First post in a month! Bolivia to Argentina

So I will try to recap an entire month of memories in one way too long blog.  We were "blessed" with an extra day in La Paz in which we went to go watch some lucha libre wrestling, except it had locally dressed ladies as fighters. Despite the low budget nature of this, it was entertaining since you could throw trash at people.  At one point the man threw one of the "cholitas" right over the metal railing and directly into me!  She rolled around on the floor while Lora and I took silly photos.   We then took the opportunity to go to some Pre Incan ruins in Tiwanaku making up for some of our wasted time in La Paz.  There were some cool face sculptures in an underground pit and some neat carvings in rocks that actually seemed more intricate than the Incan ruins we had already seen.  We took a local minibus there and in order to return to La Paz we were stuck in the La Alta, the plateau above La Paz, with a scheduled bus that evening and with no idea how to get in the city.  Luckily for us the driver showed us another minibus that stopped right by the hostel. After leaving La Paz we stopped in Sucre which had a much more colonial and overall cleaner feel than La Paz.  We stayed at a great hostel in which our room was well decorated and even had a couch!  There were some cool dinosaur tracks near the city on a raised cliff, but since they did not let you get close, they put up a bunch of dinosaur statues which Lora and I had a blast taking odd pictures with. After a few days we took a bus to the pinnacle of our Bolivian trip, the Uyuni Salt flats.  The bus however was hot, dusty and a crazy lady told about 4 people to close their windows over and over despite the crazy heat.  Lora in the small desert town of Uyuni, Lora and I got addicted to a pizza place run by a Bostonian, our first real good pizza in a long time.  The next days we spent hours trying to figure out which tour to go with, and we learned no matter how much time you spend, most tours are all the same.  The siesta the town took also made it difficult to get things done in the early afternoon.  The tour of the salt flats were great. We were in a truck for 3 days and 2 nights.  The first stops are in the salt flats themselves, blinding white salt in which tourist like to use as a backdrop for silly pictures of distorted proportions.  We then stayed in hostel made nearly entirely of Salt!  The next day we went to many lagoons full of andean flamingos, some lagoons were red or green due to the minerals in the water which made for some crazy looking landscapes.  There were also boiling hot thermal pools to add more to the feel of an alien landscape.  After roughing it, we were able to go into a hot spring near the thermal pools and relax despite the air being freezing cold.  We were the only people who understood any Spanish in our tour group so we had to serve as interpreters.  Unfortunately, the other couple did not reciprocate, by taking the double beds, eating the best pieces of meat, sitting the the middle of the truck the whole time, so we were force to stop interpreting for them.  We "forgot" to tell them we were waking up at 4 am so they got a little bit of a surprise.  The tour ended in San Pedro, a more expensive and totally touristy town on the other side of the Andeas in Chile´s Atacama desert.  To our despair, the bus to Salta, Argentina only left twice a week and was book for the next day meaning we would be trapped in this damn town for a week.  There we met a 2 German couples and a Swiss couple who came to find the same annoying news.  We hunted around all day and finally had to settle for a car transfer to Salta.  The ride to Chile included more picturesque and colorful"cerro siete colores," mountains which having the car ride was nice because we got a bit of a tour.  We arrived in Salta and found a relaxing and friendly hostel to stay at.  In Argentina we got to finally get some good wine, ice cream and finally some good meat, not that mystery meat in Bolivia, at a BBQ hosted by the hostel.  We also had our first taste of Argentina spanish.  Ordering Vanilla ice cream I learned that it was not Vah nee ya, but vah nee jah! Our next stop was to visit Lora´s distant relatives in Chaco, a process which we found to be a bit difficult since it wasn´t on the main gringo trail.  We spent 2 nights, one in Resistencia with some relatives and another night in a small town with more of Lora´s family.  Besides one cousin, most people only spoke Spanish so it was quite and interesting but beneficial experience.  The heat in the town was brutal but her family was very accommodating which made for a good experience.  We then moved on to Igauzu falls, another highlight of the trip.  These massive waterfalls took 2 days to see.  The first day we went and finally took care of our time consuming Brazilian visa formalities and viewed the falls from the Brazil side.  Our Portuguese experience was a bit difficult but Spanish and English were spoken in such a touristy area.  There were many butterflies in the air and little pesky coatis sneaking around looking for a free food. There were places where you could get right near the falling water and get quite wet, which was nice in the heat.  However, the Brazilian side was mostly for nice views of the waterfalls from afar.  The second day we went to the Argentinian side in which you could get much closer to the waterfalls.  You took a small train toward the falls from the park entrance. There were bridges going over many of the smaller sub waterfalls.  The last step was a big bridge to the Garganta del Diablo which was a chasm where most of the water flows over the edge with awe inspiring power.  

 After really rushing through Iguazu, we headed into Buenos Aires which we have just finished up a crazy and busy week visiting my sister and a few friends down here.  I will save that for later because I am pretty much exhausted!