Toby & Meris not in South America anymore

Last known location: 49°19'29" N 123°03'59" W

Yes, it's true, we've left the southern hemisphere for the icy winter weather of the northern hemisphere - what were we thinking!?

Of course, the journey was not uneventful and started with an interesting bus trip from Foz do Iguacu in Brazil to Sao Paolo. Foz do Iguacu is right on the border of Paraguay, and the closest Paraguayan city to the border, Ciudad del Este, is a bit of a shopping mecca for the Brazilians, resembling Hong Kong in its bright lights and sale of electronic goods. Well, it turned out that our fellow bus passengers were importing electronic goods from Paraguay, and from the amount of money they kept paying to the bus driver to keep going, everything wasn't quite above board. For us innocent bystanders it was a frustrating and at times scary trip with heated confrontations between passengers and bus driver, and lots of unscheduled stops when the bus driver refused to go on without further "pay". We finally arrived in Sao Paolo 18 hours later, about 2 hours behind schedule, tired but thankful to be off the bus!

From Sao Paolo we flew to Houston and picked up a rental car, then drove west towards New Mexico. They say that everything is bigger in Texas. I think they're right. People (some so large they need motorised shopping carts just to get around the supermarkets), vehicles (Hummers are dwarfed), hats, boots, belt buckles, guns, friendliness, coffee, burgers and colddrinks. After the first time we ordered two small sodas, we learnt our lesson and from then on only ordered one to share! We drove through the back roads of Texas and found that it was prime hunting season. We saw loads of people wearing camo, buying deer corn, and buying guns in Walmart. We drove along close to the Mexican border, and the scenery was similar to the Karoo. There was no snow this far south and it was warm enough the first night that we camped, feeling a little dwarfed by the massive RV's surrounding our two man tent. No kidding, some of the RV's are as big as public buses, and then they still tow a truck behind that.


Our destination was Las Cruces in New Mexico, where we visited Meris' brother Jeremy and his girlfriend Dong Hui, who looked after us really well. We tried to toboggan down the local equivalent to snow - gypsum dunes. It's not very slippery. We spent some time walking in the mountains, we glutted on excellent cheap Mexican food, and drank great micro-brewery beer. Soon our visit was over and we started the long drive back to Houston, via the Carlsbad Caverns, which were huge and full of stalactites and stalagmites - quite impressive. The weather had cooled down somewhat since we arrived in Texas and we decided not to camp, a decision we were very glad of when the thermometer on our car told us it was 18°F, about -7°C next morning! The temperature didn't get above 0 celsius all day, and when it started raining the rain froze to the car. We had to stop and chip ice off the windscreen wipers - a new experience for us uneducated South Africans!



From Houston we flew to San Francisco, crossing the snowcapped Sierra Nevada on our approach. After the iciness of the previous few days in Texas, San Francisco felt positively balmy! We did a walking tour of the city, checking out the worlds curviest street. After all the action movies we've seen we were surprised by how flat the city is! On our second day we picked up a rental car and Toby's friend Vince and his sister Tamlin before driving up to Oregon. We spent a long weekend with Jeremy and Marg, friends of Vince who live in Medford. What an awesome weekend it was!

We drove up to Crater Lake, one of the snowiest places in the states (they can get up to 21 feet of snow, although there were only 6 feet at the time), and were lucky enough to get a clear sunny day, really unusual in this part of the world at this time of year. Give four South Africans that much snow and some sun and you have some happy South Africans! We had a ball, and only regretted our inappropriate clothing when we started getting wet and cold.



Oregon also has a wine-making industry, and our host, Jeremy, took us on a tour of local wine farms - not great wine but in that cold weather does it matter? He also took us to a local brewery, run out of the garage of a local Aussie, Ross, who let us sample copious quantities of the excellent brew.

Back in San Francisco we decided to splurge on the Cirque du Soleil, something I've always loved watching on TV. WOW!!!! It was SOO much better live, and held us enthralled for 2 hours of incredible acrobatics, music and clowning. If you ever get a chance to see this, go!

Now we're in Vancouver, where we have our longest stopover of the trip, probably into the New Year. We'll be spending Christmas with Meris' family, and hopefully be getting onto the slopes for some snowboarding.