More from Argentina

I'm already getting bad about writing this!

We left our hostel in Buenos Aires on the 2nd and moved up the road to an apartment belonging to a friend called Nico, who we met on a night out. Nico is from a suburb of BA, and really kindly offered us a place to stay for a few more days in the city for free, so he coukd show us around some more, with another friend we made called Martina, who goes to uni with Nico.

We dropped off our enormous backpacks at his place, then headed north to San Isidro which is the town Nico grew up in. It was quite a small place, and obviously a very wealthy area, all the houses were huge and the restaurants looked super posh! We sat on the riverfront and drank maté, Argentina's favourite beverage. I'm growing to really like it!

We stayed for two nights at Nico's, then headed 4.5 hours north to a city called Rosario. Our bus was an hour late to arrive, but we'd bought tickets for 'semi-cama' seats which means they recline really far back and are pretty comfy, so at least the journey wasn't too bad.

Our hostel here is really nice. Everyone gets introduced to everyone else by the owner when you first arrive, and there's a huge garden where everyone congregates in the evenings. There are a few English couples here, as well as many other nationalities, and it's a very social place. We had a huge BBQ on the second night, with the best steak we could buy at the butchers. Argentina is a pretty expensive place to travel but there are two things you can buy here for very cheap: wine and beef. Could be a lot worse!

Yesterday we took a boat across the river to a beach on an island, and spent the afternoon sunbathing, but it wasn't that nice a beach and we probably wont bother going back. The river water is technically clean enough to swim in but its quite grey/brown, and it doesn't look particularly appealing!

We're planning to stay at this hostel for another few days, then get on a 12 hour overnight bus to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay. Not so excited about the long journey, but we're getting semi-cama again so it hopefully won't be too bad!