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After a pretty horrendous bus journey overnight from Uyuni, we´ve now arrived in the capital of Bolivia, La Paz.

We´re now in Bolivia!

Our first stop in country was the sal flats of Salar de Uyuni, a very surreal place where everything is white and the sky is always an amazing blue. If yoú´ve seen the latest Pirates Of The Carribean film, it´s a lot like the scene with multiple Johnny Depps in that.

It´s  bizzare and strange place that takes a while to get used to, it´s just so big and empty and well, white :P

One of the highlights of the trip is the Isla de Pescado, an island suddenly rising out of the salt plain and covered in un-numerable large cacti of all shapes and sizes.

Something I loved about the Salt Flats was that you´re able to play around with the perspective in photos a lot because there´s nothing else to get in the way, allowing you to do pictures like the one shown here :)

Again, a picture I thought I´d highlight and share with the world.

It seems o have been getting quite a lot of attention so far on Fcebook (6 comments, wow :P) and back home, so what better to do that to show it off even more? ;)

Interesting fact for you, apparently Cacti only grow around 1cm a year or so in this region, meaning this big fellow is pretty darn old. There was one cactus we saw later, the largest in the area that was 12m tall, making it a grand old ages of 1200 years old. I wonder how many people have taken pictures like this in that amount of time…?

The picture was taken on the way to Cachi (see previous post). The driver stopped in the desert to see if we wanted to take pictures, and I just couldn´t resist the temptation to take a rude picture…

Sorry! :P

Only a day trip from Salta is the quiet and beutiful Argentinian town of Cachi. To be honest we decided to check it out mainly because the rude name…

Check out this picture taken on the road to Cachi, it was just stunning.

If you happen to be around Salta with time to spare, make the extra effort to get out here, I´m sure you´ll appreciate it. The town itself is a quaint little place with numerous market stalls, nice little cafes etc and is just generally a nice place to relax and have a bit of a chill out :)

Checking into our hostel in Salta, we noticed an interesting poster advertising paragliding. We checked it out and seeing as it was so cheap, we decided to go for it.

None of us had ever done it before, so we didn´t relly know what to expect, but it was a good fun day out and we went with the 2nd best acrobatic paraglider in Argentina - quite impressive.

If you ever get a chance to try it out, take the plunge, it´s good fun, but I don´t know if I´d do it at home where it´s a lot more expensive saying that.

This is a picture of me landing on the nearby racetrack :)

One of Argentina´s premier natural wonders is the Iguazul Falls chain on waterfalls on the Brazillian border in the north of the country. I think the first thing me, Hedydd and Cian decided on doing when planning the trip was to visit the falls, so it was a long time coming, and really nice to finally visit them.

The falls mark the Brazillian and Argentinian border, and can be viewed from either side. On the Argentinian side you can walk over and amongst the falls, including the amazing Devil´s Throat where you´re surrounded by 270 ° of water, which was simply awsome. It´s pretty easy to cross over to the Brazillian side (as we did for a day) to view the falls, where you get much more of a panoramic view of things and see them in their entirity. This also means I´ve now been to Brazil, if only for a day! If you want a sene of scale, they´re a lot bigger than Niagra falls if that helps :)

Seeing as we were so close to the other Welsh settlement in Argentina on the other side of the praire (that of Esquel and Trevelin) we thought we might as well check it out as well. Mainly to get more Welsh Tea…

We stayed in a fantastic little hostel there called La Casa Verde, owned by a Welsh speaking family. It was a wonderful little wooden cottage type arrangement and we had our own private room and everything like that. It´s a real shame we´d already booked a bus out of there and couldn´t stay a few days longer. It would´ve been really nice just to relax and chill out there for a few days, the music selection they had was top notch as well.

Whilst in Trevelin we went for a little horseride, which was the only time I´ve ever ridden apart from in Llangrannog for about 10 minutes maybe. It was pretty fun, I´d be interested in doing it again somewhere on the trip if we can find somewhere as cheap as there.

My advice to anybody Welsh travelling to see the Welsh settlements would not be to skip out Esquel and Trevelin just because they´re a long bus journey as well. It´s worth the extra effort, and if you manage to get a place in La Casa Verde, I´m sure you´ll enjoy :)

Being in the Andes for the ski season meant we really had to go skiing didn´t it? Also, the fact that it worked out so so much cheaper doing it in South America than probably anywhere else on earth was a pretty decent incentive really. However, we were on a budget so only really had time and money for 3 days, which was nowhere near enough of course, but at the same time long enough to get back into it to be decent on the third day at least :P

The town of Bariloche itself is clearly a ski resort town, which expensive shops and really nice eateries, and much to the girl´s delight, top notch chocolate shops renowned all over Argentina. It was tempting I must admit, but having already splashed out on skiing I found it a bit hard to justiy buying a lot of expensive (in South American terms at least) chocolate. In hindshight this was a big mistake as we´re yet to see any more decent chocolate. South America, depsite being the biggest grower of coco beans I imagine, seems to ship all the good ones abroad - the same seems true for coffee, meaning it´s hard to get anything decent, but I´m off the subject now completley. Going skiing made me realise how much I´d missed it and how much I´d love to spend a ski season somewhere sometime, that´d be a lot of fun. Glad I went with school and had lessons as well, it means I´m alright on my own now as well. The weather wasn´t really on our side, but one day we had stunning views from the top of the mountain of all the hills around and the lake Bariloche is next to as well.

We also had a lot of fun taking cool skiing pictures, the best one probly beign this one of Cian.

Avenida 9 de Julio, one of the main roads in Buenos Aires, happens to be the road with the most number of lanes.

Officially totalling 16 lanes all in all, Buenos Aires drivers seem to have other ideas, and I swear I must´ve seen at least 20 lanes there at some point…

Not much traffic when I took this though!

Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, was our next stop. We were meeting a friend, Angharad, there before heading off to go skiing a week or so later.

It was a city I really enjoyed, very pleasant to be in. Heavily influenced by European immigrants, most notably Italians, it does feel like a European city. The food was all top notch, and numerous all you can eats costing around £1 each were very tempting as well. We spent most our time in the old cobbed district of San Telmo, which wasn´t too far from the centre, but not so close either.

I don´t really know what else to say about it, it was a cool place, and again one to which I´d like to return to sometime.