My Birthday, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay

After the Bolivian salt flats we arrived in Chile, San Pedro de Atacama, to spend a couple of nights of luxury, courtesy of my big sis, for my birthday.
We had champagne and nibbles,

a jacuzzi at our disposal and the biggest buffet breakfast I´ve ever seen. The hotel was made from mud and looked out onto a volcano. It was really, really nice.


On my actual birthday we went horse riding during the Day (Dan´s treat). My horse kept wandering off to eat stuff and Dan´s kept wanting to gallop home...apart from that, it was really good fun.


In the evening we went out for a posh meal, courtesy of my little auntie and cousins. That was really nice too. We had a good bottle of wine and some after dinner spirits, which came in a tumbler..

After those, Dan ended up swinging from the ceiling of the room (I don´t know, these 30 years old just can´t take their booze anymore).

After our time of luxury it was back to reality and we headed back onto our usual sleeper buses and into Argentina, to Salta. From there we went to a town called Resistencia, which is full of sculptures (over 300 of them dotted around town), and from these to Buenos Aires.

Buenos Aires is a great city. Lots of parks. We hired bikes and spent a day cycling round an ecological reserve in town, which backs onto the Atlantic. We went to an overly opulent graveyard, where we saw Evitas grave.

You get professional dog walkers here who walk several dogs at a time. 13 is our count so far. Amazingly, apart from poohing all over the pavements (which is more of the walkers fault than theirs), all the dogs are really well behaved. It does mean that we have to dodge the turds whilst walking round.

We then decided to get some more stamps in our passport and got the ferry over to Uruguay. We spent a night in Montevideo, the capital, which is the quietest capital city we´ve ever been to. We were there on a saturday night and everything was shut and there was no-one around. It was also extremely foggy, so we couldn´t see all that much. We decided to stop off for a beer, not realising that it was happy hour and ended up having 4 (litres that is). We then spent a night in another town, Colonia, which has lots of cobbled streets and is very nice, although again didn´t see that much of it due to the fog.

We´re now back in Buenos Aires getting a bus to Puerto Maldryn tonight (about halfway down Argentina in Patagonia). We´re hoping it´s not going to be too cold down there, and that we can go whale watching.

Dan has been living off steak since we arrived in Argentina, so much so that´s he´s lost quite a bit of weight - the Atkins diet!