Buenos Aires and Patagonia

Hello,

to begin with please ignore all grammer and spelling mistakes!

So here I am in Argentina. It has been quite a trip so far. We arrived in Buenos Aires after a very long and uncomfortable flight. Anna´s friend who was already in Argentina met us at the airport which was great because I have learned that not knowing spanish is a big problem. I am trying but it is not easy and it is especially not easy to understand anything that anyone is saying. We took a cab into the city which is HUGE! It goes on forever. We got a hostel down town close the the capital building refered to as the pink building on the plaza de mayo. We walked around one part of downtown for the rest of the day. Buenos Aires is beautiful or at least I thought so. It has such amazing buildings! Although there are definitly poor areas like down by the bus station which is a bit of a shit show. Anyway we spent three days in Buenos Aires mostly just wondering around. We took a cab once to get to a bar in another part of town and they drive like mad men here. I was suprised when we arrived alive at our destination. I feel as if hollywood has an untaped resource of stunt drivers in the cabbies of Buenos Aires. I got very sick the last day were were town. Strep throat raised its ugly head again and I got a very high fever but luckly I brought the drugs I needed so I am feeling much better now. We left Buenos Aires on a bus bound for about half way down the Argentinian coast. The buses here are better than in Canada and we had bought tickets on a first class bus which means you get food and wine and your seat goes all the way back and turns into a bed which was good for me in my sick condition. the bus ride was 18hrs through the flatest desert I have ever been in and when we got to our destination we decided to stay on the bus and just all the way south. On the way I saw lots of cows, horses, a couple llamas, some big flightless birds, a fox and a cow boy. I also got to sit up in the drivers area drink yurba mata and ¨chat¨with the driver and the server which mostly involved sign language although the driver told me he wanted to move to canada with me because I was beautiful. Two days later we finally arrived in El Calafate a town in the middle of nowhere. It is in a valley where the flat desert that is Patagonia meets the Andes. It is a very strange hollow beauty around here. it makes me think of what Europe must have looked like durning the ice ages. there are these little houses here and there with a tiny patch of green around them and two trees in the middle of a brown desert streatching out in all directions. The mountains are amazing! they sit on the horizon like monsters towering over the desert. El Calafate is a strange place it is a resort town and the down town looks like whistler and it is pretty small little oasis in the desert however when we got here we took a wrong turn I suppose and we ended up walking through this shanty town where the houses were made of pieces of aluminum and a man started yelling at us very aggressivly. The proximity of extreme poverty and extreme wealth is intense here as I am sure it is in most developing places. Although Anna made a good point that hasting street in vancouver is very close the center of wealth in vancouver as well.

I am very excited about our next adventure we are going on a 5 day hike in Torres del Paine park in Chile. It is supposed to be spectacular! Although me and anna realized that we were idiots for leaving out hiking equipment at home and we rented a tent and think we might buy one in the next town and we bought two very shitty sleeping bags so we will see how it goes. We are also traveling with a friend of Anna´s named Laurena. She is very cool and we are all getting along great although we will see how we fare after 5 days sleeping in a two man tent. ouch. Anyway miss you all and hope you are all well.