Well it´s almost over. In about an hour we will be on a bus to Santiago, the first leg of our journey home. We will be in Manchester by Monday night, our huge 18 month journey at an end. We´ve seen some incredible places and met some great people, but to be honest, I can´t wait to get back, see family and friends and get back to the ´real world´. A nice pint of Abbot Ale is high on my list of priorities too.... :)

After another mammoth 19 hour bus journey (although this one was just one bus, so wasn´t quite as bad as the last) we arrived in Buenos Aires. It was Saturday night and we had heard great things about the partying to be had here, we quickly started looking around to find out what was on. On a billboard we spotted that Stephen Malkmus (ex of Pavement) was playing that night, so we grabbed tickets for that quick smart. Unfortunately, we ended up pretty disapointed. When we saw Evan Dando, (ex of The Lemonheads) in Auckland, I didn´t think he would be up to much but in the end he played both Lemonheads songs and newer songs with entertainment and passion. Both these things were missing from Malkmus´ performance. He gave the impression that he didn´t want to sing Pavement songs, and gave a completely lack-luster performance. At one stage in the middle of Range Life, (which was the encore) he completely forgot the words and had to bend down to be prompted by the fans in the front row! How many times has he performed that song? Perhaps if he doesn´t want to sing them then he shouldn´t bother! As we made our way on to another bar we had the feeling we had seen a man trying to pay off the mortgage, rather than a talented pop star.

We don´t have much time left before reality dawns and so we took a check on priorities and decided that seeing the Iguazu falls was high on the list. After a twenty-six hour bus journey (which has got to be the longest journey I´ve ever made, of any sort) we arrived. This place has the reputation of being one of the natural highlights of South America, if not the world and it didn´t disappoint. Enourmous amounts of water crash around from huge heights, swallows and tucans are flying around, along with lizards and monkeys in the jungle. It is a pretty busy place, with hundreds of tourists every day, but it didn´t really detract from the experience. On the second day we took a bus into Brazil and saw the falls from their side, which if anything was even more impressive, as most of the actual falls are on the Argentinian side. As the Argentines say, "Argentina puts on the show and Brazil charges for the view".

We met Tara and Dimitri on the bus coming across into Argentina and Salta and arranged to hire a car with them and take it into the desert and do the ¨tourist circuit¨. It was cool to get in a car again, even though it was far too small for me :) Although I was OK at the more ¨off-road¨ navigation through the rough stuff I left the hard core driving (i.e. when there are actually other South Americans around on the road) to Tara. I forgot to bring my trainers with me so did most of my driving in bare feet, as in New Zealand. This brought many stares and strange looks (well, even more than usual!) when I didn´t bother to but my boots back on when we had a look around the local superstore just outside town.

So now I´m here on my tod in Tupiza, Helen has gone off on a three-day horse ride into the desert, no doubt dreaming of being a cowgirl in the wild west or something, the scenery certainly looks the part. There are enourmous ´fin´ rocks and cactii, rolling hills and dusty plains.

So, yesterday I decided to go for a walk into the desert. The description in the guide book seemed easy enough to follow, and I walked out of town with a confident air. - Past the cemetary and the military barracks, follow the path west..... suddenly I heard someone shouting at me and I turned to see three soldiers walking towards me, two of them armed with huge machine guns. Oooooh dear. Instead of walking *past* the barracks, I had somehow managed to walk into it. :( Now, I´ve only been studying Spanish for a few months and I couldn´t understand half of what this officer was yelling at me, although it was obvious what I had done wrong. Lots of disculpe, and solo camino! seemed to get me off the hook, and I didn't have to resort to soy solo un gringo tanto! or ?por que usted no tiene vallas?

The first time I ever was on a horse was in Mongolia, where I think the guide was more interested in getting my dollars of me than teaching me how to ride. The horse was too small for me, the stirrups were too small and I ended up getting very, very sore; I think the horse fared even worse. At one point I was hanging on for dear life, yelling ´STOP; STOP, STOP!!!´ and pulling the reigns waaaay back while the horse continued to gallop on, it´s head pointing up into the sky in what can only be a position of much discomfort.

Over a year later, I finally agreed to try again, when we handed over money to do a ´triathalon tour´of Tupiza. This is a day spent riding mountain bikes, horses and in a 4x4. The bikes were great fun, and thankfully, when it came to the horse riding this time I was given a huge horse and stirrups I could actually get my feet into. Helen (an accomplished horsewoman) has taught me a few things about what I did wrong the first time, and I found that this time the horse actually did what I wanted it to! (mostly, anyways).

I´m afraid not much of interest has happened, but I thought I had better ´join the dots´:......

We took a plane from La Paz to Sucre, where we did some more mountain biking (fantastic again, I´m going to have to get me one of those when I get home) and then a shared taxi from there to Potosi. Potosi was once one one of the biggest cities in the world, due to the huge amount of silver deposits nearby in Cerro Rico (rich hill). It is possible to have a guided tour of the mines where you can see the attrocious working conditions of the men and boys that work there. We decided to give it a miss as I feel fully aware of just how bad the conditions are, and I´m not sure I would have fitted down the mine anyway!

We then took a bus to Uyuni, which was a seven hour journey of the most incredible scenery. Thankfully the bus was half empty too so we were able to stretch out a little. Uyuni is basically a tourist town, as it is the usual start / finish point for tourists wanting to see the Salar de Uyuni, one of the biggest salt lakes in the world.

From Uyuni, the standard thing to do is a jeep tour of the salt lake, and the ´southwest circuit´, which takes three or four days. However, Helen had heard from Laura, our fantastic guide from Joy Ride in Sucre, that there are great horse riding tours to be done in Tupiza. So we decided to take a tour which ended there. The scenery was just incredible, I took around 250 photos, some of which will hopefully make it up on the site at some point. But we were travelling quite long distances and over very rough terrain- on the third day we travelled for 14 hours in the jeep to make sure that we made it to a town which had hot showers! The jeeps seat eight, and along with our guide, Ambrosio, and our cook, Anna, we travelled with two Fins: Janna and Sakke, and two Hungarians, Panna and Atilla. Everyone was great company and made the long journeys in the jeep a little easier. :)

After the 12 hour bone-shaking jeep journey to Rurrenabaque, we weren�t really looking forward to a similar 16 hour-plus journey back. Instead we took the easy route out, and shelled out a few more dollars for a one hour flight back to La Paz on a 14 seater aeroplane. The journey itself was fine, although quite taxing on the body as we gained about 3500 metres over a one hour flight. We ended up feeling the altitude quite a bit, later in the day.
La Paz is the highest capital city in the world (although we can�t quite work out if it the �official�official capital city or whether that is Sucre) and is quite a bizarre place. It has all the nice restaurants and coffee shops a gringo can shake a stick at, but also boasts a market which basically seems to take over pretty much every square centemetre of space in the city otherwise known as �pavement�. These people sell dodgy CDs, tat for tourists, musical instruments, jewelry, door knobs, paper towels, furniture... basically anything you or I might buy in a shop. People spread their wares all over the pavement, which means that the average pedestrian has to walk on the street to get about. LaPazians who have more �specialised� things for sale have cottoned on to the fact that most of the passing trade doesn�t actually use the pavement, but walks on the edges of the road. These traders launch themselves in front of you as you walk, offering baby clothes, fossils and hair nets. At one point I was accosted by someone who was absolutely convinced that what I needed in my life was a metre-long metal ruler.

We took a jeep North East from La Paz to Rurrenabaque, where we managed to find stay in the only hostel which was right next door to a VERY loud Kareoke bar, which didnt close until 1am each night. Still, it was clean an reasonably cheap.
Rurrenabaque is the place to take a tour into the Amazonian jungle, and the Pampas, which is a national reserve where you can spot all the wildlife. We had a great time avoiding the spiders and other nasty insects in the jungle, and saw alligators, caimans, capybaras (Like a huge hamster - see the piccie on the right), pink river dolphins, anacondors, racoony-type -things񴴴 and so on. We also did some fishing for piranhas and caught a decent number for lunch. You had to mind your fingers when getting them off the hook!