http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy Late November 2009 - We're finally in Patagonia and looking forward to everything that it has to offer. Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:24:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en It’s been a while since my last post, mostly because we haven’t been anywhere in the past two weeks nearly as captivating as Valparaíso, and because I’ve been pretty busy this week taking Spanish classes in Córdoba, losing my credit card, trying to book a trip to Antarctica, etc. The day ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/central-argentina-wine-tours-and-spanish-classes.html I’m not quite sure how to begin an entry on the quirks and unorthodox beauty of Valparaíso, but here goes anyway: it’s somehow fitting that such an unusually shaped country like Chile should contain within it an equally unusually shaped city, and it is the geography of the city more ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/the-curious-charm-of-valparaiso.html South America - what a continent! (Please excuse me while I gush like a child for a paragraph.) In many debates over the years with Wendy or other travellers, I have tended to choose Asia as my preferred continent for overland travel (especially if I get to include so-called ‘West ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/the-atacama-desert.html Fortunately, our travels in northwest Argentina in the past week have proved more successful than our previous foray into the northeast. The northwest is a charming, indigenous land a world away from the pace of Buenos Aires; to me it feels like a mixture of the Mexican Bajío (the colonial ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/northwest-argentina-don%e2%80%99t-tie-up-your-horse-in-the-plaza.html The upheaval of the week after my last post seems distant now, but it was pretty chaotic at the time and I didn’t have a chance to post about it while it was happening. To cut a long story short, two weeks ago we tried and failed on a Monday ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/suddenly-argentina.html Vilnius is harder to characterise than the two other Baltic capitals. It doesn’t have a medieval core – it’s instead a baroque city with the occasional medieval building or, more frequently, newer buildings with a few medieval bricks from the original foundation displayed - and it’s certainly not as beautiful ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/lithuania-vilnius-trakai-and-a-picnic-at-stalin-world.html The old city of Riga was certainly nice enough, but had it not marked our first steps in Europe for over a year, we probably wouldn’t have been greatly impressed – there were no city walls or gates, and only one tower, and it was the type of old city ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/estonia-the-glorious-medieval-city-of-tallinn.html It’s always pretty extraordinary to fly directly from the Third World to the First World, but it was especially so on our flight from Uzbekistan to Latvia, considering how massively different the two places seem while remembering that, less than two decades ago, they were both part of the Soviet ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/latvia-alternative-riga-medieval-castles-lots-of-apples-and-lenin-in-a-box.html Within five minutes of our arrival in Bukhara, we were drinking vodka with the jovial, large-bellied owner of our guesthouse – straight, and in a bowel, as is the custom here. Even in the most Muslim and least Russian of the three Central Asian Republics we have visited so far, ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/a-tale-of-two-cities-bukhara-and-samarkand.html Almost eight years ago, in a hostel in Rome, I met the best-travelled person I have ever come across, still as true today as it was in 2001. He had been to 164 countries, a number that boggles me even more now than it did then, given that after all ... http://blogs.bootsnall.com/NickWendy/the-long-road-to-khiva.html