Greetings.
Click on any picture you want to see bigger.
We finally left Buenos Aires and headed first for the lake country, on the eastern side of the Andes Mountains southwest of Buenos Aires. The main city, Bariloche, is a quite developed tourist destination with every lind of convenience for the many foreign and Argentine visitors. We hung out there for several days, kind of getting our traveling sea legs again. The best thing to be able to do there would be to rent a car and drive around looking at the many lakes with their mountanous backdrops. As is so often the case when traveling on a shoestring, we decided to forego that and take in some scenes we could do easily on public transportation. I may go back there and maybe go in with a group on a car, but for now I´m satisfied.
You can go up in many places to vistas like that above. We went to the most popular spot from where that picture was taken. I took the tram. Myung walked up. She´s a great hiker, stronger than I am, really.
If you are rich, there are plenty of high end accommodations to be had. I walked around on the grounds of a five star resort complete with golf course and took the next two pictures. My guess is that these cottages cost about $1000 per night. We passed on that. Over the hill was the view in the second picture.
I say ¨I¨ walked around because Myung was intercepted by security. They tried to make her leave the whole resort even though she didn´t know she wasn´t supposed to go on the grounds. She then only wanted to go to the hotel´s public areas to look at the shops and restaurants. Man, that screaming Korean gave everybody all the way up the food chain a ration of shit! Woke up a few dozing millionaires, she did. Their little umbrella drinks had whitecaps.
We took many pictures of Bariloche and the environs, but you get the picture. From there we took an 18 bus ride down to southern Patagonia, to a place called El Chaiten. That was the first stop along the way we are taking to see the wonderful Patagonian scenery. There is very little population on the Argentine side, which is mostly semi-arid steppe. They are in the process of paving the highway, but a lot of it is like this.
Once you head back into the mountains, it is truly beautiful. And that´s coming from a pretty jaded traveller. There are many trekking routes. The two most popular, because they are only all day hikes, are to the bases of two glaciered mountains, Cerro Torre and Mt. Fitz Roy. Here´s on the way to Cerro Torre.
It looks like a nice little walk when you look at the glade pictures but, boy, was it cold up there. Actually, it may have been about 50 degrees F, but the wind was about 70 Km an hour. We took some pictures and headed for the more sheltered lower areas. This next pictures are of Mt. Fitz Roy. It wasn´t sucessfully climbed until the 1950´s and remains what is considered one of the most difficult ascents in the world. Unlike Cerro Torre, it was nice up there by the lake at the base, no wind. By the way, Fitz Roy was the captain of Darwin´s ship, the Beagle.
From there we took another all day bus ride back down through the steppe to El Calafate. El Calafate is famous for one of the most fantastic, easily accessible glaciers in the world, Perrito Moreno. You can walk to within about half a kilometer from the face of it on a series of terraces. This place is jaw dropping. This first picture is from a viewpoint the bus stopped at. The spit of land on the right, in front of the glacier, is where you go.
At one point the glacier calved an iceberg about the size of 20 SUV´s. THAT would have been the money shot. Myung got on one of a piece of ice only the size of about four SUV´s, but for some reason I can´t upload her pictures. I don´t know what´s up with that. About ten minutes after the one berg fell off, another bigger one floated to the surface. Apparently they break off from below the water level, too. Did you see a couple of weeks ago where an iceberg the size of Rhode Island broke off in Antartica? Hmm, ships for Antarctica leave from Ushuaia for another couple of weeks…. Ah, the old shoestring problem. It´s be nice. Hmmm.
A mere four hour ride got us to where the high Andes mostly peter out. You cross a low pass and 10 kilometers later you are in the Chilean coastal city of Puerto Natales. This is mostly known as the gateway to what Lonely Planet calls the best national park in South America, Torres del Paine. We are in Puerto Natales now. It´s a lot like the Alaskan panhandle here, in the midst of a similar archipelago and at about the same latitude south as Juneau. Fall comes early and the tourist season is just about over. It´s pretty cold and very windy. I don´t have pictures of Torres del Paine because we thought about hiking up there for a few days but Myung didn´t want to go. She took a day trip today to places you can drive to. I will probably come back and try it after Myung leaves from Ushuaia for Buenos Aires and points north in five days. I may not do it, though. It´s gertting pretty rough out there. The wind and the near constant drizzle are biting, to say the least, though at least it hasn´t started to snow at the lower levels yet. There are refuges, so you don´t have to camp, but still, five day hikes in this weather can be taxing for old guys like me.
Here, at least, is a view of the Pacific Ocean from the end of the lane where our guesthouse is.
The cruise ship up to Puerto Montt leaves from here. I´ve always wanted to take the Alaska cruise, and this would be similar, through the glaciered fjords, but the $600 for a dorm bed on that boat will probably stop me. I´m going to have to make some decisions.
That gets me to our plans. Myung is pretty tired of traveling and has decided to return to Korea. She´s flying out of Ushuaia in Argentine Terra del Fuego on the 19th. She plans to go to Bolivia and Peru. She has a ticket from Limsa to Korea on April 24. That´s too soon for me, so I´m staying on. I´ll go with her to Punta Arenas tomorrow, then then see her off in Ushuaia on the 19th. (The take off in this wind and weather in that twin prop plane should be an E ticket, I´ll wager.) I plan to come back here for Torres del Paine, then go north. Maybe I´ll take the famously scenic Carrera Austral in Chilean northern Patagonia. North of there is earthquake country, so I´ll probably come back to the lake country in Argentina and go from there to some places on the Atlantic coast. then I´ll probably tour northwestern Argentina before going to Bolivia. After that, I don´t know. Maybe down the Amazon or on up to Equador. I´ve been to Peru and Macchu Piccu is closed due to severe rains and mudslides. Or maybe Equador then down the Amazon from there. Or maybe I´ll just take a series of buses to California. That´s all in the future, though, and speculation that far ahead is almost pointless. I willl join Myung in Korea after that. She doesn´t know where she´s going to put down. It depends on her opportunities. She wants to work again, so I guess that will be the main basis for her decision. I hope it´s somewhere with a pulse, like Seoul, but she doesn´t prefer to go there. She may go to her hometown of Anyang, just south of Ulsan and north of Yangsan. I´ve been to Anyang many times. I can´t say I´m excited at the prospect of living there, but I´m willing to give it a try. We talk about this a lot. I´ll keep you posted.
So, until next time, be well all of you.