Posts Tagged ‘cold’

This post was originally published in March 2009 Confused?
During one of my moments of meditation sitting staring at the cruise ship (seriously, just how do those things float?) I decided that I was going to head back to Buenos Aires for a variety of reasons. Send me a stamped SAE and I’ll tell you what they are. This of course meant deciding how I was going to get there. I had a few days so just 3 hours on a plane felt like overkill, plus goes against my principles (yup. I’ve grown principles). There is a weekly boat which went up the side of Chile from where I could get a bus back to Bariloche and then on to BsAs. But for some South American reason, they decided to skip a week in the schedule. No boat, so that was that. Which meant I was left with the bus, which didn’t feel right. So I decided to hitch hike the 600k back up to Rio Gallegos and then get a bus from there.

I set out on Friday morning (after 4 hours sleep), took a picture of the sign which told me I had 3040k to go, and stuck my thumb out. Took 5 minutes of walking and thumbing to get a lift to the Police Checkpoint at the edge of town, where I put my backpack on the ground, turned round to see a lorry pulling up, and the driver asking me where I was going (um, North please). I hadn’t even put my thumb out! This was the way to go! So, I trucked the 200k to Rio Grande with Manuel the chain-smoking, mate drinking Chilean feeling like king of the world. Didn’t have as much luck that afternoon in Rio Grande (and to be honest felt a little awkward hitching next to the Memorial to the Fallen Soldiers of the Falklands War) so after an hour I called Matias, a guy who lives there whom I’d met earlier in Ushuaia, and he helped me find a room for the night.

Ended up having a grand old night out in Rio Grande, drinking for free in a private bar, run by some friend of Matias’s uncle’s coke dealer’s accountant’s window cleaner or something. The owner was hugely excitable and wouldn’t stop telling me that I was the very first tourist he’d ever had in his bar and insisted on taking lots of pictures of me against various signs and bits of furniture to prove I’d been there.

Rio Grande Crew

The next day I headed off (4 hours sleep again) and walked for an hour to get past the bloody War Memorial to the next strategic hitching point, where a couple of fisherman picked me up and took me to the Police Checkpoint where after about half an hour a Belgian couple stopped and told me I could ride in the back of their pickup truck they’d hired. Yeah! Proper travelling. I leapt at the chance and jumped in the back and settled myself against my backpack and away we went. What I’d overlooked of course was that I was in Tierra del Fuego, and it might well be summer, but Tierra del Fuego is cold. God, I was freezing, but it felt fantastic. I loved it.

Cold

Even when we got the gravel road and I slowly became coated in a fine film of Fuegian dust. Even when a 20 peso note fell out of my pocket and blew over the side of the truck. Even when the Belgian guy was driving too fast, skidded off the road and we ended up in a ditch with a burst tyre. A shout must go out to the 3 amused Chilean truck drivers who stopped, towed us out of the ditch and then changed the wheel. These boys could work for McClaren. I was so impressed.

The Rescue

Finally at 9 in the evening, after 36 hours on the road eating dust, I arrived dirty, shivering but very happy back in Rio Gallegos. Took the Belgians to the same hotel I’d stayed in the week before where I was met with a cheery “Hola Senor Jonathan” from the nice lady. Took a good, long, hot shower and fell into bed, happy to be home.

Welsh Snow

Some snow in Wales. It’s not all tropical beaches you know…

Ok, so I haven’t given you a Brasil part 2 yet, but it’s on the way, honest. So, if you’ll allow that little omission I can continue with my dispatches from my current location in Bolivia. Have had a very busy week here and am having a day off from all the madness in La Paz. I’ll fill in all the details when I have the photos, but the highlight has been the 3 day tour of the Bolivian desert and Uyuni Salt Flats which were truly out of this world.

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…

As I said before El Chalten sells itself as the National Trekking Capital. And, blimey they’re not wrong. Dominated by the ridiciously high, steep and pointy Cerro Fitzroy there are trails all over the place up to lakes, viewpoints and glaciers. Fitzroy didn’t really play a big part in my El Chalten experience as for the whole time I was there I couldn’t actually see it because of the clouds. But, it didn’t matter (not even the fact that as the bus pulled out on my way to El Calafate, the clouds lifted and the whole incredible thing was visible) and it didn’t stop me from trooping my way up hills, down hills, along valleys, across rivers, sometimes with a bridge, sometimes not, for 4 days. I loved it. Hooked up with others from the bus and people we’d met in the hostel and just walked for hours. In rain, in snow, in sunshine, in hail, in cloud. Nothing mattered except just putting one foot in front of the other. It felt incredible and honestly, I felt something change in me. My head felt clear, nothing to worry about, nothing could stop me, it all just fell into place. My God, could I actually be Happy? Certainly felt like it. And what’s more I saw condors. Lots of condors. And parrots.

Lago de los Tres

So, onto El Calafate. Like Bariloche, it’s much more geared up to a wealthy Argentine crowd and rich (or short of time) tourists who fly in (as opposed to humble backpackers such as myself who trudge everywhere by bus) from Buenos Aires for two days to see one thing, the Perito Moreno glacier about 50 miles out of town. And who can blame them, this thing is BIG. First seen by Western eyes in 1879, it extends down from the Patagonian ice field (3^rd largest in the world after Antartica and Greenland fact fans) and covers 257 km2. It rises 60m above the waters of Lago Argentina (itself the largest lake in the country) and its North and South faces are 5km long. If all that wasn’t enough it’s the only stable glacier in the world. While all others are shrinking in the face of global warming, this one keeps marching on. Can you tell I did a tour yesterday?

Perito Moreno

And what a tour. The basic option is to get to the park, stand on the 2 viewing balconies about 100m from the front of it and just watch. Because all glaciers move (even the shrinking ones) big chunks of ice are constantly falling off the front edge with an almighty roar, a huge splash and hundreds of tourists frantically turning their cameras on to take pictures of the ripples, having missed the fall itself. I did this for a bit, then we were all marched back onto the bus to catch a boat over to the other side of the lake where we walked for an hour or so through the woods alongside it, then put on our crampons, had a little lesson in crampon technique (duck feet going up, monkey legs going down) and headed onto the glacier itself. For 3 hours we tramped around, across crevasses, up and down little slopes, past streams,waterfalls, pools, ice caves (complete with ice slide weeeeee!) and ice. A whole lot of ice. It was magical.

Glacier Feet