Iguazu Falls

From Starred Photos

We enjoyed our bus ride out to Puerto Igauzu, it was on a company called Via Bariloche which was the same one we took to Bariloche way back in January. We took it as first-class which was really nice. Thinking about it now, it's the best bus ride in terms of comfort and service that we've ever really experienced in South America. They had personal TVs with headphones allowing you to opt out of the movies if you so chose and they had multiple channels of movies as well. Throw in the fact that they serve wine with their excellent dinner and then top it all off with champagne at the end and you just go a step above every other company we've traveled with. A lot of companies could learn a bit from these guys. :)

We arrived around 12pm still tired from the trip but found our hostel right next to the bus station and after talking with the hotel staff decided to head to see the park right away since the weather was so nice. We hopped on the bus to the falls and arrived at the park.

Iguazu falls is yet another amazing place to visit. It's absolutely huge. We've often gone places in SA where there are really pretty waterfalls but they're always pretty short (height-wise) or not too powerful, but Iguazu falls is another animal entirely. It's waterfall after waterfall, all of which are tall and powerful. It just goes on and on until you get to the crown jewel of the park, which is the garganta del diablo or “the devil's throat”. This waterfall is absolutely huge, we have a video below and some pictures as well. It's kind of like a horseshoe with waterfalls on every side with the main part of the horseshoe being just awe-inspiring. :)

Video (you might have to click the image to play the video):

From Iguazu Falls

From Starred Photos

From Starred Photos

Any waterfalls are a great place to try your neutral density camera filter to get the cool flowing soft water effect, so why not try it here!

From Iguazu Falls

Argentina actually shares Iguazu falls with Brazil but they got the better end of the deal for sure. Their side holds most of the waterfalls and their park has all sorts of trails and walkways that allow you to get up close and personal to the falls. I can't say too much about the Brazil side since we would have had to apply for an expensive visa to get over there, even for a day, but from what we hear all you get is a good panoramic view of the falls.

A Zoo?

The falls were not only amazing in their beauty, but the wildlife that surrounds them is amazing too! Suzanne said right away that the tourist facilities, which were really good, reminded her of the Omaha Zoo (she loves that zoo in case you didn't know) but I had to agree with her after spending our second day constantly running into an amazing variety of wildlife. We found coatie's (see picture), monkeys, giant lizard things, butterflies (so many they would swarm around), toucans, turtles, and alligators!

From Iguazu Falls

From Iguazu Falls

From Iguazu Falls

From Iguazu Falls

After a great two days we got on a bus and headed back to BA. As we were getting on the bus we ran into Ross. Ross was on our galapagos cruise with us way back in May! After 5 months and completely different paths, we happened to be in the same bus station and on the same bus with seats next to one another in a country thousands of miles away from where we spent a week together. Small world...

Anyway, if you want to see all the pictures, (we just couldn't delete too many of them, they were all good!) check out the below slideshow:

~Mike

Livin' it up in Buenos Aires

In my last post I mentioned that we were in Buenos Aires and loving it. That hasn't changed. At all. We stayed in our first apartment for a week in the lovely neighborhood of Belgrano. Then we had to move to a hotel while we found another apartment, which was only a small hassle, but now we are settled into a studio apartment that we will remain in for the rest of our time in BA.

The good life

BA in the spring is just amazing. The weather is cool and when the sun is out its just perfect. Suzanne and I just love walking around the city exploring the different neighborhoods on foot. We both love looking at the buildings and their old architecture that stands out in such contrast to the concrete blocky ugliness that dominates cities of the rest of Latin America (barring the colonial centers of the capitals). We love resting our feet in cool little cafes, sipping a coffee or latte and watching the people go by. We like having the free time to sleep in every day till 11. We love the fact you can get anywhere in the city by subway or bus for less than 50 cents. We love having our friends Ximena and Andres show us around and take us to the authentic places we would never go otherwise. In short, we just love this city!!! So much so that we often stop by the realtor windows where they are selling apartments. Since the country revalued its currency and screwed a lot of its citizens, everyone sells property with US dollar prices. It seems you can buy a great apartment in a fantastic neighborhood for only $100,000! In the US this would be at least $500,000!

So what do we do every day? Well, we have this guide book that the tourism office gave us that has a section on each neighborhood in the city with a nice little walking tour for each one. So we do that during the day and at night we're trying to take in a little culture. We're going to go to the opera, maybe see some ballet, and possibly take in the BA philharmonic orchestra. Additionally, we're going to go to a Tango show and take a week or so of Tango lessons. I think we'll be plenty busy and at the end of our time here we're going to wish we had more. I'm even thinking how great it would be to take a month off of work later on in our life and just come down here and hang out with our future kids. :)

Escaping bad luck?

We've had a bit of bad luck though. A couple of things have gone wrong and we hope that our bad luck has run out. The first thing was our first attempt to go to the opera. The Colon Theater is considered one of the best theaters in the world and was recently fully renovated and might now even be the best! It just reopened in May of this year. We figure, why not go? So we bought our tickets and headed to the theater. Well, we stood in line to go in for awhile while the time slowly ticked closer to show time, but they wouldn't let us in. After curtain time passed we still waited for fifteen more minutes and then everyone started leaving. Turns out the employees of the theater decided to strike. We were assured by several locals standing around us that this had never happened before. Strike 1. Disappointed, we headed back to the subway station to go home, only to have the train stop for some reason for another 30 minutes while we just waited... Strike 2. Strike 3 came while we were staying in a hotel between our apartments. Ximena and Andres came to pick us up for a night on the town and as we were heading outside, we looked out the window and saw several young men with sticks yelling with some other people while our hotel clerk called the police saying “No Salgan!” (don't leave). While we waited for the gang (what else do you call them?) to disperse with the aid of the police, the clerk told us that this had never happened, especially in an otherwise tranquil neighborhood. Strike 3. We sincerely hope that we don't have anymore “This never happens” moments while here!

Next stop, Iguazu falls!

The only out-of-city destination we have planned for the end of our trip is the famous Iguazu falls. The falls are on a lot of people's don't-miss list and were a big reason (besides BA) for coming back down to this part of the continent, especially since we're dissing Brazil. Due to a strange system in Argentina of charging foreigners over four times the price of locals for flights, we decided the only affordable way was to take a bus again. While the prospect certainly does not appeal to us (it's a 15 hour bus ride), we take comfort in the fact that we're going first-class and it will most definitely be the last 15 hour bus ride we will take in many years!!!! My next post will be about the falls.

~Mike

Bogota and my Dad's Visit

Last we left off, we had just come back to Cartagena from the beautiful Playa Blanca. We didn't have much time there though before our journey continued. First we watched the Notre Dame game online and were sadly disappointed when we lost to Michigan. Then we tried to visit any remaining tourist attractions we could before we left Cartagena for good. Finally, the day of our flight arrived and we flew into the capital of Colombia, Bogota.

It was good to get away from Cartagena and get into a real city that doesn't depend on tourism for its existence. And how could it? Bogota has a reputation for kidnappings and crime that make every website we've visited about this country assure us that everything is much better now. Luckily the websites were not lying. The city itself is much like any other capital city we've visited in South America and just as safe or unsafe depending on what you did. Luckily we had a friend in Bogota who welcomed us into her apartment and let us stay with her. Suzanne has a whole blog post on Amanda Lyons in her head so I won't spoil it, but I can say that we absolutely loved staying with Amanda for a couple of days. She took us to some of the nicest places in town and gave us her bed to sleep in. We told her of our plans and she gave suggestions and advice. It was real hospitality.

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Dad's visit

We didn't have long in Bogota till the main event occurred. My Dad, who had been unable to make the journey down when my brother Thomas came to visit was able to reschedule his flight for a long weekend in Bogota with us! We booked a place in the old colonial part of town (named the “Candelaria”) and picked Dad up from the airport. We were amazed at how quickly he seemed at home in Bogota. On the cab ride to the hotel he chatted with the driver the entire time about Colombia, his time growing up in Cuba, and the current state of Latin American politics. His Spanish skills hadn't diminished at all since he had stopped traveling internationally over 35 years ago. In fact, Dad seemed more at ease in Bogota than he often appears in the states! He would often strike up conversations with random Colombians wherever we found them and just chat with them for 10-15 minutes. I usually don't see that in the states. As you may know, my dad spent the first 15 years of his life in Cuba before Castro came into power. His dad was a businessman who had to flee before Fidel nationalized all businesses.

Dad just chatting with a local about Cuba:

From Bogota

Since we only had a weekend we tried to fill it with the major sites. We started out at the Gold Museum. Wow. In a previous post I talked about never seeing so much gold before in my life. This museum beat it by far. It was 3 full floors of gold artifacts from the native peoples in Columbia. The crazy thing is that this is all the gold the Spanish missed! There were frequent quotes from the old explorers about how everyone in a village would have a gold nose-ring or earings. (Gold was admired but not used as a currency). In the end you got tired of all the gold in the room and just went past it. This is in great contrast to some of the museums in the southern countries where the gold breastplate was the prized asset of the museum! Not only was the content amazing but the presentation was excellent. All signs had English sections and the material was excellent. We learned about all the methods used to make these beautiful artifacts, methods which are still used today. In fact, there are no new methods other than the ones these people used, how crazy is that?! Unfortunately, I assumed that there would be no picture taking in the museum so I didn't take my camera, so no pictures. :( You'll just have to go yourself!

Dad and Suzanne looking over Bogota city:

From Bogota

Me and Dad in the botanical gardens

From Bogota

The other big site we visited was the Salt Cathedral. There is a big salt mine just outside of Bogota and the miners constructed a church out of the huge chambers they created. Then the church became unstable and they had an international contest to design a new mine. This is the one we got to visit. It was pretty cool. It holds 10,000 people and is just huge. The way in begins with the stations of the cross which are made out of salt (everything is made out of salt). Then it opens into the huge nave with some absolutely massive columns. Overall, pretty cool. :)

Stations of the cross in the salt cathedral:

From Bogota

From Bogota

From Bogota

From Bogota

We had a great time with Dad and the only regret was that it was so short. However, this was mitigated by the fact that in about a month we will be coming home! Yes, you read correctly. We are going to be done with our adventure in South America in just about a month! Why? Well, its a mix of factors. First, we're going to be out of money in a month. We really should have planned on spending $150 a day instead of just $100, second, we are starting to become tired of traveling. Things that shouldn't bother us (like that massage lady in the last post) really start to become nerve rattling and things that should delight us are just not that interesting anymore. We miss our families and our country and just want to come home! But not yet. :)

We had always wanted to spend time in Buenos Aires, longer than the 3 days we spent there at the very beginning of our trip. Our dream was to spend 6 weeks there originally but we took a look at our money left and decided that one month would work too. We have some friends who live there, plus it's arguably one of the best cities in South America.

The big loser country in our decision to come home early is Brazil. It's not that we didn't want to go, but the combination of the factors above (out of money and getting tired of traveling) plus the facts that it is one of the most expensive countries, speaks a different language, requires you to get an expensive visa, and is absolutely huge all caused us to look at the country and say “we'll try to get back to you”. So sorry Brazil.

We arrived in BA last Thursday and have been living in a furnished apartment since Thursday. We love it! BA is such an amazing city. It's like visiting a European city but without the expensiveness! We are really lucky to have our friends Ximena and Andres here. They are excellent guides, showing us things we never would have seen just using our guidebooks.

Next post will be more about BA and our new life there. :)

~Mike

Giant wall of ice

El Calafate is at the south end of the same park (Parque National de los Glaciers) that El Chalten is in.  It has only one real attraction, and that is the Perrito Moreno Glacier.  And what an attraction that is!  It is not the only glacier in the world but its circumstances are truly amazing.  It is “stable” which means its not receding and its terminus extends into and almost across a lake that is easy to get to, which means that all you have to do is drive to this little peninsula and you can see the glacier up close!  The park has a series of balconies that you can walk on to see the glacier from different angles and different heights.  Since the glacier is still moving but not really making progress, it has to be melting into the lake.  This causes parts of the glacier to break off and fall into the water as ice-bergs which causes mini-tidal waves and flying ice which as one sign told us has killed 36 people since the 30's.  Our first day we watched and waited for these occurrences and every once in a while you would hear a huge CRACK and you would frantically search for where along the several kilometer face the chunk of ice would be falling and if you were quick enough (you didn't have much time at all since the sound got to you too slowly anyway) you got to see it fall in the water and the wave.  Sometimes you'd get lucky and happen to see it before the sound and you could watch it fall.


It was truly amazing just sitting there and studying the glacier, waiting for something to happen, but after awhile of just staring you start to see shapes and forms in the ice.  We try to point these out in the pictures.  But after four hours of almost continuous rain we were cold and wet and we went home.

The next day has become the highlight of our trip for me so far.  There are several tours you can do at the glacier, but the best tour (and most expensive) was known as “Big Ice” (translated to big ice).  We threw our budget to the wind and went for it.  It was the best decision we've made!  On Big Ice you get to hike up alongside the glacier to some point and then strap on crampons and hike on the glacier for a full four hours!  I'm sitting here trying to describe what it is like to hike on a glacier but I'm coming up short.  Even the pictures below can't really give more than a glimpse...  All I can remember is over and over just laughing with pure joy at what we were doing.  We would straddle a crevice with our crampons to get across or check out an incredibly blue ice cave and through it all I would just laugh.  The highlight was definitely the sink hole, where melted water that had formed a river would just fall in a giant waterfall into the glacier.  The guides had to hold our harnesses so we wouldn't fall in from the shock of it all (It's also constantly widening so they didn't want us to fall in.)  It was just simply incredible.

We are now in Ushuaia, the southern-most city in the world in Tierra del Fuego.  Here there are penguin colonies and tons of birds and sea-lions.  We're waiting for the weather to clear as its a bit rainy now.  More details to come soon.

~Mike

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Get your own

Bariloche

We just spent the last 5 days in San Carlos de Baroliche.  Bariloche is a beautiful town situated on a a very large glacier-carved lake, Nahuel Huapi.  Wikipedia..  We arrived from our long bus journey at around 11.  We were still pretty tired though, since even in the luxury of first class, you're still on a bus moving around while trying to get some sleep.  We checked into our hostel, called “1004” and checked out the amazing views it has.  It is on the top floor of one of the taller buildings in Bariloche and the views are just simply amazing.  While we were there, we took several tours / hikes and the results are in the picture slideshow below.



Overall things are  going very well.  We are really enjoying the sights and sounds.  The hostel we stayed at was a highlight for me.  The staff was very friendly and learned our names and helped us out with tours and rentals.  Most of the guests there spoke English, but very few were Americans.  We found mostly European, Canadian and Australians there.  Overall we're less “extreme” than most of the travelers we found there who would talk about what mountain they climbed a couple of days ago or whatever, which for us is a bit out of reach since all the big mountains around here still have snow covering their tops!

As far as our Spanish speaking skills, we have good days and bad days.  A lot of our time in Baroliche we were with only English speakers so we really didn't get a chance to practice.  Suzanne and I can talk among ourselves in Spanish and understand each other, but its not quite the same as hearing a native speak it as fast as they do.  On the good days we're able to have good, long conversations with someone.  Always a bit slow but we're able to communicate and get our ideas across and understand what people are saying.  But some days we're terrible and just freeze when someone says something.  Mostly its because they speak it so quickly and have the Argentinian idiom of saying “sh” whenever you want to use the “ll” sound that my brain get's overwhelmed.  (insert jokes in comments please).  :)

And many of you may know that we lost our little man.  Pause for moment of silence....  He was with us and doing great on our first big hike and as you can see we have many great pictures of him.  At the end of the hike we let him see out the backpack.  Anyway, we finished our hike and were heading to the bus stop and saw the bus coming.  Since the buses are not that frequent we began to run to the stop and that's where we think the little man fell out.  We didn't think about him again until the next day but when it became clear that he was no longer with us we were soo sad!  If I can't keep the little man safe after only a week of travel, how can I keep my future children safe?  :)  Anyway... now we're looking for someone (or something) to replace the little man, but how can anything replace him?  Someone pointed out that we can use this opportunity to get a new little guy, maybe with a South American flair and there are some here but they're like little gnomes with crazy faces and Suzanne says that they scare her...  So anyway, we're on the lookout.

I'm writing this in our new town, Villa la Angostura which is just across that big lake from Bariloche and we're staying in a hostel in the double upstairs and in the morning a rooster does his thing to wake everyone up, which is quite annoying but tonight I plan to try out my earplugs.  That's it for me, we're thinking and praying for all our family and friends and miss you all.

Ciao!
~ Mike

Our time in Buenos Aires was great with Ximena and Andreas teaching us about local phrases and foods.  They took us all around the city and then accompanied us to the bus station.  From there we headed out on our own.  The bus ride was 20 hours to Bariloche but was quite a luxury experience.  I felt like one of the large people in Wall-E that just sat in a chair and had food/entertainment brought to them.  First came tea, then dinner, then coffee, then just before sleep they asked us if we wanted champagne or whiskey.  Nearly asleep I didn't even understand the question at first.  In hindsight part of the reason I didn't sleep that well (the seat laid down to a full 180 degrees) was the fact that I said yes to the coffee around 10PM at night.  So lesson learned that even though coffee almost always sounds good to me I need to show more self control and not drink espresso before bed.

The drive was very beautiful and Bariloche and the Lake region is truly a special place.  The size of the lakes are truly amazing.  We went on a boat ride for a day to one region, Puerto Blest.  Going slow on the way there it was about a two hour boat ride.  On the way back going faster it still took 45 minutes to get back to the port and this was by no means doing a complete tour of the lake.  The strangest part for me was that we were one of the only boats on the lake.  I think because it is a national park you either need to be on a national park boat or live on the lake (which there are only a handful of places).  The water was incredibly clear.  Then we arrived in this jungle and then I felt like I was in Jurassic Park.  So I started humming the theme song and imagining what I would do if some dinosaur jumped out from the jungle.  They were describing how this region is so wet whereas the surrounding areas are so dry because of the Andes mountains and the water from the Pacific Ocean.  They said that the air condensed on this side of the mountain just like air condenses on your window in the winter so the moisture is trapped in this region.

Bariloche also happens to be the chocolate capital of Argentina.  Up to this point we had not experienced this aspect.  However, after a more lazy day of exploring the town and painting a watercolor we decided to try out the chocolate.  It seemed very early when we went on our chocolate tasting adventure.  However, that night we realized that the coffee and chocolate were actually consumed at 6PM.  So we didn't sleep that well that night either.  Everyone eats dinner around 10:30PM or 11:00PM so 6PM seems like the middle of the afternoon.  The chocolate was very delicious and we saved some of our box for the rest of the week.

On Wednesday we rented a car and drove the Seven Lakes Drive.  This ended up being a twelve hour adventure as lots of the roads were gravel.  We ate lunch on the beach of one of the lakes and Mike and Koven played with their cameras.  On the return trip we thought we were taking the paved road but ended up taking another gravel road through another national park and seeing these interesting  rock sculptures.  With a half hour to spare we returned the rental car full of gas.  Needless to say we slept well that night.

Now we are in Villa La Angostura and are going to hike to see the ancient los arraynes trees on the peninsula.  ~Suzanne

Pictures

Hey everyone,

Don't have time to describe Bariloche in a post yet, but did have time to sort through the pictures we took and have posted them online.  Feel free to check them out here.

~Mike