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.