Advertisement
Published: January 3rd 2007
HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM USHUAIA, THE SOUTHERNMOST CITY IN THE WORLD!!!!
Hope you all had a very happy holiday season.
Let's see, how to catch you up on my adventures....
First, I spent a few days in Santiago. a city i LOVED. They have a great subway system- clean and efficient. I found it to be such a sweet sleepy little city with great weather. The first night I met a guy from Colorado who I got along splendidly with. We ended up scouring Santiago, end to end, to find an iPod for me for my long travel days. We found the American style mall, complete with you know what (starbucks-yipppeeeeee!), I sat on Santa´s lap, had lunch and finally bought an ipod. Then got back to the hostal to realize i couldn´t load any songs to it. So what to do? We went to the store and got some rum! So we sat around playing not-to-sober Jenga with the hostal owner, who eventually was enough of a dear to load his CDS onto my ipod. Great fun! Days with a travel companion are SOOOO much more fun! He left the next day and i got some errands
Santiago
Nothing like an upscale mall decorated like Christmas to make you feel like you are in the civilized world againand sightseeing in before my tour left.
I had feared my tour would be filled with 20 yr old partiers or couples or annoying people. But i couldn´t have ended up with a better group. 10 in total- me, an older guy from Holland and the rest Australian and English. Great group. We are touring around Patagonia in a big blue old german army truck. Comfortable? Notsomuch. Nor is it heated, so i am frequently wearing all my layers AND my sleeping bag for our marathon drive days. But the company of a tour is infinitely better to sitting in my hostal with a saduko book.
First stop, Pucon, a cute sweedish looking town in the middle of the mountains. We were camping tho. And i can sum up Patagonia in 3 words: RAINY, FRIGID and WINDY. (And i don't mean breezy. Sometimes we couldn't stop while driving because it was too windy to open the door!) One of the girls found a bunch of kittens in the lodge near our camp. So i arrived to see 2 gorgeous fluff balls and a tiny baby standing in the middle of the cold hard concrete floor screaming, and my
Starbucks
oops, i did it again! heart broke in a million pieces. He fit in my palm and was so young his eyes were just opened. Apparently his mom rejected him. So guess what i spent the next 2 days doing? Trying to get the owner guy to get him a box, some towels and a dropper so i could bottle feed him, and then trying to get the mom of the 2 older kittens to nurse him. Didn't help that he was all black, just like my nut. The other people in my group thought i was nuts, but marveled at how he quieted right down when i picked him up. So i spent 2 days sitting by the fire with him under my coat. When we had to go, he was looking a lot better, but i had to leave him and hope for the best.
On to Bariloche, another cute city covered in gorgeous yellow "spring" (HA) flowers. Wish i could show you pics, but my camera flat out died again. No repair shops around. So i spent a day looking for new ones, finding that even basic crap cameras here range from $350-600!!!! So i ended up getting one of those
Santiago
Not so sober jenga with Nard, my companion for the day pieces of shit. It really is heartbreaking because i am missing shots of a lifetime. This camera sucks in comparison. I did manage to get a kayaking trip in on a very windy lake, covered from head to toe with cold weather wear. And a few of us went zip lining through the canopy, tied to a harness, swinging from platform to platform (10 in total). That was a blast!!!
We moved on to El Chalten, where we took a long hike and then walked on a glacier with crampons on Christmas Eve. How many people can say they climbed a glacier on Christmas Eve? The highlight was at the end where the guides carved out a ledge in the ice, set out glasses, filled them with pieces of the glacier and served Baileys!! Yum!
Christmas was in El Calafate. We exchanged presents within our tour group- secret santas. I got a characacture made for my giftee, which he LOVED. Then we went out for a nice dinner on the town. The next day we took a day tour of the Moreno Glacier, which could be the most amazing sight i´ve ever seen in my life!!!
On
to Torres Del Paine for some more camping. We went on a kick-your-ass hike, complete with sleet, rain, snow and boulder scrambling. It had to have been freezing out. Camping was really cold, but we get free meals while camping, and our tour guide is a fantastic cook, making veggie meals specially for me. There was a restaurant with a wood burning stove, with an incredible view of snow capped peaks. Needless to say, i spent a day there!
And i realized i don't want to be cold ever again, for the rest of my life!!
For the most part, it has rained constantly on this trip!! The weather has been unimaginably miserable, even tho we are in "summer". But it is really cool that the sun doesn't set until 10:30 pm. And we've got some pretty goofy people on the tour and have some fun times. I am enjoying it.
We arrived in Ushuaia, end of the world on new year's eve after a brutal 16 hour drive day, a ferry crossing, and a night of free camping (remote camping without facilities). We've done a few of these and i always feel like i am on the
show Brat Camp, a show where they send delinquent druggie kids out for a wilderness experience to whip them back into shape. Sitting there in the frigid air, my fingers feeling like they are going to snap off from the cold, tent blowing everywhere, trying to drive stakes into the hard ground, i wonder, isn't this supposed to be vacation? And if it is brat camp, then where's the free therapy?
At any rate, New Year's Eve was an absolute blast! My group and a bunch of people staying at the hostal had a big bbq and a ridiculous amount of spirits, which made for a big party. So nice to be in good company and doing something social for once. We called it a night around 3;30 am. And now we have 3 days to relax and regroup in Ushuaia before another 6 days of camping (4 free camping nights- ugh). You will all be glad to know i have gone as far south as i will go and will now be heading back in the direction of home. I am some 6000 miles from home!!! But i am SOOO enjoying this hostal- internet and heated tiles. The
place is so warm that i can wear tshirts and flipflops, so i don´t even want to go outside.
It is so nice to be in the civilized world again. We've been skirting in and out of Chile and Argentina and it is so nice to see neon signs, roadsigns, bathrooms with toilet seats and no litter, like Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.
We took a cruise around the Beagle Canal yesterday and i took pics of everything Antartica!!! A guy on our group tried to hook up a last minute cruise, but in the end didn´t get on. They wanted $3500. Another time, i think.
Missing you all. Write me comments so i know you haven´t fallen asleep reading this!!!!
Buy the way, here´s an update for you subscribers. My roommate from the animal sanctuary in Bolivia had everything to her name stolen from our room the week after i left, so my intuition to leave early was right! I wrote the place and told them they need to take better care of their volunteers!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.34s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 19; qc: 98; dbt: 0.1294s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.3mb
monster
non-member comment
You drank a glacier???
Man, I want to drink glacier cubes! Sucks about your camera, though...still, you had a way better new years than I did--I filed two years of bills and paperwork. Exciting start to 2007... hopefully it just gets better from here! As always, great pix, and cute penguin!! Lisa and I went to the zoo at Xmas and saw the penguins there, but I'm thinking yours are way cooler! (literally and figuratively...) I'll send a real e-mail soon...