Free Latinalicious: The South America Diaries by Becky Wicks

at the moment my plans to get there for the Rio Carnival in February are only vague and I didn’t want to miss out on seeing the falls altogether. No one should miss this.
    No matter what happens in your life, big or small, good or bad, Iguazu Falls will still be there, tumbling into infinity, and nothing we can ever do will stop it. There are some things in this world more powerful than all of us can ever hope to be, you know? Unfortunately, snorers on buses are one of them.
    02/09

House-sitting for the rich and famous …
    My friend Autumn arrived from Sydney the other day with a suitcase and a disproportionately large plastic bag. When I asked what was inside the bag she said, ‘Koala bears!’
    Autumn has brought with her to Buenos Aires thirty large, stuffed koala bears, which we are to distribute throughout our travels over these next couple of months together. As she’s a photographer, we’re to document the giving of these bears in a series of photos on our blogs to mark our journey. It’s a lovely thought. I’m not yet quite sure how we’re supposed to get them all onto buses, though.
    We have a lot of ground to cover, including much of Patagonia and a cruise through Tierra del Fuego — a wildlife-riddled archipelago off the southernmost tip of South America, which few people ever get to see. We are literally travelling to the end of planet earth. With a bag of stuffed toys. It’s a true test of friendship, if ever there was one.
    The first challenge was getting the koala bears from one end of Palermo to the other. We stayed for two nights at a ridiculously chic hotel called Home, which was a well-deserved treat after Milhouse (although hanging with Dror and the transvestites was fun) and saw us staying up all night gossiping over bottles of Malbec and playing the Evita soundtrack on loop.
    The Evita Peron Museum, which we felt obliged to visit, turned out to be one of the most entertaining, yet most baffling museums I’ve ever been to, thanks to an audio guide that insisted we run about the place in no particular order, looking for exhibits that weren’t where they were supposed to be. Make sure you’ve got nothing else on your agenda for the day, if you’re planning to do it — it’s going to take you some time.
    Anyway, Home was the kind of hotel we could have stayed in for a week, with its amazingly presented food items, such as scrambled eggs in tiny jars, and a whirlpool tub in the bedroom. It’s the kind of Home I’ll clearly never have, actually, but it’s good to dream. After that, we had an invitation to join some friends I’d met out and about at a place called Jardin Escondido, which happens to be the summer home of the esteemed movie director, Francis Ford Coppola (ooh-er!). He rents it out, apparently, to those looking for a quiet hideaway in Buenos Aires.
    Knocking on the door with our cases and bag of koala bears, we were welcomed inside by our friends and a couple of super friendly Argentineans called Fernando and Germán, who showed us to our rooms.
    I let Autumn have the room Francis Ford Coppola sleeps in because I’m nice like that and also because I was slightly wary of finding a horse’s head in the bed (well, you never know when he might slip a little movie prop in a random place, just for kicks), but the whole house was sinfully sexy, with absolutely no severed heads anywhere. I particularly liked the stash of Francis Ford Coppola movies by the giant TV and Francis Ford Coppola books on the coffee table … just in case he forgets what he’s achieved when he stays.
    Think oak bookshelves, leather couches, the sweet smell of incense and expensive candles, cow-skin carpets and vases brimming over with pretty blooms. It’s a gorgeous place, one that made me realise why the man has made so many good movies … if all his homes are like this, he must be permanently inspired, although it must have been a momentary urge for something more obtuse than a scented candle in his