Where in the WORLD is Pat?!

Angkor Wat -- July 2008

patdev — Sun, 7 Aug 2011 07:58:00 GMT

Rounding the corner amid a tangle of motorbikes, tour buses, taxis, tuk-tuks, dogs, elephants and pony carts, I suppressed a sob as I saw the first towers of Angkor Wat. As a professed New World ruins freak, seeing Cambodia's 12th-century gem had been a personal mecca for 20 years.

Chip Carroon and I flew from Bangkok on an obscenely overpriced flight to Siem Riep, a tourist ghetto in an area of rural poverty. Cambodia has one shining attraction that half of its 1.4 million tourists came to see in 2005: Angkor. Unfortunately, once-sleepy Siem Riep, a city with many colonial buildings left over from its tenure as part of French Indochina, is being rapidly overdeveloped, as evidenced by the myriad brand-new huge hotels on the road to the airport. But we chose a perfectly adequate family-run guesthouse for $7 per night.

Our first afternoon, following the advice of guidebooks, we rented rickety girls bikes for $2 a day for the three-mile ride to the ruins. Taxis and "tuk-tuks" - open-air carriages powered by a motorbike - are the transport most people choose, but we chose the physical exercise and freedom of two wheels.

Just before the Angkor Archaeological Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) is a large sign designating that the area had been cleared of mines, planted by U.S. troops at the end of the Vietnam War, as part of the effort to stop the bloody excesses of the infamous Khmer Rouge regime, from 1972-75.

One cannot see all of the temple complexes in fewer than three days; four is recommended. We bought a three-day pass for $40, which allowed access to the major complexes plus outlying ones. Tours give you a choice of the "Small" or "Grand" circuits. But on the bikes we had absolute freedom.

Angkor Wat proper is the first complex you see. It is the most famous image of Cambodia, and shows up on its currency, flag, in the Siem Riep airport's name - even on the country's most popular beer's label.

Like the Mayans, the shape of the temples, or wats, represents the people's cosmology. At Angkor, MountMeru, the Hindu mythical home of the gods, is represented by the tall temples. They are surrounded by a moat, which is the Ocean of Milk from which life evolved.

On a Saturday afternoon, the causeway across the moat was jammed with tourists: Europeans (very few Americans here), Japanese and middle-class Cambodians, for whom seeing Angkor is the equivalent of an American's pilgrimage to the Statue of Liberty.

Although the earliest temples date from 820 AD, the most spectacular and famous were built by one king, Jayavarman VII, who reigned from 1181-1219. Angkor Wat took more than 37 years to build and was consecrated in about 1150. The wats are built of sandstone and laterite, and their resemblance to Mayan ruins I've seen, particularly Guatemala's Tikal, is uncanny. Neither culture discovered the Roman concept of an arch with a keystone, so the buildings are long and narrow, or very tall and small, for without a true arch, the weight of the stone cannot be borne.

The most extraordinary thing about Angkor is its bas-relief murals of battles, from the Hindu gods' exploits in "The Ramayana" and of earthly kings. Many-armed Vishnu, astride a peacock, goose or rhinoceros, battles Hanuman, the monkey god. The troops of the gods and kings have human or benevolent spirits' faces while the adversaries have simian faces or are grimacing demons. Screaming elephants lock tusks and trample the fallen, lions roar, and crocodiles and fearsome fish devour corpses.

But the finest sculpture at Angkor Wat is the celestial dancing maidens, or apsaras. As in France's nearly contemporaneous Chartes Cathedral, most of the 1,500-plus images are in niches. Each bare-breasted woman strikes a different pose, with distinct hairstyles, symbolic hand gestures, decorated sarongs and detailed jewelry. We wandered in awe of the figures' delicate grace and evocative, enigmatic smiles.

A very steep staircase led almost 200 feet up to a small temple with views of the surrounding jungle. Saffron-robed monks prowl the halls, eager to practice their English on tourists. One monk, perhaps age 16, laughed heartily in disbelief when I told him my only "children" were cats.

Chip photographed evocative images of prasads, high conical towers, and the moat's lotus flowers in the sunset before we plunged back into the traffic jam heading for town. I heard an odd noise behind me, then a motorbike shot past bearing two men and a huge, upside-down, grunting hog.

Next morning, we set off early for what was to be a 23-mile circuit of the Grand Tour. The Angkor Thom complex is approached by a causeway flanked by demons and guardian spirits wrestling with a giant naga, or many-headed cobra.

The gate beyond bears the first gigantic head of the Buddhist deity Lokesvara, whose fleshy cheeks and full lips reminded me of Olmec heads I'd seen in Veracruz, Mexico. Archaeologists believe that the heads - four on each side of 54 towers in the Bayon complex alone - are portraits of Jayavarman VII. It's hard to imagine how incredulous the first French explorers must have been in the 1850s when they first saw the giant faces rising above the canopy.

The bas-relief murals of the late-12th century Bayon are more deeply incised and better preserved than those of Angkor Wat. Scenes of armies and kings vanquishing earthly and mythological foes alternate with charming depictions of everyday life, many the same as still seen in modern rural Cambodia. Women haggle in the marketplace; men urge on fighting cocks, boars and dogs; people play chess; girlfriends chat while picking lice out of each others' hair; and a midwife assists at a birth. Lokesvara's faintly smiling face and the apsaras preside over the action.

The Terrace of the Elephants consists of 750 feet of bas-relief, nearly life-size behemoths. One beast strangles a lion with its trunk, and elephant parents tenderly shepherd their baby. Triple-headed elephants, beloved of the god Indra, support platforms.

Here, we gratefully left the crowds and pedaled to the outer complexes. Jungle gave way to rice paddies and a lake, and Brahma bulls and water buffalo grazed by palm-thatch-roofed houses made of reeds or wooden planks. Women wore traditional collarless, long-sleeved blouses and sarongs with red-checked turbans. Naked boys swam in irrigation ponds with ducks and pigs. Every kid in Cambodia knows one English word - "hello" - which they shout at you from their yards or the back of a motorbike, much to the amusement of their mothers.

We rode back in time to temples built 300 years earlier than Jayavarman VII's masterpieces. Most were not as meticulously excavated as the Grand Tour edifices, the vegetative fringes adding to their exoticness.

The most famous is Ta Prohm, built in the mid-12th to early-13th century. It was left just as archaeologists discovered it, with the roots of tall kapok, banyan and strangler fig trees wrenching apart the walls and oozing down into the masonry's cracks. Screaming parrots add to the romantic atmosphere.

Night falls like a guillotine at 12 degrees latitude, but the brief twilight of our ride back afforded us a look at two wildlife species. Leaf monkeys came to the edge of the main road for picnic leftovers. On the bridge over river that bisects Siem Riep, I screeched to a halt to stare in gape-mouthed wonder at hundreds of huge bats leaving their roost. Unlike our insectivorous bats, fruit-eating bats fly in a determined, straight line with slow wing beats. From the ground, they looked gull-size, but may have been flying foxes, which have a wingspan of up to 4 feet. The final night of a full- moon water festival was going on, with small, lotus-shaped boats containing candles floating down the river beneath me.

On our final day, we needed to see the most-distant temple complexes so we hired a tuk-tuk, for $18 for the entire day. I particularly wanted to see 967 AD Banteay Srei, which my guidebook said, "has some of the most gorgeous stone ornamentation that you are ever likely to set your eyes upon." We were not disappointed.

Every portico and gallery of this small temple was covered with bas reliefs so deeply incised and prominent that I found myself looking at them sideways to ascertain if they weren't, after all, three-dimensional.

Set among elaborate floral lintels and atop arches were delicate figures displaying much emotion: dying monkey warriors and their concerned companions; a terrified goddess Sita, the wife of Rama, being kidnapped by Ravana, the god of the underworld; and apsaras and other divine guardian spirits in the hip-slung stance called "contrapposto" in Renaissance art.

The Roulos Group of temples contains the oldest structures in the Angkor area. Pra Kreah, built in 881 was an ancient ruin revered by Jayavarman VII, who topped it with a new prasad. Badly eroded statues of nagas, elephants, lions and bulls guard the crumbling structures. Of note at late-ninth century Lolei were Sanskrit inscriptions on the door supports proclaiming that the temple was built to honor the parents of King Yasovarman.

The stone faces of the Bayon's towers, the Terrace of the Elephants and Banteay Srei's carvings match anything I've seen in Latin America, and have become an unforgettable addition to my fascination with ruins.

Bali -- July 2008

patdev — Sun, 7 Aug 2011 07:53:00 GMT

THE JOURNEY OVER

Basically, “You can’t get there from here” easily. So we had to fly United to Tokyo then spend a day in Singapore then get on an Indonesian carrier for the final leg to Denpasar. Thankfully, this two-day ordeal means very few Americans in Bali.

It was kinda neat to see Singapore even if just for a day. Talk about modern: THE most gorgeous airport I’ve ever seen, architecturally skyscrapers, everyone on the excellent metro talking on a cell phone or listening to an iPod. We walked around the old colonial district and checked out the famed circa-1820 Raffles Hotel, Indiatown, and what remains of the waterfront Chinatown.

HOTELS and COSTS:

The guidebook said Bali is not the tourists’ bargain that it once was, but you coulda fooled us.

We ate full dinners for a total bill of $3. We averaged $17 for very nice, family-run hotels that included breakfast and had beautiful and elaborate gardens and pools, shrines and verandahs. Many had elaborately carved red-and-gilt doorways, with the requisite protective spirit leering at you from above the door. Sure, many of the places had the usual cheap Third World hotel oddities – one towel per room, no TP, robust cockroaches and mildew in the bathrooms, erratic or no hot water, one sheet per bed – but what did we care?

The biggest hotel score was half a bungalow about 75 feet from a black sand beach – for a mere per night.

We rented a shitty Suzuki for an unbelievable $75 for eight days. Yeah, OK, a bolt supporting the passenger’s seat fell out and Chip had to struggle with the left-side driver’s shift stick, but it was part of the adventure. Due to Bali’s extreme topography – a mountain range bisects it – every trip involved labyrinthine detours through tiny towns and streets full of motor bikes, chickens, door-side offerings to spirits, dogs, vendors’ carts, buses – even a troop of begging monkeys running after scooters!

UBUD

We spent a quick first night in the touron nightmare of Kuta, from which the drunken, pissing, screaming Aussies thankfully rarely venture. A minibus trip brought us to Ubud, a rural town in the uplands known for its artisans (and ex-pats). Ubud is one of the best places to visit craftspeople at work and to see traditional dance and wayang kulit, the shadow-puppet shows.

Ubud is now overrun with tourists in the high season, but we were very early so it was fine.

We took long walks out into the gorgeous, surrounding rice paddies, communing with ducks and old guys yelling, “Hallo, turis!” (The famous friendliness of the Balinese people is still very much in evidence.) Homemade noisemakers of bamboo and tin cans scare off the birds, and little boys fly kites.

We also went to Ubud to see Annie, Chip’s flight attendant friend who’s lived there 30 years in a great house with a drop-dead beautiful view of the paddies. She was upset because recently a huge boa has been sneaking in between the roof and walls and eating her cats!

CULTURE

For all of its modernity, I must say this is the most flat-out exotic place I’ve ever

been. Traditional culture is still very alive; I’ve never seen so many men in native dress, namely the sarong (even guys doing concrete work wore a T-shirt and sarong.).

I got by well on two Indonesian words: the ubiquitous “Hallo” and “terima kasi,” or “thank you.” Due to its long colonization by the Dutch, Arabic script is used, and many words are quasi-recognizable to an English speaker.

Religion is an indivisible part of everyday life. Bali is Hindu and animist, vs. Java, which is Muslim (we saw an amusing Muslim-ladies TV talk show with the audience all in pastel head scarves).

Water is the No. 1 most sacred thing, and we visited pretty and elaborate water palaces and temples, witnessing worshipping crowds in traditional dress -- for women, a lacy blouse and sarong. Chip saw a beach ceremony in which a widow scattered her husband’s ashes into the sea.

There are temples literally everywhere, with great, cast-concrete images of gods and demons, many intended to be comic (a demon devouring a child is common). Every morning, wives set out hand-made palm baskets of offerings, with flowers, rice, incense and holy water. There was even an offering tray in our car!

At the four corners of every bridge, I noticed small demon/deity statues to presumably bless and protect the crosser. I envision a warehouse in Jakarta full of bridge demons which every highway engineer must requisition.

Each house entryway has a barrier just behind the door because spirits cannot turn corners. Our favorite Ubud hotel had an elaborate shine that a guy tended to for an hour a day. In the fields are vaguely human-shaped palm-frond images called “rice mothers” to bless the harvest.

We went to the only Buddhist temple in Bali, and saw 11^th century tombs cut into living rock in a mountain stream’s canyon. In the highlands, we heard prayers broadcast five times a day in Lake Bratan’s mosque. To visit it, I put on long sleeves, a sarong (one must always wear a sarong and special sash in any Balinese temple) and a head scarf. Chip loves the image of me he took in that get-up and tells everyone I’ve converted now!

THE ARTS

People go to Bali specifically for its arts, and we were no exception. You drive through entire villages devoted to one craft: a certain type of chair, wood carvers, stone cutters, idol and mask makers, weavers, acrylic painters, and batik artists. The most spectacular new addition to my folk-art collection is a fabric kite of a leering flying fox bat with a 5-foot wingspan hovering over my dining room table.

Bail is most famous for its gamelan orchestras, and you hear it all day everywhere. To be a gamelan musician is expected of every man, and the banjar, or village cooperative, owns all of the group’s instruments, which anyone can play. Gamelan is almost 100% percussion, on xylophones, gongs, and bells. It sounds entirely improvised, but is decidedly not. It seems discordant to the Western ear at first, but its tonality grows on you. It has a sparkling, laughing, merry sound full of joi de vivre.

Bali is also famous for its elaborately costumed dancers. Young women enact sinuous movements with splayed feet, hyper-extended fingers on fluttering hands, and flashing eyes. We also saw a performance of seated men “dancing” and singing a staccato, a capella tune. We missed the barong dance, in which a buffoon half-lion/half-human figure cavorts. One Sunday morning, we happened upon charming kids practicing dance in Ubud’s former imperial palace.

But the No. 1 thing I HAD to see in Bali was the shadow puppet drama. It is a dying art, with only about 10 puppeteers left on the island. The simple marionettes are cut from cow hide with stick-operated arms. The art form is a metaphor for life’s mysteries as you view the puppets’ shadows only, cast upon a screen backlit by a flickering oil lamp. One guy simultaneously operates up to four characters from Hindu mythology who speak in High and Low Balinese (and sometimes English in our show) and provides the percussion, accompanied by a simple gamelan orchestra. The show has elements of high drama, slapstick, battle scenes and song – I can in no way describe how magical it was. It was certainly THE most unique dramatic performance I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot.

OUTDOORS STUFF

Of course, we didn’t go to Bali just for the arts. We rented bikes in Ubud to ride to a tiny village known for the hundreds of ethereal, white egrets that roost in its trees near sunset.

We walked in the achingly picturesque palm-lined paddies for miles, Chip in photographers’ heaven.

We climbed the volcano above Lake Batur, formed in a vast jungle-filled caldera and truly one of the most scenic places I’ve ever visited. The guidebooks said you could find the route easily and didn’t need a guide, but times have changed. As we drove to the trailhead at dawn, two guides on a motorbike followed us, then when we stopped, screamed, ‘You must respect my association! [Code for: hire them at an exorbitant rate.] You cannot climb by yourself! We go to police station now!” It didn’t help that I smirked when a guy claimed, “I am not a criminal!” We shrugged them off, drove another two miles to lose them – and found the trail and climbed it ourselves!

At Lovina Beach, for $8 each, we took a three-hour boat and snorkeling trip to see leaping dolphins at dawn. The reef was just out of the world, better than Cozumel even.

On Lake Bratan, we rented a crude wooden canoe with handmade outriggers for $5 for four hours. We went around in circles for 45 minutes, but eventually got the hang of the damned thing.

CRITTERS

In towns, wicker cages with men’s beloved fighting cocks are lined up in front of houses. You see cross-legged guys stroking the fearsome roosters and chatting.

There are mangy dogs everywhere, on roads and asleep in restaurants, and a few nervous, bone-thin cats. Dogs embody demons so are appeased, many eating rice offerings, sleeping, and copulating in temple grounds.

Vast flocks of quacking, flightless ducks roam the paddies, looking for snails and fish and providing fertilizer. Brahma bulls are still used by some farmers to plow the paddies.

Ubud has a famous forest in which langur monkeys are fed for the pleasure of tourons. The place is just crawling with monkey families, with many cunning babies in May. They wrestle, squabble, and leap into a pond. We even saw a begging monkey on Batur’s summit! Oh, and then there was the guy walking a huge macaque on a leash on the beach.

The one big, expensive (all of $20 each) touristy thing we did was visit the Bali Bird and Reptile Park, with hundreds of tropical species from Asia, Africa and the Americas. I was spellbound, recognizing many bird species from my forays into the wilds of those regions.

They had a super-cool (and free) opportunity to be photographed with gigantic parrots on your arms or clutching turtles and iguanas. I was in heaven!

There was a vast walk-in aviary of shrieking species from Papua, but our favorite part was feeding time for the Komodo dragons. The up-to-30-foot monitor species is found only a few Indonesian islands. Twice a week, the dragons are fed three whole rabbits by a nonchalant rangerette. Way cool!

Photos: Worldwide shots

patdev — Sun, 7 Aug 2011 07:33:00 GMT

Tasmania-New Zealand -- January 2010

patdev — Sat, 6 Aug 2011 10:10:00 GMT

PUNAKAIKI-PAPAROA NP

We had originally planned to visit a friend who spends every February in her North Island New Zealand house, but she didn’t go there this year. Nevertheless, we decided to go ahead with our plans to visit NZ. I had recently regained contact with an old travel writer friend, Tamara, a Tasmanian native, who’s always told me what great “bushwalks” (hikes) that island territory (state) has. So, once again, we plundered outfitters’ itineraries for the two locales. We reserved a campervan for NZ, packed a “chillie bin” (ice chest) with camping dishes, and off we went.

SYDNEY

We spent two nights in the Glebe neighborhood, filled with students, quirky shops and eateries, and backpacking tourists. It is strange to stay in a youth hostel where you are at least 20 years older than 90 percent of the customers, but the price is right. We strolled down to the famed Sydney Harbour and saw a white-faced heron near the graceful Anzac Bridge. Sydney strikes me as a very livable big city with its spectacular docks, tropical vegetation, multi-ethnicity, and distinctly British colonial-style homes with balconies and grillework. It is swarming now with Chinese tourists; 10 years ago they would have been wealthy families, but I suspect now they are all middle class.

Our first day, we took a 9-mile (all distances are round trip, or “return,” as they say down there) walk to the downtown area with its museums, aquarium, galleries, statuary, high-class shopping district – and our chief goal, the fabulous botanical garden, or “domain.”

Australia is one of those meccas all serious “twitchers” (the vaguely obscene-sounding British term for birders) must experience. Immediately, we saw a bizarre sight: turkey-size white ibises with 6-inch down-curved bills begging alongside pigeons and gulls! The ibises fill the same niche as our parkland Canada geese: sneaking up on picnickers to beg, terrorizing toddlers clutching sandwiches, foraging in trash cans. We also saw crow-like pied (black-and-white) Australian magpies; purple swamphens, a coot with orange bill and legs; sooty (black) oystercatchers with bright red legs and bills; that most-ubiquitous of tropical birds, mynahs; and a yellow-faced, long-legged lapwing, or plover, I knew from Southern Africa.

But the most extraordinary birds in the domain were the parrots. The trees were filled with screaming rosellas, small green-and-red birds. We couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw flocks of large, white sulphur-(yellow) crested cockatoos raucously wheeling through the canopy! An Aussie later told me that even in his country captive cockatoos are worth $2,000-$3,000, and much more than that in ours. Later in the domain, 10 cockatoos grazed in the grass not 10 feet away, then flew up into a tree right above us. Having seen them in the wild, I can never again look at a parrot sulking in its cage, plucking out its breast feathers as it slowly becomes psychotic in 50 years of solitary confinement …

I noticed hundreds of large hanging nests, like that of an oriole or oropendola. Imagine my shock when I realized they were actually flying fox bats hanging upside down, waiting for dusk to feed on fruit and nectar! Their bodies have the mass of a large grapefruit, and their wingspan is close to 3 feet. They are cinnamon-colored, with winsome, big-eyed, dog-like black faces that give them their name. I’ve seen flying foxes in Cambodia, but never so close in such numbers; indeed, the thousands of bats are killing the park’s trees, and the city is trying to humanely eradicate them. We were so fascinated, we spent at least a half-hour watching them fly around (landing up-side down by their feet), fan themselves with their wings to cool off, and squabble and shriek at each other. On our last night of the trip while taking the airport shuttle back to Grebe, we saw thousands of the foxes flying purposefully – unlike our insect-eating bats’ erratic flight pattern – out to forage. Sydneyites are no doubt blasé about them, but seeing those bats was truly one of my coolest-ever wildlife-viewing experiences.

BLUE MOUNTAINS NP

Early in his fight attendant career, Chip flew into Sydney many times. He wanted to again hike the limestone cliffs and valleys of Blue Mountains National Park, a two-hour train ride to the east of Sydney. It was a grey, drizzly day, but not prohibitively. The “blue” moniker is from the bluish haze created by the dense eucalyptus forests; we must have seen 25 different eucalyptus species in mainland Australia and Tasmania (hereafter to be referred to by the natives’ “Tassie”). We set off on a 6-mile loop that began with a near-vertical, 1,000-foot descent into a canyon down a harrowing staircase. The canyon floor was choked with some of the densest rain forest I’ve ever seen: myriad fern species, turpentine and eucalyptus trees, strangler fig lianas. We passed under the Three Sisters karst monoliths, three legendary women turned to stone for violating an Aboriginal “kapu” (taboo).

Halfway into the hike, it began thundering then we had a 45-minute torrential downpour which our Gortex, ponchos, and gaiters did little to fend off. Leeches immediately came out to insinuate themselves into our shoe tongues and up our pant legs. Fortunately, we had encountered terrestrial leeches in Thailand, so were en garde. On the train ride home, it actually hailed, even though it was summer and only about 3,000 feet.

Next morning before our flight to Tassie’s capital, Hobart, we had time to run down to the Harbour again to photograph the iconic Opera House in full sun – and ogle the bats and cockatoos once more. The Opera House is truly one of the great wonders of the architectural world with its wing-like partitions and gleaming white tiles. I never thought I’d see it in my lifetime.

TASMANIA

The idea of going to Tassie intrigued me from the start as a place few Americans visit and reputably having some of the best hiking in Australia. Tassie is the huge island off the southeast corner of the mainland, and was where the worst-of-the-worst convicts were originally sent. (I had to laugh when the entry-visa card you fill out to enter Australia asks if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony – hell, everyone in the country was originally a prisoner!) I’d heard that Aussies look down on Tasmanians as hicks, like we do on our Okies or Southerners. It’s also supposed to be 25 years behind the times, a designation I saw proudly touted in a local newspaper. We found Tassie to be almost tourist-free, charmingly rural, and full of wildlife.

Hobart is an old ranching and logging port with a now-trendy waterfront area. We met Tamara and her “mum” at a very posh restaurant co-owned by her younger brother. The prices were way out of our league, but we had a lot of fun chatting with the women about their lives, country, and where we should hike for three days. Tamara had just returned from a long stint of writing a guide to Borneo.

In a rented Honda, we set off for the interior highlands through sheep and cow pastures and yellow hills not unlike California’s Central Valley. We immediately began seeing roadkill that we ascertained were wallabies; the small, nocturnal kangaroos sit on the warm asphalt and get killed. We despaired of ever seeing a live one. Currawongs, the equivalent in size, look, and habits of our ravens, feasted on the corpses of the wallabies and bush-tailed possums, vocalizing an odd bleat like a sheep or human baby.

Tassie is home to many famous wildlife species: diverse marsupials; the world’s only two egg-laying mammals, the duck-billed platypus and the hedgehog-like echidna; and the iconic Tasmanian devil. Chip had a brief look at an echidna crossing the road, and we examined a roadkilled devil: a cute, marsupial, black, knee-high cross between a pig and a dog with white bands on its chest. Honestly, I have no idea where the idea for the whirling, bipedal, human-like Tasmania Devil of cartoon fame originated. Devils are like our badger, willing to take on prey much bigger than themselves. The famous snarling gape is actually a reaction to uncertainty or fear, not necessarily a threat. Devils are in big trouble now, with a wasting fungus disease decimating the population.

This was also the home of the Tasmanian tiger, or wolf, a doglike marsupial with striped back and legs. When Europeans introduced sheep, the opportunistic tigers preyed upon them, so were relentlessly hunted down. Within 200 years, tigers were declared extinct, with rumored sightings up until the 1970s. Their story is one of the most famous and sad of species extirpations.

We rented a tiny two-bunk room in an old summer camp with a communal kitchen at the base of Mount Roland. We took a steep, 9-mile hike up to the saddle of the peak through an impenetrable jungle of ferns, tropical conifers, and eucalyptus.

By definition, “alpine” vegetation begins where the soil can no longer support trees, due to the cold. At 45-degrees latitude in the Southern Hemisphere, alpine habitat is at about 3,000 feet; in contrast, it begins at 10,000 feet in the Sierra and 12,000 feet in Colorado! On the way back down, we were thrilled to catch a glimpse of screaming blue-green parrots and immense yellow-tailed black cockatoos. On our last morning at the hotel, about 20 cockatoos were in a pine right above our hotel room, ripping apart green cones with their supremely powerful beaks. Talk about a died-and-gone-to-heaven birding experience!

That night, as I was walking to the bathroom along the “carpark,” I saw shadowy forms in the basketball court: about 10 wallabies seeking the pavement’s warmth. They were wary little guys, bounding off effortlessly in single 6-foot leaps. Next night, we staked them out -- odd herbivores with deer-like faces and ears, seemingly useless little dangling forelegs, and huge hindquarters containing their jet-propulsion muscles.

CRADLE MOUNTAIN NP

We headed to Tassie’s most famous NP on what the Irish call “a fine soft day”: light drizzle and fog. We started out on a 9-mile loop to the summit of 4,500-foot Cradle Mountain. It was odd to be in alpine habitat at the same elevation of my Nevada house. Marian’s Lookout was a bowl of pea-soup fog, but as we started to climb the half-mile of talus to the red limestone summit of Cradle, it began to blow off. On the way back, we had super views from the lookout of alpine lakes, distant peaks, and flower-spangled moors.

FREYCINET NP

We drove down the west coast to stay in the tiny beach town of Bicheno and access Freycinet NP and its WineglassBay, named by Outside magazine as one of the world’s most-beautiful beaches. In our hotel’s communal kitchen was a funny map of a gigantic Tassie dwarfing its territory, the mainland, with acerbic comments as to why Tassie is superior.

Bicheno is just enchanting; think 1960 BodegaBay in “The Birds.” We took an 8-mile walk along a beach path past powerful blowholes and rocks with a unique, picturesque red lichen. I examined a dead masked booby, then we saw sooty (“redbills” in the local vernacular) and pied oystercatchers, two gull species, shags (aka cormorants), and breeding colony of black-fronted and crested terns on a close-in island. We walked down white-sand beaches with turquoise water to a spit over which we walked to Diamond Island in low tide.

When we checked in, the hotel owner asked if we were here for the penguin tour. Fairy penguins, the world’s smallest species at calf height, come up the beach rocks at dusk to feed their chicks hidden in burrows. You can pay a fortune to go with a group, or simply go to the areas the hotel folks pointed out to us. As luck would have it, there was a full moon, so visibility in the dark was good.

We waited for a half-hour in the designated spot then decided to try another. As I started over the rocks, I almost stepped on two penguins hidden in the shadows! Then we realized that the continual peeping we were hearing was the chicks’ locater calls. The birds’ eyes are photo sensitive, so Chip was frustrated that he couldn’t take flash photos. But from 15 feet away with my binoculars, I could clearly see many penguins creeping up the rocks and feeding the chicks by ramming regurgitated fish down their throats. I have seen penguins on islands off of Peru and in a breeding colony south of Cape Town, but Chip never, so needless to say, we were thrilled.

Next morning was foggy again for our 6-mile loop around WineglassBay. Still, the bay was gorgeous, rivaling any famous Hawaiian or Caribbean white-sand beach. I examined a dead albatross, which I had never seen, and we watched two currawongs gleaning insects from kelp and heard the evocative “tock-tock” of a bellbird in a marsh.

In another bay, we spotted six wallabies in the bushes – at last, a close, daytime encounter with live specimens! Chip took a million photos as they allowed us to get within 10 feet; we later found out they actually beg from beachgoers. NZ has introduced five introduced wallaby species, but Tassie’s were the only ones we were to see. (FYI, the difference between a kangaroo and a wallaby is simply weight.)

It finally cleared on our drive back up to Hobart to catch our Christchurch plane, and we saw many more gorgeous beaches in brilliant sun. I had Chip stop so I could examine a cat-size roadkilled, marsupial bush-tailed possum with pink “hands” and full, prehensile tail.

NEW ZEALAND ECOLOGY

I had bought a guide to all of NZ’s wildlife and plants, which proved extremely helpful in our identifying efforts. NZ’s ecological history is fascinating. Before the advent of the Polynesians who became the Maoris about 1,000 years ago, NZ was a nation of birds. Its sole mammals – two bat species – were “birds,” and its most famous bird was a “mammal,” the moa, which was the size and shape of a juvenile giraffe, minus the front legs. The Maoris exploited the moas and their eggs so efficiently that the 9-foot-high, largest birds in history were long extinct by the Europeans’ arrival in the 17^th century.

In a predator-free environment, many of the birds evolved as flightless, and thus became fair game for introduced mammals, starting with stowaway rats in Maori canoes. NZ is a biologist’s nightmare of why introduced species are so damaging. Nearly 50 percent of the islands’ 41 endemic bird species have become extinct due to predation of flightless adults, nests and fledglings by rats, possums, stoats (a weasel-like animal), ferrets, goats, foxes, dogs, and feral cats. The Department of Conservation (DOC) has declared war on predators in an attempt to save species, establishing barrier fences and pest-free outlying islands to raise endangered, captive-bred birds for re-release. We saw many stoat traps baited with eggs, and gulped at a very graphic DOC poster of a possum and rat chewing on endangered fledglings pulled from a nest. Even NZ’s most famous bird, the flightless kiwi, is severely threatened: 95 percent of fledglings in the wild do not survive.

NELSON LAKES NP

In Christchurch, we picked up our very basic campervan with comfy foam mattresses and bedding. We had brought my single-burner Coleman stove, assuming we could find the proper fuel canisters. Alas, they were unavailable, so we had to shell out $30 for a stove that used very expensive butane cans. At trip’s end, we donated the stove to the DOC for use by its predator-control field biologists.

We spent our first night in a private “holiday park” (campervan campground) en route to Nelson Lakes NP in the north-central area. This was our intro to NZ’s very peculiar campground situation. They collect your fees, but since the spaces are undesignated, people just cram in wherever, as close as they can in the more-popular DOC campgrounds. As people who avoid campgrounds virtually entirely, this was an irritant to which we never became accustomed. The worst example was two Israeli kids who erected their tent 3 feet from our table!

Next day, we camped at Lake Rotoito, a large, deep, textbook glacial lake. We hiked a steep, 6.5-mile loop up a ridge above the lake in alpine meadows then dense rain forest. We encountered a flock of fantails, which follow hikers to catch the insects attracted to them. The tiny birds bounced off branches all around us, flashing their black-and-white tail “fans.” Harrier hawks soared above the ridge, and we saw yellow-green silver-eyes and a cute little NZ robin that’s totally unlike the North American species.

We drove down the island’s west shore to hike the Hawaii-like rain forests of Paparoa NP near the town of Punakaiki. In an 8.5-mile loop, we waded across one river then went up over a ridge to walk back alongside another. The number of fern species was mind-boggling -- NZ has 65 species – including ones with 6-foot fronds and 20-foot tree ferns. We spotted our first flightless bird: two brown, chicken-size wekas begging at picnic tables. We also saw purple pukeko swamphens and white-headed paradise shelducks.

Punakaiki is famed for its very powerful blowholes surging among the “Pancake Rocks.” Layers of limestone and a softer material were deposited along the shore. The softer material has partially eroded away, leaving odd columns resembling stacked flapjacks.

OKARITO

Our guidebook sang the praises of Okarito, a beach town down a gravel road so tiny it has no stores. Folks rent kayaks to bird its jungle-lined lagoon. We camped in a funky, town-run campground a block from the beach and walked to the start of a trail up a ridge with views of pretty beaches and the lagoon. Okarito is the sole habitat of a severely endangered brown kiwi. Kiwis are nocturnal, flightless, and chicken-size with stiff feathers and a 6-inch beak with the nostrils at the end. The closest we came to seeing one was a joke shot Chip took of me training my binocs on a “kiwi-crossing sign.”

Next morning, we set off for four hours of kayaking at the same time as a nice young NZ couple, the male of which was a bird professional. We had long, close looks at many white egrets; white-faced herons; barred godwits; crested terns; pied stilts with impossibly long, hot-pink legs; both oystercatcher species; kereru wood pigeons; and huge white spoonbills. I’ve seen roseate spoonbills in Florida and Central America, but it was a first for Chip. The lagoon was the birding highlight of the trip.

THE GLACIERS

This was to be our best “full-body workout day” when we ran down the coast that afternoon to take the steep 7-mile hike up to the base of Franz Joseph Glacier. Now NZ looked like Alaska, with surging rivers opaque with “rock powder” silt in broad, desolate beds of moraine gravel. On the jungle trail, we crossed swing bridges and climbed over roots and slippery rocks. Finally the glacier vista opened up: a huge snowfield with endless, sheer cliffs of bluish ice hemmed in by sheer peaks. It reminded me of walking out on Mendenhall Glacier near Anchorage in 1976; nowhere in the Lower 48 can you get so close to a glacier as this. Alas, the experience was marred by the incessant drone of sightseeing helicopters jockeying for position. Yeah, yeah, I know the access-for-all argument, but why is it always at the expense of hikers’ enjoyment? In a DOC campground that night, we heard NZ’s only endemic owl, named for what it clearly hoots: “more pork!”

Next morning, we walked almost to the terminus of nearby Fox Glacier. With my binocs, I could see 50-foot cliffs of that otherworldly blue ice high on its face. At another overlook, trees draped with red-flowering rata vines framed a dazzling look at the glacier completely surrounding the base of 11,000-foot Mount Tasman.

MOUNT ASPIRING NP

Heading south, we drove the Haast Highway alongside the glacial HaastRiver with views of snow-covered peaks. We camped in a DOC facility with beautiful views of 8,000-foot snowy MountBrewster. The first afternoon, we took a 3-mile hike across a swing bridge to the Blue Pools, perfectly clear, aquamarine, glacier-fed river pools, so ice-cold (as we found out when we tried to swim) as to support no life. Next day, we took a hike along a river then over a ridge in the MakaroraValley. Another flock of fantails latched on to us, so tame they actually alighted on my outstretched arms!

MILFORD SOUND AREA

Now we headed to the most famous and widely photographed part of NZ: the Southern Alps and Fiordland NP. We camped alongside the vast, white-capping Lake Te Anau then drove the twisting 50 miles to the Sound in intermittent rain. This area receives as much 7 meters – yes, 21 FEET! – of rain, so we did not expect to see the Sound in clear weather. Indeed, the swirling mists and vertical falls pounding down into the Sound we saw from its forebay are its essence.

On our way back to the Divide (the lowest pass in the Alps) hiking area, we stopped at a tunnel to look for keas. The DOC constantly warns you about the large rascally parrots’ propensity to chew up things – windshield sealing, motorcycle seats, tents -- with their powerful beaks. Three of them descended on a tour bus, begging and preening their bronze-green and red plumage while the cameras snapped.

It was clearing as we hit the Routeburn Track, the only one of NZ’s nine multi-day Great Walks we would trod, for a 7-mile hike. We ascended among dense, moss-covered trees above mists swirling over the HollyfordRiver Valley. We passed the backpackers’ Howden Hut, and were glad we had decided not to join the 23-year-old Germans and 20 Singapore high schoolers there for the night. We lunched at 525-foot Earland Falls, one of countless falls and freshets cascading down the canyon walls all around us.

Next day, we returned to the Divide for a steep, 6-mile hike up to Lake Marian, reputedly one of the park’s prettiest. We paused at the “gantry” (viewing platform) over a stupendous cascade. I gasped when we got to the perfect tarn of Marian: pure blue under swift-moving clouds and a textbook glacial hanging valley bordered by steep, snow-capped peaks.

Back in Te Anau, I wanted to see a lakeside DOC wildlife center that houses rare, endemic birds. We got another close look at keas, and at two other parrots we did not see in the wild: the large, green-and-red kaka and the small red-crowned parakeet. But the bird I most wanted to see was the takahe, a turkey-size, purple swamphen with red legs and beak. Another flightless victim of the insatiable introduced predators, takahes were believed to be extinct until a tiny population was stumbled upon in 1948. Captive- and predator-free island-breeding programs have brought the population up to a precarious 300, only 30 percent of which are currently in the wild. The center’s sole takahe was very old, sad, and slow. Watching her, I got the same lump in my throat as when I saw Hawaii’s state bird, the nene goose, of which there were also only 300 left, at Haleakala in the mid-1980s.

ROY’S PEAK

Queenstown, beautifully situated on huge LakeWakatipu, has become the ultimate active-tourism destination, with a smorgasbord of rec offerings. (“Q’town” was the original bungee-jumping site, but, no, we didn’t indulge.) We spent the night there en route to Wanaka, on the shores of yet-another large, gorgeous glacial lake. We did a 9-mile hike up 3,000 feet of switchbacks in sheep pastures to the ridge below Roy’s Peak. The views of Lake Wanaka’s islands and peninsulas and glacier-bound 9,100-foot Mount Aspiring were stupendous.

We spent that night at a working sheep and cattle ranch, or ‘station.” The guidebook said owner “Tony shares his kitchen and lounge as well as his theories on farming and politics,” and, boy, did he! A recent widower, Tony rents out rooms in his house and camping space in his lovely garden to supplement the ranching business and assuage his loneliness. After 10 days of DOC camping, we were grateful a hot shower and the use of his cooktop and doily-covered dining table, musing at the chintz-covered armchairs around the big-screen TV. As we sat down for dinner, Tony came out and talked our ears off all about how destructive the previous prime minister’s policies were toward agriculture, how small NZ farmers are being swallowed up by multinational conglomerates, and his son’s trip to Italy to sell the station’s merino wool for suits. He also described the social ills of NZ and the problems of the Maoris, which are very like those of our urban blacks. He was a bright, astute guy, and it was one of those rare travelers’ opportunities to question a native about his country.

AORAKI/MOUNT COOK NP
We headed up long LakePukaki to NZ’s most popular national park, Aoraki/Mount Cook. It is dominated by Aoraki (“Cloud Piercer” in Maori), aka Mount Cook, Australasia’s highest peak at 12,350 feet. Twenty-two of NZ’s 27 mountains over 10,000 feet are in the park. Aoraki and the nearby ridge dominated by Mount Sefton form the backdrop to the camping area, with that ethereal glacial blue ice right above you.

Perpetually swathed in rapidly moving mist, Aoraki is one of the most picturesque mountains I’ve ever seen, with an abrupt double summit surrounded by ice fields. It is also one of the most dangerous to climb, and was not summited until 1884. For the first time, I got a gut feeling about how dangerous and unpredictable is ice climbing; we heard several avalanches in two days. The visitors center had three books filled with memorials to hundreds of climbers who have been killed on Aoraki or Sefton.

As soon as we changed money in Christchurch, I recognized on the $5 bill that most famous of beekeepers, who would be knighted for his Himalayan-climbing feats: Sir Edmund Hillary. A big museum in the park dedicated to NZ’s national hero opened just weeks before his death. Hillary learned to ice climb on Aoraki, even bringing Sherpa Tenzing Norgay there to train before they conquered Everest.

Our first afternoon, we did a 10-mile hike up the valley formed by Hooker Glacier, at the base of Aoraki. We crossed a swing bridge over the opaque river emanating from the glacier, and marveled at blue icebergs floating in the pool at the terminus of its dirt-covered ice field.

Our last day of hiking on the trip, up to the Sealy Tarns lakes and Mueller Hut, was our most difficult, not so much because of its 3-mile, 3,000-foot gain up talus as for the intense wind. As we neared the ridge, I was almost literally swept off my feet. We spent a shell-shocked half-hour lunch in the hut recovering and steeling ourselves to go back out into the gale. But the close-up views of Seton’s dead-blue ice cliffs were worth it. Chip left our snug campervan the next dawn to capture images of the Cloud Piercer in rosy mists – a fitting end to a trip suffused with natural beauty.

________________________________________________

MILES HIKED: 144 in 17 non-traveling days. NZ’s trail system is marvelous, with trailhead map boards, clear signage, informative hiking brochures, and good route maintenance. At the end of the trip, I asked Chip, “What do non-hiking tourists do in New Zealand? What a shame to experience the country simply from a tour bus.”

LANGUAGE: First, Aussies really do say “G’day” (pronounced “good-eye”) and “mate” (“mite”) all the time. I enjoyed using the former to greet oncoming hikers throughout the trip. I feared I would have trouble with the extreme NZ accent, but quickly got used to it. I was amused when a New Zealander complained about how he hated the Brit accent, which sounds so refined to us! NZ vocabulary we loved: jandals=flip flops (Japan+sandals), judder bars=speed bumps, sweet as=similar to our “fantastic!”, tramping=hiking, track=trail, no worries=no problem, Enzed=New Zealand, nappies=diapers -- and our all-time favorite expression, “Rattle your dags.” Dags are the turds clinging to a sheep’s ass, and to rattle them is to hurry up. Kiwi has three uses: kiwi=the bird, Kiwi=a New Zealander, kiwifruit= the fruit we know.

Hiking Patagonia: Argentina/Chile -- November 2010

patdev — Sat, 6 Aug 2011 09:59:00 GMT

This hiking destination was high on our must-do-before-we-get-too-decrepit list. The two treks we took are on every list of the top 20 best hikes of the world. The trails were extremely well-marked and easily accessible by bus, so there is no way in hell you’d need to go with an outfitter, if you speak even a smattering of Spanish.

This was only my second trip to South America, after Peru in 1984. As expected, Argentina and Chile are extremely Europeanized with huge middle classes, but traveling independently, the trip was very affordable. As in Spain, the South Americans’ mellifluous Spanish accent sounded almost like Italian to us, versus the very crisp Mexican Spanish we hear here.

BUENOS AIRES

Many visitors spend a long amount of time soaking in the sights and bustle of “the Paris of South America,” but we only spent a half-day exploring. The city reminded me very much of Madrid. We stayed in a hostel in the San Telmo district, the city’s oldest and filled with gracefully aging Beaux Arts and Art Nouveau buildings. The 1880s San Telmo market was a delight with colorful produce, vintage clothing, and antiques and early 20^th-century from the mansions of “wool barons.”

The famous Plaza de Mayo had screaming parrots in its trees. It is the site of many of Argentina’s most famous political rallies, including the weekly “Madres de Mayo” vigil of grandmothers whose young family members – “los desaparacedos" ("the disappeared") -- were the still-unaccounted-for victims of the military’s 1976-83 “Dirty War” reign of terror. The pink Casa Rosada mansion houses the president’s office, and Evita Peron gave her famed speeches from its balcony.

IGUAZU FALLS NP

One cannot go to BA without also flying to nearby IguazuFalls, one of the world’s mightiest cataracts. I was expecting it to be on the scale of Zambia’s Victorian Falls, which I saw in 2004, and it was. The park has two sides, in Brazil and Argentina, and we set off on the many viewing paths of the latter. Catwalks take you out over the edge of the massive walls of roaring water all around you. Vultures soared overhead, dusky-headed swifts zipped in and out of nests behind the cataracts, and we spied a white heron patiently fishing in one of the myriad side falls.

This was the only tropical destination of our trip, and the birding was exotic. I immediately spied in my binoculars two tuco toucans and a Chilean field flicker, a woodpecker with a golden head. We saw blue-beaked, red-rumped black caciques zipping in and out of hanging, 4-foot-long nests. The plush-crested jay had a white breast and royal blue head and poufy crown. A turkey-sized guan had a red wattle, and I spotted a trogon with a barred tail.

Fat black-and-white iguanas sauntered about. There were warning signs at the concession stands about not feeding the coatis, and sure enough, around lunchtime, many of the raccoon-like, leaf litter-rooting mammals walked boldly among the shutter-clicking tourists. I hadn’t seen coatis since Tikal in 2002.

Two southern lapwing plovers cried loudly as we crossed a dirt parking lot. A trio of park workers saw us watching the birds, and one guy gestured for us to approach a small grassy strip in the middle of the lot. I asked, “Hay un nido?” (“Is there a nest?”), as the guy stood up with a tiny fuzzy grey fledgling with black spots! We were horrified that he would touch it, so quickly smiled and nodded so he’d put the chick down immediately. We later heard and saw the parent birds wheeling around the nest – right beside of which a bus was now parked. How they had managed to raise their baby up to that point was beyond us.

Our guidebook said our best chance of seeing wildlife was on the Macuco Trail, a 3-mile, little-visited path to a small waterfall. Blue morpho butterflies the size of my palm and other colorful species flitted about the dense jungle, and Chip got great shots of another toucan.

But the species we were really hoping to see was the brown capuchin monkey. Sure enough, as we retraced our steps at about 4 p.m., we spotted a troop of them right above us in the canopy. The capuchins I’d seen in Honduras were black with pink faces and a pronounced white “tonsure,” which give them their name, after the monks’ order. But these capuchins had brown fur and faces, with less-distinct head coloration. A juvenile enchanted us by sliding down a trunk upside down, with the help of its tail. This was a novelty, as, for all of the monkeys I’ve seen in Asia in the last four years, only New World species have prehensile tails, the underside of which in some species have rough “finger pads.”

The guidebook told us to save the best falls for last: the Garganta del Diablo (Devil’s Throat), accessed by a narrow-gauge train ride and mile walk on catwalks over the broad river. Several massive falls converge in a thunderous slam with a 200-foot-tall column of spray. Rainbows danced along the top, and swallows went about their feeding under what seemed impossible circumstances (I hypothesized they are probably deaf). This wondrous natural phenomenon capped a marvelous day. On our flight out of the nearby town of Puerto Iguazu, the pilot flew directly over the falls, to the delight and applause of the furiously shutter-snapping passengers.

Our plane didn’t leave until 4 p.m. the next day, so we had a down day in Puerto Iguazu. We walked to The Hito, a monument at the juncture of the Iguazu and Parana rivers, where Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay meet. There was a bust of the famous Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish conquistador who survived a shipwreck in Florida, the loss of half his men from starvation and Indian predation in the jungle, capture and life with Indians for many years (about whom he wrote the first New World native-peoples anthropological treatise), and wanderings in our Southwest as far north as Colorado. Eventually, he returned to Spain and secured funding to explore the Rio del Plata, the site of today’s BA. He was the first European to “discover” IguazuFalls, in 1541.

Our Aerolineas Argentinas flight back to BA proved a fiasco. When we got to the airport two hours early, we found out the flight was delayed three hours. After 2.5 hours, they announced the flight was cancelled, and we would go to a hotel for the night, then they’d roust up another plane in the a.m. We had prepaid a room in BA for that night, so were out $40. To make a long story short, we ended up getting two nights’ hotel, four meals, and two round-trip taxi rides to two airports out of the deal. We ended up having to take a 4 a.m. flight out of BA for our original destination, Rio Gallegos. We then started hearing from sympathetic Argentineans that government-owned AA was a constantly unreliable screw-up.

PUNTA ARENAS

Rio Gallegos was our first Patagonian destination and where we first experienced the No. 1 thing you expect there: strong, incessant winds. Gallegos has a big military installation and was the base of operations for the 1982 Falklands War, called the Malvinas War by Argentineans. We tend to treat Argentina’s disastrous move to take over the British-claimed islands as a joke, but it was a source of deep humiliation for the Argentineans and is still very fresh in their minds. An unpopular president decided to stake the claim to the Falklands to bolster his standing. Maggie Thatcher, also down in the polls, saw it in the same terms. The teenage Argentinean forces were ill-equipped and untrained, and forced to surrender after only 74 days. The 650 men who died are considered heroes, with many visible reminders of their sacrifice.

We took the bus to Punta Arenas, just over the Chilean border. The Patagonian pampas reminded me of our northern prairies, and we saw our first llama-like guanacos, Patagonian hares, upland geese, and a fox-crossing warning sign.

Punta Arenas is very near “el fin del mundo,” “the end of the world,” right on the Straits of Magellan. Arenas was heavily colonized by Brits, Scots, Italians, Germans, and Yugoslavs in the latter half of the 19^th century, drawn by its whaling and fishing potential and endless grasslands for cattle and sheep ranching. Pesky Indians kept poaching the colonizers’ stock, so in 1879, the president decreed that the indigenous people be systematically exterminated in a campaign euphemistically called “The Conquest of the Desert.” Problem solved.

Arenas is a rough-edged, wind-lashed town with many old tin-roofed cottages and a pretty plaza surrounded by wool barons’ mansions. Frequent rain spatters in bright sun reminded me of Northern Nevada. We took a long walk on the esplanade along the Straits, scudding with whitecaps in wind you could lean on. It was just so neat to be on one of the most infamously treacherous waterways on earth at 53 degrees, the farthest south I’ve ever been -- just a few hundred miles from Antarctica. (We had 18 hours of daylight in late spring.) Magellanic cormorants on mud nests crowded a pier, buff-necked ibis cried, and we got a long look at a Chilean swallow crouching in the sand. We visited the town “cementario,” which was one of those wonderful Latin American over-the-top celebrations of death with lavishly decorated crypts, elaborate marble tombstones, and mausoleums the size of many an apartment I rented in Berkeley.

SENO OTWAY PINGUINERA

We went to Arenas for one reason: its easily accessible penguin colony on Seno Otway (Otway Sound). The Magellanic penguins spend all day foraging at sea then return to the beach to rest and tend to eggs in dirt burrows. I’ve seen penguins in South Africa and New Zealand on sand and rocks, but it was strange to see them walking around on grass.

As a species, penguins are very tolerant of humans, and it was a spellbinding delight when they passed within 5 feet of us behind the fence. There were about 100 birds, including kind of klutzy yearlings with less-pronounced black-and-white and more-fuzzy plumage than the adults. I always feel guilty when I laugh at penguins’ looks and antics, but they are so damn cute, you can’t help yourself. The birds resting on the beach looked like big footballs, and their arched-neck interactions and preening were cunning.

As a birding bonus, a chimichango caracara eagle strolled down the beach among the pinguinos, looking for babies and eggs. I saw this predator-among-prey phenomenon in Africa, with ungulates ignoring lions in their midst and sea lions ignoring jackals. On the bus ride to the pinguinera, we saw guanacos and our first rheas, a grey ostrich-like walking bird. Alas, we were only to see rheas from buses, so never got a really good long look at them.

TORRES del PAINE NP

Another bus ride took us to Puerto Natales, an old ranching town on the ominously named Seno de Esperanza Ultima (Sound of Last Hope). Natales’ cash cow now is thousands of trekkers bound for the jewel of Chile’s mountain national parks, Torres del Paine (pie-NAY). On our hike of the 24-mile “W”(-shaped) Circuit, we had planned to stay in the dorms of refugio lodges. But upon discovering they were totally booked and redoing the math to realize it would cost us $100/night, we decided at the last minute to backpack for five nights.

We rented a tent, stove, and sleeping pads, and hit the supermercado for food. Thus began 11 consecutive nights of the same two dinners: tuna and rice alternating with lentils and beans, cooked over our camp stove or in hostel kitchens. Hey, while boring, the dinners were cheap, easy -- and utterly delicious after consecutive long dayhikes.

TORRES del PAINE Day #1

We had been told that it rained every day in November 2009, but we couldn’t have had better weather for every day of our hike in Paine. While very near the Andes, the Torres massif is a separate range, and just as dramatically shaped by glaciers. Just before the park entrance, the bus went through multiple herds of very nonchalant guanacos. The alpha males maintain harems of up to 30 wives and their babies. Then we saw a grey fox chasing a hare right next to our bus window!

Excitement grew as we neared our first view of the famed “torres” – towers – sheer-sided knives of rock that looked like they were thrust up yesterday. I’ve never seen their like, in all of my alpine adventures. We started up the trail to our first campground, with glimpses of Lago Nordenskjold through the orange-red blossoms of Chilean fire-bush. The lakes are a pale turquoise blue, just like in the tropics. But while the latter is due to the white-sand sea floor, glacial lakes’ astounding color is due to sun reflecting off of “glacial flour,” fine rock sediment.

The free campground, in dense beeches thrumming with wind noise, was jammed with young backpackers, predominantly Brits, Germans, and French. Chip was off filling the water bottles from the glacial stream (none of the available water was processed, which made us very nervous) when he came upon what was clearly a campground pest: a charming little red fox, which posed for several pix.

That afternoon, we hiked up steep talus to the Torres mirador (lookout). I gasped when I saw the three impossibly sheer rock needles over an ethereal, aquamarine lake. The No. 1 thing folks all do on this trek is go to the mirador at sunrise to photograph the light on the torres. My vision in my glasses in poor light is very bad, and I feared negotiating the talus, so I opted out the next morning. But Chip got the shot, with dramatic clouds swirling around the orange-hued torres.

TORRES del PAINE Day #2

On a Thanksgiving Day to remember, I hiked the farthest with a pack that I have in 10 years: 15 miles. We had shirt-sleeves weather and, miraculously, no wind. Near the lake, we heard an odd, loud, repeated call I first thought was a raptor. But it was a guanaco, pursuing a smaller one; I surmised it was a bachelor trying to convince another’s wife to mate with him. Chip got what were to be the only shots of guanacos that we didn’t see from a bus.

The lakeside trail was a real rollercoaster, but the heartbreakingly pretty landscape was compensation. The pale blue lake framed by fire-bush filled with birds and butterflies, green hills, cumulous clouds, rocky beaches, colorful wildflowers, green islands, and snowy mountains alternately reminded me of many places: Switzerland, Maui, Alaska, Canada, the Sierra. But mostly it looked like a Chilean Tourism Board poster for what you would assume was an enhanced, postcard-perfect image.

We staggered into camp to find it jammed tent-by-tent by trekkers, but Chip managed to find a relatively removed site for our two-night stay. The camp was at the mouth of the river flowing down the Valle de Frances under the 7,500-foot Cuernos (“Horns”) ridge and their glaciers. We heard ominous avalanches, like thunder or a jet takeoff, several times during the night.

TORRES del PAINE Day #3

This was to be our layover day, but we still hiked 13 miles, mercifully without the packs. Under partial clouds with snow spindrifts blown off the peaks, we started up the talus and beeches beside the swollen, ice-cold river churning off the hanging valleys of glaciers. Cerro Paine Grande, the highest in the range at 10,500 feet, loomed over a glacier riven by deep crevasses of blue ice. Glacial ice is blue due to trapped oxygen and light wavelengths. The more compact the ice, the longer the light has to travel, and the bluer the ice.

The spiky Cuernos were two-toned, with dark sedimentary rock on top pushed up by the younger, grey granite. Their sheer faces reminded me of Half Dome or the Wind River Range’s Cirque of the Towers. The mists swirling around the snowfields parted for a view of the peaks against blue sky – the continuing clear weather was a miracle.

TORRES del PAINE Day #4

This was our last pack-carrying day, an easy 5 miles to Campamento Paine Grande, on the shores of Lago Pehoe. This was a paid campground and lodge, accessible by a catamaran ferry. The hot showers, nice communal kitchen, and picnic table were worth every penny of our $18. The campground pests here were American robin-like austral thrushes and cute chestnut-collared sparrows with loud, melodious songs.

We took a short hike along cliffs above Pehoe, the lake you see in all images of the region. Its turquoise blue was almost incandescent under scudding clouds. The lake, fire-bushes, Cuernos and Paine Grande, islands, and grassy camping area looked like a child’s drawing of paradise. Honestly, it was one of the most gorgeous landscapes I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t help but think that if this celestial place were in the U.S., it would be just like Tahoe: accessible by roads, have huge RV-filled parking lots, the lake would be covered in private boats, and there would be multiple fast-food joints.

A pair of upland geese – the male white and black, the female brown – posed for Chip, and I saw male long-tailed meadowlarks, with brilliant red breasts, spy-hopping in the grass.

TORRES del PAINE Day #5

Our longest hiking day of the trip -- 19 miles -- began with a light drizzle. We headed up through beeches alongside huge Lago Grey, an opaque grey color because of its high glacial flour content. Bright-blue icebergs, from RV-size to small chunks, trapped in inlets, gave the lake an otherworldly appearance. As we neared Grey Glacier, it cleared for an hour, and Chip got great shots from the mirador practically right over the terminus. The glacier has 600-foot-high ice cliffs that may be 2,000 years old. Deep-blue crevasses indicated where it would calve next, and fins of solid, turquoise-blue ice stretched for miles back up the valley.

The immense glacier is part of the Campo de Patagonia Hielo Sur (Southern Patagonian Ice Field), which extends north for hundreds of miles. We always think of the Northern Hemisphere as the “land of ice and snow,” but the glaciers I’ve seen in Patagonia and New Zealand make our Canadian, Montana (including Glacier NP), and California ones look downright pitiful.

Next day, having hiked a total of 70 miles within the park, we took the catamaran across Lago Pehoe back to the bus to Natales. Rheas, Chilean flamingos, and the resident guanaco herd bade us farewell.

EL CALAFATE

We retrieved our stuff from the Natales hotel and dashed for a 6 p.m. bus back into Argentina and El Calafate. We’d been warned that unreserved rooms were hard to find, and it was midnight before we got a $20 room with two twin beds and a shared kitchen and bath in someone’s sister-in-law’s back yard.

This old sheep-ranching town has remade itself into a trekkers’ mecca, with ritzy mini-malls crammed with hiking gear from all of the major U.S. outfitters. Many houses are in the quaint “Alpine” style, stucco with wood and stone accents, patterned after immigrants’ Central Europe homes. A 2-foot-high lupines in blues, pinks, and purples made for pretty gardens.

There were dogs wandering everywhere; those with collars have owners, while those without are strays. They were sleeping in the sidewalk and street medians, looking for handouts at the bus station, trotting purposefully down the sidewalk on serious doggy business, following one person then abruptly taking up with another. As always, I was struck with how calm Third World dogs are. Unlike our neurotic canines, they never bark maniacally if a person walks by their yard territories nor fight amongst themselves.

Calafate is on the country’s largest interior waterway, Tahoe-size Lago Argentina. The guidebook said the birding was good along its shore, so we headed off in 50 mph winds with the goal of finally getting a close look at the Chilean flamingoes we’d hitherto only glimpsed from buses. We hopped the back fence of the Laguna (Lagoon) Nimez reserve for a good look at about 50 of them foraging in a shallow pond. I assumed what was to become “the Patagonian birding stance”: legs spread, feet firmly planted, forearms flat on my chest to try and steady my bins in the relentless wind.

I’ve seen flamingoes in Peru and Namibia, but never that close. Their big mass of plumage was a solid pale pink – like cotton candy on stilts – and they had red, knobby knees on their black legs and huge black bills with which they strain the water for crustaceans. (FYI, wild flamingoes derive their characteristic color from ingested shrimp; the dark pink ones we see in zoos are fed dye.) We gasped when they flew, revealing a slash of red in their wings, with black primary feathers – talk about a spectacular bird! While we associate flamingoes with the tropics, my best sightings have been deep within the subtropical zones.

Other bird highlights were an ibis harassed by nesting lapwings and a small hawk wheeling in masterful control of the wind. We spooked an upland goose from her nest of six large eggs, lined with her breast feathers.

LOS GLACIARES NP Day #1

The town of El Chalten was founded in 1985 to service Los Glaciares NP. It is the official “trekking capital of the nation,” and the trails start right from its edge. The first stop on the bus is the NP office, where they give you maps and an excellent briefing. The Fitz Roy Massif (named after the captain of Darwin’s Beagle) is in the Andes proper. The weather is notoriously bad in the range, which is so ice-bound it makes its own weather. Climbers sometimes have to wait for weeks for it to clear, so we crossed our fingers we’d have sun.

The park museum chronicles climbers’ first ascents of the most difficult peaks, including the Ruta California. One of the climbers on that route was Yvon Chouinard, who went on to found the clothing company named after his beloved Patagonia. Galen Rowell took stunning images of his climbing trips here.

We found a wonderful duplex with many luxuries we’d been lacking: a queen-sized bed, chairs and a table, our own bath, a kitchen we only had to share with one other room. We splurged on the price: just $55.

We took two short routes above the park HQ to lookouts; alas, the range was in clouds. But we had great views of the icebergs on Lago Viedma and a Chilean flicker (woodpeckers are called “carpinteros,” or “carpenters”).

Chalten had the air of an Alaskan outback town, a hodgepodge of buildings thrown together with no regard for codes. They were painted all manner of bright colors; why are U.S. houses such bland colors? The Rio de las Vueltas (Returns) braids through town in a glacial-till floodplain under steep cliffs.

Dogs roamed everywhere; part of the NP lecture involved making sure they didn’t follow us on the trails. Glaciares NP is home to the nearly extirpated Patagonian deer, or huemel, which the dogs will chase.

LOS GLACIARES NP Day #2

We headed out for a 14-mile day through beautiful alpine meadows of flowers and beeches to Laguna Torre, at the base of 9,300-foot Cerro Torre. The peak is an impossibly vertical spire of granite twice the height of El Capitan. It was considered unclimbable until finally being conquered in 1974.

Lago Torre was an opaque grey with small icebergs, created by immense Glaciar Grande. The snout of 100-foot ice cliffs looked like a wall of quartz. We waited three hours for the clouds around Cerro Torre to clear, to no avail.

Chip saw a bird flash out of an eye-level, 4-inch cavity nest hole. We had disturbed a carpintero parent feeding its brood of furiously cheeping hungry babies. We also had a glimpse of green austral parakeets – another species erroneously associated strictly with the tropics.

While eating dinner, we discovered that the peaks were finally clearing. The massif was stunning in the late-afternoon light, with 10,000-foot Fitz Roy dominant. “El Chalten” is the Indian name for the peak they revered, and means “Smoking Mountain.” Sure enough, ragged clouds caught on its summit did look like it was on fire. One of its attendant peaks is St. Exupery, named for the “Little Prince” author and aviator, who directed Argentina’s airmail service in the 1930s. The small Andean town at the base of the mountains was beautiful. We had resigned ourselves to never having clear views of the range so were ecstatic to be able to get good photos of it.

LOS GLACIARES NP Day #3

We were on the trail at 7 a.m. for the day’s 16-miler. Under clear skies in buttercup-strewn meadows, we flushed goldfinch look-alike black-chinned siskins, so numerous they looked like a swarm of butterflies. We had our first long look at a hare, very much like our jackrabbits. The trail ascended 2,000 feet up above the river through beeches then onto a boggy altiplano like Alaskan tundra. Chip was strafed by three squabbling parakeets going about 60 mph.

A light rain began to fall as we began the final, very step climb up talus to Lago de los Tres, named for three climbers killed in one incident. The last stretch was in light snow and face-planting wind; thank God for trekking poles! The lake, right below Fitz Roy’s glacier, was frozen solid. Again, we waited in vain for the clouds to clear for a peak view.

On the way back down, I had my first confirmed ID of an Andean condor, with its distinctive white neck ring and wingtip “fingers.” Where else would you see a parakeet and a condor on the same day?! Near a campground, we were startled to see a crested caracara walking around in the grass like a big chicken – another campground pest? The magnificent eagle had a black “toupee,” white face and chest, striped belly, bright yellow legs, and orange-and-blue beak. Halfway down, the clouds above Fitz Roy finally cleared for a good, relatively close-up view.

LOS GLACIARES NP Day #4

I got up to pee at 5:15 a.m. and noticed our clearest view yet of the massif. Chip ran off with his camera while I stood out in the street in my nightgown skirt, long-johns, and jacket staring at the mountains with my bins. A police car cruised by, and the woman officer laughed at my get-up and grinning, exaggerated pointing at the peaks.

The day became our clearest yet for the 15-mile, 2,100-foot ascent of Pliegue de Tumbado, the only trail, according to the guidebook, from which you can see both Cerro Torre and Fitz Roy. Sure enough, the massif came into view immediately, including our first real views of Torre, much less in mass than Fitz Roy and 1,000 feet lower. The abrupt finger of granite gave me a shiver as I wondered how this “unclimbable” peak was finally conquered.

We walked through meadows of buttercups and dandelions then beech groves, ringed by snowy peaks and distant Lago Viedma, with cloudless views of the cordillera all day. Attaining a treeless altiplano, the wind hit us at 70 mph for the final 1.5 miles; at times I thought I would get smacked down. The view at the end was the stuff of fantasy: Laguna Torre and Glaciar Grande at the base of a ring of vertical peaks—truly, one of the most sublime landscapes I’ve ever seen. Several of the peaks and routes are named after the Italian and French climbers who conquered – and in some instances lost their lives on – there, as vertical as the Matterhorn and Eiger on which they learned to climb. We spent an hour basking in the cold sun and feasting our eyes on the vista.

On the way back down, Chip spotted another huge caracara inexplicably walking on the ground. It was a white-throated caracara – our third of the four caracara species in Patagonia. Back in Chalten, we paid homage to the Capilla de los Escaladores (Chapel of the Climbers) memorial to the 30-plus people who have lost their lives in the massif since 1953.

GLACIAR PERITO MORENO

Back in Calafate, we prepared for the No. 1 attraction of the town, the Perito Moreno Glacier. We decided to look for the flamingoes again, and got even closer this time. We saw a darling gosling swimming along between its upland goose parents. I spotted some very large white birds across a mudflat. As I gingerly walked out, I realized they were coscoroba swans.

While not as high as Glaciar Grey, Moreno was certainly the most massive we’d seen: the terminus wall is 3 miles wide and 180 feet high, with blue crevasses and ice fins extending back into the Hielo Sur as far as you can see.

This is one of just three glaciers worldwide considered “stable,” and it’s actually advancing up to 6 feet a day. You hear constant noises like the crack of a rifle as the ice splits and shifts. Here is where we saw many calving cliffs – a sobering, scary, and unparalleled sight. The glacier was one of the most spectacular natural phenomena I’ve ever seen.

Two miles of catwalks take you closer and closer to the wall of ice, until, above the Canal de Tempanos (Icebergs), you are just 1,000 feet away. There is a big sign warning you to stay behind the fence: 30 people were killed over 15 years by tidal waves spawned by the calving. The intense blue of the crevasses increased in the afternoon light, seeming to glow from within. Between the ice and blue-grey Lago Argentina framed by snowy mountains, fire-bush, and beeches, it was another postcard-perfect landscape.

Our final bird encounters of the trip were many condors wheeling up on thermals and the startling image of an ibis flying across the ice face. Of the latter, I told Chip, “Now, that’s a birding experience you’ll never have again.”

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MILES HIKED/WALKED: A record-shattering 160!

CRITTERS: I ID’d 36 bird species using a Patagonia checklist and a Torres del Paine fauna book given to me years ago by Nick’s parents. I ID’d 11 bird species in Iguazu. The mammal total for the trip was eight, including mustangs and a flash of a furry butt on the Macuco Trail that was probably an agouti.

A WORD ON GUNACOS: There are four species of New World camelids, two of which –llamas and alpacas – are the result of centuries of selective breeding of the wild guanaco. The fourth species, the knee-high vicuna, is the highest-dwelling animal on earth. Llamas were bred for their meat and cargo-carrying ability, and alpacas for their wool. Guanacos are not much smaller than the llamas, at about 250 pounds. They and jaguars are the biggest terrestrial animals in Central and South America. When Panama was a land bridge, Pleistocene megafauna (including the giant sloth, one of whose bones are in a famous cave near Natales) crossed to South America, but died out. Panama became separated again, and the North American megafauna thrived, resulting in our modern bears, caribou, elk, moose, and bison. Interestingly, the North American camelids died out, while they survived in South America.

MUST-DOS WE DIDN’T DO IN ARGENTINA: 1) eat beef; 2) drink mate, this bitter infusion of herbs drunk through a straw in a gourd cup is a national obsession; 3) eat chocolate, ditto; 4) dance or see the tango in BA; 5) buy souvenirs. This is my third-consecutive trip to a Europeanized culture that has essentially eliminated its folk art. Argentina has an active indigenous culture in the northwest Andean region, but the only traditional art for sale was in expensive gift stores. No, thanks – I want to buy art objects directly from market stalls or off of dirty blankets from the folks who made them.