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Our best mate in Ushuaia!
Little Milly here happily accompanied her mum on all of our walks and visits. And she loved nothing more than posing for photos!Any traveller worth his salt knows to be wary of street meat and other such delicacies while travelling around tinpot parts of the world. Now I'm no particular believer in omens but as a general rule of mine I always try to stay away from countries that resemble an enormous tapeworm. With this in mind I could scarcely believe what a brave little soldier I was being in visiting Chile.
Famous for little more than its ridiculous shape and a former dictator, here is a country that's populated by 15m people who like to consider their country the England of Latin America. And with good tea, awful coffee, unfriendly people and extortionate prices everywhere you look they do kind of have a point.
Chile's good relations with the UK apparently go right back to the 1890's War Of The Pacific, when British Generals led Chile's armies to victories over a combined Peruvian and Bolivian force attempting to drive the occupying Chileans from Bolivia's mineral-rich coastal region. Since losing that war the Bolivians have been landlocked and the dispute still flares up from time to time.
I entered the country around
Puerto Natales right down near the bottom of
Torres del Paine
First day of my walking was a lot of this. Patagonia. The stunning
Torres Del Paine national park is three hours bus ride north west from here. This is Chile's most visited attraction and the only reason I'd come! I'd heard that Lord Of The Rings would have been filmed here had the New Zealand government not provided the necessary tax breaks, so you can imagine it's really quite a grand little number.
By now absolutely loving that whole cash cow feeling as I make my way towards the park (£8 for a bus there, £10 entry to the place, another pound for a minibus to the start of the walking and positively salivating at the prospect of paying £20 a night for a cold cold hostel bed with no bedding whatsoever...) it crossed my mind that now might be a good time to start living on absolute minimal expenditure (A concept that unfortunately I couldn't have thought of once all my time in Brazil...)
To this effect I had planned to camp but by the time you've paid the locals' going rates to hire a tent, a sleeping bag, a roll mat, a stove and whatever else I'd have needed, frankly you may as well have chartered
and this...
was the view from my first night's hostel. a fighter jet from Argentina to take you in low and dip its wing over each glacier you come to. Thinking about it, the Chileans would only go and shoot it down, the relations with its neighbours being as warm as, well, England's.
And so, with my Boy Scout years but a distant memory and far too much confidence in my near-destroyed physical condition, suddenly reality hits me like a wet fish in the face: I'm sitting on the minibus through the park and I notice that I'm surrounded by nothing but hardcore guys and girls sporting the most ridiculous array of hiking gear I've ever seen. I, meanwhile, am sitting pretty in five T-shirts and a pair of Pumas. And a rucksack just about big enough for my 3kg of dried pasta and a family tub of mayonnaise.
Two things strike me: Firstly I'm doing this walk by myself (everyone else on the bus seems to be doing their own things) and secondly I can read maps approximately as well as a small child. With cataracts.
Off the bus, and maybe everyone felt they had something to prove, as each one of them shot off quicker
Second Morning in Torres del Paine
The weather wasn't really very clear for the mostpart. And look! I'm not even holding the camera level! Fingers... cold.... than a favela kid with my wallet.
By now I'm trying to remember some golden rule or other about maps (something about them being like a scaled-down picture of where you are) while simultaneously trying to remember that right then the sun was due north, but I'm afraid these days even that constitutes far too much multi-tasking for my liking.
Eventually I pick a direction that looks like it may or may not contain a path and just start running. And being acutely aware of the costs that every additional minute in this blood-sucking country incurs, I did a Forrest Gump and jus' kept on runnin'!
I ran fo' two days n' two nahts... well, strictly speaking I spent the nights shivering myself to sleep in little wooden huts. Although I was pleasantly surprised with the pasta/mayonnaise combo; I mean in terms of quality I'm disinclined to pigeon-hole it with the Argentine steak pizza but those shitty tomato sauces you get in supermarkets seldom bring anything but disappointment and misery while mayonnaise, even in Chile... well, I guess you always know where you are with mayonnaise! A bastion of certainty in an evermore uncertain world... amayonnaizing.
(WOAH! Glaciers in the Gulley
This was where the avalanches kept occurring, between the two mountains that form the 'W' of the 'W'-trail. Does anyone at Hellmann's need a new marketing strategist?!)
In total I managed to walk most of the 'W' trail which takes you around two mountains for you to go
'ooh' and
'ahh' at lots of glaciers. Really that's about it. There's a cool part half way through the walk where the ice keeps avalanching down the gulley between the mountains but really it's all about the glaciers.
So resolute was I not to spend a peso more than I had to that on my final day I left the hostel five hours early to walk the ten miles that save you spending another tenner on a half hour boat ride across a pond. A couple of buses later and I was back in Puerto Natales where during dinner with friends where once again my open-mindedness got me into trouble... (yeah! Know my problem? I'm just
such a good sort...!) Saw something new on the menu and thought it'd be rude not to try it. It's always the same with me;
"¿Es bueno?" - "Si!" - "¿Es típico?" - "Siiiiiii!" - "Entonces... dámelo!" An entire pint of 'beer and egg' later and I'm shocked I didn't throw up.
Oh I don't know...
Somewhere else in Torres del Paine. And why does none of the locals seem to drink them, eh?
Next morning and I'm winging my way back to Argentina. The place I have in mind is Ushuaia but first I spend a day in Punta Arenas, another Chilean town where I spend my time shopping for warmer clothes and getting soaked in a rainstorm. The following day I'm on the 12 hour bus/boat ride that'll take me over to
Ushuaia on Tierra del Fuego, the big island riiiiiiiight at the bottom of Patagonia.
Ushuaia's tourist board have worked hard on marketing this town as the end of the world. If you look at a map of the world you'll see where they're coming from. They'll have you belive it's the most southerly city in the world. And this is why most tourists visit it. My reasoning was even more mundane;
("errr, I dunno. It's something to do, init?") What the Argentines seem to be conveniently ignoring is that just across the Beagle Channel lies a small Chilean naval settlement that's a wee bit further south. They'll tell you that that's not a city though.
Newsflash! Then Ushuaia (population 55,000) isn't one either. Well, not in
Sunrise on my last morning in Torre del Paine
Sunrise? SUNRISE? You KNOW how I feel about these things... my mind!
I guess if Hellmann's don't step forward and offer me the lucrative advertising contract I've always dreamed of, I'll have the Argentine tourist board avail themselves of me:
"Ushuaia! The second most southerly city in the world!" No, wait.
"Ushuaia! The most southerly city in the world until the next one!" Maybe tweak it a bit and then we can start talking about my fees...
Anyway, I'm not even sure what all the fuss is about; it's only as far from the equator as Manchester and I don't remember anyone making a big song and dance about that the last time I drove up there.
By now I'd decided I just wasn't going to take another bus for a while. After Ushuaia I'd be travelling north (hang on, did I just say something obvious?) and Buenos Aires was 48 hours solid stuck in a metal box on wheels smelling other people's farts. So I didn't care how long it would take, I was flying up and that was that.
In the event I had to wait a week for availability. Which meant I was stuck in the cold for plenty of time. Still in
Laguna Esmeralda, Ushuaia
I'm not even sure if this picture's the right way around. the flip-flops which gave the locals plenty to snigger at but I was big enough and cold enough not to care. (The Pumas turned out to be too small and didn't seem worth the pain). Plus I was actually really lucky with the weather. Every day had clear blue skies and a lovely fresh feeling to it. Typically it was about 8-10º which was apparently a lot more than you should expect two months from winter.
But wait! That's still not good enough for the penguins, who'd rather inconsiderately waddled off north before I got there. Apparently to an island near Brazil of all places (though
I'm still skeptical about that)
I was gutted. It's a well-known fact that penguins make people happy falling around and eating fish like nothing else matters and I'd come all this way. Looks like I'll have to return to London Zoo to get my fix seeing as those penguins ain't going nowhere, regardless of the temperature...
("YEAH! Now waddle for me! Now.... eat some fish! Right I'm bored... let's go and look at the elephants..." literally minutes of fun).
I was lucky to have quite a good crowd in my
Me and Milly.
Nice photo here, kindly taken by my good friend Emma. Effortlessly combining not being in focus with not being level. hostel for most of the time. There was even a cute six year old kiwi girl travelling around with her mum who used to soak up all the attention everybody gave her with alarming ease! There were maybe seven or so of us in total going looking for things to do in Ushuaia. And there was plenty to take my mind off the penguins... we ate more steak, drank more cheap wine, went out a bit, stayed in a bit. One day we went on a two hour boat ride to see the sealions but they smelled of poo cos there were so many of them crowded onto each rock. Another day we walked through all these marshes to get to Laguna Esmerelda which was quite nice. The day after I arrived everyone else went off on a really nice seven hour walk around the nearby national park. I stayed in bed after the previous night, knowing that I was around for plenty more time and eventually scheduled it for the day before my flight left.
My flight actually left Saturday morning from a town three hours' bus ride from Ushuaia. What I hadn't realised was that the first
Sealions.
Bloody thousands of them... bus Saturday morning arrived in the town too late for the flight so I actually had to get the bus Friday instead therefore scrubbing around the national park altogether. By the sounds of all the locals' reactions I'm now the only person in the world to have visited Ushuaia for a whole week and not set foot in the national park.
"WHAT?! Oh go bollocks to you! I'm sick of parks anyway!" And so Saturday morning's flight brings an end to my Patagonian dillydallying and before I know it I'm back in the capital where I'll spend a few days before carrying on northwards towards Bolivia.
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sara
non-member comment
Hi Mrs Perkins!