Brasil (14-21 feb)

Once carnaval was over, I finally got a chance to actually explore Rio. Thursday I met up with Sam and his friends to go on a favela tour in Santa Marta. I was surprised how self-contained it was. There is a school, a community centre, little shops, and even a wall separating it from the next favela. Santa Marta is one of the safest favelas, having been pacified over 5 years ago. There are community outreach police officers that work there, but none carry weapons. Rio is really trying to clean the city up before the world cup and the olympics, and apparently in some of the most violent favelas they have forced the druglords to move out. There were also a lot of community projects going on such as free martial arts classes got kids if they participated in a sustainability education project. Santa Marta has 991 steps to the top, but luckily they built a fernicular in 2005; only 4 or 5 favelas have them- the rest have to face the sweltering steps everyday. There were a 91 and 89 yr old women who still refused to use it though, and walked up and down every time they went into the city!

 

Favela Santa Marta

Before going into the favela, I assumed that everyone would be living in tiny shacks, but there were some shantys that were like 7 stories high with the front half of them built in stilts...the structural integrity did not look so sound... The tour was good and really eyeopening, but I felt like we were trying to get sold on Brazil's new image. At the bottom when we were finished the tour, we got açai which is pretty much the greatest thing in the world. They sell it from stands all over the city and it's frozen açai berries from the amazon sweetened with guarana juice. You can add granola or sprinkles, and if you want it as a dessert there are flavour syrups you can add. Not only is it the most delicious food ever, it's also the perfect hangover cure which made it pretty clutch during carnaval. I'm like obsessed and wish we could get it in Canada!  I had it pretty much every day.

In front of the Lapa Arches outside Sgt Pepper

That night I had the most hilarious dinner experience with Colin, Kyle, and this new guy at our hostel Joe. So we all went out and Colin being the only one that speaks Portuguese did the ordering for the table and gets something to share. About 45 minutes go by (because good service is a concept that doesn't exist in south America), and then the waiter brings one single portion of food to Colin and no one else. At that point we didn't want to wait another 45 minutes, so we all shared his one plate and then got a few slices of pizza down the road. So ridiculous.

 

Sgt Pepper

That night Sgt Pepper was playing yet again, so we went for the third time.  There was this awesome girl group that opened for them.  The show was at a venue beside the lapa arches, which get quite sketchy late at night as we cam to know... When we left the show around 3 or 4 there were all these hookers hanging out there who kept harassing all the boys I was with and wouldn't leave them alone.  There was even one pregnant hooker who was drinking beer.  It was really sad.  The cab ride home we took was terrifying.  There were 5 of us, but we decided to all cram into one cab, and since I was the smallest I was sitting on Kyle's lap and had no seat belt, and this crazy cabby was going into turns at like 70km/hr in the city.  I thought I was going to die.  I hate the drivers here.

 

Friday Maria and I went to the centro and went into a free centro cultural with a bunch of great exhibits--it was like 3 floors of mixed medium art, and the best part was that there was no religious iconography!  We also went into the legislature, which used to be a prison.  Before this we headed to the National History Museum which was in an amazing building, and taught us the really interesting history of Brazil.  Women got the right to vote in 1933!  And their second King was just a baby when his father returned to Portugal; aides ruled for him until he was 14 at which point he took control of the throne!  And he instituted a bunch of reforms to make education accessible, and to eventually lead to democracy...not your average king.  Maria and I also went to 2 more cultural centres in the afternoon...Rio is full of all these free art exhibits all over the city--it's amazing!

 

National Library Foyer

On Saturday Joe and I went into the centro again and did a tour of the National Library.  It was all in Portuguese, but Joe was translating some of it for me, and I could pick out a few of the sentences.  The library is HUGE and so grand, and they are getting thousands of new arrivals every single day.  The stacks aren't public, and there's a dumbwaiter to send books up and down from the stacks to the desk.  After that we went to the Museo de Bela Artes which was also huge and free!  They had a few awesome temporary exhibits, and a really extensive permanent collection...a giant room of religious iconography which I practically ran through, and some really great contemporary art as well.  We didn't get through the whole place though, because we were getting hungry for lunch.  Practically everything was closed in the centre, as it's the business centre, so it's dead on the weekends, but we managed to find a nice place with an outdoor patio, and Joe ordered some delicious Bahian dishes.  After lunch we went to the Modern Art Museum which was amazing!  It was also huge, and after completing 2 and a half giant floors, we didn't have the energy to finish the last exhibit.  I could spend a month easily just going to museums and cultural centres here in Rio--they're all so interesting, but you can only cram so much into a day.  We had been planning on going to Scenarium that night--apparently it regularly ranks in the top ten of the world's best bars, but it was expensive, and I was tired so I figured I'd give my liver a rest.

Sunday was the very last Bloko and it was so much fun!  Kyle, Colin, Fiona, Brett, Maria, and I headed down to the city centre at like 10am for the start decked out in feathers, leis, facepaint, devil horns, and festive spirits.  Even though Carnaval officially ended on Mardi Gras, there were final celebrations until the end of the weekend.  There was a huge float with musicians on it slowly making it's way through the thousands of people filling the streets.  When it was over Colin, Kyle, and I had the most ridiculous lunch ever.  We were all decked out in our gear, me with a huge feather sticking off me sitting on this patio surrounded by normal looking people.  Colin did the ordering and redeemed himself from the one-man dinner debacle--he got this really yum rice dish to go with the fish and meat.  We later found out that one of Colin's friends saw us lunching, but didn't want to come say hi because we were too ridiculous looking.

 

When we got back to the hostal after lunch we started to get ready for the futbol match that night!  A vancab picked up Fiona, Brett, and I from the hostal and again drove so terrifyingly that I was sure my death was imminent.  To curb violence in the stands, there is no drinking allowed in the stadium, so the driver dropped us off in a gas station parking lot a block from the stadium and told us we had half an hour to chug beer before heading to the entrance...um ok.  The match was super fun--the stands were full and the crowds were insane!  And we had really good seats.  But there were these super creepy guys who kept like staring me down which was really uncomfortable, so I ended up moving to a higher seat.  When we got back to the hostel, everyone was pre-ing for an apparent beach party in Ipanema.  So Colin, Kyle, a couple Norweigan girls, and I set off for the beach, but when we got there it was completely empty.  No DJ, no people, no party.  We found a little bar on the beach to hang out at, and then super randomly out of the blue Pedro shows up!  He had been working when we left, but he decided to join us when he got off and just turned up.  Then some of them decided that swimming in the ocean at night, in the dark, while drunk was a good idea.  And despite my protests they did, so I became neurotic staring at them and getting angry convinced they were going to go out too far and get caught in the current.  They were all fine, but one of the Norweigans had left her purse alone on the beach at one point, and Colin saw some guys steal it: he chased them down and got the purse back, but they had already stolen the phone out of it, and we had no way to prove it/get it back.  Despite the drunken swimming and stolen phone, it was still a really fun last night in Rio.

 

Brett, Fiona, and I at the Futbol match  

Monday our little crew went out for Acai in the morning before they headed off for the beach and I hopped on a bus to Paraty.  I did nothing other than lie on the beach and swim while in Paraty--my hostel was across the street from the beach, and although it wasn't the nicest beach in the area, it was empty, and conveniant.  I also ran into Sam and Sophie and my last day there--they were staying in Trinidade, but had come to Paraty for the day for a boat trip, so that afternoon we met up for some drinks on the beach, and then they came to my hostal for one of those all-you-can-eat meat BBQs that seem to be so popular on this continent.  It was really nice to see them again, but they had to catch the last bus back to Trinidade, so it was an early night.

 

Last night in Brasil!

I got back to Rio on Thursday, went to Copocabana and walked around for a bit, and then was convinced by Kyle and Colin that if I tried to sleep and wake up for my 4am pickup for the airport, I would probably sleep through my alarm and miss the flight, so the more responsible thing to do would be to stay up all night and just sleep on the plane.  Seemed reasonable.  So we all went for dinner, and then headed to Lapa to see some local bands play.  Even Pedro and Maria were there!  So it was really nice to hang out with everyone one last time before I headed to Ecuador.  And after staying up til my flight, I slept for the entirety of both flights.  The line though in Lima for security for flight transfers took 50 minutes.  So all connecting flights were delayed to ensure all passengers would make their connections.  I don't quite understand why you need to go through security again if you literally just stepped off the plane, but Lima needs to get its shit together.  And then after waiting that long in line, there were idiots who hadn't taken off their belts, or had stuff in their pockets and were setting off the sensor.  Unimpressed.  And then in Quito, they had opened their new airport the day before I arrived, so obviously nothing was running smoothly, and it was a 2 hour cabride into town.

CARNAVAL (10-13 feb)

 

Ipanema Beach!

Carnaval was INSANE!  I arrived in Rio on Sunday in like no sleep and was a few hours early for checkin, so I literally just passed out on a couch in the lobby of my hostal haha.  I then realized that Rio is sweltering, so I should probably buy a pair of shorts.  In the mall there were musicians playing and all these kids with their parents were dancing and singing along, wearing costumes--it was so cute!  That night I went to Ipanema beach with Eddy, Tim, and Pedro who worked at the hostel, as well as a group of aussies from the hostel, and this Scottish guy Colin I met who's teaching english in Rio.  There were thousands of people, and a DJ...it was nuts.  Colin and I met this Chilean girl who had found this amazing pair of angel wings just casually on the street haha.  We had all kicked off our flipflops into the centre of where we were dancing, and at one point when I was going to the street to get beer, I realized that one of my shoes was missing.  I was looking all over for it, when this guy who had been trying to hit on me before came over and said he had "found" it like 2 m away.  And then we wanted a kiss essentially for stealing my shoe and then bringing it over.  Loco.  That night though when me and one of the aussies were heading back to the hostel, we stopped to ask someone on the street for directions when suddenly she like grabbed our arms and started running and we were just like wtf...  Then when we're a block away she casually tells us that there was a dude under the tunnel near where we were with a gun, and that you can't just stop on a street corner in rio at night.  Super sketch.  But other than that minor detail it was a really fun evening.

 

Chilean Angel at Ipanema

Monday I went to the tail end of of Sgt Pepper Bloko with Maria and Colin. Blokos are just giant street parties with live samba music (different bands play in the neighbourhoods), and you can just buy cheap beer on the street, and you're surrounded by hourdes of other sweaty people loving life with facepaint and barely any clothes.  They're really fun.  Sgt Pepper is this band that plays beatles music to a samba beat, and they are SICK!  There was a sea of people for as far as the eye could see in every direction, and at one point a police car was trying to get through the crowd and then like turn around which was just hilarious, as it was moving like a snail as people were trying to squish together to create room for it.  That night was the most amazing night of my life...I went to the SAMBADROMO!!!  Colin, Maria, Marcos, Tim, and I all got dressed up and headed down to see the final night of competition between the samba schools.  It was unreal!  Each school has 1 hour (although from the start to end of the sambadromo each dancer has to go for an hour and a half!), with a fifteen minute break in between each one, meaning we were dancing in the stands til almost 6am!  Each school has their own song, and like at least 10 floats, with thousands of dancers, and a constant samba beat.  The stands were so full of energy, we were all just dancing along for the entirety of the like 8 hours.

 

Float on fire at the Sambadromo

Also, ridiculousness: I met my future mother-in-law in the stands.  This woman who didn't speak any english asked her son how to tell me that I was "sooo beautiful."  But then she kept translating through her son asking me if I had a boyfriend and then telling me all about how amazing her son was...all translated by him!  And then at one point, the guy asks Marcos (who is from Puerto Alegre in the south of Brazil and had better english than the dude), to tell him how to say that I "conquered his heart."  And then the guy keeps going on about how it's always been his dream to kiss a canadian girl, and how disappointed he is that I won't make his dream come true.  This family was clearly crazy, because who tries to set their son up with a stranger they just met in the stands, and who tries to get with the girl their mom is pushing on them?  While this was all happening, Tim had met some turkish girl and her mother, who were also trying the same thing.  We moved to a new spot in the stands after that...

 

Float in the Sambadromo

 

Dragonly getting stuck

It was really cool having Marcos there, because he could explain to us all the politics behind each school.  One for example was essentially doing propaganda for the rights dispute in Brazil regarding the oil found off the coast.  Also, craziness--One float caught on fire!  We were right at the end of the parade, and it happened just in front of us as it was finishing.  Officials had to run onto the float and evacuate all the dancers while ripping off their elaborate costumes.  Also, one of the floats had a dragonly that extended up above and behind it, and it didn't rotate when they got to the press overpass, so the whole parade had to stop as the float backed up to turn it so that they could get through to the end.  When we were walking home, we found all the floats from the earlier schools in the night, just casually on the street.  And on the metro we ran into some dancers from the sambadromo who were carrying their costumes and let Colin and Tim try them on.

 

Wannabe mother-in-law

 

Amazing costume!  Don't know how he could even stand up though with all those feathers...

 

Me, Marcos, Maria, and Tim exhausted after 8 hours of dancing

Tuesday I went to a bloko at Ipanema in the day, and it was alright, but the energy was not nearly as high as at some of the others. There was a great brass band playing though, and there must have been over a million people on the beach.  It was completely packed, and the beach stretches for kms!  Everyone was just dancing on the streets and loving life.  That night we went to Sgt Peppers again in Lapa because they were so good the last time, and we had only caught the last like half hour before.  They were amazing again--Maria and I had just gone, but we ran into Tim and some of his friends there which was cool.  After that I met up with Sam from Mexico!  We had been trying to meet up all week, but making plans by email is not very efficient.  Anyways, all his mates and his girlfriend had flown up from Australia, so I got to meet all them which was pretty cool!  We went back to the Lapa stage, and then decided we were all going to go to the beach.  But then somehow, Me and 3 of Sam's friends lost Sam and the others... We went to Ipanema anyways, hoping we'd find them there, but when we got there it was kinda dead, and they were nowhere to be found.  But then just as we were about to leave and give up hope, we ran into them on the street!  And then music started playing!  So we danced on the beach all night, and one of Sam's friends even had feathers from one of the costumes in the smabodromo that she gave me!  It was an insane last night of carnaval, and so much fun!

 

Maria and I at Sgt Peppers in Lapa

 

Sam's mate's from Aussieland at Ipanema on the last night of Carnaval!

Wednesday was a complete writeoff--just sleeping to recover from my lack of it the previous week, but I met Kyle who moved into my room who I ended up befriending which was pretty cool.  Carnaval is like if you combined Pride, a music festival, and halloween; add cops who want you to party instead of just being dicks; and then make it like 10 times better.  It is probably the most amazing party in the world.

Buenos Aires (Feb 6-9)

BA was sick.  So much fun!!  I met this awesome British girl there named Sarah, and these 2 crazy cool Tazzies names Yuri and Finn.  They were like besties and adorable together.  When I first got in, I took them to the street with all the black market money changers on it and traded their US$ for them as they didn´t speak a word of spanish.  It´s insane--because of the 25% inflation rate a year, and the new ban on foreign money being available in the country, USD were exchanging at 7.2, when the official rate is 4.9, as all the Argentines want to convert their savings into a hard currency.  I was getting 6 for the CAD which was still pretty good, but not nearly as good as the american rate.  That night we went to Don Julio for restuarant which is some famous steak place, and it was delicious.  Massive portions though--none of us even got through like half of what was on our plate.  After our like midnight dinner, we headed to this club called Brooke at like 2am, because that´s what time Argentines go out, and met up with Alejandro there!  It was so cool to see him again since travelling together, and one of the guys from our hostel when we had stayed in San Pedro de Atacama was also there visiting.  BA´s nightlife is insane...I didn´t go to bed earlier than 6am the entire time I was there.  And while the boys were sleeping off their hangovers each day, Sarah and I were rallying at like 10am to explore the city.

Sarah and I in San Telmo

 

My second day Sarah and I went to San Telmo where we wandered about for a bit and then went to the Museo Nacional de la Historia, which was kind of small and disappointing--it only really talked about the anglo-franco embargo on the BA port, and not too much other history.  We also went to the Mercado Central de San Telmo which had the most random and ridiculous collection of antique jewellery, electronics, clothing, weird creepy dolls, and food.  And then that night we went to Club 69 which was insane!  It was Carnaval themed, so there were people dressed up in these sick costumes everywhere, and then there was this awesome drag show going on onstage.  The guys though were insufferable!  Like creepy and annoying guys kept coming up to hit on Sarah and me, and didn´t get the message to fuck off when we weren´t responding to anything they were saying.  The machismo culture here is just the worst.  But in our flee from these douches, Sarah and I found a secret room in the back with another DJ who was playing a mix of like swing, electro, tango, and hiphop.  Unreal.  It was so much fun and so much less crowded and we got left alone by the guys there, so we hung out there for awhile before heading back to the main room, where there was a door that led right in front of the stage.  The show was so much fun and we just danced undisturbed there watching the drag show for the rest of the night.  So much fun...

Learning how to tango.

Somehow Sarah and I rallied on my third day and went to La Boca where we saw the Bombadero--the BA fútbol stadium; la caminata--this cute pedestrian walkway with artisan stalls; and the Museo Proa de Arte Contemporano, which had an amazing view of the harbour from the top, and had some really cool exhibitons.  The building was also gorgeous.  Sarah had moved hostels that day, so that night the boys and I walked over to pick her up and went to this bar/club called Bahrain close to her new place.  We just danced til like 5 in the morning and it was amazing.  Great DJ, and such an awesome last night with the BA crew.

Club 69!

My final day there I went to Recoleta, and met up with Alejandro again!  We went to the Feria Artisanale, and cemetary (where I saw Evita´s grave among others).  It´s insance how elaborate some of the grave stones things are.  And for members of the church...do people not give a shit that their collection plate money is going towards paying for massive tombstones in the most expensive cemetary in the country?  Ridiculousness...  We then went to the Museo de Bellas Artes, which was alright, but barely had any argentine painters...I didn´t need to come all the way to Argentina to see some french renaissance painters.  But afterwards we headed to the Museo de Latinoamericano de BA, which was amazing!  It was modern art, and there were some really cool exhibitions.  One by this feminist artist named Tracy something, and one of her pieces was a video of her describing her experience with her abortion.  So anyways, Alejandro and I were discussing this afterwards, and he told me that abortion is illegal in the entire continent!  And women go into really dangerous situations to terminate their pregnancies illegally...I knew the country was catholic, but I had no idea it was still so conservative and oppressive towards women!

Alejandro on a cool bench in the Latinamerican Museum.

After Recoleta I went back to the hostel, but had checked out that morning, so just hung out with Yuri and Finn in their room where they let me have a nap, as I had to leave for the airport at like 230am.  It was so sad leaving the boys, especially because they get into Rio like 2 days after I leave.  But now I have an excuse to visit Tazmania.  And I´m going to be meeting up with Sarah again in Brazil!  Pretty much BA is just super fun, but I´m not quite sure how I survived on like 10 hours sleep over the course of 3 days.  Defs need to return to Argentina as my time got cut short there--I want to see the rest of the country, and spend heaps more time in BA!

Mendoza (3-5 feb)

I love Mendoza!  It is so hot here, and the city is so pretty!  Even though it's in the middle of the desert, the Huarpes built this irrigation system throughout the whole city before the Spanish arrived, with trenches running between all the sidewalks and roads.  This has allowed the city to be super green, with trees lining all the streets and the plethora of plazas.  I got there on a Sunday morning, and it was like a ghost town.  The Museum of Modern Art was like the only thing that was open, so I went there, and it was nice, but super tiny.  There were only 3 Mendocinos being exhibited, but the building was underneath the middle of the Plaza Independencia which was cool.  I also checked out the artisan fair in the main square, but it was really bizarre--it started at like 8pm and went to 2am.

Plaza Independencia

Yesterday I went on a tour of the Bodegas, and it was so much fun!  Luke, this guy I met at the hostel, and I rented a tandem bike and took it through wine country to try all the different wines.  Some of them were sooo good!  But it was so hot, that none of the whites or rosés were chilled enough, so we mostly stuck to the reds.  Besides, Mendoza is known for it's Malbec, so we had a lot of that.  We started at Trapiche, which is apparently a famous one internationally, and is the oldest in the region.  They gave us a tour where we got to see where the grapes get crushed, and the barrelling process, and learned about how they designed the architecture to control the temperature for the grapes inside without air-con.  We met a British couple there and teamed up with them to visit the rest of the Bodegas.

Luke stealing some delicious grapes roadside.

The next one we went to was Mevi, and the grounds were BEAUTIFUL!  They had such a nice terrasse for the wine tasting, and they were a lot more generous with the portions than Trapiche.  They had a really good Malbec.  We then did a tasting at Tempus Albi where we had lunch, and they also had such a nice patio overlooking the vineyards.  After lunch we went to Familia de Tommaso, which had a really nice dessert wine.  I forget the name of the one we ended at, but it was really small, and the garden was super cute, but I wasn't a huge fan of their Malbec.  I ended up running into an Aussie who had been at my hostel in Santiago which was super cool.

Barrels of wine at Trapiche

Once we got back to the hostel, it was only a couple hours until their Asado!  They eat soooo much meat here.  And their salads only ever have 2 ingredients: lechuga y tomatoes.  The asado was good, but there was a lot of fat on the meat which was kind of disgusting.  And meat is really hard to cut, especially when you're trying to get the gross fat parts off and the meat is too soft to like stay in place when you're trying to cut.  The food here though is sooo much better than Chile.  Their empanadas are like ten times better, AND I found Tropicana in the grocery store!!!  I have been missing sugar-free juice for the past like 2 months, it's so exciting to be able to buy real juice again!

Biking through Mevi

They take their siestas really seriously here.  I was wondering about the city today and at 1pm EVERYTHING shut down.  Like the city dies.  Shops reopen at 5 and stay open til 9.  And then you eat dinner at like 11 pm.  There was a pub crawl starting at my hostel last night, and they guys didn't even end up leaving until 2 am!  The hostel has a hammock though covered by the trees, so it's the perfect place to take a nap, when everything is closed.

Wine country (Maipu)

I'm hopping on a bus to BA tonight, and I'm super stoked!  And then on the weekend I head to Rio for Carnival!!

A missed bus, a car crash, and my first encounter with the Chilean healthcare system

January 26 was definitely the most hectic and dramatic day I have had on my trip so far.

I had a bus from Ushuaia to Punta Arenas that left at 7 am. Naturally, I had stayed up late drinking with the Aussie and French guys after the Asado, so I was extremely hungover and functioning off about 2 and a half hours sleep when I departed for the bus terminal. I got there at 6:30, and when the bus got there I tried to board it but the driver told me that he could not accept my ticket, as it was a “voucher” and not actually a ticket. I had bought the voucher from a travel agency in Puerto Natales, and apparently I had to have traded my voucher for a ticket beforehand at the bus office. The bus “terminal” in Ushuaia was a parking lot with no ticket offices, so essentially I would have to walk across town with my giant pack to an office that didn't open until 9 am, to get the ticket that I had already paid for for the bus that would already be gone at that point. I was really unimpressed. And dealing with this bureaucratic BS in a foreign language while that tired and hungover was really not fun. So I missed my bus and somehow had to get to Punta Arenas before my flight left the following evening. I went to the ticket office when it finally did open, only to be told that the local ticket office didn't have any ties to the PN travel agency I had bought my ticket from, and that I had to have traded my voucher for a ticket in Puerto Natales, not in Ushuaia. And if I wanted a refund, I would have to contact the travel agency directly. But I bought my ticket with cash, and I wasn't going back to PN, so there was no way I was getting my money back.

So then I go around to a few different travel agencies in town (because you can't buy tickets from the bus companies...wtf! You have to buy them from travel agencies), and none of them had a bus that would get me to Punta Arenas in time for my flight. So at this point I'm thinking I've pretty much lost $150 on a missed bus and what will be a missed flight, so I head back to the hostel to see if any of the staff there can be more helpful to me than the other people I'd encountered so far that morning. As I start to relay my story to the friendly girl at the desk, she mentions to me that 4 people from BA are driving to Punta Arenas today! So I asked them if they had any room, and they did, and they agreed to take me! By 10:30 am my day was already starting to look up.

They were super friendly—all my age, on holiday from uni, doing a roadtrip all the way down to Patagonia and back up Argentina to BA again. We ended up stopping in Tolhuin to go to the “world's best bakery.” I have to admit, I was sceptical at first, but that place was fucking delicious! And my new friends knew someone who worked there, so we got to go into the back and see where they made all the delicious baked goods, and the kitchen was HUGE! I had the best empanadas I have ever had in my life. And then back in the car they broke out the Maté. Maté is an Argentine herbal drink that every single person in Argentine society drinks. It's a communal drink where you put herbs into a cup, add hot water, and then sip through a metal straw with a filter at the bottom. Once you finish the water in it, you refill it up and pass it to the next person to enjoy. It's quite bitter, but it was good! The Porteños had also bought some croissants at the bakery and informed me that I was now having the most typical argentine breakfast—sweet croissants with Maté.

The next couple hours I had a nap, watched a movie, and then we got to the border and as we were getting out of the car, my flipflop broke. So I had to walk into the Argentine exit office barefoot holding my flipflop in one hand, getting a lot of strange looks. We ended up finding some packing tape in the car, so I “fixed” my flipflop, and by the time we had driven to the next border control to enter Chile, I was walking in sandals held together with tape. I think I got just as many strange looks.

About an hour from the border control we were driving on a really windy stretch and suddenly one of the tires popped. We were on an unpaved road, and the driver as a result started swerving uncontrollably. Suddenly she just completely lost control and the car started to roll. I was sitting behind the driver, and the car rolled to the left, slamming my shoulder and head into the window. After a full rotation though, the car landed on it's wheels again, and luckily no one was seriously injured. We all had our seatbelts on, which I'm sure saved us from smashing our heads on the ceiling and breaking our necks. We were in a complete state of shock; I was just sitting there after it happened shaking. The car was totalled—all the windows were smashed out, and the passenger door wouldn't close anymore, but it could still run. Although we were in a no cell zone, we were on the main road between the border and the ferry to leave Tierra del Fuego, and within minutes about 3 cars had passed by and stopped to help us.

The Argentines stayed at the scene and decided to go back to border control to get help and get it towed. One of the cars that passed by to help, however, was heading to Punta Arenas, and offered to drive me there so that I could still catch my flight the next day. Once I got to Punta Arenas I went to the hospital and they gave me a bunch of tests and everything came back normal. I was really impressed with the Chilean healthcare system—aside from the exorbitant costs (a few hours in there with a CT scan, Xray, and some pain drugs was about $700!), I was seen faster than I ever have been in a hospital back home. There was no one in the waiting rooms, and I had to wait less than an hour to get the tests done, and then less than another hour for the results. And this is all in a tiny town in Patagonia. And there were even a couple lab techs who spoke English. I also talked to the guys from BA, and they were all fine as well. Just really shaken. We were super lucky that no one was hurt badly, but it was really terrifying looking out the front of the window and seeing and feeling the car start to flip over.

I flew back to Santiago Saturday night, and after I told my parents what had happened, my mom got on a flight and came and met me in Santiago.  She had an offer from some friends to come stay at their country house outside the city, so after a couple days of rest in Santiago, we went out there, and it was GORGEOUS!  It is an old castle, with huge grounds, and a pool, and flowers and other plants all surrounding the house.  And it overlooked a river, so the sound of it could be heard from our bedroom. It was so nice and relaxing, and the son of the people who owned the place was there and makes sculptures and furniture, and his work was all over the house.  I was just mellowing out on painkillers most of the time I was there, and didn't think to take any pictures, but it was so nice and beautifully decorated, with an amazing view.

Me and my mom are back in the city now, and after a day of exploring, I'll be hopping on a bus to Argentina tomorrow, which will hopefully be less eventful than my transportation down in Patagonia.  Spending so much time here doing nothing has cut into my Argentina time, but I'm super stoked for wine tasting in Mendoza!