Road Trip - Argentina styleeey!

'Let's hire a car and drive around the north of Argentina for a few days!'

This is always the best way to make impromptu plans, someone throws an idea out there and the other one says, 'yeah why not!'

So we did, we hired a little Chevrolet corsa or something and drove south from Salta, to Argentinian wine country. It was incredible; the landscape in the north of Argentina is amazing because there are so many mountains and deserts and rolling hills, so the view changes dramatically every ten mins or so. We drove to the top of one mountain which put us at 4000m above sea level!

As you can imagine, doing wine tasting in a vineyard on the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere in Argentina is an awesome experience. We were walked round the factory where they process all the grapes they grow, produce and bottle all the wine, then box it up for exportation. The area we were in, Cafayate, is famous for its Torrontes wine, which is white and fairly new to the game in comparison to grapes like Pinot grigio and Sauvignon blanc. It's also delicious, I recommend that you try some, and chances are it'll come from the region we were in too! It only grown in four places, three of which are in Argentina, and one in Chile.

I was so ill the three days we were there unfortunately. I caught some sort of coldy/fluey virus and felt absolutely awful (forced myself out of bed for all the wine tasting though, obviously). I didn't even drive the car we hired because the roads were all on cliff faces and I was sneezing so much that I was afraid I'd close my eyes are the wrong second and drive us off the side!

We had an incredible three days, came away with a lot of wine to keep us going, and were very pleased with our little adventure! We had a slightly unfortunate incident the day after we got back however, as we left our camera with all the hundreds of amazing photos on in Salta, and when we called the hostel from our first stop in Bolivia, they checked the room for us and said it wasn't in there :( so some lucky bugger has themselves a nice new camera, complete with all our snaps of northern Argentina, the bastard. Luckily they are the only pics we lost as I backed up all the others a few days before, but it hardly softened the blow. I got one pic on my iPod, which is where I am writing this post, so I'll post it below so you can see a very poor example of some of the stunning views that we saw. This photo does not do it justice!

Oh well, onwards and upwards, and on to Bolivia baby!

Paraguay

I haven't written in quite a while, and once you get out of the habit of writing after each place or event, it's hard to get back into it again!

So after Iguazu Falls, we went to Encarnacion, a city in southern Paraguay. Paraguay is basically only travelled by about 1% of backpackers in South America (that might be a made up statistic but judging from the very few people we met there, and have spoken to about going, it's fairly accurate). It rained a lot in Encarnacion so we didn't do much, but it seems there wasn't much to do anyway. There is a Unesco World Heritage site nearby of some Jesuit ruins, which quite frankly, we could have done without seeing. They were literally a few fallen down walls with signs like 'this was where the head priest lived' or 'this was the store room for the missionaries corn'. Thrilling stuff.

We then headed to the capital Asuncion thinking it might be a bit more exciting. Unfortunately, it wasn't. However, we did meet up with three guys who had stated in our hostel in Encarnacion so we had a lot of fun in the evenings playing drinking games and cooking epic BBQs but we could have done that anywhere really! We ended up staying for an extra day because the other guys were going to a big football match between the two major Asuncion teams and Josh said we should stay for it. I didn't really care either way but we thought it would be cool to see a match while in South America so we stayed. What a waste of time. We walked to the stadium the next afternoon, but when we got there, it was completely empty. We asked the security guard what was going on and all he said was, 'cancelled'. Great.

Oh well, I have a Paraguay stamp in my passport now, which very few people can claim!

Las Cataratas do Iguaçu

So, casually went to visit one of the new 7 natural wonders of the world the other day. Las cataratas do Iguaçu, or Iguassu Falls in English, are a series of many many waterfalls which straddle the Brazilian-Argentine border, and quite frankly, they´re bloody spectacular. (Have a look here: http://tiaraintransit.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/devils_throat_iguassu_falls_argentina.jpg )

They were incredible, I was absolutely awestruck by how enormous they were, and how many of them there were too. You can visit the falls from both countries, and you get a different experience from each side. The Brazilian side is more like a panoramic view of all the falls in a row, and there was one bit where you´re so close to one of the waterfalls that you get absolutely drenched. It was so fun!

Then we crossed to Argentina the day after, and went to see the falls from that side. There, you´re kind of above them, and you get to walk out on a fairly rickety brige so you´re standing abve them, looking right down onto them, which is incredible, although made my knees feel a bit funny!

Now we´re in a little town in Northern Argentina called Posadas, where there is nothing to do if it rains, as we found out! Tomorrow we cross to Paraguay, and are going for an adventure through a very un-travelled country, which I`m very excited for!

More Rio, Salvador and a taste of paradise

We leave Brazil in three days, and as much as this country is an absolute BURN money-wise, I'm going to miss it so much; I've loved it so much more than Argentina and Uruguay. I've said it before but I really wish they spoke spanish here because I want to be an Anglo-Brazilian and live here!! And since I already speak un poco de espanol it would make life a lot easier.

So, last time I blogged, I was despairing about the poverty in Rio, and how it seems to be pointedly ignored by anyone who isnt suffering from it. Well, I'm not going to take back my words because I was very moved, and not in a good way, by the troubles in the otherwise amazing city, but I am going to add to my thoughts: I am by no means denying that there is a HUGE distinction between rich and poor in Brazil (because its no different anywhere else in this country - there is an enormous gap) but maybe I was unfortunate to see some very bad situations that made me react in a way that maybe others would be shocked to hear of about Rio. Seeing the police attack those children is a terrible part of life there, but I think things arent quite as bad as they first appeared. People are poor everywhere, that's the hard truth, and in retrospect I think I reacted very emotionally to a problem that is not as bad as it seemed at the time. Having said that, if I could do something to help anyone who is even half as worse off as some of those we encountered, I would. Poverty comes to a whole new level in South America to anything I've encountered anywhere else in the world.

Moving on, we just spent the past week in Bahia, a state in the north-ish part of Brazil. We came to Salvador first; an awesome city with an incredible afro-brazilian culture. It was the biggest slave port in the Americas at one point, hence the lasting African culture, and its been really interesting for Josh, with his family being from Ghana, to see the similarities in lifestyle. It rained a lot here our first few days so we didn't get to leave our hostel for very long, but we managed to catch an awesome live music festival with samba bands, and dancing in the streets. Every Tuesday night there is a big street party right by our hostel, and we saw a live reggae band (incredible) and a huge room filled with people samba dancing, drinking cocktails made at little stalls in the street, and eating kebabs barbecued off little braziers on the pavement. It was so much fun!

On Wednesday,  we went to an island near Salvador called Boipeba. I say 'near' but to get there we had to take a bus, a ferry, another bus and another boat! Worth it though, because I've actually seen a glimpse of paradise now. It was gorgeous! White beaches, turquoise water, hammocks swaying in the breeze... you get the idea. We stayed in a tiny little pousada, which is basically a b&b, and we had fresh mangoes and papaya for breakfast everyday, it was amazing. When the tide went out in the middle of the day, you could swim across to another uninhabited island, and sunbathe there for a while, but the tides change very quickly so you have to keep an eye out or you could end up marooned! The island had no cars, and so few lights on at night that we lay on the beach and could see more stars than I ever knew were visible to the naked eye; you could actually see the Milky Way!

We came back to Salvador yesterday to collect our bags that we had been lucky enough to leave at our hostel while we were in Boipeba. Tomorrow we fly to Iguaçu Falls, huge waterfalls that straddle the border of Brazil and Argentina.  Its supposed to be beautiful, so that's taking the sting out of leaving Brazil a bit. Cant believe its been two months already, time is flying by! Bring on the next three I say...