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Lago St Martin
As viewed from "El Condor" Maria Chiara and I must be suckers for punishment. After two long plane rides we had finally managed to escape an excruciatingly long and severe British winter when we arrived in Buenos Aires. No sooner had we got nicely settled and acclimatised to the benign late summer temperatures, than we took yet another long flight down to Southern Patagonia and yet more cold! As our plane plunged towards Antarctica, the land below looked like some sort of moonscape. Or possibly Mars.
After touching down at El Calafate airport, a minibus trip to the town took us through tundra-like landscape. El Calafate the town has jauntily-coloured buildings akin to what one would expect to see in Lapland or Alaska. Patagonia is the sort of place where civilisation can never really dominate, where the extreme nature of the surroundings make you feel small and insignificant. The one big plus is that, at least when we were there, it was actually almost warm.
We took a small stroll from our adorable hippy hostel to the lake front. I hadn't expected anything in particular, but what we found was a small reserve with rust-coloured tussock, horses and a huge profusion of birds. I
hadn't thought a zoom lens would be necessary for a short random walk, and when after being in the reserve for less then a minute we saw a rare flamingo I couldn't bear it any longer and ran back to the hostel and fetched the lens. I was sweating and suffering by the time I got back, but I got my flamingo shot - which is far more important than my physical comfort.
Southern Patagonia straddles most of the Southern half of both Argentina and Chile. It snows so much on the Chilean side that Argentina is the only place in the world where the Glaciers are actually growing. Our visit to Perito Moreno Glacier was jaw-dropping. The scale is gigantic - it's 30km long weaving down a mountain valley (that it created), and at its base 5km wide and as high as a 20 storey building. The two other striking things about it were its colour (luminescent blue, from a high concentration of hydrogen) and its sound. It made constant booming and cracking sounds - like gun fire or bombs - and on several occasions we saw huge icebergs break off and smash into Lago Argentino below.
Our fellow tourists...
...demonstrating how to act with dignity and decorum whilst walking on a glacier Back in El Calafate township after a day of glacier action (which did actually involve wearing crampons at one point in order to trek on the big ice) we found a restaurant that ended up being our favourite of the entire Argentina trip. It was called Pura Vida and was clearly run by hippies if the decor was anything to go by. The hippies sure knew how to cook - and we each had a hearty casserole, washed down by copious amounts of malbec (we will shorten this to C.A.O.M. for the rest of the blog).
I wasn't looking forward to the horse-riding day that Maria Chiara had insisted on. I have ridden horses only a few times and I remember it being fairly nerve-racking. We were a party of six on this occasion: as well as MC and myself there was an American nurse, a Russian called Sergei (who had lived most of his life in Tokyo and had the accent and mannerisms of a Japanese person) and our guides: two gauchos (that's Argentinean for "cowboys"). As I was the least experienced rider I was given a particularly docile horse, Obelisco. Thanks to Patagonian horses being extremely fearless,
and (thankfully for my groin) quite narrow, the whole experience was hardly traumatic at all. We rode up to a windswept point with a spectacular view of the Andes, lakes and the glacier. The most important factor however was lunch: in the middle of nowhere we started noticing trees that were slung with cow skulls and we stopped at a shack. The two gauchos cooked us steak sandwiches on a BBQ which were washed down with C.A.O.M. from a magnum that Pedro (the older shorter gaucho) had retrieved from a trap door in the ground. Back on the horses, Maria Chiara and Carlos (the younger taller gaucho) had a post-prandial gallop across a field. I was far too scared to do it myself, but she loved it - and looked cool!
We made our way northwards from El Calafate to El Chalten, the trekking Mecca of Patagonia. As we drove around huge glacial lakes and along the legendary Route 40, the weather was getting fairly dodgy. We had only one day to hike in the Andes and we were told under no uncertain terms that the chances of us seeing any peaks under the forecast low cloud were non-existent.
The phrase was: "we could forget about it". I was hardly surprised: I am a bad luck guy when it comes to mountains. I got altitude sickness from trying to walk up Mt Ngauruhoe (in NZ) too quickly when I was on school camp at the age of 14 - I was ridiculed for a year for that. Thirteen years later I traversed the width of Northern India on a 30 hour slow train just to catch a glimpse of Mount Everest. Unfortunately it was shrouded in haze - it could have been empty sky for all I saw. So you can imagine our pleasant shock when we woke up in El Chalten the next morning to see crystalline blue skies and perfect visibility. What followed was without a doubt the most glorious day's walking of my life. We walked through valleys of tall grass, strange dead-looking trees, and beech forest shrouded in early Autumn colour. We arrived at the foot of Mt Torre which is fronted by a lake with small floating icebergs, where we had our empanadas (an Argentinean version of Cornish pasties in the most idyllic picnic spot. The only slight drag of the hike was we
had decided on a very ambitious route which ended up taking 9 hours - more than enough to give us both blisters, and to suck out our will to live. That will to live was duly restored that evening with a giant plate of lamb chops and of course C.A.O.M.!
Our last port of call was the most far flung. Maria Chiara had wanted so much to stay on an Estancia ("Ranch") and we decided on El Condor which has a huge reputation - both for being stunningly beautiful and for being in the middle of nowhere. We had to drive through an awful little town called Tres Lagos, which seemed to be run by a cartel of rabid looking large stray dogs. We had to go there because we had been told that if you don't stop for petrol in this town it is impossible to get to El Condor and back! Post-fill-up it was 130 km of dirt road in complete barrenness to the estancia.
El Condor ranch lived up to expectations. It's on the edge of Lago St Martin (or Lake O'Higgins on the Chilean side - very Spanish sounding) which is an uncanny aquamarine
colour from the minerals of melted glaciers. The farm area was gigantic - 40,000 hectares - that's slightly larger than the entire vineyard space of Champagne. We were staying in a farmhouse where all the guests ate at a large dinner table. We had three National Geographic photographers with us - dinner time conversation topics ran from things like "whales" to "snakes" to "lions". We liked these guys very much - less so the right-wing and/or anti-Semitic guests who preferred talking about "lazy Argentineans" and "rude Israelis"!
Maria Chiara tricked me: our main activity on our main day at El Condor was... more horse riding! It was lucky for her that I had discovered that I liked it. The horses were unbelievable: they would ride us up and down steep hills, and across rivers with minimal fuss. We rode up through wildly varying landscapes of forests and meadows to La Condorera, a famous viewing point for seeing condors. From this point we could see across the aquamarine lake towards Chile. At one point we could see six of these birds of prey with massive wing-spans of up to 3m gliding around the lake. More yummy empanadas made another unforgettable
picnic in a stunning location.
After an epic drive back down the dirt road and beyond back to El Calafate airport and thereon back to the warmth of Buenos Aires. Patagonia is quite special: beautiful, often barren, and mostly untouched. It was even quieter than the New Zealand countryside and that is saying something!
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Mari francis
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What a fantastic story Xave!! Keep on writing your trip experiences, it is great fun to read it and it makes me want to go to all those places!! Thanks!