Itaipu Dam

This was our geekiest day out so far but was actually really good!!! A massive 3km long hydro-electric dam on the border of Paraguay and Brasil and a really amazing feat of engineering. Not exactly what you would call beautiful tho!! It powers 97% of Paraguay and a massive chunk of Brazil too.





Geeky or what!!! It always pays to be cautious.

The turbines were massive and were really hot and vibrated when you touched them!


A guy actually cycled around the turbine hall rather than walked it was so big. I am telling you Tate Modern has nothing on this place!!

Injuries

Cooking with your top off isnt sexy, it´s dangerous.

Here´s me happily cooking some steak at our apartment in Palermo

Here´s my arm a week after splashing hot fat up my arm and chest.

Climbing up mountains isn´t sexy, it´s dangerous.

Here´s Nic working her way down from Cerro Fitz Roy

Here´s the bruise that covered her thigh after she stacked it.

Stencil graffiti

Stencil graffiti is really popular here. They´re not quite Banksy but they brighten up the place.

Don´t cry for me..........

So time has come to move onto Brazil! We are sad to leave the land of steak and wine and of course ham and cheese. And just as we are getting good at Spanish we are off to a Portuguese speaking country, yikes!

In all seriousness we have seen landscapes so varied you wouldn´t think it possible in 1 country; scrub land and jungle, snow capped mountains and turquoise lakes, and lunar rock land.

The people are so friendly, if a little unable to understand personal space and that is rude to stare. They´re a mixed bunch; gauchos and trendy city dwellers all inhabiting the same space. The buses journeys are long and the atmosphere at the bus stations crazy but they get you about and really are a melting pot of all the people that live here.

We have been told to make the most of the food as it gets worse everywhere else we will go, but we have been a little disappointed to be honest.

Right, this photo sums just about it up. Is it me or is that way too much cheese on a pizza?! You can only eat 1 slice before you pass out from the protein and fat intake. It´s a long long way from being a nice cheese too. It´s their version of mozzeralla and its super bland. This pizza was actually pretty good given that you got a vague vegetable intake with a bit of pepper on each slice, shame it didnt really have any tomato sauce on it...

Ham and cheese is just about the only filling for pizza, pasta and sandwiches. They just cant get enough of the stuff.

We always steer clear of the cheese and ham empanadas too, best to stick to carne or pollo which are beautiful.

Bus food is a frenzy of ham and cheese. Every journey is much the same, so they kind of roll into one. We have done so many buses the above standard lunch and dinner is getting pretty tiresome and sometimes gag worthy..We´ve decided we would rather be hungry alot of the time. The above had a prize winning a total of 7 ham and cheese sarnies in varying breads. The brown bread is a rarity and the Swiss roll ones really are in cake bread. Yuk.

What they do well, they do really well. The red wine is fantastic and they are obsessed by meat, so every supermarket has a brialliant meat counter and everywhere you go you can get amazing steaks cooked on a bbq, or ´parrilla´, restaurants or road side stalls. The meat is amazing here but even that gets tiresome after a while. Somehow, after a couple of days you gert back on it again.

Above is a restaurant´s parrilla and below is one of our own! Note there are vegetables on ours, not the case in restaurants.

Ed has also joined the Argies in their love of ´mate´. They drink the dried leaves of a type of holly bushes in a little cup through a straw with a filter. They never seem to leave home without a little thermos of hot water and their mate (cup) and bombilla (straw) and bag of yerba mate. It gives a cheeky little buzz like a cup of tea or coffee.

You can also get great coffee and pastries everywhere too. They certainly have sweet tooth. Dulce de leche is another national obsession. The sweet toffee like jam made from milk comes in nearly every biscuit, cake, pastry or chocolate.

IGUAZU...... Soaks you right through.

OK so it really is amazing. Was not expecting to be so impressed and to get so wet too! Puerto Iguazu town is nice and our hostel is great, really chilled out and everything feels humid and jungle-like. Lots of green everywhere which is nice after so much barreness.

Day one, didn´t make it to the falls, Dutch people, dodgy pizza ( too much cheese agaaaaain!) and too much beer the night before made sure of that. So day 2 we went. There are 250 waterfalls altogether and the 1st bit we went to was the Garganta de Diablo or the Devil´s Throat. This is where a load of them converge, the noise and the spray is immense.

Then we went down to the lower cicuit to see a panorama and you can get right up close and wet through again, welcomed in the afternoon heat. There are loads of rainbows everywhere too.

Then we did a small trek to a separate waterfall you could swim in and saw loads of cool butterflies and Coaties along the way, they nick your food if you aren´t careful!

That is me ( nic) under the waterfall in that last pic and yes it hurt like hell! And that is only a trickle!

Festival nacional de doma y folklore de Jesús María

When we were in our little cabaña in San Agustin, we´d seen some footage on TV of the Gaucho Rodeo called Festival nacional de doma y folklore de Jesús María. It looked amazing and we´d said to one another how great it´d be to go. When we got to Cordoba we realised that it was just up the road.


We got there and there was a real festival atmosphere, loads of people, loads of stalls selling gaucho paraphernalia, parrilla (bbq) tents everywhere etc.









In the stadium the gauchos took it in turns to have a go at taming a wild horse by riding it bare back.

Check out this fella stacking it




and this one showboating

San Juan and Talampaya

After Mendoza we headed north to San Juan, a more chilled out little brother version of Mendoza, where we stayed in a beautiful but run down hostel and watched some amazing thunder and lighting.

After a couple of days frying in the heat there (max 40, min 25), we headed further north to the Valle Fertil and a little town, well village, called San Agustin to stay in a little bungalow called Cabaña la Hilda where we played with the resident puppy and had bbqs.

San Agustin was also the place from which to do a tour to Talampaya National Park. Basically you travel along a dried up river bed in a massive canyon with huge great 160m tall sandstone cliffs and various rock formations, plus have a look at some ancient art work of guanacos on some of the rocks there. We also saw some massive dog sized rabbits called mares

Mendoza-Happy New Year!!!!

96 hours on buses in 10 days meant we deserved a hostel with a pool and some relaxing time. So it was off to Mendoza the home of sunshine and fine wine.


2 days turned into a week after meeting a wicked bunch of people and drinking way too much to actually do anything. There is the excuse that it was stupidly hot too, and it´d be rude not to have a BBQ or two

After our drinking chums had left and we stopped discussing how truly terrible the ham and cheese sarnies are here ( it is a re-occurring theme, literally all you can get if you want a snack is a sarnie, an empanada, a pizza topping, or pasta filling based on ham and cheeeeeeese) we actually went out and did something more constructive with our time.

1st up Ed and Julian and Ricky and Miguel (brazilians from the hostel) gave some argentinian teenagers with amazing fashion mullets a lesson in football.
Given we´re in Mendoza, we then went to a bodega (winery) on a bike ride, and got drunk on a bike....
After that, we decided to hire a car with some new French friends we had met and drove south to San Rafael and the Laguna Del Diamante

The 4 hr trip up to 3700m was pretty arduous given that the road was unpaved, and we´d hired a Suzuki Fun, not a 4x4 (I don't think that car will ever be quite the same after the punishment we gave it). Getting to the lake was well worth the effort as the scenery on the way was amazing (hard to do justice with words or pictures) and the lake was truly beautiful. Swimming in it wasn't the brightest as it was colder than a brass monkeys...

Have a look at Stephanie and Clements blog. It pisses all over ours

stephetclem.over-blog.com