New Continents - Part 1

 

Over the last couple of weeks my Wife and I have been in South America, it's been a long planned trip that we started work on earlier this year and we were very excited when our departure date finally arrived. So, at the start of November we made our way to Heathrow T5 for our 17 hour flight to Buenos Aires via Rio de Janeiro. 

I've been lucky in my life and have visited most places, Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and Oceania, South America was conspicuous by it's total absence from my postcard wall, i.e. neither of us had ever been there before and so all of the places and countries that we planned to visit were completely unknown entities to us! 

The photo above could be anywhere really, but is our first glimpse of the place, somewhere in Brasil early in the morning after flying all night across the Atlantic and just prior to landing at Rio. Our stop in Rio was only 90 minutes or so, most passengers got off there and a few got on, the last leg to BA took around 3 hours and by midday we were landing at EZE airport in Argentina. As we took off from Rio I snapped the picture below, it's the famous Copacabana and Ipanema beaches featured in several iconic songs over the years, our itinerary didn't include Rio but as we remarked at the time, a good reason to return one day!

We were staying in the Palermo district of BA, and as we learned it's somewhat trendy and upcoming, kind of like Shoreditch in London, a bit scruffy but where all the good bars and hip restaurants are.

I even managed to find a little craft beer joint on the same street as our hotel, more of a hole in the wall than a bar but they served up a delicious APA (American Pale Ale) (see above) that tasted fab after nearly a day and a half of travelling. The prospects for the trip looked good and we met up with a couple of mates who were travelling with us but had come out the day before. We only had one night in BA before heading back to the airport and hopping across the Andes mountains to Chile, however we would be back to BA later, more in the next part.

Gaps

I haven't been posting much over the last couple of weeks, the reason is that we've been away again, somewhere far-far away and much of it pretty much off-grid! Anyway, I will be posting about the trip over the coming days, it ticked off (the bucket list) a brand new continent and several new countries for me and was a blast! (locational clue in the picture above)

Friday Smirk

The lad's playing tennis without a net again...

Friday Smirk

The lads pointing out the concept of Occam's razor, sometimes the simplest answer is the correct one. When asked by a Theist why an Atheist doesn't kill or rape as many people as they like (i.e. if there's no retribution in some afterlife) my response would be that we do exactly that, and the number we prefer is zero. 

Gotham 4

We visited a museum called the "New York Historic" while over there last week, never been there before and really enjoyed it, an eclectic mix of cultural stuff including an exhibition of Tiffany lampshades, more dragonflies that you can shake a stick at, very beautiful!

We also dropped into the MOMA or the Museum of Modern Art, as you can see in the picture above it was a load of old Pollocks..

Gotham 3

Finding beers from producers such as Trillium (Boston) is, of course, much easier in NYC than it is at home, here I'm quaffing a can of "Melcher Street" from the aforementioned brewer and delicious it was too! Reminded me of our visit to that city back in 2022 when we visited their brilliant taproom in Seaport a couple of times for supper and beers.

We also revisited the "Highline" this trip and browsed around the Hudson Yards area in the afternoon sunshine. In the picture above is the stunning "Vessel" sculpture designed by British artist Thomas Heatherwick, it looked fantastic glinting in the sunlight, an impressive "thing"..

Gotham ales

A delicious pint of hazy pale ale from NYC brewers "Other Half", sampled at their new taproom in Midtown New York at the Rockefeller Centre. We visited a couple of taprooms while in the city last week, notable ones were Other Half (great beer!), Bronx Brewery (Hudson Yard) and "Strong Rope" down in Red Hook (Brooklyn) which had the most fabulous view across the bay to the statue of liberty (see picture below).. the beer was pretty good to!

After a quick pint in the Strong Rope taproom we decamped to the Red Hook Tavern for some dinner, I had their famous burger (best in the city by all accounts) It was epic, I've had many burgers in my life but this one may well be the best so far, so flavoursome and not over "stacked" like many today, a perfect evening..

Gotham 2

Snapped this while in NYC last week, it's the building at 1 Liberty Street where I used to work in the early 2000's it was right next to the World Trade Centre and was severely damaged on 9/11, after that we moved up to Midtown (the smell downtown was intolerable) It was good to see the old place again, and, although we've been before (2018) we also had another look around the memorial that's on the spot where the twin towers were (see video below)

Gotham 1

Just spent a glorious week in NYC, really lucky with the weather although it felt like it's just turning over there, anyway right up until Thursday the Sun was still out and blue skies the norm. The picture above was taken from Central Park looking back toward 59th - 57th streets, this view never gets old the architecture (while not everyone's cup of tea) is so striking.

Cracking Limes

A new beer from Verdant, tried last weekend it's a pale ale made with Motueka, Citra, and Simcoe hops and their legendary house yeast strain. It's a banger, classic Verdant murk, creamy and soft with flavours of pineapple, mango and citrus (think limes) a cracking beer!