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Published: November 3rd 2006
It´s almost over and we can´t believe it. In about six hours´ time, the South American leg of our travels will end when we hop on a flight out of Santiago and travel for 20 hours - crossing the international date line in the process - to Australia. We have been in this continent of incredible contrasts for four and a half months now, but the time has just roared by. Given the choice, we´d both stay longer - months rather than weeks longer - but we can't, and anyway, the couple of weeks we've just had have been the perfect way to sign off.
The last time we wrote, we were about to set off on a nine-day odyssey from San Carlos de Bariloche on the eastern edge of Patagonia all the way down to Ushuaia in Argentine Tierra del Fuego. The latter styles itself as the 'city at the end of the world', but at this time of the year the only way to get there without waiting around for days on end to hop between buses to hire a car to head down there on Ruta 40, the fabled highway that links the northern and southern ends
Ruta 40
They decorate the road signs with bullet holes round here. We don't blame themof Argentina. Which is what led us to Ricardo and his Renault Kangoo.
Ricardo ran the cheapest hire car company in Bariloche. Imagine a mardy, polilingual Derek Trotter and you'll have some idea of what he was like. He agreed to lend us a 'mot-ah' and organise for it to be picked up in Ushuaia and taken back to Bariloche (about 1500 miles) because we didn't have time to do the journey both ways. It should be noted that Ricardo was not doing this out of charity: the pick-up cost us nearly as much again as hiring a car for nine days. Not only that, but he attached the most punitive insurance excess I've ever seen to the deal; we would have to pay up to $3000 dollars in the event of us doing any damage. And he would only hire us a Kangoo (essentially a rattly old diesel van, only with windows in the back) because he said that the roads would be too dangerous in anything else. As we trusted Ricardo roughly about as far as we could throw him, we took all this with a pinch of salt.
But boy, was he not wrong. We
Ice cream stop
Adele going through hell on Ruta 40 reckoned nine days would be loads of time to drive down the spine of the Patagonian Andes, visit three national parks, pop into Chile and still have time for a quick cruise on the Beagle channel in Tierra del Fuego. However, Ruta 40 soon put paid to that idea. After driving flat-out for the first 800 kilometres and still failing about 200 short of our intended night-stop, we realised that we might have bitten off a bit more than we could chew; the following day, the roads changed from pot-holed tarmac to rubble-strewn gravel with holes big enough to swallow the Kangoo whole. Paranoid about about punctures, and with Ricardo's wallet-knackering insurance excess ringing in our ears, we dared go no quicker than 25mph through massive swathes, meeting other motorists roughly once every other hour (and on one occasion, just twice in a whole day). The scenery was pretty daunting, too: hundreds of miles of absolutely bugger-all, otherwise known as 'Patagonian steppe' in the guidebooks. What looked like towns on the map were usually isolated houses where we prayed we'd find both fuel and somebody to pour it into the car. We found ourselves playing more and more elaborate travel
games in a bid to stay awake, wondering whether Patagonian bus hell would actually have been a more attractive option. And if the Kangoo was a racehorse, we would have been reported to the Jockey Club long ago for 'excessive use of the whip'.
Things changed once we started to get up close and personal with the Andes, though. After two days of driving, we made it to Parque National Perito Moreno - a huge nature reserve that's 150 miles down a dead-end dirt track from the nearest town. It's billed as Patagonia's most wild natural park - in practice this means that there are no footpaths, you to drive everywhere to see anything beyond yet-more-bloody-steppe and that it is possible for the sun to be shining and hailstones falling simultaneously. It covers hundreds of square miles and we were the only people in it on the day we visited, and in truth we were pretty unimpressed by the experience - mainly because we went there to walk, but the rangers looked at us like we were mentally ill when we proposed actually getting out of the car. However, getting out of the car and staying upright was another
Parque Nacional Perito Moreno
'Slow down for puma' warning signs - just like Dudley, really matter - the wind was blowing what felt like a Force Ten gale.
The best bit was staying on a local
estancia, or cattle ranch, for a couple of nights. We were the only people there, so we ended up with the bunkhouse (admittedly freezing cold) all to ourselves, and were brilliantly looked after by the proprietor Miguel (or 'Big Mig', as we called him, for being as high as he was wide) and his missus. They baked us bread and let us try
mate for the first time. The latter is a kind of Paraguayan tea and a national craze in Argentina; everywhere you go you see people slurping it out of metal straws in funny wooden-framed cups, which they endlessly refill from giant Thermos flasks. (As a result, every Argentine bus driver needs a 'driver's mate' with him to make his
mate, something that amused us greatly everywhere we went.) Even when loaded to the gunwales with sugar, we reckoned that your average cuppa tastes as strong and bitter as steeped horse excrement, which in turn amused the 'Big Migs' greatly. I'm amazed anybody can sleep at night with a couple of mugs of it inside them.
But if Parque Nacional Perito Moreno didn't live up to the hype, everywhere else we visited in the next couple of days did, and with bells on. We intended to overnight it at our next stop, a little town called El Chalten on the edge of the Parque Nacional de los Glaciares, but we ended up staying there for our nights, stunned by the brilliant weather and staggering beauty of the landscape, all snow-covered mountains and glaciers. We spent a day on an exhilarating (and knackering) trek to the base of Mount Fitzroy, a jagged, jaw-dropping peak that's a postcard for all of Patagonia - and then, feeling like hardcore mountain people, signed up for a day's instruction in ice-climbing on a huge glacier underneath Cerro Torre, one of the world's hardest-to-summit mountains. We had to get up at 6.30am to hike 14km to the glacier with a guide called Luis, a charming bloke who was simultaneously mild-mannered and as hard as nails; we then spent three hours climbing on the ice with crampons and ice axes, then walked the 14km back as the sun went down. We felt like we'd been run-over afterwards, but scaling the huge walls
of ice was the most amazing feeling and probably the highlight of everything we have done so far for me.
The next day, we got up at 6am to bomb 150 miles down the road to the Glaciar Perito Moreno, which despite its same-again name is one of the wonders of Patagonia: an enormous glacier that advances several feet every day. You can see (and hear) its progress as gigantic lumps of ice break off and fall into the lake beneath. It was a shock to the system coming here because it was full of coach parties and it had been days before we'd met any more than a handful of people on our travels, but the spectacle of what seems like hundreds of converging ice-filled football fields was enough to silence even the most irritating video camera-wielding goon. Which was nice.
After that, we headed across the country to drop the Kangoo off in Rio Gallegos, an exotically named port city which rather disappointingly is more like Staines than Staines is. There was good and bad news for us there - the former being that we successfully handed the car over in one piece and thus avoided
Estancia Menelik
'Alas, poor Rob...' handing the evil Ricardo any more of our cash, the latter that the one bus out of town in the next two days was full. As a result, we decided to ignore the financial pain and fly the final leg down to Ushuaia; in any case, the incredible views from the plane of the land running out at the bottom of Argentina were definitely worth the budget-bashing.
Despite being super-touristy, Ushuaia is a lovely place too - perched between mountains and the Beagle Channel, it really does feel like the end of the world, even though the Chilean town of Puerto Williams is actually further south. We found ourselves wishing we had a couple of days just to hang around and soak up the atmosphere, but by this point the clock was really running down on us.
As I can feel you nodding off, I'll keep what we've done since brief: we flew from Ushuaia to Santiago, the Chilean capital. The latter was (a) actually much nicer than everybody told us it was but (b) very expensive after Argentina, so after a day of sightseeing we hopped on a bus and crossed the border back into Argentina to
Ruta 40
Remember: we drove this for hundreds of miles so you didn't have to visit Mendoza, or 'Mendonkey' as we christened it. (Anyone remember the former Charlton striker Clive Mendonca? Thought not.) Mendoza is a leafy, laid-back town in the middle of Argentina's main wine-producing region, but we steered clear of the grog and went horse-riding instead - a first for me, if not for Adele. I thought it was brilliant and a wonderful way of taking in some lovely countryside, although the wisdom of inflicting that much punishment to your backside just before wedging yourself into a cattle-class aeroplane seat for 20 hours is something which I suspect we are about to call into question.
Right: it´s time to don the corked hats, fire up the 'barbie', eulogise about piss-poor lager and do whatever else it is you have to do to pass through Australian immigration. See you on the other side, when - hopefully - these outrageous stereotypes will have been confined to history.
Adele and Rob x
Catchphrase of the week
No 10. ´An' oi thought t'moiself, whoiy am oi paying thurty-eight pezzos fer thess?´ Oh, this is cruel: we met this lovely couple from Bristol who were sweet, kind and thoroughly good company - and to repay
Let's off-road!
This ford felt very deep, but looks strangely unimpressive in pictures them, we spent literally
days in the car taking the mick out of their accents. (Then again, God knows what people do after they've met us - probably thank their lucky stars they're heading in the opposite direction.)
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