After all our train rides in New Zealand, as well as the buses and planes everywhere else we were ready to get our own wheels to explore the rest of the country. We picked up our stylishly understated 1.3 liter white Nissan station wagon that converts into a "micro campervan". We decided on the fitting name of Tina, and began our adventures on the wrong side of the road down under. We first explored the war zone that is downtown Christchurch still experiencing af...

A 7 day rail pass took us through some of New Zealand's spectacular back country as well as coastal areas that can't all be explored by car. Ride 1- We left Auckland at 7 am and travelled south to Wellington, a winding trip of 12 hours that stopped directly at the base of "Mt Doom" for a midday break. This train has only 4 passenger carriages with a cafe in one of the carriages and a little outdoor viewing deck in one of the other carriages. Very quaint, old tr...

Longest plane ride ever? Check. Longest of the trip? Not quite. First impression of New Zealand? Everyone is incredibly cheerful and nice especially considering our 5 am arrival time. Seeing signs and hearing people speak English seems confusing now, and like everything should be hard to understand. The main thing upon getting off the plane was understanding the coffee nomenclature of "long blacks" and "flat whites", and that ketchup is called tomato sauce. Eve...

So since Santiago did not have much going for it, and since we had been marooned in the one of the driest places on the planet, we jumped on a bus to the lesser visited beach town of Ritoque on the Pacific coast of Chile. We had seen an amazing hostel right on the cove and thought it would be a great way to spend our last day in SA. We were right. We had our own small house with two pairs of fun Dutch and German travelers coupled with the surfers kind of runnin...

After actually leaving Buenos Aires for the last time we arrived at the Santiago airport and luckily found plane tickets for a two hour ride to the Atacama Desert, a hauntingly magical place of vast, open space and scorching sun by day with bone chilling cold at night. We stepped off the plane on what appeared to be Mars, and arrived after a shaky bus ride through the desert to the old town of San Pedro de Atacama. We walked in the dark to our hostel/house on the...