Leaving South America

Well, I suppose it's a fitting day to update the blog as this is our last day in South America!  It's hard to believe that this day is already upon us!  It has been quite the journey!  I am certainly looking forward to going to a cheaper country now as Argentina and Uruguay are certainly more expensive!!! 

So to fill in the gaps from my last written post until now!  After San Ignacio, we moved on to Colonia Pellegrini which is certainly the smallest village we stayed at in S.A.!  On Saturday when we arrived, we found no restaurants open in the town, and one tiny store that had some food we could buy!  There were no plazas which was odd after every little town seemed to have one!  It really was an isolated little community!  The extremely bumpy gravel road only had at most 3 small buses that ran once a day!  We arrived Saturday, but no buses ran on Sunday so we had to stay until Monday.  But the bus left at 3:30 am Monday morning so we just stayed at the common area of the hostel until it was time for the bus to depart instead of paying for another night!  The owner didn't seem to mind as one of his friends was teaching us a new card game called Truco which is quite popular down here and the owner joined in as we started to play!  It was incredibly confusing as they spoke no english and rules to the game involved vocabulary I had never needed to learn before and the rules seemed to change while we played!  We all had really good laughs as Fabian (a fellow traveler from Germany) and I fumbled our way through the game with the two locals.  Definitely a learning experience!  I've looked up the rules online now and it is a little less complicated than I thought but still involves a lot of strategy!

Anyways, while at Colonia Pelligrini, we did a boat tour around a lake as we saw a variety of wildlife!  Colonia Pelligrini is inside a provincial reserve.  The locals swam in the water during the day but you wouldn't catch me going in the water!  Besides the alligators (who apparently only feed at night and aren't a threat during the day...), the water had coral snakes which are very poisonous as well as piranhas!  We hung out with Fabian and Yvette from Germany for the couple of days and it was a lot of fun!  It was nice to get off the beaten track for a while and away from the more touristy areas!!!!

So we left at 3:30 am Monday morning (a week ago) and spent the next 28 hours on 5 different buses as we crossed into Uruguay and went straight to Punta del Este, Uruguay which is a narrow peninsula on the southeast corner of Uruguay.  It was a quiet place as the summer rush to get to the beaches starts at the end of the month!  So it was good timing as it gets even more expensive than it already was during the busy season!!!  It was nice to relax a little bit around there for a couple days before we headed to Montevideo (the capital of Uruguay) Thursday night.  We had heard from numerous people that Montevideo was a really boring place so we simply spent the night there and wandered around for a morning before heading off to Buenos Aires Saturday afternoon!  We took the bus from Montevideo to Colonia del Sacremento from where we took a ferry across to BA. 

When we arrived in BA late afternoon, Lonely Planet told us which port all the ferries left from which looked fairly close to the hostel we wanted to stay at.  Well...we got off the ferry and started walking but none of the street names looked familiar!!!  We had walked for a couple of blocks and I decided to look closer at the map in the book.  After looking for a while and not finding our location, our BA angel came walking towards us and asked in perfect English whether she could help us!  I explained where we wanted to go and if she could point out on the map where we were.  Well it landed up that our location went beyond the outskirts of our map and the port we had docked at was not the one we thought it should be!!!  She informed us that it was way too far to walk and we should take the bus!  She walked with us for the block and half to the bus stop where the bus we needed would stop and helped us get the change for the bus that we didn't have!  Everything went smoothly and it was nice to pay only 40 cents for the ride!!! 

We have to leave our hostel in a few minutes for the airport, so I'll have to end here.  It's been a good couple of days in Buenos Aires which included the best steak supper I have ever had last night!  Cooked over an open flame "oven" to perfection!  And now I'm getting hungry again....anyways - tonight we fly to Miami, Florida on an overnight flight and get to Guatemala City around noon tomorrow morning!  Chris Klassen will be meeting us in the Miami Airport!  It's exciting to start this next "phase" of the trip and your continued thoughts and prayers are very much appreciated!!!  It's been a huge blessing to get through South America with no major mishaps and relatively good health and great weather throughout the trip!!!

I don't know when we'll have access to internet again as we are entering totally new territory and will be on the move a bit once we get to Guatemala, but I will update some more pictures on here when possible.  For now - I updated a few more albums on Facebook but I'm not totally caught up!  Hope and pray you are all doing well!