A beautiful 5 hour bus journey through the Andes left us feeling a little bit sad that we were leaving South America and as we'd not heard great things about Santiago we weren't massively looking forward to it, seeing it as more of just somewhere we had to stay before getting our flight to New Zealand. Low expectations are sometimes a brilliant thing though; Santiago is a great city. As soon as we got off the metro with all our bags (there are a few more now as w...

This was intended to be our last foray into the big outdoors before we reach New Zealand. Uspallata, although not nestled in the mountains was a friendly little town. We stayed in a tinpot little hotel where the owner could not do enough to make us welcome. Bringing us tea in our room, giving us the low down on all the local sights, turning on our shower (ok, that was a little too helpful) and generally improving Argentina's odds in getting the topspot when respo...

We travelled for 21 hours on two buses to reach Mendoza, although we are now level with Santiago so will have no more long trips in South America. Mendoza is a very beautiful city which has a very distinct European feel about it with lots of cafes, restaurants, parks and a whole heap of wine shops. Mendoza is the heart of Argentina´s wine region and wine has pretty much dominated our stay. We have spent a couple of days wandering round the town and have been out...

We left Salta on a (relatively) short bus ride to the small town of Cafayate and after a cheap evening cooking our own risotto and polishing off 3 bottles of wine with Gemma we set off for a walk to the seven waterfalls that are nearby. We didn`t actually make it though, having walked for a couple of hours, with yet another canine walking companion, we reached the river and decided that was far enough as we would have had to walk for 3 more hours to reach the wat...

We arrived into Argentina for the 4th time on our trip along with Geeçmma and Eddie from La Paz and Jez, Garrad and Luke who we had met in San Pedro, travelling in such a big group we managed to get a discount at our hostel and then immediately headed out for some Argentinain steak, one of the great things about Argentina is being able to go out for a good meal at approaching midnight. We then spent the following day trying to resolve camera problems and then si...