Egads! How time flies.

Hi everyone, sorry we haven't been keeping things up to date. And we'd been going so well!

So we've been home for more than a month now, and things have settled into a bit of a routine, though of course, both of us are doing shift work and that does make it hard sometimes. The house is a mess, and we've still got 4 boxes sitting in the lounge room to unpack! But it's all good. We'll get there in the next 10 years or so.

Anyway, we have been keeping our photos up to date(ish) on Facebook, which you can see on the right.

Um, so let's see, from our last post, which was in Pucon, we did lots of stuff. This included:

• Climbing Cerro Tronador in Argentina. Brilliant mountaineering trip!
• Meeting up with Em and Leece again, and Mike and Tes. We hung out in Bariloche for a bit and did some riding and exploring.
• Headed down Route 40, for 24 hours of bus ride over 2 days. Epic boredom.
• Hiked the Fitzroy Circuit.
• Hiked the Torres del Paine Circuit (absolutely f$%*'n brilliant), and said goodbye to Em, Leece, Mike and Tes.
  
• Hiked the Circuito Dientes Navarino, in Chile, the world's southern-most trek. So spectacular it was ridiculous.
• Spent Christmas in Puerto Williams, Chile, the world's most southern town.
  
• Spent New-Year in Ushuaia, Argentina, the world's most southern city.
• Flew to Buenos Aires and spent a few days hanging there and seeing the sights. We stayed with Julia Worley in her flat (thanks Julia!) whom we'd met in Croatia, and ate the most expensive meal I'd ever eaten with Lee and Sonia.
• Flew to Los Angeles, USA, and met up with Steve from our mountaineering course. He took us around to see the sights, which was a lovely way to spend our 12-hour stopover.
• Flew home! The 6 hour wait in Sydney airport was tedium at its worst.

So there you go. We've got FB photos up to the Dientes Circuit. I suppose one of these days I'll get off my bum and put up Buenos Aires and Los Angeles photos too. One of these days.

As for now, I'd better get back to bed. Coming-off-nightshift-insomnia is killing me.

m.

Chile

We arrived in Santiago on the 1st of November and ended up staying there for 4-5 days. All we did was eat and eat and eat. It was good to have a bit of a relax and some recovery time as we'd been going hard at it since the start of the mountaineering course, which was early September.

We stayed in the suburb of Bella Vista which reminded us a lot of Melbourne, with cool bohemian cafes, great restaurants, and good coffee. We had the best lamb ever in a place called La Boheme. We also treated ourselves to a couple of nights in a nice hotel, called the Patio Bella Vista I think. I'd recommended it to anyone, but it's expensive. We didn't care.

After Santiago, we headed down to Pucon. This is in the northern part of the Patagonian Andes and there's meant to be heaps of fun stuff to do around there, like hiking, biking, kayaking, and it also has Volcan Villarrica at its doorstep which you can climb and ski on.

Unfortunately the weather was atrocious for the next 3 days, and we spent a lot of that hanging out in our hostel, "!ecole!" which had a great vego retaurant. While there we met another couple of aussie doctors, Lee and Sonia, and on one of the crappy days we headed out and did a little day walk to Lago Verde. It was a beautiful walk, with heaps of awesome Monkey Puzzle trees which are a kinda pre-historic pine tree. Very cool looking. We had to trudge through some snow near the lake, and on the way back we were walking through a blizzard. It was fun though.

Monkey puzzle tree on the way to Lago Verde.

The next day we went and hung out at some hot springs. They were hideously expensive but they were the nicest hot springs we'd been to thus far.

A couple of days later the weather finally cleared, which gave us a chance to climb Volcan Villarrica. It was a straightforward climb up snow, and the four of us (Lee and Sonia joined us) overtook a lot of guided groups on the way up by shortcutting up steeper sections of snow.

Jen enjoying using the crampons we'd been carrying since Bolivia.

It was a nice amble to the top, which was unfortunately marred by some poor route selection by yours truly - when we got to the top we were downwind of the fumes, so we had to pop down a bit and traverse across the lip which was very icy and quite sketchy. We were lucky we'd done some crampon work before. We finally reached the top after about 3 hours.

Sonia, Jen, and Lee at the summit.

For those of you who choose to do the volcano unguided, all you need to do is show the park rangers either a mountain guide card, or if you don't have one of those (we didn't), then they check out your equipment (you need crampons, ice-axes, helmets, and a story about how much mountaineering you've done).

The weather cleared beautifully and we finally managed to see the volcano from town.

Villarrica from Pucon.

After that we said goodbye to Lee and Sonia and caught a bus to Bariloche in Argentina, where we were going to meet up with Em and Leece again, as well as Mike Ashbolt and Tes Naidoo (all friends from med school).

Huaraz

The weather was quite shite in Huaraz, but we decided to have a crack at the famous Santa Cruz trek anyway. It was a beautiful trek and we did get some patches of good weather. Jen and I also got absolutely thrashed at multiple games of 500, winning only one game in ten against the Queenslanders Rik and virgin 500-player Kath.

I think we took 5 days to do the trek, which included a side trip to Alpamayo base camp.

A cool mountain, day 4.

The pass. Countless false summits made it a long slog, but worth it for the views.

After the trek, Rik left us and we hung out for a few days, one of which we went on an ice climbing trip in miserable weather and then mountain biked back down. It was wet and cold, but a lot of fun.

Jen cruising up the overhanging ice wall.

We dried off in our hotel and then caught an overnight bus to Lima. We had a whole day in Lima waiting for our plane to Santiago, and spent most of this in Starbucks doing internet. Lima isn't a pretty city. We did venture out to the beach to watch the surfers surf through the fog, and also ate some fine cerviche (raw seasoned fresh fish), so it wasn't all that bad.

We also found ourselves in a shopping centre when suddenly everything started shaking for a second or two, and all the local shoppers ran out screaming. We weren't sure if it was an earthquake or a bomb, as it was such a short little blast. And we thought the locals would be used to tremors... we found out on good ol' abcnews.com that Lima had experienced a small earthquake, about 4 on the Richter scale, but that it didn't damage anything. We walked away with nothing but 6 new T-shirts.