There’s a small, sad, plastic Christmas tree on the way into Jumbo, our local supermarket, and although the market stalls are selling decorations, it’s 30 degrees in the shade; I just wasn’t feeling it. Until we went to Tierra Santa. It sits on the north coast under the flight path of BA national airport, with couples on garden chairs with cold boxes sitting in the shade enjoying the sea breeze on the road side opposite, the place empty except for us and a few Argentinian families. We went there to chortle and snigger at the plastic animations,but as we toiled up a steep hill there are three bodies hanging from crucifixes, gambling Roman soldiers slouched on surrounding rocks , and women with their arms raised imploringly at their dying mens’ feet, all plastic statues. The broiling heat, just as there would have been two thousand years ago, the silence, and the suffering, stop us in our smirking tracks. A nativity scene playing Handels Messiah, and giraffes, elephants and lions creaking out onto the stage for the creation, Adam and Eve eventually appearing with their nether regions covered in green polythene holly and artfully arranged hair, is quite joyful though. I may be an atheist, but I love all choral music, especially this stuff, and I am in heaven. The reason we were there was to see the hourly resurrection, and it doesn’t disappoint, although perhaps you had to be there.
The resurrection
Although I can’t deny how much I love the sun, in the galleries we have visited all over Buenos Aires I am drawn to the winter paintings; bleak leafless landscapes that remind me of what we are coming home to, Brueghel’s transplanted census to snowy Holland, Paris in the winter rain, I love them all. But there is one artist I have never heard of called Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida whose paintings are just so evocative of light and the beach on a summer’s day you can almost hear the kids’ shrieks of joy, the horses grunts as they haul boats out of the sea, the waves lapping at the sand, that would make the most ardent winterphile yearn for summer.
Playa de Valencia by Joaquin Sorolla
Joaquin Sorolla.
Sur le quai de Paris Luigi LoirBrueghel The Census seen at Collection de Arte Amalia FortebatAlfred Sisley
Yellow fever drives out the rich.
The cobbled streets, bougainvillea tumbling from metal balconies and bars on every corner make San Telmo feel like 19th century Paris, when the rich people living there fled with just the clothes they were wearing as yellow fever swept in, leaving their fully-furnished houses to be divided up into low rent tenements. There’s a small central raised square where couples tango before passing around their hat and a central market selling slabs of tortilla sliced from huge yellow potato-studded motherships made the night before.
San Telmo
The disappeared.
The white head scarves are now painted onto their route around the obelisk. Very few of the mothers remain.
We were not sure if visiting the Remembrance Centre might be a form of dark tourism, peering at dimly lit attic spaces, freezing in winter and stifling in summer, where poor souls spent their final days before being anaesthetised and turfed like rubbish into the Rio de la Plata on so-called death flights. But then we came across the “mothers of plaza de mayo” walk in around the pyramid in front of the red house, the equivalent of the Houses of Parliament in the UK. They have done this every Thursday at 3.30pm since 1977. They wear white headscarves, and movingly, there are only three or so women left, in wheelchairs fronting a large crowd who walk slowly chanting the names of the 30,000 or so people who “disappeared”. The Remembrance Centre lies in the far West of BA, and was formerly one of over 750 clandestine detention, torture and extermination centres in Argentina between 1976-83 when the military dictatorship ruled. In addition Milai, the president in waiting, has denied the numbers of people involved, and his running mate, president, Victoria Villa Rruel, and presumably next Vice-president, is an outspoken apologist for the Junta. All good reasons to go and bear witness ourselves, I feel.
Our flat is in a converted warehouse in Puerto Madero, on the east side of San Telmo. This area used to be the first port in BA, but fell into disuse for 90 years until cleaned-up and gentrified. Between us and the river Plata is a huge eco wetland that has been left to re-wild.
Wattled JacanaLapwing?Some kind of Coot?A tropical Kingbird
A Tiger heron
We see a Tiger Heron, and loads of birds we have yet to id.
Our home until this Saturday
A day trip to Uruguay
One day this week we crossed the Rio de la Plata, so-called because the Spanish enticed immigrants with the promise of silver = “Plata”, that no-one ever found. Reminiscent of a trip from Lymington to Yarmouth, but with customs, we’d been warned the food in Uruguay might be bland, but we stuck with spag Bol, and as always, it came good. Colonia had a chilled, laid back green leafy vibe that made us kick ourselves for not bringing our binocs because the birds were crazy in their variety. There really wasn’t much to do there after lunch, as we and pretty much all the day trippers on our ferry could be found in Colonia’s’ every nook and cranny lolling about on patches of grass, slabs of beach and benches in the park waiting for the 6 o’clock ferry back.
Old car in Colonia Desperatingly trying to get comfortable on rocks.
Another death defying day in paradise.
The only way to see Tigre, an area of hundreds of small islands a 30 minutes train ride north of central Buenos Aires, is by Kayak, a blog I found tells me, as you cannot walk between the islands. What I hadn’t bargained on was the kayaks being proper sea going ones with splash hoods and the stability of a three-legged giraffe. We set off with Adrianne and her assistant, a retired armed police officer, reassuring if we get mugged by gun-toting kayak robbers, and head straight into the main thoroughfare where the wash is huge and the chances of flipping 180 degrees feel high. I fear my fib to our guide that we know how to kayak will now lead to our deaths by drowning, and fess up so that I get a quick lesson in what to do if I capsize. To be fair we have pootled up and down Beaulieu river a few times, and even owned a blow up double kayak which I seem to recall went round in circles and ended up gathering mould by the side of the house. We paddle like maniacs across this M1 of rivers and are relieved to arrive in a series of much smaller, calmer tributaries. The places hidden in the greenery vary from stunning glasshouses to one roomed beach houses, all on stilts as they regularly flood. There’s a shopping barge that brings vital supples, a rubbish barge that takes your refuge hung from the end of the jetty, and it must be magical at night, although a mossie heaven no doubt.
The mesmerising effect of our boat’s wash on the reedbank
Tara for now
Well, this is over and out for this trip. Things I’ve learnt are – I really don’t need many clothes, even in cold weather, I can make do with a very limited repetoire, and wow does it make life easy. I have hardly any eyelashes left from the dreadful make up remover here. But they’ll grow back. I feel my pants should get some kind of medal having lasted this long and not being that saggy in the gusset – I think they even have another trip in them! I haven’t lost that many things since the last list, the most annoying is my headphone case, no doubt still languishing under the chair on a bus somewhere, and a second pair of sunglasses that lasted 24 hours – lucky I never spend much on them for that reason.
The things that have been life savers:
A phone with 5G. I actually don’t think we could have done this trip without one of us having access to google maps etc all of the time.
Squalling babies? Brazillian families who don’t stop talking at all on a 12 hour bus trip? Someone, somewhere, watching their videos on full volume? Noise cancelling headphones.
Ear plugs. There is not always another bedroom to retreat to when the snoring reaches 4 million decibels. Note that sentence has no subject.
Our fanny packs, as the yanks fondly call them. I fully attribute having one to not losing my phone and credit cards, and they are difficult if not impossible to pickpocket.
A charge free account like Starling. We discovered rather late in the day that using a debit card gave us a rate close to that on the black market.
Photocopies of our passports. You practically can’t breathe here without knowing your passport number, in fact people have been stupified that we couldn’t reel it off by heart.
A plug I bought Clive online that has three adapters that worked in Chile, and Argentina, but also has loads of inlets for USB’s and stuff.
A power pack. Great when everything’s dying, there are no plugs and I am at a vital point in my book/on netflix with god knows how many hours of limbo ahead.
Having US dollar bills in big denominations.
A magnifying mirror and tweezers, obviously.
So home we go, to the rain, cold, friends, and family, the last two of which I have really, really missed.
I’d love to steal this and put it on the corner of our road.
There’s a storm in Buenos Aires and no seats left in the departure lounge as all the flights are delayed, toddlers are going off like grenades left, right and centre, and the queue for the ladies loos is predictably gigantic. Eventually it’s clear that all our flights have been cancelled.
Team work prevails.
I wait for our luggage while Clive dives into the morass of people at check-in trying to get out of Buenos Aires. He is third in-line but unfortunately a German girl at the front wielded even better team work and her 12 ebullient compatriots appear with all of their luggage, ecstatic that she has nabbed the last of that evening’s remaining flights. There are no flights left until the day after tomorrow. Our final trip, to Puerto Madryn and the whale watching trip, might be the one that got away.
Will our brains explode at 2 am?
Eventually we are offered flights at 4am, to Trelew, half an hour’s drive from Madryn, which we accept. There are only $600 a night hotel rooms left in BA, so as we would be sleeping in the airport anyway, we figure we might as well go for it, although with some trepidation. Apart from rare events when we might stay awake until oooooh 2am, we never go to bed after midnight, and are generally tucked up and snoring by 11pm. We are genuinely scared that our brains might explode after 2am. Hence Clive’s “Remember to be nice to each other” as we make an uncomfortable camp for ourselves in Burger King, no doubt expecting me to bury my teeth into one of his carotid arteries at 3 am when he says something (he thinks is) innocuous.
A pod of dolphins passes by our window.
Our living room in Puerto Madryn.
We eventually arrived in Puerto Madryn at 8am. I dreaded it being like another La Serena in Chile, blowing a hoolie up a gazillion mile long sand blasted beach with circling vultures. But it’s more Hove circa 1960, and getting back to self-catering is a joy, especially when we spot a pod of passing dolphins from the living room window.
After a day of recovering, we head for the Valdez Peninsula, to see some wildlife, especially whales. Our guide is at the extreme end of pessimistic, preparing us all for disappointment. He explains that the mothers are teaching their babies how to swim, to dive, and to feed, and they will be gone by next month, down South to the Antarctic. They spend a lot of time diving to feed on krill, tiny little prawns they sift through keratin curtains lining their mouths. Hence they aren’t seen at the surface much.
I am 100% prepared to see nothing at all.
The beauty. They are curious and friendly. This is the money shot. A baby whale swims by our boat, sussing us out. In heaven. Coming back in to Piramides. She is right by the boat.There she blows. Sorry, had to be said.
I lost count of how many whales we saw – all Southern Right whales, all in possession of a 100 -200 tonne baby whale. They come to this bay near Puerto Piramides because it is shallow. This keeps them safe from Orcas, whose preferred method of hunting baby whales is for one orca to swim above the baby while another swims below it. The lower orca shoves the baby towards the surface while the other orca blocks its blow hole.
Caleta Valdes and seals. Not the best view of seals we’ve had tbh. This is where Orcas have been seen to hunt by deliberately strand themselves.
Puerto Piramides is a cool little village that reminds me of somewhere on a Greek island. We decide we’ll stay here when we return.
Elsewhere on the Valdes peninsula, which you reach via an isthmus near Puerto Madryn, is one of only two places in the world where Orcas have learnt to intentionally strand themselves to hunt the seals snoozing obliviously in the sun. The mothers have taught their children to do this, and interestingly the seals haven’t done the same and taught their broods to move away from the sea edge. Like lions, it’s the females who hunt, as the males are too big to be stealthy. The male only joins in if they need a bit of muscle, otherwise he holds back while looking after the babies.
Little armadillos, walking across my floor.
Although a rather flat and unexciting landscape, there’s a tremendous amount of wildlife here. After the whale watching we are as high as kites. As we get off the bus to see some seals, Clive says
“I feel lucky- I AM going to see an armadillo today”,
And Immediately, one scuttled past. They were much smaller and nippier than I expected, and not afraid of humans. I have a strong suspicion that their diet includes snippets of ham and cheese sandwiches nicked from the tourists in the tea house but our guide says they are there for the fresh water.
A long tailed meadow sparrow spotted at Caleta Valdez. Liolanus melanops Caleta Valdez again. A female seal A hairy armadilloI can’t resist another picture as he posed so willingly.
Wales transplanted to Argentina.
A Welsh colony arrived here in the mid 1800s to escape the English yoke that banned the teaching and speaking of the Welsh language and religion. On a day we went to see yet more Magellan penguins at Punta Tombo, we popped in for a carb fest at a cafe in Gaiman, aka “Welsh tea”. Welsh is still spoken here, although I am not sure if that’s a first or second language. I would dearly love to tell you the waitress bowled up and said “”Helo, what’s occurring?” But she spoke Spanish, disappointingly.
The old train station in Gaiman.Scones and jam but no cream. My face says it all. Yes, we are in Argentina.
Cramming for a Spanish language test.
We are back in Buenos Aires and due for a Spanish language test this afternoon as we are going back to school. My overwhelming feeling is excitement that we have 19 days to explore this beautiful, interesting and sunny city. The weather is warm and sunny.
I am frantically cramming sentences that are way beyond my proper level as I don’t want to be in the beginners class, and as a class A crammer, a skill honed to polished perfection at uni 41 years ago, I am optimistic. Deseame suerta!
Whenever I’m in a bus or taxi here, waiting at a crossing, and a car pulls up alongside us, a lone driver patiently waiting for the lights to change, I am so jealous of them I want to wrench them out of the driving seat, jump in and drive, goodness knows where. My car is a slice of personal space, of autonomy, me-time. Here I am never further away from Clive than a King penguin and it’s baby. I don’t miss my garden at all, as it’s November and is probably under water; instead of pruning my roses, I tend Clive’s eyebrows. But boy, do I miss my car.
Since we’ve been in Patagonia, where ropes are strung between lamposts so you can cling on to them rather than be tossed rolling down the street like tumble weed, I have worn the same clothes for two weeks, maybe longer now – black action pants, t-shirt, snug, coat, thick socks, walking boots, woolly hat, gloves +/- thermals.
Man clinging to rope so he’s not blown away.
We stay for such short times in hotels I can’t face opening my suitcase, putting on make-up, taking it off, wearing jewellery, getting out my pj’s, moisturising, brushing my hair. My face is reptilian, wizened, dry and scaly from the wind and cold; my legs hairier than a baboons. I draw the line at not cleaning my teeth; even baboons have standards. It’s 90% liberating and 10% unhinging to be so free of any aesthetic concerns. Our waistlines, despite us being much fitter, are no thinner as our diet here, born of late night arrivals and early morning starts, centres around croissants, bread, crisps, chocolate, beer and fanta orange. I know “No friday night feeling!” is the complaint of some retirees, but the opposite can also be true – every day is a Friday.
We’ve gone feral.
King Penguins.
King penguins don’t care what I look or smell like. It is difficult, as we peer through our binocs off the coast of Terra del Fuego, not to attribute human feelings to them. A large wobbling ball of brown feathers shuffles alongside their smaller parent squawking up a storm, beak wide open, never more than 3 mm away, and as they gently peck him on top of his head to get him to give it a rest his head keeps popping back up, beak ever wider, squawks ever louder. A nice little metaphor for parenthood right there. They are 10 months old and in a few weeks will moult and be sea-bound, and on their own. Only around 60% of them will survive to breed. There will be about a weeks gap and then their parent will have a new pregnancy on the go. Brutal.
Most of the baby’s bulk is their feathers. When they’re in the water they look more like seabirds than land animals.
Ushuaia.
Defies expectations.
I am always struck by the difference between my expectations of a place I’ve never seen and the reality, as they rarely match (Santiago, I’m looking at you.) I thought Ushuaia would be a cruise terminal with a few scattered tourist offices, restaurants and hotels, teetering on the end of the world like the bus in The Italian Job. It turns out it’s a vibrant, smart, port town that caters for skiers in the winter and cruises in the summer, with an alpine vibe, timbered restaurants,expensive adventure gear shops, weather that turns on a sixpence from blinding bright sunlight to sleeting snow, and a bone-chilling wind blowing up the Beagle Channel straight from the Antarctic.
Old and new- the wreck a reminder that this stretch of water is perilous. Great ambience here. A church in the Main Street.
Ear wigging.
Eavesdropped gossip on our journey down, which involved our fourth passage through border control between Chile and Argentina, is that everything in Ushuaia is fully booked. Not to be disheartened, we decided on arrival to walk down to the office and try our luck.
Perseverance pays off.
We strike gold, booking one of the last penguin viewing slots that probably hasn’t shown up on-line. The English couple in front of us booked this 3 months ago and are only here to pay, but a Frenchman who did this has discovered that because he didn’t pay on-line, he’s lost his place. We’re all trying to pay upfront in cash, as it costs a third as much than if you pay on-line in dollars, but even more if you book it through a tour operator. Pirator is the only place in Ushuaia that has a licence to let people set foot on the penguin island, and they are only allowed to take 80 people a day in 4 groups. We also have to pay for a separate boat trip on a different day, which Clive is very sniffy about but it turns out to be tremendous, with several birds we’ve never seen before, including a blackish cinclodes:
They only ever come onto the boat at the lighthouse, to drink the fresh water that lies in puddles on the deck. A rather non-descript looking bird, nevertheless it is almost extinct and can only be seen in the Beagle Strait and The Falklands.
The residing alpha male seal top, a hopeful contender, bottom.
Be afraid.
We watch as a Southern giant petrel drowns a seagull and then eviscerates it to feed on its innards. There’s something psychopathic about this – you expect to see birds fighting in the skies, perhaps to the death, but the petrel just sits on the bird in the sea until it drowns. It turns out drowning your prey isn’t unique to petrels, as orcas do it too, lying on top of a whale’s blow hole so it suffocates; then it eats only the lips and tongue. Nature, red in tooth and claw.*
The boat takes us really close to a colony of cormorants and seals. Seals are coming up to mating season, the time for a lot of argy bargy when settled alpha males fight off young upstarts hoping to steal some of his harem of 20 or so females.
The petrol after drowning a seagull and then eating it.
A napping femaleImperial Cormorants have piercing blue eyes.Southern giant petrols aka stinkpots.
Magellanic cormorant – no blue eyes, but has orange colour around eyes.
New Forest mud maestros.
The next day we’re walking to the Emerald lake behind Ushuaia, yet another glacial lake and hobbit walk through dense, dark woods, river beds, gnarly paths, steep climbs, but with the added thrill of mud, mud, glorious mud. I feel we are mud maestros, having walked in it, through it, over it with kids, dogs and grandma’s for 25 years in The New Forest – we know mud. And so it proves. We can hear the cries of laughter as groups get stuck sinking thigh deep into the infamous bog as we take the firm left hand side by the river, gratifyingly overtaking them all. (No-one dies).
A crested carcara, after my sarnie.
I don’t know if it’s the altitude we have been at and all the walks we’ve been doing but we fly up to the lake and back, and when we share a taxi back to Ushuaia with a Canadian he jokes that we beat everyone on our bus, most of them under 40. Except him. Competitive – moi?
When a man is tired of penguins, he’s tired of life.
Below – penguins oiling their feathers on Martello island.
Gentoo penguins.
A Gentoo penguin nesting on their egg/son it’s stone plinth.
I move out of this Magellan penguin’s way.
“Well, I never did…”
On our last day we visit Martello island to walk among Gentoo and Magellanic penguins, and one stray King penguin. It’s a peaceful place buffeted by a gentle breeze around 20 minutes by rib from Harberton Estancia, a sheep ranch owned by an English family for 150 years. The farm was the first estancia (ranch) built on Tierra del Fuego in 1886.
Photos above show the estancia loo, sensibly placed I feel, then a barn oozing history and dust, and lastly Clive by the rib that took us to Martello island.
No selfies and no coughing.
Our guide gives us strict instructions about staying 3 metres away from them, not poking them with a selfie stick or breathing near them. Avian flu is on the rise and they absolutely do not want it here. Some of the Magellan penguins didn’t get the memo though, and stand in our way on the path. There’s quite a few small children in our group and I am surprised by how good they are, even the toddlers tiptoing silently around the penguin who doesn’t seem bothered by us (they are very shortsighted out of the water).
Monogamous penguins.
The Magellan penguins are here year round and are monogamous on a yearly basis, and as they are currently breeding, we can see one or other parent down in their hole on the egg/s while the other is at sea feeding or oiling themselves down on the beach to stay sleak in the water.
Romance very much alive in penguin world.
The Gentoos arrive every October to mate. The 2-3 year old males display their worthiness by presenting single females with their best stone, rubbed smooth by the sea, to lay on their future nest. They lay their eggs on a pile of bricks as they think they’re on ice although they’re not; it’s touching to see their mate hovering near the nest, gently tucking in a stray feather here and a bit of fern there under their mates bottom to keep the eggs snug.
A Gentoo penguin lining their nest.
Next stop a Welsh colony – and some whale watching.
We are now heading North for some whale and dolphin watching in Puerto Madryn on the east coast, plus a spot of Welsh breakfast. It’s 25 degrees, apparently, which I just cannot imagine.
The word for blue in Spanish is azul, which seems like the perfect word for the blue of the small glacial lake we’ve just climbed up to. On a scale of 1-10, 8 for me being Ben Nevis, this is maybe a 6. It’s only an hours climb, and quite steep. Our lovely airbnb host told us there’d be a 30 km bus ride and I’d imagined a number 59 bus taking us along a tarmacked road to the start of the walk; silly me – we took a bone rattling minibus crammed in with 14 others, along a rough old track alongside a river with trout making their way upstream, and mountains on all sides. It snowed intermittently, but we were lucky, and as we climbed through the forest the sun came out, and we made it to the top and the glacier. It turned out to be a good training walk for the big one we do a couple of days later.
Laguna Torre
With steep climbs requiring chains to pull yourself up, passing through gnarly old woods, dried out river beds, and paths laced with tree roots, it was quite the hands down hobbitiest walk I’ve ever done. A 24km round trip, culminating in another Glacier above a glacial lake lined at the edges with a lot of exhausted people, mostly a good 30-40 years younger than us – yay for the oldsters!
Stamp inflation
Lucky I’d left a gap for the 7 stamps
We have an amusing interlude in the Correa (post office), as it seems impossible to buy stamps anywhere else. The lady behind the counter sends us all , one by one, into a queue for stamps, where no one sits behind a counter, and she busily avoids our eyes as we eventually bond with the rest of the queue as we wonder why she can’t sell us stamps for our postcards, and how late Ng we’ll be waiting. Eventually another lady appears, the stamp lady, clearly, and shows us how to put the 12 stamps required per postcard costing £2.25 red rate onto each card. I end up buying 18 quids worth, due to my useless Spanish. Inflation has hit the stamps as well as the money.
Torres del Paine.
Puerto Natales from our windowAnother hotel viewAnd another. That’s a Hurtygurty cruise ship in the harbour – I have had ambitions to go on one ever since my friend Margaret sent me a goodbye-old-friend-I’m – about-to-die- in- a-storm email from one. She survived.
We left El Chalten and 8 hours later arrived by 2 buses in Puerto Natales, a very smart little town in Chile we’re using as a jumping off point into Torres del Paine National Park. In Spanish and a native language called Teheulche this means Towers of Blue.
There were several different aboriginal groups living in the area for thousands of years, both around here and down in Tierre del Fuego where we are going soon. Ferdinand Magellan called it “The land of fire” in the 16th century, because of the many bonfires lit by the natives seen on shore by the first European explorers.
Lakes are different colours due to the algae and minerals in the water.
Unbelievably, considering how cold it can get here, these people were often naked, even the babies, seemingly undisturbed by snow, rain, wind, whatever the weather brought. They used the fires to keep warm.
This mother and child were in a zoo when this picture was taken. The young girl died soon after it was taken. One of the oldest photos of indigenous people. The young males in the tribes dressed as devils. I’m not sure why. I’ll get back to you on this.
In the 19th century they were almost completely wiped out by measles, brought by missionaries and settlers, to which they weren’t immune, but also by hunters, paid to find and kill them. Some were shipped off to zoos in Europe. The barbarity seems almost impossible to believe nowadays, done so that settlers could farm sheep on the land. The last laugh definitely goes to vegetarians, although it’s a somewhat hollow one.
A ridiculously hairy, extremely friendly “wild” dog.A street dog kennel
Puerto Natales has a lot of dogs, usually long haired ( because it is freezing here most of the time), and always friendly, that loll about everywhere in a state of stupor unless a motorbike or a car with a dog drives past when they suddenly all jump up and run at the car or bike, ibn a pack, barking like mad. The whole thing is hair raising to watch and no doubt leads to some horrible injuries to the dogs. These dogs look well fed and healthy, but aren’t owned by anyone, and have kennels on the side of the road and are clearly fed by someone, although who remains a mystery.
Mylodon Cave.
Another visit takes us to see a cave where they’ve found Mylodon bones, a long extinct giant sloth I’d heard of from Bruce Chatwin’s “In Patagonia”. It’s huge, very chilly, and not at all the safe, cosy hideaway I’d imagined.
The cave where they’ve dug up Mylodons’ fossilised remains. There are wooden Mylodons all over the place
Pisco Sours should have health warning.
Being back in Chile we are being very careful not to just pile into the nearest restaurant as prices are pretty much the same as in the UK, sometimes higher. However a Pisco Sour in the bar upstairs is only £4 and it is delicious. You should only have one though as they are very strong. So obviously I had two.
It’s raining, windy, and freezing. Feels like home.
My first thought on emerging from our taxi in Punta Arenas is:
“Dear God, please let our hotel have central heating.”
It’s 5 degrees celsius, but feels colder as there’s a gale raging, and horizontal rain pummels us, driving all things sideways – hair, clothes, eyebrows (Clives). Our hotel is in the centre of the city, a guft of warm air embracing us as we climb the stairs up to reception. Our room, up another elegant wood panelled stairway, overlooks the main square, and glory be to god, has a radiator emanating warmth. For the first time since leaving Argentina, my spirits lift. Moods often follow no rhyme or reason, but hazarding a guess, Santiago felt dangerous, La Serena desolate, but this feels like home.
At the one place that is open, as most museums are shut for renovation, a lady tells us that sometimes “you have to hold onto railings as it is so windy you will be blown over!” As I have already been nearly blown over I think she’s joking, but it transpires that Punta Arenas can be much windier than the day we visited, with gale force winds a pretty regular occurrence.
Where Shackleton and his men were welcomed back to.
We are only here for two nights, ostensibly to recover from our late arrival, as the next leg of our journey is another long bus journey up to El Calafate. After a not-great dinner that costs a lot, we are off the next day – back into Argentina – yeehaa!
An interesting feature in the only museum open in Punta Arenas, and our hotel.
We get a coach to El Calafate, but you can fly there. The landscape is undulating, pale green, treeless – not unlike Shetland. But the houses remind me of Iceland, presumably for the same reason – both places have a tendency to blow your roof off. It seemed awfully strange to hear Spanish being spoken in such a Nordic setting.
Distances from Punta ArenasOur route from Punta Arenas to El Calafate then El Chalten. Clive in Puerta Natales, in a 2 hour break between buses we went pizza hunting.
El Calafate is a cheery one street town with many Parillas, restaurants with – vegetarians look away now- whole pigs being roasted round a fire in the window. It’s expensive compared to other places we’ve been to in Argentina, because it’s a tourist hot spot, but still cheaper than Chile. Clive orders a huge pile of lamb which is only a half serving, while I have seafood spaghetti because I’m lambed out.
We’re pretty much all here to visit the Moreno glacier, and the day after we arrve we take a tour and a boat to get up close. It’s worth the 90 minute drive. It’s the third largest glacier in the world after the Antactic and Greenland. The water we shower in, and clean our teeth with, is straight from this glacial melt.
The glacier from above El Moreno Glacier with a boat cicled to show scale.It’s 74m high. The glacier, not the boat. The striking blue colour is because the high density ice absorbs all colours other than blue.
Clive sounding extremely pleased with himself.
Defcon 4 knicker alert.
Today we’ve made our way to El Chalten, which is only accessible by bus, where we’re self-catering. Our apartment is adorable, and snugly warm. Our host, smily, bright-eyed, bearded, same age as us, tells exactly where we should walk in the next few days, bearing in mind weather and routes that are open, and in the absence of any other plans, and suspecting he’s also taken our apparent physical fitness into the equation, we decide to follow his lead. We walk to a local waterfall, and go to the local supermarket on the way back to stock up. It seems that spag bol is the go to meal for every nationality as we all line up at the meat counter and ask them to mince our lamb. I am stiff as a board once back home. I’m looking forward to cooking for ourselves and catching up on washing, as I am pretty sure we both reek, and I am at the inside-out pant level wearing stage. Desperate times.
Chorrillo del Salto waterfall near El Chalten El Chalten On the way to the waterfallOur home for the next 5 days.
Nothing brings home that we are in a different earthly hemisphere than seeing unfamiliar stars in an unfamiliar sky. Our closest neighbours are Magellanic clouds, named after a Portuguese navigator from the 18th century, two galaxies containing 33 billion stars between them. Their light has taken so long to reach us that we are looking millions of years into the past. New constellations leap out at us; Sagittarius, a centaur aiming his bow and arrow at Scorpion, whose tail sweeps across the dark blue sky. Jupiter glows through gathering clouds, its orange brown rings just visible with three of its 80 moons through Ivan’s giant telescope.
Sound bathing in Vicuña.
We are in Vicuña, a valley between two mountain ranges making it especially good for looking at the night sky. Ivan is our star-gazing guide, showing us moon craters 300 mile wide, the spokes emanating from it’s edges a sign of the impact an asteroid created millions of years ago. Strange to think everyone, everywhere, always has the same view of the moon. In the 1600s Galilei realised that while the stars glitter and stay constant in their geography, there were other entities that didn’t shimmer and had differing trajectories; that these were planets, not stars, and that they were circling the sun. No doubt others knew this well before he did, nomadic tribes in the deserts, sailors at sea, breast feeding mothers; but they didn’t have his influence. Our evening ends with a sound bath, it’s eerie song lulling us and Ivan’s dogs snuggling beside us into a sleepy trance. To finish our perfect night a huge shooting star soars across the sky like a rocket.
Top left a globular cluster, middle shows the Magellan clouds, right is the sound bath equipment.
Vultures glide past.
In an ongoing bid to save money for the care home fees, we’re staying 90 minutes drive away in La Serena, in a windswept apartment circled by vultures. I thought we’d only ever see them in the desert or up in remote mountain ranges, but it turns out they’re as partial to a chip as the next bird. Our apartment is in one of six tower blocks in a complex voraciously guarded by a woman who insists on checking our every detail each time we enter. On the first morning we walked about 3 miles to get to the beach which is only a stones throw away, before realising there is a breach in the barbed wire fence between us and the beach manned by yet another security guard.
A vulture passing our balcony, on the look- out for chips.
Fort Knox- like security in South America
I recall Gisella’s horror when Clive told her we lived in a house with no security guard/bars at the windows/barbed wire/ cameras, her rationale for living in a 4th floor apartment in Mendoza being that it had all of these with knobs on. Probably literally.
Photos: from left to right – Clive walking on the beach, our apartment seen from the lighthouse, average security measures for houses and flats in Argentina and Chile.
Rusty hob saves the day.
The beach is rather cold, bleak and windswept, like a Chilean Clacton-on-sea in November. Anything metal in our flat has rusted in the briny air, including the electric hob, it’s heat so feeble that there is little damage to the flat or the pan when I accidentally leave my white shoe laces “boiling”for 4 hours during a morning walk. The laces, however, are toast.
If all goes well today we’ll be arriving at around midnight. In Patagonia.
There were all kinds of dodgy dealings going on as our luggage disgorged from the bus, people in the know flashing notes at the man scrabbling about in the hold to get their bags out first.
“Put that away NOW” hissed the burly Ukrainian we’d crossed the Andes with, as Clive tried to catch the driver’s attention by airily waving his passport about.
Up until then the journey had been blissful. I’d kept my inner toddler at bay with Netflix/Audible/podcasts/Kindle/fact and fiction real books/Spotify/Prime/editing photos/Freeform (an ipad drawing ap)/jotting in a notepad/ writing postcards to my mum/reading The Times/ The Guardian/Al-Jazeera/CNN/BBC news/playing with Garage band (when there’s wifi). Clive, meanwhile, lasted the entire 9 hour trip reading The Honorary Consul by Graham Greene.
Santiago bus station seemed like a menacing moshpit in contrast to the gleaming, quiet, smooth running one in Mendoza. After retrieving our luggage from the bowels of the bus we fought our way to the taxi rank. Santiago lies in a river valley between The Andes in the east and Chilean coastal range in the west, and for the time we were there, lay steeped in smog. The taxi pulled up outside a derelict looking building with peeling paint covered in graffiti and we realised with dismay that we’d arrived at our hotel. A locked front door suggested it may well be abandoned, but as we bickered over why we’d felt the need to book somewhere miles out of the centre in such a state of disrepair, someone opened the door.
Our hotel at night.
and in daylight. I think it looks worse actually.
It turned out, although the bathroom lay across the hall and our room in the rafters, to be quite charming in a creaky floored, brass bedstead kind of way. We were hungry, as we’d assumed the bus would stop for food but it hadn’t. The girl on reception smiled beautifically when Clive asked:
“Is it is safe to go out?”
She assured us it was. But then added:
“But after dark, it becomes..” she cast around for the right word, “peligroso’”. (That’s dangerous in Spanish.)
Although Clive tried to clarify this – “early dark? late dark? In an hour’s time dark?” she doesn’t understand, and just looks gnomically at us. Empanadas having lost their appeal after eating them daily for three weeks, we’ve earmarked an Indian restaurant for dinner, because I would kill for a Peshwari naan and chicken tandoori. But it lies down a quiet, possibly murderous street, so we stick to the main road, eventually finding a roaring, rollicking student bar in the throes of happy hour. It’s 30 quid for two drinks and Fajitas, so while more expensive than Argentina, we can pay with cards, and don’t have to wield a wheelbarrow load of notes everywhere we go. We try around three different cards before one of them works mind you, a relief as we have no back-up Chilean cash yet. Wing and a prayer baby, wing and a prayer.
Arty bollocks
We’re in Santiago for 2 days, so spend day one walking for 10 hours, visiting galleries, museums and Londres 38, the address of one of many places people opposing the Pinochet regime were taken, interrogated and tortured, often never to be heard of again.
You could touch the edge of the terror witnessed by these walls as we walked through a dark narrow corridor and up some winding wooden steps, but once upstairs the mundanity of the rooms belied its tragic, horrific history.
Londres 38.
Day two finds us in Valparaiso, where grafiti has been elevated to an artform (perhaps it is everywhere, it’s just not my cup of tea). It’s a seaside city an hour’s drive away, like our Brighton to London. We’ve already been in to see La Chascona, the poet, politican and writer Pablo Neruda’s house in Santiago, and on the tour we’ve booked they take us to his place in Valparaiso. Colourful, light filled, with curiosities he’d picked up from second hand shops and on his travels as ambassador for Chile in various parts of the world, all three of his houses in Chile were trashed and in Santiago’s case, flooded by Pinochet’s regime, then lovingly restored by his third and final wife after his death.
Neruda is a Chilean hero to many though not all; his reputation having become tarnished by his autobiographical account of raping a maid in the Far East in his youth, and for abandoning his only child, who had severe learning difficulties, who died probably prematurely aged 8 at the hands of the Nazis in Holland. He came to a sticky end himself, probably on the end of a botulinum toxin-infected needle, more than likely at the hands of the same people who shot the then president Allende in the military coup that ocurred a few days before Neruda’s death. I first heard of him when the Lyndhurst film club ( a hotly contested title, aka Minstead Film club) watched Il Postino – a very old, very lovely Italian movie. I think his poetry loses a lot in translation, as however well it’s done, it can’t have the timbre and lyrical beauty it probably has in it’s original language. I wouldn’t know, obviously.
Valparaiso.
Things I have lost:
Knickers, that blew off a window sill down to the breakfast patio below, hopefully not onto some’s medialunar (croissant) y marmalada.
A pair of trousers. Now I only have two left and one of these are white, not practical now we’re heading South into the cold. It’s all upside down here – the sun travels east to west in the sky but shines from the North, they hanker for a North facing garden as South facing ones are mossy and damp. The sun also moves from right to left. I have only just realised this last fact. Mind-blowing.
My jewelled ebay-find designer sunglasses that exactly matched my wedding handbag. I know, gutted. A victim of Mendoza’s three room changes in 24 hours.
Next stop is further North to La Serena and a trip up to see the night sky.
Condoooooooooor. Only people over 55 will get this joke.
Being mistaken for an Argentinian at Buenos Aires airport is possibly one of the most thrilling things that’s happened to me so far on this trip. I’m usually met with a sweeping glance, the unspoken thought “pasty faced chubster = English,” game over. But Argentina has the most diverse population anywhere in the world, as we saw up in Salta, where the 500 year old children’s facial features exactly match those of the people wandering the streets, and now in Mendoza where there is a strong Italian thread running through it’s veins; we met two of them in an Artisanal beer bar – Mendoza’s that kind of place – who define themselves by their Italian roots, despite their family being here for 140 years. They also seemed to be very dubious about the upcoming elections, telling us that as Milei decided to run for president after seeing a psychic who told him one of his dead dogs wants him to do it, they fear he may not be entirely sane.
An artisanal beer bar Note the ridiculously huge beer tankards the Italian/Argintinian lads are drinking from.
Staying with airports, at Heathrow security they insisted on dismantling Clive’s drug flask as thoroughly as an AK47, sniffing suspiciously at the freezer block in particular. Here, the Argentinians obsession with mate, which puts our tea habit into the shade, has meant that Clive’s experience taking his drugs in a flask through security has been entirely stress free, as they assume it is a flask of boiling water for his mate, just like every single Argentinian in the queue with us. I honestly think this stuff must be way more addictive than coffee, and the airport staff would rather wrestle with a terrorist than deal with a stream of wild eyed Argentinians withdrawing from their mate habit.
A common site in Argentina – a woman with her mate mug to which she just keeps adding water to the increasingly disgusting looking mush. Pat would approve I feel, Katy.
All things mate.
Mendoza is the biggest supplier of Malbec in the world. We visited several vineyards and an olive oil farm, where they make the most divine and delicious balsamic vinegar. Never again will I buy the cheap and nasty stuff, now I understand how much tastier the pure stuff is; it’s made from the grape skin mush left over from wine -making, mixed with white wine vinegar, heated up, left for 3-7 days depending on how sweet you want it to be, and bobs your uncle, Balsamic so moreish I could slurp it straight from the bottle.
What a terrible photo. Anyway, numnumnum. My plant ap said this is called Golden Shower. No comment. An old olive press.More old olive making paraphernalia. How they used to make olive oil – cold press.
We also took a trip into the Andes, as although that’s the way we’ll go to Chile today, we aren’t sure how much the bus will stop so we can properly see the Andes, and take photos. Mendoza is basically a desert oasis, fed by the snow from these mountains. It hardly ever rains, which Gisella, Clive’s Spanish teacher, told us last night that she sometimes yearns for, “to feel the unique misery that rain brings.” Yeah, been there, done that, got the t-shirt G.
The trip into the mountains we took yesterday.The 1800’s bridge that took travellers across a now non-existent river, as they walked to Chile. An old thermal spa, abandoned in 1982 when Chile tried encroaching into Argentinian land.Spring arrives in the Andes.
The Andes on the Argentinian side are bleak, beautiful , and blooming cold. Condors circle high above us, and our guide tells us that Condors mate for life. If the female dies, whatever age the male is, he kills himself rather than live without her. I wonder if, as he soars downwards in ever decreasing cirlces towards the ground and an untimely death, he feels regret at what might have been? The females on the other hand, shed their feathers and beak, grow new ones, and find a new male. Pretty pragmatic, and a baffling decision from a genetic point of view for the male. No time to research this today.
Last night Giselle took us out for tapas, but we got to see her flat first. Clive wanted to see it so much, having had the same truncated laptop view of it for the last 2 years. She is a Portenas, born and bred in Buenos Aires, but the rent she gets for her tiny flat in BA buys her rent for this lovely, airy, light apartment she shares with her 11 year old son, who on hearing we support Arsenal, ignores us in disgust for the rest of our visit.
Gizella, who has italian roots, and moved her to be near her sister and mum.
Gizella chose this from a selection of a gazillion other Malbecs; very delicious and 7.50.
Disaster occured on our return to the hotel last night. Having washed three of my remaining six pairs of pants, one of them had blown off the window sill. I can’t find it in the hotel outdoor space and am too embarassed to ask if they have them at hotel reception. 2 down, 5 to go.
Standing on the 3,500 meters high salt flats I feel breathless and dizzy, but not as bad as I felt coming over the mountains at 4,500m. It’s reassuring to hear that the 30 year old girl sitting next to me on the bus feels the same and I’m not about to expire from altitude sickness, or at least if I go we’ll go together.
(bottom pic = wizard behind curtain)
Even down at 2,300 m in Purmacarma ( Ben Nevis, my go to bench mark, is 1300 m ) I keep getting sudden attacks of shorthness of breath as my lungs cast far and wide for more oxygen. Climbing up to a viewing platform feels like a HIT session, but once my breathing settles from imminent cardiac arrest to feeling slightly out of puff, the view is guess what? Breathtaking.
If you think 60 is old, try 600 million years, the age of the oldest green/grey tinged layer of rocks making up one of Purmamarca’s renowned hill of seven colours. The air is redolent of wood smoke and incense and muddy roads, which fills me with “the sense of something lost and nearly forgotten.” *
Having been way too hot and hindered by the trousers and jacket I didn’t need in Cafayate, I arrive in the mountains wearing skimpy shorts and a t-shirt. Clocking the ski jackets and long trousers the rest of our bus is wearing when we board in Salta, I should have seen it coming. Who knew it could be cold in the mountains? Everyone but us, clearly. Damn our weather ap.
(A cold me.)
Luckily there is a daily market in the square selling all things alpaca, and we jumper-up before dying of hypothermia.
(Pic – after years of being constrained by the need to dress conservatively for work, Clive pushes his retirement boundaries to the limit with his choice of jumper.)
Our charming Brazillian stallholder, who looks like a louche version of Clint Eastwood, (picture below, our friend, not Clint) invites us to listen to his band that night.
After lama disco (veggies look away now – not a shimmy on down with a lama, but a stew, delicious, tastes like very rich beef) we tip toe up to the the doorway of the bar but lose our nerve; but while scurrying back to our hostel we bump into Clint, who is definitely on something, if not things, and he lures us back to the bar. We pray this isn’t another Istanbul barber moment (long story, but it ended with us sprinting up side streets and wearing disguises for the rest of the holiday). The bar has its fair share of his disciples, all wearing his alpacan cardies, but there are locals here too. The place slowly filled with more and more people, musicians came and went, playing pipes, saxaphones, drums, while the central core of the band sang heavenly argentinian folk on guitars, and everyone except us joined in, and some people danced, in a joyous bubble of merriment and mountainous high jinks.
I just love the saxophonist’s unadulterated joy, and the stray dog wandering around. Yes, I finally worked out how to upload a video.
While up in the mountains we find out more about the Incas, who built an empire similar to the Romans in Europe. Unlike the Spanish who ruled South America through death, destruction and slavery, the Incas conquered through peaceful assimilation; they offered local men women, who would then teach these men their language, religion, culture, and of course, have their babies, so mixing the genes. Only if the locals turned down their offer did they get their heads chopped off. Seems fair.
In a local museum we witness the shocking site of a perfectly preserved, mummified child, buried alive as a sacrifice to their gods. Found by mountaineers in 1999, and initially taken to Cusco in Peru, these three children are now displayed in rotation in a cryofridge. If you’re interested here is a link:
The freezing cold and low oxygen levels preserved their bodies, but together with high levels of alcohol and cocaine found in their hair, meant that they probably died quickly. Let’s hope so.
Tomorrow we are heading for Mendoze, where Clive’s Spanish teacher lives, and one of the main red wine growing regions of Argentina.
Arriving in Salta early on a sleepy Sunday morning the streets are deserted, the shops shut, the locals enjoying a lie-in. Our apartment is on the less salbubrious side of town and there is a slightly menacing feel in the air as we drift into town, unable to book in until 3pm. It turns out this is entirely paranoia, and the next day with people milling up and down and the roar of traffic, we cease half-expecting to have our throats slit. The traffic system at junctions is bonkers, whoever gets there first has right of way, until the waiting traffic gets fed up and barges in, waving and shouting.
Our apartment in Salta.
Our apartment is great. We have a coat rack! A large fridge! An air dryer! Domestic bliss. We have it for a week although we will be spending two nights away, one going South, the other North. The only meds we’ll take away are lomotil, as buses and bowels don’t mix well.
Visit to art museum.
Doorways in Salta.
After lunch we took the cable car up a hill for a view of Salta from above, but we felt hot and tired. We wilted like steamed spinach onto a patch of grass in the shade and then retired down the hill and back to our flat for a siesta. Mad dogs and Englishmen…..
Yesterday we headed south though the Calchaquai Valley, past massive rock formations up to Cafayate, a really sweet little town surrounded by mountains.
In Cafayate Clive booked us into a decent bnb (£22) for the night, right in the central (and only) square
Burra beer – with a kick like a donkey. (8% alcohol).
Clive’s Spanish is opening all kinds of doors. Last night we drank the waiters recommended Malbec which tasted divine, cost 6 quid but sells for 35 in the uk. In Salta a waitress gave us two free glasses of wine because she said most English people don’t speak Spanish. Today we walked just 5km to a local waterfall but my legs told me we are 1700 meters high (Ben Nevis is 1345 m high – which is why this region makes wine – it’s high, sunny, and dry ) and even though we set off early the sun beat down on the dusty road and I walked slower, and slower, and slower. By the time we arrived the cavalry sat by the road, aka Jose, who became our guide.
He was from one of four families living around the mountains who do the guiding. He showed us a tree that makes Mate tea, which Argentinians are obsessed with to the extent they take huge flasks of boiling water even onto planes so they can drink it whenever they want. I bought a mate straw today – like my own personal tea strainer. He held my hand as we climbed up to the waterfall in ever steeper steps, such a sweetie. The price he asked? 4 quid. The thing is the guides get paid in cash, which obviously we added to for a tip. There are queues everywhere for the ATM’s at all times of day – long, long queues, we think because they can only get out 20,000 pesos (20 quid blue rate, 60 red) a day out, and because of inflation everyone wants their money out of the bank (you only need to look at my savings to see that economics is not my strong point so please correct me if I am wrong). So anyone working in an industry that pays cash is at a distinct advantage.
There is no way in a million years we’d have found the waterfalls without Jose, which although minuscule compared to Iguazú, meant we could take a much needed dunk in the icy cold water. This water is channelled into a canal and feeds the town of Calafate.
After trying the wine ice-cream (horrid) we sat waiting for our minibus to return us 200 km back to Salta.
Tomorrow we go North, to the hill of seven colours, lama stew, the salt flats, and Humahuaca, which sounds like a smokers cough.
Travellinglight 