So we left you in Uruguay about to get the ferry to BA which seemed like a simple journey. But nothing is ever that simple with us. Just as we were about to leave, a freak thunderstorm arrived which seems to have become a pattern: whenever we leave a city we get absolutely drenched. Soph has put this down to the city crying at our departure, but I think its more like bad luck. So lesson of the day that day; dont wear denim mini skirts and flip flops in torrential rain. We learnt it the hard way. I slipped on some marble, landing on my bag, not being able to get up and not being helped up by sophie who had become stuck in some kind of quick sand-mud and feared for the loss of her flip flops. Eventually we managed to stop laughing enough to recover, but by this time we were completely drenched, battered and bruished and had to deal with the security guards laughing (and pointing) at us as we managed to fall over right in front of them. We got into the terminal to meet alex who was bone dry. Unfair. The ferry "terminal" soon cured that though as we got soaked waiting for our ferry due to the rain just coming pouring though, and the guys that worked there thinking it was wise to hoover up the water. What?!

We got to BA, checked into our hostel and had an early night. The city is amazing, and we fell completely in love with it. We did most of the touristy things, like visiting the cemetry, going to see La Boca with its crazy coloured houses, going to the zoo(and crying at the polar bear who was struggling in the heat, emotional times=ç), visitng antique fairs in San Telmo which was stunning. Its a lot like Paris, but greener, and bigger, and well, more mental. The roads have about 10 lanes and the crossing time doesnt give you enough time to cross. So we´ve taken to grabbing each others hands, screaming Cruce! Cruce!(our spanish is immense as ever) and running across the road. it´s a fail safe method and so far we have a 100% record.

The nightlife is also crazy, and we had some awesome nights out aswell as meeting a load of people who were either from bristol uni or lived in yorskire. The most eventful night though was probably last saturday when we went to pacha. A few 2-for-1 cocktails and some good old fashioned vino tinto (from the bottle, not a carton, we´re classy girls now) led to a random night out, choosing to go about 2am after our sensible "we can´t afford it" went out the window, as the budget always does after the red wine arrives. We busted out some pretty awesome dance moves (as we do everywhere, usually in the supermarket in the middle of the day. we are not giving brits a good name abroad), till about 4ish when sophie realised her purse had been stoled by the Dirty Thief. Dirty Thief had undone soph´s bag and got her purse out with both our bank cards in it, soph´s id, and 4 precious peso (about 80P)- Dirty Thief was not our favourite guy. So, we got a taxi back to the hostel to report Dirty Thief to the banks. As ever, our spanish came out as we yelled Urgente! urgente! at the taxi triver to get us there. We have no idea if this is actually spanish or not. When we got back to the hostel, soph kicked someone off the computers to get our bank numbers so we could report them stolen. If there is any Natwest or Halifax workers randomly reading this then...we are really sorry. Soph spent most of her phone call yelling "i´m in south america, help me" every 30 seconds, whereas the poor man who got me and simply asked what account it was had to put up with apologisng for my student overdraft, telling him I was "on it" as soon as I got back to england but that wouldnt be for a while. Eventually the cards were stopped and we high fived...a lot. Normal people would probably think that was a good time to go to bed- we had been robbed, it was 5 etc. and most of the other people in the hostel (there were 3 others who had been robbed) did exactly that, but no no, we decided Dirty Thief would not stop our fun. After putting my purse in the room (we had lived and learned) I came crashing through a door into reception to find the receptionist guy massaging sophie to calm her down. We then danced round the hostel a bit, stole some lovely man´s pizza, declared our love for south america ( we were threatening to sue buenos aires as a whole a little while before), and ran out to get a taxi. We got one pretty quick and the taxi driver has never been so scared. He got our amazing spanish "olaaaar mr taxi man olaaarr!", our fantasic acting skills (me pretending to rob sophie to deonmstrate what had happened), and one of us asking "pacha si?" every 2 minutes. he loved us. We got back to the club, decided our good work earned us more beers and danced away to the sun coming up. Alex eventually told us it was home time so it was time to get another taxi back which turned into the Best. Taxi Ride. Ever. Not sure we happened but we went mental, including clambering to turn the music up, dancing in our seets (obviously) and taking photos of everything because we thought they were key tourist spots. Taxis have now taken over Buses as our favourite transport, its just a shame we cant actually afford them. We got in at 8, perfect timing for breakfast, and fell asleep happily.

The next day we had to report Dirty Thief to the police. After sitting around at one police station for about an hour, with the policeman telling us about all the major cases in the area and showing us the files (nothing like a bit of security), we had to go to the river police to report it. The river police are our new idols. They stand around in the nice air conditioned office with a mix of police and sailor uniforms doing absolutely nothing, but holding guns. While alex was sensible and reported it all, we were dancing along to Go West which they kindly put on for us as thats the only english music they had while imagining crusing down the river on a speedboat. I´m pretty sure it´s sophies new life plan.

So BA was pretty eventful, and we were absolutely gutted to leave, but we hopped on a bus (no andesmar :) ) and arrived in mendoza a short 14 hours later. The highlight of this place was the wine and bike tour. basically a bar crawl on a bike, where you visit local wineries. We were pretty excited about the bikes, but totally forgot we had to actually ride the bikes on roads...with cars...in a massive city. My last experience of this was in Paris which wasnt pretty so Mendoza wasnt going to go well either. for about 15 mins we were both convinced we were going to die, spent most of the time screaming and closing our eye, and declaring our love for our parents. We did actually manage to get out the city (they tell you its a flat city, they lie, it was up a massive hill), but did also get lost thanks to the shoddy excuse of a map they gave you so spent a while riding around, not having a clue where we were, and smelling the wine around. Our first winery was awesome, she clearly didnt beleive in tasting and instead gave us a bottle just to drink.
The other thing we didnt think about was that it was 40 degrees, which is hot, and we had to actually cycle a lot. And we were hydrating ourselves with wine. Oops. it all got a bit messy, but we got back at the end of the day with 5 minutes to spare, and all of our lifes intact. Just.
We have also decided that people should incentivise exercise with alcohol a lot more aas it really did help us cycling to know what was at the end. Who needs the gym.....
Our reward for our day of hardcorse excerise was a steak about the size of our head, washed down with lot of red wine. Happy times.

So now we are in santiago, Chile and about to wave goodbye to south america and alex as we fly to New Zealand. We leave tonight (saturday) and get there monday so god knows what this flight is going to be like, as we cross the time zone layer thing and everything. People have tried to explain to us how it works but we are very confused by it all and dont know how it works. We´re so excited to go to NZ but gutted to leave south america, and and already contemplating that we might need to extend the trip even further...
SJ x