Fuddland

So here I am, back in Londres, and blimey it’s a bit nippy — this is the first time that I’ve switched seasons after coming back from a holiday, leaving the very warm summer of Argentina for the tail-end of the cold snap that has hit the UK over the last few weeks. I thought I asked you all to do something about this?

Aside from the few days in Buenos Aires that bookended my trip, I spent my time in the north of the country, visiting a couple of cities and several small towns along an essentially north/south-running mountainous line roughly 250 miles in length [so Google Earth tells me]. As you might be able to tell from the map, to the west of this range the landscape is quite arid, whereas to the east, where the clouds can rise no higher and so dump their rain on the mountainside, it is much more fertile. These “clouded mountain forests” are known as the Yungas, the natural habitat of endangered creatures such as numerous species of birds and jaguars, for example. I spent five days trekking through this region on foot and on horseback, probably the highlight of my trip.

I’ll not bore you with the entire transcription of the journal I kept whilst I was away [not least because I’m a bit behind and haven’t yet written up the last week or so], but I’ll provide a few thoughts and photos [via my slowly-growing Argentina Flickr photoset] over the next few days, before I forget everything and just end up writing: ate steak, climbed some rocks, then drank magnums of red wine, Argentina’s ace — which is essentially the entire month in a nutshell [and in haiku form no less!].

#1

Kav | 2005 / 12 / 05 – 10:10

I thought I asked you all to do something about this?

Well I personally have been pumping out the greenhouse gases in an effort to warm things up.

#2

Gordon | 2005 / 12 / 05 – 10:33

Gosh. That fornight in Torquay is seeming less and less exotic and adventurous…

#3

Daisy | 2005 / 12 / 06 – 15:49

Horseback through the Yungas… *sigh* I want to do that when I grow up.

Hang on, that sounds suspiciously like a euphemism. And if isn’t it should be.

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