Empujar Por Las Escaledas

Getting into town...be prepared for traffic like Vietnam, sitting on a train track with a train heading towards you and somehow not managing to hit anything...this kindof driving skill cannot be taught.

Moving on, we are now in Buenos Aires and it is raining and we have actually spent long enough in an internet cafe on a computer that actually works to get around to sending some emails which are long overdue. We arrived here and made it to the posh part of town and saw Evitas grave (oh, please let me have my photo next to that...in fact let me frame it and put it on a wall!) and since then it has rained but we figure we will be back here at some point so the lack of sightseeing has not been too disturbing. We have a friend of a friend here who has been very kind, i say he has been very kind...he did con us into eating cow's intestines the other night. I think i preferred the chickens feet in china. We did go for amazing ice cream afterwards though which did kindof make up for it.

Have been trying to recall my spanish from school but without too much success. In my attempt to order pizza the other day i ended up with chicken pastries. d'oh. Then there are the mosquitos who have taken a liking to Amy and me...and especially my face. In our confusion we couldn´t quite work out which currency they were working in Pesos or Dollars (although looking back now it is pretty obvious U$S15 for some laundry...naaa!) so we went to a restaurant thinking it was in dollars...ordered really stingily, paid for it on credit card because we thought we didn´t have enough money then left what we thought was a 10% tip but was in fact 25%! The waiter must have thought we were loopy :)

On the plus side we are back to paying a pittance for everything, including mosquito repellant, chicken pastries which you didnt really want to begin with, overly large tips, internet to pass some time when it is raining, cows intestines which you didnt really want to begin with...

We leave tomorrow at 7am...we dont have a bed for tonight and are going to use Pablo´s house as luggage storage while we go and experience Buenos Aires nightlife, enter Pablo (another one). His parents have been all too kind and say their house is our house...hopefully that means we can one day adopt their dog Flappy. Chip chop...must be off now.

If at first you don't succeed then skydiving isn't for you

We left Nicky, our jobs, our apartment and headed to Christchurch - we had no desire to stay long there so we picked up our Jucy Rental car the next day and bid our farewells...Lake Tekapo here we come. It was not long down the road that the scenery happily morphed into mountains and lush green landscapes...the New Zealand we were hoping to see. And it only got better...we booked into a wooden lodge-style hostel in front of Lake Tekapo and at the base of a mountain. The mountain was Mount John and we managed to climb it in 30 minutes, when it actually suggested 90 minutes, what can I say apart from Professional Mountaineerers! Even the near-on vertical section at the top was no trouble for our burning lungs.

Clint, a friend from Brisbane who was also in Lake Tekapo was jumping on our Road Trip Band Wagon for the few days so we sat around waiting for him to tell us something useful, like when he could leave and where he lived...since we had very little signal on the mobile phones this meant we had to go wandering up the road and round the phone box hoping for a bar of signal or two in the freezing cold. We visited Mount Cook the next day which we would highly recommend if anyone is heading that way.

We picked Cliff, I mean Clint up the next day and headed to the South Coast Road and the promise of some more extraordinary sights...in truth we saw the Moeraki Boulders (seems that the Kiwis have taken after the Aussies in this respect and are calling rocks on beaches tourist attractions!), the steepest street in the world in Dunedin, millions of sheep, some sealions (after some several hours of searching), Milford Sound and the happening place (if you are 15) of Te Anau. Turns out we have managed to arrive in the South Island in low season (which is only a small window of opportunity between winter and summer...I don`t know how we do it). Queenstown was particularly quiet which equated to us wandering the streets a lot looking for a party that wasn´t really happening. We did find the casino and I did make some significant profits on the 5c machines without really knowing what I was doing. We went luging and ate Fergburgers and Clint finally bought a camera after what felt like months of deliberation! We found a mountain to drive up (not convinced it is in the rental car contract to do so!) only to get to the top and not be able to see through the clouds. The surprising thing being that people were still managing to ski!

To bungee or not to bungee that is the questions...No is the answer, it just takes a few hours and one detour to figure that out...by which time I am ready to push Clint off the bridge without a rope and for free :) Next stop was Wanaka and Puzzling World which was very interesting but made us feel a little sick and that evening we cooked up a storm with some Lamb`s neck curry! Not the easiest thing to do - Ayms you are culinary genius. Clint broke his new camera...noone knows how?! We dropped Clint off in FrANZ jOSEF for his next job and me and Amy walked over the glacier/iceberg while he gave himself five minutes to decide if this was the town for him...turns out it wasn´t and he is now in Auckland. Anyway, back to the iceberg...we walked half way round before we ran into a guide who told us we had our spikes done up wrongly! Tip: if you do ever do it, do the full day tour, it is not as strenuous and you do not need to be as fit as they say you do. Our evenings were spent beating Clint at pool and watching the Magic Bus folk get it on the local club.

Amy and I continued on to, yep some more rocks...this time in the shape of pancakes and then Hanmer Springs for a soak in some eggy-smelling water! We saw the seals at Kaikoura before heading to Picton to get the ferry back to the North Island.

We were reunited with Nicky in Wellington (the land of Miss Dibby) and to celebrate both we did karaoke, not once, not twice but three times and I am pretty sure there would have been more had the DJ been more sympathetic to our ´Bad Singers Trying to Sing´ campaign! We saw the Crater´s of the Moon, Lake Taupo, Thermal Wonderland, the natural phenomenon of the Geyser which they add soap to to make explode and Rotorua - extreme sports, check. We launched ourselves into a giant inflatable ball with some water and rolled down a hill...Amy and Nicky also swooped. We would have gone to Hobbiton but the tour was a little expensive so we followed (private-eye style) the bus instead until it (sadly) turned down a private road, we definitely made it to the Shire though.

Back in Auckland there was one final Sunday Session in Danny´s...thank you to all involved and thank you Nicky for having us to stay...and thank you Diego for all your advice on Buenos Aires!