Hello – thanks for joining us!

In this blog, Rachel (and Dunstan here and there) will be sharing our thoughts on travelling through various countries in South America over 3 months.

Now there’s probably loads of blogs out there about travelling around South America, with inspirational photos, raving descriptions, that will make you feel jealous whilst you’re on a 90 minute commute to London as it rains outside. Then there will probably be many that say that they’re different from this and offer a more ‘authentic’ view of life over here. Yawn.

This blog will be a simple journal of our day-to-day experiences in South America – our opinions on things to see, costs and itineraries etc.

To give some context of who we are, hopefully to help understand why we make certain decisions, we’re both 34 and had good incomes and savings, and are travelling for 2.5/3 months without any strict plan. We speak survival Spanish, and important to mention also is that we decided to go during the autumn/winter in South America (summer in Europe).

Let’s go further back….after spending almost two decades between us in London town, Rachel was offered a PhD place, outside of London, and Dunstan was contracting. We decided that this would be a perfect time to go somewhere we’d never been and we decided that South America would be great seeing as we’d heard so many positive things from others.

Originally we booked flights to Buenos Aires through Norwegian Air around 2 months before we left, purely as a way to ensure we go actually go! At this stage we didn’t have any idea if were going to stay in London when we got back etc so everything was up in the air. However, once we knew our plans, we had 1 month to find people to rent our flat in London, pack and find somewhere to store our things, organise stuff for our travel whilst sustaining 9-5 jobs. It was exhausting and stressful to put it mildly. 😞

Bit of an early fail when the airport cash machines had run out of currency. So we paid for coffee in the airport in dollars to get change in Pesos. It’s fair to say we were a bit blinded by the various exchange rates at this point so she could have given us anything to be honest.

Our initial view of Buenos Aires was somewhat confused as the driver – whose car had a hole in the bottom of the chassis (we could see straight through whilst driving at 60 mph) – mentioned that the city was very green. This was mentioned in the face of 6+ lanes of traffic that seem to permeate the entire city. Despite the clear lie, he was a nice person and helped us find our accommodation via a dropoff to pick up the keys to our accommodation.

The Airbnb – where we am writing this from – is nice. A room for £50 for 7 nights between two i.e. £25/person, or £2-£3 per person per night which is ridiculously cheap.

Anyway, what did we do on our first day? We unpacked our things properly knowing that we’d be in one place at least 7 nights and decided to go for a wander. Our Airbnb is situated in Palermo, close to Avenida de Santa Fe which is one of the main arteries through Buenos Aires. Think of the south circular running through the whole of London but twice as wide and with more shops and ‘life’ on it. Palermo itself is a cool area with many nice restaurants of all types, some really good coffee shops, bakeries, bars and all other things you get in what is a middle-class area of Buenos Aires. We’ve not a perspective of what this area is like during other times of the year, but it feels especially nice now and ideal to acclimatise coming from London. Although it’s close to winter, the temperature is around 15 degrees, the sky is clear blue, and the autumnal colours can be seen on the high trees from the pavements.

After leaving the flat, we headed to Palermo station, and crossed the monstrously wide highway in the middle of the city walking past a huge mosque. Traffic priority isn’t straightforward. At times, it feels like two cars are about to collide at a crossroads (as the city is built in blocks roads cross…a lot) on and then it all seems calm and controlled. Other times it feels that when crossing the pedestrian crossing, you’re about to get mown down by a taxi only for it to slow down and stop just before you. It’s unnerving initially but you get used to it and you become more confident – hopefully not too confident.

Back to wandering……maybe due to our lack of pre-reading about Buenos Aires, we were surprised to see such a huge mosque in quite a central place in the city. We didn’t imagine that there would be a Muslim community. The mosque itself wasn’t the most ornate but packed a punch in terms of size.

From here, we kept walking and walking, aiming towards the Japanese Gardens. We certainly underestimated how long this would take, and how big the city is. The Japanese gardens were cool with huge koi and lots of locals indulging their selfie habits in the unique surroundings. It was quite surreal to have gone from London to Argentina to “Japan” all within the space of about 14 hours. Discombobulating.

After trekking back to our flat, we quickly changed, met our friend J, who has lived here for over a year as a teacher. We grabbed some beers and had our first try of empanadas – handheld local pasties stuffed with random fillings – and went to a show.

La Bomba De Tiempo (Time Bomb) is a percussion group that do sets every Monday. The venue – a former warehouse and now a huge cultural ‘city’ – was around 20 minutes by Uber from Palermo. Ubers only take cash here – pretty weird! The music itself was great, the vibe was energetic, the communication between the performers tangible. The smell of hashish was pungent, and the beer came in litres. People were having a great time dancing and jumping around but nobody seemed drunk. Somewhere similar in the UK there would surely have been some ruckus or some people the worse for wear.

A packed first day. Sleep was not hard to come by.