Dear all non-Slovak speaking families and friends of ours!

bytomassko on 29. apríla 2010

First of all, grand apologies for not writing our travel blog also in English for those of you who might be interested in more than just our pictures. Trust me, keeping only the Slovak version up-to-date is not an easy task at all; it requires discipline (while being on a holiday) and to be 100% honest, sometimes becomes even pain the butt 😉

Mito and I left London together on Feb 9 and flew via Sao Paulo to Salvador, Brazil, where one day upon our arrival the famous Brazilian carnival was starting. (Great planning as always, I reckon.) 5 days later we continued in a carnival spirit mood to Rio de Janeiro not to miss out the carnival There (!) and to be able to make our own comparisons.

Salvador and Rio carnivals are so different – music, people, visibility of tourists in the crowds, organisation, prices, beer, but, ..both are amazing, ‘rock’, it’s an awesome feeling to be part of them and with an extra couple of million people in the streets partying, dancing, boozing there is always something to see & do usually till late morning hours… Occasionally, the sense of safety may disappear but staying on top of thing using common sense is always helpful and recommended. If you feel somehow uncertain or weird, take a cab and leave for a friendlier place or home 🙂

We spent almost a month in Brazil in total, baking skins on some fantastic beaches, exploring big name cities, watching Maracana footie, meeting Brazilian friends from London and on top of that, making many new ones, especially via couchsurfing.com. This site is one heck of an invention and activity to do on your travels. Thumbs up big time! Practically, you don’t end up leaving your hostel doormat with a map in your hands looking like a 1st class gringo, but there is always someone local who is either with you or co-ordinates your moves around places, gives recommendations, ideas where to go or NOT to … (Salvador & Rio especially!), shares popular, local, and cheap pubs or different homey restaurants. Thanks to all great people that had hosted us and shared their time and our shots with us. God bless!

If you are interested in details, let me know or check out ‘Couchsurfing and Buddies’ category on our site. Also, all cities we went through and the countries we are going to, can be found in the Itinerary category which we are hoping to improve with some visuals or Google maps possibly within a month. Talking about Itinerary, if some of you still wish to join us for your holidays (we might have spoken about it earlier or even in person), have a look, drop us a line so we can see what the ‘booking availabilities’ are like and don’t end up looking like a kindergarten down here 🙂

We tried to hitchhike from Brazil to Uruguay, just to prove the lonelyplanet.com wrong about the hitchhiking section there. Well, the book was unfortunately right, since we didn’t move much forward using this form of transport (7km out of 23km in total – personally my worst hitchhiking performance ever). Anyway, we got to Uruguay and spent 7 days there. It’s a small, very relaxed country with great people (FYI this is probably the only country in South America without indigenous population). Their way of living, but especially the atmosphere in general reminded us of Europe, also due to its citizens and safety wherever we had roamed. Couchsurfing in Montevideo was again one of the highlights there.

We took the most scenic way to reach Buenos Aires, Argentina – boat from Carmelo (Uruguay) to Tigre, BA’s suburb. We took advantage of the sun & beer combo and when beer was gone, added 2 bottles of Baileys to improve sunset over the river experience and to get more prepared for Friday night out supposedly in the best capital city of South America. We had a great week in BA where we saw all we wanted to and got gear ready for outdoor Patagonia. We spent almost one full month in Patagonia (both Argentinean & Chilean parts), watching wildlife but mostly improving our physical condition by doing numerous treks in simply splendid scenery circuits (see pictures in e.g. ‘W’ trek section).

We tried to get a last minute boat to Antarctica from the Southern most city in the world – Ushuaia,but ended up SOL since the season was at its very end and info I possessed prior to arrival was incorrect. I will try to write a separate article (in English) about ‘How to get to the White Continent’, so provided some of you want to go there you’ll have hopefully more valuable pieces of information which I couldn’t learn from the guidebooks.

When we ‘smashed’ the trekking targets in Patagonia we deserved some relax and took a 4 day 4 night Navimag boat from Puerto Natales to Puerto Montt (both Chilean cities) where we competed with sea sickness by drinking more rum. In the end, we won and it wasn’t us who was throwing up.

We are now in so called ‘The Lake District’ back in Argentina and the plan for the next month is to cross the Argentina/Chile borders few more times to cover it all as we head up North. There are two people joining us; both in 4-6 week time so there will surely be heaps of fun. For a pretty simple as good as it gets itinerary, check out the section mentioned earlier in this article. We also have a triper.sk facebook fan page for more pics. However, I did “some smart settings” and can’t log in there so it’s properly out of date. (Help!)