas, further south it is (we are now almost at the bottom tip of south america)!

Whilst there we checked out a Penguin colony, stayed one night and the next day caught a bus to Rio Gallegos on the east side of Argentina and then got a connecting bus, 15 hours to Puerto Madryn. This is where we were going to see the amazing spectacle of the orcas beaching themselves to eat the seal pups in Peninsula Valdes (about 1.5 hrs from Puerto Madryn) which happans each year in February, when we were going to be there! Apparantly, you only have at most a 3% chance of seeing this amazing wildlife phenomenon and guess what......they must be right cos we saw a whole bunch of seals and pups all alive and healthy and no orcas. Also saw more penguins and an armadillo which was the most exciting thing of all. Also saw lots of llamas on the plains. But I think that good old Kangaroo Island in SA is better in terms of getting close to penguins, seals and elephant seals.

From Puerto Madryn we caught another bus (only 11 hours this time) to Bariloche which is in the Argentian lake district surrounded by mountains and of couse numerous lakes. Of most importance was this town has wicked ice cream and chocolate shops.

Having listened to Mark bumble along for the past few weeks in trying to speak to the spanish in his year 10 italian with a couple of merci´s thrown in and me being not much better we decided it was time to do some spanish classes, so we booked ourselves for a 1 week spanish course at La Montana (that´s the mountain´´ for those of you that don´t know spanish). So everyday from 9-1pm we sat in a classroom. There was only 4 students in each class and people were from US, Canada, Netherlands and Australia so it was nice to speak to people to hear their travel recommendations, although not in spanish!

We also lived it up by renting a very swish new apartment with television and a washing machine, this was very exciting for us. We actually got the apartment by mistake as when I was negotiating the price, I thought we were talking Argentinian dollars and the landlord meant US dollars. Didn´t realise the mistake until we had moved in and was signing the contract....thought we were going to have to move right back to the crappy, smelly, small hostel we had just come from as the apartment was WAY more than we could afford. However, the landlord wasn´t going to be able to rent it our for a week if we didn´t take it so we got it for half price, still more than budget but we couldn´t leave after sitting in our own living room. We just had to eat cereal for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

One week of spanish school and we still can´t speak it but have a better understanding of the language and hopefully we will become better as we try and speak it more.

We left Bariloche yesterday to head back into Chile to a town called Pucon. It sits at the bottom of the active volano Villarrica which we are climbing up tomorrow (takes 5 hours - we can cut it short by an hour if we take a chairlift up which Mark doesn´t want to do ´cos if you do something you should do it properly´...whatever i say it´s still going to be a 4 hour hike up a volcano - we shall see who wins out...) Anyhow, the cool part is we get to slide down it in tobaggans.

There are also some natural hot springs that we are going to check out and also do some bike riding to some waterfalls. We then leave to go to Mendoza (I booked the bus ticket this time) where we will check out the wineries. From there to Salta and then we plan to move in to Bolivia. Hoping that Bolivia and further on will be cheaper as have found Argentina and Chile quite expensive (all the guide books are way out on the prices).

Hope this finds you all well and please write messages on our message board as its looking fairly empty.

Take care

Laura and Mark