Travelling back down south, Buenos Aires is a long way from Iguazu Falls so we decided to break it up with a couple of stops on the way. A small detour from our route meant that we could visit the Jesuit Mission ruins at San Ignasio. Before the Spanish and Portuguese invaded South America the Jesuit missionaries from Europe arrived in Northern Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. They found nomadic tribes of indigenous people in the large forested areas of the region...

Our crossing of two borders went suprisingly smoothly and it wasn't the crossing of doom as predicted by the increasingly inacurate guide book. We booked into a nice and comparatively cheap residencial and went out to grab food and provisions for lunch the following day. Up early in the morning and the sky was a deep blue colour, the leaves on the trees were tinged with a lovely autumnal hue and we were off to visit some of the most beautiful waterfalls in the w...

After our experience in the capital our next port of call had a lot of work to do to try and win back my confidence in Paraguay. Cuidad del Est sits on the border with Brazil which when crossed is only 18km from the border with Argentina and the town of Puerto Iguazu, home of the famous Iguazu Falls. We decided to break our trip to the falls with a stay in Cuidad del Est. Some 20km out of the centre of the town is the Itiapu Hydroelectric Dam. The sad civil engin...

There is not much that you can say about Asuncion. We arrived on Sunday morrning to find the place deserted. No shops were open and the only sign of life either past or present was a perfectly decapitated pigeons head on the steps to the capital cities main plaza. We retired to our room to see what the next day would bring. Sadly the next day did not exactly bring much more excitement as the only real attraction that the city had to offer was cordened off by riot...

After travelling through Bolivia for the last month or so it was a nice suprise to arrive in Argentina. It is a stark but welcome change almost as soon as you cross the border. The bus we finally managed to get on was modern and the axles were not hanging off due to the fact that the roads in Argentina are paved with asphalt rather than being honed from solid rock as we had come to expect from Bolivia. Our smooth overnight bus whisked us silently into Salta. Upon...