Archive for March, 2009

Ok, so I’m a geography nerd. That’s not news to anyone. I’ve spent more time on buses in Brasil so far than actually in Brasil if you see what I mean and the only reading material I have is my Lonely Planet Brazil. So there I was flicking through the pages yesterday and discovered that there is an island in the mouth of the Amazon the size of Switzerland. Which is pretty amazing in its own right. However look at the size of it compared (top middle, left of Belem) to the rest of the country. Stuff like this fascinates me. It’s called Ilha de Marajó if you’re interested…

And to continue in the nerd vein, in a spare moment on bus I worked out how far my travels in the last four months have taken me. 18,000km so far, give or take, all of it overland. I’ll leave you to figure out how much that is in miles.

That’s it for the nerdy stuff for the time being, off to the beach now.

Bit disappointed in Brasil so far. I’ve been here 2 days and haven’t:

• seen a half-naked indian kill an anaconda with a blowpipe
• been to a beach
• drunk a caiphirinha out of a coconut shell
• been robbed at gunpoint

The times in this might seem a bit weird, I wrote all this at different times, some of it on the bus, some it afterwards so it’s a bit jumbled, so you’ll have to bear with me…

After a couple of weeks travelling round the Lake District, I decided it was time to head down to Patagonia proper. The Patagonia of legend, land of glaciers, the steppes, the sheep. I arrived back in Bariloche (5^th visit to the bus station there in 2 weeks) last night, treated myself to a nice proper hotel and then went to the travel agency to arrange transport down to El Chalten, “The Trekking Capital of Argentina” and got me a 2 day tour leaving this morning at 6:45 (so that nice fancy hotel was really worth it for the 3 bloody hours sleep I got…)

But why a Travel Agency? Why can’t I just hop on one of Argentina’s wonderful, modern, comfortable buses? Well I could but it would mean 28 hours to Rio Gallegos which is a large fishing port and not much else on the Atlantic Coast and then doglegging back 350k to El Chalten. So I ain’t doing that, plus I wanted to do the alternative which is to go down Ruta 40. Which, I had been told is what proper travellers. Well, proper travellers actually hitch down it, but given that only 3 cars an hour pass, I’m on a bus with 8 others trundling down the asphalt of Ruta 40 on the way to our much awaited lunch stop. We left at 7am, it’s now 1pm and we have been through 3 towns.

Whole Lot of Nothing

I am finding it really hard to grasp the concept of how empty this country is. Get out of Buenos Aires Province where the best part of half the 40 million inhabitants live and it’s 8 times bigger than France. The trip down to El Chalten is 820k today (700k asphalt, rest gravel) and 650k tomorrow (all gravel) and we go through 2 towns big enough to have accommodation. However, driving through it is an experience in itself, simple because the lack of anything becomes the thing you’re looking at. Moving south the landscape gets progressively flatter. After a while it becomes hypnotic and you stop asking yourself “Who lives here? What do they do?” (answers are Hardly Anybody and Not Very Much) and just stare. It’s incredible. Approaching Perito Merono where we spent the first night we drove for over an hour through an area so flat nothing could be seen on the horizon in any direction. I wasn’t in Montana but this really was Big Sky Country. Was I imagining it or could I see the curve of the earth?

Day 2 started at a more reasonable hour, 10:30. The first stop was a couple of hours later after 125k of gravel road in a town called Baja Caracoles. I never really got why one patch of desolate scrubland was the place to set up a town compared to all the other patches of desolate scrubland, but maybe somebody just got tired one day and decided to stop. There’s so much to say about a place like that, somewhere so alien, about the whole experience and my head was at the same time full of thoughts yet I’m incapable of writing them down. I did however write this into my notebook at some point in the day. At least I think this is what I wrote, it was kinda bumpy.

On the Bus

The fact there is nothing is the point. Why else do it? Nothing, but you’re moving, making progress. Moving on with your life but with nothing else around, nothing to distract. Nothing else is moving apart from you. It’s not about seeing, it’s about being. Here you have no choice but to be. There are no thoughts to be had, no decisions to be made, no revelations to be experienced. Just being. In the middle of everything. Now.

Deep huh? Looking back on it does nicely sum the day up. At one point a fellow traveller (from an small northern European country, that’s all I’ll say) on the bus had been into the little shop run by a very friendly lady, came out and all she could do was moan about the prices of the sandwiches. There we were 80 miles from anything, these people literally scratching a living out of the dust and all she could do was moan. Kinda ruined the moment for me. But overall an unforgettable day.

Ruta 40

Unrelated to my travels but it’s my blog etc etc. Got this mail from my Dad this morning, one of many tales of derring-do in the family:

My Great Grandad James Jago (born in Ireland in the 1840s and a Sandgate coastguard) was in the Hythe boat which sank during the rescue (I’ve got a photo of him and the crew on a different occasion posing for the camera). The story is that my Grandad George dashed into the surf to pull him out when the lifeboat went down. Anyway Uncle Tom had the medal and when my cousin Jim (Tom and Mick’s brother) emigrated to Australia in 1965 it went with him. He died after a few years and since then there have been one or two requests to his widow to return it to England – and now here it is:

Benvenue Medal Front

Benvenue Medal Back

Details of the rescue can be found here and more here.

Things I’ve lost here

• iPod (sniff)
• Oakley ski hat
• El Chalten fleecy hat (bought to replace above item)
• all sense of time and what day it is
• 3 shower gels
• a right glove
• a shoe

Things I’ve found here

• 300 pesos in my jeans (was mine but I’d forgotten about it)
• the right glove (2 days after I’d thrown the left one away)
• respect for ladies that work in laundrettes
• 2 of the lost shower gels. 3rd one gone for good
• map of Recoleta cemetery

I’d been umming and ahhing about going to Ushuaia. Having spoken to people who’d been there, the impression I’d got was that pretty much the only reason to go there was to say you’d been there. It makes a pretty big deal of being the Southernmost City in the World (which isn’t even true, there’s a place in Chile further south) and the tourist office will put a crappy stamp in your passport to say as much. Add to that it’s not the easiest place to get to overland, in fact I hadn’t met anyone who’d not flown there, and I was wondering whether it was worth it. I figured, however, that I did actually want to say I’d been there and I’m not exactly in a hurry, so what the hell.

Caught an early bus from lovely Rio Gallegos and set off. It’s 600k and the bus was due to take 13 hours, which even by South American standards is pretty slow, and half an hour after leaving I found out why. Chile and Argentina having been fighting over borders for a long time and as a result half of the island of Tierra del Fuego is Argentinian and half is Chilean. However, the Argentinian bit is not actually attached to the rest of the country, so you have to drive through a bit of Chile when travelling overland. To do so, you have to leave Argentina, enter Chile (promising you have no fruit or meat with you), drive a bit, leave Chile and finally enter Argentina again (where you get a brand new 90 day tourist visa after having promised you haven’t bought any fruit or meat in the 3 hours you’ve been in Chile). Each of these actions means the whole bus getting off at a border point and trooping inside to get passports checked, stamped or whatever. It takes bloody hours. Add to this the ferry across the Straits of Magellan, the gravel road through Chile itself and the 13 hours suddenly make much more sense. Needless to say, we were late.

Ushuaia itself was a pleasant surprise given what I’d heard.`About 100k before you get there the endless Patagonia steppe comes to an end (not endless then is it?), the land begins to rise in interesting ways and trees begin appearing. Trees! Hadn’t seen any them outside a National Park in weeks. The town itself is on the edge of the Beagle Channel, one of two ways to reach the Pacific by boat without going round Cape Horn (the other being the Straits of Magellan we’d crossed earlier), and frankly it’s beautiful. Surrounded by water and snowcapped mountains, it was one of those places that make you feel all poetic. Until the cruise ships arrive and discharge 3500 fat American and tiny Japanese tourists for the afternoon that is. But they all stick to the main street, which is full of shops selling fluffy penguins and “My Friend Went To The End of the World And All They Bought Me Was This Crappy T-Shirt” t-shirts, so they’re easy to avoid.

Ushuaia

But not that easy; I met two (one fat, one fatter) American passengers from one of the ships on the bus on the way to the National Park. It was a 50 day cruise round the Americas and they’d spent a day in Buenos Aires, an afternoon in Puerto Madryn and the morning in Ushuaia. “Gee, I love Argentina” the (fatter) wife gushed (she really did say “Gee”, honest). Call me a cynical old sod, but, well you know what I’m going to say don’t you? Honestly. I’ve spent longer on one bus than they had in the country. Tsk, bloody tourists.

None of this spoiled the town though, I did a couple of walks in the Park and surrounding mountains and spent a couple of days sitting down by the sea watching things sail about (boats) and fly around (birds), and had a lovely old time of it. And of course, I now have a crappy Ushuaia stamp in my passport…

Regular readers of this blog, both of you, know that there are some beautiful cities in Argentina. Some I’ve been to (Bariloche, Buenos Aires, Salta) and some I’m yet to visit (Mendoza, Cordoba, Rosario). I must let you into a secret however, there are also some right old shitholes, very few of which ever get visited by tourists, for one simple reason, they’re horrible. Rio Gallegos is one such town that has this reputation and had been a cloud on my horizon for a long time, mainly because I knew I would have to pass through it at least once if I were to go to Ushuaia, but also because I knew chances were I would have to spend the night there.

So it was with some trepidation I jumped onto a bus in El Calafete with Rio Gallegos written on the front of it. Got there about 4 and asked a cabbie to take me to a hotel in the centre. As we were driving through streets populated only by Exhaust and Tyre centres, street dogs and surly looking teenagers he started pointing possible hotels out. I looked at them and told him I preferred something nearer the centre. He looked over his shoulder at me and said, “This is the centre”.

But as it turned out I found a very nice place, next to a Tyre Centre and opposite an Exhaust Centre, with 4 surly looking emo kids sat on the front step, and headed the one block to the main shopping street. Which took me about 10 minutes as every step I took forward I was blown back and slightly sideways about ¾ of a step. The wind here was unbelievably strong and cold. People climb Everest wearing less than I was that sunny (sunny because no clouds hang around in that sort of blast) afternoon I was freezing watching in disbelief as the good people of Rio Gallegos scampered around in t-shirts and shorts. Seriously, they were.

So, I ended up staying a night in Rio Gallegos. Turns out it wasn’t that bad after all, nice room, nice steak, some little kids came and talked to me in the restaurant and drew on all the blank pages of my notebook. Maybe I’ll drop a note to Lonely Planet…