Advertisement
Published: December 29th 2005
An owl...
The fawny, twittering, small, feathery, effervescent eared bird was a dramatically small distance from Mel's cranium.Happy New Year to y'all!
A ridiculous o'clock alarm got us up and ready to leave Ushuaia for Puerto Natales. It was a lot of miles, consisting of mainly nothing. Not even roads - bumpy gravel - not ideal for sleeping. We stopped somewhere to swap buses, before embarking on a journey of more nothingness. It was amazing to see so much nothing; just flat, bare, windswept and barren land. The border crossing to Chile was just a couple of huts, 14km apart. It's hard to put into words how empty this part of the world is.
18 hours later, we arrived at Puerto Natales, a small town built mainly of corrugated iron and a questionable fashion sense. Fishnet gloves, anybody? We stayed at a fantastic hostel: Erratic Rock, owned by a couple of American expats. They described the building as "work in progress" and they wanted their slogan to be "shit house, great hostel". It didn't matter because the atmosphere was great and so was the food. We trained their kitten to be an attack monster and by the time we left we were nursing multiple ankle scatches..
And so on to Torres del Paine! The famous
Glacier Grey
Ice! Needs sound effects as it's a creaky old thing "el Circuito" was our plan but we found out it was closed due to possible avalanche/rockfall. Maybe. No it was open. Closed. Who knows?! Not the people that ran the park, anyway. Despite being one of the world's most popular national parks. So we did it anyway! It was super-smashing great.
The circuit is about 120km of mixed walking, from pleasant meadows, to mud, over a snow covered mountain pass, along the side of a glacier and up giant glacial valleys. We were both very excited at the geography (for once I'll even let Mel use the phrase "thigh rubbing.." to describe it).
Pictures (or words) don´t really do it justice, which is lucky because it was far too windy to take any as we went over the pass, and we were far too tired at one of the most spectacular glaciers we've seen. It tumbled down a steep mountain, then as gravity took over, sheared great chunks of ice into a small lake. A dramatic sight, but after 9 hours of tough walking it wasn´t the campsite we hoped to see.
We spent Christmas Eve sat drinking wine by our tent, watching the sun go down
More ice!
That's us being icebergs then. as 5 condors circled high overhead. A great moment, and we even treated ourselves to a tin of tuna to go with our instant noodle and broken cracker slop dinner. Mmmmm! It may well be the most scenic Christmas we will ever experience, the strangeness of our Christmas dinner beat last year's ostrich and who knows what next year will bring?!
After eight days of sweating, we were mightily proud of ourselves and returned to civilisation with the desire to smell less and eat more. After a day of doing bugger-all, a "4 hour bus journey" (ha!) awaited to El Calafate. Anyone spot a trend with our transportation yet? Yep, we got our bus stuck in the mud up to its axles, suspended precariously over a drop-off. Along with the bus coming the other direction, a bus that tried to help and several cars thrown in for good measure. Main roads? Na, mud will do!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.12s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 9; qc: 66; dbt: 0.0834s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Fordis
non-member comment
Beautiful
....and nice scenery too! Where is my coat? Good to see you're travelling such a beautiful place guys - hope you had a good christmas and that you have a good new year too. Lots of love and stuff