Well, this really is it. The end of the (travelling) road. After 10 months and approximately 100,000km, we're back in the UK.

It's been a truly epic journey through 16 countries, involving some 30 flights, 38 boat trips, 14 train journeys, and countless cross-country buses.

We've had an awesome time. Here are a few of our favourite things:
- City: Sydney
- Country: Argentina
- Sight: Machu Picchu
- Bar: Cloud 9, Shanghai, China
- Restaurant: At the top of the hill in Valpo, Chile
- Drink: First beer in Salta, Argentina, after a 3-day journey from Bolivia
- Beer: either China's Tsingtao or Peru's Cusqueña
- Meal: 6 course wine pairing lunch in Mendoza, Argentina
- Food: Malaysia
- Chocolate: Mamuschka, Bariloche
- Wildlife: Penguins in Puerto Madryn, or orangutans in Kinabatangan
- Hostel (excluding the Four Seasons and our fantastic hotels in Cuzco and La Paz): Los Pinguinos, Arequipa, Peru
- Guide: Bing Xue, our Chinese Intrepid tour guide

We're very pleased to be home, and are looking forward to catching up with friends and family in the next few weeks. I am also excited about drinking as many cups of tea as I possibly can!

Thank you for reading about our adventures on the blog and we look forward to seeing you soon.

Well, this was it, our last stop: Rio de Janeiro. The 8 hour drive from Sao Paulo to Rio was apparently pretty spectacular, lush and green – but I slept through most of it. Clearly 10 months of travelling has started to take its toll. We agreed as we arrived that we would take it easy during our last few days, focus on soaking up some sunshine and enjoying some capirinhas. An eminently sensible plan.

After 3 months in South America we had become pretty used to speaking Spanish and whilst not perhaps as fluent as we might have wished, we could definitely make ourselves understood. We'd naively thought that with the words for 'hello' and 'thank you,' we'd be able to get buy in Portuguese – because after all, Spanish and Portuguese are quite similar, right? Wrong. Actually, Portuguese sounds like a cross between Russian and Arabic, with lots of phlegmatic sounds and pronunciation bearing little resemblance to the letters on the page. We've had to resort to sheepish smiles, pointing (picture menus are a godsend!) and the kindness of English-speaking strangers.

Rio, like Sao Paulo, has a reputation for being dangerous, although our hostel host soon attempted to put us at our ease: “Don't worry, the area's perfectly safe, the dealers only sell pot around here, there's no coke anymore.” I love that this was a good yardstick of safety in the area. As in Sao Paulo, I prepared myself for the worst. Actually, Santa Teresa, the bohemian area of town in which we were staying, was lively and full of families having dinner in street cafes on the Friday night we arrived. We got stuck in to the capirinhas – well, it would have been rude not to.

We were most excited about a visit to the Christ the Redeemer statue. Our second morning dawned sunny and clear, and so off we headed to the Corcovado, or Hunch Back Mountain. The most famous way to get to the top is the cog train, but, facing an hour-long queue just to buy our tickets, we decided there had to be another way. Enterprising locals have created a mini-van service to the top, which has the advantage of stopping at a viewpoint halfway up to the summit. And air conditioning, which in 36 degree plus temperatures was a definite benefit. We opted to take the van. The viewpoint was spectacular – we could see across to Sugar Loaf Mountain and Guanabara Bay, and also the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer looming in the distance. It is possible to take a helicopter flight around the statue, and although tempted, we couldn't quite bring ourselves to get into another small aircraft at this stage of the trip. Watching the super-rapid descent of some of the helicopters later in the day, I think this was a good decision.

From here we continued up the Corcovado, bought our tickets and then took another mini-bus ride to the very top. We popped out right at the base of the statue, which was ENORMOUS. Opened in 1931, the statue is nearly 40m tall, the largest Art Deco statue in the world. I wasn't quite prepared for how big it was going to be. Neither was I prepared for the crowds. The area at the base of the statue was teeming with people, including a Father Christmas in full costume and six teenagers in Michael Jackson regalia, all trying to squeeze into the best possible spot for a photo with Christ. We didn't stick around long. Instead we headed on to the sandy beaches of Leblon, Ipanema and Copacabana, for which Rio is famous. It was actually too hot for us to sunbathe, so we settled for a walk along the shore to watch the beautiful people and soak up a little sun. We saw a lot of women clad in thong bikinis, but very few were as buff or as beautiful as I was expecting. The men (mostly in very tight shorts) looked a little better, although the majority clearly indulged in heavy doses of steroids. Sexy it wasn't.

The other highlight of our stay here was a visit to the Museu do Republic, a very grand 19th century mansion which was built by a coffee plantation millionnaire, but later became the seat of the Brazilian government, home to several presidents. The rooms were spectacular, “renovated but still maintaining all original features” as most houses in South America seem to be. Most of the explanations were in Portuguese and therefore lost on us, but we were able to appreciate the room of Getúlio Vargas, President from 1930 to 1945 and 1951 until 1954, when he committed suicide in his bedroom at the palace. The room has been kept exactly as it was on that day, which is pretty macabre in itself. Worse still is the glass case in the corner of the room, containing not only the blood-stained pyjamas worn by Vargas when he did the deed, but also the gun and a replica of the bullet.

We spent our last couple of days visiting local attractions in Santa Teresa. This seemed to involve sitting outside lots of cafes and drinking copious beers. It also enabled us to stick close to the internet, watching and waiting to see whether we would be making it back to the UK at all, thanks to the heavy snowfall over Heathrow. I am sure spending Christmas on the beach (under the shade of an umbrella) wouldn't have been so bad, but after 10 months away we were really desperate to get home to our families. Lady Luck was smiling upon us – we flew home as scheduled on 22nd December.

Our journey to Sao Paulo didn't predispose us to like the city. After 19 hours on the bus over the border from Iguazú, we arrived to find the city laid low under a grey drizzly sky.

Sao Paulo is home to 17 million people – the largest city in South America – and is known as the creative centre of Brazil. Unfortunately Sao Paulo was also once known as one of the most violent cities on the planet, racking up over 700 murders a month in the mid '90s. So whilst I was looking forward to seeing some of the amazing art and architecture that I'd heard about in Wallpaper over the years, Sarah was terrified that we would end up a crime statistic.

The art and architecture we saw was pretty impressive. The city reminded me a little of Beijing in that the town planners, if there actually are any, seem to have given the architects free reign. The most obvious examples of this are the stunning Edificio Italia and its wavy neighbour the Edificio Copan, but Avenue Paulista, the financial centre of the city, was similarly avant-garde.

Touring around theses sights I don't think I quite grasped the level of fear Sarah was harbouring until we were walking around the area near our hostel the first evening. Suddenly Sarah grabbed my arm and hissed at me to put the camera away, after observing a teenager standing at a bus stop - minding his own business and sheltering from the rain in what Sarah clearly regarded as a suspicious manner

This paranoia peaked when we took another James-patented 'scenic route' down a busy road under an underpass to get to a museum. First of all we saw a gang of young girls who were 'clearly prostitutes', that is, wearing short skirts, and shortly after Sarah nudged me in the ribs and whispered that we were being followed. I stopped by a busy shop to let whoever it was go past us: it was a clean-shaven young man wearing a polo shirt with his name badge pinned to the front on his way to work. Another criminal mastermind.

To be fair to her, the city does feel a little more edgy than most places we've been. Even the supposedly risky centre of Lima felt less dangerous. Walking through the CBD at lunchtime we saw genuine prostitutes soliciting biz in bras and denim hot pants, and derelict skyscrapers home to hundreds of homeless people. We clambered over dug up pavements down empty streets. All those cues that tell you that you should maybe be watching your back a little bit were there in abundance. Shuttered shops, broken windows, bad graffiti and cardboard nests in doorways.

Once we got into the shopping district it was all different though. Christmas clearly means something here, and the just-a-pound shop equivalents that seem to predominate were doing a roaring trade. As we got further into the xmas frenzy we came across the Mercado Municipal, an incredibly grand building housing what is probably the finest market we've seen on our trip thus far. Cured meats, spices, fish, poultry and all manner of exotic fruit tumbled from a thousand well-tended stalls. Given the general level of wealth we had seen up to that point I'm not exactly sure who could afford to buy all these things, but nevertheless the market was crowded with shoppers. I think this is my main impression of Sao Paulo; the very physical division between rich and poor. The public spaces and infrastructure seem dirty and best-avoided, and the rich stay inside their gated communities, armoured cars and body-guarded restaurants, living their lives apart.

As we flew over Misiones state to reach Puerto Iguazú, it felt like we were about to land in a new continent. Acres and acres of lush green forest lay beneath us, and only at the last minute did the trees open up to reveal the runway. Technically this was still Argentina, but the scenery felt closer to Borneo than to the megalopolis of Buenos Aires we'd left only a few hours before.......

This sense of being Somewhere Else only increased once we reached Puerto Iguazú proper (which I suspect would be a rather nondescript border town, were it not for its close proximity to the Iguazú Falls). The roads and pavements were covered in the same fine red dust which coated our clothes and faces in Phu Quoc. Most of the restaurants offered patrons plastic garden chairs to sit on, just like in Vietnam. And the oppressive heat and humidity, which left us instantly damp with sweat, took us right back to our early summer in South East Asia.

I guess this dramatic change shouldn't have come as so much of a surprise: you can see both Brazil and Paraguay from Iguazú's waterfront. So it's only natural the place should be a bit of a melting pot. One really positive consequence of this (from our perspective) was that the cuisine on offer here was a little more varied, and our first lunch consisted of a Paraguayan specialty for me, and a Brazilian one for James. Neither slice of ham nor piece of cheese in sight.

The main purpose of our visit was of course a trip to the Iguazú Falls. The Falls consist of some 275 individual waterfalls, stretching on for more than 2km, which crash at several thousand cubic metres a second into the Iguazú River some 80m below. They were first seen (by Europeans) in 1542 when Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his crew came exploring. Now of course, they're a little busier.

The Falls lie across the border between Argentina and Brazil, which means you need to visit both countries in order to see them properly. Although our next stop will be Sao Paulo, we decided to base ourselves in Argentina and just do a day trip to Brazil – having heard horror stories about how expensive Brazil is, we are keen to keep our days there to a minimum!

The morning after we arrived dawned bright and sunny, and so we got one of the first buses of the day to the Argentinian National Park. The build up was pretty impressive: first the bus takes you the 15km to the park through lush green rainforest similar to the tropical Amazonian jungles further north. First impressions: it's a lot like Jurassic Park here. Next, you get to wander through part of the forest along a narrow winding path, on the look out for toucans and other exotic birds. And then you enter the Park proper. Just like at the Perito Moreno Glacier, the National Park Authority has created a series of walkways to enable you to get close to the Falls, and see them from several different perspectives. They have clearly designed the walkways to keep you in suspense for the longest time, keeping the falls hidden until the very last moment But even from the start of the trail, the noise of the water gushing is huge – it sounds like a busy road in the middle of the national park! We interrupted a coati, a cousin to the raccoon with an incredibly long and flexible snout (think Cyril and Cedric Sneer from The Raccoons, though brown not pink), prowling around on an early morning stroll. And then finally, we turned a corner, and there they were.....

The Falls were absolutely spectacular – I've never seen waterfalls on anywhere near the same scale before. Some of the waterfalls we specifically drove to see in New Zealand were mere trickles by comparison. There are individual falls as far as the eye can see, ranging from small trickles to absolute monsters. The water is a dirty muddy colour, apparently the result of significant deforestation in the region – 40 years ago, the water ran clear. This seems a real shame, although it does add to the other-worldly feel of the place. Butterflies in almost every colour, from orange, to yellow, to blue, to purple, flitted around, and we even saw some condors soaring overhead. Wow. It's really difficult to do the Falls justice in words, so perhaps this will help:



We wandered around the walkways for a couple of hours to get our fill of the Falls, one of which you're able to walk almost right up to. James and I stowed our bags and then walked towards it hand in hand, getting absolutely soaked in the process. Fortunately it was such a sunny day it was pretty refreshing! We finished our day at the Garganto del Diablo, or Devil's Throat, a concentrated torrent of water. The viewing platform is perched right at the top of the falls, so you can watch the water disappear over a ledge into the abyss, occasional plumes of spray bouncing upwards to obscure your view completely.

The following day, we were less lucky with the weather – there had been an enormous electrical storm the night before, and the rain continued well into the afternoon. Not to be discouraged (and having already bought our bus tickets for the 8.10 journey to Brazil) we donned our rain coats and decided to make the best of it.

But actually, seeing the Falls in both sunny and wet conditions made for a good contrast – and being on the Brazilian side mostly involves getting absolutely soaked at every opportunity anyway. If anything, this second day was my favourite: seeing just how many falls there are in the area really takes your breath away. Jostling for room amidst the visiting Brazilians and snap-happy Japanese tourists, we managed to take a few pictures ourselves.

The Brazilian walkways generally give you the more panoramic view, but again, at one point you can walk right into the heart of the falls – surrounded by water on every side. Looking over the viewing platform at the edge of one of the Falls, you realise there is no way you'd survive being swept away. Luckily, James kept a tight hold on me and I didn't blow away in the gusting winds.

I love ice cream. I have no qualms about that. It has been a long-standing love affair, starting with neopolitan and gino ginelli's toffee flavour when I was little, progressing to the flavour of the week and late-night brownie sundaes at G&Ds during my years at university. Now I have a particular penchant for Haagen Daaz Cookies and Cream, which I have been known to eat half a tub of (oh, ok then, more like two-thirds) at one sitting.

I have always found that I liked to eat ice cream more often than most other people I know, and in larger quantities. I had resigned myself to the fact that I was probably just a little bit greedier than most when it came to gelato.

But being in Argentina has been a revelation. I find that I am not alone. It seems, in fact, that ice cream is an Argentinian obsession, much like mate, football, and steak. Most major cities in Argentina have ice cream parlour on every street corner, like Starbucks in New York or London. They are open all day and late into the night – in short, there to help whenever that ice cream craving should strike you.

And as for the portions, well. Here is a picture of me about to enjoy a 'scoop' of strawberry sorbet. Bear in mind, if you will, that this was the SMALLEST portion size available. Most people were ordering a minimum of two flavours, piled high atop wafer cones, then dipped in chocolate and sprinkled with nuts. Others went for ¼ kg pots of the stuff, crammed with four or five different flavours.

Ice cream production here is something of an art – the old secret recipes brought over from Italy and then honed and perfected to incorporate local flavours like dulce de leche and calafate berry. The regular flavours too are outstanding – banana tastes like real banana, chocolate is full of flavour and even vanilla is done very well, made using real vanilla pods.

Ice cream heaven is definitely here in Argentina.

From the coastline of Uruguay, Buenos Aires' skyline shimmers like a mirage over the Rio del Plata: A dream of tall buildings and wide streets, modern art museums and restaurants serving food where the main ingredients aren't ham or cheese.

Up close 'BA' is a city of Parisian buildings, on a New York layout, to a London-scale. There are 13 million living in Greater Buenos Aires – over ¼ of the entire country's population – spread over an enormous grid system around the open mouth of the Rio del Plata. Every block in every neighbourhood seems crammed with grand buildings, four storeys or more of high ceilings and ornate balconies built then abandoned by the rich as they fled the latest outbreak of yellow fever or moved on to more fashionable areas. So whilst every district has its own distinct personality, even the most run-down streets in La Boca have a faded grandeur that makes the city endlessly interesting to walk around.

And by God did we walk in Buenos Aires. Pondering why my feet were throbbing on Friday, I estimated that we had walked well over 10km every day for 6 days. We pounded the pavements from our hostel in San Telmo, up to the Microcentro, down to La Boca, west to the harbour development of Puerto Madero, and further north to upmarket Recoleta, Palermo and Belgrano.

In Palermo we stopped to visit the Evita Museum, as we were a little embarrassed how little we knew about this national icon. I can't say I left the museum knowing much more. After a promising introduction – 'Evita was a controversial figure...' - the rest of the exhibits were little more than propaganda, which seems to be a pretty accurate reflection of her time in power. I think we learned more from the imagery than the words: as we moved forward in time the graphics became more and more soviet communist ('Workers Unite!')...the PR stunts more and more shameless (Evita sponsors a free day out at the sea-side for all poor children! Look how happy these street urchins are!)...and the crowds of poor people ever bigger.

We continued following Evita's trail to her grave in the famous Recoleta Cemetery. A walled city of mausoleums in the centre of the most upmarket neighbourhood in town, the cemetery is a seriously spooky place to spend an afternoon. It's like an enormous terraced town; each house inhabited by stacks of coffins and rotting flowers. The mausoleums are all built in different styles and sizes – some new, some old – and most have glass doors that display the coffins resting on shelves inside. The newer ones tended to be more discrete with their contents – metal grates or staircases set in their floors leading down to dark subterranean catacombs. Sarah let out a gasp when we walked past an especially ancient mausoleum where the shelves had rotted away. The glass door had smashed and we caught a glimpse of a splintered coffin, spilling cloth and bones onto its marble floor. We walked away from that one as fast as we could without running, and continued our search for Evita. Her family tomb was actually one of the smaller ones in the cemetery, although it drew the biggest crowds. About 8 tourists gathered around the doors holding their official cemetery maps in one hand and cameras in the other.

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Our first evening in town we took the metro (30p a trip by the way – makes you wonder what TFL are up to!) up to swanky Belgrano to watch a Sunday night tradition in the local park: as sun set, the old bandstand filled with smartly dressed oldies, shuffling a tango to the music from a small set of speakers. Sarah and I sat and watched, and with twisted arm I promised that we would go to a lesson before the week was out.

After putting it off for 5 days, on our penultimate night we went to a tango hall in the centre of town. When we arrived at the ridiculously early time of 10pm, we were shown upstairs to a grand hall with marble floored and a long thin dancefloor surrounded by pillars and tables. As Sarah fetched Quilmes to ease my nerves I watched as several other tourist couples sheepishly ascended the stairs. We were the youngest there by a good 20 years.

Our lesson was given by a professionally greasy pint-sized lothario in a black suit and a pony tail. He showed us the basic steps of a tango, training us up to perform a simply 'el ocho' (figure of eight) over the course of an hour. I'll admit it, I enjoyed it. The tango is at once a bit mincing and very macho – the lady has absolutely no idea what moves she has to do, and has to intuitively respond to the man's movements. Unsurprisingly Sarah struggled with this concept, preferring instead to try and lead me around the dancefloor. This drew the attention of one of the teachers – an elegant old gent who interceded on my part to show Sarah what was what.

As our lesson drew to an end, the tables around the dancefloor filled with local couples in their glad rags, ready for the real dancing to begin. So having finished mangling the art-form beyond recognition, we sat back down to our now warm Quilmes and saw how it was meant to be done...

To see the pros do it, the tango seemed to me to be a very slow and graceful dance: The men gently guiding their partners around the floor in seemingly random directions, avoiding the other couples, while the ladies did all sorts of twirls and lunges and feet pointing. The couples were very old though, so maybe we have a distorted view of the pace of the dance. My favourite couple's average age was 70 (he was around 80, she was around 60) and spent the whole hour we were there dancing, only stopping every 20 minutes to rehydrate and (probably) pop pills. He was wearing a crisp blue shirt with chinos belted up around his armpits, and she was wearing a very low cut purple dress that showed off her thin figure and large breasts. Actually, I think bony is a better description than thin. She looked like Skeletor with fake tits.

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Aside from the spectacle of the tango, the real highlight of our stay in Buenos Aires was the food - no more ham or cheese! OK, so these ingredients were still present in abundance, but at last there were other options for us to try. During our week in the city we gorged ourselves on Japanese, Chinese AND Indian food. The last time we had a curry was in Kuala Lumpur with Zubin: a meal so good we worried it might have ruined all other curry for us for life. However after a five month break we were both craving some spicy food, and were delighted to find a 'British Curry House' two minutes from our hostel run by an expat Londoner and his partner. While there were no poppadoms, there was mango chutney, naan and a most passable rogan josh.

And so it was that we ended our week in BA with sore feet and full stomachs, slumped exhausted in a taxi that took us through the shanty towns to the airport and off to Puerto Iguazú. We're beginning count the days till we see friends and family again, but still have the adventure of the Iguazú Falls and Brazil ahead of us...

Before heading back to Argentina, we thought we'd spend a day in Colonia, a World Heritage Site described as a must-see day trip from Buenos Aires. It's a pretty little place, with cobblestone streets and lots of flowers, founded by the Portuguese in 1680 as a look-out to keep an eye on Spanish activities, and also to smuggle contraband across the water to the Argentine capital. So quite a chequered past. The main problem today is....there simply isn't that much to do. Even 24 hours is a stretch to fill – much like in Melaka in Malaysia, we spent most of our stay waiting for it to be time to leave again.

We did pay a visit to the lighthouse, which somewhat bizarrely is in the middle of town, attached to the ruined walls of an old convent. No explanation why. I like to think it was to catch escapee nuns, but I am sure the reality is based on geography, eroding rocks and whatnot. There was a nice view from the top, although not masses to see......The Lonely Planet talked glowingly about the city's 8 museums – we stuck our heads into a couple but they didn't look very good, so we decided to save our remaining pesos for nice coffee at “Colonia's best-kept secret,” a little cafe run by an Argentinian woman who had lived in Shepherds Bush for about 6 years during the economic crash in her homeland, returning a couple of years earlier. We reminisced about London and admired the enormous collection of English books lining her shelves (unfortunately not for swap or sale).

Our principle entertainment in Colonia came in the form of a couple of characters we met. The first was an American man called Robert, who judging by his appearance must have been travelling for some time: his dress sense seemed a little warped – lurid green wife-beater teamed with green shorts and a brightly coloured Peruvian-striped flat cap. He was also an environmental zealot, and proudly told us about the changes he'd made in his own lifestyle to minimise his carbon footprint – selling his car to use public transport and, more disturbingly, foregoing toilet paper for the old-fashioned “Indian method,” as he described it. That's hand and water, for you and me. Yuck. We resisted the urge to tell him that we were owners of an enormous carbon footprint, for fear of the consequences.....

Friendlier and better house-trained were the dogs we met in the centre of town. As those of you who've been following our travels will know, James has a bit of an affinity with dogs, and has made a fair few canine friends around the world. In Colonia it seems, stray dogs are more starved of attention (and food) than elsewhere. During breakfast we were befriended by one hungry mutt, who sat by our table the whole time, on the off-chance of receiving a titbit or two. James patted him on the head once, and that was it – friends for life. As we left, he followed us, and was quickly joined by a couple of others – a stately brown collie and a skinny black labrador. They followed us across town, making quite a grand procession walking alongside James, leader of the pack. I am not sure quite what the locals made of it, especially as at one point we were 5 dogs strong, walking down the busy mainstreet! The three loyal ones even waited outside for us whilst we went up the lighthouse, running off occasionally just to check we hadn't walked off without them. I don't think I've ever had such a friendly reception as I did when we returned – the black lab came scampering over, tail wagging frantically, and jumped right up on her back paws, front paws roughly on my chest, all the better to say hello. Very cute indeed.

It was very odd to hear the news of early snowfall in the UK – coming as it did, on the 1st December, when we were at the beach. Uruguay is famous (amongst Argentinians and Brazilians at least) for the quality of its beaches, and feeling in need of a bit of a tan before we head home, we headed east for a few days.

Our first stop was La Paloma, a little beach town about 4 hours from Montevideo. We did little but lie on the beach, nap and read during our 2 days there, although the timing of our visit was notable in that it coincided with the 'Day of the Gnocchi.' This occurs on the 29th of each month, the day before payday, when people were usually so poor that they couldn't afford to eat anything other than these cheap potato dumplings. Today, often gnocchi is only available on menus on this day, so we had to sample some. Coupled with bolognaise sauce and a 1 litre bottle of Pilsen, one of the local beers, it was absolutely delicious.

From La Paloma we headed west to Punta del Este, the “party capital” of Uruguay, where the beautiful people come to dance at the nightclubs and gamble in the casinos. Or at least, they do in high season, which, we discovered, only really lasts between Christmas and Carneval in February. James had a vague desire for us to go out but his plans were foiled: most of the clubs only open on weekends in low season (and we were there mid-week). Just as well really, considering a) our regular bedtime of 11pm is a good 3 hours before the clubs even open and b) after 9 months on the road, I am not sure even our smartest remaining clothes would pass muster with any self-respecting bouncer.

The centre of Punta is meant to be a little like Surfer's Paradise in Oz, so we decided to stay in Manantiales, a small suburb 20 minutes out of town which is home to Bikini Beach (sponsored by HSBC Premier). The upside of being here in off-season was there were no crowds: in fact, we had the beach pretty much to ourselves. The area is pretty good for surfing but our desire to hire boards for the day was quickly overpowered by a stronger desire to just lie on the beach and soak up some sun. I did rouse myself enough to go for a paddle in the sea a couple of times, but the water was so icy cold I didn't last long.

Away from the empty beaches Manantiales was a hive of activity, with lots of businesses preparing for the official 'seasonal re-opening' next weekend and lots more in the process of construction – we were very sad not to be able to pay a visit to “Glam Coffee” which offered take-away drinks, a fairly new concept in these parts. Presumably the 'glam' part refers to the models who will be acting as baristas. We were there however, for the opening of Cactus and Pescado, a gorgeous fish restaurant overlooking the beach. We only meant to stop in for a quick lunch before catching the bus into town, but the restaurant had a 3 course menu del dia which included a free glass of wine – clearly too good a deal to pass up. After washing the meal down with an additional bottle of wine, we realised that we had accidentally had another Quality Lunch, decided that the town probably wasn't worth the effort, and collapsed on the beach for the rest of the afternoon.

Arriving in Montevideo after a month in Patagonia was something of a relief – not quite of the scale of our arrival in Salta after Bolivia, but it was definitely a good to be back in a city again. And Montevideo, walkable in scale and with a population of just 1.5m people, was the perfect place in which to readjust to urban living. Unlike the airport, which seemed brand new, with a futuristic design and more brands than we'd seen in weeks. It was a little overwhelming.....

This is a special entry, not about a place we've been to but an item we're carrying that has become very close to Sarah's heart. Her back-pack.

Purchased in a market in Hanoi in April for the princely sum of £6, this '100% Athentic' (sic) North Face back-pack has now travelled with us across 3 continents over the last 8 months.

It started to show its quality two weeks after purchase, when the handle on the top of the bag fell off. About two weeks later, a large tear opened up in the material on the front of the bag, just below the wonky North Face logo. Luckily, Sarah has been saving up Christmas cracker sewing kits for the last three years, and was therefore able to stitch up the hole in an attractive 'drunken trainee surgeon' style with snazzy blue and white thread. This process has been repeated once every couple of weeks as more of the cheap nylon material around the stitching tears away.

Next the shoulder straps started to give way. These were fixed using a combination of stitching and black duck tape, that nicely sets off the blue and grey colour scheme of the rest of the bag.

In Australia we lost one of the zippers, but were able to make do with the one left over, which only falls off occasionally and can easily be reattached in a quick 5-minute procedure.

In New Zealand the metal support bars built into the back of the back suddenly decided to invert themselves, sticking painfully into Sarah's back. Through brute force we were able to bend them back into roughly their original concave position.

In Chile the zip teeth began to misfire, so that once a day or so the bag wouldn't do up and we had to run the zippers back and forth from side to side until they finally caught and started to work again.

Then as we walked around the Lake District in Bariloche, we heard a ripping noise and discovered that the breathable mesh back support had torn from top to bottom. Figuring this only made it more breathable, we left it as is.

What I thought was the last straw came in Ushuaia whilst we were trekking through the Tierra del Fuego National Park. The zips themselves finally fell off, and the bag fell open scattering our food over the forest floor. So that we could make it to the end of the trail, I tied the bag up with a scarf and we pressed on. Sarah was clearly upset, but I told her that the bag had had a long life, and we would buy her a better one as soon as we got back to the shops the next day.

The next day I awoke to a grin the size of a Cheshire Cat, and with bleary eyes watched as Sarah unveiled the ultimate expression of her worrying new make-do-and-mend mentality. She explained that she had found a number of buttons in the sewing kits along with the needles and thread last night, and had had a brain-wave. Instead of a zip, the mouth of the bag is now closed by means of a system of buttons around which you loop short lengths of strap that were re-purposed from a pair of her trousers. It really is quite ingenious. Over the course of the last week these straps have distintegrated into a loose weave of threads, but these can still be wound round and round the buttons to close the bag.

I only hope that Franken-bag makes it home, otherwise I think Sarah may have some kind of breakdown.

At the end of the world they've run out of scenery. The view from the bus window was bleak: dull tundra stretched to the horizon under a hot cloudless sky, and the few birds overhead looked hopelessly lost. We were on our way to Tierra del Fuego, Land of Fire, 'Fin del Mundo', The End of the World. I've always wanted to go, to follow in the footsteps of Magellan and Darwin and see what it's like at the very edge of the map, or what used to be the edge of the map before it all got filled-in.

So it was with no small amount of excitement that I found myself standing on the edge of the South American continent, looking south across Magellan's Strait to Tierra del Fuego. This romanticism was dampened when the car ferry pulled in to take us across. We could have been going to Calais.

Whilst the Strait is by far and away the safest route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (or was, before the Panama Canal was built) it's by no means a cake-walk. The clashing of the two oceans makes for a roller-coaster ride, and within a few minutes of leaving the shore Sarah and I had to climb out on deck to breath the fresh air and find a horizon to stare at. The air was pretty fresh. Freezing, actually. We were contemplating climbing back down when we noticed a black and white object streaking through the water towards the ship at high speed. As a large wave rolled over it, the black and white shape broke free of the water, jumping though the air for a second before diving under our bow. Commerson's dolphins! Just like their cousins in Puerto Madryn, the dolphins in the Strait like to ride the waves that form around the boats, and we were soon joined by four or five of them, zipping around in the surf. We were so distracted watching their antics that we didn't notice the enormous wave coming towards us. It hit us with a crunch and a splash, completely drenching the entire starboard side of the ferry, including the 30 or so passengers who were out on deck. Sarah and I burst out laughing, but the smug Dutch guy next to us with the now-soggy, formerly-fancy SLR looked less-than pleased.

Once we arrived on the other side of the Strait, I was a little disappointed to discover that the scenery was pretty much the same, in that there wasn't much of it. More flat plain as far as we could see. This began to change though, as we drove further and further south. Over the next few hours evergreen forests appeared around large alpine lakes, and the road began to weave left and right as we climbed up towards some mini-mountains. We were driving up over the end of the Andes – the coccyx of the spine that stretches the entire length of South America. At their bottom as they peter out the Andes make one last swerve east, a detour caused by the grinding of the Scotia against the South American plate. These mountains are the youngest of the Andean range, and are only knee-high to some the peaks we saw to the west of Mendoza and Bariloche. It was over this last small hurdle that we had to travel to reach Ushuaia, the Southernmost City on Earth, nestled between the mountains and the sea, staring south towards Antarctica.

At first glance, Ushuaia looks just as you would expect. Stacks of shipping containers, small grey battleships, bunkers and more corrugated iron roofs crowd the harbour and give the place the utilitarian feel of a WWII outpost. This atmosphere is dispelled as you enter the centre of town and realise that the Twee Alpine Architecture disease that afflicts Bariloche seems to have claimed another victim. I suppose the many rich tourists that now visit Ushuaia en-route to Antarctica need somewhere to stock-up on chocolate gifts and penguin ornaments.

Most of Tierra del Fuego's recent history is shaped by its remote location on the border between Argentina and Chile. Both want countries want a piece of the pie, and have been close to war several times while staking out their claims. One of the rules for claiming sovereignty over a place seems to be that you have to have people living there. This is an issue in Ushuaia, as who in their right mind would want to live in such a place? Covered in snow half the year, ripped apart by wind for the rest, driving you to madness with 18 hours of sunlight a day in the summer or depression in winter with only 6. Argentina initially got around the problem by forcing people to live there. Inspired by the British Empire's penal colonies in Australia, they decided to build their own in Tierra del Fuego. We spent a great morning wandering around the former prison cells of some of the first inhabitants of Ushuaia, including that of the famous Russian anarchist Simón Radowitzky who served 18 of his 21 years in solitary confinement for blowing up the Police Chief of Buenos Aires. He then escaped on a pirate ship, was recaptured, then pardoned, then made his way back to Europe where he fought in the Spanish Civil War before finally emigrating to Mexico where he died, presumably from exhaustion.

Also in the prison, we found this photo which we think deserves a special mention due to the the unknown prisoner in the first row, second from the right...

I wish I knew what he was in for. Judging by the look of his brylcreemed hair, square jaw, and moustache/eye patch combo I would say seducing a Naval Commander's wife, stealing a ship and then knocking-out the Mayor in a bar-brawl that started over a game of cards.

Argentina now uses less extreme measures to encourage people to live in Ushuaia. The whole town is a tax-haven, and the government employs roughly 70% of the population (doing what, we never found out) with incredibly generous salaries and employment terms such as the 'The 25 Winters Retirement' whereby those who stick out 25 winters in the town are allowed to retire early, on the best pension in the entire country.

Those not working for the government work in tourism, and as I mentioned above the most common reason for finding yourself in the town is to catch a cruise ship to Antarctica. Ushuaia sits above the Antarctic Peninsula that juts out from the mainland towards South America, which means you can easily reach it by a 4 day boat trip as opposed to a several weeks through dangerous iceberg-filled seas. We were almost tempted to try and get onto a boat on a last-minute ticket until we found out that even the cheapest berth would cost over $4,000. Most people pay $10 to $20,000 to make the trip.

Instead we contented ourselves with a more modest expedition by sea-kayak into the Beagle Channel. To get to the river where we would start our journey we had to take a minibus an hour east of town. For the most part we drove along the edge of a long U-shaped valley that in the winter is used for cross-country skiing and dog-sledding. As we sped by we saw a couple of farms where the huskies are bred – hundreds of white wooden kennels arranged in rows like a miniature version of the POW camp from The Great Escape.

We were a group of 12, and once we reached the river and got changed into rather fetching waterproofs we had to be divided into two kayaks for the two hour trip. We then dragged our inflatable kayaks into the river and spent a leisurely hour coasting downstream before we had to lift the kayaks over a sandbank and then pushed off out into the channel proper. Out in the open water we spent an hour paddling around cormorant-studded rocks and sea-weedy inlets. We even spotted an enormous turkey-vulture cruising around the bay, menacing the smaller birds.

It was a magnificent morning, but hard work. Sarah and I had elected to row in the smaller of the two kayaks, which was an error in that there were only 3 other people paddling with us, all of whom, whilst able to row in time, seemed completely incapable of actually putting any effort into the process. I found myself wishing I had the rest of The Gentlemen's Eight from college in the boat, with Miss Gledhill coxing. Then we would have got somewhere. As it was Sarah and I had to take the strain for all of us, which turned into a herculean effort as we made a last push back to shore into a headwind.

After our exertions we were treated with cups of soup, and piled back into the minibus for the second half of our trip – a nature hike on Gable Island, an almost-deserted Argentine military outpost in the middle of the Channel. To get there we took a zodiac – no more paddling thank god – and had a great lunch of steak sandwiches, olives and red wine on the island before setting off on our hike. We had lunch in the garden of the one and only building on the island, a three room wooden shack manned by three Argentine soldiers. Sounds official, but the reality was somewhat more casual. When I went into the building to use the loo I found all three in the living room having lunch. A fat man in a string vest was spooning meatballs out of an industrial sized pan set on the table for his colleagues. One of them was shoveling the food up as fast as it could be served, the other was slouching in his chair playing playstation (Assassin's Creed I). Keeping these three consummate professionals company were their three dogs; an ancient Alsatian, a mad Huskie-Corgie hybrid (a Horgie?) and an adorable terrier puppy. I spent most of lunch playing with the puppy, after it was bitten by the Horgie for acting up.

When we set off on our hike, the Horgie stalked off ahead through the bushes whilst the puppy happily bounded along with the group, clearly thrilled to have such a large pack to play with. We walked away from the camp along the beach before heading inland through sub-Antarctic forest from one side of the island to the other. Our guide Augustino was very knowledgeable, and supplied all manner of interesting names for the many trees and plants we'd been seeing over the past months – our favourites were Winter's Bark, Old Man's Beard, Indian's Bread and Chinese Lantern. As we walked through the forest, stopping to play with the puppy every five minutes, we saw several beaver dams and whole patches of forest destroyed by their malevolent tree-felling.

When we reached the beach where the zodiac was waiting to pick us up, we tearfully said goodbye to the terrier pup. The Horgie had emerged from the undergrowth to see us off as well, and both stood on the edge of the beach, looking forlorn as we chugged away waving in the boat. They looked terribly sad to have lost their playmates. That is until the Horgie turned around and began to cheerfully sodomise the poor terrier, staring out at us over the increasing expanse of water with his tongue hanging out.

From El Calafate our journey down to Tierra del Fuego took us south, back over the border into Chile to visit the Torres del Paine National Park. The park is known as one of the best in the whole of South America on account of its spectacular scenery and epic hiking trails. It has only recently acquired this reputation, as before 1959 it used to be one great big sheep farm, before being bought back by the Chilean government.

The nearest town to the National Park is Puerto Natales, a ramshackle collection of buildings that are really little more than shacks, stitched together from plyboard, corrugated iron and plaster, leaning against each other to keep out the cold. Dumped in the centre of town after a 6 hour bus ride we were a little unsure what to expect of our hostel, and were most pleasantly surprised when we arrived to find we had booked ourselves into a very well run B&B with warm rooms, TVs and big comfy beds.

We had no time to take a rest though, as we frantically ran around town trying to sort out our hiking trips for the next couple of days before the shops shut. Most people only stay in Puerto Natales for one night, heading off into the National Park the following morning to 'Hike the “W”' - a four day trek taking in the main sights in the park, camping en-route or in mountainside refugios. We neither had the time, equipment nor the inclination to put ourselves through that ordeal, so had to work out the best way to see as much as possible in the few days we had. After checking the weather forecast we decided to take the bus into the park the next day to hike one leg of 'The W' route – the most impressive stretch up to the namesake 'Torres del Paine' peaks – then take a rest day before taking on a one-day minibus tour of the other main sights.

At 7am the next day we clambered onto the bus taking us into the park. We slept most of the way to the base camp, waking up in time to be shoved off the bus at 10am, at which point we realised we had a 26km round trip ahead of us, and not that much time to do it in. Off we went! The first hour we walked along a broad flat plain, then up a mountain path that wound round into a steep river valley. There were a few dark clouds around, but for the most part the entire valley was lit up by the sun and we were soon down to wearing just our T-shirts. As we walked up into the river valley though, the weather flipped from nice to nasty. An icy wind kicked up and it started to rain and sleet. By the time we reached the first refugio at 12:30 we were soaked, freezing and thoroughly demoralised at the thought of another 10km ahead of us, mostly straight up, before we reached the end of the trail. To make matters worse the clouds had come in and the entire range was covered in a thick white mist, so we didn't even know if we would be able to see the Torres when we got there.

We sat in the refugio debating the best course of action over our soggy sandwiches. As we counted kilometres and looked out the window up at clouds, we found that we were sitting next to an English couple who were making the return trip from the Torres. They assured us that it was worth the trip, and as they had camped on the mountain the previous night before setting off at dawn, we felt like complete wimps for considering turning around halfway. So we set off again.

Luckily the weather cleared up almost as soon as we set off after lunch. The track was also a lot more easy-going and sheltered from the wind inside a shady forest. We kept up a good pace too, so found ourselves an hour ahead of our planned time as we broke free of the treeline and found ourselves at the foot of the final ascent. This last hour was to be a scramble straight up over a scree slope of boulders, sand and gravel. As Sarah has achieved true 'Mountain Goat Status' through our hikes in China, Borneo and Peru, we had no problems (well, maybe a couple of vertigo panics, but nothing serious). The view of the Torres del Paine when we reached the top of the scree slope was breathtaking. Three spires of granite laced with streaks of basalt, soaring above a hidden glacial lake you can only see when you reach the summit.

The way down actually took us longer than the way up, carefully treading down the mountainside till we reached the safety of the forest. The clouds rolled back in again, and we walked through more rain to make it back to the pick-up point with two hours to spare. To Sarah's disgust, I insisted we walk a further 7km back to an earlier drop-off point. She sulked for the first few kilometres, before I made the error of suggesting that the empty gravel road ahead looked like something out of a pop video: Cue Sarah's interpretation of 'That Don't Impress Me Much' by Shania Twain, followed by countless other karaoke classics, all the way home.

After a much needed rest day, lying in bed till noon massaging our aching legs and watching Friends re-runs, we were ready for another crack at the National Park. This time, we would be doing it from the comfort of a mini-bus with minimal hiking. It was a long day – over 12 hours of touring – but took us around all the sights we would have missed. We saw more mountains and glacial lakes, waterfalls, rheas (ostrich-like birds) with their chicks and lots of guanacos (another llama spin-off).

The two highlights for me though, were a trip to a giant milodon cave and a short walk to Lake Grey to see the glacier. Milodons were prehistoric plant-eating mammals that look kind of like giant sloths. They were about 10 feet tall, and were the preferred food of the hunter-gatherer tribes that used to inhabit the area. The first stop on our bus tour was an enormous cave hollowed out by an ancient sea, within which Victorian archeologists discovered a Milodon skeleton and human artifacts from around 5000 BC. The discovery of the Milodon skeleton caused quite a bit of excitement at the time – the Daily Mail even sent a team of explorers over in 1909 'To capture a live milodon to exhibit at London Zoo'. Ambitious.

Glacier Grey was the last stop of the day. We actually only caught glimpses of the glacier from the southern end of the lake, but the shore was crowded with massive icebergs that had broken off from the glacier and floated downstream with the wind. We nearly didn't make it to the lake itself as the wind blowing down from the glacier was so fierce - it regularly reaches over 100km/hr, knocking you off your feet and ripping the heat from your body. We definitely felt like we were close to the Antarctic, and were very glad once we had taken our photos and sprinted back to the bus. We were even more pleased as we sat back in our heated seats ahead of the rest of the group, and it started to pelt it down with rain, then snow.

El Calafate is famous as the base for visiting the Perito Moreno Glacier. As a result it's bustling with western tourists clad head to toe in shiny new North Face adventure gear, buying maps and boasting about their amaaazing 6-day trekking exploits. The phrase "all the gear, no idea" seemed to apply to about 90% of them......

Despite being something of a tourist mecca, El Calafate still has a local feel: on the day of our arrival, there was a music festival happening in town. The music could be heard as soon as we stepped off the bus from Puerto Madryn, and we eventually discovered it was taking place in the field next to our hostel. We had thought about going along once we were settled in, but as a) we could hear every word from our room and b) the 'music' was shit, we decided not to bother. The festival didn't finish until about 1am, which went down really well with us both, especially as this was meant to be our first proper night's sleep after a 26 hour journey.....

We took the next day as a 'rest day', making time to visit the local Laguna Nimez, a pretty nature walk around a couple of lakes which are home to a family of flamingos and various other birds. We didn't get quite as excited about the wildlife as a lot of our fellow visitors (many of whom, armed with binoculars and notebooks, seemed to be proper birdwatchers) but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It also gave us an excuse to get out of the hostel and escape its owner, a young and at first seemingly friendly girl who quickly started to unnerve and then terrify us both. It seemed we could do nothing right - we took the key outside the hostel with us when we weren't supposed to, we stored food in the fridge and then had the audacity to try and cook ("You aren't really supposed to, but I'll make an exception this time" she said, with a smile that could freeze the blood in your veins). Creepy.

The main event here was predictably our visit to the glacier. Perito Merino has special status amongst the world's glaciers as it's the only one that's still advancing. It moves forward at a rate of 2m a day, but at the same time pieces break off from the glacier's face, and so overall, it pretty much stands still. Everyone who'd been before had told us how fantastic it was, but were still blown away by our first glimpse. Even partially obscured by swathes of mist, it was absolutely spectacular - an 18 mile long river of ice. Our bus stopped to let us get off and take pictures – right from the get-go, I was a little trigger-happy. By the end of the day, we had taken some 470 photos between us! Whilst we were taking photos, our guide told us a bit about the local flora and fauna - the firebush, so called because the plant's bright red flowers look like tiny sparks, and the calafate bush. The calafate bush has a berry which locals use in everything from jam to sandwich cookies to ice cream. As you'd expect in these mysterious southern parts, the berry also comes with its own legend. Those that eat the berry are fated to one day return to Patagonia and, if unmarried, likely to meet and marry a local girl. I kept James well away from the fruit, but I later tried a sample of the calafate ice cream - it had a slightly odd taste, like a bitter blueberry.

Next we took a boat ride, right to the south face of the glacier. I'd heard horror stories about boats crammed with 300+ tourists, and although our boat wasn't small (about 130 people on board), it had a viewing deck that ran all the way around its outside, meaning everyone who wanted to got a great view of the glacier. From here, we could appreciate just how enormous it is - some 60m high, it towered over us, its pointed peaks glinting menacingly in the sunlight like teeth. As the light changed and changed again during our hour-long trip the colours in the ice changed too: from flat white, to turquoise to bright blue and back again.

I could happily have stared at the glacier for hours. Luckily, that's exactly what happened next. Flush from the exorbitant entrance fees, the National Park authorities have actually done something useful with the money and built a large network of wooden walkways in front of the glacier - close enough for you to observe it from several different levels, but far enough away that you don't get hit by pieces of falling ice. Every 20 minutes or so, we'd hear an almighty rumbling like thunder directly overhead, and a chunk of the glacier would sever off and splash into the icy cold waters below. The noises were deafening - often out of all proportion to the small pieces of ice that made them. In 2004, a piece of ice broke off causing an explosion so loud, it could be heard some 10km away! No one can predict exactly when and where the next 'big one' will happen, but anyone planning a Patagonian holiday in 2013 could be in luck......

We managed to catch one of the chunks falling on video - sort of.  James would particularly like to draw your attention to the 'atmospheric' water drops on the lens in the following clip: