End of trip wrap up

Well, that's it. One year and a whole lot of memories. We have been back in New Zealand for three weeks, but have been putting off our final post as it is hard to believe it is over. 

We saw two continents. We learnt (some) Spanish. Most importantly we met some amazing people on the road, and caught up with old friends and family.

We thought we would pull together some statistics and facts about the trip, in no particular order:

• Distance travelled: 29,000 miles or 47,000 km
• U.S. states visited: 28
• Countries visited: 16
• Gas tanks guzzled: 75
• Estimated fuel cost: $10,000
• Flat tires: 5
• Couches surfed: 14
• Bribes paid: 1
• Birthdays celebrated: 2
• Illnesses: 0 (excluding mild tummy bugs and hangovers)
• Mild tummy bugs: 3
• Fluency in Spanish gained: 5%

You may also be interested in how the van performed- here is a list of things we had to fix on the road:

• USA: new front tires
• Mexico: new alternator, fixed holes in radiator hoses, welded muffler back on
• Guatemala: replaced seals in rear axle
• Panama: repairs to air compressor
• Colombia: repaired drivers side power window
• Ecuador: new front brake pads, roof repainted
• Peru: four new tires, crown wheel and pinion replaced in rear differential (by far most expensive and time consuming repair)
• Argentina: bearings replaced in air compressor

Here are some lessons learned (don't be expecting anything deep and philosophical here):

• Mexico is not as dangerous as Americans claim
• Colombians are the nicest people in the world, but the worst drivers
• If you see something you need/want, buy it- you probably won't find it again
• If you have duct tape, WD40, and two-pot epoxy, you can fix anything
• Pretending not to speak spanish is the best way to handle dodgy road cops
• Probably best to invest more than in a week in spanish classes if you want to learn the language
• Our parents are amazing and very supportive (as if we didn't know that already)

Thanks for reading! We need to get back to planning our next trip....

Thirteen hours in Chile

After a quick two hour flight from Buenos Aires, we landed in Santiago, the capital of Chile, with thirteen hours to check out this lovely city before our flight to NZ. Ringed by snowy mountains, it's a beautiful city with plenty of character and old colonial buildings. 

We walked up Cerro Santa Lucia for a fantastic view of the mountains and the city. We visited the main plaza, and the presidential palace. We then spent a good few hours drinking beer, playing cards and eating wantons before our flight back to Aotearoa at midnight.

Uruguay, who would've thought.

We never planned to go to Uruguay, it was kind of a bonus track on our panamericangladiators greatest hits album. Indeed we had never really heard anything about Uruguay other than it was down there near Argentina/Brazil and presumably Paraguay.

We visited the beautiful colonial town of Colonia del Sacremento, an hours ferry ride west of Buenos Aires across the Rio Plato. We stayed in a hostel, which we are not used to. We were treated to an all you can eat asado, and bottomless jugs of wine, so it wasn't all bad. We even managed a little sightseeing between rain squalls.

We also had a rain soaked peak at Montevideo, the nation's capital. Torrey made a conscious tactical decision to leave his rain jacket in Argentina, and paid for it dearly. We think Montevideo was beautiful, but couldn't see much for the weather.

Finally, we spent two nights in Piriapolis at a fantastic apartment. We had huge views of the coast and a marina. We had a very nice day in the sun, before the perfect storm struck on our last night. We had rolling thunder and lightning for eight straight hours.

Olavarria

We visited Juan's parents Remo and Maby, and Juan's little brother Valentine, in Olavarria. We had a great weekend, eating asado, drinking mate, drinking wine, playing football, eating asado, playing Monopoly Deal, and eating asado.

We also met Bruno, Juan's cousin and a former exchange student of Ken and Debbie (who you may remember from our Canadaian blog post almost a year ago). Bruno and Juan stayed with Torrey's folks last year in NZ. Bruno showed us around his hometown of Sierras Bayas. 

With Juan and his parents

With heavy hearts, we had to say goodbye to the Gladiator. We have been trying to sell it for weeks now before we fly home to NZ, without much luck. Argentina has incredibly tough vehicle importation laws, which means that it is nearly impossible for an Argentinian to legally keep it in the country. So our target market was tourists, who would take it on a similar trip as ours, but it is the middle of winter here, and any smart tourist (with enough money to buy a sweet van) is not going to be starting a trip at this time of year. We finally found a good home for it, and a buyer who wasn't too interested in doing things by the book. We will miss the van and all the adventures we have had over the last year. It has served us very well, and we hope it will keep running strong for its new owner. It was pretty hard to say goodbye to such a wonderful traveling buddy.

Kellie closing the deal wearing her trademark bargaining slippers

Buenos Aires bumper edition blog post

We are but a few weeks out from the end of our trip now. We arrived in Buenos Aires to finally meet good family friend Juan. He lives with his brother Joaquin in a nice flat overlooking a pretty park in Recoleta, one of the nicest neighborhoods in BA. Our goal for the next week or two is to find someone to buy the van. We love the van and don't want to sell it, and this means that our trip is coming to an end, but it needs to be done so we don't have to sell it to a garage for spare parts. We ended up having a lot of time to look around BA while we got busy selling.

Recoleta is home to one of Buenos Aires' most famous points of interest, the enormous Recoleta Cemetery. This is the final resting place for many famous Argentinians: presidents, prominent businessmen, and even Argentina's most famous lady, Eva Peron.

The city center has many other points of interest. We visited the main plaza, home of the Casa Rosada or "Pink House". This is the presidential palace, where the President works but does not sleep apparently (except after occaisional big nights out clubbing presumably). There is a balcony over looking the plaza where Evita used to address her throngs of admirers. 

We took a one hour boat trip into the delta of the River Plate to visit Juan's friends Pablo and Andres. We stayed a night at their new bed and breakfast venture, which will be opening soon. They took excellent care of us, feeding us lots of asado and wine, and teaching us new card games.

We also celebrated Kellie's 29th birthday. Torrey had an extra special day planned involving banana pancakes, flowers, a theme park, a large pyrotechnics display, pisco sours, a small party and a cake (which he only remembered at 11.56pm). Kellie was taught the traditional Argentinian way to eat a birthday cake, which is to put three fingers inside it first and make three wishes.

Thanks for reading...here is a bonus tango video!

Argentinians are wonderful... and weird

For some reason, the region of Cordoba has a collection of very weird towns.

In the town of Nono, there is a very weird museum called "Museo Rocsen". If you are interested in any or all of the following: geodes, fetuses in jars, taxidermy, old stamps, cameras, printing equipment, shrunken heads, horse drawn carts, religious art, old soda cans, medieval weaponry, ancient agricultural equipment, lampshades, and disassembled engines...Rocsen could well be your happy place.

The museum building itself is impressive- the front facade is a pantheon of life-size statues dedicated to people with ideas that changed history. Aristotle, Hippocrates, Jesus? Sure, no brainers. It was intesting to see the likes of Chief Seattle, Rachel Carson, and JS Bach included with these giants of history. I suppose if you own a museum you can put whoever you like up there!

Alta Gracia is a town south of Cordoba, famous for being the place where Ernesto Guevara lived between the ages of 5 and 16. The house where he lived for a portion of this time is now a museum. We weren't expecting much, but it turned out to be very worthwhile. There are interesting exhibits on the stages of his childhood and adolescence (including replicas of the bicycle and motorcycle that he took around Central and South America), a small theater that shows interviews with people he grew up with, and even a bit of dirt and rocks from the room in Bolivia where he was killed.

A bit further south, we checked out the town Villa General Belgrano (named after the creator of the Argentinian flag), a small German-style village that was founded by two Germans in 1930 and later inhabited by German seaman whose boat sunk off the Argentinian coast. You can buy German-language newspapers, drink German-style beer, and eat German food. It was pretty weird, but a nice little town to have a wander.

Jesuits and the Falkland Islands

Two unconnected subjects as far as I know, but we both find them interesting topics and couldn't figure out where else to blog about them.

The region of Cordoba is full of old Jesuit missions. If you are from a secular country like New Zealand, you may not have heard of these guys. Here is a quick recap from google on who they are:

The Society of Jesus is a male religious congregation of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits. The society is engaged in evangelization and apostolic ministry around the world. Jesuits work in education (founding schools, colleges, universities and seminaries), intellectual research, and cultural pursuits. Jesuits also give retreats, minister in hospitals and parishes, and promote social justice and ecumenical dialogue

The Jesuits set up missions all over South America, spreading their religion and doing what they saw as necessary to help out local indigenous communities. They also made an effort to learn local languages and customs, and encourage locals to hang on to them in the face of colonisation. The Spanish eventually had enough of the Jesuits, as they were helping the poor too much, and had too much power among the masses. The Spanish authorities put an end to their activities, forcing them to abandon their missions. 

We visited one mission in the town of Jesus Maria. It is a beautiful building and grounds. There is a stash of wine making equipment out back as well, it turns out the Jesuits were prolific wine makers, using profits to fund their activities. 

Another topic that comes up often in Argentina is the politics surrounding the Falkland or Malvinas Islands. Again, if you are like us you may not know too much about this topic, so here is google again:

The Falklands War (Guerra de las Malvinas), was a ten-week war between Argentina and the United Kingdom over two British overseas territories in the South Atlantic: the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. It began on Friday, 2 April 1982, when Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands in an attempt to establish the sovereignty it had long claimed over them. On 5 April, the British government dispatched a naval task force to engage the Argentine Navy and Air Force before making an amphibious assault on the islands. The conflict lasted 74 days and ended with the Argentine surrender on 14 June 1982, returning the islands to British control. In total, 649 Argentine military personnel, 255 British military personnel, and three Falkland Islanders died during the hostilities.

The conflict was a major episode in the protracted confrontation over the territories' sovereignty. Argentina asserted (and maintains to this day) that the islands are Argentinian territory, and the Argentine government thus characterised its military action as the reclamation of its own territory. The British government regarded the action as an invasion of a territory that had been a Crown colony since 1841. Falkland Islanders, who have inhabited the islands since the early 19th century, are predominantly descendants of British settlers, and favour British sovereignty.

In Argentina, it is hard to ignore the issue with graffiti, art work, road signs and currency remembering the conflict, and often declaring the Falklands/Malvinas are Argentinian. We have also been trapped in a number of conversations with Argentinians who want to know what we think about the conflict, and who should own them. Short answer? We don't really have an opinion either way.