Some interesting numbers

Since we left Switzerland the 26th September 2012, we travelled aprox. 2'958 km and 31 hours  by car in South Africa, we spent about 28 hours in planes to do about 21'000 km and last but not least our travels in South America. We travelled for 75 hours to do 4'953 km with buses... I would like to point out that we spent 6 (!) hours at the Chilean border, most of the time waiting...

Break down of our travel route: We flew from Zürich to Johannesburg over Amsterdam. Then from Johannesburg to Cape Town and drove back to Pretoria via the Garden Route. We went again to Cape Town and explored Greyton and Struisbaai and back to Cape Town.  This time we flew back to Johannesburg. Then we visited Swaziland and later on Shelly Beach and Durban by car. Finally we left for Buenos Aires Argentina. In South America we travelled so far only by bus. Our route:
From Buenos Aires to Foz do Iguaçu in Brasil, then to Asuncion in Paraguay, crossing the border to Clorinda in Argentina, then going to Salta and Mendoza. From Mendoza we went to Santiago de Chile and from there to Valparaiso, that's were we are right now :-)

The travel has been quite an adventure... One of our favorite towns along the way was the tiny and run down town Clorinda, bordering Paraguay. It was crazy to see people riding their motorbikes with babies in their arms... But everybody was so friendly and nice to us. When I asked a gentlemen if I could take a picture of him drinking mate tea, he gladly posed for me and immediately offered me some tea.

Also our lunch was quite a different experience. We chose a tiny restaurant and Damien ordered a glass of red wine, the lady brought the bottle with the kork inside of the bottle. She told us that it was too much effort to get it out and it was much easier to just push it in... :-) According to Damien the wine didn't even taste too bad. When we finished our meal and paid, the lady run after us with the rest of the bottle. We didn't realise that we had purchased the whole bottle, it was so cheap (about 15 CHF for two meals, wine and water...) We left the wine for the people in the restaurant, since we were about to take our next bus ride and it would have not been the best idea to down a bottle of wine before that. Or maybe it would have been? ;-)