Just call me Shackleton.

So, I'm totally on the bottom of the world. I can't quite get my head around it. Every few minutes I have the rerealisation that I'm further south in the world than everything except New Zealand. It is truly an alien place, Argentina, if not actually but intellectually. I feel spiritually connected to the pioneers and explorers of yore who created the footsteps I'm walking in. Of course, one man's other side of the world is another man's home.

I shall without doubt have plenty to say on my various adventures when I return, once the heavy fog of long-distance travel has cleared and the feeling returned to my legs. I'm in Patagonia at the moment, which involved 28 hours sat on a bus. Far more comfortable than the flight over the Atlantic as it turned out, but still 28 hours on a bus. I'm a walking DVT timebomb. My veins are going to be like old semolina.

I shall take this one for the team though, happy to run the risk of economy class-induced heart attack to see a bit of the world most have not experienced before. They say the planet is a smaller place these days, and perhaps not so long ago it would have taken me months to get here, but several days of travel is still significant. I don't think 7,500 miles by air and land should ever be easy, it awakens the explorer in all of us.

I get up for my holiday.

I woke up in a panic fully three minutes before my 6am alarm went off just now. I slept the night before embarking on a major journey, which is surprising enough in itself, actually. But now begins the ridiculous slog to get somewhere outrageously hot and mildly glamorous.

Packing is tough. You load your entire set of worldly possessions on to your bed, thinking that each item has a crucial and world-changing reason for making this trip, and then the whole process becomes an elaborate sartorial version of Dragon's Den. "I like you, green t-shirt, you've got spunk and verve and you've been loyal for many years. But you just don't go with enough pairs of trousers, and for that reason, I'm out."

It's Argentina I'm off to, that doyenne of South America and long-time foe of the UK. The official Foreign Office advice is not to join any protests against the UK whilst in Buenos Aires, so I'm glad they've got their best man on the job and it isn't the kind of place they train up work experience kids before they earn the right to work somewhere better. I fully intend to avoid any such protests, and I've got my fingers crossed I'll look down-at-heel enough not to get mugged. I basically plan to pretend I'm German for much of the trip, I have a backstory planned and everything.

It's 30 degrees in Buenos Aires at the moment - the middle of summer in the southern hemisphere. I won't be happy unless I come back with third-degree sunburn or at least a couple of juicy melanomas. When you're putting in the effort to go this far for so long (I've used up more than half of my annual holiday allowance already!) you want something good to show for it.

Of course, it's the flight schedule that is even more punishing than I thought, with a 10-and-a-half-hour stopover in Madrid to look forward to this afternoon. It's the 13-hour flight to South America that's really going to kill me though. I don't think I've ever been in one place for that length of time. I don't recall ever even sleeping that long. It's not like they can even touch down at a Moto service station on the M40 for a wee and a quick run around, the only convenient possible place being a brief stop in Mauritania but no-one has done that since 1836.

Now, where was I?

I have always wondered how a seemingly thriving blog can just stop mid-flow and never be updated again, without so much as a goodbye-your-leave from the proprietor - the blogosphere is littered with the carcasses of good intentions, efforts that have been sustained for years laid low by a new child or a change of circumstance. I have always wondered how it can just stop, as if in mid-sentence. But now I know.

I'm aware of the not-so-subtle irony in welcoming the New Year by apologetically promising to write more often and then going quiet for five weeks. Silly boy. I do of course hope to rectify the situation, but it would be unwise of me to promise. In fact, I'm definitely going to be quiet for the next couple of weeks or so - I am off abroad, on an epic jaunt the likes of which have not been imagined. I shall fill you in the very second week I get back. Bon February, dear reader.