Back in BA

Chris and I are back in Buenos Aires. We took an hour long ferry from Colonia in Uruguay and arrived yesterday. The pictures from Colonia are up on the website here. We’re staying in the neighborhood of Palermo which is the trendier part of town with lots of cafes, restaurants, shops, bars, etc. It’s nice and much cleaner and quieter than the other parts of Buenos Aires we stayed at in February. BA is the land of dog poop all over the sidewalks, so we’ve been watching out for that, as well as crazy drivers. So far, neither one has gotten us.

We’re staying in Casa Esmerelda hostel with a shared room. After living it up in actual hotels with TVs and private bathrooms, we need to save some money and stay in the shared rooms/bathroom places. We’ve got one Australian guy in our room that’s been riding motorcycles around the world for four and a half years. On this leg, he rode down the coast from Oregon. He’s ridden through Africa and Europe, and makes my travels seem lame by comparison.

Today was a national holiday (kind of like a Labor Day) so it was pretty dead. Last night we went out with a couple from Colorado that we met in the hostel and Chris and I put away 4 (!!!) bottles of wine so it was good that things were quiet today as we didn’t feel like doing much anyway. The couple had been traveling through South America since June and their Spanish was awesome, which made me jealous. They had lived in BA previously on this trip and took us to a really good vegetarian restaurant and I had some broccoli ravioli in a cream sauce that was glorious. When you can find fresh veggies in a restaurant in South America, it’s time to celebrate. The Colorado people had lots of good things to say about Colombia, which is great. We haven’t heard anything good about Venezuela so we’ll probably skip that and spend more time in Colombia.

Tomorrow is our last full day in BA so we should probably venture out and actually do something… although I’m not sure what that will be. Maybe I’ll finally make it to the Evita Museum, and Chris wants to check out a big book fair to look for books to learn Spanish. Our friend Seth from Paraguay is in town with his parents so hopefully we can meet up for dinner or something.

Saturday morning we fly to Lima, Peru. We have a hostel booked and someone from the hostel is picking us up at the airport, which is helpful. We’ll probably stay in Lima for only a few days and then go north, up the coast. We want to surf and lay around on a beach. There are also some ruins that apparently rival Macchu Picchu but I think it involves a lot of jungle and nature to get there, so I don’t know how excited I am for that.

And I guess that’s it. Things are fine; I’m just a little boring right now.