Where Are We Now?

A quick update to let you all know we have made it back to Canada without incident. Other than a nerve-wracking 10 seconds of serious turbulence on our flight. We were picked up at YYC by my father-in-law and are staying with them, at Karen’s old home in Red Deer, about an hour north of Calgary. We’ll be here for a week or so, making up for some missed holidays and enjoying some home cooking that puts mine to shame. 🙂

Our last stop before returning to Alberta is going to be Cancun, Mexico. It has been an amazing 19 months of living in and exploring almost a dozen Latin American countries. I have so many more stories, experiences, photos, and videos to share. I plan on continuing to post more as time allows, even after we are home.

We will be leaving Ecuador in less than two weeks. We’ve been in the same apartment for our whole stay here. That’s a record for us. Before we depart the country we are going to get out of Quito for a night and check out Otavalo, Ecuador. Why are we going there? Apparently, it has the largest outdoor market in all of South America.

We booked four weeks at an Airbnb here in a fairly central location in Quito. The apartment has large rooms and big table we can set up our laptops on for work and school. Although our trip from Asuncion felt like it was primarily north, we moved two time zones west. That, combined with day light savings moved us three hours “closer” to Calgary. We are in the same time zone as the central time zone in North America.

We are heading back towards Canada now. The bus ride from Buenos Aires to Puerto Iguazu was a big jump north. Asuncion is more of a lateral move on the map. We will spend a less than a week in Asuncion before we fly back to the equator. Getting to Asuncion was more of a hassle/adventure than we planned. We ended up back tracking quite a bit, but we made it. Sydney has said she wants to write about that. I might as well if I get a chance.

Well we had a pretty good run of relatively trouble free travel through Latin America. It came to an end on Thursday when we arrived at the Corrientes International Airport for our flight. It is not a large airport and the check-in line was empty. I figured it was because we were there almost 3 hours before departure. No, it was empty because almost nobody wants to fly to Asuncion, Paraguay from Corrientes, Argentina. Whether it was just the four of us, or perhaps a few more had purchased tickets. Whatever the number, it wasn’t enough for Amazonas Airlines to bother with the flight, so they cancelled it.

This trip makes five consecutive bus trips for us. This was the fourth overnight bus. The ride was “only” nine hours, from 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM. If it was lights out after we departed and all quiet until we arrived, it might have been restful. It was not. They played a couple of movies, handed out a sandwich/snack at just after 10:00 PM. We stopped in Posadas at about 2:30 AM. People got on, people got off. A couple of military guys wanted to check bags. All that to say that when we got into Corrientes we were tired.

Puerto Iguazu is a small city of 66,000 or so people and is the Argentinian jumping off point for trips to see Iguazu Falls. We will be visiting them over the next couple of days. We’ve heard they are spectacular.

Last night we were once again on an overnight bus traveling across South America. This time it was a 1,000+ km trip north of Buenos Aires to a little place called Puerto Iguazú. Puerto Iguazú is the city on the Argentinian side of three boarders. The other countries it borders are Paraguay and Brazil.

Yes, we are still in Buenos Aires. And I am sorry, I did it again. I forgot to post an update on our change of location. We didn’t move too far from the Airbnb in Monseratt. We are also only a few blocks away from La Barca Hotel, where we stayed the first week we were in Buenos Aires. This time we selected an old building.

If you are going to live in a big city, you need to do it near the heart of the city. Monseratt is close enough to the action that you can walk to most points of interest. For the ones further away, there are special tour buses that have different routes. You can hop on and off them to see the sights you are interested in. The place we stayed in last month was OK, but the neighborhood was just so much urban filler.

Sorry I am late getting this posted. It seems that no matter what your circumstances are, planned and unplanned events fill all the time in the day. We are not quite as central here as we were in the hotel, but that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. We’ve been planning on checking out the subway and buses.

Well we made it to Buenos Aires! The marathon bus trip from San Carlos de Bariloche wasn’t too bad. The hotel is in an old building, probably 100+ years old. The doors are 3 meters high and the ceilings at least a meter above that. The high ceilings are supposed help keep things cooler when it is hot out. We will be putting that theory to the test is a couple of days. The temperature is supposed be in the mid-30s Saturday. I know friends and family dealing with -20 degrees currently might not have too much sympathy for us. 🙂

Wish us luck! When this post publishes we will be on a 1,600 kilometer, 20 hour bus ride to Buenos Aires. The bus is going to be about as comfortable as a bus can be. The cama (bed) seats are wide and recline way back. There are curtains for privacy. USB ports to charge iPads. It’ll be be fine! 🙂

Well we’ve made it to another country! After a longer than scheduled bus ride from Valdivia, Chile, we arrived in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina on Friday evening. This place reminds us a lot of Banff back in Alberta. There are beautiful mountains all around, many of them with snow on top still even though it is summer here. The water in Nahuel Huapi Lake is too cold to swim in, but it looks clean and blue. There are steady winds driving waves across it so the surface is choppy. This area has some of Argentina’s best skiing and is the home of its craft beer industry.

Valdivia is a about 850 kilometers south of Santiago. The city is located about 15 kilometers inland at the confluence of the Calle-Calle and Cruces rivers. The climate is cooler, the temperatures have been about 10 degrees lower here compared to Santiago. We even had some rain today!

We have returned from three days and a couple of nights exploring part of Santiago. We left most of our belongings at our friend’s house in El Ajail and stayed at an Airbnb apartment for two nights in Barrio Bellavista. It seems like we keep finding the bohemian areas of cities south of the equator. The Bellavista neighborhood is known as Santiago’s bohemian quarter. The area has popular locations; the most noteworthy are Cerro San Cristóbal (St. Christopher’s Hill) and La Chascona.

We have made it to to our friend’s home on wonderful, green acre and a half south of Santiago. We needed to get adapters for the plugs on our computers and phones. Shopping took a while. Our phones’ SIM cards didn’t activate effortlessly as advertised when we put them into our phones. Our electronics are plugged in now, but it is late and I think everyone else went to bed some time ago. I’ll update this post with better information tomorrow or as soon as I can!

We arrived in Santiago, Chile just after 11:00 PM local time so we booked a night at a hotel just 10 minutes from the airport. It was a nice little place in a quiet, gated community with heated beds that Lucas and Karen immediately took a liking to. They were a bit reluctant to crawl out from under the warm covers in the morning. It is going into Spring down here now, but it is a bit cooler than we have been used to the past few months.

Lima, Peru – First stop south of the equator! We were up early on the morning of September 26 to catch a flight from Medellin to Bogota. A few hours later we boarded another flight to Lima. We arrived just as the sun was setting. The sky was overcast, so it got dark quickly and we didn’t see too much as we landed.

You may have noticed we haven’t traveled very far in the past four months. What can I say, we like Medellin. We have settled into another Airbnb apartment. This time we are on Calle 29, a dozen and a half blocks north of Poblado. Poblado is a very popular neighborhood for  foreigners. That is not something that makes it attractive to us, we prefer more authentic Colombian experiences. But it does mean we could satisfy our desires for North America products, if we are willing to pay North American prices.

We’ve arranged a lot of our accommodation on this trip using Airbnb. It has proven to be a great way to get long term, furnished places and we have met some really cool people along the way. Our current Airbnb apartment in Envigado is at the north end of city. Technically we are just outside of the El Poblado area in Medellin. But like many urban areas today, it is hard to tell where one ends and another begins.

We crammed ourselves and our bags into a tiny little taxi this morning. It was a 30-minute drive from Itagüí to Medellin. Once there, it didn’t take us long to feel good about the place.

The drive through the mountains and down into Medellin from the airport was beautiful. So lush and green everywhere you look, except where the buildings and construction projects shoot up from the hillsides. We’ve had some heavy rain as we settle in for our first night in Medellin. This three bedroom place is in a much newer and taller building, but much smaller than our Bogota apartment. Hopefully we can be comfortable here. Time will tell.