A Thousand Miles By Bus

Hello.  It's time for another update on my travels, as I've been on a very long journey since I last blogged.

After I got back from Easter Island, I took a trip to a city called Valparaiso.  It's on the coast of Chile and it's a huge port.  I saw hundreds of containers ready to be stacked onto ships for delivery around the world.  Have you ever thought about how the stuff in the shops in Birmingham gets there?  I bet some of the things you buy have travelled in containers exactly like the ones I saw in Valparaiso.

The port of Valparaiso

The other interesting thing about Valparaiso is that all the houses are brightly coloured and they are built on a very steep hillside.  There are lots of funicular railways in the city to get to the higher streets in the town.  Otherwise, you have to be very fit and walk up all the steps.  I preferred the funicular myself!

After two days in Valparaiso I took the bus across to Argentina.  It was a beautiful bus ride as there are very high mountains between Argentina and Chile, called the Andes, and we had to cross them in the bus.  It was like driving to a ski resort; we went round loads of hair pin bends.  Luckily I wasn't travel sick!

In Argentina we stayed in a place called Mendoza.  They make lots of wine around here - hundreds of litres a day!  I took a tour to see how the wine is made.   They crush the grapes in a big machine and the leftover bits (the pips and skin) come out of the machine in a big pulp.  This pulp goes on the fields as fertiliser!  Meanwhile, the juice is turned into wine.  I think I'll stick to orange juice for now though!

Vineyards

Casks of wine

Yesterday, I spent twenty hours on a bus!  It wasn't too boring as I had lots of chances to look out of the window at the mountains.  They also showed 'The Hobbit' on the journey, but they'd turned it into a Spanish version, so I couldn't understand very much.  At least I now know that the elves in Spanish are 'los elfos'!

I'm now in a place called Salta in the northwest of Argentina - a thousand miles from Valparaiso where I started writing this blog.  That's a very long journey for a stuffed traveller!