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Travel Blog

From the farm to the city: warm days in Buenos Aires

At the end of November, Karin and I spent five days in Buenos Aires, bringing us a welcome change in scenery from the dust of the horse ranch to the wide, paved avenues of the city. We rented an Airbnb studio apartment in the neighborhood of Palermo, an area most popular for its plethora of cafes, shops, bars and outdoor markets. Approaching their summer months, we experienced warm weather in the low 80's, prompting me to buy a cheap summer dress and trade in my trail boots for sandals (if I were really trying to fit in these would have been platform shoes).

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WWOOF days at Estancia Huechahue

Note to fellow travelers- when you run out of money on the road, just head to a farm for some good old fashioned manual labor! After Bariloche, Karin and I checked off one of our longtime travel desires to WWOOF (World Wide Organization of Organic Farms) for five days in Argentina. The deal with WWOOFing is that you provide the farm with whatever skills you have ("Can you garden? Sure!") and in exchange you get a bed and meals para gratis, a pretty sweet deal when you're on a tight travel budget. The farm that welcomed us in was named Estancia Huechahue (weh-cha-weh), a horse ranch located on over 6,000 acres near the town of Junin de Los Andes.

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Seeking mountain refuge at Refugio Frey

The word for refuge in Spanish, refugio, was quite applicable for our experience hiking up to the skiing and trekking destination of Refugio Frey just outside of Bariloche. The 3 1/2 hour hike towards a peak named Cerro Catedral, or Cathedral Tower, was scenic and glorious and full of sunshine on the way up, but once we reached the top the weather had turned into icy winds and threatening snow clouds, giving us much gratitude for the shelter that Refugio Frey would provide us with that night. No more tent-induced frozen toes for us!

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It's about the journey, not the mirador

Unfortunately, not all of our days can be spent backpacking through the mountains in search of some of the world's best miradors (lookout points). Sometimes it's necessary to get from point A to point B, and in Argentina and Chile, that means lots of bus and ferry time. Luckily they have their system pretty fine tuned and it has been surprisingly simple to make our way from the south to the north of Patagonia.

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Peruse Peru - from Iquitos to the Amazon

 

It is rare to encounter a place today where you are truly cut off from communicating with the rest of the world. Attached to my phone like most everyone else, I find it almost impossible to go more than a few hours without checking in on the latest texts, emails or tagged pictures I might have missed while away. 

Sometimes it takes going deep into the jungle to disconnect and to see if these incomunicada spots still exist. 

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