The Great South American Adventure

Cordoba was pretty cool. It`s the second biggest city in Argentina, after Buenos Aires, and there was a fair bit of stuff to do there. I travelled to Cordoba on bus overnight from Mendoza with an english guy named Ledger who is a friend of Harry, Jasper and Jeremy who met up with us in Mendoza. After trying another hostel which was full, looked crap anyway, we booked into a hostel called Baluch, which was in a renovated big old apartment down town which was cool, highly recomended. First thing we did was not much. We watched a lot of dvds in our first days there, including such classics as Madagascar and fight club. This is how we met Clarisa and Charlie, an unlikely pair of poms (oh yeah, alliteration) travelling together. In an rare moment of motivation, we decided to go out one night to a club called mitre. Not a bad place, questionable music, but that was made acceptable by the abbundace of good looking argentinian women.

One of our other notible excursions was to Villa Carlos Paz, a nice little town on a river about 40min bus ride out of town, which only cost 4.50 pesos. Our objective was to do some karting, but first, we were hungry, so we went to an italianish looking restaurant by the river. Everyone else got lasagna which was questionable in quality (more alliteration, god i`m good) but not as questionable as my order of the menu of the day, a local delicasy that would best be described as fat soup, kind of like a stew with pieces of fat instead of meat and no vegetables. However, the soupy part was pretty nice and I thought I had made a pretty good go at it until the waiter asked me if i didn`t like it, because I left all the pieces fat, assuming you weren`t supposed eat them. However the expression of doubt on waiters the waiters face when I said I did enjoy it would suggest otherwise. Anyway, after lunch we went go-karting which was good fun. There were some passes, powerslides (not actually that good for mainting speed, usually resulting in being passed) and a few good crashes, that i`m sure couldn`t have been avoided, after we were told that they weren`t dodgem cars and bumping is stricly forbidden.

After Charlie and Clarisa left us for Mendoza, me and ledger went to another little town outside of the city on another minibus called Alta Gracia, where a certain Ernesto Guevara spent most of his childhood. We went to one of the houses where he lived when he was a child where there is a museum dedicated to him, displaying photos, letters and other memorabilia, including the same model of motorbike as that which he travelled on around argentina, and got a photo next to it (so gringo). It was interesting to learn about his family and his childhood but it didn`t really explain much about what he did as an activist. I´ll have to wiki it sometime.

By that stage, it was only one day until the Rally of Cordoba, which is part of the world rally championship. So I stayed around for that and we went to a stadium event, which was really cool, and one of the stages out in the countryside. Also very cool. They drive really fast. Check out the photo`s on my flickr site www.flickr.com/photos/12875483@N00/ and check out this video

How cool is that! Anyway, hope you`ve enjoyed the entry and keep up the comments, I love hearing from you, and stay tuned for more TALES OF INTEREST