I am bloody annoyed after spending an hour composing a beautiful entry full of witty anecdotes and hilarious recounts of events. The bastard didn´t save and enthusiasm has seriously waned, so it´ll be meat and potatoes today I´m sorry.
Ushuaia was fantastic. We did a hike in Tierra del Fuego, an amazing national park. It was absolutely stunning; I have never seen scenery like it. Everywhere I looked I wanted to whip out the camera and take a pic. I ended up so far behind the others due to my happy snapping that I had to run to the entrance to catch up which was actually quite good for the ever expanding waist line. Keeping the weight off here is proving difficult! Everything is BIG and comes with a side of fat. Vegetables do not feature highly in the argentinean diet; they have been replaced by cheese. Cooking has proved to be my only salvation, but a trip to the local supermarket or market can at times be a frustrating or rewarding experience. The meat counter is unlike Austalia; here it features whole sides of meat from every part of the cow (or other unidentified creatures) and a man stands behind weilding a cery large, very old, very sharp knife. My Spanish is still rubbish so my meat shopping involves a great deal of looking, guessing, pointing and holding up two fingers to indicate the thickness; two inches or three? Results can be hit and miss but when you lock onto a tender 400g eye fillet for $4 you´ve done well. Alas my last experience was tough as old boot straps. Needless to say learning the cuts of meat and mor importantly hopw to ask for them so I´m understood is high on the agenda. Thus far I have steered away from chicken as it often looks far from fresh.
In terms of staples there are very few. Or very few that I recognise anyway. Rice, tomatoes, canned vegetables, seem to feature highly on the Argentinean agenda. It seems your standard meal here is Empanadas (meat filled pastry favored by Brendan who is often dubbed Empanada boy due to polishing off three a day) folowed by Steak or BBQ´d meat and potatoes. Most herbs, curry powders, etc bottled sauces do not really exist here (or are hiding). Vegetables are minimal and often of poor quality. Capsicum and onion are about as far as we get generally. So there have been lots of vegetarian pàsta sauces made and steak, potato and tomatoe and onion. Eating out is usually pretty good (and sometimes amazing!) but I´m trying to keep it to twice a week due to expense and love handles.
Hopefully all this hiking will help in the quest to keep the pud at bay! I´ve been loving the hiking and considering Inca is only a month away, I think the the steeper the better!
We caught a flight from Ushuaia to El calafate whcih was a contrast to say the least. Barren landscape, odd little town. On the way in from the airport our trusty taxi driver / tour guide ´Santiago´ filled us in on the local history and economy. I questioned him after seeing fenced land holdings everywhere but no stock. He told me nothing will grow so the ranches have become tourist attractions. Apparently European settlers brough Marino sheep which ate the grass which never regenerated. We passed lakes with icebergs floating on our way into town which was unexpected and very cool. We took a trip out to the Marino glacier which was incredible. 60m high (120m below the surface of the water) and the cleanest blue ice imaginable. We took a boat out to the face of the glacier which was frickin´ freezing but well worth the frostbite. We then did a walk along the face via a series of man made walkways and steps. It was snowing fairly heavily and I have still been hanging onto this chest infection so I left the guys after a while to go and thaw out. When the snow slowed I went for a second crack and took a serious tumble down a flight of snow covered steps. It would have been hilarious had it not been me. My intial post fall elation at discovering the hand I had landed on was not holding my camera was quickly followed by f%&@ my hand hurts. Half an hour later the hand was fat, unmovable and throbbing and I spent a lonely half hour on the bus trying to be brave and not cry about my potentially trip ending broken hand. Needless to say hand is not broken, just swollen, missing flaps of skin and turned some interseting shades of purple and red.
We caught a bus from El Calafate to El Chalten the neighbouring town (just three and a half hours away). El Chalten is a sweet little town which consists largely of hostels, hotels and restaurants (95% of which proved to be closed due to low season). El Chalten is a mecca for seriuous climbers and hikers who come to tackle ´Mt Fitz Roy´ an enormous mountian range just outside of El Chalten. On the first (arrived at mid day) day Dave took off to do a 6 hr hike. The wind was almost knocking me over so I decided to do a different shorter hike solo and thoroughly enjoyed some much needed ´Kate time´. The group has been travelling really well together but I have realised I need to encorporate solo time regularly as I´m so accustomed to spending time alone at home. The walk was fantastic but windy! I could barely pull my camera out and take a photo without being knocked over. I was completely alone up there and kept stumbling across egales nests; it was magical. The next day we tackled an 8 hr hike to the base of Mt Fitz Roy. The intial ascent was tought going, but once across the top it was amazing. The scenery is so diverse and incredibly beautiful. Fate smiled on us and we were blessed with a sunny afternoon (rare) and the giant Mt Fitz Roy decided to poke his head out of the clouds and give us a smile..and what a smile!!! The mountain is magestic; a patchwork of granite cliff faces that tower into the sky. I will post photos later which will not do it justice. There was a final additional section, a face you could climb to get a closer look. It was reported to be icy and the wind was intense so Caz and I decided we´d start the 4 hr hike back to catch our bus in 5 hrs time. Dave decided to give it a crack and took off at a jog, Brendan decided to follow shortly there after. We arranged with brendan to meet the boys at a look out two hours down the mnountain. Two and a half hrs later Dave shows up; no Brendan. Dave hadn´t seen him and didn´t know he had started up after him. We assumed Brendan had turned back and missed the turn to the lookout and had gone down a different decent. Dave headed off to wait at another location and Caz and I waited at the FREEZING lookout for an hour. The wind was nearly blowing us off the top and we were decidedly cranky, lol. We eventually decided to head home and hope that we had been right and he´d gone the wrong way and made his own way down another trail. We ran down the mountain to try and warm up and also to get home ASAP to see BP. After about half an hr we came across a sign in the dirt that said ¨BP home¨. Caz´s relief that her darling Empanada boy was not dangling off a mountin somewhere was quickly followed by a string of obscentites I will not share. The thought of Brendan warm and cosy in the hostel, cerveca in hand while we waited on a freezing mountain inspired a collective idea that Brendan would be buying us all a big steak dinner. Brendan was a little sheepish upon our arrival and we´ve been surprisingly good at letting him off the hook. No, realistically an easy enough thing to do without a map (shhhhh), so we haven´t miked him too much.
We are back in El Calafate and about to catch a 30 hour (g r o a n) bus to Bariloche. Better go and get mentally geared up. My beautiful Auntie Lena suggested to me that perhaps I could try Uncy Matt´s trick of accepting drug laced fanta from a local on the bus and sleep my way to Bariloche. Would of course have to sacrifice the passport and wallet....hmmmm tough call.
