Last destination: Buenos Aires

After the last long busride (19 hours) I've arrived in BA a bit more than a week ago. Buenos Aires is a huge change to traveling in Ecuador & Peru and the loneliness of Patagonia.
It's a lot more european than any other city I've been to in South America and with all the great food, good nightlife, cheap but pretty clothing and souvenirs it's just the right place to end my trip!

During the first couple of days we stayed with a really nice couple, Nelly & Claudio, who were the parents of friends we got to know in Santiago, while we went appartment-hunting for Nigel. We checked out a couple of places and Nigel ended up renting a nice 1-room appartment in Palermo, a really pretty and safe neighbourhood in BA. Staying in an appartment is such a nice change to crappy and dirty hostels. I love it!

There's tons of fun stuff to do in BA. So far we've been to Recoleta (probably the most pretty & expensive part of BA) and the cemetery there. It's such a weird place! There's no real graves but huge tombs. They are arranged so they build different alleys and the whole place looks more like an actual city in the center of Buenos Aires. There's Evita Peron's and the grave of many other famous Agentinians on the cemetery and it was funny to see loads of tourists standing next to the door of Evita's tomb which was covered in red roses, taking pictures.

Then there was Puerto Madero, right next to the docks with tons of nice restaurants (Sushi, yumm!) and different arts & craft markets in different areas of the city with San Telmo being my fav! Lots of antiques, ridiculously cheap!

We also went to La Boca, apparently a rather dangerous area but really beautiful with all the coloured houses, nice restaurants and tango dancers in the streets.

Speaking of dangers... the day after we got here we saw a robbery on the street out of the window of a restaurant (nice welcome present) and last night we witnessed a parked car burning on the street and lots of argentinian cops standing around not knowing what to do. It took them 10 minutes to come to the conclusion that MAYBE they should block the road since there was loads of cars & buses driving right by the burning car. They don't have the slightest plan here!!!

Bariloche - HEAVEN for chocolate and icecream-Lovers

Spent the last 3 days in Bariloche, Argentina's honeymoon destination Nr. 1 and an awesome place to be if you like good food (especially steak), chocolate and icecream and nice landscapes.

Apart from stuffing our face with chocolate at Mamuschka's we rented bikes for a day and explored the beautyful area around Bariloche.
The only down part of the trip was the car drivers!!! They were crazy! They either must not realize how scary it is to sit on a bike and get passed by a car less than 10 centimeters next to you or they simply don't give a shit! I'm surprised we survived the day without any major injuries!

Whitewater rafting on the Futalafeu

On our last stop in Chile before crossing into Argentina again we stopped in this tiny little village named Futalafeu.
It lies next to the Futalefeu river, apparently one of the top 5 in the whole world to do whitewater rafting. We signed up for a trip but weren't sure until the day we were supposed to go if it'll work out or not since it has been raining there for the past 3 weeks and the company wasn't able to take anyone out on the river cause the water level was too high.
We were really lucky cause it stopped raining and the water level sunk to a decent level (still pretty high though)

We went out on two rafts. One with 6 people and ours with 4 (Nigel, Chiara, me and a guy from Sweden). The rafting was simply AMAZING! Probably one of the most fun things I've ever done!
You're out there in this little raft getting washed around from one huge rapid to the next one, the raft violently rocking up and down, icecold water splashing into your face, trying to paddle through the rapid as hard as you can and it all makes you feel so tiny and vulnerable. I totally lost track of time and didn't know if we've been out on the river for 30 minutes or 3 hours.

I was really tempted to stay another couple of days and do more rafting (or kayaking) but unfortunately ran out of cash and since the town didn't have an ATM machine or Credit card facilities I had to leave :(

Thinking about joining a kayaking club when I get back to Germany. It's such an awesome sport!

Isolated from the rest of the world in the Patagonian Andes

It's been almost a month since my last post due to two factors: firstly it's really tough to get internet access here and secondly the fact that the longer I don't post the more I loose track of what has happened - which can make it hard to finally sit down and start writing. Anyway... "let's kill this bitch" (as we kept saying quite often for the past couple of weeks during long hours of hiking, hunger and frustration)

Both, the Chilean and the Argentinian side of the Patagonian Andes are really gorgeous!
We started out on the Chilean side with a 9-day trek in Torres del Paine Nationalpark. I think it's not exaggerated to say that we've had every possible weather condition you can get down here: drizzle, light rain, heavy rain, freaking strong wind, snow, blizzards and occasionally a bit of sunshine. This lead to hiking through swamps, 2-foot deep snow and sliding down crazyly steep mudslides (while trying not to break our necks). My boots were pretty much soaked after every day!

We spent the first 4 or 5 days hiking through the backcountry, which was pretty remote, and then after crossing the pass continuing on the "W", a part of the trek that is a lot more touristy and crowded with people doing day treks. I tried hard not clenching my teeth seeing all those people with their small, tiny daypacks that slept in the fancy huts and had awesome meals cooked for them! We used to call them "Wussies" or simply "W-Hikers".

We ended up with a pretty cool crowd of people: Chiara from Australia who drinks about 20 "cuppas" every day (she ended up being called the Tea-bitch), Dan and Clay, two hilariously funny Americans carrying around a 25 Kilo heavy FUN-BAG filled with Cigarretes, Journal, a box with freaking 20 different crayons (?!?) two bottles of Bourbon and boxes of Gato Negro (probably the cheapest wine you can get anywhere in Chile). Weight doesn't matter when you're hiking, right??? ;)

It was sad to finally split up after a couple last days together in Puerto Natales where we enjoyed an awesome meal, hot showers and real beds after all those days of camping.

Chiara and our plans were similar so we decided to stick together for a while and ended up going north and into Argentina to do another 5 days of hiking in Los Glaciares Nationalpark and finally got rewarded with some nice weather and plenty of sunshine.
We spent Christmas out there, preparing a pretty fancy meal on our camping stove followed by cake and lots of Whisky!

Back in El Chalten we had a hilariously funny night with 3 bottles of wine (split between 4 people) and a trip to the local supermarket at 2 in the morning to get some more! Not the best idea... the supermarket was closed but there were some guys doing construction work in there that happily opened the store for us to sell us two huge bottles of cheap wine.
The next day was spent hungover on a bus up north for about 15 hours!

We crossed back into Chile to hitchhike up the Carretera Austral, a really nice scenic road. Hitchhiking here can be tough but we've been lucky so far, hitching a ride in the back of a truck (sitting in the complete darkness and trying not to break any bones during the bumpy journey) It was tons of fun though!

Tomorrow we'll make our way back into Argentina, stopping in Bariloche (Argentina's chocolate-heaven) and slowly making it up to Buenos Aires where I'll catch my flight back home in less than 3 weeks!