Buenos Aires

We spent two nights and one full day in Buenos Aires before our flights home. We are not huge fans of cities, but we did our best to have a look around. We ended up doing a walking tour of the center that was laid out in my Lonely Planet guide and we also did a bit of walking through Recoleta, where all the rich people live. We found the city to be enormously spread out, very congested with cars and kind of falling apart! The city is full of crumbling old buildings, especially in the area we stayed in, San Telmo. Many of the streets and sidewalks are made of cobblestones or tiles, and there are many places where tiles have broken or fallen apart and there are huge holes. Instead of fixing any of these holes they put piles of trash over them to warn you not to fall in! We spent most of our walking tour admiring the trees and parks more than anything else. It remains warm all year in Buenos Aires (probably around 80 when we were there), so the trees in the city are very different from what we saw in Patagonia. It was a lot like San Diego, lots of Eucalyptus, jacaranda and fig trees. We did a bad job of taking pictures, but I did take a few of our hotel.

One thing we really enjoyed about Buenos Aires was the abundance and variety of food. Being in Patagonia is like being in Alaska, food is expensive and not very fresh because it must travel so far. So we enjoyed going to the grocery store in Buenos Aires! We also enjoyed delicious ham and cheese empanadas for breakfast from a nearby bakery. We found a burrito shop and had delicious California style burritos! And we of course went to a steak house. We were going to go to a fancy steak house to use up the rest of our pesos, but we got lazy and just went to one in San Telmo by our hotel the last night. It was call El Disnivel and is basically a popular local spot. It was packed to the gills, and had so many delicious menu options that we wished we'd eaten every meal there! Jeff got a big juicy cut of flank steak and I got a thin flank steak topped with pizza sauce a cheese (called matambre a la pizza).

Yesterday we began our long journey home. Jeff had 20 hours travel time to get home and I had 24, but these tickets were about $400 cheaper than everything else available. Jeff is probably just about to New York now. We got to fly together from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, which turned out to be a 9 hour flight! I was very surprised it was so long, but luckily it was one of the best flights I've ever had. We watched three movies, got two hot meals and many drink refills. I was able to get away with having four glasses of wine! We got to Mexico City at 10:30 our time, Jeff had a six hour layover, and I had 11! We had to go out of security (because the flights were overnight) and wait until they would let us check bags in again and go back through security. For me, this wasn't until 4 AM! I am now on my flight to Los Angeles, I have my own row and they gave us a lovely breakfast! I have enjoyed AeroMexico. Shannon is coming to fetch me. I can't wait to be home! (If you are reading this, I am already landed.)

I can honestly say this trip was by far the best travel experience I have ever had. We saw some amazing sights! I never had any idea that Argentina had so much to offer! We never expected to spend so much time in one country, but we had no desire to leave! We loved everywhere we visited! If I had to pick, my favorite part of the trip was probably the hiking in El Chaltén, but I also really loved the Lakes District! We have left many places to be discovered and can't wait to go back and see the Chilean side of Patagonia and take the ferry through the fjords!

At the bottom are two photos of the packs of dogs we saw all over Chile and Argentina. People let their dogs out all day (in cities) to socialize, I guess. But as a result, the stray dog population has gotten out of control, and you can often find poop on the side walk. Some people feel bad for them and leaves piles of dog food out. The first picture is the largest pack we found in Puerto Natales. There were probably 20 dogs! And the second one is of some particularly interesting dogs in Ushuaia that were shaggy and mangy with dread locks! (:

It means a lot to mean that some people actually took the time to read about my travels. Stay tuned for the next trip! Good bye for now!

Ushuaia

We ended up with four nights and three days in Ushuaia. There was a lot more to do there than there was in Punta Arenas, so I wish we hadn't pushed back all our travel plans after being stuck in Torres del Paine. We still managed to do all of the things we really wanted to do, though.

Ushuaia (ooh-shwai-ah) is Argentinas Southern most city. It's not connected to the mainland and you have to go through Chile to get to it. It has a beautiful location sandwiched between glacially carved mountains and the Beagle Channel, also glacially carved. The place reminded me a lot of some coastal towns I've seen in Alaska, including Anchorage. The towns claim to fame is that it's the end of the world. There are signs every where stating it. I don't really get the claim though, as 60 km South, across the Beagle Channel, is Puerto Williams, Chile, and further South of that is Cape Horn and then there's Antarctica too!

Our first day in town we didn't do a good job of getting going early. We wanted to go up to the local ski center Cerro Martial to view the glacier there and see the views, but we missed the bus, since we didn't know there would only be one per day. The weather was perfect and we didn't have days to waste, so we took a taxi there with the plan of walking back. To save more time we decided we'd take the chair lift , which turned out to be a joke! The people below us were walking the trail about as fast as we were going! It only saved us about 15 minutes of flattish walking each way and cost $13.50 per person! I don't know how anyone could ski here, must be mostly kids. After we got off the lift (which here is called an air chair!), we hiked around for a few hours. We could see views of Ushuaia, the channel and the surrounding islands. The glacier wasn't as impressive as the views. It was a series of three cirque glaciers, which are essentially bowls of ice in a mountainside, the last remains of an enormous glacier that once filled the valley. We continued a ways beyond the end of the trail over boulders and snow fields to the base of the glacier. As soon as we got there fog closed in on us and the view was gone. It was very strange to see it happen so quick! Even with the view gone it was very pretty, and being up there reminded me of so many hikes I've been on in Alaska.

The second day we took a sail boat tour of the Beagle Channel. It was an expensive tour, but so much more fun than the cheaper motorized boat tours! They only take small groups of people and we rode with a French family that moved to Mendoza four years ago to start a winery. They invited us to come for a visit one day! On our boat ride we got to see Ushuaia and the surrounding mountains from afar, sea lions and lots of sea birds. We stopped for a short hike on one of the small islands. This part was especially interesting. The plants on the island are consist mostly of colorful mosses and lichens and some short bushes, most of them growing only one millimeter per year. The only reason they grow here is because the seeds are brought over by bird poop! We also got to learn about how the natives Yamana people used the islands for shelter. They spent most of their lives squatting in a canoe or next to a fire, so they had weak feet and legs and a funny look to them. Darwin referred to them as the lowest barbarians! I think they were quite smart to be able to survive 6,000 years in such a harsh environment. They used bird bones as straws to extract water from the crevices in the rocky islands! Instead of wearing clothes, which would have been damp all the time, they covered their bodies with sea lion and whale blubber, natural weather proofing! And they brought fire with them everywhere, even in their canoes! This is where the name Tierra Del Fuego (Land of Fire) came from, the first explorers to the area saw all of the fires from the natives on their approach! During our walk a storm was brewing, and winds and rain were beginning to roll in, this made for an exhilarating ride back! Most people sat inside, but Jeff and I sat on the left side of the deck in our rain suits getting pelted with waves, wind and rain. The extreme winds pushed the boat forward at a 45 degree angle, the right deck of the boat was skimming the water! My heart was racing a few times, as it seemed the boat would tip, but we had a good captain and made it back safely to the harbor. We sure enjoyed the ride!

On our last day in town we visited Tierra del Fuego National Park, which is 12 km west of town and where the end of the Pan-American Highway is located. I wore my Alaska T-shirt, and good thing because we met Chris, who lives in Willow, Alaska! He probably wouldn't have initiated a conversation with us had it not been for my shirt. It turned out we had plans to hike the same trail, Cerro Guanaco, so we went together. Jeff and I have gotten along amazingly on this trip, but it was really nice to have someone else to talk to for a change. Chris was an interesting guy, a pilot with his own bush plane! He promises to take us for a ride when we get back to Alaska and he'll also share with us moose and caribou meat, which I've never had the opportunity to try. The trail was pretty steep and we had to go through a nasty mud bog. We got up to our ankles in mud and one of my shoes almost got suctioned off. For some reason I found this part of the hike hilarious, and couldn't stop laughing. (: From the top we had awesome views of the far off snow capped mountains and ice fields in Chile, the network of glacier lakes that make up the park and we could also see Ushuaia, the channel and the islands beyond. We also saw a fox who hangs around looking for scraps! Jeff was a bad boy and gave him peanuts! It was nice to know that this is our last hike for a little while, our knees are dead!

On our ride back from the park, we met a girl who was going on a evening tour to visit the local beavers. They are an invasive species that have destroyed the ecosystem on Tierra del Fuego and the plan is to eventually get rid of all of them! They were introduced in the 40s when about 50 of them were brought from North America because the government thought it would be good to establish a fur trade. Those 50 beavers multiplied into 100,000! So now you can go on a beaver tour in Ushuaia with a man who has a dog that is friends with the beavers and they all come out to play with the dog is around! So that would be fun to see next time, if the beavers are still there!

Today we got up early for a flight to Buenos Aires. We had originally planned to do this part of the trip by bus! It's about 3,000 km or 1,800 miles! Cesar, the guy we hiked with in El Bolsón recommended the flight to us, which is turned out to be cheaper. (: We will be here two night before flying home on the 7th. We are staying in San Telmo at Hotel Bolivar. It is a cool old building from the 20s, and much of the building seems to original and it's cheaper than the dorm beds in the popular hostels in town! Tomorrow we plan to take ourselves on a walking tour of the center and we will feast on delicious grill meats and homemade ice cream.

Punta Arenas

Punta Arenas turned out to kind of be a dump. If you walk a few blocks from the main park, any building that is not fenced in by big metal bars and spikes has graffiti on it and many of the building appear a bit run down and messy or abandoned. It is a shame because Punta Arenas was a bustling port until the Panama Canal opened in 1914. The center is surrounded by enormous mansions from the wool boom era, which are done up in European style architecture. The town in still surrounded by sheep ranches. We have seen many sheep through out our travels in Patagonia.

We stayed at a B&B, which was about a 15 minute walk from the center. It was an interesting walk through residential neighborhoods. Many of the houses are made of colorfully painted metal sheeting, like Puerto Natales. We chose the B&B because it was cheaper than all of the hostels in the center and wound up being the most comfortable bed and nicest room we have had during our whole trip! It was a great place to recover from Torres del Paine.

We delayed our departure to Ushuaia (ooh-shwai-a) after being delayed at Torres del Paine. We originally had bus tickets for Wednesday and pushed them back two days to ensure we got to see all that Punta Arenas had to offer. Really we didn't need all the time there, there wasn't much to do.

The day we arrived we walked the bike path along the waters of the Magellan Straight. Punta Arenas gets almost daily cruise ships, and there was one anchored out there each day we were there. It appears the government tried to revive the water front at some point. There is a really nice bike path, and all sorts of exercise equipment and basketball courts. But it of course has all been neglected and graffitied. And I was quite sad to see that the shore was littered with loads of trash. We also walked to the central square to have a look at all the mansions, and this was the only nice area of the city we saw.

Our second day in town we took a ferry ride on the Magellan Straight to Magdalena Island to see the Natural Monument of Penguins! It was a boring two hour ride each way to get there with only an hour spent at the island, but it was pretty cool! The island is quite small and just completely overrun with penguins and sea birds! 120,000 Magellanic penguins! We got to get off the boat and walk a short path up to an old light house and back. The penguins were so fun and silly to watch. We got to see them waddle across the path, lounge in the sun like beached whales, crow at the sky like roosters and dig holes for sleeping in. We had a good time, but an hour wasn't long enough!

Our days in Punta Arenas didn't go to waste, as we found the biggest, nicest, well stocked grocery store of our journey! And in that grocery store, we found a special treat, peanut butter!! We have seen it in only one other location the whole trip, which was a small grocery store in El Chaltén. The grocery store was owned by a foreigner and he said it took him 10 years to find a distributor for peanut butter! And it was expensive, $10 a jar! So we have not indulged in peanut butter since before leaving the US and we have missed it greatly! We purchased a jar and have been enjoying the luxury of peanut butter as jelly sandwiches! For some reason the Argentinians despise peanut butter, they think its the most repulsive thing a person could want to eat. This was confirmed to us by a group of Argentinian college girls we met in the Lakes District.

The last day in Punta Arenas was spent trying to figure out how to pay a reciprocity fee to enter back into Argentina. When we came into Argentina the first time in December, the fee hadn't taken effect for land crossings yet. It started January 7th, and we each had to pay $160! They're getting back at Americas, Canadians and Australians for charging them entry fees. No other countries are charged a fee, which I don't fully understand because I would imagine some of the European countries charge some sort of fee for visa entry. The fee can only be paid online with a credit card, directly to the Argentinian government. The web page wouldn't open on the computer at our hotel and wouldn't open on our iPod's either, so we went to the bus station to ask them what to do and they sent us to the Argentinian embassy, which turned out to be closed for a holiday! We finally ended up at an Internet cafe where we were able to pay and print the confirmation. It took up many hours and lots of walking, all in extreme wind, The wind was so strong it was whipping up dirt and pelting us in the faces, and making mini tornados and blowing trash all over. Our original plan for the day had been to go to the nearby Reserva Forestal Magallanes and walk to a look out point over the city and the straight. It didn't take much for the lady at our hotel to talk us out of going in the wind!

We are now on a thirteen hour bus ride to Ushuaia (three hours for border crossing!!). We had to back track a little ways North and drive along the Magellan Straight for awhile, eventually reaching a narrow point, which we crossed via a twenty minute ferry ride. We are now on the island of Tierra del Fuego (Land of Fire), and have left behind mainland South America for now. Ushuaia is the Southern most city in the world. City being the key word though, as there are people that live in small towns and villages on islands South of Ushuaia. We spent four nights in Ushuaia before a flight back to Buenos Aires, and then home.

Our bus is full of a very large Polish tour group of 25! They have two tour directors who have taken control of the dvd player. They are playing a movie in English with Polish subtitles, but instead of letting the 12 other people (not in their group) enjoy it one of their guides reads the subtitles over the microphone! They are all old and slow getting on and off the bus and always blocking the isles and their loud chatter is annoying!

Puerto Natales / Torres Del Paine NP

We came to Puerto Natales over a week ago so that we could visit Torres Del Paine National Park. I expected it to be a big town for some reason. It is the location where ferries from the North (Puerto Montt) start and end. Chile doesn't have a road that connects the Southern part of the country to the Northern portion. The stretch where there is no road is a place where the Andes are too close to the coast leaving little room to build a highway, there are also fjords, islands, glaciers and the Southern Patagonian ice field making it even more difficult. Unless you travel through Argentina, the only way to get to Northern Chile from here is by ferry or airplane. Earlier in the trip we had considered taking this ferry because we hear it is very scenic, but we have run out of time.

Puerto Natales is smaller and more isolated than I had expected. They usually have cloudy cool weather and lots of wind. None of the buildings appear to be more than two stories high, and all of them have an exterior of brightly painted sheet metal. There are tons of tourists here because this is the gateway to Torres del Paine National Park and most people spend a night or two here on their way in and out of the park. Even with all the tourism money coming in, the town appears to be depressed and many of the houses as neighborhoods run down.

We took a bus into Torres Del Paine on Wednesday afternoon. It's about a 2 1/2 hour ride from Puerto Natales, a lot of it being on dirt road. We saw hundreds of guanacos on the way! Our plan was to do the W trek, which as named as such because on a map the route follows a W shaped path. It can be done in 3 days, but we decided to go easy and do it in 4 days. The route follows around the base of the Torres (Towers) and Cuernos (horns) which form a mountain range unique from the Andes. The park is a UNESCO biosphere reserve and contains 17 different ecosystems! There are multiple milky blue green glacially fed lakes and rivers, many glaciers and rocks and mountains everywhere. The rock is particularly interesting because you can see layers and patterns in the cliffs and mountains where glaciers have carved away and the towers and Cuernos (which the park is famous for) are composed of layers of granite and compressed sedimentary rock (which looks like basalt but is not). Surrounding all the rocks, mountains and glaciers are the rolling green hills and flat grasslands of the steppe. It is all very visually pleasing. (:

We had phenomenal weather every day. Mostly blue skies and little wind with clean mountain views and it wasn't too hot either! This is unusual most people have to deal with clouds, high winds and rain. We never saw any rain. In total we hiked about 60 miles and are quite tired now, and looking forward to rest. We were able to pack really lightly though, because there are refuges along the trail, so we didn't have to bring camping gear. The refuges are extremely nice compared to ones we have previously stayed in. They are like deluxe hostels contained inside of a log cabin and you can even get all your meals from them! They are very expensive, around $50 per person for a bunk bed and $50 per person for full board (meals). All of the refuges are privately owned and they can get away with it! The trip was very hard to plan because there are many different options for where to start and how long you will hike each day and where you will end up each night. There is also the option of renting camping gear in town and camping the whole way, as there are a few free camp sites. We decided we'd rather hike with little weight so we stayed in refuges and purchased all the meals.

Here is a link to a map of the w trek. This is a map someone else made and not the same order we did our trek in.
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgR8uInSQjZ7uJ91tVRtn0dg8w2ymtmMO40dHCOfwRyCfznn8aM54i49zZG6lGiSndDfP77FlEkVuXcQSUxVvqDdfpEOoHi0kXN5ZG7oWPvGIfzirBmGvlAuIznLrHzAh9Xfz6XnnryIX9z/s1600/w+trek+map+torres+del+paine+5.jpg

The first day was a 3 1/2 hour hike from the park entrance to a lookout out point at the base of the towers, which included glaciers and a lagoon below and then 2 hours partway down the mountain to Refugio Los Chilenos. The second day was a 6 hour hike along the length of a large mint green glacier lake (Nordenskjold) to Refugio Los Cuernos, which sits just below the Cuernos (which are black on top yellowish on bottom, the black is sedimentary, the yellowish is granite). Day three we hiked from Los Cuernos, up the glacier filled French Valley (where we watched multiple avalanches) and back out to Refugio Paine Grande. It was a long day, at ten hours. The Paine Grande Refuge was by far the nicest place we stayed in the park and the lodging and food there put the others to shame. On the fourth and final day, we hiked four hours from the refuge along a greenish grey glacier lake to a cove where we had a view of Glacier Grey, a tidewater glacier. It was extremely windy for most of the hike, but we figured it was normal. We took the same route back to the refuge where we were supposed to get a boat across Lago Pehoé and out of the park. On the walk back the winds got worse and worse. It was at our backs on the return as we could feel it pushing us. By the time we made it back to the refuge the wind was forcing us to walk at 45 degree angle. And we watched a fancy North Face mountaineering tent get blown out of the camping area next to the refuge. It was ripped open and almost blown into the lake. The lake was a mess of mist and vapor, as the surface of the water was being blown off. Still we thought this was normal! We have heard over and over that the winds in Patagonia could be crazy. It turned out it was too windy for the boat to run and 50 people, including us, were stranded until the following day! The only way out was by hiking 5 hours to the administration building, which would do us no good, as there would be no bus when we got there, and we were also exhausted and it would get dark soon. The people at the lodge could only remember this happening one other time! We were amongst the lucky people claiming a couch and window box to sleep in. Jeff took the couch and I took the back cushions and put them in the window box. We were quite comfortable, and the lodge didn't charge us to sleep there. Some had tents and others we not so lucky and slept on the floor of the ranger hut, which overflowed with bodies. It was a big mess.

The next day we got up early and decided to skip the boat, saving $50. We took the mostly flat five hour (10 mile) long trail to administration. It ended up being a nice hike we had lovely views of the towers and Cuernos from far away and we walked through grassy golden meadows that rippled in the wind.

We didn't get back to Puerto Natales until 5 pm last night. We had missed our morning bus to Punta Arenas and all the evening buses were sold out. We had no choice but to stay another night. We were lucky our hostel, which was storing our luggage had been able to fill our spot and didn't charge us for the night we missed. But I don't think we will be so lucky with the place in Punta Arenas. We also had to push back our bus tickets from Punta Arenas to Ushuaia (the last stop on our trip) and move our hostel reservations back as well. It was a big headache for me.

Even with all the mess at the end of our trek, we had a great time and couldn't have asked for better weather! I am afraid to ever go back because I don't believe we could ever be so lucky again!

We got up early this morning and are en route to Punta Arenas. It's a short three hour ride. We will spend three nights and three days in Punta Arenas. The highlight will be a visit to the National Monument of Penguins at Magdalena Island, with 50,000 breeding pairs on penguins!! (:

** I wrote this blog 2 days ago Tuesday but was until this moment not able to connect to the wifi at our hostel (Hospedaje Costanera).

El Calafate

Our first day in El Calafate we did little. We sat around recovering from the exhaustion of endless hiking in El Chaltén. Our hostel was a little ways out side of the center so we walked to town to get groceries and to the bus station to get onward tickets and that was it. El Calafate is much larger than El Chaltén was, but it is also a relatively new town. The oldest building was from 1949! The town sits on the shore of Lago Argentino, which is an enormous glacier lake. It's largest in Argentina and you can see it in satellite images from outer space! It's a lovely milky blue green color, and with our hostel being up on a hill, we had very nice views of it. Nearby there was a wetland along the shore that we planned to visit, because they have wild flamingos,(!!!) but we were too lazy and it was hot and sunny out again.

The main reason people go to El Calafate is to see the glaciers along the lake, none of which you can see from town. You have to drive about an hour west along the lake toward the Andes and into Parque Nacional Los Glaciares South. The lake and mountains in this part of the park border the gigantic Patagonian ice cap and many glaciers can be seen. The most famous glacier to visit is Perito Moreno. It's not even the largest one along the lake, but it's certainly the most impressive because of how close you can get to it at the various view points that have been set up. It's also famous because it advances, sometimes so much that it makes it across the lake and separates the lake into two parts, creating an ice dam! When this happens, about every year or so, the force of the trapped water creates a tunnel through the ice and eventually the tunnel breaks. Both the creation and the breaking of the tunnel are very exciting to see. We went yesterday to see the glacier, and the tunnel had ruptured the day before!!!

We visited the glacier on a tour, so we only had about an hour to view the glacier. Many people will sit for hours and watch. It's constantly thundering and calving off large ice bergs into the large. The park service has created a series of boardwalks for people to walk along and see all different angles of the glacier. It has 2 faces, North and South, and the South face alone is 2 km wide and it extends back 27 km and at the face, it's as tall as a 20 story building! We had another clear, hot and sunny day and we could see all the way back into the mountains where the glacier was coming from. It was mind blowing!

The focus of our tour was ice trekking, so after our short visit to the viewing platforms, we took a boat across the lake and began hiking up a rocky lateral moraine alongside the glacier. After about 45 minutes of going up we strapped on crampons and began walking across the glacier. We learned some interesting things about glaciers that I never knew! There are rivers of melt water running on top of the glacier and the water escapes to the bottom of the glacier through holes in the ice, this creates nice water falls. There are rocks on the glacier, that the glacier itself kicks up while it moves. The rocks get hot in the sun and create long tube like melt holes in the ice. There is a bug that lives on the glaciers! And melt water along the side of the glacier can build up if it has no escape route, so sometimes you will see a high water mark alongside a glacier where a lake once was until the water broke through the ice! We got to spend a little over 3 hours on the ice walking over hills and around crevasses and into valleys and along rivers. We ultimately reached a high view point and then turned back. It was a very fun and unique experience.

We are now in Puerto Natales, Chile. The bus ride was about five hours, but we spent an additional two hours at customs checking out of Argentina and into Chile. It takes forever with a bus load of people, and we had another bus in front of ours! We will spend about a week here visiting the main attraction, Torres del Paine National, and hiking the 4 day W circuit inside the park. The mountains in Torres del Paine are similar looking to what we saw in El Chaltén, granite spires and towers, but the fauna should be much different as the rain fall is quite a lot higher on the Chilean side of the Andes. And we have the chance to see guanacos, rheas (the ostrich birds) and flamingos during our hike!