Mmmm, Steak!

Hola! After Bolivia we headed south to Argentina and spent a few days in Salta... Oh My God: what a culture shock! Argentina is just so SORTED! Everything, it would seem, actually works! The difference between Argentina and Bolivia is extreme to say the least but, having spent quite a while in much poorer countries, Argentina has actually come as a very welcome change :) So after chilling in the very lovely and European feeling Salta, we went to the AMAZING falls at Iguazu and yes, as I have been told so many times, it is really quite a sight - I never thought it possible to spend 4 hours looking at the various different cataracts of the same waterfalls! (Some people were doing 2 day tours, though personally I don't think any waterfall warrants that much attention!) It is a little bit over-crowded with old people to the extent that sometimes I wasn't sure if it was yet another cataract, or just a seething mass of white hair! The older traveller is something that Argentina as a whole seems to attract more of than other South American countries (though not disproportionately), and I can see why: travel is easy (luxury in fact), the food is excellent, the climate is agreeable and the two larger cities we have visited so far, Salta and Buenos Aires, feel very European, relaxed and even sophisticated, depending on what you do. Oh, and it's cheap!

So here we are in Buenos Aires and it really is fantastic! We're staying in a very cool hostel (www.ostinatto.com) which is probably the best hostel I have ever stayed in - I couldn't recommend it more. Last night I cooked up a couple of steaks I bought from the supermarket meat counter: They were about 10oz and cost 75p each, crazily cheap, and whatever it is that they do to their cows out here - it works - 'cause there wasn't an ounce of fat on them and they were DELICIOUS! I could go on about this all day, but the quality of steak out here is just so fucking good - it's a real treat :) Oh, and did I mention that it's cheap?

We have done some sightseeing in Buenos Aires, though much less than usual. We went to check out a cemetery in the center of town. It doesn't sound too interesting I'm sure, but it was definitely one the weirdest and most interesting things I've seen. On one side of the cemetery (the cemetery is massive) were hundreds, perhaps thousands of massive tomb like buildings, some of them like miniature churches, for the richest Argentinian families - Peering through the doors you can make out dozens of coffins going back for centuries, stacked up with the most recent on the top shelf. On the other side of the cemetery were perhaps a dozen two-storey deep complexes, each comprising of dozens of corridors with, in total, literally tens of thousands of bodies locked in drawers, all adorned with flowers and the like. They were kind of like giant public morgues... Almost impossible to describe and certainly very unusual.

So that's about all I've got to say this time, largely because Argentina has so far been all about drinking beer and wine and eating steak, and the coming week is likely to continue that way with some hardcore clubbing and tango shows thrown in for good measure! At some point we intend to go further south, probably on the most luxurious bus on the planet, where apparently we can get a boat into the Atlantic and check out some Orcas (Killer Whales), and then there's that massive glacier a little further towards Antarctica... Should be fun! Take it easy, Steve x