Posts Tagged ‘patagonia’

With the impending arrival of Mummy and Daddy Gringo, I’ve been planning a couple of excursions. Until now, my travelling around Argentina and South America has involved very little planning, but on this occasion I’m making an exception and booking stuff up in advance – I want these few days to be a trip to remember for the right reasons, rather than knocking on hotel doors at 9 in the evening.

I’m looking forward to these trips (one to Iguazu, the other to Puerto Madryn) for two reasons. Firstly my parents have never been to South America, and I really want them to see a little bit of what I’ve experienced over the last couple of years and secondly, it means getting back on the road, if only for a short while.

On the Road, Patagonia

But it has also reminded me of what a bloody enormous country Argentina is, and how my attitude to travel has changed. Buenos Aires to Puerto Madryn is 1442km (896 miles – just under the distance between London and Barcelona) and we’re going by coach. A couple of people have suggested I look at flights but to be honest I wouldn’t consider it. It may be cheaper (although unlikely) but I just don’t enjoy flying anymore. As soon as it stops being about the time, there really is no reason to fly. I could play the green card, according to this carbon footprint calculator, the bus journey accounts for 1/10th of the CO2 emissions the flight does. However, for me it’s more about the journey. There’s no more complicated reason than I enjoy it.

It sounds boring, sitting on a bus for 18 hours but I simply enjoy watching the world go by. Argentina is just full of scenery, and in Patagonia there is little else, miles and miles of nothing. It’s a great way to relax, switch off and let your mind go wherever little roads of its own it wants to go down. Now that I know I’m going to be doing it again, it makes realise how much I miss it.

KM 4373, Ruta 40

For those of you paying attention, you will remember that I have already written about Ruta 40 from my Patagonia trip. On that occasion I travelled on it southwards from Bariloche to El Chalten, a distance of around 1,500km. It wasn’t however, my first time on the 40.

A few weeks before heading to Patagonia I’d been on a week-long roadtrip in a hired 4×4 from Buenos Aires to Argentina’s North West corner, based around the city of Salta. A lot of that trip was done on an unpaved section of Ruta 40, with a reminder every kilometre of the size of the country and the road that runs the length of it.

If there’s one way of impressing somebody who has never been to South America before, it’s by saying, “Oh I’m going to such and such tomorrow, it’s a 20 hour bus ride”. To someone who has been here before then all you’ll get is an unsympathetic nod and a change of subject, but to the uninitiated you will a short pause while their mind assimilates what you’ve just said and then a gasp of horror. “20 HOURS?!” they will squeak, while you nod with the unbearable smugness of the seasoned traveller.

So, this is for all you who have never had the pleasure of dealing with the terms Cama and Semi-Cama, to whom Andesmar and Crucero del Norte sound like beach resorts. Firstly, let’s be clear about this, if you’re travelling round Argentina (let alone other South American countries) on any sort of budget, you WILL encounter at least one 12+ hour bus trip. There are planes, but they’re expensive and  don’t always go where you want to go. Which leaves the bus. Forget trains, I’m aware of one train line that could be considered an inter-city line here in Argentina, and trust me they ain’t 2 cities you’d want to go to. Plus it’s slower than a bus,

So, you’re stuck with a bus. You bravely head to Retiro bus station in Buenos Aires to buy your ticket. This is where the problems start. There are intergalactic spaceship docking stations smaller than Retiro. This place can take over 100 double-decker buses at a time, is always full of people you’re convinced want to steal your bags (or your kidneys) and it’s bloody chaos. Upstairs is the ticket section, which is not a simple question of walking up to a desk and asking in your shabby Spanish for a ticket to El Culo del Mundo. You first have to figure out which company goes there and then ask each one if they have a bus on the day you want to go. Most of them don’t. Eventually you find one that does and then they ask you what class you want. Class? On a bus?

Well yes, there are 3, and within that varying levels of food and drink service. To keep it simple there is Semi-Cama (cama is spanish for bed) which is the cheapest and gives a fairly standard coach seat which reclines about halfway. Then there is cama, which despite the name is still a reclining seat, but reclines more and is wider (3 across the bus) and at the top of the tree there is Ejecutivo or First Class which is the same width as Cama, but the seat goes all the way down to make a flat bed. Pretty much all 3 classes feed you, although alcohol usually only comes with Cama and Ejecutivo.

I’ve tried all 3 and have come to the following conclusion. Even if it means waiting in El Culo del Mundo for another 3 days, I ain’t ever going Semi-Cama again. The recline is not bad, but of course the idiot in front of you reclines too which limits your personal space to a very small tube and sleeping just is not an option. Plus people reclining in front of me inspires sheer hatred in me. Not the picture of reasonableness I know, but in my mind, it’s one step away from child abuse. Cama is better and is an option, although the person reclining in front of you is still a problem. Which brings us to Ejecutivo which, in my humble opinion is the ONLY way to go. Each seat is cocooned in its own space (a suite is the marketing term) therefore nobody can impinge on your space. And you have a bed. A flat one. It’s wonderful.

This has been on my mind a lot recently as yesterday I took my first 20 hour trip (from Buenos Aires to Bariloche in Patagonia), and I stumped up the extra 50 pesos (£10) to go flat. Now, 20 hours on a bus is still 20 hours regardless of the shape of your seat, but by God is it easier when you do it in comfort. For a start you spend the first hour playing with the recline button, thinking, this IS a comfy seat. So only 19 hours left. Then you have to get to grips with the lie flat mechanism and make your bed. Luckily they tell you how:

How to make a bed

The result is something like this (although it does actually go flatter – this is just chillin’ mode)

Chilling

Pretty good huh? However, even this little marvel of modern engineering cannot compensate for the sheer size of and boredom induced by crossing the Argentinian pampas. However, given that you have no choice in this, I know where I’d rather be…

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.

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

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…

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