This afternoon sees the arrival of La Famille Senac. One thing I forgot to mention yesterday, which greatly increased stress levels at the already tense estancia, was that Jean-Luc (Fabrice's brother) received a call that morning to say that the apartment that we had booked for the Christmas week was no longer available due to illness. Not great news the day before everyone was due to arrive, a couple of days before Christmas. After a little to-ing and fro-ing...

Having not managed to stay on an estancia (ranch) in either Salta or El Calafate we decided to remedy this with a stay at La Porteña, near San Antonio de Areco in the Pampas area just outside BA. La Porteña dates from 1822 and is a National Historic Monument, a beautiful old farmhouse converted into a small hotel. We were booked into a huge room in the main house, beautifully furnished in period pieces. After a thrilling 2 hours at the Retiro bus station in B...

Culture buffs that we are, this morning we visited the MALBA - Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. This appears to be essentially BA's modern art museum. It is not big. On the ground floor there were a few pieces of recently acquired art by Latin American artists and on the second an eclectic mix of paintings, sculptures and other media. Some interesting bits and pieces but I'm no connoisseur. Losing the Latin American connection somewhat, Tracey Em...

Look at that, a picture of Evita's tomb to accompany a blog about Buenos Aires. No marks for originality! We arrived in BsAs (as the locals insist on abbreviating it, I'll stick to BA from now on) early afternoon on the 17th and headed to the trendy Palermo Viejo district that was to be our home for the week. Pete Steward very kindly offered his 19th floor triplex penthouse apartment complete with rooftop hot tub. That'll do very nicely indeed, we can't than...

With yesterday's success with the whales, today's targets were more penguins and elephant seals. Having gained another passenger for the car, a Québécois guy whose name I can't remember, we set off on the 200km journey south to Punta Tumba. This is home to over a million Magellenic Penguins. Thankfully all but the last 22km of the journey was paved. A fair stretch was even a dual carriageway. We were very pleased to spot an armadillo (of the seven banded vari...