From Santiago, across the Andes and into Argentina

Maybe sleep deprivation is just the thing to get the creative urges going. I started to write this post at about 6am on a long distance bus travelling from Mendoza to Buenos Aires. We´d been on the bus since 8.30 the previous evening, trundling through huge, flat expanses of Argentina. It was one of those moments you get on long haul journeys, where everyone on the bus or plane seems to wake up at about the same moment. I glanced out the window and caught sight of a road sign - still another 312km to Buenos Aires.

Long distance buses are pretty unescapable feature of South American travel. With unlimited funds, we'd be on planes all over the continent, but putting in the hours overland at least gives you a sense of the terrain. Our journey from Chile crossed the Andes, where the border is high in the mountains (one hell of a commute for those customs officals!) and took us to Mendoza, Argentina. This is of course wine-making country, with rafting, horse-riding and trekking thrown in for the days when you've nearly had enough Malbec. (Unsurprisingly, we failed to have anything to do with rafts, horses or walking shoes during our brief stay. James even went so far as to throw his away before leaving Santiago, just to ensure there was no more epic cross-country nonsense on this trip.)

Heading now to BA, this city has in many ways always felt like the ultimate destination of our trip: apart from being the city we fly home from, it's been the place we've talked about most and which has been one of the most highly recommended cities from friends and fellow travellers. We hope it lives up to our expectations!

The Latin American leg of the adventure began in Santiago, one of the quieter and smaller capitals, but one which we came to really like. We took a week to find our feet and get over the monster 16-hour time difference from New Zealand, did a little sight-seeing and found that speaking no Spanish at all quickly became very irritating. After weighing up various options, we decided to take a week's lessons in the hope that we would at least be able to order some food and argue back with taxi drivers who swapped our 500 peso note for a 100... but that´s another story.

So the second week in saw us getting down to five days of emergency Spanish. The first lesson was pretty tough going - conducted entirely in Spanish, and both of us getting stressed out by the experience of being total beginners and getting everything wrong! We walked away the first day feeling this was an uphilltask we were facing (I don't know what else we were expecting, near-fluency at the end of one 90 minute session presumably) and realising that although we could now ask each other where we were from and what our jobs were - Hey James, where are you from? Really? Me too! - we still weren't in a position to get a coffee without an elaborate pantomime accompanying the few words we knew. However, the next morning over said coffee, we hit the coursebook and our homework exercises and got the first few bits of grammar sorted. I think it was our success in learning the verbs Ser and Estar that then gave our teacher a rather false impression of our capabilities: over the next four days we did a high-speed tour through times, dates, where things are ("the garden is behind the garage. The cat is under the tree etc etc) and the compexities of three different verb forms - James, walking dazedly away from one lesson: "Did she say we weren't doing any more verbs tomorrow?" Me: "No, I think she said we were doing a lot MORE verbs...."

But no one who knows me and James at all will be surprised to learn that we actually quite liked doing our little exercises and reading dialogues in which we were introduced to a range of fascinating characters called Paula, Pilar and Pedro who have conversations about what they had for lunch and how many brothers and sisters they have. By the end of the week, we had a basic grasp of forming questions and saying what we needed to say. The tandem conversation class probably topped skydiving in terms of terror but we managed to string a few sentences together... in the English half of the session, James, who had made it wordlessly clear that he didn't want to go, ended up in lively conversation with a delightful Brazilian girl - and I don't think any man can argue with that as an outcome for an evening!

Santiago has been a really cool city to get to know - cool bars in the Bellavista quarter, fantastic national buildings like La Moneda, the presidential palace that used to be the country´s mint, and sunshine, sunshine, sunshine. A walking tour gave us the inside track on the history behind the city, which bars we should visit, and how much you should pay for chorripan - a thin steak fried at a streetside vendor, then loaded up with guacamole, mayonnaise and salsa. With some elementary Spanish, we have ventured into the famous Cafe Haiti branches - a coffee chain that hit upon the idea of making their waitresses wear very short dresses to entice the customers in; unsurprisingly, I was the only woman in the there... and enjoyed nights out fuelled by piscolas (pisco plus cola) - then paid the price in the morning. Chileans have a reputation as the quieter, more reserved Latin Americans... so we can only imagine what Buenos Aires will be like!

New Zealand

Photos from top left, clockwise: I prepare to jump out of a plane; James walks across one of the many deserted beaches in the Coromandel Peninsula;James looks out over New Zealand´s Central Plateau mid-way through the Tongariro crossing; Mount Tongariro.

So, how many cliches of the New Zealand holiday maker have we managed to tick off over our three week stay? Hire a car and marvel at the jaw-dropping scenery – done. Do some Middle Earth tourism and walk across the craters and plateaus of the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, AKA Mount Doom – still aching after two days, three months of idleness has clearly taken its toll on the fitness levels... Throw self out of a plane over Lake Taupo, NZ's largest lake – yes!

So far, so Lonely Planet... but there's been a lot more. Spend Christmas with a family we met in our first few weeks away, whilst aboard a boat trip to Halong Bay, Vietnam – we send huge thanks and best wishes to Bryan, Jacqui and Lyle Patterson, who adopted us for the Christmas period. Beers in the sunshine, several games of Monopoly (NZ edition of course), and more pavlova than one would think it humanly possible to consume made the 25th December a proper Kiwi Christmas.

So although we haven't made it to the South Island, we hope that our more well-travelled friends will spare us too much of a verbal haranguing, as it's been a pretty packed 20 days. Having spent a few days in Auckland taking in the sights, we met Bryan and Jacqui to head south to their town of Tauranga. After a relaxing weekend getting to know the dogs, we picked up the first of our hire cars from the wonderfully-named Rent-A-Dent: an achingly cool Nissan Bluebird – check out that walnut dash! We travelled north into the Coromandel Penninsula, winding our way through the mountains and walking on deserted beaches. We continued our research into New Zealand beers and stayed in possibly the nicest backpackers' ever, the delightful Tui Lodge. We also took our tranquil state of mind up a stage by staying in a Buddhist retreat for a night, meeting lots of alternative types from all over the world, including a Californian Buddhist nun. Meditation and simple, vegetarian food left us serene and discussing how to transcend our egoic selves – then we got back to lovely Tui Lodge and had a massive barbeque and some beers.

We got back to the Pattersons on Christmas Eve and settled down to enjoy Christmas in the sunshine. Owners of a small landholding (ok, pretty huge by UK standards), the Patterson family includes dogs Sting, an elderly Jack Russell, and Turc, a Flanders Cattledog who is similar in appearance to a small bear; also five sheep and three hens. Apart from the dogs, the animals earn their keep through their eggs and meat – home-reared lamb is something else – and the peacock who was foolish enough to wander across the Patterson homestead took a bullet in the head and took pride of place in the Christmas Day feast. A more traditional aspect of the Kiwi Christmas dinner is the pavlova, served with cream and strawberries – and proceeded to eat more than was safe for the arteries. You know who it was who flew the flag for the Brits on that one...

We Rented Another Dent from the 27th, picking up the second of our Grandma-magnet vehicles... this time taking us to Taupo to see the lake and, for me, jump out of a plane somewhere over it. After a few cancellations – they only jump if the weather conditions are just so – a fine morning saw me heading out to Taupo airfield. Bearing in mind the sage advice of my mother-in-law (“Now Helen: only jump if you're strapped between a sexy man's legs”), I was pleased to get up close and personal to a tanned, smiling Kiwi guy who told me he'd already done four jumps that morning. We climbed 15 000 ft and I realised that our position in the tiny plane meant only one thing – last one to get in, first to jump out! I can honestly say mild butterflies were the strongest nerves I experienced in the preparation, the climb... and see my smile in the exit photo! - but the feeling of the first few seconds falling through the sky was quite literally beyond terror! I was too frightened to even scream, I could hardly breathe, and I vaguely wondered how the cameraman who had jumped with us expected me to wave, high-five and shake hands... damn that personalised DVD option, it seemed such a good idea on the ground! A few more seconds flailing around and falling at terrifying speed and then – sweet, blessed relief – the parachute went and everything was peaceful. Looking around over the lake and the mountains was just beautiful and I took in every second as we gently floated down, landing effortlessly on a patch of grass the size of the average back garden. Meeting a very relieved James afterwards, I tried and failed to contain the babble of the post-adrenalin high. He was just glad I was ok – I don't think he liked my joke about getting me a bench with one of those engraved plaques on it to go by Lake Taupo, if I had ended up in it.

From Taupo it was down to the very tip of the South Island, to see in New Year in the capital city of Wellington. Putting in some serious miles over New Zealand, it could only be Flight of the Conchords on the CD player, so, singing along with Brett and Jermaine we arrived in Welly, another of those cities that New Zealanders think are busy – 'ooh, mind the traffic... and that one-way system's a nightmare!' - while we looked around at the empty streets and wondered why Kiwis still wait for the green man when the only two cars in sight are parked. Still, it made for a chilled and very enjoyable New Year's, with no queuing, no paying on the door and no standing five deep at the bar. We then experienced a weird sense of satisfaction the following day at 1pm, speaking to both sets of parents just as the UK New Year came in - by then, we were en route to Auckland for the next long haul flight... New Year - done. South America here we come!