The North Coast as a foreign country

Punta del Diablo :: Uruguay

I may have sunstroke.

Places: Punta del Este, La Paloma & Punta del Diablo.

Coolest thing I did: Finally found a beach with warm water and surf worth swimming in.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The French have churros. Until this trip I thought it was just the Mexicans that liked these crazy Latin doughnuts but its seems like they're everywhere.

So far my decision to not spend more than 30 mins in Montevideo changing buses seems to have been vindicated: pretty much everyone I've spoken to who was there was very vague over whether they liked it at all and tend to say they think they could have skipped it themselves. I have no first hand knowledge of the place so I can't comment but I feel happy that I went directly to the beach, and made it to Punta del Este (PdE) in time for the weekend.

PdE would like to think of itself as the Miami Beach of Latin America, but for my money it's more like the Gold Coast of Latin America. It's set on a narrowing peninsula with a port that is home to "artisanal" fishermen (I'm not sure if they do wood work in their spare time), with uninterrupted beach down the Atlantic side and a massive port for mooring your yacht on the sheltered side. That alone should be a warning that there's some money floating about the place. Any ground on the peninsula that is capable of supporting the weight of high rise buildings pretty much already has a high rise building on it, apparently the population sky rockets from Christmas until early February, meaning it's necessary to have plenty of places to stay, rent or own on hand.

It's a well known fact that South America has some of the highest concentrations of cosmetic surgery recipients in the world, and there would have to be a fairly high percentage of those on display on the beaches of PdE. There are innumerable women in their 40s and 50s shot full of botox and collagen in tiny bikinis supporting totally improbable breast implants. It does, however, only seem to be the women, as the beaches are also heaving with fat, ugly middle aged men, and the numbers would dictate some of their disposable income is being pouring into physical maintenance of their wives/mistresses.

The beach culture here is very different to Australia, or practically any other Western country I can think of. Instead of everyone lying down, feet pointed at the sea and ignoring each other (which is some feat on Bondi in summer), there are groups set in circles, women sitting back and chugging ma-te while their kids run wild around the place, and the men all standing in circles arguing with animated hand gestures that reach back to a forgotten Italian heritage. Everyone is talking to everyone, and generally having a good time. I can't understand why even the slightest glance at another person in Sydney on the beach is going to cause offence, when you see these people actually enjoying themselves. This is true whether it's the rich folk on PdE, the family friendly La Paloma or the hippies and backpackers of Diablo. Much like Tango night I feel like we might be missing something at home.

All the beach towns I spent any time at in Uruguay had a fairly good nightlife, mostly due to it still being peak season, but PdE takes the cake. After spending all day lazing around the beach getting tanned all the girls get made up to the nines and make their way to the bars and clubs. Even the backpackers in the hostel seemed to put in extra effort. Of course, all the blokes make barely effort at all, and when you've been out a couple of nights you tend to work out why - the blokes have all the money. I was taken aback by the fact that every girl out on a Friday night looked like she was about 21 and every bloke looked like he was over 40. It seems like the guys get in anywhere if they have money to spend, and the girls get in anywhere if they don't look like they've just been dragged backwards through a hedge.

The Brazilians that adopted me on the first night out told me that nearly all of PdE is owned by either rich Argies or Brazilians who are looking for somewhere more solid to stick their money than their home countries, and for some reason Uruguay seems to be one of those places they feel safer with. With past histories of military dictatorships and even more recent financial calamities in both countries I guess it would seem prudent to have a bolt hole over the border somewhere.

My next stop along the coast road towards Brazil was La Paloma, which isn't really high on the list of most of the Lonely Planet crowd but it does seem to be a hit with the Argie student or family crowd. The hostel was almost exclusively Spanish speaking, with the thankful exceptions of 3 Swedes speaking better English than mine, and a few words between some of my BA native room mates. It's a lovely little town, but if PdE is the Gold Coast of Latin America then LaP is the Forster Tuncurry. Most people are staying in camp grounds on the road into town and it's very big with families on their summer holidays. It's kind of like of Northern NSW and QLD were in a different country to Sydney and Melbourne. By this time it had been a week and I'm pretty sure I still hadn't met an actual Uruguayan - even the staff working in the bars, restaurants, supermarkets and even at the bus station ticket window are from BA or Argentina somewhere. They seem even a little bit more friendly in Uruguay (must be that sun putting people in a good mood) but I still can't say for sure if the people from Uruguay are nice, simply because I don't think I've met one.

So after a quiet couple of full days in LaP where I mostly tried to get over the head cold I seem to have acquired through mostly lacking sleep and proper food in PdE (my attempts to sleep on the beach ended in sunburn, rather than rest) I decided to move on. While I toyed with the idea of going to Cabo Polonio just for the laughs of going to a town only reachable by 4WD it was starting to get into my mind that Carnival in Rio was only 3 weeks away (and I'm still in Uruguay) I decided to get a move on and get to the closest beach town to the border, Punta del Diablo (PdD) where you find me now. Cabo Polonio is famous for having the second largest sea lion colony in the country/continent/planet (can't remember which) but seeing as I have just seen sea lions begging, and usually getting (from the size of them) fish scraps on the docks of PdE I chose to skip it.

Diablo is probably what Byron Bay looked like in the 80s, before the hard core Noosa-fication took hold. The bus drops you at a sandy square 4km from town and then it's a minibus into the beating heart of a town that swells from 200 in winter to something in the order or 10,000+ in summer. It's all sandy streets, hostels and cabins, with lots of Argies in dreadlocks trying to find themselves. You get this kind of nonsense in many foreign coastal towns (Germans with dreadlocks and piercings are deep down, still Germans) so I try to ignore all the people selling hand woven trinkets and concentrate on the fact that the surf just out beyond them is the best I've seen anywhere so far on this trip. The water in by PdE and LaP was a few degrees below bloody freezing so it was a vast surprise that here, only two hours north of La Paloma there was water you can comfortably wade into and spend a long time swimming about in. My Swedish mates got a little bit worried when I didn't return from the surf for a good hour or so, but I was having way too much fun just body surfing.

The crowd that Diablo attracts is quite similar to the kind that Byron once attracted - young kids who want to be hippies and the hard core surfers who despise them. You can tell the difference right away, with the former decked out in baggy parachute pants in Inca woven patterns, possibly playing reggae and the latter wearing boardshorts and a singlet for all occasions, mostly staring out at the waves for hours when not actually on them.

So despite the occasional short bursts of torrential rain and a summer cold I've been trying to offload for a few days I've thoroughly enjoyed my detour into Uruguay and I'm really glad I've had some extra time to relax on the beach. We're a few days past the end of the second month now and I needed a bit of downtime after those couple of months of relentless seeing-cool-stuff but tomorrow morning it's off to Brazil, which I don't suspect will be quiet in any way this time of year.

The Luxembourg of Latin America

Colonia del Sacramento :: Uruguay

A testicle in the vice of history.

Places: Colonia del Sacramento.

Coolest thing I did: Went to a beach that faces the actual sea for the first time on this trip. Pity the water was rather brown.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Uruguayans seem to have won the best steak sandwich so far with an artery cracker called a chivito. Apparently your steak sandwich needs at least two hard boiled eggs on it.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of Uruguay yet, because I'm having trouble not being surrounded by Argies at the moment - it seems like the fact Colonia is quicker to get to that some BA suburbs there are more Argies here than anyone else. I've been told the people are noticeably friendlier and more laid back but I'm starting to suspect I'm just being quoted verse and chapter from the Lonely Planet. Like many other tourist-centric towns in South America so far this one seems to be full of people who somehow seem to forget tourists are their source of income. The girl at the bakery who got frustrated I didn't speak good enough Spanish really doesn't deserve to sell a whole lot of empanadas. I'd think it was just me, but speaking with a few people who haven't read the Lonely Planet it seems like there is an agreement that a lot of the people who work in the service industry here are dicks. It could also be that everyone is just snappy at everyone because it's still so damn hot here.

I'm starting to wonder if my time in England somehow predisposed me to whinge about hot weather all the time? That should go away when there's a beach nearby. There is a beach here that faces the mouth of the La Plata, but the water is really a bit brown for me to swim in and I'm kind of conscious of the fact I can just make out the skyscrapers of BA on the horizon. That, however, does make for a rather cool sunset as BA is directly west of here.

So Colonia, like Uruguay itself is a little bit of a historical oddity with a story that reminds me of all those wacky micro-states in Europe that don't make rational sense either. It all started with the Pope drawing a line through the middle of a blank page.

There was a bit of a problem when the New World was discovered in that everyone wanted it because it had heaps of cool stuff like gold, silver and natives to enslave. In order to sort this out the Pope of the time drew a line down the middle of the world and said to Spain "you have this bit" and gave the rest to Portugal. If you've got Foxtel and watched the historical drama The Borgias then the Pope who did this is played by Jeremy Irons. Who I only really remember as being the baddie in Die Hard 3. Anyway, Jeremy Irons divided the New World between Portugal and Spain with a Papal Bull called the Inter caetera and as a result Brazil speaks Portuguese and practically everyone else here speaks Spanish. I skipped some big bits but that's basically the gist of it.

With that sorted out the Spanish took hold of the south bank of Rio de La Plata and founded Buenos Aires in order to handle the trade coming up the river from Paraguay and whatnot. The Governor of Rio de Janeiro wanted to challenge that so sent some people with guns to found what would become Colonia del Sacramento, a fortress right across the river delta. Then it changed hands about 6 or 7 times, including for a short time when the Brits got it to further their policy of letting pirates plunder Spanish ships at will, before the music finally stopped. After independence from Spain it was originally part of a confederation with the other Plata colonies but went it's own way to form South America's smallest Spanish speaking country.

So when the centre of gravity in the country shifted out to Montevideo what was left was a quaint little colonial relic an easy day trip from BA. The streets don't at all conform too the grid pattern the Spanish imposed on the Argies, making me suspect that at least the old part shows it's more chaotic Portuguese roots. It's got cobbled streets, old churches, the walls of the fort and all that other good stuff you expect from a historical town. Probably the best bit is by the historical accident of it having to point at BA in order to shoot cannons at people it also has a nice Rambla that faces out at sunset and people have put nice cafes on it so you can watch the sun go down while drinking cold beer.

I do also like the fact you can hire golf carts from Hertz here to get around town. That would have been cool but then I saw a beach buggy with a Thrifty logo on it but all my attempts to find one of those to rent have come to nothing.

I've actually made the concious decision to skip over Montevideo and head directly for beaches on the Atlantic Coast I can probably swim in. Uruguay is know for having lots of nice beaches that are packed with Argies this time of year so I'm not expecting it to be cheap, but after a couple of months of hard core touristing I'm kind of looking forward to the break. I might even finish that copy of Catch-22 I've been carrying since Sydney.

Filling in the gaps

Colonia del Sacramento :: Uruguay

Buenos Aires wakes up from it's holiday slumber.

Places: Buenos Aires & Colonia del Sacramento.

Coolest thing I did: Spent a lazy Monday night watching people with drums go crazy at La Bomba del Tiempo.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Tango was probably the result of their being way too many blokes in BA when it was expanding in the 19th century so being a crazy good dancer was a way for the very few women around to pick between all the men on offer. I'd have been doomed.

Just to mix things up a little bit I chose to base myself in the barrio of San Telmo this time as a change from the awesomeness of the streets of Palermo. It's an area south of the centre of town which has heaps of cobbled streets and bars and restaurants decked out in a traditional style. That alone should have been a warning it was probably going to be a bit touristy for my taste, but I assumed that my body would probably thank me if it was a quieter part of town than Palermo, but somehow I still managed to find a way to stay out way to late for the 4 extra nights I ended up spending there.

So really everything I still had wanted to do in BA was a night time activity so I spent most of my days staying out of the sun and mooching around town. It was nice to not feel like I had to see anything in particular, and just wandering around different parts of the city I'd already been to I kept uncovering new and interesting things to see. That's one of the primary reasons I think I tend to like big cities to base myself rather than out in the country - there seems to be a never ending supply of new and interesting things to see in a city. One accidental gem was stumbling across the El Abasto shopping centre on my way to see something else. This used to be BA's fresh food market however it's been gutted and restored in order to house a shopping centre, but it's been done with such respect for the original building that you can't help but be taken aback when you first see it towering over you when you exit the subway station.

I spotted that one on the Monday night I went to La Bomba del Tiempo, which if you've spent any time in a hostel in BA you'll not only have heard of, but more than likely gone to. It's in the Konex centre, which is an old factory with it's roof ripped off to house cultural events, and every Monday about a dozen percussionists of various musical backgrounds take to the stage as they have been every Monday for years and smash out some highly infectious tunes. This tends to turn the crowd of somewhere like 1000 people who have been drinking beer out of litre plastic cup for well over an hour into raving lunatics. It's hard to get a good feel of how many people there are tourists due to the high concentration of non-Argentinian Spanish speakers but there's definitely a high concentration of Anlgo and Euro backpackers about the place. I liked it because you can basically dance like you're having a brain hemorrhage and everyone thinks it's normal. Well recommended.

I was quite happy to slip out of BA having only seen the Tango performed on the street for the tourists. It's a big draw in La Boca for the daytime crowds, and one of the benefits of being in San Telmo was on Sunday I got to see the antique markets spill out and take over the street. Towards the end of the day, once the tourists have had their fill of buying tat the stall holders give way to the performers, and there is quite a few couples dancing Tango as a kind of busking. That would have been enough for me, I didn't need to go and see a hugely expensive Tango show, however I was told the thing to do, even by other Australian males so I knew it was probably not too So You Think You Can Dance, was to go to La Catedral on a Tuesday night.

La Catedral is a dance club which takes place under the high arched ceilings of an old converted factory that on it's own is probably a more hip place to have a beer than practically any bar in Sydney. They do lessons every night of the week, however it's somehow become an accepted fact that Tuesday is the night that all the foreigners who have no rhythm at all show up and embarrass themselves in front of an equally poor group of dancers. The lessons are mostly in Spanish, with a smattering of English, but that doesn't really matter because half the crowd speaks not much of either. Being a single male you're generally outnumbered 3:1 to single girls so it's a good way to meet girls who speak practically no English, are all 5 feet tall and get a bit miffed when you're crap at dancing. Well, that's what seemed to happen to me anyway. Thank God there was a group of about 5 French girls who couldn't really dance at all either so you could spend most of the time you're stepping on each other's feet laughing.

Once the tourists have had their shot (there's two classes so I was able to spend a couple of hours drinking beer and feeling like an accomplished dancer watching the later class stumble about like I had been earlier) the real show starts. La Catedral is a serious dance club, which tends to attract a young, non-traditional crowd who just want to dance and it's hard to explain just how good some of these people are. None of them are paid, they're simply on a night out. At midnight. On a Tuesday. There's a large part of me that was sitting there wondering what went wrong with our culture when we'd rather sit at home and watch reality TV than go to something like this. A few of the Argies I spoke to said they never really come to dance, it's just to watch other people who are really good and sit around talking crap with your mates. If you've ever seen the crowd at a pub that happens to be open at 2am on a Wednesday morning then it's hard not to be stuck by the contrast.

So back in the day Argentina became independent from Spain and decided that what they needed to do was go on a massive expansion spree to try and make use of the mass of natural resources on hand. To do that they needed blokes, because back then stuff like tractors and cars hadn't been invented yet, and a good source of those were the struggling countries of Mediterranean Europe, most importantly for the culture of Argentina one of those was Italy. Not only did they get decent pizza and pasta, but they also got heaps of macho blokes in a town with practically no women. They theory used to be the tango originated in the brothels of BA, due to the fact there was a shortage of women brothels were a good business to be in. However it seems that it's more likely that the dance originated in the tenements of BA, where all the women were and the blokes needed to stand out from the crowd by being top notch dancers. And it's likely there would be more buskers annoying you in La Boca, because all those people silently dancing the Tango for your money would have had to find other work.

I'm glad I went back to BA and stayed a bit longer in the end, I got to do a few things that I wasn't able to do due to the holidays last time and it only added to my opinion of the place. I'd really love to come back on day in Spring when the city is in full flight and see it in all it's glory, but I get the feeling from what I saw that it would be one of those rare places I could actually see myself living in, which is unique in Latin American cities I've seen so far. Despite having lovely bits much of Mexico City looks like a war zone and Santiago would be a bit too dull. If it's wasn't for the hyper-inflation and the lack of vegetable content in my diet making me feel a bit woozy all the time it would be almost perfect.

So my trip today was a 1 hour ferry ride over Rio del La Plata (the river of SILVER!) into Uruguay. I'm in a former colonial outpost called Colonia del Sacramento which is a manageable little pueblo (town, gringos) whose story I shall tell next time.

Mucho agua

Buenos Aires :: Argentina

1800 cubic metres of water per second!

Places: Puerto Iguazu & Buenos Aires.

Coolest thing I did: Took a jetboat ride right into the wash of some of the medium sized falls at Iguazu and looked like I'd swum there.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Iguazu falls were the ones that Roger Moore nearly goes over in Moon Raker, which aren't really at the end of the Amazon River like the movie says.

There's times I feel like I might have become a bit jaded with all these years of travel and am finding it hard to be impressed by the really high volume tourist sites that are considered must sees. I kind of shrugged at the Sphinx, thought the Mona Lisa was a bit small and Chitzen Itza was probably my least favourite pyramid site in all of Central America. However, every now and then I go somewhere that completely exceeds all expectations, and I threaten to bore the pants off everyone I meet for weeks after extolling it's virtues. Iguazu Falls is one of those places.

For those of you who have been to Niagara Falls, imagine that multiplied by about a factor of 10. Rather than one big waterfall it's a series of falls coming off the edge of load of cliffs around the face of a sheer valley, with massive jagged stone breaking out of jungle in between. By sheer luck I happened to view the falls in order of size, from the smallest upwards, so by the time I saw The Devils Throat (you'll note the Argies like calling things The Devils Throat) which is the biggest I'd already been smacked about the gob several times during the day. Apparently the view of Diablo is better from the Brazilian side, but the Argentinians have built a series of catwalks so you're standing pretty much right on top of them and the sheer volume of water flowing down the face of it plays tricks on the eyes. I could have watched it for hours, only I was sharing the catwalk with about 3 thousand of my closest friends.

The Argentinian Dream is a camera and a step ladder over Iguazu Falls - there were about half a dozen guys there cleaning up by taking portraits of families and couples from a slightly higher vantage point.

I loved spending the day walking through the jungle and all of a sudden getting a different perspective on the falls - I think I took roughly 1000 pictures so I'll try very hard to cull them before inflicting them on anyone. Some of the catwalks take you along the rivers at the top of the falls and it always amazes me just how slowly the appear to be flowing up until the point where they drop off into a massive wall of white water. Again, I could spend all day just watching the water disappear off into the crowd below.

So just to give the park more of a Disneyland feel there are companies that do adventure tours inside the park. My mate Claudio in Salta had told me the one to do was the jetboat up to the face of the medium sized falls (once you see Diablo you know why they don't try and get close to that one) so I made sure I gave up an extra 100 pesos or so to do that. The boat seemed to be filled mostly with the rowdiest family I'd seen in the park so they pretty much treated it like a roller coaster - hands in the air and screaming and shouting. I couldn't help but join in. I loved it when the boat tore right into the falls and then swung back out and the whole boat was changing Otro, otro, otro,...(again! again!). Despite the fact you get soaked right down to the bare skin it was well worth it. I felt sorry for whoever had to sit next to me on the plane that night back to BA with my walking shoes that had slowly been drying with my feet in them all day.

Nothing much could take the glow of the day away from me, not even the Saturday crowd. I'd been warned to get there early, and even arriving at about 8.30am was probably a bit too late. By lunchtime the park is packed any you spend a very long time lining up for things. To anyone trying to do the Argentinian park in a day I'd suggest trying to go on the very first bus at 7.20 am if lining up for things irritates you as much as it does me. Then go back to town and sleep the afternoon away. The only other thing worth doing was walking to the end of Puerto Iguazu and seeing the confluence of the rivers, the only place you can get Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina in the same photograph.

Doing Iguazu in a day was not a cheap experience - I took my bags to the national park and put them in storage and instead of going back to town I got a taxi the 4km to the airport. That cost 90 pesos, which is about $20. I also had the misfortune of only being able to fly back to EZE, the international airport which is also a money sink. The shuttle back into town literally passed by the door of my hostel and I couldn't even bribe the driver to let me off early. There's nothing like landing at 8pm and not getting into the hostel door until 10pm. I did consider sharing a taxi with some other whiteys on my flight but they're priced the taxis at 200 pesos, meaning even 3 people sharing it would be cheaper to get 3 tickets on the shuttle bus. I've not seen a scam for fleecing tourists so blatant since Macquarie Bank found a way to charge for the train ride from Sydney Airport into the city using 2018 prices.

So back in BA in time to catch Gerry before he has to fly back to Oz tomorrow night. Hopefully I'll get to do another couple of things I wanted to do last time that I couldn't due to the New Years shutdown before I shuffle off to the beach in Uruguay.

Red & Yellow & ...

Puerto Iguazu :: Argentina

I haven't had a good human sacrifice story in ages.

Places: Salta, Quebrada de Humahuaca & Quebrada de Cafayate.

Coolest thing I did: Three words - Red. Wine. IceCream.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Llamas will hold still long enough to take a picture of with self portrait mode on your new camera. Man I love my new camera.

The most stark different I found coming from the flatlands of central Argentina up to Salta was to find just how different the people are physically in the North. The Incas made it this far south and everyone looks a lot like they do (or so The Discovery Channel tells me) in Peru and Bolivia. There is a much stronger native influence in the gene pool than is evident in places further south, with people being shorter, broader, darker and having almost Asian eyes as a result of the Americas being peopled by dudes walking across the Bearing Straight during the last ice age from Mongolia. For the first time in South America I felt that same kind of traditional culture that was so prevalent in Southern Mexico and Guatemala, even if the locals will be the first to tell you not much of that traditional culture remains.

The town of Salta itself is set in a river valley and is surrounded on all sides by green mountains, a contrast yet again with both Patagonia and Mendoza. It has it’s standard square, bloke on horse, church and town hall so as a result I didn’t plan on spending a whole lot of time in town. The rain on the first day forced me to do more of it that I had planned, and it turned out to be quite a stroke of luck. The one museum I went to on the town square had the remains of children that had been sacrificed by the Incas, and because those wacky Incas sacrificed their children by getting them smashed on booze and then putting them on top of really high mountains, those kids are nearly intact. In 1999 some archaeologists found 3 bodies on top of a volcano that had been there for over 500 years and all 3 are in near mint condition, with the exception of one young girl who was struck by lightning sometime since and shows the burn marks. They rotate the mummies on display so only one is on display at a time, but it is seriously eerie that you’re looking into the face of someone that looks like they could have been alive a week ago.

It’s very hard to work out exactly why the Incas were sacrificing these children, apparently something to do with bonding disparate parts of the empire together or some such, but the English translation seemed to be one page to every 5 of Spanish so I think they might have been skipping large parts of the story.

In order to get out of Salta by Friday and onto a plane for Iguazu to see the falls I sent myself on a gruelling 48 hours of day trips, which are generally my least favourite things in the world. I didn’t really get to experience much of Salta’s nightlife simply because I was getting up at 7am every morning to go somewhere. My first day was out into the Quebrada de Humahuaca (I think that means gorge, or valley?) which involves going down into a gorge where the erosion has exposed multi-coloured stone and then locals have gone and built their villages in the shadow of these technicolour mountains making them lovely places for tourists to stop and take pictures of. They also all have town squares, churches and town halls for you to pretend to be interested in, and various knickknacks you probably should buy for people at home to pretend to like and then stick in shoe boxes at the bottom of their closets.

Now I love quaint native cultures as much as the next Western Imperialist but I’ve documented in many places before how much I find the Disney-fication of these places at best uninteresting. From the hand woven llama poncho I’d never wear to the blokes playing the pan pipes while you’re having lunch I get the feeling I’m not their target market. The most interesting conversation I had with a local was probably the guide, who comes from one of the villages but moved to Salta because that’s where all the jobs are. That circular situation where people are keeping their local traditions alive simply so the tourists can feel they’ve seen something authentic kind of makes no sense to me. These guys wouldn’t be living in adobe huts and trying to hide their satellite dishes from view if we didn’t pay to go and see them living like it was pre-Colombian days.

Yep, for me it was all about the scenery, and it’s simply one of those unique places in the world. The various hues come from such phenomena as fossilised algae (green) to oxidised iron (red) to make, in some places cliff faces showing seven different contrasting colours. Even the subtle colour change between the late morning when we were driving into the gorges and late afternoon when we were coming back meant you constantly got a different palate to look at. If it was up to me we could have spent all day in the gorge and far less time in reconstructed Inca ruins, eating llama meatloaf or the half hour in Jujuy on the way back to see yet another town hall, even if this one did have a rather cool French Baroque feel to it and independent Argentina’s first flag in it’s front room.

My other day trip was to Cafayate, which is Argentina’s other major wine region, even if it is dwarfed massively by Mendoza. Again, the best part of the day is going through the almost desert landscape of the Quebrada de Cafayate, which we did far more stopping at and photographing than the day before. You’re constantly being told this formation is an iguana, and this one is a frog, but my favourites were the big dramatic ones, like the two dry waterfalls The Devils Throat & The Amphitheatre. The latter is even cooler because you can walk right inside and find acoustics so good that some of Argentina’s best loved musicians (I’m told) have played there. You got the feeling this is true as there were some buskers taking advantage of the many, many tour buses by playing right in the middle to make the most of the sound. I wondered how it would have gone down had I bought one of those pan pipes and played the first 3 bars of Three Blind Mice (the only music I actually know) repeatedly.

I have to grind an axe with the wineries I’ve so far been to in Argentina. Does no one understand that when you get a lot of white people in you may have the best marketing opportunity you could possibly have? Why on earth bring out your bottom of the barrel wines and treat everyone like some criminal that’s out to eat into your profit margin by drinking a thimble of your wine? Seriously, it should be a cost of doing business. Not one of the wine’s I’ve had so far would have been something I’d actively go looking for, but I also guess that might be because the servers somehow have the art of making half a bottle stretch to 40 people and despite selling wine that costs 100 pesos a bottle you’re serving the stuff that cost 18 in the supermarket. Even if most people are tourists who can’t tell their wines apart and will never remember the name anyway, what’s that compared to the 1% who might know what they are talking about (I’m not in that category, by the way) and might buy a whole case right there.

When I’m in charge, things will be different.

So the thing that Cafayate had going for it that was kind of unique was the heladeria (or ice-cream parlour, gringo) that made red and white wine ice cream. There are several places that now sell a wine based ice cream in Cafayate, but the original isn’t easy to miss – they literally only sell it out of a window that is lined with the reviews from the Lonely Planet, Rough Guide and other travel guides blown up in 40 point font. Strangely enough the LP reviews were in French, German and Spanish, but not English. Anyway, the woman will give you a scoop of Torrontes & Cabernet ice cream, and from the first taste you can tell there is a whole crapload of actual wine in there. I’d say if you’d opted for the 1kg tub you’d be fairly sure you wouldn’t be driving home afterwards.

The way back was almost a write off, after a couple of wine tastings, lunch and wine icecream it was about 5 mins out of town before the whole bus was asleep. The only thing that actually got us all out of the bus on the final stop of the day was the excited squeal of the 9 year old girl who had spent the whole day doing grown up stuff and simply wanted to feed the llamas. On the side of the road someone has tied up about 5 or 6 llamas that you can feed with something that looked like rabbit pellets. After seeing my mate Claudio (a BA native on holiday in the North) take a self-portrait of himself and a llama I decided to do the same. Luckily they held of spitting on either of us, which I hear is a common enough problem.

So after a surprisingly painless flight from Salta to Iguazu I find myself with 24 hours to go and see falls that allegedly make Niagara look like a sprinkler and then get on another plane to BA. I’m not feeling a sleep in tomorrow.

Next time, Spring

Salta :: Argentina

Summer in the 'doze.

Places: Cordoba, Alta Gracia & Cabalango (via Carlos Paz).

Coolest thing I did: Saw the motorcycle they used in the movie version of The Motorcycle Diaries.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Child rearing practices seem to coddle the kids too much - in Argentina it seems normal to have your kid sleeping in a pram in a bar at 2am.

Much like my experience with the ‘doze, my time in Cordoba (hence forth known as the ‘dobe) is totally overshadowed by the fact it spent all the daylight hours I was there absorbing heat into it’s surface all day in order to make you imagine you’re walking around on the sun. Which is a pity, because Argentina’s second city does seem to have a vibrant cultural life, which is probably the result of having a long history of being a centre of learning (and more importantly drinking) for university students. The only problem of course with when I was there is there is said students had cleverly buggered off to the beach or mountains and left the streets to Europeans frying alive wondering why they are walking around the centre of a deserted city during the 5 or 6 hour siestas the locals have this time of year.

Now if you spend any length of time in the northern half of Argentina you’ll get to know fairly quickly that all the colonial centres are pretty much a central square with a town hall and a church of some kind on them (neatly dividing church and state by, usually, a statue of a man on a horse). The ‘dobe, being the first colonial capital of what would become Argentina (it’s complicated, don’t ask) lays down the blueprint for this, including the cathedral with Jesus in his pointing-to-his-own-chest pose, which I’ve taken to calling “I’m the Jesus” pose. In Thailand you see Buddha in about 4 or 5 common poses, which all have names, so I don’t see why Jesus can’t have his standard poses named too. He’s also well known for the peace sign pose, which I call “Japanese schoolgirl Jesus” and the one with his palm out, which I call “Gimme five Jesus”. You may get the feeling I’ve seen way too many colonial churches lately.

During the morning hours, and post-siesta every space in the pedestrianized streets is filled with people selling junk made in China off blankets. There seems to be a serious amount of hustling of pots and pans, baby clothes, socks, and even one bloke we saw selling hunting knives off a blanket. People keep telling me the hyper-inflation here is causing the middle class to pretty much have disappeared and I do wonder whether it’s causing a new breed of entrepreneurs who are somehow capable of sourcing 150 different baseball caps and a blanket are simply making up for the steeply rising cost of shop front rents.

The inflation, in fact, is pretty much the topic of conversation you end up with in the occasions you find yourself speaking to an Argie who speaks enough English to hold a conversation with someone with Spanish as woeful as mine. The restaurants draw their prices on the menus in pencil, no-one can leave the country for anywhere because their currency is worth less by the day, and despite the fact a good steak and beer costs well over 70 pesos people don’t keep enough change to let you pay for it with 100 pesos. Even McDonalds won’t change a hundred (or as Gerry has awesomely dubbed it, a hunjee).

Where were we? Oh yeah, Cordoba.

Despite the heat kind of getting everyone down during the day, the ‘dobe is a totally different town at night, even in summer. We only really managed one proper night out while we were there, but it didn’t take very long at all to find a strip of bars and nightclubs in town. After downing a 400g steak each (which is becoming a disturbingly normal size meal these days) we made our way along the canal that runs down the edge of downtown to Guemes, a barrio (suburb or neighbourhood to you gringos) named after some figure or other in Argie history. It’s not important who he was at this point, for some reason he made it possible for there to be heaps of bars that are also restaurants, and quite often nightclubs that span two or more streets. You have to get used to this eating at 11pm malarkey simply because you’ll be eating on your own if you don’t, and you’ll think the town has rubbish nightlife because no-one shows up before 2am.

If you’re a spirits drinker I strongly suggest that you try and make a mental switch to beer and/or wine before coming out to the A-Zone, they may have a book with pages of spirits as a menu, but quite often asking for 99% of the things on it will result in a series of ‘no lo tenemos’ (we don’t have it). They always have beer.

Inside the ‘dobe itself you’re supposed to go and look at heaps of old buildings left by people called Jesuits, who built churches, monasteries and universities. I know I’m usually good at this kind of thing, but to be honest it was way too hot to read up on any of it so I have no idea who the Jesuits were or why they were so important. From all the crosses on their rooves I suspect they were somehow related to the Catholic Church, but that’s just a wild guess.

What I mostly did is try to escape the city to see other stuff. The day trip out to Alta Gracia is supposed to include a look inside another important Jesuit but to be honest it was even hotter there than in the ‘dobe. Instead I saw the childhood home of Che Guevera, which was way cooler.

I’d forgotten the reams of captions I’d read in the temples to Che that pass for museums in Cuba and misplaced the fact that he was actually and Argentinian. The house in Alta Gracia is a nice change from all that because it’s mostly about how sickly a kid he was with asthma (which he never kicked), his time in medical school and his two epic journeys as a young man, first around Argentina and then more famously around Latin America, which he recorded in the Motorcycle Diaries, which I’ve read but never seen the movie that was made about a decade ago. They have the motorcycle they used for the film in the museum, which is kind of cool. They also dedicate a very small portion to the same photos you see in Cuba, but only the most famous ones of the post-revolutionary government and his adventures in Africa and, fatally Bolivia. They also have the obligatory blow up of the photo that launched a billion t-shirts. My favourite bit, however was the fact that the family bathroom has a sign on the toilet that says something like “don’t use this, it’s part of the museum”, which I guess means there’s been past incidents of tourists weeing in Che’s childhood dunny.

I liked the fact the hero worship, while still apparent in the one-sidedness of the political segments of the museum, is nothing like as prevalent is it is in the museums in Cuba. I still have my doubts that Che ever had x-ray vision or killed Godzilla with his bare hands. Communist dictatorships tend to have issues with balanced journalism.

One thing I didn’t notice in Cuba, but was blatantly obvious in Argentina was in lots of the pictures Che has a mate cup in hand. Mate (the ‘e’ should have an accent – not may-te, but mah-the) is what Argentinians do to while away bus trips, work days, routine traffic stops and pretty much anything else that allows you to have one hand free. It’s basically a kind of tea that you fill a special cup with, then you keep refilling that cup with hot water from a 1.5 litre thermos you carry with you everywhere and drinking the tea through a pipe that stops the tea leaves from getting in your mouth. Seeing Che do it probably fills the Argies with the same pride as I’d imagine Aussies would get seeing photos of Donald Bradman batting 322 with a stubbie in hand.

My other day trip was an exercise in being Argentinaed for pretty much an entire day. The owner of the hostel told us that in order to escape the heat the best thing to do would be to get a minibus out to a place out of town where the river is actually nice to swim in (the river through the ‘dobe has a kind of storm water drain quality to it) called Cabalango. So off we trudge, far too late in the day to the minibus station, just as the temperature is topping 40. When we arrive we find out the bus goes every hour and we just missed one by like 10 mins. So we buy tickets and wait for the bus, which is about 20 mins late and has a broken door. There’s a fair bit of faffing around with the door for another 20 mins or so, until we’re allowed on. This catch is there were 4 of us and by the time 3 of us have gotten on they say they’ve sold too many tickets and the bus is full. So we get off and get told to take another bus which comes in another 20 mins to a town called Carlos Paz which is on the way and get onto another bus there. Needless to say, by the time we actually got to the mythical land of Cabalango we had about 45 mins before we had to get back on the bus and go back, because I was in danger of missing my 9pm bus to Salta.

Having said all that, it was a very nice spot and with the day’s stupid heat it was very nice to actually sit in the rockpools above the river for about half an hour. We were also lucky we got told to go the last stop on the bus and swim there, because half of Cordoba seems to be in the river all want to go home at the same time. I’d have been totally Argentinaed if we’d been one of those in the massive queues the bus driver ignored on his way back to town.

Much like the ‘doze, I think I have to reserve judgement on the ‘dobe due to the massive caveat that the heat has pretty much scarred my view of the places. From what I saw they’d both be very nice cities to spend a few days in during spring or autumn, or even later summer but in the heat they aren’t that pleasant. Funnily enough I spent a lot of time explaining myself to people that just because I’m from Sydney it doesn’t make me some kind of mutant crab man who is impervious to heat. The only reason we actually have less of an issue with 40 degrees in Sydney is because we also have heaps of beaches, swimming pools and (out West) air conditioned shopping centres to hide out in. Stand on the platform of Wynyard station at 5pm in the middle of summer in a suit and see if Sydney is any better than these places in the heat.

So Gerry and I parted ways for a little while as he wanted to spend some time on the beach before he has to fly back on the weekend and I was keen to still see Salta and surrounds while I was already in the North of Argentina. It was with strange relief that I got off the bus to find it 25 degrees and raining.

How hot is it?

Mendoza :: Argentina

Summer in the 'doze.

Places: Mendoza.

Coolest thing I did: Stood at 4000m on the border of Argentina and Chile and had my picture taken with the Christ the Redeemer of the Andes.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayas is in Argentina. At 6900m Aconcagua isn't even in the list of the tallest 100 mountains in the world, but it's the largest in the Americas.

Getting off the night bus before 10am you can already tell that the interior of Argentina is far hotter than BA could ever hope to be. The one thing I'd really wanted to do while I was here was head off to the little hamlet of Maipu just south of Mendoza itself in order to hire a bike and ride between wineries and get slowly more drunk. I'd been told that if you got too drunk you just left the bike in the grass on the side of the road and they came and got it later. That was the first reason. The second reason is I've made it my lifelong mission to do anything this whinging fool complains about. Seriously, how do you get a travel blog with a nationwide audience and spend all your time complaining. Man, that column makes me mad.

Anyway, the bloke in the hostel did say you could still hire bikes in the heat of summer but practically no-one does it for the obvious reason that once you've ridden 10km to a winery in near 40 degree heat the last thing you actually want to do is drink red wine. That kind of could have been pointless. So instead we got on what was going to be a "minibus" which in the A-zone means "massive bus full of old people". I was ready to be mad at this latest round of being Argentinaed, but then I remembered I wasn't supposed to be whinging and enjoyed myself instead.

Mendoza is basically situated in a desert that leads up to the foothills in the Andes and has extremely low rain fall according to the guide, who was telling us this as the wind shield was being pounded in heavy rain. The only reason it's a good wine growing region is people have been artificially irrigating here since the Incas and the soil is good for growing various grapes, stone fruits and olives that mostly get mashed into extra virgin olive oil. As you look out over the endless rows of grape vines you're given an awesome view of them ending with the snow caps of the Andes in the background. It's an amazing sight, especially as we were given the dramatic effect of storms coming out over the mountains as it seems to have been raining up there almost constantly since we got to the 'doze.

The tour took us to the Chandon factory (they have one in a few places outside France apparently, including Oz), an olive oil press and a smaller boutique winery, Vistandes, which was in a building designed by someone who obviously majored in airport design at architecture school. I didn't mind the wine, it tasted about as good as any bottle I've gotten from the supermarket here at 40 pesos (about 9 AUDs) but it was actually the olive oil that was a revelation. I knew nothing about how that stuff gets made and when they lay out all the plates with bread drizzled in different oils I probably smashed my fair share. Which you had to be quick on because it seems the Argies and Chileans who were on the tour don't hold back - be it wine or oily bread it's every man for himself and elbows at the ready.

The coolest fact I learned from the day is when there is hail it smashes the grapes so the government has funded the bigger vineyards to install devices that emit a frequency undetectable to human ears but smashes the hailstones into little bits so the can't do any damage to the grapes. I thought that was awesome if it's true.

Mendoza itself seems like a lively looking town, however due to this being the height of summer and many of the 'dozers off at the beach in Chile or Uruguay it's also mostly dead in the middle of the day. No-one really wants to be out in town when it's that hot so most of the shops in town shutdown for a 4 and a half hour siesta at noon. It's enforced a whole load of lazing about during the day when not doing things. I like it here, but much like BA I don't get the feeling I'm seeing it at it's best. Next time I'll come to the North of Argentina in spring I reckon. The nice thing about here as opposed to BA is they've managed to avoid the urge to put roads with 18 lanes through the middle of town. You don't often feel like you need to plan the next 20 minutes crossing the road.

The other big day trip we did, which didn't involve wine for a change, was to hire a car and drive up into the Andes to see some mountainous stuff. The scenery is so dramatically different to the south, with much drier, rust coloured mountains and mostly dry river beds at this time of year. The main thing you go to do is look at Aconcagua, which is the highest mountain in the Americas. Before you do that, however, you end up stopping at something called Punte del Incas, which has nothing at all to do with the Incas as far as I can tell. It's a natural limestone bridge that the Argies have unfortunately built stuff under, however it's still quite amazing to see. Until 2005 you could even walk over it and up a path to a church they also inexplicably decided to build on top, however for some reason my Spanish wasn't good enough to glean from the sign that's not on any longer.

Aconcagua is climbable by amateurs but not in a day trip, funnily enough. A guy in our hostel from Quebec was going to climb it, and told us he was going to hire a donkey to carry his stuff. The level has now been set at if a trek requires a donkey then it's probably too far for this trip. Instead we went to the national park and looked at it, after a gruelling 10 minute walk we were promised would take 45. Even with a halo of cloud it was still an impressive sight to behold. It would be a fairly standard trip to and from the lookout, but two things stand out. People must molest the ducks so regularly that there's a sign telling them not to (and funnily enough there were no ducks near the sign to be molested), and when you hear a big yelp from behind you, get off the trail. At the end of the day the cowboy dudes that hire out donkeys send all the unhired donkeys back down the trail by just setting them loose and hoping the tourists get out of the way. I guess in the A-zone it's not like you can sue them if you get trampled to death.

The final stop on the trip is a 9km winding rocky road (which sorely tested our crappy Chevy hire car) leading to the original border crossing between Chile and Argentina which was marked in 1904 after some war or other by a statue of Jesus giving the Japanese schoolgirl peace sign. The view is simply stunning into each country, and it's well worth the effort of getting up there. The only thing we found out is the climb from 2900m to 4000m you do in that 9km also means that instead of a nice 28 degrees like it was down the bottom it was a balmy 12 degrees at the top. We were both in t-shirts and shorts, which I cleverly topped off with a hoodie, which Gerry didn't even have. The pictures are mostly of us looking cold but happy.

So tonight is another nightbus, this time to Cordoba (the 'dobe) to get even more scorching heat in the Argies original colonial capital.

I'm finding the Argies a bit easier to deal with outside BA, which isn't to say they were all rude there, but people are definitely friendlier out here in the smaller cities. I guess if you had a job where you got to sleep for 4 hours in the middle of the day you'd be happier too.

Feliz ano nuevo

Buenos Aires:: Argentina

New Years Eve in BA, or how to get blood from a stone.

Places: Buenos Aires.

Coolest thing I did: Went to what would probably be the best bookshop in the world, if they had anything in English.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There are blonde Argentinians. Heaps of them.

Even though half the town appears to have decamped to the beach to escape the heat there is still an undeniably busy vibe to Buenos Aires (BA to it's mates). We're holed up in the highly hip Palermo Hollywood district (separated by train tracks from the equally cool Palermo Soho) and you could just spend weeks just drinking coffee, eating meat and drinking wine from cafe to bar to parrilla around here - even in this slack time between Christmas and New Years there's endless options. It's also full of furniture shops that have one chair in the middle of a room made of glass and polished concrete, a sure sign that an area has been crowned as cool.

The whole town here was once meant to look like Paris, with streets of low rise buildings done in what I'm reliably informed is a Baroque style. During a resource boom starting in the 1800s and lasting until the Great Depression they then added Art Deco and Art Nouveau to the mix, and after more modern buildings done in in that every-flat-must-have-a-balcony style, only with cages all over them, I guess to stop Spiderman robbing you on the 7th or 8th floor. You look down any street and see this mix of styles running into each other, but for some reason they've resisted the urge to build proper highrise, narrow the footpaths to make more room for cars, or to break from the grid pattern (each block is numbered for 100 buildings, even if there's less than 50 on each side) making the whole thing very walkable and easy to get around. I'm promised that once you go to the poorer suburbs this all breaks down, but generally I feel like you could easily live here.

My favourite building so far has been the El Alteno bookshop, which is a converted theatre with shelves down in the old general seating and more all around the galleries. On the old stage is a cafe and people can bring stacks of books with them and sit in the opera boxes and read them. If this shop was all in English I'm sure I'd be able to waste days in there. It may be the nicest bookshop I've ever seen. This is a city that prides itself as readers, and every block seems to have at least one bookshop of some size. With the death of book retail in Australia it's a refreshing thing to see. We quite often blame our climate for making us dumb, but it's just as hot here and it doesn't seem to stop anyone reading.

My other favourite tourist site here was the La Recoleta Cemetery, which seems to be mostly an open air sculpture park. Though a lot of the themes obviously revolve around angels or the military, nearly every row you look down there's another statue begging for a photo. Like the buildings surrounding it the many artistic styles of the last 150 years are represented in each tomb, making it a kind of art history lesson. What you want to avoid is Americans talking loudly about how they are clever enough to know the difference between a Doric and Ionic column. There is a surprisingly large number of them populating the cemetery at any given time. The big draw here is the Duarte family tomb which houses the remains of Eva Peron, who was a major figure in Argentinian politics no-one in the English speaking world knows much about because she had the misfortune to have been played by Madonna in a musical movie of her life. Tragic.

If you want a different view on how people live in BA and a bit of an adrenaline hit at the same time then totally ignore the LPs advice of getting public transport to La Boca to see the Boca Juniors stadium and instead walk the streets through the projects to get there instead. There's a very sudden line between the swanky parts and the not so swanky parts of BA, and La Boca lives up to it's blue collar, docklands reputation. There's a lovely street that leads from the waterfront (which smells like an open sewer and has a nice black murky sheen) up to the Boca Juniors stadium which includes many houses painted in bring colours and an open air art gallery along the old train tracks, but veer even a street too far in either direction and it's becomes a whole lot poorer and lest touristy very quickly.

La Bombonera (the chocolate box) is the home to Club Atlético Boca Juniors, one of the world's best known football teams, and former club of the man they call God here, Diego Maradona. As you walk up from the waterfront you can see the blue and yellow terraces start to rise up over the streets and standing in front of it you can only imagine what it's like when the crowds are shoving themselves in for match day. This is home to what is considered by some the best fixture in all of world sport, the Superclasico where Boca plays cross town rivals River Plate. However, there is no chance at all of seeing it this year, due to the fact River were relegated and there will be no match-up at all for the season. Apparently it's the local derby to end all local derbies, with the whole city coming to a standstill to watch.

So the goal of being in BA at this time of year was to try and be in what is considered one of the biggest party towns in the world for New Years Eve. What we've since discovered is the Argentinians generally all leave BA and go to the beach at this time of year, and the ones that stay go to family parties, because that's what they do. Some of the younger ones go out at about 2am to the clubs but generally speaking BA starts being a ghost town about 8pm. The only way to avoid being stuck in a hostel with a lot of other drunk Aussies was to go to the internet and get tips.

At 25m high the Planetarium is the highest park in BA and we were told a place people go to have picnics and watch the fireworks. What we didn't know is pretty much no-one shows up until 11pm, so we had a whole bunch of us sitting in the pale glow of a building that's lit up like a 1968 acid trip and trying to mostly eat and drink in the dark. It was good we managed to get a group of about 8 of us, so it didn't matter so much that it was totally dead, we could make our own fun. Which if Gerry had found out about 10 mins earlier he could buy fireworks could have meant setting off our own fireworks. The guy at our hotel told him to go to the shops and just pick some up (something Australians haven't been trusted to do in years) but by the time he got there they'd cut off selling any more. This would have really helped us get into the spirit, because after midnight everyone seemed to be letting off their own fireworks pretty much everywhere - at ground level, into the sky, at eye level. Which was good, because the official fireworks being let off from the newishly redeveloped docklands were safely hidden behind a row of trees.

After we'd had our fill of drinking in the park we came back to the hotel, drank some more and then made our way down to Niceto, a fairly large club at the end of the street. The girls in our group managed to skip the 30 minute line up and get us in quickly, and in true nightclub style we found it about 50% empty when we got there (I'm a club half empty, not a club half full kind of guy), but by about 3 or 3.30am the place was starting to heave. At home I'd pretty much never have gone to a club but I had a stellar time and I suspect every one of us did.

So today I discovered New Years Day in BA is deader than disco. Even McDonnalds & Starbucks were shut. We're hoping something opens for us to get some kind of steak refill before heading off on the night bus to Mendoza and wine country tomorrow night.

The A-Zone

Ushuaia :: Argentina

Feliz Navidad desde el Fin del mundo

Places: Ushuaia.

Coolest thing I did: Watched a very determined South African turn his dreams of cooking half a lamb into reality..

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The best cooking show in the world: http://www.youtube.com/user/EpicMealTime (Gen Y have been teaching me that there is far more to watch on YouTube than TV).

Once the bus turns it’s back on Andes you find yourself very quickly looking out at flat grassland as far as the eye can see, and you pretty soon see where all that Patagonian lamb and steak you’ve been consuming for the last month comes from. As one fellow Aussie on the bus said aloud, at times you could almost think you were back in Australia, until you look back over your shoulder and remember the ranges of snow capped mountains you just left. Once again in this part of the world the border crossings seem almost pointless, with the same sheep wandering over international borders and no one seeming that fussed if you actually filled out the entry card or not. The trouble with all this is, when the bus you’re on takes 12 hours and the first 10 look like endless flat paddocks then the rural idyll gets dull really fast. Despite a bit of excitement on the heavily rolling car ferry over the Magellan Straight there’s a lot of staring out the window trying to learn Spanish subconsciously through your iPod.

The thing that makes it all worth it is rounding the corner at about hour 11 and seeing the mountains rising up over the end of Argentina part to reveal the gorgeous Lago Fagnano and then you realise you’re back in fairly remote, untamed country. So untamed that the island, Tierra del Fuego (The land of fire) gets it’s name from the fact the natives here used to get around in the nude and required heaps of fires to not freeze to death in the almost Antarctic conditions. They must have seen Europeans show up wearing clothes and must have had a technological leap into not getting frostbite on your rude bits akin to an iPad being dropped into the heart of Medieval England.

So my one and only goal of coming to Ushuaia, which is the last town in Argentina and technically the last on the continent (there’s one further south, Puerto Williams in Chile but apparently that’s one street of grizzled locals) was to have a fixed place to spend Christmas Day with the other orphans I’ve met along the way. The thinking, of course, is what better place to do Christmas than the end of the world, Ushuaia being the place where all those high priced Antarctic cruises old rich people take depart from. I admit to having seen basically none of the town and very little of the surrounds, you know because you should have Christmas off.

I assume the plan had been to try and cook some more European style hot food for lunch on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, until we saw the BBQ outside. With all the styling of Tower of London torture paraphernalia (you know, all black chains and clinking ratchets to lower the massive black grills up and down) you could tell these people take their BBQ seriously. So we spent an hour or so standing in blinding smoke burning down large chunks of timber into hot coals and then threw a whole load of steaks on. That went so well that we decided to forgo the oven on Christmas Day and BBQ our chooks instead. By that time I’d been demoted to charcoal boy by Doc, or resident South African who did a stellar job on the birds. So good in fact that he stated he would acquire half a lamb on Boxing Day and do it all again. This was a man not to make idle promises, and after 3 days of pretty much nothing but meat I’m starting to wonder if I might need to become a vegetarian for the next 48 hours or so.

One thing we’d been missing since Bariloche was Chimichurri, and oil based herb concoction that makes all meat instantly taste 56% better (that number was determined by years of study at BA’s research universities) and it seems like you can just buy the herbs that make it up in the supermarket and mix the oil in yourself. So we didn’t have it at Christmas, but we dramatically improved the already awesome 4.5kg of lamb that we attempted (and failed) to polish off between six of us. We’ve also been buying wine pretty much by pulling it randomly off the shelf in the supermarket and while Chile was a bit hit and miss I’ve yet to have a bad one in Argentina. A truly enlightened people.

So despite being hung over by two days of drinking I did attempt to get out and climb up to the glacier behind the town on Boxing Day for the view. That turned out to be 7km uphill through the sketchier parts of town, where the wild dogs look a fair bit wilder and defy naming and then up to a chairlift that promptly stopped working at 3:45 in the afternoon, which is fine when you don’t show up at 2:45. So I managed to get most of the way up to see the glacier, through at times heavy rain and howling winds, to see what must have been an awesome view over the town and out over the Beagle Channel to Chile if it had been a clear day. A large part of me thinks I should have stayed in the hostel, which has a nice view over the Beagle Channel as well, only you sit on white leather couches, not walk through the rain.

So due to taking my time to get here via the wilds of Patagonia I’m sitting in the Ushuaia airport waiting for my plane up to Buenos Aires (to an airport with the code EZE, which reminds me of a dead, high-pitched former member of seminal LA rappers NWA) which hasn’t yet even arrived from BA and is about an hour late. Some young American stoners I met in Bariloche refer to this as “being Argentina-ed” which happens a lot. When your bus doesn’t come, or you get searched at random at bus checkpoints, you’ve been Argentinaed, which puts you in the A-Zone. I’ve been promised as I travel the north of the country later on I will spend a whole lot more time there.

So I’ve loved all of Patagonia and the sleeping in tents and whatnot but a big part of me is happy to be heading back to a city again for a few days over New Years. My mate Gerry flies in from Sydney for at least 3 weeks starting tomorrow so it will be good to have a familiar face along the way.

Feliz Navidad a todo el mundo.

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.

Waiting for No Ash Wednesday

Villa la Angostura :: Argentina

Right now, I really should be in Chile.

Places: Bariloche, San Martin de Los Andes & Villa la Angostura.

Coolest thing I did: Shared a hire car around the Seven Lakes route, this time with the added bonus that we could stop the car to take pictures of things. The bus drivers here won't let you do that.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Not only can you ski here, but these lakes also hide a population crazed by chocolate.

So having knocked yourself out for 48 hours on spectacular alpine scenery the best thing it seems you can do is try and top it with more spectacular alpine scenery. This being a country full of wilderness and nothing there are certain parts that it's certainly easier to see with your own car, and I'm finding it's also rather easy to find groups of people hiring cars for this very reason who are happy to share them with you if you kick in for the costs. So with no inkling I'd actually be doing it that morning, I spent my second full day in Bariloche in a car being driven the scenic route to San Martin de Los Andes.

The best section is totally unpaved dirt road that winds it's way around several lakes with ample stops to view the sights. This had the added benefit of our driver for the early afternoon being Michela of Berlin, a young lady who seems to have absorbed scarily good driving skills by virtue of working for Mercedes Benz back home. There was a fair amount of sideways action around some of the corners, probably to the point I should have been holding notes and yelling out "hard right!" & "break". I'd like to think I'd have made an excellent rally navigator, except for my slow reaction time and terrible eyesight.

We'd decided to go for a swim in the lake at San Martin, because that was the end of the road, but with us being followed by the ever present ash cloud from Puyehue we thought it best to get into one of the earlier ones. The big benefit of this is there was only four of us to share it with the geese (downside being you have to wade through gooseshit to get to the water). I was the first to wade out to my knees and due to the settling of ash in the lake I felt it better to simply dive all the way in and keep swimming or treading water. Man, that water was cold. There being ladies involved I was too stubborn to admit I was freezing to death so I kept going for about 5 or so mins before wading back out, trying to look manly as I noticeably shivered. I think I was breathing so hard because my lungs had shrunk to the size of peas.

San Martin feels a lot like somewhere like Vail or Aspen translated into Spanish. There may have been a real, working town under there once, but it's not been converted into a fairly tale village in the mountains, again with the requisite beautiful lake to back onto. I'll remember that place for two things: ice cream and people learning karate in the board walk. The Argies seem to have far superior ice cream technology to the rest of us, with flavours that defy logic. Why would you have White Wine & Egg White ice cream? Who knows but it doesn't taste half bad. I also tend to think that because these guys haven't yet found a way to make lamb or steak flavoured ice cream means that it simply defies the laws of physics. I can't believe people who love meat and ice cream this much haven't tried to splice the two yet. Maybe there's people working on this in labs in Buenos Aires as we speak.

Today's update comes hard on the heels of the last, mostly because today has been a wee bit of a disaster. Due to our nonchalant habit of buying tickets at the last minute we've been bitten badly by all the buses going back into Chile today being full. That wouldn't be an issue, except there's a $480 ferry ride we should be checking in for starting 9am tomorrow over in Puerto Montt and that's about a 6 hour bus ride away, and our bus is now leaving here at 8.35am that day. The ferry sails at 2pm if everything goes 100% right so we should arrive in town with 15 mins to make that. Fingers crossed.

It's not come without trying hard to make amends for this. We took a bus to the closest town to the border, Villa la Angostura in the hope we could either get onto a bus which someone hadn't made it for in Bariloche or failing that hitch hike into Chile. With hindsight doing this on a public holiday was making it very hard for ourselves, as there seemed to be zero trucks or people in town with Chilean plates but none the less we did stand on the side of the road for about 4 hours until the border closed. The sign evolution tells a story. We started with "Chile". Simple enough, but then we added "Osorno", which is the first town in Chile. After that wasn't catching us any, we added "Por favor", to be polite. Towards the end of the day we thought "Tengo dinero" (I have money) was a nice touch, to make sure no-one thought we were some kind of free-loading backpackers, but all to no avail. So now we're on plan B, which is to go as early as we can and hope the ferry is delayed in leaving. Next time I'm writing this will either be me having spent 4 days on the fjords or me having been chastised with a $480 lesson on buying your bus tickets early in peak season.

Right now, I'm trying to be philosophical about it, but it's not been helped by Puyehue, which picked today to ramp up it's ash spewing a notch or three. It feels like I smoked 3 or 4 packs of cigarettes by standing by the side of the road and breathing the air. I also think we're getting noticed by people, sitting out having a beer to celebrate a day well fucked up people were all greeting us. My Spanish is not good enough to know if this is a very friendly town or whether we've become local celebrities, known for politely wanting to go to Chile and having money.

You're climbing what?

Bariloche :: Argentina

Apparently you can go about your business without being worried there's a volcano spewing ash on the horizon.

Places: Valdivia & Bariloche.

Coolest thing I did: I would have said the Patagonian lamb if you'd asked me two dinners ago, but the Bife de Chorizo cut of steak cooked by the Argies is how God has his steak done.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Germans were very big in South America after World War II. Apparently a lot of the Nazi hunters did very well around the Argentinian Lakes District. On the plus side, they taught the locals how to brew good beer.

Valdivia became a totally different place when the rain stopped. I woke up to bright blue skies on the second day and spent hours walking the foreshore of the three rivers that join up in and around the town. It might have been made even more pleasant if I hadn't been nursing the hangover from hell.

Why was I so hung over? One word: Kuntsmann. The brewery for this fine range of beers lies over a couple of bridges, a short taxi ride away from the middle of town and being rather enlightened they stay open until midnight, so if you show up in town in the afternoon after a long bus ride you can still go at dinner time. We started with a shot of all 10 beers they had on tap (including a rather nice blueberry one they only do at the brewery) and then decided to do pretty much the whole lot again in 1/2 litres. The staff were very kindly to people doing this, even though most of our translation had to be done by the one barman that spoke good English. Strangely enough we assumed he was Irish, being the first red haired Latino I've ever seen.

The brewery struck me as the kind of place people bring their kids to run riot on a Saturday while Mum and Dad smash a few litres of beer in peace and quiet. My favourite souvenir was a 5 litre jug with a sealed lid (kind of like the old Grolsh bottles for those who lived in Europe) that they fill up directly from the tap for you to take home. Saw quite a few of those go home with people. They even managed to make sure we got a taxi back into town when they closed up at midnight. However, instead of going home, which would have been sensible we decided to go hit the nightclubs.

It seems like we've been in Chile for telethon season, but they take their Teleton very seriously. People advertise it by writing the dates on the back of their car windows and while we were sitting there in the Irish pub at about 1am the crowd was going nuts and cheering every time they announced how much money had been made. Like the rest of the country it appears that telethons start late and finish late. I'm not sure how much they made, because we decided to keep moving clubs. I lost track of my mate James at one point and went home, only to find out he'd been in the DJ booth communicating with the DJ completely using Google translate. The DJ was apparently very bored, which I guess is what happens when you play the same club every week in a small town.

The next movement was to Bariloche, including the first of many border crossings for the trip. The road passes right in the path of Puyehue, which those in the Southern Hemisphere will remember as the scourge of air travel from Sydney to Capetown about 18 months ago. Well it's spewing loads of ash again, and when we we through it was all piled up next to the road like snow. The story we're being told is this time it only disrupted air traffic as far away as Uruguay but it did spend most of yesterday afternoon blocking out the sun here, so there might be more to tell of that story yet.

The bus ride from Valdivia to Bariloche is simply amazing, following the side of Nahuel Huapi lake, which is serious ski country in winter and a flawless alpine lake in summer, surrounded by the head wrecking jagged peaks that seem to dominate this part of the world.

So when in Bariloche you're pretty much here to ski in winter or climb things in summer. We took a day hike up around the main ski hill, Cerro Cathedral which shields a turquoise lake in a valley about 3 and a bit hike hours up. Nestled in that valley is Refugio Frey, a small bunch of huts that people sleep in when they're doing more serious hiking up in the mountains for days, and if you're like most of us you'll have lunch at and go home. It's hard to describe the setting without resorting to cliches, you'll just have to wait for the pictures. There's a certain serenity to sitting there with your feet in the crystal clear water pondering stone towers shaped like ice crystals made out of rock. While I was doing this a group of 3 blokes from Colorado found their way into the valley, and it turns out their entire reason for being up there was to spend a whole week climbing these sheer stone walls. Part of me kind of longed to have that kind of focus when I go on these trips. I kind of get edgy when I've been in the same place for 2 or 3 days.