Patagonia

Trip Start Jul 24, 2006
1
6
Trip End Jun 19, 2007


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Flag of Argentina  ,
Monday, May 14, 2007

So as to see more of Argentina than just the capital, I reunited with Darius and travelled for two weeks through Patagonia.  We flew into Ushuaia, "fin del mundo" and the jumping-off point for Antarctica, and did a wild 3-day trek in Tierra del Fuego National Park.  Don't be deceived by the name... it was very wet.  And green, like New Zealand.  The first day we got lost, and I fell into a peat-bog.  The second day a fox stole all our food, and it started to snow.  We combined the last two days of hiking into one, and pushed over the pass in a snow-storm, guided by the occasional cairn.  Plus, we had nothing to eat but wild berries (which we ate a lot of).  It was a rough day.  Oh, and to give a sense of the wildness of the place, in 3 days we saw only 3 other people, and they were a group of park rangers.

From Ushuaia, we bussed to El Calafate and visited the spectacular Moreno Glacier
01. Tierra del Fuego: Day 1
01. Tierra del Fuego: Day 1
.  It's an amazing feeling to approach the giant ice-sheet from the road, seeing it for the first time out your window so blue and bright in the late-afternoon sunshine.  El Calafate also boasts some phenomenal handmade chocolate.  I'd recommend the café mousse. 

Then it was to the climber's mecca of El Chalten, where we did our second 3-day hike, having by that time somewhat recovered our strength.  The trek was much tamer than the first, but also beautiful.  It was dry and rocky, like Colorado, with yellow canyons and white-water rivers.  And there were glaciers and glacial lakes everywhere.  All the water in the national park is potable, so we drank directly from streams and lagunas.  Mount Fitz Roy (El Chalten) courteously came out of the clouds for us, and we pushed through powerful westerly winds to get close to it (they call them the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties).  Unfortunately, the second and third days were cloudier, and we spent a lot of post-hiking time playing Cacho (a Bolivian dice game) in the tent.

Then it was time for 3 long days of bus-rides, over the open Patagonian steppe, to get back to Buenos Aires.  We went via the coast, and were compelled by Semana Santa (Easter) to stop for a day in Puerto Madryn and wait for a bus.  So we rented a car and went searching for wildlife on the Valdez Peninsula.  We didn't spot any orcas, but we did see penguins, rheas (like ostriches), foxes, guanucos (like llamas), sea-lions and elephant seals. 

Two of the best weeks in the last half a year, for sure.
Ushuaia hotels Slideshow

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