Things I've learned in South America

People are Nice

We found pretty much everyone as helpful as possible, given language constraints, and often leagues ahead of what any visitor to London might reasonably expect. We'd thoroughly recommend South America as a holiday destination (but see "Spanish").

For the avoidance of doubt, lots of people in Argentina asked where we came from and not one looked less than delighted when we said "England".

Spanish

I learned Spanish between the ages of 12 and 14. I thought it might be nice to brush it up before travelling in case it helped me read menus, etc. I downloaded a couple of "Learn Spanish" podcasts and found that Beginner was too easy but Intermediate just made me feel I should revise my grammar. Hence I did nothing more.

I'm now here to tell you that I think it's pretty much impossible to do the kind of independent-traveller tour we did without at least as much Spanish as I've got.

Although we booked most hotels online (so bypassing the language issue), when we arrived less than half had anyone on hand with much English at all - and one always has questions, if only "how much?" and "where can I eat?" When driving, there are at least a few police checkpoints during every day's drive, and they won't all wave you through. Then there are the road signs with text instead of pictures.

How well I did in each context depended on whether I knew the nouns and verbs people chose. Hence some interactions went fine and some hit an immediate brick wall. Usually I managed to catch enough to get the gist. The other trick was to work out or look up (Google Translate when I last had wi-fi) the key sentence.

Without some Spanish I think you'd have to stick to an organised tour and/or hotels expensive enough to have multilingual staff - just as we'll be on Leg 2.

Telly

Every hotel room we had with a tv had many satellite channels. As you might imagine, we searched out the programmes in English with Spanish subtitles.

We found that cartoons and other kids programmes are always dubbed, so just surf on past. Long-running series are most likely to be subtitled for locals. Hence we watched A LOT of CSI, Law & Order and US comedy shows. Our favourite ended up as "Two and a Half Men" (Charlie Sheen era), which we had never watched before. We now have the theme as a ringtone on our phones.

Argentina is Huge

I think I found out that the surface area of Argentina is 12 times that of the UK. Big.

My original plan to do a lap of the whole of Argentina and Chile in a month was fatally flawed. I'd have been driving pretty long days most days to do it. The pattern that we fell into - of driving about six hours every other day (plus lunch, petrol, etc.) gave a pretty good balance between getting to places and actually appreciating them when we got there.

Because the land is so big, the scenery changes only fairly gradually during the day. We spent hours on end in the middle of huge, flat areas staring at dead-straight roads disappearing to a haze of reflected sky at the horizon - a stark beauty, but more so in recollection than "toughing it out" at the time to get through another N hours of the same.

I Like Traffic Lights...

... and it comes as something as a surprise to say that. One of the types of road junction they have in the Americas but not in the UK, is the 4-way stop or all-way stop. I have driven in Canada and these work quite well, it's a crossroads and whoever gets there first has priority. If there are lots of cars, then one comes out of each road clockwise until all have gone - nice.

That's not the way they do it in South America. Every city is a grid of quite small blocks so there are LOTS of crossroads. The trouble is that there seems to be some sort of local agreement about which road has priority in each case, but the visitor is not privy to this, so every junction becomes a Russian roulette of glancing left, right, crossing fingers and going, so when there is a junction with traffic lights it's a big relief.

One of the "interesting" things during our journey has been the variety in something as mundane as traffic lights.

In Lima, for example, the lights display a number of seconds in red or green counting down to tell drivers and pedestrians exactly how long until the next change. It seems like such a good idea that I wish we had it at home.

On some fast roads in Argentina, the green light flashes before it turns amber to give you extra warning to stop. In other places the light just flashes amber all the time, which means that anyone can go, but with caution. In other places, they may as well not fit an amber light because it never seems to get used.

SatNav

Clare bought me a Tom Tom SatNav for Christmas. It was mainly to save her having to squint at the iPhone map when we're trying to find somewhere new in the UK ("Is the blue dot still on the purple line, Dear?").

On the off-chance, I bought and downloaded Tom Tom maps for Argentina and Chile. The data sizes were vastly smaller than the data just for the UK, so I didn't expect them to be much cop.

Oh My God! We wouldn't have been able to do the trip at all without it/them. They were great in most cities: knowing all road names, one-way roads (very common) and even house number ranges per block. Out of town they were patchy: very detailed diagrams of many complex junctions, and elsewhere telling you you'd gone a quarter of a mile off the road you knew you were on.

Worst sins were (1) where it advertised a shorter route to Cordóba then showed only a very-wrong single line for the town we got lost in for much of the next hour, (2) repeatedly telling me to turn through the barrier in the middle of dual-carriageways in Valparaiso. Best virtues involved getting us to the very door of so many hotels in towns where we'd have struggled even if we could have found sufficiently detailed street maps before reaching the town (pretty much impossible, especially with no mobile data service).

In summary, a life-saver (possibly literally). Clare loved the Kindle which was my Christmas present to her, and thought it was an equally essential travel aid.

Other Argentine Road Stuff

Speed limits are a confusing matter. You're going along a very remote highway with a 110kph limit when you see a 60kph limit and then a 40kph one. Eventually you work out that these relate in some way to a side-turning, often a rough gravel track used about once a day. Before long you have to pretty much ignore these.

Theoretically there are 60kph and 40kph limits in towns, depending how busy areas are. However, you're happily driving along and see a sign "Urban Zone" (in Spanish) and often need to guess what speed limit applies. When you leave the urban zone (with or without a marker) there's just an 80kph limit sign, and no suggestion of 110kph until a summary sign showing different max speeds for different vehicle types - and that several miles on, if at all.

Cones in the middle of the road

If you see three or four cones down the middle of the road, it usually means a checkpoint. You need to slow down and be ready to stop. They may be manned by police, national guard, agricultural protection (to stop plant/animal diseases migrating via carried products) or nobody at all. Mostly you get asked where you're travelling from and to.

Clare likes snorkeling

She's made it one of her Leg 1 highlights (beside Machu Picchu and the Iguazú Falls). I'm very happy about that, because I love it too - just floating there beside shoals of fabulously-coloured fish, rays and sharks. I'm hoping we'll have some fine times together during Leg 3.

Eating

The Latin Americans eat late. We were usually first in at 8:30pm, and places were often still filling around 10pm when we left.

Insects

Despite visiting five countries (ex-US), from sea level to 13,500 feet, and at temperatures from beachwear to gloves, I have to say that this has been one of the least insect-troubled warm-country holidays I've had.

I'm not saying we weren't bitten, just not so much and not so badly. The story is slightly weakened by one particular bite that Clare had a bad reaction to and we had to call out the medics in Lima. But in general it's true.

Aircon Rain

As you walk around Latin American cities, you'll see numerous little puddles. Don't step over the top of them.

Up above will be an air conditioning unit, with the water it's extracting just dropping straight down onto anyone using the pavement. Cheers!

As almost everyone in some cities wants aircon, this is quite common.

We'd have to imagine an exception for Peruvian cities beyond Lima, as our perception was that neither heat nor cooling was in evidence!