Spent one evening down at Cafe Tortoni, an Argentinian institution incorporating a restaurant upstairs and a tango show downstairs. I´m not sure where it stood on the tourist vs authentic axis, but it was an entertaining night out nonetheless. The body clock needs adjusting a bit out here. It seems nobody goes out before 10pm, and when we went for a night out on Saturday in Palermo, there was virtually nobody in the bar we were in until 1am. We were being escorted round by a guy from Buenos Aires, and by the time it got to 4am he told us we should go to this bar that would just be getting going! He seemed surprised when I explained that back home people would normally be passed out on their sofas with pieces of kebab stuck to their shirts.

There are some great street markets here, with impromptu entertainers performing all over the place (a higher quality variety than their South Bank equivalents) and the food has been good too. Although it´s difficult to get what you´d call a balanced meal here. If you order meat, you get a plate of meat, and if you order salad you get a huge bowl of salad. It doesn´t seem possible to get a steak and chips with a side salad. It´s one thing or the other. But the steaks are great! We went out for a day to a town in the Pampas which is Argentinian gaucho (cowboy) territory. Hoped to see poncho-clad gauchos on horseback lassoing errant cows, but sadly it was a bit tamer than that. But enough to get a sense of Argentinian history prior to the importing of culture from Europe in the 19th century.

Impressive city though it is, it is still a city with all the dirt and noise that goes with that, so it´ll be good to get down to Patagonia in a few days and get back to a bit of nature.

written by  phileasdogg on January 18, 2009 from Buenos Aires, Argentina
from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs
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Decided to get out of the hustle and bustle of BA for a couple of days, so took a one-hour ferry ride over to Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay. It´s an attractive seaside town that apparently used to be a key base for the Portuguese to smuggle goods into the Spanish colonies. Or something like that. Anyway, it has the feel of a Greek island with it s cobbled streets, green plazas with pavement cafes and Mediterranean-influenced architecture. For some reason there are also a lot of very old cars parked along the streets that don´t look like they´ve been moved for many years. But it´s a town with a lot of character and is a welcome refuge from the heat and crowds of BA. We haven´t done much here apart from take a bike ride out to some of the beaches nearby (on possibly the worst bike I´ve ridden since I was 10 - no gears, steel frame and a saddle that might as well have not been there).

written by  phileasdogg on January 20, 2009 from Colonia del Sacramento, Uruguay
from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs
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Then today we went out for a trek on the Perito Moreno Glacier itself. Clearly it´s in a fairly safe part of the Glacier a long way from the face, but there are still deep crevasses all over it, so it pays to watch your step. There are impossibly blue small lakes and mini-waterfalls all over the Glacier (I think the colour has something to do with the density of the compacted ice) but it was brilliant to be out there on such a vast, constantly shifting ice Field.

It´s definitely been a highlight of the trip so far, and it´s a shame we´ve got a non-changeable flight to Bariloche tomorrow as I´d have like to spent a couple of days trekking in Torres del Paine, but hey ho...

written by  phileasdogg on January 24, 2009 from El Calafate, Argentina
from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs
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Argentina has been great - Buenos Aires is a vibrant, cultured city, and the natural and diverse beauty of the glaciers, the Lake District and the Iguazu Falls have got to make it one of the most naturally beautiful countries in the world. And the steaks have been great too! It´s almost enough to make you forgive the Falklands and the Hand of God. But not quite.

written by  phileasdogg on January 28, 2009 from San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina
from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs
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I also parted company with Caroline here, so after 5 weeks of having a highly efficient organiser to tell me where to be at what time, I´ve now got a few days of trying to keep myself alive before joining a 6-week tour in Santiago that takes in Chile, Bolivia and Peru.

written by  phileasdogg on February 3, 2009 from Puerto Varas, Chile
from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs
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There´s really not a great deal to do in Santiago so after making some cursory gestures towards exploring local culture by visiting a couple of museums I took in two movies, which I can justify by claiming they improve my Spanish - they´re English language with Spanish subtitles.

It´s up to La Serena tomorrow, a coastal resort about 6 hours drive from Santiago.

written by  phileasdogg on February 5, 2009 from Santiago, Chile
from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs
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Anyway, made it in the end. There´s not a great deal to do or see in La Serena itself, so a few of us made the 3-hour trek up the coast to do some whale watching. Or as it transpired, whale searching. We went out in a 10-man boat that looked like something out of Moby Dick, but couldn´t find so much as a spurt of water in 2 hours. However, all was not lost as we did get a school of dolphins playing alongside the boat, and also saw sea otters, sealions, an elephant seal, pelicans and penguins. So I reckon we probably got our 28,000 pesos worth there (about 28 quid).

There´s also a big observatory nearby where regular punters can go along and look through a big telescope at Orion´s Belt, the Northern Cross, Saturn etc. Actually more interesting than it sounds, helped by the fact that lack of light pollution means Chile gets some spectacular starscapes.

Hopefully a less stressful trip to San Pedro de Atacama tomorrow, though it´s an overnight bus which doesn´t bode well. A few of our tour group did an overnight bus in Brazil that got hijacked. Fingers crossed...

written by  phileasdogg on February 7, 2009 from La Serena, Chile
from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs
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But in the meantime it´s a nice chilled-out place to relax for a couple of days. We hired some bikes and went off to some nearby sand dunes to try our hands at sand boarding. It quickly became apparent that snowboarding techniques aren´t so great on sand - there´s too much friction. But after some experimentation I managed to get down the dune in one go, and it was actually really good fun, if a touch painful on landing. Also biked out to see some pre-Columbian ruins, that were little more than a few piles of mud. But then they were 2800 years old (allegedly).

The tour group are a good group all told. Still have some doubts about my roommate, a rock-bothering know-it-all geologist, who seems reticent to flush the toilet and has a penchant for getting up at 6.30am and rustling plastic bags for 20 minutes. Each to their own I guess.

written by  phileasdogg on February 9, 2009 from San Pedro de Atacama, Chile
from the travel blog: Planes, Trains & Taxiwallahs
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