Sharon and Andy's World Tour 2006

Friday 21 - Saturday 22 July

As if to reinforce my dislike of overnight buses, about an hour after leaving Cordoba last night the bus came to a stop next to a police truck with its lights flashing. Uniformed cops began pulling bullet-proof vests from the back seats of the truck and we began to worry. In fact, they were clearing space in the truck to accommodate a passenger on the bus who had seemingly suffered a heart-attack and needed rushing to hospital. By the time the bus crew and police had completed an hour's worth of form-filling at the hospital, the patient - now upright in a wheelchair - was looking decidedly better.

After two big cities, the small, pretty town of Colon (pronounced co-lon, before you get any ideas for smutty puns) made a nice change, and our host Marcela at the Hostel Sophie could not have been more helpful; not only in giving us invaluable travel advice but also booking our onward journey from Colon and actually walking to the bus station to pick up the tickets for us!

Colon Harbour

With a warm sunny afternoon at our disposal, Marcela directed us to a local tour company with a perfect-English-speaking (and delightfully nutty) tour guide called Charlie Adamson. Charlie, a third-generation Argentinian of Scottish descent took us on a terrific boat trip along the Rio Uraguay,

The sunlit Rio Uruguay

stopping at islands to allow us to explore the sand dunes

and to look for semi-precious Jaspers and Agates. I was particularly pleased to find a sizeable chunk of fossilized wood, estimated by Charlie to be 65 million years old.

With his expansive knowledge and infectious sense of humour, Charlie made the perfect day for us -

Is that a beard or have you been glue-sniffing on the carpet again?

and we were even more delighted when, once back on dry land, he invited us to dinner! We soon learned that this kind of unthinking hospitality is commonplace in Argentina.

That evening, Charlie cooked us the most unbelievably succulent beef (what else?), kept our kidneys afloat with good Argentinian red wine and regaled us with jokes and anecdotes. We rounded the night off by watching the Terry Gilliam film 'Brazil' (Charlie's personal favourite) with the sound turned up around 3000 decibels. Despite this Sharon still fell asleep, and so we left Charlie to it with thanks for a wonderful evening.

Saturday 22 July

Up bright and early for another sunny day, we took a long an enjoyable stroll along the 'beach' which forms the bank of the Rio Uraguay on the Colon side.

Saturday is the day that traditional Argentinian gauchos come into town, and we saw no shortage of these smartly dressed cowboys as we made our way back to the hostel after a pleasant evening out.

Although having spent only two days in Colon the place, the weather, and the people we met all contributed to its inclusion on our 'places we were sorry to leave' list.

Time, though, to continue our journey north.