Argentina Part 1
Sunday, November 20th, 2005
Well after my last post I haven´t done a great deal worth mentioning, unless you all want to know the in depths to my new and much appreciated diet, which I will tell you about anyway as it will pad this out a little bit more…
I arrived in Salta (Argentina) and immediately fell in love with the place. Admitably the reason for my positive outlook was the fact I could purchase something other than indigenous clothes, llama meat or 3 stones stuck together to resemble a monkeys face, but – there were also nice women to look at too. So, enjoying the new style of life I stayed in Salta for a while and ate nothing but steak (occasionally with chocolate sauce) ice cream and played ping-pong all day, I also managed to watch England Vs. Argentina in my hostel surrounded by Argentineans.
After 4 days of losing ping-pong to my Scottish buddy I decided it was definatly time to move on, so in the true spirit of budget travelling I jumped on a 28 hour bus trip all the way to Iguazo Falls to avoid him – it was just a shame he sat next to me on the bus, stayed at the same hostel and then continued to beat me at ping-pong for the following 2 days.
In between getting beaten at the-only-sport-Scottish-people-seem-to-be-good-at we visited the mighty Iguazu Falls. The hostel where we stayed was on the Argentinian side of the Falls and if you walk for 10 minutes towards the river you stand at a point where you can see Paraguay and Brasil (and obviously Argentina, if you look at the ground). The waterfalls are shared between Argentina and Brasil so for the first day we ventured into Brasil. We received a few more passport stamps (upside down) in the process of crossing the border and jumped on a few more buses to get to the National Park. Inside the park we walked around for about 4 hours being truely impressed by the waterfalls, the park itself was pretty tacky with hundreds of tourists (bloody tourists!!), adventure trips, and various other things which resembled an amusement park, but the waterfalls made it all the worth while. I also had the pleasure of meeting some Chinese tourists and impressed them with my ability to speak Chinese. I pretended to understand everything they were saying, then just to clarify my fluency I threw in occasional sentences here and there. Impressed, they then grabbed my Scottish mate (he´s called Alasdair) and said something like “You have red t-shirt, me white t-shirt, photo together my English friend”…To which Alasdair replied….”SCOTTISH”. I laughed so hard I nearly dropped the Chinese dudes camera.
I suppose I should mention that I abseiled down a cliff with the waterfalls behind me, but to be honest it was pretty rubbish. It cost over my days budget and I spent most of the time trying to spin myself around to look at the waterfalls behind me.
The next day we walked around the Argentinian side which wasn´t as good (more tourists), but it took us further into the waterfalls. We payed a few pesos to ride a power boat into the waterfall and to ultimately to get drenched. I have hundreds of photos which I am sure will bore the living socks off you, but I will post a few of them on there just to give you an idea of why the waterfalls were so spectacular.
I am now in Buenos Aires after a further 18 hours on a bus, I have carefully selected a Hostel without a ping-pong table and tonight, no doubt, I will get a sample of the Argentinean´s capitals nightlife.
Buenos noches chicos
Rob.
Rob Hasler