Valparaiso to Mendoza to Cordoba

So much for sleep! The bus trip from Valpariaso to Mendoza that we had thought would send us to sleep failed to. Our seats were at the back of the bus right above the engine which resulted in a very hot night, combined with this, every stop that the bus made we thought was the border between Chile and Argentina where we would have to depart the bus to go through border control. We didn't actually come to the border until around 3.30am and it wasn't until 5am that we were on our way again!! I managed to get some sleep, though not very comfortably, Mike however suffered and combined with being a bit sick he was in a sad state waiting for our passports to be checked. Once we had gotten through the formalities and our bags were checked (this time Bananagrams was not picked up as being a fruit as it was going through customs between Argentina and Chile!) we were back on the bus for another 3hrs. We both got a little sleep and awoke driving though the Andes with the sun rising around us, which was pretty magical really. Once through the Andes we saw what Argentina is like - flat - seeing a hill on the horizon is actually quite exciting! We arrived in Mendoza and it was already pretty darn hot but we were relieved to be in a quieter city. Mendoza was flattened by an earthquake in 1861 and when they rebuilt the city they made all the roads really wide and a lot of plazas for people to escape to if an earthquake happened again. This makes Mendoza a lovely city to walk around as we spent a couple of days doing. Because of the lack of sleep we have had we decided to stick to double rooms for the next little while as we can control the environment better. Our hostel in Mendoza was lovely, quiet and air-conditioned which lead to our first full nights sleep since we left NZ. We woke up feeling revived and set out to explore Mendoza as the day before we had only stumbled around like zombies. We have decided as a result of bus trips being long and not the most fun that we will not head down to Buenos Aires but instead leave it till the end of our trip as it is where we fly out of. We also made the decision to do one extra flight to the one we had planned. Although we'd rather not be flying because of environmental reasons we have had to consider ourselves and our enjoyment of the trip and have booked a flight from Foz de Iguazu to Rio. This would have been a bus trip of over 22hrs unless we had stopped in Sao Paulo which, being a city of over 19 millon people, did not appeal to us at all. From Mendoza we caught another bus to Cordoba, where we currently are. The trip was somewhat more enjoyable than the first as it was during the day, we were not attempting to sleep and we were at the front of the bus, it however was still 11.5hrs and exhausting. Along the way we followed the Jepson tradition with bacon sandwiches, I knitted, we watched the movie Unstoppable in badly dubbed Spanish, also with spanish subtitles - which I managed to follow pretty well (thanks to Mike having seen it before and filling me in a bit), ate triple Oreos, saw a truck load of Fanta tipped off a truck and had many more fun trips to the toliets. We're still not really used to having to put the toliet paper in a bin beside the toliet here and not in the loo itself. With a tum that has been feeling rather funny this is even more fun!! We arrived in Cordoba at 8.10pm and decided to book our trip to Posadas then as the bus station is on one side of town and we didn't want to have to come back. In the sweltering heat and very tired we had to come to grips with the fact that what we originally thought to be a 15hr bus trip is actually going to be at least 20hrs and will leave at 11.55pm. With this to look forward to we headed to our hostel and had another good nights sleep. We spent today exploring Cordoba - for the second largest city in Argentina there isn't much to see, being followed by a dirty stray dog that found us again after we hid in a department store (I was convinced it was going to bite us and give us rabies), and booking our hostels for the next little while. We have another full day here before the dreaded bus trip and will mostlikely spend in resting and reading if we can find somewhere to, all the parks here and in major disrepair and are dust baths, the one we found that looked lovely was corndoned off. We are however keeping our heads held high, although I have suffered from quite a bit of homesickness, and we're looking forward to heading towards the Iguazu Falls! On towards the jungle!
Ilona