Northern Argentina: A Love Story

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Kristy and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary on May 10, and we were excited to use this as an excuse to indulge a bit. After months of bad mattresses with pilly linens and cheap bus seats with questionable stains, we were ready to live large.

We started by splurging on an “executive class” bus ticket to Salta, a beautiful city in northwest Argentina. Argentine buses are some of the best in Latin America, but after countless overnight trips in our usual class – semi-cama (i.e. your seat is semi like a bed in that you occupy it at night time) – we were ready to see what a real elite experience was like. Spa treatments? Warm cookies? We weren’t sure what it all meant but gee was it expensive and gee were we excited!

We’d get on the bus on May 9, wake up 20 hours later on our anniversary and be at a fancy Salta hotel in time for check in! Clever, aren’t we?

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Waterfalls, Butterflies, Rainbows. Sorry, No Ponies.

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Iguazu Falls is a pretty ridiculous place. A massive wall of waterfalls almost 3 kilometers wide is breathtaking enough. Layering on rainbows and electric blue butterflies sort of makes you want to shout “COME ON!” If there were unicorns and a splash of pink, it would be like stepping into a Lisa Frank folder.

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The Countdown Begins…

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Our trip is drawing to a close, and while we’re working on catching the blog up to present day, we wanted to send out a real-time update to those of you who have been following along religiously (i.e. hi Mom!)

We just got off a 24 hour bus from Tacna, the southernmost city in Peru, to Lima, and have decided to stay here until we fly home on June 3. For those of you who read our first post and are thinking, weird, I thought you guys hated that place, let me explain…

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Blog Bonus: My Favorite Kristy Spanish Story

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When we first arrived in South America, Kristy, a natural talker and friendly gal, was immediately frustrated by her inability to communicate with strangers. Besides the cheerful “hola!” she delivered to anyone within 50 meters, she didn’t have a ton to work with in the Spanish department, and it drove her bonkers.

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A Taste of Maipu: Adventures in Mendoza

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A few days after our initial rejection from Mendoza, we gave border crossing another try, this time by bus. Success! We now have so many Argentina stamps in our passports from various shenanigans that a customs officer recently asked Kristy in Spanish if she lived there. She didn’t understand him so she cheerfully responded, “dos o tres semanas?” which we think indirectly answered his question.

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Central Chile and Almost Argentina

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A worldly Columbian we met in Peru said this of Chile: “It is the best of the South American countries, but my least favorite for travel. There are no – how do you say? – surprises. The showers, they are hot. The buses, they are on time. The toilets, they are working.”

I was relieved to hear this as my mother was coming to visit us in Santiago and bathroom-related surprises are some of her least favorite. And honestly, after a few months enduring some of the “surprises” Peru, Bolivia and the more remote regions of Chile had to offer, this didn’t sound so bad to us either.

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Last Hurrah in Southern Chile: Chiloe and Puerto Varas

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After leaving Patagonia, we only had a few weeks to explore the rest of southern Chile before we needed to hightail it to Santiago and greet our next round of visitors.

Past experiences had made us somewhat distrustful of Patagonian transportation, so we didn’t want to jam too much in and get stuck in some remote town with bi-monthly mule departures. We decided to play it safe and stick to two places – Chiloe and Puerto Varas – and pre-booked as much transportation as possible to avoid disaster.

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Patagonia: So Much More Than a Clothing Brand You Can’t Afford

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The Patagonia portion of our trip opened with a very wonderful, welcome change: friends!

Kristy and I enjoy each others’ company very much, but when you spend literally every moment of your day with one other person, occasionally the conversation wants for some additional voices. Kristy will often start a sentence with, “did you hear that they recently did a study…” and I have to cut her off because it was a mutual friend that posted that article on Facebook, and I just read it too.

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Bo-livin It Up

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Visiting Bolivia was sort of an accident, and our first diversion from our 3 countries in 6 months plan. We originally thought we’d work our way down slowly on buses from Peru into northern Chile, but we had some good friends coming to visit that were interested in going to Patagonia (i.e. the very tippy end of the continent). Chile is that lonnngg skinny country on the map that looks like a subway sandwich – when rotated ninety degrees I believe it wraps around the world thrice – so the most practical option was flying. We were happy to make this change as Patagonia was high on our list and not a place we probably would have made it on our own, but to fly, we had to find our way to the nearest large city. Enter: La Paz, Bolivia.

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Cusco Rocks! (See what I did there?)

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After Arequipa, we hopped on an overnight bus to Cusco. Cusco was the capital of the former Incan empire, and is thus the jumping off point for visits to some incredible piles of stones, most famously Machu Picchu.

Continue reading Cusco Rocks! (See what I did there?)