Puerto Madryn could be a stand-in for just about any other beach town in the world, but after being in Buenos Aires with no beach to speak of except for the aforementioned brown river, we got much more enjoyment out of it then we usually would. “Look!” we would cry. “Water is blue!”

Then, “What is that strange smell?”

“It’s air minus the smell of diesel fuel! Will the wonders never cease?”

We only had two days in Puerto Madryn just to break up the time traveling from Buenos Aires to Ushuaia. Since it took 22 hours just to get to Puerto Madryn, I would come to see this as a wise decision on our part. Continue reading “It Was the Best of Tours, It Was the Worst of Tours” →

Even though I didn’t really want to stay in Buenos Aires any longer, as we packed up our possessions in our backpacks that hadn’t been touched in two months, I started to get a nervous feeling. I was ready to leave the big city and get back to the small towns, wilderness, and hiking every day (and so was my waistline), but we had gotten so accustomed to being in a big apartment. There was nothing that we ever had to do. And the feeling of uncertainty and apprehension of being in a new place had vanished long ago. Now we were facing smaller living spaces, places that we had to get to on time, and an uncertain future involving long bus rides, new towns, border crossings and recrossings, and the certainty that we were going to have to speak Spanish to communicate. So as we left the apartment on that last day in a taxi bound for the bus station, I felt almost the same feeling that I did when we left the United States. But our bus ride to Puerto Madryn was all that we needed to remind us that there was nothing to be nervous about. Annoyed and disgusted perhaps, but not nervous. Continue reading “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round…and Round…and Round” →

Reflecting on our two months in Buenos Aires was a thought-provoking mental exercise. What did we do in Buenos Aires? We decided to stop and be stationary for two months midway through the trip because we figured that after almost 5 months of being on the move, we would be glad to settle down and just relax. And that is a fair overview of our time there. During the weeks that we weren’t taking our Spanish lessons, we fell into a fairly familiar routine that went something like this: Continue reading “5,443,200 Seconds in Buenos Aires, Mas o Menos” →