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Travel Journal

Date: thursday, 27th September,2001---1 Day before we leave
Location: home
Weather: cloudy
State of mind: a bit stressed
Well this is the first entry to what hopefully will get updated regularly. I am very excited about our trip, but it's all a bit too much at the moment. Have a million things to do--more important than writing this so...
From : linn

Date: Friday 28th sept,2001
Location: Buenos Aires
Weather: Cloudy
State of mind: Sleepy
After a very long flight (I did not sleep much, Linn did!) we arrived into a very grey Buenos Aires. Patricia picked us up from the airport and took us for a tour of the city in peak hour traffic! The argentinian drivers are all crazy! Not Patricia of course. Since we were all hungry we stopped at roadside hotplate where they were cooking chorizos and other meat so we had a chorizo on bread each. This was overlooking the Rio de la Plata (It's a river, not an ocean!! I'll will explain some other time!) Then we went back to their house which is very beautiful and fell asleep in front of the TV on a bean bag. Very attractive.
From : Blair

Date: Saturday 29th September 2001
Location: Buenos Aires
Weather: Still Cloudy a little rainy
State of mind: Contemplating Cattle farming
Today we went to La Boca, the immigrant section of BA where the buildings are painted all beautiful colours, I think this is done so as to distract them from the smell! Smell: raw sewage, possibly dead things, definitely rubbish and chemicals in the water (Riachuelo). Anyway the buildings are very pretty, it is touristy like The Rocks. We had some lunch at a local cafe and had a Argentinian BBQ called Parrilla. We had Blood sausage, intestines, glands in neck of cow, steak, sausage, avoided the kidneys, ... sometime later we finished. Then we went to the oldest cafe in BA, called Cafe Tortoni which was built in 1853 (I think), very very beautiful, marble columns, french style, umm you get the picture, any coffee was good and helped digest the meat. Came home and taught Guadi, Rodolfo and Patricia's daughter to say G'day mate, Orr right Guv?, Beauty Bonza, I'm stoked! (with hand signals), Cheers and I dunno. She'll be ok in Australia!

Then about 5 million people came over, alright 24 kids and 19 adults came over for the ņoquis (gnocchi) party which they have on every 29th of every month for the past 22 years. That's a lot of gnocchi and wine!! We had a good time but didn't stop eating all night. Party finished 2:30am and we crashed into bed.

Mental Note: Must remember to ask Sergio about: 1. Car alarm story, 2. How he met Claudia and what they talked about for four years before going out. 3. What his address is and 4. How to get to his house and back! 5. Where did he park his car? and more.

Must remember to eat with more of Sergio's friends.
From :Blair + Linn + Guadi

Date:sunday 30th sept, 2001
Location: Bs. As.
Weather: Rain rain go away
State of mind: full
more food today. slept in until 1:30 then back to sleep then finally got up at 4pm and went to lunch....ahh itīs a hard life. had a huge baggette with ham, egg, lettuce and lomo(nice part of cow). oh I wanted lemonade with my lunch so alvaro, son of rodolfo and patricia ordered the drinks. since the place had freshly squeezed juice i got a tall glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice...i couldnīt finish it.

went to the bus station to get bus tickets. we opted not to get the bus that served champagne with the meals. will be leaving for Iguazu monday night.
From : Linn

Date: Friday, 5th october,2001
Location: Puerto Iguazu
Weather: beautiful sunny spring day
State of mind: blissful and sunburnt
Okay quick recap on our bus trip.
Well, ... it was long, reasonably comfortable and dropped us at 9:30 in the morning on a very dusty stretch of the highway with little or nothing but a few shops in site. A little disconcerting to say the least. Well that is until this guy drove up and said he was the taxi service so he drove us to our hostel. We then proceeded to walk into town on dirt roads which had the odd chicken or dog or both walking across, not sure why, and managed to find the Jesuit Ruins in the centre of town which we had been told to visit.
The Jesuits as you know wore black which would probably explain why they left, it was pretty hot when the sun came out (Linn brought up the point that the Beduoin also wore black and well it was pretty hot there, but I say was it sticky no! nuff sed). Ok enough of the history lesson, the ruins were amazing, they built this massive series of ornate buildings in what would have been for them the middle of nowhere. Quite incredible.
So having toured the facility we headed home and slept, woke up wandered off to a restaurant in which we had the place to ourselves, very exclusive.
Caught the bus the next day and headed off to Puerto Iguazu and found a place to stay and since it was late had a look around the town and went down to the tres fronteras in which you can see Paraguay, Brasil and Argentina if you look carefully. Separated by the Rio Parana and Rio Iguazu, which were very pretty. After missing the bus we trudged back into town got into bed and slept. Well Linn slept and slept and slept and slept (repeat for 12 hrs!!) I got up and went for a run and 3 km swim, you know "the usual".
OKay so here we are, the day of going to Iguazu Falls, will it be better than the three sisters, will it beat the big banana, pineapple, koala, merino, guitar, etc. We were skeptical.
so here it is,....
wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
omigod wow!!!
now when you see the *cough* 80ish photos,you may not quite understand but the water which is brown, well the brown water kind of flows over the rocky cliffy things, and then lands and flows on at some point below the said rocky cliffy things, its a little hard to tell from the *cough* 80ish photos that this is whats happening.
But WOW!!!!!
Linn is going to take over now, ciao!
Ok--the sleeping thing is such an exageration--i woke a few times in the night to roll over and check the time to see if it was breakfast time yet--so itīs not a complete 12 hours.
oh the food--well the first thing i ate when i got here was the choripan. itīs a chorizo(argentine sausage) in a bun--hotdoggy thing. and i havenīt gone a day without it. then there is the empanadas(itīs like a bigger curry puff with different stuff inside it)--yummo! yes iīm probably the only person whoīs going to gain weight on this trip.
so iguazu---OH WOWOWOWOWOW....i totally got trigger happy with natasha and oh i donīt want to know how many photos i took. we took a "gran aventura" tour thing out to the falls and we got to go on a speed boat right under the falls----wow. it was absolutely AWESOME...ok i think i should have brought a thesaurus instead of a spanish-english dictionary(itīs not helping my spanish at all) so back to the WOW! OH MY.... did i say it was awesome! we got totally drenched--so did ken by the way. [ken has acquired the necessary rain gear too]. we had a fantastic day. then we had dinner with another australian, a brit and 2 irish girls. got all their stories. felt like we were absolute novices at this backpacking thing. well i guess we are actually. oh and there was some very embarrassing tourist behaviour from us when we were attempting to chase a toucan and all the pretty butterflies....
today- weīve got to catch a 10pm bus so we decided to go to the brazilian side--reluctantly...i mean what on earth could beat the argentinian side! well ok the brazilian side of the falls is not so full of things to do as the argentinian side but it gives you a brilliant panoramic view of iguazu falls.oh WOW....i thought it could not get any better but then turn a corner---yes more WOW...
iīm getting tired just recapping the WOWīs. letīs just say it was so amazing i bought T-shirts for the both of us.
iīm also glad this web page thing is working ok. itīs great to read the guestbook and see that people we love are reading this(or just writing in the guestbook)...iīm just happy to hear from anyone from home.

From : Linn and Blair

Date: Sunday, 7th october, 2001
Location: Resistencia
Weather: drizzly
State of mind: looking for something to do
Resistencia, the city of sculptures, sounds interesting doesnīt it! ... Well itīs NOT! itīs a hole with dusty dirty little streets! In the nicest unoffensive way to all people from the Resistencia region. Weīll tell the truth after weīve left the country!!
ok what the heck weīll tell you now, ... itīs a hole.
It rained, the tourist office was shut on the weekends, it rained, we had a thunder storm right over our room for most of the night. The good things are the plaza, which was nice, the fantastic confiteria in which we got 6 pastries for US$1.80, coffee cost more. There was a festival on and we decided to buy dinner, we bought 2 choripan (Chorizo on bread) and 2 empanadas (cornish pasties) and then we wanted a drink. The smallest we could get for $1.50 was a 1.5 litre bottle of coke, ... so we took it!! And almost finished it.
To liven up the evening they had some dancers do multicultural dancing from the various sectors of society and well ok I just couldnīt help myself I had to get a photo with the belly dancer, you know, purely for a documentation objective.
Almost didnīt get a bus out to Salta on Sunday night, but we were desperate and took the dodgy bus company with non-reclining seats (well compared to the others). Linnīs seat was wet so we moved to the back seat only to be unable to breathe due to a strong gasoline smell. Really nice otherwise.
Very Happy to be in Salta.
From : Blair

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