MATT: A short journey from Areco to Rosario late at night - arriving into what looks like a deserted city at about 10pm. We are a bit concerned that we should not have come here, but make it to the hostel without incident - and are welcomed by the very friendly owner and made to feel at home. The hostel is pretty unique and quite grand, but quite dirty...but will do the job for the next couple of nights. It is pretty late and we are hungry..so head out for a bit...

Kel: On the road again, just can't wait to get on the road again...... by overnight bus from Mendoza to Buenos Aires first, in what has to have been our best bus journey ever. We were in an 'executive' bus with almost fully reclining leather seats, we got served dinner, we watched the latest Batman and then we slept ... loads. The journey took about 13 hours but it was painless. We stayed in BA for a milisecond before jumping on another bus north to the pampas...

MATT: We left on the bus to Mendoza early, with a long journey ahead of us. But all in all a pretty painless one. We headed out of Valp, up the coast then inland towards the Andes. It is a few hours through the rugged, rocky landscape, gradually climbing up through the foothills towards the border pass. The last stretch is a climb of about 2000m that happens very quickly as the road snakes up the mountain side to the pass at about 3000m above sea level and across...

Kel: We headed for Valparaiso, the bohemian culture capital of Chile. It was a gorgeous little city that was very rough around the edges. There seemed to be more stray dogs than people at times. Anyway, an industrial port, set on about 13 hills (cerros) with lots of cobbled streets, multicoloured buildings and some wicked graffiti art on some of the buildings. Our hostel was lovely. Very clean, nice beds, but it felt like it was being run by nuns or somethin...

Kel: We made it! We travelled back in time. We left NZ at 5pm and got into Santiago, Chile at 1pm, 4 hours earlier on the same bloomin day! We were unbelievably dazed and confused. Never felt anything like it. We went back 16 hours in total so our days were flipped on their heads. We slept as soon as we hit our hostel and didn't really start to explore Santiago until the evening. It wasn't Argentina, we had one of our best meals in South America so far. ...