Argentina!

After our trek through the Lares valley in Peru, we sat down and checked out a map of South America and considered how far we wanted to go in the next few months. Then we booked a flight to Buenos Aires. In case you haven't looked at a map lately, let's just say that Argentina is big. Really big. We´re now in Salta, our fourth major stop in Argentina, and we've spent over 65 hours on busses already. Not that we're complaining, since the long-distance bus service here is incredible. "Coche Cama" (sleeper) is the most common travel type - every seat is like flying first-class. If only Canada had busses like this...

We mostly chilled out in city parks in Buenos Aires, but we did manage to stay up late enough to go for dinner at a fancy restaurant. Once. Dinner here starts around 10:00, but things don´t really get going until nearly midnight. The food was great, even though they kept calling Megan´s salmon "trout". Buenos Aires is a magnificent city, Megan compared many places to ones in Paris. And there is lots of coffee :)

After Buenos Aires we caught a short (10 hour) overnight bus to Córdoba, where we spent 2 days wandering the city and one night camping in Los Gigantes (The Giants) provincial park. We also did the pilgrimage to the house Che grew up in, in a small town south of Córdoba. Not the greatest museum in the world, but there were lots of samples of his writing, and it piqued both our interest in learning more about Che.

Next stop (23 hour bus ride) was Puerto Iguazu, home of one of the world's largest waterfalls. And some really cute Capuchin monkeys. We spent two full days in the park, the first on the established tourist walkways taking LOTS of pictures and the second on a slightly less-travelled path to a smaller falls and a little swimming hole. Amazingly, we had this to ourselves for over an hour, and left just as a massive school group arrived.


Dave having a gently-massaging shower

The second day was sunnier and we briefly considered walking out to the big falls to see them in bright sunlight (Dave wanted a picture with rainbows) but we were out of water and nearly out of camera batteries so we decided to head back to our hotel's pool instead. We were a bit disappointed that we'd seen neither toucans nor the troop of monkeys we'd read about, but we'd seen crocodiles and birds and lots of lizards, so we weren't too disappointed. The edge of the park walkways is "El Sendero Verde" (The Green Trail) and it meanders under a canopy of trees covered in vines and epiphites. Monkey Food :) We saw the whole troop snacking above the trail, generally hangong upside-down and looking back at us while they nibbled. Unfortunately, our camera battery was completely dead due to Dave's many attempts to photograph butterflies on the wing, so no monkey pics. Doh!

Puerto Iguazu is a friendly little town on the edge of a tropical jungle and we really enjoyed our stay there, despite the complete lack of edible vegetables. We were getting quite concerned that the only things that Argentines eat is meat, sugar and white bread. This is difficult when you don´t eat meat!!! But our hotel was awesome. For about $17 we had a pool, air conditioning and breakfast!!! And a litre of yummy dark beer was about $1. Yum. After a slight bout of bad veggie induced food poisoning we headed up to the Andean Northwest of Argentina, a mere 27 hour bus ride away. More details on this area in our next edition.


The right-hand edge of the main falls