After a 20 hour bus from Rosario we arrived at Puerto Iguazu right up in the Northeast corner of Argentina. It was hot, very hot. I moaned about the heat and Sarah moaned at me for moaning about the heat. The town was really nice and pretty laid back and not as expensive as we thought and was only half an hour from the waterfalls which is what we had gone to see. We stayed 4 nights at a friendly hospedaje and got some well needed laundry action. The waterfalls are some of the largest in the world and are made [View Full Entry]

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So, within 24 hours of standing in the cold, looking at a massive glacier in Patagonia, we were dragging our backpacks through Rosario, 2000 kilometres and 30 odd degrees centigrade away. It was the biggest city we'd been to since Santiago and we liked it. We stayed 3 nights in a hostel with a balcony (so that Sarah could be nosey). The heat was almost unbearable but there were plenty of heladerias selling ice cream and loads of good bars selling cold beers. The city is famous amongst other things for being the birthplace of Che Guevara and a great football [View Full Entry]

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Don't think we'll ever catch up on this but..... After Torres Del Paine we spent a couple of nights back in Puerto Natales relaxing and eating the flesh of many animals. The house we were staying in was our favourite of the whole trip and the owners were really friendly. On the Saturday we got up early and took the bus back over into Argentina and a few hours north to El Calafate. El Calafate was a shock to our wallets. Our room wasn't too expensive but everything else was. This didn't worry us too much as we planned to move [View Full Entry]

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So, after our cross-continental detour, we got to Puerto Natales last Tuesday afternoon. This was the furthest south we were due to go in the whole trip. We liked it straight away and found a really nice residencial about 5-10 minutes walk from the centre with the best hot shower we´ve had so far and breakfast included. We went out on the first night and treated ourselves to lomo a lo pobre which is fillet steak, chips, fried onions and two fried eggs. We´d had it a couple of times in Chile before but this was the best yet, we´d read [View Full Entry]

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It´s been a couple of weeks since the last update so we´re backtracking a bit here. Going back a couple of Thursdays: THE PLAN: Get this bus (Friday morning) a few hours south to Villa O Higgins and do a couple of days trek over the border into Argentina and the small town of El Chalten and do a few days trekking around there as it is supposed to be really nice. After that, we would go to El Calafate to see the Perito Moreno Glaciar and then back into Chile to visit Parque Nacional Torres Del Paine. These 3 places [View Full Entry]

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After a couple of days in Puerto Tranquilo we got the bus a couple of hours south to Puerto Bertrand which was somehow even smaller than Tranquilo. There were less than 20 houses, 2 tiny shops and more stray dogs per capita than any village on Earth. It lies on the shore of a small lake called Lago Plomo which has beautiful clear, turquoise water and is the start of the Rio Baker, one of the largest rivers in Chile. We found a house that allowed camping in the garden and put the tent up under the watchful eye of a [View Full Entry]

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So, we got the bus on the Wednesday morning and travelled about 6 hours south down the Carretera Austral to a tiny village on the shores of Lago General Carrera called Puerto Tranquilo. The road down had some spectacular views of jagged mountains and we saw our first glaciars hanging around the top of some of them. Puerto Tranquilo consisted of about 50 houses, a couple of minimarkets, 2 cafes and a few places to stay. We found a friendly little hospedaje behind a shop and stayed there for a couple of days wondering what we could find to do. On [View Full Entry]

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The original plan for the island of Chiloe was to spend 2-3 days there before getting a ferry from Castro to Chaiten on Wednesday morning. When we got to Castro we found out that the ferry didn´t leave from Castro but from Quellon and not on Wednesday, but on Friday. So we hung around a couple of days only to find the ferry cancelled. This led to a pretty drastic rethink of the route we had to take! We took a bus 2 hours back to Castro and managed to get our ferry refund without too much bother, then another bus, [View Full Entry]

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We got a bus a few hours Southwest to Valdivia, a city on a river not too far from the coast. We stayed a couple of nights in a hospedaje which is usually someone´s house a bit like a B and B at home and usually the cheapest option to sleep other than camping. The owner was very friendly, like almost all the Chileans we´ve met so far. The town itself didn´t have that much to offer but it felt like a proper Chilean town, unlike Pucon, which had stunning surroundings but had little character and even less selection of food [View Full Entry]

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Well, we managed to survive the volcano anyway. We were up at half 5 on Saturday morning to get to the tour office at half 6. They gave us a backpack that Edmund Hillary would be proud of. Crampons, hat, helmet, sun glasses, massive glove mitten things, wind and waterproof trousers and jacket, ice pick and a tie-on blanket/sledge thing. We were driven up to the ski lift and given the option of taking the lift or walking an hour up to where the lift ended. Sarah was determined to do the whole lot, so we walked. The first hour wasn´t [View Full Entry]

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