Still in Bariloche

Hello All,
With a bit of luck we managed to make it back from our 5 day trek in Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi. It´s a beautiful area full of waterfalls, forests and lakes pure enough to drink from. On our first day of hiking, our packs weighed a ton (probably due to all that last minute emergency chocolate thrown in), the second day was painfully long due to an incorrect trail map and total lack of trail markers. The third day was a bit worse as it took us 10 hours from one campsite to the next with infected blisters on Darryl´s feet and a frighteningly steep descent. The fifth day was difficult not due to bad terrain, just lack of bathing! Nevertheless, we somehow made it back without the kind aid of any search and rescue teams.

The map said this would be the easy day?



Such an aussie, Darryl is fascinated by this new substance called 'snow'

Nights were warm enough inside the tent, but views like this drew us out into the cold clouds of midgees

Led astray by the map yet again, Darryl found his own way

Fifth day, Tronador in the background

After a couple days of recovery (spent at the brewery of course) we went on a peaceful rafting trip down the Manso river in which Darryl almost drowned. After our guide tipped us over he got sucked into the 'washing machine' for about a minute. That´s him at the bottom of the pile just prior to submurging.


Luckily the river didn´t like the taste and spat him back out, and the rest of the trip was great fun with Argentine barbecue back at the farm.
We leave Bariloche for El Chalten, further south, on Saturday. Hope you all are well. Love D&J

Four Sheets to the Wind in Rio de Janeiro and beyond

Hello avid readers, since our last brief encounter so much has been going on.

We stayed in Ipanema, then in Santa Teresa where we rode the little yellow tram down to Lapa in the center of Rio.

We had an introduction to the Selaron staircase, a public area, completely taken over by a man with a tiling obsession. This is Selaron himself supervising the work of an underling

Some tiles are his own, but many have been sent from people all over the world

Every day in the lead up to the parade there were street parties & samba concerts that were lively & generally so packed you had to give up and happily follow the masses

We watched a few football games at Maracana stadium, go Botafogo! (we cheered for them so as not to get beaten up by their loyal fans...as this is a not uncommon occurance in Rio)

We went to the Viradouro samba school rehersal (possibly the strangest school of all) and a favela funk party consisting of 2000 people crammed into a warehouse
There was plenty of sun and coconuts at Ipanema & Copacabana beaches

We took a tour of two favelas, poor but thriving cities, Vila Canoas and Rocinha


The company we toured with donates money to the Para Ti school in Vila Canoas & this is some of the students clever artwork

We walked all the way up to the Christ the Redeemer statue on a grey day, eating smelly jackfruit on the way

We had lunch with Igor and Anna (who we first met in Buenos Aires) at the Girl from Ipanema restaurant. They also graciously invited us to their house in the southern suburbs for dinner before we left Rio

Then, there was the major reason we went to Rio, the parade at the Sambodrome, 6 schools performing on one night, 5000 people in each school dressed in the most amazing costumes parading until the wee hours of the morning

Wandering home at 5 am, we saw so many costumes left behind in the streets, some beautiful and some not so, but all getting soggy and dirty in the morning rain

We also hiked up Urca mountain (the one next to the distinctive Sugarloaf) There were butterflies everywhere, also nasty little wrestling monkeys

We then took the worst 42 hour bus trip back to Buenos Aires ever, complete with broken air-con, police probes, missing passengers, broken toilet (makes for a smelly bus), disorganised border crossing, and the painful crooning of Los Bukis band on the "entertainment" system until midnight

Once in Buenos Aires we experienced three iconic cultural experiences with our friend Seamus who lives there, eating some amazing parilla at Des Nivel, running for the obelisk in the middle of 12 lanes of speeding traffic & frolicking with the locals in the ever present problem of uncollected city trash

Then took a Super Cama bus (the closest to luxury travel we will ever come with fully reclining seats separated by curtains, free vino whiskey and champagne, hot meals, good movies & bingo) to Bariloche, where they had to drag us off

We took one week of Spanish classes on the edge of a glacial lake surrounded by mountains and forest. Darryl says it's very similar to Queenstown (just no jails)

Laguage instructor Angie who took us bowling where they still set the pins by hand

There's good mountain biking on the Circuito Chico around glacial lakes (which Darryl has classified as spanner water), forests and a brewery (which was not exactly conducive to riding a bicycle(well) which Jess can further attest to)

Tomorrow we will start on our attempt at a 5 day hike through the wilderness near Bariloche. Hopefully you will hear from us again soon.

Love, Darryl ´I want to be Edmond Hillary´ West and Jess "Porter" West