European Gauchos Reloaded!

Hi everyone!

 We are back on the road again, so it’s certainly time to be back on-line with our tour diary.

 Some two weeks ago we’ve finally brought ourselves to file our resignation, cash in on the paychecks and prepare to leave Buenos Aires. This plan had been lingering in the back of our heads for some time, we’ve steadily grown a bit tired of the big city and the opportunities – or lack thereof – that it had for us. Our business plans didn’t quite work out, which by the way is a story to be told in the future, and we had come to realize that is was virtually impossible for us to travel around the continent while working in Buenos Aires – the amount of vacation provided by the argentine labor law is by far too short and so is the money earned. The only way was to withdraw and adjust the plans accordingly. I gave up on my somewhat ambitious plans to study sound engineering here, however it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to pick up on them somewhere in the future. When? Who knows… Definitely not in the close future. For now we’re just going to focus on getting to know South America.

 Before we left we had to say good-bye to all the good folks we’ve met during our stay here. As there was quite an impressive amount of them it resulted in a week of alcoholic binge of farewell parties. We’ll soon provide you with visual examples of how it looked like. Even though we’ve done this so many times in the past, it was difficult for us to leave all of our friends behind. During the 10-month of our stay in Buenos Aires we met a lot of people and most of them became our close friends, especially for Niki who – as some may already know – is an extremely social animal. She was even pondering possibilities of postponing our leave, but it would have only been a cheap trick to fool us. So – we left.

 The idea is to reach Bogotá (Colombia, for those not too keen on geography) sometime in the end of October. It’s not an overly ambitious plan in the terms of time planning, mind you. It’s plenty of time to reach our target, and in fact we want to take it the easy way. No rush, no deadlines. The end-of-October thing is merely a calculation – it may be faulted…  Quite frankly it probably is. To sketch the route (we’ll improvise on the way): San Luis – Mendoza – Santiago de Chile – Viña and Valparaiso – San Juan (that’s back to Argentina) – La Rioja – Catamarca – Tucuman – Salta – Jujuy – Bolivia (that’s where we’ll start to improvise) – Peru – Ecuador – Colombia. As we travel and meet people we get more and more of a picture how the later stages of this travel are going to look like but we’re not going public about it just yet. Since we’re a bit unpredictable it safer not to say too much in advance.

 You may be wondering why we chose to stop in Colombia – the Mecca of cocaine junkies, drug cartels and home to the (in)famous FARC, the most dedicated guerillas in South America. First of all, it is anticipated that we’ll run out of funds when we reach Colombia. Secondly our dear friend Ben is there, helping out his brother Julien to run the bar, that Julien opened recently. If everything goes well we hope to be able to stay at Ben´s / Julien´s place long enough to get back on our feet, find a job etc.  Don’t ask us what we’re about to do after that – we have no idea. We’ll just improvise, as usual.