the photos

here are the photos so far, and thanks to nancyfoo for organizing the albums:

http://www1.snapfish.com/share/p=316181232292625089/l=464854013/g=8904398/otsc=SYE/otsi=SALB

back to ba

after puerto madryn, we headed to buenos aires for a couple nights, where we stayed in this crazy hostel in bunk beds. we shared a room with several people who livedslashworked there. there seemed to be one bed that was permanently someone´s and the others just rotated through the unoccupied beds. and the day we were leaving, this guy in our room discovered that something like $1800 had been stolen from the safe deposit box in the hostel. you need two keys to get into it, one that they give you and the other that they keep at the desk. so pretty obviously it was someone who worked there. and in about 4 minutes they stole several months worth of pay. so, sorry to john from san francisco who lost a ton of cash. i would probably cry.
anyway, we went north from there to puerto iguazu where we saw some huge waterfalls. i thought it was going to be a three hour adventure and that´s it. oh no. we walked around for several hours in the sun. but it was pretty amazing. maybe foo will post some pictures of it...
the scenery up north is much nicer than the rest of the country. most of argentina is a desert. but the north has trees! and rain! and an amazing waterfall.
we were going to do a full moon tour of the falls that night, but it was really cloudy. we kept asking the desk at the hostel if the tour company would cancel, and the tour company kept saying ´check back at 6.´ then ´check at 6.30´ then 7. and our bus left at 7.10. it was clearly going to be a cloudy, even stormy night. i asked for a refund because i didn´t want to go, clearly we couldn´t see the moon. the lady had the money out on the desk, but then the other lady was on the phone with the tour people. at about 7.07, the tour people said it was still on. we wouldn´t get a refund, they hadn´t cancelled. so we ran to the bus, bought tickets, and went. we got to the falls and clearly there wasn´t any tour. so after about an hour of waiting for someone to talk to us from the company, they got the park guide to tell us that there would be no tour, it doesn´t make sense to have a full moon tour when there was no moon to be seen. duh. no one from the tour company seemed to want to take any responsibility for this, for not telling us what was going on. and the bus had long gone, the next one wouldn´t be for an hour or so. oh my. i was annoyed. because i knew before we left the hostel that we couldn´t do the tour. so now i had lost at least two hours and bus fare. and no one would explain anything. i got a bit too annoyed i guess, and spoke very firmly to a man with a tour company shirt on. i asked him why no one told us earlier when a bus was still there. he just told me i could get a refund from the hostel and walked away. not the answer i was looking for. anyway, we eventually got back and had a pretty mediocre dinner. the next day nancyfoo explained to me that i was a jerk to the developing world at the waterfalls the night before. probably true.
we met this canadian woman named jennifer. and so the day after the falls we took a bus to paraguay. apparently they have very cheap electronics because at night things can be shipped across the border and you don´t have to pay taxes at the border. so we went there, via brazil. so we got an exit stamp on our passports out of argentina, then passed through brazil (where i need a visa and supposedly cannot go) and into paraguay, not getting an entry stamp in either place. we shopped in a really overwhelming market, almost bought a 4-band unlocked phone, but then didn´t. i got a dress and nancyfoo got a hammock. and we walked back across the bridge into brazil where customs just pointed us past all the other people filling out declaration forms, and we walked to a bus stop where the colectivo took us back into argentina, getting an entry stamp at the border. so for a few hours, i was apparently nowhere.
then we got the bus back to buenos aires that night. we arrived here yesterday, got a private room with a private bathroom. living in luxury here....
we went to china town for dinner. i made nancy order in chinese because when her parents were here and ordered in chinese we got better food than when we ordered in spanish. and sure enough, the food was good.
today we sent clothes to get washed, praise jesus, because it is not awesome to take a shower then get dressed and immediately smell bad again.
and then we went to the recoleta cemetery. that´s where evita is buried. so we got to see the grave. the cemetery is pretty amazing. it´s all bricked on the ground, no grass. and the graves are all sort of little houses. it´s all tall and stone and cement. i´ve never been to a cemetery like that before.
i think that´s it for now. i hope you´re all doing well.
love
kt

back north

we saw the glacier. pretty amazing. and huge. i think 6km by 30 km or something like that. really really big. and blue. and it´s advancing, which means it is still growing. two meters per day, but it also loses three meters per day, so it´s not really getting bigger, just growing and losing bits. lots of bits. we went there with a tour, a little unnecessary, because we could have just taken the bus and looked at it without a guide. anyway, it´s like a huge wall, several storeys high, and every now and then you see giant chunks of ice fall into the water (lago argentino). and you have to stand pretty far away but the noise is incredible. it´s soooo loud to hear the ice fall into the water. that is a pretty good indicator of the size of this thing. amazing. and it´s all blue and icy and makes crackling noises. really cool. also, it´s so far south there are maybe 6 hours of darkness per day. that´s it. i went to sleep with light and woke up with it too.
then the next morning we took the 7am bus back to rio gallegos and then got a 6pm bus to puerto madryn. this was new years day, so nothing was open. so we just sat in the bus terminal, ate fried rice that foo made the day before out of bowls we made by cutting off the top and the bottom of a water bottle. i ate out of the top.
oooh i forgot to write this: we were in el bolson before going to see the glacier, and the last night we were there someone stole one of our backpacks. most of the stuff was in the tent, but we kept the mostly empty backpacks on the side of the tent because it was too crowded with stuff in the tent. anyway, we woke up and my pack was in a different place than i left it, and all the compartments were opened and my stuff was sitting everywhere. and foo´s pack was gone. the guy who worked there told us it was the dogs, because the same thing had happened to some french kids that morning but they found the packs close by.
so we looked for a couple hours around the campsite. nothing. then thought about it for a bit and here´s what happened: that night, someone came through the campground and picked up packs sitting out. one of the french kids´ and mine and foo´s. then they took the packs some yards away and opened everything, threw it all on the ground, took what looked valuable, and stuffed what they wanted to keep in foo´s bag and took off with it. awesome. we are now down one pack. there were two pairs of sandals, one pair of shoes, foo´s expensive rain jacket. all the foreign money she had, other random things that aren´t worth much, but we need them.
so we made a police report. we knew they couldn´t really do anything, but if someone tried to change 500 singapore dollars in a bank there, they´d probably be the first ever, so maybe the popo could find them that way. at the police station, the policeman didn´t seem interested at all, told us it would be impossible to find, and typed up a report which said that foo was japanese. not exactly successful, but i still felt better after making the report.
so that´s why we ate fried rice out of a plastic water bottle.
and we came to puerto madryn, north of rio gallegos and on the east coast of the country. the vegetarian meals we requested for the 18 hour bus ride had giant slabs of processed meat with hard-boiled egg in the middle.
puerto madryn: yesterday i wanted to see the sea lion colony. 17km from here. and you can rent a bike on the beach and 17km isn´t that far on a bike. so we get the bikes and head out. and 3 km down the road we hit gravel. not just a gravel road, more of a sand and gravel mix. let me tell you , riding a bike on sand is impossible. and really loose gravel, next to impossible. two hours later and after two incidents of throwing a bike down and announcing that this is not going to happen, we arrived at the lomeria, where we had to pay 25 pesos each to go look at a sea lion colony. it was neat. not something i need to do again. we ate lunch and rode back, two more hours but infinitely less painful than the ride there. and we got back to the bike rental place an hour early but i was ok with that.
now i´m sunburned and ready to go to buenos aires to eat chinese food and salads.
after that it´s up to iguazu to see the waterfalls. yesssss.