Last stop: Buenos Aires. Here we went tango dancing!



















Street performers not doing the tango.





European-like city centre.

Arrived yesterday in Bariloche, Argentina. They definitely know how to make better coffee on this side of the border. The Chileans seem to have missed the concept entirely - they don´t know what they´re missing.

After the Torres Del Paine epic we rented a cabin on the shores of a lake at the foot of a volcanoe, on the edge of a national park! It was very quiet.... almost too quiet. But we went white water rafting on the Petrohue River, and I thought I might be about to die.
Rob loved it.

After that, kicked about a bit in the Chilean lake district, drinking dreadful coffee, and getting bitten to bits by bedbugs.

Tonight we fly to the buzzing metropolis of Buenos Aires, and then soon back to the wonderful familiarity of the UK for Christmas with friends! Hopefully this will signal a break from:
1. My red fleece, which I seem to have worn every day for the last 3 months;
2. Pokey hostel showers;
3. Loo´s which lack any loo-paper; and
4. Re-packing the backpack every morning, trying in vain to shove everything in.

We´re in Patagonia, Chile. The mountains and glaciers make New Zealand´s look tame. Little baby glaciers in comparison.

Yesterday we completed a 5-day trek in the Torres del Paine National Park. It was awesome - but more so now that we are finished, washed, clean, with the prospect of hot showers, nice dinner, and soft bed ahead of us. I told myself many times over the last 5 days that I am not hard-core, what was I thinking, and that 5-day camping treks are way optimistic and that I should remember this and never sign myself up to such an undertaking ever again.

However, we now have nice picture-postcard memories, and the worst of times can sound like the best of times when re-living them from the comfort of a warm restuarant. My knees took a bit of a hammering on all the up-and-downs, and I now ease myself down-stairs like a geriatric, but this all means a good excuse for taking it easy over the next few days: We treated ourselves to a taxi from the Puerto Montt airport to Puerto Varas, in order to avoid negotiating Puerto Montt´s big bus station. And tonight we have a bathroom en suite ... the sort of stuff we fantasized about during the trek (which had extremely scary lavatorial facilities).
So no specific plans over the next few days. Just wishing with ever fibre of my being that I could speak Spanish. So embarrassed that I have the audacity to come here and expect
to be able to communicate in English!















Pasta, again?