After a 8 hour flight from Santiago de Chile we arrived at the Mexico city airport at 6:30am. Our connecting flight was supposed to leave at 12:30am so we had 19 hours to kill. First we visited a Mexican fabric exhibition directly at the airport and after that we drove into the city. After meeting a nice guy at the airport we were less afraid of the crime rate and eager to get some Mexican food.
In the city we met a Brazilian couple, who only had 4 hours in the city. With them we spend the next few hours sightseeing and tasting Mexican food, Quesadillas and tacos.They had to leave early so we visited some famous ruins on our own. We were pretty worn out so Max was way too tired to enjoy it, and Paula could enjoy it more than him, since she slept on the bus to the ruins. It would have been more awesome After the ruins we checkt in and waited the last few hours at the airport before we left to Tokyo.
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After a 5 hour wait at the border, we arrived at Santiago de Chile with 7 days until our next flight.
Since we by now have adapted to the south american style of "we can do it tomorrow", it took us 4 days to send our stuff to Germany. Sadly, there is some kind of new international regulation for sending batteries, so the tablet can basically only be sent to Germany for half the price of the tablet, which is way too much. So now we hope it can be repaired in one of the next countries. We went into downtown Santiago a few times, and they have some really nice things to see here. We were really surprised to find out that there is a mercado central in Santiago, since everybody told us about how western Chile is. We met a lot of people in the hostel and had some nice evenings with people from all over the world. It was sometimes very confusing with the languages, since there was a mix of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, but we managed. Today is our last day in South America and at 11 in the night we are off to Japan, with a 20 hour stopover in Mexico city. We will arrive in Japan on the 29th. Our plan is to stay in Tokyo for 4 days and then go to Kyoto until the 14th. From Kyoto we then have a flight to the Philippines, where we will probably stay for a few weeks. Then we will try to get to Nepal, since we don't want to go hiking in the rain season. So much for our plans, next time we write, we will be in Japan. If you have any recommendations on what to see, feel free to leave us a message! After 36 hours and a few stops on the way we finally arrived in Mendoza. We basically only went to Mendoza to drink wine and eat a good steak.
But the city is very nice, even if we didn't see a lot of it. Since we still had to see about sending home the broken tablet and some souvenirs, we wanted to arrive in Santiago de Chile early and only stayed in Mendoza for two days. After that we drove off to Chile. After Asunción we were thinking about where to stay at the Iguaçu waterfalls. There where three options: Paraguay, Brazil or Argentina side. After a few suggestions we decided to stay in Argentina because everything is just half an hour away by bus and we have to go there any way to get to Santiago.
So after we arrived in Ciudad del Este ( Paraguay ) we saw a lot of people with huge shopping bags, because electronics are really expensive in Argentina and they all come to Paraguay to buy them. So the bus to Puerto Iguaçu was just 45 minutes and we arrived happy but not knowing where to go and without money and a functioning bank in Argentina. Apparently you have to try multiple banks until you find an ATM that works with your credit card. Luckily we could exchange our Paraguay money to a sufficient amount of Argentinen pesos to go to a cafe and (with its WiFi) look up hostels and ATMs. We found a nice hostel just 10 minutes walk from the bus station. It had a pool which we couldn't use because it was dirty. The owner found always a new reason to clean it the next day till we left. South America - a place where productivity is tomorrow. But else it was quite nice with a good kitchen and the power and WiFi worked almost the whole time. Nice chill out area where we met a lot of very nice people. So we had always someone to cook with or visit various places. At the second day we went to the waterfalls from the Brazilian side. It was quite nice and you get a good overview but it didn't really compare with the next day and the Argentinan side off the falls you just get much closer and feel more than of the falls. Sadly, after the charger fiasco in Asuncion, now Max's phone gave up. That is now 2 chargers, 2 phones and a tablet that broke in South America. At least Max got to go phone shopping in Paraguay. On our last day prima, our dragon mascot was stolen. That confirms what everybody says about Argentina. If they can steal it, they will. So we left Puerto Iguaçu pretty pissed of, but we still had a nice time with a lot of awesome people. The next stop was Mendoza, next to Chile and just a 36 hours bus ride away. By the way, the weather is awesome. Sunny and hot. The way to Asunción was different with unique landscape and a lot less people. We drove for hours without seeing any sign of civilisation. The bus was checked for drugs 5 times on the way, one time we had to take our luggage out of the bus and they first searched it with dogs and then went through it by hand.
Asunción was a small culture shock because it was really western. After talking to a few people living there we had a taxi take us tothe cheapest hostal from the lonely planet, together with another German guy we met on the bus . The hostel was nice with air conditioned rooms and a pool but being the cheapest one still means that it is double the price from Bolivia or Peru so 10€ per person and night. But because of the currency we still felt pretty wealthy. Our first time withdrawing half a million from an ATM :) We stayed 3 days because we wanted to watch the superball and didn't know whether it would be possible in other cities. We went to a public viewing in the streets with Simon, the guy from the bus and a few other people. Other than that there wasn't much to see. Some nice buildungs, an old palace with slums right next to it where we nearly walked through by accident . In the hostel Max met someone from the village he spent most of his school live in and who knew some of the same people he did. The world is a small place. Besides from him we met a lot of other Germans, more than we saw during all of our time in Bolivia. On our last day the hostal had some electric problems and an electrician came to repair them. The hostel owner didn't tell us and they didn't check for plugged in devices before starting "to fix" the electricity as a result all of our and Simon's chargers and power cabels were burned trough and the owner didn't see what he did wrong so we had to buy new ones from our own money. Other than that it was a nice time in Asunción with a lot of relaxing in the pool and drinking beer. After an overnight bus we arrived at 3 am in Tarija. We first tried to get a hostel around the bus station but they were ether full or way to expensive. So we found a nice taxi driver who drove us around till we found a good hostel which would open their doors at this time (we tried 5 hostels).
The place was actually really nice so we stayed a whole week. The food in Tarija was excellent for the first time in a long wile there were multiple types of meat and they were very good. We were kind of tired of chicken. Tarija is famous for its wine since it is one of the highest farming areas for grapes with special soil the wine taseds a little different than elswere. So we spend our dayes releaxing and walking around the city. We visited the world largest wine cup. On one day we did a tour trough multiple wine yards of course with wine tasting and ended up buying a preety delicious one for just 3 euro. After that we took a bus in direction of Asunción, the capital of Paraguay. |
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Oktober 2016
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