Part of my road trip ""From the Caribbean to the South Pole"" in 2015. An enormous country with the longest bus trips ever, but well worth it: the must-see tourist attractions include the Perito Moreno glacier (beware, not the Perito Moreno city, which is hundreds of miles away), the breathtaking Patagonian landscapes, the Epecuen ghost town (well, if you like ghost towns) and the world-renowned Iguazu falls.

In terms of living, Buenos Aires is where things happen – one third of the entire population stays there! Your experience will greatly vary. The first time I lived in Buenos Aires, during the winter vacation period (i.e. July – remember that seasons are inversed in the southern hemisphere), my experience was awful: hotels/condos fully booked, high cost of living due to the terrible exchange rate, and a pickpocketing experience on a bus to top it all. I returned a few months later (with the only purpose of meeting again the lovely Clara Luz G.) and found a different city: empty hotels, collapsed pesos, great exchange rate on the “blue dollar”. In other words, you need to carefully consider the timing of your trip, as the Argentinean economy goes bankrupt regularly - and this is a good thing.

A few tips:

- Transportation: if you want to do the entire trip by land as I did, a great resource I used is www.plataforma10.com : it shows the complete time tables, prices and other details of all buses in the entire country.

- Phone: If you call an Argentinian land line with VoIP software such as Skype, you must add the local area code preceded by a 0, so for example +54 (Argentina) - 02963 (Perito Moreno) -123456. If however you are calling cell phone numbers (which often start with 029), you must add a freaking 9 before it, and remove the 0 (and in case remove the initial “15” which is sometimes provided with the number, for inexplicable reasons). So for example to call 0297-1234567, you would dial +54-9-297-1234567. You have no idea how much time I wasted on that one.

- Cash: as I write this note there is a new government, and the “blue dollar” (i.e. the exchange rate on the black market) is not used anymore. The blue rate was 20-30% better than the official Forex rate! Considering the Argentinian economic cycles, the return of the blue dollar is probably just a question of time, so load up with USD before travelling. USD can also be obtained from ATM in nearby Uruguay: during my stay, many expats did “ATM runs” to Colonia with several credit cards, to withdraw the maximum amount of cash allowed.