Buenos Aires... cut short!

Surprise! I am writing from the UK (we're at Gary's parents Graeme and Joyce's house in Southend), we got back yesterday.

As I said in the previous entry, we arrived in Buenos Aires on Wednesday last week, to the lovely temperature of 28 °C. A nice change from freezing cold Ushuaia - no problem to adapt to the change! There was, however, an aspect of Porteño life we had to get used to (we're old and boring, you see): the nightlife. In Argentina in general, and in Buenos Aires in particular, going out does not happen anywhere near as early as it does in the UK. If you're off for a meal, turning up at a restaurant between 10 pm and midnight is the norm. As for drinks, well, bars are generally empty before 12 pm. Somehow we had a good go at adapting to the culture and did pretty well, but were totally knackered after 4 nights on 3 hours' sleep.

The thing is, we enjoyed the night life, but we also did plenty of stuff during the day, which left no time for afternoon naps! On Thursday and Friday we had a walk around the Centro area, going window-shopping along the Calle Florida and up to the Plaza de Mayo, at the end of which stands the Casa Rosada. My understanding is it is an equivalent of the White House in Argentina (although the president doesn't live there)... except it's pink. We heard several anecdotes about the colour, apparently pink was chosen back in the 1860s to defuse the tension between Argentina's two main parties, by mixing their respective colours (red and white). We were also told that when it was first painted, the red actually came from cow's blood. Lovely! Thankfully they now use real paint!

On Friday night, we met up with our Irish friend Mick (Pantanal, Rio, Bariloche, Buenos Aires... hopefully we'll see him next in Dublin!) We had a few drinks and he excitedly told us about a hurling match taking place the next day. Hurling is an Irish game I had never heard of before, but it looked like fun and we went along with Mick on Saturday afternoon.

Funnily enough, it took place in a neighbouhood of Buenos Aires called Hurlington (pure coincidence - just happens to be where the hurling club is based) and it was a match between Ireland's best players of 2008 and 2009. I guess it was a bit of a reward for the players (being taken on a jolly abroad for a few days, with the excuse of playing a match) and a way to promote hurling abroad.

We had a really lovely afternoon, sitting in the sun drinking wine/beer and chatting to Irish people or practising our Spanish with the many Argentinians of Irish decent who were there. Mick was like an overexcited child all afternoon! By the way, the reason our Flickr is full of pics of him with his favourite hurling players is that he'd forgotten his camera so we lent him ours, imagine being about to meet all your favourite players and finding out you can't take any pics!

After the hurling match on Saturday, we went to the football on Sunday (yes I know... how on earth did Gary make me agree to that?) We saw Boca Juniors vs. Banfield (both are teams from greater Buenos Aires) at the Bombonera stadium (home of the Boca Juniors).

The match was not exactly amazing but, it has to be said, the Boca supporters were. They call themselves "El Jugador N°12" (the 12th Player) and certainly know how to show their support. They sang throughout the match to the sound of heavy drums (their tunes were rather catchy, too) and at the start of the match they unrolled a couple of banners so huge that it covered the whole stand. The first one looked like this...

Then they unrolled the second banner underneath the first, and rolled the first back up to unveil the second one...

You can tell they're used to doing it every week!

On Monday, we had a quiet day to try and recover from a week end of watching sports (always a tiring activity) and going to bed at 4 o'clock in the morning five days in a row. It was on the same day that we found out British Airways had voted in favour of going on strike between 22nd December and 2nd January, which was very bad news for us since we were scheduled to fly back right in the middle of it, on 24th December.

That night, while out, we spent ages racking our brains to figure out how else to get back home. When we got back to the hostel, Gary went on the internet and saw that there were 3 stand by spaces that had just opened up on the BA flight to London the very next day. So at 1.30 in the morning, when we thought we'd still be in Buenos Aires for 10 days, we decided to change our ticket back to fly the next day. It left us only a few hours to pack, cancel out the hostel and make our way to the airport. It was a risk as there were no guarantees we would get on, but thankfully we made it! We were a bit tense as we feared we might be offloaded from our nice seats or from the plane altogether at some point, but when we took off again from the Saõ Paulo stopover and no one came up to tell us to leave, we relaxed and enjoyed a lovely flight back home.

It was so strange, though... one minute we were in Buenos Aires, planning to go shopping and see some tango the next day, and the next we were on a plane headed out for London! We arrived yesterday morning but I think neither of us has quite realised that the adventure is over. Pity it had to be cut short like this but we can't really complain. It would have been bad to be stuck out there until mid January because of the strike, not knowing when or how we'd get back - so we had a lucky escape, really!

Time to go for now, will be back soon for the very last entry............

C.

Ushuaia and a lot of French...

It´s already Monday afternoon and after 6 days in Ushuaia it´s nearly time to move on to Buenos Aires, the very last destination on our trip. We are flying tomorrow at 2.30 pm - a 3 hours´ flight vs. a 60 hours´ bus journey, the choice wasn´t hard to make. Especially since we´ve come all the way down from Santiago de Chile by road - once was enough!

Our time in Ushuaia has been nice and relaxed. It´s very cold down here and rather wet at the moment, but we managed to make the most of it. On Friday, we didn´t do much else than sit in a coffee shop and read; in the evening we took advantage of the fact that there was a special French film festival here in Ushuaia, organised by the Tierra del Fuego Alliance Française. So we went to the 7.30 pm showing and for 3 pesos (about 50 p) each, we saw... a really, really bad French film called `ça brûle´. It was an absolute pile of rubbish! But it was a different way to pass the time and by watching the film Gary had the chance to practice both his French (soundtrack) and his Spanish (subtitles).

Talking of which, for the past six months Gary has been moaning that people here only ever speak Spanish to him, because they can see straightaway that he is a gringo. Okay, it´s true, and sometimes it´s really very annoying (particularly when you´re speaking perfectly good Spanish to a guy and he replies in English every time, and his English is not even as good as your Spanish) but I´ve personnaly made my peace with it. Well, Gary hasn´t. So as he was complaining once again last Wednesday that people only ever speak to him in English, I turned around and told him `D´accord. Je ne vais te parler que français pendant une semaine, et tu ne vas me répondre qu´en français´. So we´ve been speaking only French to one another for 6 full days now (only one day to go, phew!). When we first got to our dormitory here in Ushuaia last Thursday, Gary asked the girl in the bed facing us where she was from (hoping it would be somewhere English speaking, so he could survive his week of French-infused hell by chatting to other people than myself) and she said she was French. And she didn´t speak any English, hee hee. So Gary has been hearing French, speaking French, seeing French films and going out for drinks with French people all week. That´ll teach him!

On Saturday, we took an afternoon boat trip through the Beagle Channel (named after the boat Charles Darwin was on when he sailed through this channel.) It was amazing to feel the difference in sea `choppiness´ when you go from the Bay of Ushuaia (nice and smooth) into the Beagle Channel (very choppy indeed). It gave us a more concrete idea of how hard it must have been for the first pioneers who came from Europe centuries ago and discovered the area. There have been hundreds of shipwrecks in the area in the past 500 years and given how the sea behaves it´s really no wonder.

The landscape was a mix between Ireland (sea, green vegetation and rocks) and Switzerland (huge snow covered mountains). Neither of us expected Ushuaia and the Tierra del Fuego in general to be quite so mountainous.

During the boat trip we also sailed past a couple of islands inhabited by different animals. 2009 has been `Sea Lions Year´ for us!

On Sunday we didn´t do very much, apart from visiting the Museo Marítimo, where we found out everything about how the Argentinian government sent prisonners out to the Tierra del Fuego over 100 years ago in order to start a colony (as the climate is really tough in this part of the world, it wasn´t exactly a natural choice of dwelling for most people.)

Yesterday we woke up bright and early and went to the Tierra del Fuego National Park, 12 kilometres out of Ushuaia, where we trekked all day. We were really lucky with the weather (it had been raining all week, but we harldy had any rain and the sun came out a little bit in the afternoon.) We trekked along the coast first and enjoyed pretty views.

Then we went up the Cerro Guanaco, or at least as much as we could as after a couple of hours the path was closed due to snow still being there. We walked on the snow a little bit but after falling flat on my face a few times I thought it might be best to turn around...

So after walking around for almost 7 hours, we stopped in a coffee shop in the park and enjoyed hot chocolate as well as alfajores, a delicious Argentinian cake/biscuit type thing filled with dulce de leche and covered in chocolate. So so so good!

(We´ll bring some back when we´re home in a couple of weeks, if you want to try them. Although I can´t promise they´ll last very long.)

C.

Zigzagging between Chile and Argentina

After a couple of weeks of thinking I need to update the blog, I am finally getting the chance. We haven’t exactly been traveling in big capital cities so a good and speedy internet connection has been hard to come by.

Since leaving Santiago about three weeks ago, we spent a couple of days in Puerto Montt – a medium sized city by the sea, nothing of particular interest there (except, perhaps, the delicious cheese we bought on a street stall at the port… but here I am going on about food again.) I guess the only noticeable event there was that I had to go to the local hospital’s A & E because I’d had a weird insect bite for a week and it was getting all infected. On the day I decided I’d better get it checked out, all the doctors in town were on strike so I was advised to go straight to the hospital and to my great surprise I hardly had to wait at all – 45 minutes and I had seen a doctor, been prescribed antibiotics and we were back on our way. I was quite proud of my Spanish as I managed to go smoothly through a whole medical consultation with a Chilean doctor!

From Puerto Montt we made our way to the little island of Chiloe, just off the coast of Chile. We spent a couple of days in the little town of Castro, which looked uncannily like the west coast of Scotland. It was strange walking around feeling like we were in Ullapool or Oban, when we were actually about as far away from Scotland as we could possibly be!

After a couple of days we crossed back into Argentina, to the town of Bariloche. It’s located on the side of a huge lake and you can see mountains in the distance – so this time, it felt like we were in Switzerland as the mountains beyond the lake looked like they could have been the picture on a box of Swiss chocolates.

We spent a very chilled few days there, went for a long afternoon walk in a small national park outside of town and having a daily fix of the delicious chocolates sold in the many shops lining up the streets of Bariloche. We also caught up with Mick, whom we had met in Brazil (first we were on the same trip to the Pantanal, then we ended up in the same hostel in Rio) – we randomly discovered that he was staying in Bariloche for a while as he’d found a job in a hostel there.

Before long, it was time to be on our way to El Calafate (still on the Argentinian side) on the Longest Bus Journey We’ve Taken This Year ™. We set off from Bariloche at 9 PM on Wednesday 18 November, and reached El Calafate at 10.40 AM on Friday 20 November – making it a 37 hours and 40 minutes’ long journey. It was actually quite an interesting experience. We had good books to read and realized when we got off the bus that both of us could genuinely say we hadn’t got bored for one minute. I guess we’ve had plenty of bus journey practice this year. But after a journey that long, we can finally call ourselves serious, credible backpackers!

Anyway, as I said the journey was pretty interesting – but also boring at the same time. We basically travelled on the Routa 40 through the Patagonian desert, so we’re talking about 1,500 kilometres of a dusty and dead-straight road with dried up, tree and vegetation-less expanses of land on each side. At night the place took on an almost lunar quality. So it was both beautiful and boring, because the landscape didn’t change much.

(These photos are actually when there was something ‘interesting’ to the landscape, i.e. mountains or some form of shape in the background. Most of the time it was like that – i.e. same colours/dryness – but completely flat… actually quite mesmerizing when you think there is absolutely nothing around for hundreds of miles.)

The bus only stopped four times in the whole journey, for the simple reason that there were no towns or villages to stop in! Or at least, only one every 500 kilometres or so. So as you can guess it was a delight to settle ourselves down in our hostel room in El Calafate, peel off the clothes we’d been wearing for almost three days’ straight and have a nice hot shower…

We spent just a couple of days in El Calafate. We went on a day trip to the Perito Moreno glacier, which we both agreed was probably one of the most amazing natural formations we have seen this year. Take a look at this…

(I never knew there were ‘horizontal’ glaciers… It was seriously stunning.)

We then carried on south, again, and crossed back into Chile to go to Puerto Natales. We stayed there for a couple of days while organizing our 5 days’ trek in the Torres del Paine National Park. We got to Torres del Paine on Wednesday last week, and had an amazing 5 days trekking around the park.

We walked between 5 and 11 hours each day, going from one refuge to the next. The refuges had a very nice atmosphere and the food they served was good. It was also nice to have a bed and a *hot* (read ‘a bit dodgy in that it was either freezing cold or scolding hot’) shower once a day - a grand change from our trekking in Peru where we had to camp all the time. We also met some lovely people, particularly Rafel, whom we trekked with most days. Rafel is from a village near Barcelona, a true Catalan - he didn’t particularly like being labeled “Spanish”, but was delighted to let us practice our Spanish with him all day long! He was infinitely patient with us and a very nice person – it was a real pleasure to spend time with him while trekking around.

A note on the weather: since Puerto Montt, it has been quite cold – a bit like March in Britain. Right now it is late spring here in the southern hemisphere, so the days are very long (the sun is out from about 5 AM until about 11PM), which we are both enjoying a lot. During our Torres del Paine trek, we got all sorts of weather: sun, rain, hail, snow… but the most memorable element was the wind, which on the second day blew so hard it nearly swept us off our feet. There were mini tornados (we went through a couple… one minute there is nothing, the next you’re practically flying off the ground), particularly over one of the large lakes in the park: you could see small ‘whirlpools’ on the surface of the water, sweeping it upwards. It was the first time we saw something which looked like rain, but was going up rather than falling down!

We were treated to some lovely views every day. For example on the third day, we walked for nearly 11 hours and it was hard work especially carrying the backpacks, but once we got to the mirador at the end of the Valle Del Frances, we enjoyed a 360 degrees’ view of huge, beautifully carved mountains all around us.

On the fourth day, we reached Glacier Grey, which is a smaller version of the Perito Moreno glacier – once again absolutely stunning. We sat on a big rock on the side of it and watched the world go by – or, as it was, huge blocks of ice detach themselves from the main body of the glacier and crash into the water in a massive splashing sound.

We came back to Puerto Natales on Sunday, and took a bus to Punta Arenas (three hours’ further south) on Monday afternoon. Punta Arenas is still in Chile, off the Straits of Magellan. It is the southernmost point of Chile (with the exception of a couple of tiny villages – Punta Arenas is a fairly big town, three times the size of Puerto Natales.)

The Straits of Magellan is the channel through which ships first managed to reach the Pacific Ocean after sailing through the Atlantic, and (obviously) discovered by the man himself before he was murdered by the violent inhabitants of Cebu (see earlier blog posts…). Countless ships first attempted to make the journey going all the way around Cape Horn at the southern tip of the South American continent, but the weather is so bad down there that every single one ended up either wrecked or having to turn around. The discovery of the Straits of Magellan was therefore groundbreaking at the time.

On Tuesday we took an afternoon boat trip to the island of Magdalena, two hours away from Punta Arenas via the Straits of Magellan, to see a penguin colony which settles down on the island to breed every year (because there is so much daylight there at this time of year.) There were something like 70.000 penguin couples – they were everywhere you looked! We enjoyed watching them waddle off, and we had the chance to get really up close, which reminded us of the Galapagos. The weather was a little crazy – once again wind and hail… absolutely freezing.

The next day, we did a bit of ‘culchah’, going around the museums of Punta Arenas and also visiting its cemetery with boasts some very big and decadent-looking mausoleums (as well as much smaller and modest-looking tombs) and carefully pruned trees.

Of course, we also went to see the Magellan monument and did the obligatory ‘rubbing of the Indian’s foot’. There is basically an Indian sitting to one side of the Magellan statue, and legend has it that if you rub his foot, you will one day come back to Punta Arenas. Well, looks like we will both go back at some point in the future!

Yesterday we left Punta Arenas for Ushuaia , crossing back into Argentina (and making it the fifth time we’ve entered Argentina on this trip – we’re starting to be short on stamp space in our passports…) It was a bit of a grueling journey (from 9 AM to 9 PM), but it turns out to be the last bus journey we will take on this year-long adventure so I won’t moan about it!

Ushuaia is the southernmost town in the world, apart from the Antarctic continent (you can take a boat to there and stay in one of the research stations on the continent, but it costs an arm and a leg and we’ve already spent our ‘splashing out budget’ on the Galapagos... and wine.) It is on Tierra del Fuego, a triangle of land totally detached from the rest of the South American continent. Rumour has it that when ships first sailed past this land centuries ago, they saw smoke coming up from it, so they went back to Spain and said they had baptized this land ‘Tierra del Humo’ (‘Land of Smoke’). But the King (or whoever was in charge of this stuff at the time) thought it was a bit of a crappy name, and that anyway when there is smoke there is fire, so he re-christened it to ‘Tierra del Fuego’ - ‘Land of Fire’ (which sounds a hell of a lot cooler, you’ve got to admit.)

So here we are in Ushuaia, we will be staying here until our flight back up to Buenos Aires on 9 December. It was a relief when a few weeks ago we found a really cheap flight from here to get back up to the capital city, because fun though it’s been to sit on buses for dozens of hours on end to make it down here, neither of us particularly fancies the idea of doing it all again to get back up north…

The trip is soon coming to an end, just over two weeks left – how crazy is that… I will be writing again from Buenos Aires in a week or so. And for anybody out there who is reading us, I really look forward to being back and catching up with you!

C.