Argentina

Welcome back to our last post for this trip!

Courtney teaches English online so she returned to Buenos Aires a day before us so she could work. We had one last night in Uruguay then took a comfortable ferry for the short trip to Buenos Aires. We walked through the city to our apartment and the apartment was great! It was so nice to have some comfortable space. We met Courtney at her apartment and checked it out. She has settled in well.

BA was so cold - about 4 or 5 degrees some days, although at least it was sunny and dry. Much to my surprise, I really liked this city. The last two South American cities we stayed in, Santiago and Montevideo, didn't appeal to me much at all. It helped that we stayed in the historic centre here, where Courtney lives, and gorgeous old shops are everywhere. The streets are cobblestoned and there seems to be a cafe, restaurant or bar in every second shop.

These bars and cafes were fantastic. They were toasty warm inside and everything was beautifully vintage. They were decorated in rich reds, blues and golds and everything was really old-fashioned. Food and drink was fairly cheap. It'd be a great city to go out with friends in.

There were also plenty of grand old buildings, many in a French style.

Again, there was some interesting graffiti.

We spent our days exploring with Courtney. We visited the La Boca area where an historic old street has been preserved. The people who lived here in the past were very poor so they painted their houses in different colours because they had to use whatever paint they could get. This colourful streetscape has now been preserved. It was lovely but incredibly touristy. 

Paper mache models and paintings of Evita and Juan Peron, Pope Francis and other famous people from Buenos Aires peered down from a few balconies.

The unusual street had been saved by a group of local residents decades ago and one of those residents was a local painter, Benito Quinquella Martin. Martin died in the 70s and there was a museum dedicated to his art as well as that of other local artists, all set in his house. It was great! His house was painted in Mexican style - each wall a different colour. 

He used colour everywhere in his house. 

We visited an art gallery where some of Martin's art was displayed. His paintings focussed on what he saw in the old port right next to where he lived.

There were other works displayed here too. I loved the bright colours of Silvina Benguria's art.

We also checked out the famous La Boca football stadium. This type of football (soccer) doesn't mean a lot to us but it was interesting to see how the whole area around the stadium was decked out in the club's colours. Apparently it's a huge event when a game is played there.

Note the local guy on the bike - he's wearing La Boca colours and texting while he's riding.

There is a karate club in BA that is a style similar to our club at home. Courtney wants to start karate again so we visited it. The people were so warm and welcoming. John and Courtney both joined in and it was remarkable how similar the movements were to our own club. It was a great night.

BA is famous for its amazing old cemetery. Grand tombs covered an entire city block. It was huge and really cool. Courtney took some photos using filters on her phone which made the place look even older and creepier.

In many of the tombs you could see the coffins sitting on ledges. Some of these ledges were starting to crumble which was a bit of a worry. There was the occassional coffin that had fallen on the one beneath it.

There were many amazing sculptures.

Tombs came in all styles.

Many of these tombs held a number of family members. Steps lead down to crypts under the ground. It was all very creepy.

We later visited one of the world's most beautiful bookshops. It's in an old theatre. It was astonishing!

One day we all rode a hop-on, hop-off bus around the city. We saw a few sights like this huge flower sculpture.

Of course, we couldn't visit Argentina without visiting one of its famous wine regions. We all flew to Mendoza, a town nestled against the Andes. We had a fantastic apartment here. Courtney had to work but we found out that the internet at the apartment wasn't good enough. It took all day to get an alternative place organised. Courtney ended up teaching her classes out of a conference room at the Sheraton Hotel! 

We hired a car and toured around a couple of the wine valleys around Mendoza. First stop was a winery that had alpacas outside.

Alpacas can be cute but they can also be quite nasty. I kept my distance in case this one spat!

Inside we did an interesting wine tour. We learned a lot about Argentinian wine.

En route to our next destination, we detoured to a high point that had a huge statue of Christ perched on a pass. The views of the Andes from here were amazing. Again, some of these are Courtney's photos using filters.

As we drove through the valleys we were greeted by stunning views of the Andean range.

Our next tour was at a huge, modern winery. It had a circular cellar that you could look down on from above. The acoustics were supposed to be amazing so Courtney gave the vintage piano a try. It was beautiful!

We had a great small group of people on this tour and we all got on really well. I love Courtney's photo of the vineyard.

Afterwards, Courtney ran around in the spiky grass, playing with her scarf with the mountains behind her.

Back in Mendoza, we checked out a local wine tasting place one night. Most nights we ate dinner along what was nicknamed Beer Streeet. It was a whole street full of bars and restaurants. We had some good nights there and one night we had a memorable walk home when we all linked arms and sang songs all the way to our fantastic apartment. Wonderful!

Finally the sad day came for us to separate. Courtney flew back to BA and we flew to Santiago, the first step of our journey home. We flew over the Andes again. I can't get enough of these mountains!

In Santiago we had a horrendous queue to get through immigration. It was almost as bad as trying to get through a US airport, and that's saying something!

For our last night, John had chosen a fairly nice hotel. It included a welcome pisco sour (I developed a taste for these!) so we went to the bar to get it. Much to our amazement, we could hear heaps of Aussie accents. We had met very few Aussies on this trip. To our even greater amazement, one of the Aussies came up to me and said, "Is that you Heather?" I didn't actually remember her but she was a Ballarat travel agent who used to live in one of the small towns I've lived in. She was leading a group of Ballarat people around South America. What a coincidence!

We only had one day and night here. We climbed a small hill nearby that had parks and a few old buildings on it. The pollution in Santiago is terrible and sometimes obscured the mountains completely. As we drove to and from the airport we could see that the large river that winds through the city was full of rubbish and squallid shacks lined the streets. It really wasn't a pleasant place.

We celebrated our last night with another meal at the World's Best Wine Bar (according to John). Again, it was sensational!

The next morning we woke to a superb sunrise.

We boarded our plane for Sydney and were having a reasonably pleasant flight, until an announcement came over the PA saying that there was a technical issue and that we had to land in Christchurch! Oh nooooo....... Once we landed, we were then told that we would all have to stay the night in New Zealand. This was a bit concerning for us because we were flying home for my dad's 90th birthday celebrations, which we were organising. We had planned to arrive home two days before the party but we would now be getting home the day before - at best.

As inconvenient as it was, the whole process was pretty interesting. Our plane was completely full. They had to find beds for about 350 people plus feed them and transport them to and from the hotels. They also had to reorganise the flights for all the people who were only transiting through Sydney, which seemed to be most people. It must have been an organisational nightmare. To top it off, our bags weren't allowed off the plane. We all had to survive in the clothes that we had on us.  Anyway, we were shuttled off to decent hotels but all had to be back at the airport at 5am. We arrived in the dark and left in the dark and saw very little of Christchurch. John however, woke up after only a few hours and couldn't get back to sleep so he went wandering the streets. To his amazement he found an Irish pub open at 2am but decided not to have a Guinness at that hour!

Throw 350 people into an unusual situation like this and there's bound to be a bit of comraderie. We got on very well with a Brazilian lady who lives in Adelaide and a German lady who was going to Sydney for work. We cracked open a bottle of wine at dinner and all made the most of the unexpected circumstances. We were picked up from the hotel at 4.30am and spent more time in queues. John always carries a spare pair of jocks in his hand luggage and he proudly told anyone who would listen that he had a clean pair of jocks on! 

After spending hours in queues, we were finally on our way home. Those Kiwi mountains look pretty awesome too!

We made it to Tullamarine and headed to the shuttle bus. Just in case we didn't think it was a small world, the shuttle bus pulled up and off stepped my best friend's daughter. She was off on a holiday. We then lined up for the bus only to find ourselves sandwiched between two mums of friends of Cara's from primary school. Amazing.

So we did make it home in time for Dad's 90th, and it was a fantastic day!

I'll leave you with a photo of our bright, sparkly daughter. We miss her!

Until next trip.

Heather and John

Meeting Courtney in Uruguay

It was only a 3-hour hop, skip and jump from Easter Island to Santiago in Chile. To my disappointment, Santiago wasn't particularly interesting, though it was hard to get a balanced picture in such a short time there. It was also fairly cool but we expected that.

We had a fun first night. We arrived quite late but our body clocks were telling us it was dinner time so we found what looked like a classy little eatery near us. It turned out to be a pizza joint though so we ate pizza and John drank the enormous beers they had. It was fun.

We stayed in an apartment and our first night was terrible. People in nearby apartments talked outside on their balconies and played music until well after 4am.

The city was grey and drab but wasn't unfriendly. The buildings were generally boring and dirty but on one street we suddenly found a few very old buildings. This one was dripping with wintery vines.

There weren't a lot of big name sites so we just wandered around the city. There were a few beggars around, like you'd find in any big city. We walked up to a church and I was looking at the church as we walked past an older man begging. He must have decided that he needed to draw my attention to him because he hit me! It wasn't all that hard, but was bizarre.

On a lighter side, we later saw a policeman holding two police horses. A lady got him to take a photo of her while she held the horses. That wouldn't happen at home!

Being a wine lover. John was pleased to learn about a great wine bar nearby that specialised in Chilean wines, something we haven't drank much of. We had a sensational meal and wonderful wines. Each wine was described to us and came labelled. It was a great night.

After having such terrible internet for so long we were also very excited to discover the great wifi here. The hot chocolates were awesome too!

We then flew on to Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, where we would be meeting Courtney. Courtney lives in Buenos Aires in Argentina but it's only a few hours from BA to Montevideo and we were meeting here to catch up with Daniel. I'll explain about Daniel later.

The flight over the Andes was sensational! The weather gods were kind to us giving us a clear view of the stunning range.

We landed in Uruguay and quickly learned about Uruguayans' obsession with smoking when the car that picked us up from the airport stunk of cigarettes. We checked into our room to find it smelled of cigarettes too! Luckily we were able to change rooms the next day.

The next day was the big day - Courtney arrived! We hadn't seen her for seven months and it has been wonderful catching up on all her news. She's now teaching English online in Buenos Aires and is really enjoying life there. Having her passport and credit cards stolen recently has been a real pain for her though.

We found a bar for a pre-dinner drink. Check out the amount of wine in my glass!

We went to the local Irish pub as it was supposed to have live music every night. The atmosphere was good (although there wasn't an Irishman in sight!) so we decided to wait for the band which was supposed to start at 10pm. It started at 10.45 and was fantastic! They played a lot of 70's and 80's rock. The three of us danced but Courtney left after a while. Most of her work is in the mornings so it was well past her bedtime. John and I stayed on til stumps and staggered home at 1.30. It was a great night!

When Courtney first arrived in South America over a year ago, she was really well looked after by Daniel, a wine guy that was a business acquaintance of John's. John barely knew Daniel at the time but Daniel took Courtney under his wing and made sure his sons, all around Courtney's age, looked after her as well. The sons took her out and she loved her time with them. We thought it was our turn to buy Daniel lunch to show our appreciation but Daniel had other plans.

We ubered to Daniel's winery and he showed us around. It was a lovely, small winery with lots of history. We were shown the family's private wine collection. There were racks and racks of dusty, interesting-looking bottles. We were then taken to a dining room filled with old wine bottles, vintage family photos and old maps. It was a cold, windy, rainy day and a man worked over a humongous fire at the end of the room. He was cooking our lunch!

The walls were lined with old bottles and lots of bits and pieces. It was all so fascinaing.

Daniel's export guy, Nico, joined us and we tasted our way through many of their wonderful, unique wines. We ate food that had been roasted in that huge fire, plus salads picked from the garden plus local cheeses. It was an amazing meal. Thank you Daniel!

The weather was better the next day. We were able to admire the green countryside as we travelled by bus to the UNESCO world heritage town of Colonia. It was only a few hours by bus but Colonia was a world away from the hussle and bustle of Montevideo. It was wonderful!

Our first afternoon was a day to remember. It started with a quick karate spar on the deck of our accommodation.

It turned very cold but we were like three kids, mucking around in the trees, climbing up walls and taking silly photos.

We wandered the cobblestones streets admiring the beautiful old buildings. Some were fully restored, some were kind of old and some were really old but they were all stunning. These old coloured walls were my favourite.

Courtney used a filter on her phone camera and came up with some gorgeous photos.

Along with many of the other tourists here, we watched the sun set. It was so cold that we huddled together and made a mum sandwich :)

A surprising thing about Uruguay is that marajuana is legal. You can buy it in shops. We often smelled it as we walked around.

The next day we just wandered around, enjoying the atmosphere. We've seen a lot of graffiti in Uruguay and here was no exception. There was some very cool artwork though!

The historic theme in this town even carries through to the cars. You can rent brand new electric cars that look like old fashioned cars! There are also quite a few of the more genuine antiques.

Our small B&B was full of eclectic collections of vintage parerphenalia. You could spend hours just looking at the walls!

There were huge aloe vera plants in one place and Courtney used a coloured filter to capture this photo. I love it!

We had such a fun time here!

Heather, John and Courtney.