Banos, Quito, Buenos Aires, and everything in between

I wrote this yesterday (on my birthday) but the pictures finished uploading today! Just change the time frame in your mind accordingly 🙂

Today is my 30th birthday 🤗. Though I never imagined I’d be starting this new decade in the way that I am, I couldn’t be more excited! Last night we took an overnight bus from Buenos Aires to Mendoza. We are now in wine region and it looks like it’s going to be a good start to this new decade!

So far Argentinian food has been our favorite! Argentinians love their grilled meat and sausage (and so do we!) There is also a heavy European influence here, in particular, Italian, so there is wine, handmade pasta, pizza, and good cheese galore! Thankfully we’ve also been able to find more veggies in restaurants around here. We’ve had trouble finding a side item that isn’t a potato, rice, yucca, or bread in the other places we’ve been!

I’ve gotten a little behind on my blog writing, so I’m trying to catch up for the last three weeks in this one. This blog not only serves as my newsletter to you guys, but also as my travel journal, so if I don’t write something down, I’ll be missing it in the future! Here are the things I’ve yet to tell you about that we’ve done over the last three weeks (between New Years, Amazon, and now):

The rest of our time in Banos:

This picture, as well as the one below is Kirk with our favorite puppy, Douglas. He belonged to the owner of the hostel we stayed in in Banos, and we loved him! He was clumsy and fluffy and always so excited to see us. I heard Kirk tell Douglas one day that he was apart of the plan to convince me to get a dog😂. As cute as he was, it’s wouldn’t take much convincing!

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This (above) was our view walking from our hostel into town. Banos is a beautiful city planted in the middle of a valley. The views everywhere were great! One day we hiked up one of the smaller mountain paths there to a place called Bellavista. You could see the whole city!Us at the top 🙂This picture, as well as the next few, are some of my favorite art pieces around the city. —— —This is a view out of our hostel bedroom window. The snow covered one is a volcano!There are many waterfalls around Banos, but the only one we went to see was Devil’s Cauldron. It was quite large! Above and below are a couple of pics from our spa day. You can get hour long massages for around $20 in Banos! Kirk in the steam box. 🙂

In Quito:

We did far more hiking in Quito than touring the city, but I got a few pics of places we saw.

The Basilica

This is one of the plazas in the historical district of town called Independence Plaza. The statue you can see in the background is the Virgin of Quito, which is viewable from nearly everywhere in the city.

This is one of the streets in the historical district. It’s now one of the more touristy streets, but I thought it was beautiful.

On to hiking…One day we hiked up to the refuge on this Volcano. (We took a car to about midway up, but the part we did hike was put us close to 16,000 ft above sea level! The air was so thin! I walked at a snails pace, but I made it – and it even started snowing while we were up there!) We were actually aiming to reach the glacier that sits near the top of this mountain, but our guide ended up being less than honest and we weren’t able to go to the top :/. It was still beautiful though!

It was a young girl taking our photo in front of Cotopaxi. She said “Give a kiss!”Mountain man – or, I guess, volcano man 🙂

—— The refuge to which we hiked and ate lunch. This is the place that it snowed while we were there 🙂

The next day we headed to a different volcano (Pichincha) from which you can view other volcanoes in the area. It was a little to cloudy to see, but above is a picture of all the potential viewable volcanoes. The tall one in the middle (Cotopaxi) is where we were in the above photos.

This hike we also cheated on a little. A cable car carried us pretty far up and then we hiked around for the views. Still pretty high in elevation, but nothing compared to the day before! Here are some of the views:

—— Kirk switched backpacks with me this day so I could practice carrying the heavier one (we’ll be doing a four day trek with our big packs in a few weeks!). Also, this backpack is one of my favorite things we got for the trip. It’s a day pack that packs down smaller than one of those 8 oz cans of coke, but is incredibly comfortable and sturdy even with no padding. It’s nice when you don’t want to have to unpack another bag to carry around!

On to Buenos Aires:

We flew into Buenos Aires, Argentina on January 13th. We had hoped to visit some beaches, but it turns out that the nice beaches are not near the city. In fact, we went to one nature reserve that had a beach on the side of it and the water was as brown as a muddy river. There were signs posted saying it wasn’t safe to swim because of pollution 😬. We were a little disappointed to miss out on the beach, but spent our days there seeing some of the city sites.

Recoleta cemetery was the most interesting cemetery I’ve ever seen. I’ve been in graveyards with raised graves before, but these were especially tall and many were covered in statues. There are a few other pictures posted on Instagram and Facebook if you are interested.

This is Eva Peron’s grave. She is a former actress and First Lady of Argentina who, in her short life, made huge strides for women. She seems very loved by people here (it’s the only grave we saw covered in flowers) and many people attribute Argentina having already had a woman president to the strides made by Eva (often called Evita).

This is a picture from the nature reserve we visited in Buenos Aires.

This is Plaza De Mayo, which sits in front of the Pink Palace. We hear many protests go on here – which is pretty evident based on the political statements posted all over the Plaza.

I currently don’t remember what these buildings are but they are next to the Plaza and are beautiful!

Most of the cities we’ve been in have had a lot of political artwork all over the city. I like it- most of it anyway. Some of it shows the voice of the people while others show the nations history.

This pizza place has almost 7,000 positive reviews on trip advisor – open since 1932. It was, of course, delicious!

And just for kicks, here’s what we look like when we travel. One bag in front, one bag in back. Honestly, my front bag is almost entirely filled with snacks 😂. It’s fullness comes and goes :).

— That’s all for now! Whew, it feels good to be caught up!