After Torres del Paine we headed south to
Punta Arenas. Being a Sunday there wasn’t
much going on, most shops, museums...basically everything was closed. With the next day being a public holiday (we
were prepared this time) we figured there wasn’t much point hanging around. After some complicated yet lax car hiring we
set off for an overnight trip over to the Chilian side of Tierra del
Fuego. From Punta Arenas we headed north
along the coast to get the ferry over to Tierra del Fuego. On the way we
stopped off at an old abandoned estancia.
Chris took lots of moody photos of old building and boats while I got
tooted at by all the truck drivers going past.
We also checked out Pali Aike national park where we saw guanacos
(relatives of llamas and alpacas), foxes and not much else. The landscape in this area is very flat and
desolate. Recent (thousands of years
ago) volcanism in the park has resulted in some small craters and lava fields
over much of the park.
The ferry cross over to Tierra del Fuego
was pretty quick 20 mins, only really enough time to buy tickets and have a
quick look around. A small black and
white dolphin joined us for the trip, having a great time surfing in the wake
of the ferry. Once on the island we headed south to Porvenir, the largest town
on the Chilian side. The landscape in
northern Tierra del Fuego is pretty stark and desolate. There were a few sheep (sheep farming and
petroleum are the main industries around here) and lots of wild guanacos (they
just jump the fences). Porvenir was pretty deserted when we arrived,
we found a place to stay and had dinner at the only place open.
The next day we drove around more desolate
scenery and stopped briefly in a petroleum town which reminded us too much of
mining towns in Australia so we left quickly. Then it was back onto the ferry again
seeing dolphins before returning to Puta Arenas. From there we travelled to El Chalten, by way
of an overnight stay in Puerto Natales,
and an afternoon in El Calafate.
El Chalten was built in 1985 to help secure
the disputed border with Chile. The town
is surrounded by mountains of the Los Glaciers National Park, with several
walking tracks going straight from the town centre. The town itself is a little haphazard,
buildings of different shapes and sizes have been put up with no serious
thought of town planning. Despite that
it was a pleasant place to spend a few days and we liked the fact that we didn’t
have to pay for the national park or park campsites (this is to change next
year).
The two main walking tracks from town can
be done as two separate day walks however there is another track linking these
two so we decided to do a 3 day tramp spending two nights camping in the
park. The first day we headed up towards
Mt Fitzroy, from the mirador (view point) we could see the mountain, several
small glaciers and a frozen lake. On the
left side of the lake you could look down a large drop to another glacier lake
with big chunks of ice in it. On the
second day we headed over to Lago Torres and glacier, unfortunately the weather
was closing in so we couldn’t see the top of the mountains. Before leaving town we had checked the weather
and knew that it was going to change on our final day so we made an effort to
get up early and got back to town by lunch.
As we were walking out the weather packed up and it started to
rain. We passed several people going in
the opposite direction to the lake, I don’t know why they bothered, you could
tell from the first view point (only an hour from town) that you couldn’t see
much at lake due to the weather. Instead
many of them pushed on and probably got very wet and cold. That afternoon the rain turned into snow, but
we didn’t mind as we were warm and dry in the hostel.
The next day Chris went for another big
walk up to a different viewpoint. The
weather was clear and the snow pretty so he took lots of photos. I instead had a very lazy day in town, which
was great. We also spent a day cycling
from a lake by the Chilian border back to El Chalten (37 km along bumpy dirt
roads). The scenery was pretty good and
it was great having the wind behind us most of way, made it a lot easier.
From El Chalten we headed to El
Calafate. The big thing to do in El
Calafate is to go and see the Pertio Moreno glacier. So the next day we hopped on a bus and headed
out there. To our surprise a couple we
had met on a boat on Lake Titicaca in Peru were on our bus. In Peru they we
heading north while we were heading south into Bolivia, so we really did not
expect to see them again. Perito Moreno glacier is one of the few glaciers in
the world that is growing, it also moves at a very fast rate (in glacier terms)
so there is always chunks of ice falling off.
At the glacier we took a short boat trip to see the glacier from the
lake, then spent the rest of the time viewing the glaciers from the walkways
and viewing platforms. The site is a
major tourist attraction and there are lots of people visiting it. However, the Argentinian parks service seem
to do a pretty good job at managing it and didn’t seem too crowded. That night
we went with our friends to a Argentinian meat BBQ place. Basically it is all about meat, don’t even
think about going if you are a vegetarian.
The meat is BBQ’d in the kitchen then brought to the table over a tray
of hot coals to finish up. We got a meat
combo (steak, lamb and chicken) to share, it was so much. I don’t think I’ve eaten that much meat at
one time before.....not surprisingly we were a bit off meat for a few days
after.
We had planned to fly from El Calafate to
Buenos Aires, the 36 hour bus ride did not sound like fun. When booking we noted that our flight had 1
stop, but the ticket didn’t state where.
We had joked that it might go via Ushuaia at the very southern end of Argentian
Patagonian, but didn’t take it seriously.
We had decided against going to Ushuaia on our trip due to time
constraints, so we found it pretty funny when we got to the airport to discover
that we were in fact going via Ushuaia. So we can say that we have been to the end of
the world, although we never got off the plane.
In Ushuaia we got some new passengers one of which was a magician. We were treated to a mid air old fashioned
magic show which was pretty funny.
