Another overnight bus took us Mendoza AKA wine country. We checked into our hostel and over the next few days we realised that it was a crap hostel. The staff were rude ("My boss isn't here so I'm just going to lie on the couch - don't bother me with questions"), the music was blared into the TV room, the pool was green and the roof leaked. The weather was glorious the day we arrived - Jimmy managed to get sunburnt sitting out in the garden. We explored the city...

Thankfully the normal travel experience resumed after leaving Uruguay as we continued out journey west across Argentina to Cordoba. We didn't arrive until after midnight but the norm in Argentina is for restaurants to be open until 1 or 2 in the morning. So four hungry lads arriving off a six hour bus hit a local pizza place for all we could before hitting the hay. Tuesday morning we were met by some familiar places at breakfast - Murph and Lorna had arrived f...

Leaving Uruguay turned out to be a lot harder than anticipated. We left Punta del Diablo on Friday morning, heading to Montevideo, in order to catch a bus which would take us over the land crossing into Argentina, to Rosario. What none of us noticed when looking up the Montevideo-Rosario bus online was the frequency - it didn't run on Fridays! We couldn't wait around until the next one on Sunday either as Sean's cousin Jimmy had already arrived in BA ...

Leaving Argentina took us to my seventh country - Uruguay. We took the hour long ferry from BA, crossing the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, heading to Colonia de Sacremento. It could not be easier to cross into Uruguay. At other border crossings, it's always been hop off at one side of the border for your exit stamp, hop back on the bus, then hop back off maybe twenty minutes later at the other side of the border for your entry stamp. For the ferry crossing, the A...

Population: 3.4 million Area: 187,000 square km (2 times bigger than Ireland) Currency: Uruguayan Peso (€0.04) Timezone: GMT -3 hours Capital: Montevideo Population of Montevideo: 1.3 million