Leaving Pucon was another episode of Cecilia holding the bus up while I was busy getting up late. As the buses in Chile run like clockwork (amazingly comfortable - Europe could learn a lot) it has been a small feature of the journey so far!! Heading north back to Santiago we took in two stops to Chillan and Talca. Chillan was an interesting market town containing a school filled with mosaics and a pleasant church (South American churches seem to be somewhat graphic when it comes to Christ). A visit to the market ended up with us being treated to drinks by an 80-year old lady at her daughters food stall - phone numbers were exchanged, probably with only an 'Hola!' in mind! Stopping at Talca we resided in a fantastic hostel out in the countryside ... read more

After being marooned in El Chalten for slightly longer than we intended the first 'we'll have to skip it' decision, leading to skipping Cuerva De Las Manos (13,000 year old painted caves) and throwing caution to the wind with the time old effort of 'I like bus journy's' - hence embarking on a 35 hour rollercoaster journey up Argentina's legendary Ruta 40! This particular section of Ruta 40 from El Chalten to Bariloche (Ruta 40 runs the full length of Argentina) is particularly famous due to the desolate landscape and was a journey that Che Guevara made and where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid hid - amongst others. This section of the road cannot be classed as a road, being mainly unpaved (gravel) with nothing for kilometres except the view of rolling hills filled with ... read more

Our next Austral stop is the small town of El Calafate. Perched on the bank of Argentina's largest lake - Lago Argentino, it is the gateway town to the Los Glaciares National Park and also doesn't provide a bad sunset either! The main draw for visiting this area is the magnificent Perito Moreno Glacier. Not being tired of glaciers, we yet again dug deep and forked out more pesos. Our visit enabled us to get up close and personal with this crawling giant. While most glaciers on the planet are receding, Perito Moreno is amongst the very few that is actually classed as stable. In fact it is so 'stable' that its advancing at a rate of 2 metres a day. At 60m high, 5km wide and 30km long the glacier carves through the rock face, ... read more

As the ship cruised through Drakes Passage we were quite subdued; as we pined for more Antarctic time even the passage seemed rather deflated. We wished our fellow passengers, with whom we had shared dinners and exchanged stories of the day, farewell before being greeted by Ushuaia, Argentina, the most southernly city in the world. The city is perched behind a cluster of Beagle Channel islands, cocooned within a stunning backdrop of dramatic mountains. With our base set for the next few days we set off to explore the city and its surroundings. After being waited on hand and foot for the last two weeks, it was time to fend for ourselves again. Another episode of Team Gringo was well overdue so, of course, within a couple of hours we'd already booked ourselves onto the wrong ... read more

The day of reckoning! Would we make it onto land? Or would we be denied again?! So an early start was on the cards to see if we could capture an Antarctic sunrise and to check the weather out! We stepped out onto deck around 0445 to be greeted with a perfect start. The ship was sailing through a channel, coasting on iceberg filled still waters, the backdrop of ice covered mountains either side of the channel was accompanied by the morning sun reaching over the mountain peaks filtering a soft red glow over the sky, clouds, ice and water. As the waters were so calm it provided a good opportunity to view the abundance of wildlife active. Albatrosses, Terns and other bird life flew through the channel, searching for food and some deciding to follow ... read more