Ice, ice baby

Puerto Natales :: Chile

Too cold!

Places: Puerto Natales, El Calafate & El Chalten.

Coolest thing I did: Walked on a glacier, and then later one watched massive chunks of it fall 40m into the water.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, came into possession of a large section of Tierra del Fuego during their normal course of business (ie. repossessing stuff from people who can't pay their debts) and turned it into a conservation zone.

The border between Chile and Argentina runs right down the middle of the Andes mountain range, which with very small interruption runs all the way down the America's spine from Alaska to Cape Horn. This means that there is just as much face-smackingly beautiful scenery to see on the Argentinian side of the line, and that also explains why 50% of my passport is now covered in entry and exit stamps from Chile and Argentina. Seeing as the border crossing is a hut in the middle of a sheep paddock which spans both sides of the frontier I'm not sure why they even bother. Does someone have to come through at night and separate all the Chilean sheep in the paddock from the Argentinian sheep?

So having spent 5 days walking around the cubist landscape that is Torres del Paine it's hard to imagine what more you can see over the border in Argentina, however the short 4 day jaunt to El Calafate and El Chatlen was more than worth it. These two purpose built tourist towns and the southern and northern gateways to the Los Glaciares National Park, which from it's name you can imagine involves a fair amount of glaciers. Despite having just seen a highly impressive glacier on the 5 day trek the big attraction from El Calafate is the ability to go and walk on a much larger one. It's not cheap, but then again, you get to walk on a glacier.

The glacier in question is the Perito Moreno Glacier which has a face rising 40 metres above the water and is, quite ironically, considered fast moving in the glacier world. It's stable, meaning it's face has remained in a constant position, at least since the early 20th century when they started recording these things, and it takes about 400 years for the ice formed at the top to reach the bit tourists see. It's kind of cool to think when you're drinking the melt off the glacier you're drinking water that was put there before the industrial revolution had even happened, so air pollution as we know it today wasn't even invented yet.

People used to walk on Glacier Grey in TdP in the olden days but then a guide fell into a fissure and they put a stop to it. However because Perito mostly moves in the centre it's considered stable enough to have tour groups get strapped up in crampons (spikes for your shoes for laymen like me) and then trudge around for 90 mins. Walking with steel spikes on your shoes up and down fairly steep hills is surprisingly tiring, but well worth the effort. You get to drink water more pure than anything you're ever likely to get out of a bottle, and at the end as an added touch you have a glass of scotch on the rocks, the rocks being from beneath your feet. There's nothing like 50c worth of scotch to make the average Aussie think paying over $100 for a tour was a bargain.

The walking on said glacier was cool, but I also liked the bit later, where you go grab a coffee and walk down a series of balconies to watch the front of the glacier fall to pieces. Massive chunks of ice, sometimes 10 or 20m long drop down and smash into the water to the great delight of all watching. You could trust someone from the tour who happened to be from San Francisco to ask the Al Gore questions, and to this bloke's great disappointment what we were watching was natural, not climate induced. Sometimes I think these people want the world to be ending so they can get angry at everyone for not listening to Al Gore.

El Calafate has the strange distinction of being totally dependant on tourists, yet seeming to be staffed with people who are total arseholes to tourists. Everything seemed like too much trouble. You work in a bar, you expect people to occasionally make you get off your seat and bring them more beer. If you want to get tipped you should really not show open disdain for people who pay your salary. There were exceptions (the hostel staff were uniformly nice, and quite often stoned so perhaps one causes the other) but as a rule: arseholes.

Due to a very tight schedule to make it to Ushuaia by Christmas I had to force my trip to El Chalten and the northern park of the park into two days, with an 8am bus on the first morning, a day of hiking, then an early start the next day for a day of hiking to make the bus back to El Calafate at 6.30pm. However, it was completely worth it.

The reason you go to El Chalten (a town that only started existing in 1985 expressly to service tourists) is to hike up and gaze on the Fitzroy range. Like their siblings in TdP, Cerro Fitzroy and Cerro Torre are an impossible jumble of shards of stone jutting out from glaciers and overlooking impossibly blue lakes. With the weather on the first day being fairly changeable (including a light dusting of snow while waiting by Laguna Torre) we were only afforded glimpses of the three towers on top of Cerro Torre, but I'm now counting my blessings since people have told me the preceding week was even worse. I'm also quite glad of the decision to go back into town at night to sleep in a hostel bed - I don't think I'm mentally prepared to be sleeping in a tent where snow is a possibility right now.

Like El Calafate, El Chalten is another make believe Disney mountain village totally for the tourists, but I found it's tiny size much easier to deal with than it's bigger cousin to the south. My one night there involved a stew (locro) designed with hungry hikers in mind - after all, the menu claims it contains both "cow meat" and "pig meat". How could you go wrong? Add to that it's served in a microbrewery where the staff are nice to the patrons and it was the best experience I'd had eating out in 4 or 5 days.

The contrast with the second day's longer trek couldn't be more stark. It started slightly cloudy but by the time we'd climbed 4 hours to be foot of Mt Fitzroy the weather had cleared and the photos other people who didn't smash their camera on the rocks of TdP took could have been on postcards. Due to time constraints I did a fair bit of running back down to the town, which was kind of cool. There's nothing like a tour group struggling along with their walking poles and heavy packs and seeing you tear right down the mountain past them like they're standing still. I also am quite lucky I didn't smash face first onto the loose rocks a few times, but that's part of the attraction I guess. I also noted many late starting, hung over looking Israelis on that day, which I'm reliably informed was because of Hanukkah celebrations being the night before and them all going crazy at the campsites until 4am.

So besides a two hour stop off for the bus at Punta Arenas I'm on my last day in Chile until June now. I'll kind of miss the packs of wild dogs roaming the streets (I've taking to naming the ones that follow me for more than a block) and the wacky student protests. Nearly every school in the country has it's gate blocked by a wall of spikes formed by the chairs and tables being piled up through the bars, kind of like an angry echidna. Everyone wants a piece of the copper money flowing through the place, with the students quite reasonably expecting some of the royalties to go towards their costly education. However, that seems to be the extent of visible problems in the country. Really Chile has been a very good choice as the starting point of a South American trip, where you can ease yourself in with a functioning country where stuff works, buses generally come on time and there is some tourist infrastructure that appears to have been slightly planned. I'm promised by the time Bolivia and Peru roll around that will all be a distant memory.

This is probably the point where much of the ever shifting group of travel companions I've been moving with at various times since Santiago breaks apart and goes their own way - many are staying down here or going back up the Argentinian side of the Andes when I fly up to Buenos Aires for New Years. I'm quite looking forward to a few days in civilisation again, if nothing else to stop having to remember things because I still don't have a camera. I looked in the photo shop in El Calafate but many of the cameras they have for sale STILL USE FILM. I suspect it might have to wait to BA now.

So now it's just down to Ushuaia for Christmas, not sure what to expect arriving there at 7pm on Christmas Eve but there should be enough of us orphans to make our own fun. Feliz Navidad to all.

PS - I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself, having just taken on the $16 super human sandwich which lists beef as an ingredient twice and won. I may be sick.

Superlative

Puerto Natales :: Chile

NOW I'm in Patagonia.

Places: Puerto Montt (just!), Puerto Eden, Puerto Natales & Torres del Paine.

Coolest thing I did: Watched sunrise over Torres del Paine, which can't really be described in words. I thought all the pictures were Photoshopped, but it was that amazing in real life.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Beavers are the cane toads of Tierra del Fuego. They were introduced in the 1940s to start a fur industry but then just built dams everywhere, as beavers do.

I try not to tell too many transport stories, because no-one cares you spent 14 hours in a bus station, but the getting-to-the-Navimag story is movie of the week stuff. After spending a fitful night just shy of the Chilean border a lot of things had to go right for us to make it to Puerto Montt in Chile to catch the ferry we'd payed $480 to be on. James (my mate from Perth) has the only working phone so he was calling them all morning to see if there was a delay, but they kept saying it would depart on time at 2pm. It seemed like we couldn't get a ride into Chile the day before because every man and his dog had decided to go that morning - the border crossings were agonisingly slow and we could see the minutes ticking away. We were still 30 mins out of Puerto Montt when 2pm came and went and we were pretty low when we got into town after 48 hours of trying to get there. We called the terminal and the woman confirmed the ferry had sailed so we went do there to discuss refunds.

As soon as they saw us there with our backpacks one woman in the office on her phone to the captain and gibbered at us to run after her in Spanish. She threw the baby seats out of her car and told us to get in then floored it around the dock past fork lifts and shipping containers and got us so we could see the ferry was out of the dock but still in the water. After a tense 5 mins the foreman on the dock motioned us to a dinghy and we could see the ramp at the back of the ferry where they load the trucks on open and 10 mins later we were on board. We managed a round of applause from the assembled passengers watching all this unfold and spent 4 days trading off our minor celebrity status. Our bunks had been given away so we got upgraded to another room with a window with no-one else in it. It's safe to say we learned nothing from this life lesson, as things just got more awesome through lack of planning.

Moving in backpacker circles again you get used to feeling embarrassed about spending money on anything, and lots of people take the overland trip to Patagonia instead of springing for the ferry. I'd say after 4 days of fjords, black and white dolphins, humpback whales and a glacier they get you close enough to feel the freezing cold air off that this is a mistaken way to look at things. The only time you get off is to stop in Puerto Eden, a town of 170 people nestled in a fjord and the rest of the time it's drink beer, look out at the stunning scenery and make new friends.

I liked the fact that with a couple of crucial exceptions you could go to the bridge and watch the captain and crew drive the boat any time you wanted. The captain was a stern looking old bloke, who seemed to be slightly annoyed with the quality of work being done at all times, but some of the other officers spoke passable English and were happy to answer our stupid questions about how the boat worked, or to show us how to chart the course with the GPS. A few people stayed down there while they were trying to get us as close as possible to the face of a glacier named after a pope. Nothing really prepares you for the sky blue colour the sun brings out in a glacier, and now having seen a few I was most impressed with this one.

The day before that was proper, out at sea weather, with the horizon rising and dropping alarmingly out the window. I think by dinner about 3/4 of the passengers were hiding out in bed feeling queasy and the rest of us were standing on the bow trying to get a picture of the nose slamming into the sea to make the biggest splash. I did wonder if I'd get sea sick but drinking cask wine all afternoon in preparation seemed to gird me well.

The Navimag was also a good marshalling point to meet everyone else doing the 5 day 'W' trek of the Torres del Paine national park when you arrive in Puerto Natales. By the time we got off James and I had recruited 4 more for our party and we kept running into more people from the boat all the way around.

The main reason you go to this national park is to see Torres del Paine itself, a cluster of massive granite stacks twisted into an otherworldly shape by glacial forces which sit on a turquoise lake. You can do that in a day, but to really get the most out of the park it's necessary to stay out there for several. There's two options, stay in hostel things called refugios, or to go camping and carry all your food and gear with you (like tents and stoves and whatnot). I've never done this for more than a night before, so we decided a bigger group meant we could share the load a bit and buy more bulk food to carry. Having said that the packs still weigh a ton and you have moments where you and your pack get into tiffs, need some time apart, have harsh words and generally loathe each other.

But it's worth it.

With your own gear you can stay campsites that are in most cases far closer to the stuff you actually came to see. The route we took is the most popular, called the 'W' because you go up into three different valleys that face onto a series of lakes so overhead it looks like it's name. After a massive uphill hike on the first day you get to a campsite that is only 45 mins from the Torres del Paine lookout, meaning you can be up there for sunrise with only a 4am start.

The towers look spectacular enough during the day, but when the sun rises over the ridge opposite and catches the tip of each tower one by one, leaving the rest in shadow, the bits in the sun look like they're glowing. I'd seen the pictures before getting there, and assumed they'd been doctored in some way, but it's something that needs to be seen in real life to have justice done to it.

The other highlights are the Frenchman's valley, which as a treat you climb up without your heavy pack and get to a lookout (well, more a bunch of big shale boulders) which has a 360 degree view of the central valley, with snow capped mountains on each side and a wild river fed by melting snow running down into the lake at the bottom. As an added bonus we saw a large section of ice sheet on one of the mountains collapse into the valley below, which was spectacular, and probably should have worried Al Gore.

So each day you wake up wondering "how do we possibly top yesterday?". The last night we spent at a campsite which has a lookout over 280km of Glacier Grey, which is like nothing I've ever seen before. I'd seen them in Canada, where you walk up them, and I'd seen them from the Navimag and water level, but to just look out over the valley and see brilliant blue ice in all directions is hard to match. You can sit there and watch it for hours, which is good because there's no TV. We cooked up our dinner and sat at the lookout eating it and just watching the sun set. That was so good we got up at a leisurely 5.30am to see it again. The added bonus there was seeing what must have been hundreds of metres of ice beak off the front and crash into the water. For about 10 mins later huge rushes of white water splash out of the front of the glacier, as water rushes around underneath. This being 2011 and not 2006 no-one even mentioned global warming.

It is, however disconcerting to see the treeline where the glacier used to be. The refugio that's closest to the glacier was once right at the face of it, but now a couple of decades or more later it's a good hour's hike to reach the new waterline. Argue all you like about man-made vs. sunspots or aliens but it's hard to look at that and not be concerned the planet is warming. What we do about it is a whole other argument.

So due to more lack of organisation in high season I'm having an enforced rest day as I couldn't get a bus back into Argentina for El Calafate until tomorrow. Which is good as I'm just glad to not have my shoes on and let the one big blister each foot currently is breathe a bit. I feel like I've been running at full speed since I got here, there's so much to do and it's not looking like stopping until at least Christmas.

In a terrible moment I managed to smash my camera on the rocks on day 4 of the trek so all the pictures of me with the glacier exist only on other people's cameras so I'm going to have to spend some time on the first day in Argentina camera shopping. I'm wondering how far my fragments of Spanish will get me there.