Biking & Baking in Las Alpujarras

In a few hours time we'll be heading towards Buenos Aires airport and our flight back across the Atlantic...saying goodbye to Argentina and Chile and a simply great month.  We've visited 'black' glaciers that you  can only get to after 2 days walking and 'blue' lakes, stuffed with fish, after 6 hours on horseback...we've taken bus-rides through areas covered in volcanic dust and waded up to our thighs across icy rivers.  We've eaten lamb roasted outdoors on a spear of metal (parilla),  cottage cheese made from cow's milk collected by hand the same morning (after the cow was lassoo-ed) and fresh trout caught by the Man himself.  I've done a little bit of cattle rounding, also on horseback, danced a few tangos in the street and acquired a fabby pair of new tango shoes and a black trilby hat.  We've gone in and out of Chile and Argentina several time so our passports are well-stamped, and shared our bivouacs with horses, occasional small pigs and interesting birds.  Also a variety of B&Bs of varying quality...

Buenos Aires is a great city, full of colour and vibrancy, and well worth at least 1 week of your time.  You need a little bit of Spanish, some friends or guides to get you started and some street/bus maps and a tolerance for warm, humid conditions with sudden downpours of rain.  This is their summer.  Oh and some idea of what your reaction might be to having a semi-automatic handgun pulled on you in a lonely backstreet...ours was fight not flight and luckily the two young men involved decided to abandon the idea and whizzed off on their (quite nice) small Honda motorbike.  Too quickly for Steve to push them off it unfortunately!  There was no way that they were going to get my little backpack with my tango shoes inside it, but I did have to wrestle for it!!

I'm sure I'll put more on here in a few days...suffice to say that I'm thinking seriously about buying my own horse, Steve loved his fishing opportunities, we used or wore pretty much everything we took, and none of it would have been so exciting or adventurous without the support of Sepp & Inger, Camille & Diego...and each other!