Trip to Chile- Back to the ranch for lunch

We made it back alive! and Cowboy Hector's wife has been very busy preparing our lunch. A gorgeous hot day ... nice chilean wine. Incredibly hospitable family, breath-taking mountain views ... I think I could get use to being a cowgirl. mmmmmmmm

Trip to Chile- 0ur cosy cabin and a walk to the river

Trip to Chile- Views of the The Andes from the uncomfortably low flying plane

A few pics of Buenos Aires....more interesting stuff to come

My 25th birthday and a few people from work take me out for a nice 3hour long posh lunch....yum! I visited the Museo de bellas artes where one of the famous Rodin 'The kiss' sculptures is displayed, really beautiful to see up close. Me in my new house with Batu the dog.

I've moved from a brand new apartment in a posh part of town (that Macmillan were paying for), to this amazing, quirky house in a cool,more down to earth part of the city. The house belongs to a very charismatic lady who is an actress, she lives here too. She keeps me up all night long telling me very interesting stories of her life in the city throughout the years.

The house has a cosy fire place ...

I haven't really taken any pictures of the city yet as I've been trying to find my feet, but getting lost all the time, which is very time consuming! These are a few I took to send home for opinions when I was house hunting.

I thought this had good potential for restoring... i wouldnt mind living here!

I loved this orange one. Its such a cool, colourful city.

A random railway and street scene...

Good bye beautiful Bariloche

Random photos from my last few days in Bariloche. Floating mountain One of the schools where I taught

On our way to another shopping trip to a very interesting place, 2 hours from Bariloche, called El Bolson

Some rose hip growing by the lake

El Bolson is a cool arts and crafts community. The market in El Bolson is very well known for its leather, ceramics, silver, glass, fruit, veg, cakes, beer .... it was brilliant, in such a fabulous setting, and of course I bought too much stuff.

El Bolson in the middle of the mountains (you may think every place I've photographed is, but El Bolson really is). It has its own micro climate and despite the whole drive there you are driving in snow, in El Bolson it just stops. It never snows here and it felt like a summers day to me, like i'd suddenly been transported to Europe for summertime!

We had lunch by the river. I commented how it reminded me of having lunch by a river in spain, apart from the fact the rivers are all dried up in the summer. Here it's the opposite. In the summer the rivers have much more water in them from the melting ice caps.

This is the river in winter of course

Picturesque river and not a soul in sight for miles and miles. Just crazy amounts of rose hip adding a bit of colour

It's amazing to walk back from a night out to this around you ... (in the early hours)

My last morning ...

The lake turned purple

bye bye beautiful Bariloche

I am now in Buenos Aires, have been here for two weeks today. It has been a shock to system being dropped into a huge, buzzing city having just come from such a vast, natural landscape. I doubt I'll have so many landscapes to take photos of, but I'm sure there'll be other wonderful things to photograph ....

Last snowy walk

Sun then snow ... very beautiful to watch the landscapes change with the weather so suddenly. I went up Cerro Campanario, another mountain just outside Bariloche, on my last weekend in Patagonia, to have one last spectacular look at the place... and to say bye to the mountains .... Forests on the way up ... so we cheated a little bit and took the chair lift to start walking a bit higher .... From the top, we saw some of the most incredible views fo the whole month. It's amazing how a grey and white landscape can be so beautiful. The frozen lakes, the unsettled clouds, the trees struggling to hold so much snow .... (and two dots on my camera lens oops)

This photo below is exactly what I imagined a Patagonian landscape to look like