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Hi everybody,
This morning we arrived in our penultimate (new) country, Paraguay. Since the last blog we've been to the end of the world and Uruguay, then back through Bosco (Buenos Aires to the uninitiated) on our way up here.
After we left you last in Punta Arenas, Chile, we went to see some penguins. After that we tried to visit another brewery (the woman what does visits was on holiday) and popped down to the duty free area by the port, where we just about managed to stop ourselves buying a new TV for our flat. There were also some comedic American cruise ship passangers milling around town, generally making a nuisance of themselves.
Next was on to Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world (which, incidentally, appeared to have a casino) where we camped again for a few days. It was freezing. The city was lovely and refreshing, if a little touristy (as you'd expect), but we couldn't afford to do a whole lot there. As an example, a pint of the local Beagle Fuegian ale (one of the best I've sampled over here) and a coke came to over $7. That's quite a lot. In order to catch a bus leaving back for the mainland at 6am on our last day, we ended up staying up as long as we could the night before (til about 1am, it was dark and cold) and getting up at 4am, to find that in addition to the cold and dark, we had to get the tent down in the pouring rain. Conveniently, when we came to leave, the mobile we've avoided using for the whole trip decided to play up and we had to walk about 1km down the hill with all our crap to find a taxi rank. Fun.
On the crossing back to Rio Gallegos on the mainland, we stopped for four seperate border checks (all excruciatingly slow), and shared a very choppy ferry crossing with two truck loads of sheep that didn't look too impressed with the whole situation. From Rio Gallegos, we flew up to Bosco (it was cheaper than a bus, and saved us about a week), and then attempted to hop on the next ferry over to Colonia, Uruguay. The ferry people have different ideas, and the whole crossing ended up taking about 6hrs (rather than 1). It meant that when we eventually got to Colonia (after hours on a ferry FULL of screaming childs), the hotel owner had given away the last two nights of our booking and we had to spend the first night and next morning looking for a replacement hotel.
Aside from all the crappiness up to this point, Colonia was great. All very colonial and stuff, and cheaper than Argentina. Nice beaches, nice buildings, and nice tat (we went on a mini spree our first full day there). Second full day we took advantage of the free bikes offered by the hostel and cycled up the coast in search of a beach. As soon as we stopped for lunch, however, a storm formed and it started tipping it down. It stopped just before we finished, but also put us off beaching for the day. That evening we saw what was to be our only Carnaval experience, var¡ous people walking and drumming.
Montevideo next. Our hotel was amazing - top floor of a hooge block with TWO private balconies and views... well, views of all the other really tall hotels. You could just about see the sea if you tried, and there were plenty of nice plazas around. We'd arrived just in time for Carnaval, which is apparently better in Uruguay than Argentina, not that we'd know. After the best part of a day of nothing apparently happening we started looking into events in the city. It turns out that for the actual dates of Carnaval (4th & 5th Feb), the city stops celebrating for a bit of a siesta, starting up with the massive parades on the 7th, the day we were due to leave. Despite this, we managed to have a pretty good time. Only one pancake each on pancake day, but we've made up for that since.
We spent some time walking along the various lovely beaches, shopping, exploring the old town, and watching Uruguay play Colombia at the Estadio Centenario (Vicky's first football match, and it cost $5 a ticket, which included admission for one + one woman).
The boat back to Bosco the next day featured Jabba (the Hut) and Jabba Jr. We were amazed it didn't sink under the weight.
Bosco was basically a massive shopping fest. We planned to post a hooge load of stuff home, and so quantity wasn't really an issue. The whole budget thing went out the window as well. On top of the usual stuff, we managed to fit in craft shopping in the Plaza Francia weekend market and fancy person shopping in Palermo (which is alarmingly cheap, with some prices about the same as Primark). In addition to all that shopping, we had some decent food (mostly cooked by us), went to MALBA, had some very good beers (mostly free) and spent 3 hours in a post office trying to get a parcel of tat home.
Here there was a man with 9 hats on his head.
Bye.
Love,
Nick and Vic
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