Lately, we’ve been asked about where we are going and what we will be doing. So I decided to document our travel plans as they stand prior to our departure. For some portions, we have a pretty clear and defined plan. For the rest, we hope to follow a general path – always leaving the possibility to change our plan and route at any moment. It should be interesting to track our route and see how much it deviates from this plan.
Boston-Argentina
Our trip from Boston to Buenos Aires will be detoured through NY
C and Mexico City. We will be leaving Boston on 8/17 and plan to spend a couple days in NYC with brother, sister-in-law and nephew. Our flight leaves 8/19 from JFK, with a 12 hour layover in Mexico City. From the Juarez International Airport, we’ll catch a cab, head to the Zocalo and spend an afternoon in and around the plaza before heading back to the airport for the final leg of our flight. From there, it’s on to Buenos aires for an 11am arrival on August 20th. We will be spending the first few days familiarizing and acclimating to the city.
Buenos Aires
The plan is to spend our first four weeks in Buenos Aires. We will be students at Academia Buenos Aires, taking spanish classes 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, living with a family and enjoying as much of the city and its surrounding area as possible. It may be ambitious, but we expect to take cooking classes, tango lessons and voluteer. Our goal is to learn spanish and try to understand what it is that makes Buenos Aires tick.
Spring Break
After 4 weeks of intense language study and the busy city life, we will be ready for a little vacation. We will make our way down to Peninsula Valdes, which is listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. We hope to catch the southern right whales on their migratory path, see orcas enter the bay, watch elephant bull seals fight for superiority and visit a colony of 500,000 penguins. After soaking in all the wildlife, its off to the Welsh village of Trelew, for some sightseeing and most definitely afternoon tea.
Back to School in Mendoza
We’ll head back north to Mendoza, which is the center of the wine region. Mendoza is much smaller than Buenos Aires and we hope it will prove to be much more manageable city. We will enroll in another school and continue our spanish lessons right where we left off and we’ll be very refreshed and ready to learn more. Setting up a base in Mendoza, we hope to enjoy the city and get out into the Andes and the surrounding areas.
Northern Argentina
From Mendoza, the real traveling begins. We should be entering the early summer season as we head north up route 40 – same highway that you may remember from Che’s adventures – towards Salta and Jujuy in the norther provinces of Arg
entina. Along the way are national parks with moonscapes (crazy rock formations, no vegetation, desert), valleys and hills filled with wine, like Colome, and lots of other spectacular sights. Well spend some time in both Salta and Jujuy, and we’ll continue north to near the Bolivian border. We may spend some time on the massive salt flats, but will save most of that exploration until later in our trip. From the Northwest, we’ll be heading to the Northeast, with the main destination being Iguazu Falls, which splits Argentina from Brazil. All along the northern regions of the country are pre-Incan and Incan ruins.
Celebrating the Holidays
From Iguazu Falls, we’ll begin making our way back towards Buenos Aires. We hope to spend the christmas with friends in Uruguay.
