Patagonia!

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Trip Start Feb 25, 2008 Previous
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  El Chalten, Argentina
Saturday, March 15, 2008

The further south you go, Internet becomes slower and more expensive, but here we are in Patagonia none the less!

After an interesting time heading down the coast, we made it to Puerto Madryn, our first stop in Patagonia along with our first nights of camping.  It was so nice to be in our own space, be it a tent, after jumping from hostel to hostel.  We found a great campsite just up from this town of 60,000 that overlooked the water.  We took an excursion the next day to Penninsula Valdez to see the penguins and sea-lions.  It´s funny going all the way to the other end of the world to see animals that we find in Puget Sound and on the Oregon Coast... the penguins were funny though as they waddled up the hills, squawking and crying.  A hedgehod took a liking to us and practically crawled into our laps- Patience was not so fond of that!  The best part about our trip was the people we met (remind you of college- joining sororities and fraternities because of all the friends you´ll meet)

Amazed that we're here...

.  We spend hours that evening at a restaurant by our campsite overlooking the beach with Ilhame from Morocco and Laurent from France, watching the sunset and eating great food!

As we´ve made our way south into ´backpacker´s heaven´ we find that we keep running into the same people.  Ilhame is a funny girl who´s been living in Paris for the last few years and decided to take some time off before heading back to Morocco for a new life.  She´s proving to her friends that she´s not the ´fancy´ girl they all thought she was.  We spent a few days with her and took her hiking the other day, even though we couldn´t quite convince her to camp.  Recently, we´ve been camping and hiking with an avid backpacker from Sweden, Frederick.  After our last trek, he and Kyle just went to the store and walked back with their arms full of bottles of beer- have we mentioned yet that beers come by the litre?

It is funny though that we´ve connected more with individuals in their early thirties instead of those in their twenties.  Maybe its because we have no interest in staying out all night partying, or that we have a sense of respect about how much noise we create in the outdoors... tent walls do not buffer much sound, or maybe we´re just old.  Nevertheless, we´re excited about meeting interesting people from all over the world

Laguna de los Torres

.

Currently, we´re in El Chatlen, a little village in the middle of Parques Nacionales los Glaciares.  We arrived 4 days ago, spent one night in town, and left the next morning for 3 days hiking awith unbelievable views of  Mont Fitzroy and
the surrounding glaciers!  We really lucked out with 3 days of sunshine
and clear skies.  Normally, you´re lucky if you see one of the spires
of the Torres (towers in spanish) and we saw all three plus the giant
Fitzroy!  We definitely paid for the clear skies with chilly nights,
but that´s what warm meals and cozy sleeping bags are for.

We´ve both been suffering from colds (Kyle first, then Patience), so when we set up camp at our first stop, Patience took a nap in the tent while Kyle wandered around for awhile.  He came back starving and gorged on all our easily-ready (no need to cook) food.  It was hysterical!  Rationing is apparently a new term for him.  The next day, he suffered by having to loop back into town to restock on food while Patience took the trail to the next campsite

Missing Ma

.  Luckily, each stop is only 2-3 hours from town and we both enjoyed challenging solo hikes with magnificent views.

Since Internet is frozen, I´ll just keep typing until it picks up again... making this blog longer and longer, but allowing me free computer time to catch up.

This was going to be it´s own blog, but given the situation, we´ll share our story of the great glacier excursion now.

El Calafate is a town of about 3000 people and is really the jumping off point for Southern Patagonia.  The town is geared toward the backpacker, with expensive outdoor stores, tons of hostels and fun restaurants.  The main attraction from there is to go to Perito Moreno, one of the biggest glaciers in the area and arguably the only one in the world that is not retreating, but is actually growing at a rate of about 3 meters each day.  We were sitting in the bus terminal trying to make a decision about what bus company to use to get to the glacier and to our next stop when some people struck up a conversation with us about the glacier.  They were apparently trying to rent a car to go on their own, but needed more people to go in on it.  We thought about it for about ten seconds before saying YES

Monte Fitzroy

!  This was the type of thing we´d been looking forward to doing with strangers.  We ended up with ten people in two VW Golfs (yes, those are the tiny ones).  We had travelers from Buenos Aires, Spain, France, and us from the USA.  We met up the next morning with a trip to the grocery store to gather supplies for our ´parrilla´, the local term for an asado or rustic bbq.  From there, we drove out of town on dirt roads to Lago Roca, a lake with beautiful views of the mountains... and we parrilla´d.  Kyle was practicing his spanish and offered to help by saying ¿Puede ayudarme? which actually means ¨Can you help me?¨  After a lot of laughs, he was put in charge of eating... and we ate!  We cooked so much food and drank tons of wine- it was ridiculous!  Patience ate two brautwursts and a steak sandwich on her own (big surprise).  From there we drove into the national park.  In a lot of areas, there are two tiers of pricing, one for Argentinians, and the other for extraneros (non-locals).  After practicing their accents, the spanish girls got away with saying they were Argentinian and paid 12 pesos with the other locals while Kyle and I paid 40 (about $13).  Lucas is a student and only paid 6.  Once we saw the glacier and our mouths dropped in awe, we were just fine with paying our fee.  It was so great to see it in the late of the day, since the sun heats up parts of it.  At any given time, chunks the size of a basketball to a three-story building come crashing off the glacier and into the water making a huge KABOOM.  We wondered why one of the paths was blocked off, but after asking around, found out that there was a great tragedy a while ago with some tourists that were watching a bit too close and were washed away.  If you want to see the gory details, I guess there´s a video on YouTube.

Well, we´re back in business and can post this blog.  We head to Chile in the next couple of days for our BIG eight-day trek.  Take care everyone!

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Natural Bonzai

Parrilla (traditional bbq) at Lago Rocas

Perito Moreno Glacier

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