The last time we were in BA we were partied out, with Dave and I having to leave the club as shambolic wrecks of once-were-men at 6am, and with George powering on until 2pm the following day. Ahhh youth. So with that behind us we took a break and went on a mini-holiday to Patagonia.

San Carlos de Bariloche is a small skiing town on the border with Chile. Obviously there is not much skiiing to be done when the mountains aren't that high and it's 25C, so I took full advantage of the off-season and booked a 5 star hotel. From this luxury base we performed our now-signature manoeuvre, which is ...

Read the whole entry (about another 730 words)

So where was I? Oh yes, after Creamfields we decided to slow down for a bit. OK, so that is a lie, and I'll be found out sooner or later unless I fess up now. There is to be no respite for these three travellers. On Sunday we had steak number three, malbec number three and spent the third evening out of four feeling massively heavy and unable to function. Dave and George both went for the Roman method, but I just tried to work through it. Those steaks are very, very heavy, and in truth I had been forced to help Dave out, since the steak he ordered turned out to be the largest steak in the worl...

Read the whole entry (about another 145 words)

Three days, three steaks, three nights. Due to the queue for these computers, I'll merely summarise.

Friday: arrived 8am from London via Madrid on Air Iberia, who stink. Awful food, awful service, uncomfortable plane, no entertainment. Cheap though. Got the hostel and had a few drinks. The hostel is nice enough and the rooms are comfortable. George had his card blocked (thanks HSBC!) and Dave's card wouldn't work for more than 50 quid at a time so we had to trek to HSBC tower to sort it out. After that, we went out to get our Creamfields tickets, and met an old guy in the queue who recommen...

Read the whole entry (about another 200 words)

Apologies for poor typing: this is a spanish keyboard and it's screweed freom overuse.

Today was an object lesson in how not to execute a trip: we had a plan, to travel from La Fortuna direct to San Jose by public bus - a direct route which would hae entailed lots of stops (Costa Rica buses stop for everyone, everywhere) but for some reason, when a dodgy Tico dude promised us a faster ride if we travelled witrh his bus, Dave and Stephen jumped at the chance. George had strong reservations, but I was content to observe and see what happened. In my gut I felt a scam, but the thrill of watchin...

Read the whole entry (about another 235 words)

So far in this trip we've either been on tours or we've entertained ourselves: the snorkelling trip was a tour, at Jaco we did our own thing, the rainforest walk was a tour, at Tamarindo we entertained ourselves. Yesterday we did a little of both.

In the morning, we took a taxi to the La Fortuna waterfall, which is a 60m drop down the side of a rainforest cliff. More than spectacular, it was well worth the trek down the side of the cliff face to get to the pool and swim in the rocky, churning pool. There were signs saying not to swim under the waterfall, but you'd have to make a heroic effo...

Read the whole entry (about another 295 words)