Potosi was at one stage Latin America's largest and wealthiest city due to possessing the worlds richest mine at the time. It is also the worlds highest city at a little over 4,000m. To mine the nearby hills the Spanish conscripted labor from indigenous and imported African slaves. They were set to build a huge system of dams to help in the processing of the minerals and to work the mines themselves (the African slaves proved to be pretty useless at 4,000m and...

Hi there. Just a quick post to describe the bus journey from hell from yesterday. The trip was only 12 hours (tiny compared with a lot of others) from Salta in Argentina to San Pedro in Northern Chile. Nobody had warned me about this trip, but I probably should have figured it out for myself. To get to San Pedro you have to drive over the northern Andes which, unlike further south, is a wide flat desert. After about an hour the bus started going up.........a...

Well I'm now in my final few days of Argentina (I should have been in Bolivia long ago, but I hate the thought of leaving). I spent 5 days in Tucuman with some friends. I think I liked the town even more than Beunas Aires (its a lot smaller with 700,000 people) and could easily have spent a few more weeks enjoying the BEST empanadas in South America. I'm sad to say the old meat pie will never be the same now that I've got a taste for these empanadas. As I'm a...

After a few weeks in Beunas Aires it was ready for some rest and relaxation. I was convinced to take the long bus trips up to Iguazu falls in the north east of Argentina, near the Brasilian and Paraguay borders. After over 200 hours in buses I decided to splash out a bit for this trip and go 'coche-cama'. Although it's only $7 more on a $45 fare, there's a big difference in service. There is three main levels of service on the buses in Argentina. There's 'se...

Hi there all. I've just spent the last few weeks in BA doing some Spanish lessons and enjoying life in a great city. I hadn't planned on going across to BA but everyone convinced me it was a `must see'. So after another 16 hours on a bus I was in a big city again. My first reasons for being here was to study a bit of Spanish which went pretty well. The other big attraction for BA is the nightlife. On my first Saturday night I headed to 'Pasha'which I'm told...